Persistent rules
A Socratic walk-through of persistent rules — reasoned out one step at a time, not lectured.
The question we started with
THE QUESTION #Why do organizations keep rules that nearly everyone agrees are inconvenient?
Ask around an organisation about a rule that annoys everyone — the second signature, the form that duplicates the other form, the approval nobody reads. You will find near-unanimous agreement that it is pointless. And you will find it still there next year.
The usual explanation is inertia: nobody got round to it. That is worth testing, because inertia predicts something specific. It predicts that if someone did get round to it, the rule would go. Does it?
Reasoning it through
REASONING #Consider who would have to act. Repeal is an affirmative act with an author. Someone signs, and their name is attached to the change. Retention requires nobody to do anything at all. Already the two options are not symmetric, and the asymmetry is not about effort — it is about attribution.
Follow that through to consequences. Suppose the rule is abolished and, two years later, something goes wrong that the rule would plausibly have caught. The failure is traceable to a decision with a signature on it. Now suppose the rule is retained and costs the organisation a great deal in wasted hours. That cost is real, but it is distributed across thousands of small delays, attributed to nobody, and appears in no report. So the person deciding faces a concentrated, attributable downside for acting and a diffuse, unattributable downside for not acting. A rational and entirely public-spirited official retains the rule.
Now add the second asymmetry, which is about interests rather than blame. The rule's costs fall on many people in small amounts — a few minutes each. Its benefits often fall on few people in large amounts: a unit whose function is administering it, a supplier qualified under it, a profession it shields from competition. Olson's argument about collective action applies exactly here. The many will not organise to recover a few minutes; the few will absolutely organise to protect a livelihood. Repeal therefore faces a well-funded, attentive, informed opponent and a large, unorganised, indifferent beneficiary. That is not inertia. That is a contest with a predictable winner.
Third, and this one is not a pathology at all: the rule may be doing something nobody remembers. Rules are frequently written after a failure — an accident, a fraud, a lawsuit. If the rule works, the failure stops recurring, and within a few years everyone who witnessed it has left. What remains is a rule with no visible justification, which is precisely what a successful rule looks like. The absence of the accident is evidence that the rule is working and evidence that it was never needed, and from inside, the two are indistinguishable. Uncertainty about which case you are in has genuine value, and keeping the rule is the cheap way of buying it.
Fourth, rules interlock. Other procedures, systems, contracts, and job descriptions have been built assuming this one. Removing it is rarely a subtraction; it is an edit whose consequences run somewhere the person editing cannot see.
The analogy
THE ANALOGY #Chesterton's fence: you come across a fence across a field with no obvious purpose. Clearing it takes a work party, an afternoon, and a decision with your name on it. Leaving it costs each person who passes a small detour, and costs you nothing. Somewhere there is a farmer whose sheep it keeps in, and he will be at the meeting. And nobody now alive remembers the bull.
A fence is visible and its purpose is at least discoverable by inspecting the ground, whereas an organisational rule's original hazard often left no trace at all — and a fence, once the field is empty, simply stands there, while a rule keeps drawing down time and attention every day it survives.
Clarifying the model
THE MODEL #The distinction from inertia is worth making precisely, because the remedies differ.
Inertia is friction: nothing happens because no one initiated anything, and an initiative would succeed. Test it by trying — propose the repeal and see. If it passes quietly, it was inertia.
What has been described here is different in kind. It says that repeal is actively opposed by someone whose stake is concentrated, or rationally declined by someone who cannot tell whether the hazard is gone, or genuinely costly because other things lean on it. Those survive an initiative. The diagnostic question is simple: when the rule is questioned, does anyone show up to defend it? If someone does, you are in the concentrated-interest case. If nobody does and it still survives, you are looking at attribution asymmetry, or at inertia.
There is a corresponding design response, which is to make retention require an act too. Sunset clauses expire a rule unless renewed; regulatory budgets require an old rule to be removed for each new one; periodic review obliges someone to sign for keeping. The evidence that these work is genuinely mixed — sunset renewal frequently becomes a formality, and one-in-one-out schemes can be met by retiring trivial rules while adding substantial ones. They shift the burden of the affirmative act, which is the right target, but shifting a burden is not the same as changing an answer.
The honest conclusion is uncomfortable: some inconvenient rules are pure residue and some are load-bearing, they look identical from outside, and the machinery that keeps the residue is the same machinery that keeps the load-bearing ones.
A picture of it
THE PICTURE #How to readThe rule sits in one state at a time; follow the arrows out of In force to see how rarely it leaves. Three separate paths lead back to where it started — nobody willing to sign, a beneficiary who turns up to object, and a purpose nobody can reconstruct — and only one path reaches repeal, which requires positively demonstrating that the original hazard has gone. Note the Dormant loop on the left: an unenforced rule has not been removed, and can be picked up again by whoever finds it useful.
What became clearer
WHAT CLEARED #Persistence is not a failure of energy but the predictable result of two asymmetries and one genuine uncertainty. Costs are diffuse and unattributed while defenders are concentrated and attentive; not acting is safe for the decider in a way that acting is not; and a rule that quietly prevents its own justification from recurring is indistinguishable from a rule that never mattered. Calling this inertia is comforting because inertia implies the problem yields to effort. This does not — it yields, if at all, to changing who has to sign for what.
Where to go next
ONWARD #- Why deregulation drives tend to remove the rules that are easiest to remove rather than the costliest to keep.
- How professional licensing shows the concentrated-benefit pattern in unusually clean form.
Key terms
TERMS #| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Chesterton's fence | the principle that a rule whose purpose is unknown should not be removed until the purpose is established. |
| Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs | the pattern in which a policy's few large beneficiaries organise to defend it while its many small losers do not organise to end it. |
| Sunset clause | a provision causing a rule to expire on a fixed date unless it is affirmatively renewed. |
| Path dependence | the property that later arrangements are shaped by earlier ones, so a rule becomes harder to remove as other things are built on it. |
Every term the collection defines is gathered in the glossary.