In the matter of satisfying the strong genetic predisposition for status, Status Jobs are quite as powerful as Status Goods. However, while Status Goods stimulate the larger economy, Status Jobs only ablate it. They steadily weaken an economy by stealing a considerable part of the available investment power of large firms or governments and cutting it up into innumerable salami slices. Unlike the price mechanism, there are no checks and balances to the growth of bureaucracy. Because, usually, large numbers of people are involved who are strongly motivated for the process to continue -- at least for as long as their working lives -- then it becomes almost impossible to curtail it until a firm goes bankrupt, or is taken over by another and subsequently hacked to size or, in the case of governments, there is a taxation revolt or the bureaucracy simply collapses under its own weight -- as has happened time and again in history (e.g. Ottomon, Chinese, USSR)

During the period I worked for Massey-Ferguson in Coventry it was decided to build an office tower block. When it was completed, all the different departments that had been scattered around the very large industrial site were brought together. It was then discovered that two departments had been carrying out almost identical functions for almost twenty years. Their departments had different names, their managers and underlings had different job titles, the paperwork was quite different, and they both sent separate streams of data into the firm's mainframe computer which cheerfully masticated them and spewed out two other separate streams of documentation that then went to customers who'd bought our tractors. But nobody knew this until some invisible hand placed both departments on the same floor of the building.

Status Goods of importance usually require an individual or group of high creativity to get invent them and then market them. However, Status Jobs can proliferate almost of their own accord. When funds are running well in an organisation, individuals at every level in a bureaucracy can justify an enlargement of their apparent functions and the desirability of appointing others beneath them in order to claim a better salary and job title.

I'm not intending that my book should be involved in political ideology in any way whatsoever, but the fact of bureaucracy in both private firms and government, as a close cousin of Status Goods, is an important one. The following article describes what is happening in government service in England. This is a little too polemical for my taste but it has some usefulness for my book. If any listees come across similar articles describing the hairy growth of bureaucracy in private firms I should be delighted to hear from you. The following article is from today's The Sunday Times

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FANCY A RUBBISH JOB?

Gareth Walsh

The pilot was dead, his instruments were smashed and fuel was leaking from the wreckage, deep in the Panamanian jungle. How could I get back to civilisation?

Equipment lay around the crashed plane, including a compass, a machete, matches, a revolver, rum, a water carrier, a radio, food and plastic sheets. What should I take with me? The compass, I thought, and the rum (to light signal fires as I hacked my way to safety).

Wrong. I should have stayed put and waited for rescue. I was doomed. And I thought I was just seeking a job as a "protected learning time facilitator" with the Luton National Health Service (NHS) Primary Care Trust. What was going on?

What was happening was one small exercise in a monumental effort to waste the billions of pounds that taxpayers are being forced to pour into Gordon Brown's grand design to revive the nanny state. It is boom time for penpushers. Official figures show that one in four of us now works in the public sector -- that's more than 7 million employees.

Every Wednesday the hefty Society supplement of The Guardian, journal of the new Labour salariat, is packed with freshly created posts paid for with public money -- and I was being appraised on my suitability to join this huge workforce by means of a psychological test in a hot, noisy office in Luton. Research by the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think tank, shows that more than 30,000 jobs were advertised in Society over space of 12 months, paying a combined total of more than £1 billion in salaries and other benefits.

Yet that is only part of the picture. In all, 150,000 new public sector jobs were created in the past year. Public sector pay rises now outstrip those in the private sector. "There's a lot of money out there," one NHS line manager confessed cheerily last week.

Hence Luton's hunt for a protected learning time facilitator. Hence, too, the ludicrous and expensive tests that applicants for this mysterious post had to undergo. This was one of 60 equally outlandish jobs for which I have applied under various guises in a four-month investigation into the public sector bonanza. My quest into this strange world was disturbing. It really is a jungle out there, inhabited by some bizarre creatures.

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Step aside Mr Plod the Policeman; shuffle up Mr Stamp the Postman -- a whole new series of public employees has joined the Happy Families game. Here's Mr Rights the anti-racism coordinator, Mrs Strict of the council's smoking cessation unit and Miss Celery the healthy eating officer from the digestion support team. Look, there's Mr Lengthy-Forms the targets monitor, to make sure they all measure up to government standards. And here's Mr Brown the stealth-tax-and-spend invigilator.

Gordon Brown's National Insurance rises and other measures are the equivalent of a 7p increase in the basic rate of income tax since Labour came to power, according to a study carried out by the accountants Tenon for the think tank Reform.

The chancellor has promised a "world class" National Health Service in return for lightening our wallets. But critics see a flaw in his proposal -- a fundamental paradox in the funding and provision of public services. He has put in place the managers who will preside over the over-hauled health service but not the frontline doctors and nurses, who are still being trained. Between 1997, when Labour came to power, and 2002 the number of qualified doctors and nurses in the NHS rose by 15%, while managers and senior managers increased by 45%. It is possible that, because of the economic cycle, there could well be little money available to pay for the new doctors and nurses by the time they do, eventually, emerge from training.

Voters are increasingly aware that their taxes are not being turned into tangible benefits-- a poll last week showed only 7% are happy with Labour's record on public services. But the job bonanza continues. Money is sloshing through the public sector, gurgling along the corridors of local councils, NHS trusts, local education authorities and quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations). Spending on public services will rise to £512 billion in 2005-6 from £203 billion in 1996-7.

My attempts to get my share of this largesse unearthed some posts that clearly would not do. A "young lesbian and bisexual women's health worker" was sought by the London borough of Waltham Forest, to be paid up to £26,121 for "improving the mental, physical and social well-being of young women who are lesbian, bisexual or questioning their sexuality".

More promising was an advertisement for a "Five-A-Day co-ordinator" in east London to "address inequality" in "access to fruit and vegetables". Sheffield's council-funded Gypsy and Traveller Support Group was hunting for an information officer. Tower Hamlets borough council wanted a youth worker to help young Bangladeshis "at risk of becoming disaffected, isolated [and] depressed", while Camden council sought a "welfare rights adviser" to ensure that everyone in the area received as many state benefits as they could manage. Rochdale metropolitan borough council advertised for an "asylum seeker support project manager", at up to £30,594 a year. Lambeth council, understandably, wants a "multilingual service manager", to assist ethnic minorities who don't yet speak English.

I soon discovered that "diversity" was the new buzzword -- and that it indicates a new wave of anti-racist activism sweeping through the public sector. Sutton & Merton NHS Trust wanted to spend up to £35,163 a year on a "diversity project co-ordinator". Salford city council wanted an equality officer to help propel disabled, black and other minority workers into senior management. Sheffield South West PCT, Kent county council and Lambeth council in London all advertised for workers in the field of diversity.

The West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS), which has angered Birmingham residents by helping to force up council tax bills with demands for extra funding that outstripped inflation, sought an "equalities and diversity manager". Key duties included fostering a "welcoming climate for all current and potential employees" and writing reports on equality issues in the service. The WMFS also sought a diversity co-ordinator. Yet, in a glossy brochure, it said it had never had a serious racial problem in its ranks the anti-racist drive was simply spurred by the Race Relations Act amendment of 2000.

I decided I might be cut out for the post of joint learning and development coordinator with the South Tyneside Health Care NHS Trust. The £25,777 job involves helping health workers to understand how to hit government targets. As part of the selection process I had been asked to prepare a 15-minute presentation working to this brief "Based on the proposed new model of working for the joint training forum, how would you ensure a successful integrated approach to multi-agency employee development, and what potential difficulties do you envisage in turning this model into a working reality?"

My potential difficulty was that, despite reading the job description three times, I could still not work out what it entailed and had to bluff my way through the presentation -- not helped by the noise from the busy hospital canteen adjoining the interview room. At a tricky moment I was inadvertently rescued by a member of staff who burst in thinking the room was empty. Gradually I worked out that the job involves buying training in order to help staff to meet Whitehall's targets, and finding the funding for it.

One senior manager told me opaquely that there was "a social care and health workforce which is being dictated to by minimum competency levels set by government, who are very prescriptive in what they are asking for". The aim of the job was "really to provide an integrated approach to providing employee development across a very, very diverse and complex area. I guess that's the hub of it to develop the workforce within prescriptive government competency levels". So there you have it.

Funding would not be a problem. Viv Lund, a line manager with the trust, confided "There are lots of different pots of money . . . you've just got to put in the bids really. Multi-agency working and things, you know, they're flavour of the month."

This is how the NHS budget is gobbled up. One recent study claimed that, despite a 30% real-terms increase in the overall NHS budget in the past four years, the number of waiting list patients treated only rose by 2%. It emerged that the training system I would be running was unpopular with the people it was supposed to benefit -- but it had gone ahead regardless. It had met "scepticism, certainly, across the sector in many respects",said one manager. But he claimed the training system was "a huge awareness-raising exercise for all the parties we are dealing with".

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I didn't get the job. Maybe my heart was not in it. But it was typical of the culture change that has swept the public sector. With myriad targets set by the government, armies of managers are needed not only to chase progress but to collect data and fill in paperwork.

I ran into an extreme example of this when I was being interviewed at Nottingham city council for the post of "monitoring and evaluation officer" of its children's projects. Wiser by now to the ways of the public sector, I innocently asked John Seals, a programme manager, whether there were any plans for 'evaluating evaluation".

To my amazement, he replied 'Yes . . . we will be combining this post internally with an external, arm's-length evaluation programme as well, which will probably be conducted by a university or something like that. We are tendering at the moment. "It will be a two-faced process, if you like. The role of the post is to work closely with projects in helping them with this, and also enabling the link, helping the link, with the external. It's not just a matter of us doing it for our own purposes. It's related to the big picture."

So, on to the NHS trust in Harrow, north London, which was offering £26,202 a year for a "smoking cessation and prevention service co-ordinator". The Department of Health has set a target of more than 3,000 people to give up smoking in the Harrow area by 2006, and this post was described in the advertisement as "an exciting opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of our local community".

In reality it involves a maze of bureaucracy -- dealing with steering groups, developing "strategic and operational plans", meeting government targets, collecting data, producing reports and ensuring the local primary care trust complies with the government's white paper on smoking. What is does not involve on any regular basis is explaining directly to smokers how to stop.

Pretending that I had a background in helping homeless men to overcome addiction, I was interviewed at the trust's headquarters and gave a 20-minute presentation putting forward a number of "radical" initiatives the trust might like to organise. These included a "die-in" outside the Cuban embassy to protest at the cigar trade, a "zero tolerance" policy requiring all trust staff to submit to random nicotine screening, a cutback in funding for heart surgery, nurses and medicines (the money would be redirected to anti-smoking publicity) and a picket of newsagents selling cigarettes to children. "It was nice to see you strongly on the side of prevention during your presentation," said the trust's health promotion team leader Shikha Sharma. Too strongly, perhaps. Again, I was rejected.

And so to Luton, where I applied for the new NHS post of "protected learning time facilitator". My interviewers admitted that the job title was so meaningless that people reading the advert were likely to have no idea what the work entailed. Pam McClinton, the Luton trust's associate director of learning and development, told me "It was interesting when we went to the advert, because it [protected learning time facilitator] is going to mean anything to anybody? But what else do you call it, because it's a quite specific initiative really? And then we think, well if people want to find out they'll dig a bit deeper."

Having done my digging, I discovered that the job involved shutting down all the GP surgeries in the area for 10 afternoons a year, so that all staff can receive extra training. "It's a total shut-down," said McClinton. "And we pay an on-call company to cover the GPs." The facilitator would, of course, also have time off to train in how best to ensure that other staff have time off for training. McClinton admitted there had been "varied" responses to this scheme from the trust's practices, and the panel accepted that doctors and their staff could balk at the idea of haying learning time "forced on them". "I think the group that probably needs most convincing are the GPs," said McClinton.

That increased my respect for Luton's family doctors, but again I didn't get the job. I think my problem was the psychometric test, which took place at a sexual health clinic. It wasn't the sheepish people in the waiting room who cramped my score but the trickiness of the 180 questions assessed by George Havloujan, a wavy-haired, fast-talking Australian consultant.

So, turning to Merseyside, I applied to become a "fathers worker" with Knowsley council. This is a part-time job that pays £22,689 pro rata. My duties would be to accompany problem fathers on dry-slope skiing trips, help them get on with their families and perhaps make them more politically correct. "I think a lot of them think they should just work, come home -- you know, a pretty sexist view of the world. The mum does all the ironing," was how Sandra Richardson, an area manager, put it to me.

The interview was held on the first floor of offices next to a busy dual-carriageway leading into Liverpool city centre; I had to ask the chairman of the panel to close the window before I could hear what she was saying. I was surprised to see an all-female panel had been assigned to interview men for a job helping other men to understand issues relating to being a father. They appeared more nervous than me. Even though they had 12 set questions -- including "what social and economic issues do you feel young fathers face . . . and how do you feel this post will help to tackle some of these issues?" -- there were embarrassed silences as they tried to work out who was going to speak next.

At no point was I asked the most obvious question in determining what practical knowledge I had of fatherhood "Do you have any children yourself?" Whether I had any or not (I haven't), I was unsuitable once again.

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How long can this nonsense go on? Professor Len Shackleton, a leading free-market economist and head of the Westminster Business School, sighed as he contemplated the blizzard of cash now flying around the public sector. "There is a genuine boom in public sector jobs at the moment," said Shackleton. "A great deal of money has been thrown at the public sector in the last year or two, without a great deal of thought as to how it should be spent. "In the public sector, you want to increase your budget because that obviously improves things for you and your mates who happen to be in that particular job.

"Typically what happens in the public sector is you have a budget for a year, you aren't allowed to carry stuff forward and if you don't spend it you lose it. So when the sun is shining, you employ people. The public sector is also very much driven by all sorts of opportunities to do with equal opportunities and diversity -- there's an end-less amount of jobs in that area."

Experts such as Shackleton say the burgeoning public sector workforce is a key part of a sea-change in Britain, with the country steadily moving from a competitive, if ruthless, Thatcherite society towards a less productive and more touchy-feely one under Tony Blair.

There are signs of resistance, however -- and from within the public sector itself. When I went for the job of "contract monitoring officer" at Lincolnshire county council I found that part of my role would be to overcome cynicism among staff who believe they should be doing something more productive than monitoring their own work. "You have to be in a position to be able to persuade them and convince them that that paperwork is very necessary," said a senior manager.

Now there's a group of people I would really like to work with.