Morons With Money
Einar N. Strømmen & Tor G. Syvertsen,
Professors emeriti, Department of Structural Engineering, NTNU
Norway possesses more money per capita than most countries. The abundance of money flows from petroleum reservoirs in the North Sea, discovered by zealous foreigners: On December, 23rd 1969, Phillips Petroleum informed the Norwegian government that it had discovered Ekofisk — one of the largest offshore oil fields ever.
A decade earlier, in a letter of February 1958 to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the cocky experts at the Geological Survey of Norway claimed: “The chances of finding coal, oil or sulphur on the continental shelf off the Norwegian coast can be discounted”.
But, when it comes to lost opportunities, Norwegian geologists have learnt their lesson; several times over the past years they have predicted that a mountain called Mannen will collapse and create a disaster in the valley Rauma below, just the sort of prediction which brings them unlimited amounts of public funding. The mountain is still in place, and it probably will be for millennia to come, while the geologists are earning a good living by scaring the government to pay them vast sums of money for monitoring and reporting.
The common Norwegian stupidity is a result of an extremely successful schooling system that has churned out generations of subservient conformists scared of thinking. By Norway’s awkward situation in a cultural backwater in the outskirts of Europe, the cultivation of mediocrity has become the norm. Morons are in the driver’s seat, just like in America. (Collective stupidity among presumably intelligent people has been eminently described by André Spicer in the essay Stupefied.)
Most Norwegian morons do not even pretend to be smart, fitting snugly into Ambrose Bierce’s century-old definition: “Idiot — A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a deadline.” (The Devil’s Dictionary)
Morons with Money seem to fail fundamentally by three distinct tenets:
- Imaginary “problems” are first inflated and then “solved” by the most complicated and costly kludge, which soon becomes an even bigger problem than the original one it was intended to solve.
- Any problem (real or imaginary) can be solved with Money (the more, the better).
- Every undertaking has a sole purpose: Money; even public toilet cabins are operated as profit centra…
Ambitions are always inflated proportionally to the available amount of money, while ability is strictly limited by common stupidity. The mismatch between ambition and ability is a recipe for disaster … a predicament made worse by tenet 2 above.
The list of spectacular examples is virtually endless. Below follows a selected few:
Case: NTNU Campus-project
The story of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is a tragicomedy hard to believe. NTNU was established in 1996 as a compromise by a committee, forged from the University of Trondheim (UNIT, established in 1968), a multi-campus university spread out at several locations within the city of Trondheim and its surroundings. UNIT comprised two main colleges: the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) established in 1910, and the Norwegian College of General Sciences (AVH) established in 1922.
The technology part of the university has ever since its beginning in 1910 had its campus conveniently located on Gløshaugen, a hilltop near the historic city centre. For the scattered remaining parts a brand new Dragvoll campus was opened forty years ago located within beautiful farmland in the vicinity of a recreation area of wooded hills. It was based on a unique concept developed by the Danish architect Henning Larsen, who had won the architectural competition for the new campus.
The basic idea was to put several three or four storey buildings in close proximity to each other and connect them with glass roof covered streets, a concept most suitable for cold winter conditions, which later has been copied elsewhere in Norway, even at the Gløshaugen campus. The first phase of the Dragvoll campus was inaugurated in 1978, and has proven hugely successful. It is probably one of the most beautiful post-war university campuses in Europe, with a wide view over the Trondheim fjord and with plentiful expansion zones embedded in the original plan. Several extensions soon became necessary as the university grew; the last building was inaugurated in 2007.
At that point in time the NTNU Board of Directors had decided that a two-campus development at Dragvoll and Gløshaugen should be the future for the university.
But alas, the Dragvoll campus is soon to be abandoned and turned into yet another shopping mall.
Some background events are outlined in the following.
In 1996 bureaucrats in the Department of Education, lacking meaningful pursuit, set out to turn the University of Trondheim into an entirely new creation which they decided to call “The Norwegian University of Science and Technology”. (Witty tongues immediately suggested to swap the order of Science and Technology, giving the acronym NUTS. Instead it became NTNU.)
Soon after, there were other mighty people, within the local council as well as within the university itself, who also were in lack of meaningful occupation. They launched a campaign for abandoning the recently completed Dragvoll campus, and relocate it near to the city centre close to the Gløshaugen campus such that the whole university would become a single campus university. A major argument was that this would create an insuperable obstacle for cooperation.
Local politicians and merchants cheered, they were desperate to blow new life into a dwindling historic city centre losing in competition with mushrooming suburb shopping malls (earlier cheerfully blessed by the same people).
Thus, multidisciplinary cooperation became the new slogan. Although Norway, like most western countries has an underfunded health service and a care of old people which is shambolic, not many considered the financial consequences, and only a few people had the courage to talk against the howling morons; like Rolf Grankvist did when he back in 2004 correctly pointed out that the perspectives of the university itself had been lost.
The grand plans proceeded according to Warren Bennis’s Second Law of Academic Pseudo Dynamics: “Make whatever grand plans you will, but you may be sure that the unexpected or the trivial will disturb and disrupt them.”
Ever since the “One Campus” project was launched in 2003 it has wobbled on, in spite of some feeble attempts to stop the madness. Presently, hundreds of millions have been spent on project managers and staff, consultants, visions, strategies and plans. In 2013 governmental bureaucrats decided that a “concept evaluation” was required, shortly followed by what some other bureaucrats called an “External Quality Assurance” with suitable fuzzy regulations, providing employment for themselves and a bunch of consultants for however long time they decided themselves.
The university top bureaucrats have their own “Vision Project”, although nobody knows why bureaucrats are particularly qualified to predict the future needs of academia in a time of disruptive change. Lewis Thomas told us:“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.”
The university central bureaucracy seems to be ridden by an administratium pandemic.
As if that is not enough, the Trondheim municipality administration has their separate “Campus Project”, and website, planning for their own version of the university. Their vision of a vibrant university is shopping malls and coffee bars at the best location in town.
A local retail tycoon, Odd Reitan, has started building his own campus Kalvskinnet, also located in the historic town centre, hoping to skim profit from a university in desperate need of premises for students and staff. The Ministry of Education and Research are, of course, running their own campus-project, and the Norwegian Directorate of Public Construction and Property (Statsbygg) is interfering with architectural layout.
After 15 years and a colossal amount of money, only a heavy fog of hypocritical cant has been produced. Undoubtedly, millions are flowing from morons to morons…
Nobody knows what the final bill will amount to. Not only will it have to cover the cost of new buildings, but also the refurbishing of Henning Larsen’s campus from the seventies, as well as all the cost (and time) associated with moving an academic staff of some thousand people.
In the meantime the university has undergone a greedy cold fusion with the university colleges of Ålesund, Gjøvik and an engineering college elsewhere in Trondheim. Thus, while the one-campus project people are pursuing their endeavour as if nothing has happened, the university has suddenly landed itself with seven campi, two of them in entirely different regions of Norway, in the cities of Ålesund and Gjøvik. The original argumentation of distance suddenly vaporized as obstacle to cooperation.
While the morons get more and more taxpayers money, the rest of us are in awe of what comes next. The dumbstruck staff at The College of Arts and Sciences will have to face the fate of abandoning their beautiful premises and move into open landscape offices, not in a one-campus position on the sunny hilltop where the technology college is already located, but in its gloomy shadow at the foot of the hill (Valley of Shadows).
Within the municipality of Trondheim there are primary schools where children have their classrooms in temporary barracks, and at the hospital there are cancer patients who are denied necessary medicine due to “shortage of money”. It goes without saying, little children and cancer patients don’t contribute much to commerce.
It is also worth contemplating the sad fact that NTNU performs mediocre on international rankings. For years its performance on THE’s ranking has been stable between 260 and 280, despite the official strategy proclaiming “NTNU — internationally outstanding”
Case: Reorganisation
The most common case of reckless spending occurs when public bodies or private organisations experience that their performance by some more or less obscure measure is judged poor. The solution is then not to improve the performance by improving work processes, but to reorganise with the assistance of the most expensive consultants, often from abroad. This has recently happened to the Norwegian State Railways, The Norwegian Public Road Administration, the hospitals, the police, the municipalities, and to the universities.
There are two basic ways of reorganising: merging and splitting. These are applied alternately, and every time the result is a doubling of the administration for even poorer performance at a much higher cost.
Case: The Østfold railway line
In some cases the acute attention to an embarrassing situation may be diverted by throwing money at an imaginary problem, like the government did when the railway commuters between Østfold county and Oslo were regularly deemed to wait in vain for delayed or cancelled trains. On a televised debate in the spring of 2009, after decades of defect aerial contact lines and malfunctioning signal equipment, the Departmental Secretary Erik Lahnstein pledged plenty of money for procurement of new train carriages. The chairman of the commuter association, Willy Frantzen was flabbergasted; the commuters would now have the pleasure of waiting in vain for new trains instead of the old trains they used to be waiting for.
Case: DAB — Digital Audio Broadcasting
In other cases an organisation lacking money to support a growing number of superfluous bureaucrats and incompetent technicians may choose to divert the attention by creating an artificial problem, like The Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) did. They decided to make Norway the first country in the world to establish a separate, digital network dedicated exclusively to radio. The network is called “Digital Audio Broadcasting” (DAB). However, we all know that digital radio has already been accessible over the internet and mobile telephone networks for decades, so what was the problem?
The financial consequences were as usual completely ignored. Every household or individual in the country who still wanted to listen to the radio had to buy a brand new radio set. Every existing car had to have their audio equipment refitted, and since no other country in the world has seen the necessity of closing down their FM network, every new car imported to Norway will for an unforeseeable future have to have its factory installed radio replaced. Nobody knows how many beloved FM radios had to be scrapped.
Could it happen that the digital medium is not made for centralized, one-way broadcasting, but for interaction and association? Clay Shirky told us: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
The NRK insists on advancing “broadcasting”; trying desperately by all means to maintain a “problem” and a “need”,enforcing it on the public! Tony Benn did see what was coming: “Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters.” Most of us have become familiar with the digital medium called the World Wide Web; a digital medium which is associative, interactive, and requires that the individual user actively access precisely the information needed at the moment.
Based on extreme simplicity, the digital medium is capable of simulating all kinds of media, even broadcasting (streaming, etc.), even if broadcasting is antagonistic to the digital medium. Broadcasting is hierarchical dictatorship while the digital medium is individual freedom!
The flow of billions from taxpayers into NRK DAB+ will keep the Norwegians in information chains for a long time… probably as the politicians want it; control the people
Some countries like Estonia, Korea and China have decided that the future has to be built on a single, digital universal platform: the internet! They have understood that the internet can serve as a digital superhighway for all kinds of information and interactions. Norway is still lacking a proper internet, and is even lacking radio in some remote areas.
Case: The national health network
Morons have discovered several other opportunities for separate digital networks, like:
The argument for a separate Health Network is to secure “privacy” of sensitive information. However, the network frequently breaks down leaving patients in risk of unnecessary suffering or even dying, because doctors are unable to issue prescription and medicines cannot be purchased from pharmacies. No surprise, the operation of the network has been outsourced to India, Malaysia, Bulgaria and other low-cost countries where sensitive information is accessible for anyone with dubious intent.
Secure options like blockchain has of course not been taken into account due to the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
Case: The Norwegian moonlanding
It also happens that leading politicians make extravagant projects for themselves. Some succeed, some flop.
Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July, 20th, 1969. The astronauts returned to the Earth and their landing in the Pacific Ocean on July 24th marked the ultimate success of the undertaking announced by President John F. Kennedy in a speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
With gusto the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg declared in his new year speech on January 1, 2007 that the government was going to develop and build the first ever facilities for full-scale capture of CO2 at the oil and gas refinery at Mongstad, and that this would be the Norwegian Moon Landing. (They called it “cleaning” of CO2, hoping that the world is in desperate need of “clean” CO2?).
Ten years later nothing had happened, and the entire project had to be scrapped. Meanwhile, thousands of consultants and bureaucrats had earned a good living at a total cost of NOK 13 billion.
Case: Norwegian Tourist Roads
The Norwegian Road Administration has spent millions on upgrading “National Tourist Routes”, including a huge advertising campaign to attract visitors.
Big Surprise: people came!, but the toilet facilities broke down due to inferior capacity or poor workmanship (cheapest bid). People in desperate need used the immediate surroundings, and suddenly the spectacular tourist sites were tainted by stinking shit!
Many of these failures demonstrate the Peter Principle; that some people in public as well as in private organisations are safely located at their level of incompetence.
During the last decades we have seen efforts to make the bureaucracy more efficient by use of ICT (Information Communication Technology), which can only produce more bureaucracy. This is a corollary of Parkinson’s Law which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. A highly productive bureaucrat can do nothing but filling the gained time by producing more bureaucracy (look to Norway, USA, and the EU). The extreme power of modern ICT can in the hands of morons do immense harm to society, as Mitch Ratcliffe has pointed out: “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.”
Norway’s immense wealth has turned it into a state run by moronic bureaucrats. This brings Norway into an inferior position compared to other nations where intelligence and ingenuity bring prosperity to the people. These sad circumstances will persist for many decades to come, regardless of which political clowns are in government.
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) warned: “If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.”
