Duane Elgin
Author, Visionary and Citizen-Voice Activist

The Limits to Complexity: Are Bureaucracies Becoming Unmanageable?

Essays

by Duane Elgin with Robert A. Bushnell
THE FUTURIST, December 1977

Social systems tend to decline in performance as they become bigger, more complex, and increasingly incomprehensible. They also become less amenable to democratic control, and more vulnerable to disruption at key points. There now appears to be evidence that we may be pressing against the relative limits of our ability to manage large bureaucracies.