Death on the Roof

The inadequacy of response to the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina should not be attributed to “bureaucracy.” Real bureaucracies, as opposed to idealized Weberian models of them, often deal effectively with changing or even unique circumstance. The failure was not in a mode of social organization but in the perverse priorities, inflected with racism, that allowed “work to rule” as default practice. Given the situation at hand, this was pathological bureaucracy, not normal bureaucracy.