Gammon's Law

Gammon's Law is what Milton Friedman has named the "Theory of Bureaucratic Displacement" developed by Dr Max Gammon after studying the British National Health Service. In his words, in "a bureaucratic system … increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production …." Such systems will act rather like 'black holes' in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of 'emitted' production.

As Friedman put it: "I have long been impressed by the operation of Gammon's law in the U.S. schooling system: Input, however measured, has been going up for decades, and output, whether measured by number of students, number of schools, or even more clearly, quality, has been going down."

Links

 * "Gammon's Law of Bureaucratic Displacement" - A note from Dr Max Gammon with some quotes from Milton Friedman by Max Gammon, January 2005
 * Expenditure and Productivity: An Examination of Gammon's Law in the Saudi Public Health Sector (pdf) by Moaddi M. Almeth-hib