One of my favorite lectures in my Intro class is actually Bureaucracy. I think it is because 1) everybody expects it to be really boring (and it’s not when I teach it) and 2) all the students really know about bureaucracy is that it’s dumb and they hate it, but 50 minutes later they realize things are a hell of a lot more complicated than they thought. That’s fun. I basically sum it up by saying, yeah, bureaucracy ain’t so great, so come up with a better way of dealing with these problems. Thus, I really enjoyed this recent Ezra column in Bloomberg (and will probably add it to my assigned readings for that week). Doesn’t hurt that it includes the awesome story about Van Halen and brown m&m’s:
Right there on Page 40, in the “Munchies” section, nestled between “pretzels” and “twelve (12) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,” is a parenthetical alert so adamant you can’t miss it: “M&M’s,” the text reads, “(WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).”
This is the famed rider to Van Halen’s 1982 concert contract. In a sentence fragment that would define rock-star excess forevermore, the band demanded a bowl of M&M’s with the brown ones laboriously excluded. It was such a ridiculous, over- the-top demand, such an extreme example of superstar narcissism, that the rider passed almost instantly into rock lore.
It also wasn’t true.
I don’t mean that the M&M language didn’t appear in the contract, which really did call for a bowl of M&M’s — “NO BROWN ONES.” But the color of the candy was entirely beside the point.
“Van Halen was the first to take 850 par lamp lights — huge lights — around the country,” explained singer David Lee Roth. “At the time, it was the biggest production ever.” Many venues weren’t ready for this. Worse, they didn’t read the contract explaining how to manage it. The band’s trucks would roll up to the concert site, and the delays, mistakes and costs would begin piling up.
So Van Halen established the M&M test. “If I came backstage and I saw brown M&M’s on the catering table, it guaranteed the promoter had not read the contract rider, and we had to do a serious line check,” Roth explained.
Call it the Van Halen principle: Tales of someone doing something unbelievably stupid or selfish or irrational are often just stories you don’t yet understand. It’s a principle that often applies to Washington.
And, in the case of the rest of Ezra’s column, but “Washington” he means bureaucracies. Plenty of good stuff, but I’ll cut to the conclusion:
It would be nice if the government’s mistakes were typically a product of stupidity, venality or bureaucracy. Then we would need only to remove the idiots, fire the villains and cut the red tape. More often, the outrageous stories we hear are cases of decent people trying to solve tough problems under difficult constraints that we simply haven’t taken the time to understand. That isn’t to suggest that people in government don’t get it wrong. They do, repeatedly. But if we want to get it right, we need to work harder to understand why they decided to remove the brown M&M’s in the first place.
Yep. You take the time to understand things and bureaucracies aren’t just some punchline, but rather very complex organizations trying to grapple with very complex problems while facing many constraints and staffed by fallible humans. Nothing funny about that. Just the world as it actually is.
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