Miles's Law: Observations on Human Behavior in Public Policy

Organizational Behavior

CHAPTER OUTLINE

KEYNOTE: Henry Two of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, and Rufus Miles of the US Bureau of the Budget: How a Medieval King, a Martyred Saint, and an American Bureaucrat Illustrate Miles's Law

Laws are enacted by governments to regulate our behavior in a seemingly infinite number of ways. Thus, citizens are obligated to stop at traffic lights when they turn red, pay their taxes on time, and not impose violence on fellow citizens who are merely rude or dishonorable.

Laws also govern the physical world. Isaac Newton, sixteen forty-two to seventeen twenty-seven, wrote that

"To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction." This is known as Newton's "third law of motion." Because Newton discovered so many laws of the physical universe, he is widely considered to be the founder of modern physics.

Then there are laws that are not of the legal world or of the physical realm but that merely explain human behavior. This last category has a long tradition in both literature and the social sciences. For example, Jane Austen wrote as the first sentence in her novel Pride and Prejudice, eighteen thirteen, that "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." If you believe that, maybe you'll also believe what Tolstoy wrote in his novel Anna Karenina, eighteen seventy-five: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is the plot of countless other novels, plays, films, and real-life adventures. But in their essence, they are not laws, but merely observations.

The observatory nature of such laws is their chief commonality and characteristic. A law, to be truly a law, must be universal; this is the chief characteristic of the laws of science and the goal of laws enacted by governments. Observational laws as offered by literature, however great, invariably fail this test of universality.

Surely you have heard of single men "in possession of a good fortune" who are most decidedly not "in want of a wife."

For greater, if not universal, consistency in observational laws we must turn to the social sciences. The Austrian-born British philosopher Karl R. Popper is generally credited with being the first to promulgate the law of unintended consequences, that conscious human efforts to accomplish one goal will lead to "as a rule, the indirect, the unintended and often the unwanted by-products of such actions." Thus, in nineteen sixty-four the US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act with its Title Seven equal employment opportunity provisions intended to help African Americans; but the most immediate beneficiaries of this new law were white women. Not a bad result and not an "unwanted by-product," but unintended and unexpected.

Another observational law is Laurence J. Peter's law from his book The Peter Principle that "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence" (1969, p. 8). Corollaries of the Peter Principle hold that in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties"(p. 10). In answer to the logical question of who then does the work that has to be done, Peter asserts that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence."

The problems with observational laws is that they are, of course, not laws at all, merely strong tendencies, just as Peter suggests when he asserts in his principle that "every employee tends to rise." Nevertheless, even if such laws or principles are not to be depended on for all occasions, they remain useful in explaining and understanding human behavior.

The preceding discussion has been the preamble to our main story that

"proves" one of the best-known observational laws in public policy and administration, Miles's Law. It was first put into words in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States, but it has always been applicable. We'll prove this by using a famous example of the law taking effect from England in the twelfth century.

Miles's Law

Miles's Law is named after a manager in the Bureau of the Budget, now the Office of Management and Budget, who first observed, Where you stand depends on where you sit. Rufus E. Miles Jr. chronicled the history of his law in a nineteen seventy-eight Public Administration Review article after it had been folk wisdom among federal bureaucrats for many years.

While admitting that his "concept was as old as Plato," the "phraseology" evolved from a specific sequence of events that occurred when Miles was supervising a group of budget examiners in the nineteen forties. One of the examiners was offered a higher-paying new job as a budget analyst at one of the agencies he had been reviewing. Because he had been particularly critical of this agency in his capacity as a reviewing budget examiner, he told Miles, his boss, that he would prefer to stay in his present job if his salary could be raised. Miles, ever concerned about federal expenditure levels, refused to support a raise of his subordinate's salary. So the subordinate resigned his position with the Bureau of the Budget to accept a higher-paying job with an agency he believed was not very efficient with its use of public funds.

Miles then remarked to the remaining workers under his supervision that soon the former employee would be defending the new budget policies that he had so vociferously criticized. His co-workers were incredulous. After all, the exiting analyst was a man of strongly held judgments and great personal integrity. But Miles insisted this would happen and was proven correct by events. As his law states,

"Where you stand depends upon where you sit."

Because the former employee was sitting elsewhere, his views would naturally evolve to reflect his new position. It wasn't a matter of ethics so much as it was a matter of perspective. In effect, no employee can be separated from the perspective of the particular responsibilities of his or her current position. Revised stances on issues and policies can be, and often are, the opposite of those previously held. This is not so much hypocrisy as it is loyalty to, and greater understanding of, one's new employer. World history offers no better example of this common phenomenon than the events that led up to the death and martyrdom of Thomas Becket during the reign of England's Henry Two in the twelfth century.