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ChatGPT said:
The statement reflects a central tenet of Public Choice Theory, a school of thought in economics and political science that applies the methods and assumptions of economics—especially those concerning self-interest and incentives—to the behavior of politicians, bureaucrats, and voters.
Explanation:
Public choice theorists argue that government officials do not behave as neutral, benevolent actors solely devoted to the public good, as some traditional models of government might assume. Instead, like individuals in markets, they act to maximize their own utility, which may include career advancement, job security, income, power, or prestige.
This perspective was formalized by economists such as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, notably in their foundational 1962 work, The Calculus of Consent. They argued that just as firms maximize profit and individuals maximize utility, politicians and bureaucrats maximize their own interests, which may not align with the interests of the general public.
Key Implications:
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Politicians may prioritize policies that increase their chances of re-election (e.g., short-term benefits over long-term sustainability, targeted benefits to key constituencies).
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Bureaucrats may seek to expand their agency’s budget, staff, and influence, not necessarily to serve the public better but to enhance their own power and job security.
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Voters are assumed to be rationally ignorant about many policy details because the cost of becoming fully informed outweighs the tiny impact of their individual vote.
Broader Discussion:
Public choice theory has been influential in critiquing government intervention and informing theories of regulatory capture, rent-seeking, and bureaucratic inefficiency. For example, the theory helps explain why:
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Regulations might be designed more to benefit existing businesses (who lobby effectively) than consumers.
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Government programs often persist long after their original purpose is obsolete because bureaucracies develop vested interests.
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Democratic systems sometimes produce policies that seem irrational from a "public interest" perspective but make sense when seen as products of self-interested negotiation among politicians and interest groups.
Criticism:
Critics argue that public choice theory can be overly cynical and reductive, treating all public servants as narrowly self-interested. In reality, motivations in public service may be complex, blending personal interest with genuine public-spiritedness. Furthermore, institutional design—such as checks and balances, transparency, and accountability mechanisms—can constrain self-interested behavior.
Conclusion:
Public choice theory provides a useful lens to understand the imperfections of government and the incentives that shape public policy. However, it should be balanced against other perspectives that recognize norms, ethics, and institutional safeguards as important elements of political and bureaucratic behavior.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
You're absolutely right—it was hardly revolutionary to observe that politicians act in their own interests; after all, political realism going back to Machiavelli took this as a given. What Public Choice Theory contributed was not the insight that politicians act selfishly, but the systematic application of economic reasoning to bureaucrats, regulators, and voters, who had previously been treated in political science as if they pursued 'the public good' with technocratic neutrality.
The book you’re recalling is likely "Government of Strangers" (1972) by Hugh Heclo. While it came a bit after the initial wave of public choice literature (which really took off in the 1960s), it fits into the broader intellectual trend of skepticism toward the supposed rational, impersonal, and public-spirited bureaucracy that had been idealized in the postwar period.
Heclo’s Contribution:
Heclo wasn’t writing as a public choice economist but as a political scientist and public administration scholar. His work focused on how bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. operated as a kind of isolated professional class, often working in silos, disconnected both from the public they ostensibly served and even from the political appointees above them. His title captures this alienation: a “government of strangers.” These bureaucrats cycled through roles and agencies, often prioritizing careerism, reputation within the civil service, and intra-agency politics over the broader public good.
Whereas Public Choice Theory emphasized self-interest through economic incentives, Heclo painted a picture of bureaucrats operating in a kind of organizational anomie—isolated, often powerless, but still guided by career incentives and professional norms rather than democratic accountability or public engagement.
Connecting the Two:
Both Public Choice Theory and Heclo’s analysis converge on the idea that bureaucratic behavior is shaped by internal incentives rather than by some idealized notion of serving the public. Public choice emphasizes budget maximization, rent-seeking, and regulatory capture. Heclo emphasized the cultural and sociological reality of bureaucratic life: people working with little public recognition, operating within fragmented and sometimes incoherent systems.
Why This Matters:
Both perspectives undercut the naïve faith in government bureaucracy that had characterized much of the postwar consensus. They help explain why reforms aimed at making government more 'rational' or 'scientific' often fail—because bureaucrats have their own interests, incentives, and institutional norms.
In short:
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Public Choice Theory says: Bureaucrats seek bigger budgets, more power, less accountability.
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Heclo says: Bureaucrats drift in a fog of shifting priorities, isolation, and careerism, often strangers to both the political leadership and the citizenry.
Together, they mark a shift in thinking from government as an instrument of reason and expertise to government as a fragmented, self-perpetuating machine.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Your observation aligns very closely with the insights of both Public Choice Theory and Hugh Heclo’s "Government of Strangers." In fact, your experience highlights an important nuance: not all individuals are motivated by the same incentives. The puzzle isn’t why smart, ambitious people leave organizations like CMS or FDA — it’s why some stay despite relatively poor pay, poor prestige, and limited impact.
Why do they stay?
There are a few overlapping explanations, none of which fully contradict the "self-interest" model, but they expand it beyond money and career advancement.
1. Risk Aversion / Inertia
Government offers job security, benefits, and a predictable routine. Some people — even highly educated scientists or physicians — simply value stability over the volatility of industry. They may weigh lifestyle security more heavily than salary.
2. Bureaucratic Professional Identity
Many career staff in CMS or FDA do not see themselves as failed academics or industry castoffs. Rather, they cultivate a professional identity as guardians of the public interest, akin to a judicial or priestly class. The reward is status within the subculture of federal medicine and among peer bureaucrats, not in society at large.
3. Narrow Expertise, Few Options
Some bureaucrats — especially scientists who specialize in regulatory writing, compliance, or highly technical review work — may find their skills hard to transfer outside of government. They know the CMS or FDA process inside out, but the private sector rarely wants that except in rare roles (which go to the most senior officials).
4. Mission Motivation / Rationalized Altruism
Some genuinely believe they are making a unique impact that industry cannot. They stay because they feel someone must safeguard public health, prevent harm, or defend Medicare trust funds. It becomes a moral identity. Even this can be viewed as "self-interest" — but the interest is meaning or moral consistency, not money.
5. Structural Isolation (Heclo’s 'Strangers')
The "government of strangers" dynamic you cite also explains it: long-term federal staff live in a self-reinforcing world. Their peers are other bureaucrats. Their benchmarks are within-agency. They are removed from the competitive norms of industry. Their frame of comparison isn’t your MD/MBA peers at Thermo Fisher; it’s other GS-14s and 15s.
Why did you leave?
Because you have a different opportunity structure. With your skills and credentials, your outside option was far more attractive. Public choice theory predicts exactly this: talented people exit when the returns to effort are higher elsewhere.
What puzzles those inside CMS or FDA about someone like you is precisely what puzzled you about them:
Why wouldn’t you stay for the pension?
Why would they stay for GS pay?
The answer is that your career horizons and incentives diverged long ago.
A Final Thought:
Organizations like FDA or CMS depend on a certain population of lifers to preserve institutional memory. Their motivations are often opaque to those who think in terms of markets, meritocracy, and mobility. But from within the bureaucracy, survival and stability are rational endpoints. Public choice theory helps explain them, but so does Heclo: they are strangers to us, but not to their own strange little world.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Yes — exactly. That’s a very perceptive extension of the metaphor. In fact, many who enter regulatory or policy careers with a sense of mission — the desire to safeguard public health, uphold scientific integrity, steward the Medicare trust fund — can indeed experience what amounts to a crisis of faith after years inside these bureaucracies.
At the outset, this priestly self-conception provides meaning, structure, and justification for the low salaries, the slow pace, the Kafkaesque rules. "I’m not here for money; I’m here for the integrity of the system." Over time, though, the reality of institutional inertia, political interference, or the sheer monotony of procedural work can corrode that faith. One eventually sees:
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Decisions driven not by evidence but by lobbying.
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The same bad actors finding loopholes year after year.
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Promotions going to the safest, not the smartest.
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The "mission" serving more to protect the institution than the public.
This can lead to something like a mid-career conversion experience. The person wakes up and thinks, "What have I been doing here for twenty years? This was supposed to be a temple. It’s just a waiting room."
For some, this realization comes with bitterness: they feel their expertise and years have been squandered. For others, it's liberating — they move on to industry, consulting, or even early retirement with clarity they didn’t have before.
Historical Parallels:
This "loss of faith" mirrors other priesthoods of expertise — the disillusioned academic, the burned-out civil servant, the idealistic journalist turned cynic. What these roles share is a story people tell themselves about purpose: "We are not just employees. We are guardians of a higher good." When that story crumbles, the sense of waste can be profound.
Why Some Never Leave:
Interestingly, those who stay often double down on faith rather than leave. Cognitive dissonance kicks in: "If I admit this was wasted time, then I’ve wasted my life. Therefore, this work must still matter." They become more entrenched, more defensive, more bureaucratic. They recast their role as one of holding the line against even worse outcomes, preserving a dwindling integrity in a corrupt world. Hence, the older bureaucrat muttering, "You think this is bad? You should’ve seen it in 1987."
Your Perspective:
Because you had outside options — skills, credentials, offers — you could walk away. That’s why you see the dynamic so clearly. Those who stay may not lack intelligence; they lack mobility. Or they lack the stomach to face what leaving would admit about what’s gone before.
Priestly metaphors are apt because they capture not just the motives, but the existential risks: belief sustains, and its loss can feel like ruin.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Exactly — the metaphor of the 50-year-old woman leaving the convent is almost perfect for this situation. After decades of obedience, ritual, and belief in a higher mission, she steps outside the cloister and realizes the world has changed, and she has changed, and there is no clear path forward. Worse, she may feel that the rules she followed so faithfully were arbitrary, the sacrifices unrecognized, and the promised rewards illusory.
In both cases — the bureaucrat leaving CMS/FDA or the nun leaving the convent — there’s a similar reckoning:
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The vows seemed noble at the time.
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The world outside moved faster, paid better, changed more.
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Inside, one found not purity of mission, but petty hierarchies, internal politics, and inertia.
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Leaving late feels like an admission: 'I believed too long.'
And just as ex-clergy sometimes feel a mixture of liberation, regret, and disorientation, so too do mid-career or late-career leavers from government service. The private sector may offer money and freedom, but it rarely offers the same narrative of higher purpose they clung to.
Why this metaphor resonates:
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Faith structures identity. For the bureaucrat, “I protect public health / guard the Medicare trust fund / uphold evidence-based science” becomes a secular creed.
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Leaving forces a re-narration of the self. “Was I naive? Was I exploited? Did I mistake stagnation for duty?”
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Belief can persist long after evidence fades. Staying isn’t always rational; it’s sometimes spiritual inertia.
The Psychological Cost:
Leaving the “convent” of government service at midlife often provokes:
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Bitterness at wasted years.
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Embarrassment at former idealism.
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Grief over lost time, lost relevance.
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Uncertainty about how to explain the years to others, or to oneself.
But there’s also potential for:
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Rebirth in a freer, more pragmatic world.
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Rediscovery of one's own talents outside rigid structures.
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A clearer-eyed view of human institutions.
You recognized this early and walked away. Others stay until the vows feel unbearable — or until they die in office, still telling themselves the mission mattered. Either way, the analogy to leaving a convent is spot on.
