Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Parkinson's Law - Freakonomics meets Evelyn Waugh

"Granted that work (and especially paper work) is 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." This is Parkinson's Law, first expounded in an article in The Economist in 1955. In five pages C. Northcote Parkinson presents thought experiments and statistics that simply dazzle. Thnk Freakonomics written by Evelyn Waugh.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Parkinson's Second Law is also quite interesting:

"Expenditures rise to meet income".

Wiki offers the following generalisation:
"The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law