When Magical Management Thinking Gets People Killed

When outsourcing kills, Gen Z men outnumbering women in church, falling birthrates in Iran and more in this week's digest.

I’m presently in Chicago speaking at the Touchstone Conference.

What I’m reading: Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State by Perry Anderson.

Magical Management Thinking

In 2017, the Grenfell Tower high rise in London went up in flames, killing 72 people. It turns out that the building was covered in combustible cladding material that turned it into a death trap.

The UK just released the results of an investigation into the fire, and Margaret Heffernan in the Financial Times wrote a column about it. She talks about how the logic of efficiency and outsourcing deeply embedded into modern management thinking is a recipe for Grenfell Tower disasters to happen:

One of the most striking revelations is the sheer number of organisations involved in the maintenance and refurbishment of the tower. It’s hard to keep track. Why so many? In the last 30 years, outsourcing has been all the rage, the argument being that it allows access to specialised expertise of a kind too expensive to maintain in-house. This has three underestimated consequences. [First,] Subcontracting atomises responsibility. Who ultimately is accountable: the company that does the work or the one that contracted it? Outsourcing is a recipe for buck-passing.

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Second, outsourcing leaves the contracting organisation ignorant about materials, techniques and technologies it no longer feels responsible for. I can’t forget talking to a senior Ford executive who admitted, after decades of outsourcing the manufacture of many parts, that no one in head office knew enough about them to adjudicate between businesses bidding for the work.

Even worse, outsource too much and each piece of the work becomes so estranged from its central purpose as to become meaningless. This is what I call the demoralisation of work, when daily tasks are so far removed from a final outcome that they make jobs only about money — not about housing or safety or human lives. These contracts are decided largely on price: bidders compete to cut costs, to win and to keep business.

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Defenders of competition insist that it forces the best to the top, but it’s past time that we also acknowledge it routinely does the opposite, encouraging dishonesty, misinformation, cheating and fraud in education, sport, politics and commerce.

Efficiency dominates management thinking. A magical belief that everything can be done better, faster, cheaper has forced a focus on cost-cutting.

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Accumulating tragic corporate failures reveal major flaws in the business ideologies that have dominated management for most of my lifetime. Outsourcing intrinsically carries invisible risks and costs: this must be admitted. Competition does not automatically force the best to the top — it also provokes perverse outcomes. Efficiency can be dangerous.

Click over to read the whole thing. The FT has a very hard paywall so I excerpted as much as I could justify.

Keep in mind, the Financial Times is a mainstream business publication, not some type of anti-capitalist activist rag.

The Rise of Men in Church

The New York Times has a great piece on the phenomenon on how among Generation Z, more men than women are now attending church. This appears to be mostly driven by accelerated abandonment of religion by women, but is still notable.

Grace Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, has not made a conscious effort to attract young men. It is an unremarkable size, and is in many ways an ordinary evangelical church. Yet its leaders have noticed for several years now that young men outnumber young women in their pews. When the church opened a small outpost in the nearby town of Robinson last year, 12 of the 16 young people regularly attending were men.

“We’ve been talking about it from the beginning,” said Phil Barnes, a pastor at that congregation, Hope Church. “What’s the Lord doing? Why is he sending us all of these young men?”

The dynamics at Grace are a dramatic example of an emerging truth: For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip. Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

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“Religion is coded right, and coded more traditionalist” for young people, said Derek Rishmawy, who leads a ministry at the University of California, Irvine.

For some young men he counsels, Christianity is perceived as “one institution that isn’t initially and formally skeptical of them as a class,” especially in the campus setting, Mr. Rishmawy said. “We’re telling them, ‘you are meant to live a meaningful life.’”

Click over to read the whole thing.

Marriage and Children in Iran

Even a theocracy can’t stave off declining marriage and birth rates, as the Financial Times reports:

At age 27, Neda, a personal trainer living in Tehran, is wondering whether she should bother to get married. Like many younger, urban Iranians, she reckons the loss of her liberty would be too high a price to pay.

“People in my social circle keep telling me it’s not worth giving up my freedom to get married, and they encourage me to continue living happily single,” said Neda, who has an eclectic range of tattoos and regularly appears in public without the mandatory headscarf. Marriage appears to be an institution in decline in Iran, and the average age at which people wed is on the rise.

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Kazemipour said 5 per cent of Iranian women over 40 were now considered unlikely to ever marry, up from only 2 per cent in the 1980s. After the 1979 revolution, more women went to college and their qualifications limited their marriage options “as they would no longer marry men with lower degrees or careers”, she explained.

The raising of a family, said Taghi Azad Armaki, a professor of sociology at Tehran University, was “no longer as valuable and popular as it used to be” and is “not even a second and third priority for many people”. There was a sense of “radical, self-centred individualism” among young men and women who “prioritise their own self-fulfilment”, he told the FT.

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“When western states propagated their own cultural norms through social media and satellite television, it appealed to young people with shallow religious beliefs,” she told the FT. “People would lose their interest in marriage in a society wherein [sexual] desires can be easily fulfilled from a young age.”

Iran’s fertility rate has dropped from 2.09 per woman in 2017 — more or less the replacement rate required for a stable population — to 1.7 in 2024, suggesting the population will peak in two decades and then begin to decline.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Don’t Watch the Election Returns

One of the ways I manage stress is to tune out some news I can’t do anything about. I typically don’t read any articles about Ukraine, Gaza, or the election, for example. I also got off social media during the Trump-Harris debate.

One practice I’ve adopted in recent cycles that’s been great is to skip following the election returns. I turn off my computer, put down the phone, read a book, and then look in the morning to see who won. I have to say, it works great.

If the news cycle is driving you crazy, this is a technique to help deal with it.

NYC Church Planting

In response to my podcast with Jon Tyson, pastor of Church of the City in New York - it’s an excellent discussion - someone from Redeemer City to City sent me this response I said I would publish:

Over the past 9 years, CTC NYC has helped plant 203 churches across NYC, and 174 are still open, meaning only 14% of the churches have closed. Even in Manhattan specifically (center city), we have helped plant 52 churches, and 42 remain open, which is less than 20% closure rate (significantly lower than the 70% Jon mentions). 

Best of the Web

James Wood: The Autonomy Trap

NYT: I Was Adopted From China as a Baby. I’m Still Coming to Terms With That - It’s interesting to see how the narrative on international adoptions has changed, now that, among other things, we are hearing the stories of adult adoptees who have ambiguous feelings about it.

Axios: Harris, Trump go light on religion in '24 campaign - Once consequence of the negative world is that the presidential candidates are talking much less about religion.

Jake Meador has a couple of interesting pieces on the culture of the church, one on evangelical vs. mainline sociology and the other on evangelical sociology and clericalism.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was on the podcast of Coram Deo Academy talking about Life in the Negative World.

I got a mention in First Things, World magazine, Mother Jones, American Compass, American Reformer, and from Rod Dreher, Carl Trueman, and Rob Henderson.

New this week:

• I wrote about how conservatives need to reclaim FDR.

• Benjamin Mabry wrote about evangelicals needing a sociology of collectives.

• My podcast was with Chris Bolinger on how Christian men can deal with divorce.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: Grenfell Tower Fire, by Natalie Oxford - CC BY 4.0