GOD

WHEN your friends start looking for proofs of your existence, you're heading for trouble.
That was God's situation as the millennium got into its stride.

Few ordinary folk, though they had different names for him, doubted the reality of God.
He was up there somewhere (up, not down; in his long career, no one ever located him
on the seabed), always had been, always would be. Yet not quite so far up, in the
churches and monasteries of Europe, many of its cleverest men would soon be racking
their brains for ways of proving it.

Anselm, for instance, and others centuries later, such as Descartes, reckoned if you
could think of God, then there must be a God to think of. Thomas Aquinas saw
everything in motion, so there must be someone to give the first push. Others felt that a
universe so elegantly designed as ours plainly must have a designer. And so on, and
ingeniously on.

Yet why bother with proof, if everyone knew it anyway? One, because great brains are
like that; two, because not everyone did. Out there were the gentiles, Saracens and
such. But did not they too say, There is no God but God? Yes, but they didn't mean
what good Christians meant. They must be taught better. And there God's troubles
began.

They were largely his own fault. Like many great personalities, he had countless
admirers who detested each otherand he let them do so. For one of infinite knowledge,
he was strangely careless how he spread what bits of it to whom. To some he dictated
the Bible; to Muhammad the Koran. He was much concerned with the diet of Jews. He
let Hindus paint him as what, to others, looked like a blue-faced flute-player with an
interest in dairy-farming. Each set of believers had its version of what he was like and
what he had said. No wonder cynics began to hint that, if believers differed so widely,
belief might be a mistake.

The believers then made things worse. For soon it was not sets but sub-sets. Christians
nationalised God, as Jews had long since, like some coal mine. He's on our side, the
English told the French. No, ours, Joan of Arc hit back. Next, the Reformers privatised
him: unser Gott, fine, yet not the king's or the church's, but each man's own. From this
umpteen versions of what he might amount to, or think, were apt to spring, and did.
Close kin could disagree. As late as 1829, a bishop warned Britain's House of Lords of
divine retribution if it granted civic rights to Jews; happily, their lordships, aware that
stupidity thrived in God's house as in their own, took the risk. In the 1840s American
Methodism split, north against south, arguing whether his word condemned slavery or
justified it.

Nor did the rivals seem even to believe their own versions. The Christians turned not
cheeks but swords against Muslims, Jews and each other. Muslims, while averring that
in religion there is no compulsion, did the like to them and to Hindus, and put to death
apostates from Islam. For centuries, such rivalries led to torrents of blood. Was this a
good God at work? Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, the Roman poet Lucretius
had written: that's where superstition leads. It was no disproof of clerical logic, but it was
a reasonable point.

And in time reason began to take a hand. God, OK, but less mumbo-jumbo, said a
platoon of English deists in the early 18th century; we can reach him without revelation,
let alone incense. This was a risky step, as French and German thinkers were soon to
prove. If human reason was so powerful, did man need God? No, said Enlightened men
like Diderot (to be silenced, but not convinced, when the mathematician Euler told him a
+ bn over n = x, donc Dieu existe). The French revolution buried God, albeit Napoleon
soon dug him out.

Darwin did not help, blowing apart the first book of the Bible. Nor did critical 19th-century
German micro-examination of what was left. Still less did men like Marx, who saw the
close links between the ruling class and the ruling churches, and was eager to blow up
both; come the 20th century, the Soviet Union did so, literally. Religion was the opium of
the people, give them the adrenalin of communism instead. God was dead, as Nietzsche
had announced; and even if the superman Nietzsche envisaged to replace him somehow
never got born, communist man could do it.

Trouble was, communist man didn't; the people did not agree; and the corpse just
wouldn't lie down. He popped up in the oddest places. You don't find many atheists in a
landing-craft heading for Normandy, recorded a padre aboard one such in June 1944;
even though the Almighty was about to let many of their joint flock be turned into fish-
food. A French journalist, no less, was ready in the 1960s with the best possible
evidence, if it was true: a book entitled God exists, I have met him. (Or could it have
been her, as even the current pope was heard to hint recently?)

And this was in the cynical, questioning, anti-authoritarian West. Ever fewer westerners
share the church'sor the synagogue'sbeliefs, and far fewer still attend their services.
Yet outside the rarefied world of thinkers, remarkably few deny the possibility of a
supreme being; less than 10% of Americans. In Muslim and Hindu societies, the thought
is barely heard.
The test will come on Judgment Day, when man, we are told, will meet his maker. Or will
it be God meeting his?

Fear of flying

In-flight announcements are not entirely truthful. What might an

honest one sound like?

GOOD morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are delighted to welcome you aboard
Veritas Airways, the airline that tells it like it is. Please ensure that your seat belt is
fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray-table is stowed. At Veritas Airways,
your safety is our first priority. Actually, that is not quite true: if it were, our seats
would be rear-facing, like those in military aircraft, since they are safer in the event of
an emergency landing. But then hardly anybody would buy our tickets and we would
go bust.

The flight attendants are now pointing out the emergency exits. This is the part of the
announcement that you might want to pay attention to. So stop your sudoku for a
minute and listen: knowing in advance where the exits are makes a dramatic
difference to your chances of survival if we have to evacuate the aircraft. Also, please
keep your seat belt fastened when seated, even if the seat-belt light is not
illuminated. This is to protect you from the risk of clear-air turbulence, a rare but
extremely nasty form of disturbance that can cause severe injury. Imagine the heavy
food trolleys jumping into the air and bashing into the overhead lockers, and you will
have some idea of how nasty it can be. We don't want to scare you. Still, keep that
seat belt fastened all the same.

Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In
fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an
unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the
number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero.
This aircraft is equipped with inflatable slides that detach to form life rafts, not that it
makes any difference. Please remove high-heeled shoes before using the slides. We
might as well add that space helmets and anti-gravity belts should also be removed,
since even to mention the use of the slides as rafts is to enter the realm of science
fiction.

Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft's
navigation systems. At least, that's what you've always been told. The real reason to
switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but
somehow that doesn't sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are
left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on
board at all, if you think about it. We will have to come clean about this next year,
when we introduce in-flight calling across the Veritas fleet. At that point the prospect
of taking a cut of the sky-high calling charges will miraculously cause our safety
concerns about mobile phones to evaporate.

On channel 11 of our in-flight entertainment system you will find a video consisting of
abstract imagery and a new-age soundtrack, with a voice-over explaining some
exercises you can do to reduce the risk of deep-vein thrombosis. We are aware that
this video is tedious, but it is not meant to be fun. It is meant to limit our liability in the
event of lawsuits.

Once we have reached cruising altitude you will be offered a light meal and a choice
of beveragesa word that sounds so much better than just saying drinks', don't you
think? The purpose of these refreshments is partly to keep you in your seats where
you cannot do yourselves or anyone else any harm. Please consume alcohol in
moderate quantities so that you become mildly sedated but not rowdy. That said, we
can always turn the cabin air-quality down a notch or two to help ensure that you are
sufficiently drowsy.

After take-off, the most dangerous part of the flight, the captain will say a few words
that will either be so quiet that you will not be able to hear them, or so loud that they
could wake the dead. So please sit back, relax and enjoy the flight. We appreciate
that you have a choice of airlines and we thank you for choosing Veritas, a member
of an incomprehensible alliance of obscure foreign outfits, most of which you have
never heard of. Cabin crew, please make sure we have remembered to close the
doors. Sorry, I mean: Doors to automatic and cross-check'. Thank you for flying
Veritas.

Parkinson's Law

The report of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service was published on
Thursday afternoon. Time has not permitted any comment in this week's issue
of The Economist on the contents of the Report. But the startling discovery
enunciated by a correspondent in the following article is certainly relevant to
what should have been in it.

IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its
completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and
despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the
postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an
hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take
an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would
occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person
prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

Granted that work (and especially paper work) is thus elastic in its demands on time, it is
manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the
size of the staff to which it may be assigned. Before the discovery of a new scientific
lawherewith presented to the public for the first time, and to be called Parkinson's
Law*there has, however, been insufficient recognition of the implications of this fact in
the field of public administration. Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with
occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect
a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined
that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to
work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally
misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work to be
done are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is
governed by Parkinson's Law, and would be much the same whether the volume of the
work were to increase, diminish or even disappear. The importance of Parkinson's Law
lies in the fact that it is a law of growth based upon an analysis of the factors by which
that growth is controlled.

The validity of this recently discovered law must rest mainly on statistical proofs, which
will follow. Of more interest to the general reader is the explanation of the factors that
underlie the general tendency to which this law gives definition. Omitting technicalities
(which are numerous) we may distinguish, at the outset, two motive forces. They can be
represented for the present purpose by two almost axiomatic statements, thus:

Factor I.An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and

Factor II.Officials make work for each other.

We must now examine these motive forces in turn.

The Law of Multiplication of Subordinates

To comprehend Factor I, we must picture a civil servant called A who finds himself
overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial; but we should
observe, in passing, that A's sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own
decreasing energya normal symptom of middle-age. For this real or imagined
overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies

(1) He may resign.

(2) He may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B.

(3) He may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D.

There is probably no instance in civil service history of A choosing any but the third
alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on
his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W's
vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men,
below him. They will add to his consequence; and, by dividing the work into two
categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who
comprehends them both.

It is essential to realise, at this point, that C and D are, as it were, inseparable. To

appoint C alone would have been impossible. Why? Because C, if by himself, would
divide the work with A and so assume almost the equal status which has been refused in
the first instance to B; a status the more emphasised if C is A's only possible successor.
Subordinates must thus number two or more, each being kept in order by fear of the
other's promotion. When C complains in turn of being overworked (as he certainly will) A
will, with the concurrence of C, advise the appointment of two assistants to help C. But
he can then avert internal friction only by advising the appointment of two more
assistants to help D, whose position is much the same. With this recruitment of E, F, G
and H, the promotion of A is now practically certain.

The Law of Multiplication of Work

Seven officials are now doing what one did before. This is where Factor II comes into
operation. For these seven make so much work for each other that all are fully occupied
and A is actually working harder than ever. An incoming document may well come before
each of them in turn. Official E decides that it falls within the province of F, who places a
draft reply before C, who amends it drastically before consulting D, who asks G to deal
with it. But G goes on leave at this point, handing the file over to H, who drafts a minute,
which is signed by D and returned to C, who revises his draft accordingly and lays the
new version before A.

What does A do? He would have every excuse for signing the thing unread, for he has
many other matters on his mind. Knowing now that he is to succeed W next year, he has
to decide whether C or D should succeed to his own office. He had to agree to G going
on leave, although not yet strictly entitled to it. He is worried whether H should not have
gone instead, for reasons of health. He has looked pale recentlypartly but not solely
because of his domestic troubles. Then there is the business of F's special increment of
salary for the period of the conference, and E's application for transfer to the Ministry of
Pensions. A has heard that D is in love with a married typist and that G and F are no
longer on speaking termsno one seems to know why. So A might be tempted to sign
C's draft and have done with it.

But A is a conscientious man. Beset as he is with problems created by his colleagues for
themselves and for himcreated by the mere fact of these officials' existencehe is not
the man to shirk his duty. He reads through the draft with care, deletes the fussy
paragraphs added by C and H and restores the thing back to the form preferred in the
first instance by the able (if quarrelsome) F. He corrects the Englishnone of these
young men can write grammaticallyand finally produces the same reply he would have
written if officials C to H had never been born. Far more people have taken far longer to
produce the same result. No one has been idle. All have done their best. And it is late in
the evening before A finally quits his office and begins the return journey to Ealing. The
last of the office lights are being turned off in the gathering dusk which marks the end of
another day's administrative toil. Among the last to leave, A reflects, with bowed
shoulders and a wry smile, that late hours, like grey hairs, are among the penalties of
success.

The Scientific Proofs

From this description of the factors at work the student of political science will recognise
that administrators are more or less bound to multiply. Nothing has yet been said,
however, about the period of time likely to elapse between the date of A's appointment
and the date from which we can calculate the pensionable service of H. Vast masses of
statistical evidence have been collected and it is from a study of this data that
Parkinson's Law has been deduced. Space will not allow of detailed analysis, but
research began in the British Navy Estimates. These were chosen because the
Admiralty's responsibilities are more easily measurable than those of (say) the Board of
Trade.

The accompanying table is derived from Admiralty statistics for 1914 and 1928. The
criticism voiced at the time centred on the comparison between the sharp fall in numbers
of those available for fighting and the sharp rise in those available only for administration,
the creation, it was said, of a magnificent Navy on land. But that comparison is not to
the present purpose. What we have to note is that the 2,000 Admiralty officials of 1914
had become the 3,569 of 1928; and that this growth was unrelated to any possible
increase in their work. The Navy during that period had diminished, in point of fact, by a
third in men and two-thirds in ships. Nor, from 1922 onwards, was its strength even
expected to increase, for its total of ships (unlike its total of officials) was limited by the
Washington Naval Agreement of that year. Yet in these circumstances we had a 78.45
per cent increase in Admiralty officials over a period of fourteen years; an average
increase of 5.6 per cent a year on the earlier total. In fact, as we shall see, the rate of
increase was not as regular as that. All we have to consider, at this stage, is the
percentage rise over a given period.

Can this rise in the total number of civil servants be accounted for except on the
assumption that such a total must always rise by a law governing its growth? It might be
urged, at this point, that the period under discussion was one of rapid development in
naval technique. The use of the flying machine was no longer confined to the eccentric.
Submarines were tolerated if not approved. Engineer officers were beginning to be
regarded as almost human. In so revolutionary an age we might expect that
storekeepers would have more elaborate inventories to compile. We might not wonder to
see more draughtsmen on the pay-roll, more designers, more technicians and scientists.
But these, the dockyard officials, increased only by 40 per cent in number, while the men
of Whitehall increased by nearly 80 per cent. For every new foreman or electrical
engineer at Portsmouth there had to be two more clerks at Charing Cross. From this we
might be tempted to conclude, provisionally, that the rate of increase in administrative
staff is likely to be double that of the technical staff at a time when the actually useful
strength (in this case, of seamen) is being reduced by 31.5 per cent. It has been proved,
however, statistically, that this last percentage is irrelevant. The officials would have
multiplied at the same rate had there been no actual seamen at all.

It would be interesting to follow the further progress by which the 8,118 Admiralty staff of
1935 came to number 33,788 by 1954. But the staff of the Colonial Office affords a better
field of study during a period of Imperial decline. The relevant statistics are set down
below. Before showing what the rate of increase is, we must observe that the extent of
this department's responsibilities was far from constant during these twenty years. The
colonial territories were not much altered in area or population between 1935 and 1939.
They were considerably diminished by 1943, certain areas being in enemy hands. They
were increased again in 1947, but have since then shrunk steadily from year to year as
successive colonies achieve self-government.

It would be rational, prior to the discovery of Parkinson's Law, to suppose that these
changes in the scope of Empire would be reflected in the size of its central
administration. But a glance at the figures shows that the staff totals represent automatic
stages in an inevitable increase. And this increase, while related to that observed in other
departments, has nothing to do with the sizeor even the existenceof the Empire.
What are the percentages of increase? We must ignore, for this purpose, the rapid
increase in staff which accompanied the diminution of responsibility during World War II.
We should note rather the peacetime rates of increase; over 5.24 per cent between 1935
and 1939, and 6.55 per cent between 1947 and 1954. This gives an average increase of
5.89 per cent each year, a percentage markedly similar to that already found in the
Admiralty staff increase between 1914 and 1928.

Further and detailed statistical analysis of departmental staffs would be inappropriate in

such an article as this. It is hoped, however, to reach a tentative conclusion regarding the
time likely to elapse between a given official's first appointment and the later appointment
of his two or more assistants. Dealing with the problem of pure staff accumulation, all the
researches so far completed point to an average increase of about 5 per cent per year.
This fact established, it now becomes possible to state Parkinson's Law in mathematical
form, thus:

In any public administrative department not actually at war the staff increase may be
expected to follow this formula:

Where k is the number of staff seeking promotion through the appointment of

subordinates; p represents the difference between the ages of appointment and
retirement; m is the number of man-hours devoted to answering minutes within the
department; and n is the number of effective units being administered. Then x will be the
number of new staff required each year.

Mathematicians will, of course, realise that to find the percentage increase they must
multiply x by 100 and divide by the total of the previous year, thus:

where y represents the total original staff. And this figure will invariably prove to be
between 5.17 per cent and 6.56 per cent, irrespective of any variation in the amount of
work (if any) to be done.

The discovery of this formula and of the general principles upon which it is based has, of
course, no emotive value. No attempt has been made to inquire whether departments
ought to grow in size. Those who hold that this growth is essential to gain full
employment are fully entitled to their opinion. Those who doubt the stability of an
economy based upon reading each other's minutes are equally entitled to theirs.
Parkinson's Law is a purely scientific discovery, inapplicable except in theory to the
politics of the day. It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough
for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow.