I’ve googled it and I’ve read the definition but I still have no idea what it actually is and how it affects a person, particularly in their day to day lives
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It’s… hard to apply it to everyday life. For a bureaucracy to exist, you need a LOT of people.
Oversimplified, it’s a system with “tiers” of leadership. Lots of companies are set up this way. At the “top” there are people who are the “big bosses” and they make decisions about how the company runs. There are “smaller bosses” underneath them responsible for *parts* of the company. Their job is to try and make their part of the company do what the “big bosses” say. At the very bottom are the workers, who have to do an individual job to contribute to the overall goals.
A worker may see something that’s waste and could save the company money. But they can’t just order new machinery or change the process themselves, they have to work within the bureaucracy. So they have to tell their manager, and THAT manager also might not have the power to change things, so they have to tell THEIR manager. Eventually a manager who can make the change is notified and makes the change.
That’s obviously slow, so why bother? Well, there may be big picture reasons the process was wasteful. Some of the bigger bosses may be planning to change that part of the business soon, so fixing the wasteful process won’t save enough money before the change to be worth paying to fix it. The employees at the “lower” levels may not know about those plans so if they’re able to make big decisions without oversight they could really screw things up. To some extent having a bureaucracy helps everyone focus on the smallest job they need to do and helps everyone stay aligned.
But it’s really hard to get it right, and if everyone in the bureaucracy makes little mistakes all of those mistakes add up. That’s why we make fun of them and think they’re problematic. But, at the same time, if you tried to run a company like Amazon using the same rules that work for a company with 6 people, it’d be chaos.
How’s it affect you day to day? Well, that only matters if there’s some law you really really need passed. Like, suppose you’re going to die if you can’t get a medical procedure done, but it’s currently illegal in your state. In my state, the bureaucracy is set up such that the people who could change the law aren’t going to meet again until later next year, so there’s absolutely nothing you can do but hope you don’t die until then. (By the way, it’s also illegal for you to get it done in another state.)
There’s lots of other little effects. Like how the US pays more money for healthcare per citizen than any other developed nation but is only in about the middle of the pack when it comes to quality of healthcare. We started trying to reform it way back in 2010. That took years of work. Then the next President was so mad about it he said he’d write something completely new that would be better, but it turned out to be too hard and he gave up because none of the plans his people came up with even got sympathy votes. It’s 14 years later, all of the problems are worse, and the only thing we’ve *barely* accomplished is putting some price caps on insulin for *some* people. Even that is getting eaten up in bureaucracy because people who care more about winning political points than governing the nation file lawsuits or try to pass new laws to remove it. That takes up time in courts and Congress that could be spent on handling other problems.
So it’s really indirect. If you want the government or a company to do something to help you, it’s going to take a LONG time and a LOT of work to get it. That’s bureaucracy. A lot of people hate it. There are governments that don’t have so much bureaucracy and they can make decisions fast. But, unfortunately, those governments tend to make decisions without concern as to whether it hurts people. The two extremes are:
* With bureaucracy: “We can’t build this railroad system that would be good for the state. There are too many people who have houses we will have to demolish. We’re going to have to pay all of those people to move to be fair, and that also means we’re going to have to do extra work to prove there’s no better alternative that DOESN’T involve demolishing their home. That process alone will probably take five years, and by then this railroad plan may not even be what we need. Also there’s the problem of who will demolish the homes, we’re going to have to hold a bidding process…”
* With no bureaucracy: “We’re going to build this railroad. What? There’s a house in the way? I don’t care. Tell them to move. I want the site cleared by the end of the week, and I don’t care if they’re in the house when you bulldoze it. Tell them to sue me. I’ll put them in jail. Then they’ll have plenty of house.”
In government it’s meant to be for “fairness”, but there are always people who are good at tilting “fair” to mean “I get the best deal”.
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