[joe_the_user]

In the book Fat And Mean, (http://www.amazon.com/FAT-MEAN-Corporate-Managerial-Downsizi...) David Gordon essentially argues that corporate downsizing often involves survival of the most bureaucratically adept rather than the most productive. Overtime, more complexity and less productivity result.

You could apply this reasoning in the rest of the article also...

[jerf]

There's a danger of letting the perfect becoming the enemy of the good when you start to analyze capitalism. There's a lot of "Capitalism has a problem -> Capitalism isn't perfect -> In theory, social structure X doesn't have that problem -> Social structure X is better!" that goes on, but there's two obvious problems with that: Theorizing about most commonly debated social structures is mostly unnecessary now as somebody has tried it and odds are pretty decent social structure X does in fact have that problem in practice, and of course you can't slam the question of which system is better down to just one attribute.

I bring this all up to make the specific point that while it is absolutely true that a bureaucratically adept person can game the system in a capitalistic society/company, I don't know of a single alternative social structure where a bureaucratically adept person has less power. Excepting maybe anarchism (not advocating, just pointing it out). Bureaucratic-adeptness is rewarded roughly in proportion to the centralization of authority. Most people's solution to the problem seems to involve more centralized authority, which seems actively inimical to solving this problem.

[joe_the_user]

Yes, the article is correct - self-perpetuating bureaucracy is constant in human-civilization. What distinguishes capitalism from other forms of civilization is the ability to substitute creative destruction for bureaucratic sclerosis and collapse - some of the time, if you're lucky...

[hga]

When a company is downsized to 0 employees it doesn't matter who were the most "bureaucratically adept" and were the last to turn out the lights.

It's "creative destruction", not "creative downsizing".