Another road to extermination

One benefit of living into your 60s is having seen the end of the world many times. I have seen numerous films in which the world (or at least New York) is destroyed by aliens, asteroids, nuclear war, plague, and even falling into the sun. Most of these films were set in the distant future which, at the time they were made, was the 1990s or the early years of this century. Of course, I have also lived through manned interplanetary and interstellar space flight, all of which should have taken place by now. And there was that manned flight to Jupiter eight years ago which ended in a mysterious series of art-house cinematic effects.

Interest in the end of the human species has been revived recently by the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the grim realisation that almost all species that have lived on the planet have evolved out of existence. It is possible that humans could be like sharks, crocodiles etc, which have stayed more or less the same for millions of years. However, that would not please all the predictors of our demise who have made a comfortable living by spreading alarm about extermination as a result of ecodoom, nanodoom, plague (again), and (popular in the USA) the idea that God will finally decide to wipe us all out while saving only a few Godly white Americans.

Attracted by the thought of a more comfortable life, I would like to join the doomsayers by proposing a new road to extermination: death by quality assurance. Quality assurance (QA) began as an heroic enterprise. In the 1950s, Japanese manufacturers became alarmed at the poor quality and reputation of their products. They realised that customers were increasingly demanding reliable products with a higher specification. Mass-produced standardised good were no longer satisfactory: cars and other products had to be differentiated according to wishes of the customer. This all required a rethink of the production process: instead of mass production lines of workers carrying out repetitive tasks over which they had no control, workers were encouraged to redesign their work to improve quality and efficiency. This all worked: Japanese cars and other products gained a reputation for reliability and good design.

However, something terrible happened to QA once it passed from private industry to public services. Instead of being concerned with responding to customers and innovating production, the term became associated with the exact opposite: imposing centrally-directed targets, standardising procedures, removing control from the people who actually do the work, and inspection. It is time-consuming to inspect the day-to-day work of schools, hospitals and local authority services, so ‘QA’ soon became a matter of checking paperwork. This in turn provoked public services to generate standardised operating procedures, with paper reporting and IT systems to record compliance. In addition, designated QA personnel were appointed to check that all paper is produced according to central demands. Needless to say, this all demoralises staff, who respond by working to contract (ie doing the bare minimum) and covering this up by manipulating their paperwork. This in turn results in government ‘strengthening’ inspection and making the problem worse.

The result is that, over time, the number of people setting targets, devising standardised procedures, completing paperwork, and inspecting each other has risen, while the people who actually do the work (growing food, making things, running power stations, teaching children, ministering to the sick etc) are getting squeezed out. The current recession has speeded this up: manufacturing jobs are being cut, while banks need more (and probably equally ineffective) ‘supervision’. If we extrapolate this trend, we can see a time later in this century when people who know how to grow and make things will have almost completely disappeared. The vast numbers of QA staff will then sit in their darkening offices, starving to death, tapping out lists of targets and procedures on computer systems that no longer work.