Once upon a time I was sitting in a business school class where the professor was going on about how flavored tobacco products such as those made by JUUL were immoral. Why? Because they tasted pleasurable but ultimately had negative health consequences. In some ways the argument leaned on the fact that this pleasure-death dichotomy reversed evolutionary expectations. The idea being that if humans take pleasure in something it must therefore be of evolutionary benefit. Orgasms lead to genetic propagation and what not. Flavored tobacco short-circuits this function by psychologically incentivizing behavior that is irrational under superficial evolutionary modelling. Classic Epicurean, Freudian, Darwinian stuff you know?
After laying out the obvious case for why flavored tobacco was bad the professor then asked who was in favor of her position and who was not. As you might expect, 97% of the class sided with her and all of four people – myself included – were against the proposition. When asked, the other three said that they liked the product. Which is a fair position to hold. As for me, I sort of killed the mood by saying that people have a right to kill themselves, so the banning of a product based on negative health outcomes that are reasonably understood a priori seemed ridiculous.
Somewhat naturally the professor rebutted with the statement of ‘well, do we really want to condone suicide?’ To which the mood definitely got dampened by my statement that ‘well, in this country [Canada] the government will provide you with a doctor who will do the suiciding for you so….’
I don’t bring up this vignette to defend vaping. I think vaping is lame as hell. Be a man and smoke darts or rip cigars. Sucking on a first-generation iPod shuffle is weak shit. Anyways, the reason for bringing this up is to ease us into the lovely world of ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ which is the new term we use for euthanasia in Canada, and much of the advanced world, now. Presumably this term was concocted by the likes of McKinsey to neutralize negative connotations.
‘Assisted Suicide’ carries with it the word suicide which is a traditional taboo in these parts. In fact, there are many charities devoted to the prevention of suicide. So instead, we speak of ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ a term so ambiguous it could include palliative care, hospice, emergency interventions to delay the onset of death, and what have you. To be frank, we’re all dying in some way so clearly any medical assistance fits the bill. When the obvious description doesn’t vibe you change the term.
‘No Bob, we’re not firing you, we’re rightsizing to optimize shareholder value.’ Medical Assistance in Dying is the rightsizing of the population. But this is not going to be an essay about the ethics of offing yourself. Instead, we’re going to be talking about what I am calling the ‘Managerial Epidemic.’ Assisted suicide is just a rather illuminating case.
Since 2016 Canadians who meet a relatively ambiguous and ever-changing definition of eligibility are allowed to have agents of the states – i.e. doctors and sometime nurse practitioners – kill them or provide them with the means to do so. Initially this allowance of murder, or condoning of suicide, was sold to the Canadian public as aiding those who were very close to death with no prospects of recovery or pain alleviation. That ain’t exactly what we got though.The current eligibility criteria – in terms of the condition you need to be in – are as follows:
“have a serious illness, disease or disability (excluding a mental illness until March 17, 2023)
be in an advanced state of decline that cannot be reversed [bold in original]
experience unbearable physical or mental suffering from your illness, disease, disability or state of decline that cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable [bold in original]”[1]
Note that the government is explicit in that one does “not need to have a fatal or terminal condition to be eligible for medical assistance in dying. [bolding in original]”[2] As anyone with a modicum of intelligence can see, the definition of eligibility is ambiguous since ‘serious,’ ‘advanced,’ and ‘unbearable’ are unscientific terms based on subjective assessment.
As a semantic aside, it is patently obvious that the criteria of ‘unbearable’ can never be factually met. If a person is currently bearing the suffering at the time of request, then it must not be unbearable. Unbearable would mean that the suffering has already killed them. Classic Catch-22 where if you can refer to a condition as unbearable it cannot be so. This criterion is merely a denigration of what is humanly possible. But hey, splitting hairs. Not like this is a life-or-death issue – right?
The guidelines, rights, and laws pertaining to assisted suicide do not exist in and of themselves. They are instead the purview of federal and provincial government departments of health. The result being that there are bureaucrats in Canada whose job it is to make sure that eligible persons receive the service that they are entitled to. Eligible Canadians are to be informed of the availability of Medical Assistance in Dying and left to ponder whether this option is right for them. Except that’s a bit too cute of a picture given managerial operations.
The existence of assisted suicide means that the Government of Canada (and those of its provinces) believe it to be a good thing. Good in the sense that they believe it to be the right – or reasonably right – option for some people within society. Their position is not one of neutrality. Neutrality would look like their sentiments around good old fashion suicide whereby the victim and the perpetrator are the same person and therefore there ain’t much for the government to do.
With an acknowledgement of the programs ‘goodness’ comes the natural position that the government ought to promote and expand the good to maximize said goodness. In short, if assisted suicide is a good thing for some people then the role of the government is to help all of the some to participate in the good. You need government bureaucrats involved in its promotion and execution.
Thus, there are folks at Health Canada and its provincial counterparts whose job it is to get the good news out to eligible Canadians that there’s a program designed to help them. How would such bureaucrats be ‘graded’ in terms of their effectiveness? By seeing a material increase in the number of Canadians assisted in their death. And by golly, based on federal government figures, the bureaucrats have been – no pun intended – killing it.
That’s a 46% CAGR during the first six years of the program. As a Canadian I can legitimately tell you that this program seems to be the only one our government is capable of effectively carrying out. If the Department of Fisheries and Oceans was one iota as effective at their jobs as the killing Canadians crew, then Newfoundland would be a veritable land of milk and honey rather than the dilapidated fishing shack of a province it is today.
A round of applause please for the only effective employees in Ottawa, Toronto, Victoria, Fredericton, etc.…
Anyways, at some point you would imagine that the number of medically assisted suicides would plateau – at least as a percentage of the population adjusted for demographic bands. In which case the bureaucrats will no longer be killing it on their primary KPI of expanding access and execution to eligible Canadians. There are several ways around this, one of which is the expansion of the eligibility pool. Hence the mention above of mental illness becoming its own category of eligibility.
Now, you explain to me how someone lacking a clear and sane mind can reasonably consent to yeeting themselves because as far as I can tell that seems a bit off in terms of logic bud.
The point here is that if you are a bureaucrat – the archetypical manager – your job is to execute on the logic of government positions. If helping Canadians die is a good thing for some people, then you want to get all of the some to partake in the program. Why wouldn’t they do so? The government said they’re doing it in the interest of these people. Or at least that’s the logic of governmental action. Your primary KPI is whether you are maximizing the number of people who are benefiting from this program. If you run out of people – or the numbers plateau – then you very well may find that the line of eligibility unreasonably excludes some additional persons. Time to expand the pool and bring the beneficial program to these formerly mistreated or underserved Canadians.
If you’re reading this and thinking ‘Evan, it sure sounds like you’re against this whole government sponsored dying thing’ you’d be right. I think it’s a barbaric program aimed at aiding other in defining themselves as expendable. Now, if people want to kill themselves on their own, then go ahead Seneca and do it, but don’t ask for someone in a white coat to do it for you. What you should note is that despite my facetious treatment of the program in preceding paragraphs, I do not believe the logic of bureaucratic actions to be irrational. So long as you assume the basis of ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ is a good thing then the rest is all coherent.
What is worth reflecting on though is the managerial impulse and incentivization that we see in this – albeit extreme – example of a program. The primary factor at play is the driving force of non-economic KPIs and the ramifications thereof.
If you are a car salesman, then your only real KPI is how many cars you sold and for how much. Success is easy to measure. Similar KPIs exist for primary producers like farmers, resource extraction workers, retail works, insurance brokers, realtors, etc.… If you’re a manager of car salesmen, then your KPI is still financial performance except now the dollars of interest are those of your underlings. You can make a clear line of ‘financial responsibility’ from the salesman on the lot up to the CEO of Ford.
However, there are obviously more than just salespeople working at Ford. There are engineers, assembly line workers, accountants, interior designers, and what not. The efforts of those people are not directly tied to financial performance, but they are essential for facilitating it. The salesman needs a car to sell that people want to buy.
Then you have the non-economic agents at Ford. Folks whose jobs are to handle shit like corporate culture, environmental stewardship, and even most forms of marketing. These people are so far removed from dollars being tied to their efforts that you cannot directly measure their performance based on corporate earnings. These people just sort of exist. This is not to say that the bulk of human resource personnel are useless. Nor am I trying to denigrate the whole ‘not polluting that much’ thing. What I am saying is that these functionaries operate with a set of KPIs that are internal to their own operations. For example, corporate morale is measured not by dollars but by employee surveys. You can find all sorts of Harvard Business Review and peer-reviewed articles claiming that morale tracks with profitability but there are plenty of happy people at soup kitchens and miserable people at Goldman Sachs.
These non-economic agents are what I refer to as the managerial class. This is a different take than is typical since a manager is usually defined as someone who is merely not a front-line worker. But if we think about these sorts of roles what we find is that they are the almost exclusive purview of folks who went to college with the expectation of getting a white-collar jobs. Additionally, the lack of economic responsibility means that their role is to manage something whether that be a marketing asset or a portfolio of public relations efforts. I had a buddy work at a provincial health authority who held the title of ‘manager.’ When asked what it was that he managed he said ‘ideas.’ It’s this kind of shit.
The tell-tale sign of a member of the managerial class – as I define it remember – is that their KPIs are internal to their role. For example, HR may measure success as the diversity of folks hired or morale scores on surveys. These metrics are not directly tied to the performance of the entity as far as what is necessary. Their KPIs are nice-to-haves as opposed to being essentials. You can have a company that is 100% owned and operated by self-identified trans individuals of colour but if the company does not turn a profit it doesn’t matter.
The beauty of these roles is that they define their own success. If success means a 25% reduction in single-use plastics during production for its own sake, then who would fault these folks for a down year. They met their standards. Revenue isn’t their responsibility. Yet, it is revenue that allows these folks to have jobs. Do you see the disconnect here? If things go well, it’s, in part, because – so they will say – of their efforts. If things go poorly, well, it’s because another team failed to hit their KPIs.
As a concrete example allow me to dunk on former Twitter employees. Twitter had a marketing department. They went out and marketed the platform. It is not that they sold ad inventory. That was the sales team’s responsibility. Instead, this team promoted the existence of Twitter. Additionally, there was a marketing team for Twitter Canada.
Through the happenstance of fate, I was connected with a member of Twitter’s Canadian marketing team on LinkedIn when Elon fired them all. You know the first thing I noticed when they got fired? That there was no noticeable difference in my experience of the platform. Nor did I see a decline in the number of ads I saw. What I did notice was that suddenly Twitter Canada wasn’t promoting the fact that it was sponsoring workshops, conferences, and other shit.
The marketing folks who were fired from Twitter Canada – at least those who publicly made statements – all waxed poetically on LinkedIn about all they had done at the company during their tenures. Their accomplishments almost exclusively ran along the lines of ‘I synergized team efforts while boosting platform embeddedness in the Canadian conversation.’ Shit that didn’t mean anything. What one saw was that these folks didn’t actually do anything. They were nice-to-have as opposed to being essential to the existence of the company. Yet – as you would expect from self-interested agents – they were convinced they had done meaningful work because of self-defined KPIs.
My position is that we are suffering from an epidemic of managers. Inside of every company, institution, and – of course – level of government, are folks who operate under self-defined KPIs that are inessential to performance. Twitter Canada did not need a marketing team. The government of Canada does not need to promote access to yeeting oneself. Stanford does not need more employees than students and six times more administrators than faculty. But once these roles or functions are introduced it is very hard to eliminate them given their ability to achieve internal KPIs. Elon’s a dipshit but at least he saw the obvious and did something.
I can bemoan investment bankers until the cows come home but by God is that an industry tied to economic performance. The second that deal flow dries up they kick entire divisions to the curb. By comparison, if corporate favourability metrics are up, it’s harder to cut the PR team leading that charge.
What you will notice though is that this ought to lead to institutional sclerosis. If the non-essential performers are less likely to be cut, then at the same time they are more likely to be viewed as effectively carrying out their mandates. As a result, resources will be allocated to the teams because – well – they seem to be good at utilizing them to achieve institutional goals. The non-essential fiefdoms grow.
The example mentioned above about Stanford speaks to this. If you have – not to get right wing about it – a department of equity and inclusion who is tasked with overcoming systemic inequities, you hire 5 people to handle it, and at the end of the first year they have a list of accomplishments, then you will likely reward them with more resources to tackle ‘bigger’ or ‘more difficult’ issues. The team grows, they hit their metrics again, and so on and so forth.
The problem is the 80/20 rule. You can eliminate 80% of the inequity by tackling 20% of the problems. Once you do that it’s just marginal improvement from there while requiring more and more resources as the ‘low hanging fruit’ is picked. More resources are needed to tackle matters of less and less impact. But the difficulty leads to a sense of necessity. This shit happens far more at non-profit seeking institutions and governments due to the lack of baseline economic necessity, but it pervades corporations as well. If the Twitter Canada marketing team had instead been working for the University of Toronto they’d all still be employed.
Returning for a moment to the car salesman. To hit his KPI he needs to constantly sell new items to customers. Every reporting period is relevant. There is always more product to push. Why? Because Ford needs to have revenue every single day. On the flip side, Ford does not need to overhaul its environmental program every day. It does a big push and then glides for a while. However, let’s say that Ford assembled a large team to overhaul its efforts. It is unlikely that the firm would fire 80% of the team once the plan has been formulated and but into practice. It would make for a bad headline – ‘Ford fires bulk of anti-pollution team.’
As a result, Ford maintains the team, and because they hit their metrics, it is likely to allocate additional resources to them. Now you have a bunch of people sitting around without a clear purpose. They made the damn plan. What more do you want from them? You have to keep them busy, so you tell them to keep doing whatever the fuck it is that they do.
Naturally, the team will go about doing more and more environmental planning and create new and more costly and/or complex initiatives that ultimately provide only marginal improvement relative to the initial reason for the team’s existence. They gobble up resources but by their own accounting they are wildly successful.
The question naturally arises as to how we got to this point in life. My theory is that it’s all due to the overproduction of self-identifying elites. If we print degrees willy-nilly – as we do – at the undergraduate and professional level (though oddly not when it comes to doctors) then we create hordes of people with expectations of white-collar employment.
Returning to a business school anecdote, I had a professor ask a room of MBA students the simple question of “who wants to work in sales?” No one put their hands up. He then proceeded to tell us we were all fucked because 99% of jobs are in sales. As someone with a managerial sounding title I can tell you that 99% of my job is selling shit. But most people feel that sales is like manual labor – its beneath their aristocratic ways.
The result is that we have a lot of people who want to do non-essential white-collar work. There is no end to this supply. On the other hand, we have teams in organizations who grade themselves based on their own metrics and are constantly looking to increase their fief sizes to create the illusion of importance and productivity. This represents the demand side of the equation. This leads to a bunch of blood sucking leeches feasting on the productive corporate body.
I’m not saying that diversity teams, environmental squads, and marketing folks are useless or unimportant what I am saying is that they are things that are nice-to-haves once, and only once, there is a revenue generating business. Despite what they will tell you, they are not essential to the core functioning of the entity. They will 100% try to tell you that they are necessary but if you fired them all tomorrow, no one would notice other than the janitorial staff.
The managerial disposition can do wonders if your goal is to kill off your neighbors, the question is what happens when the same perverse KPI mindset is instilled in institutions and corporations. Unfortunately, it’s already there, and frankly, I don’t see it leaving anytime soon. But if you want cut costs there’s certainly opportunities out there.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assistance-dying.html#grievous
[2] Ibid.