Resource-optimizing logic quietly legitimizes differential and denied service.
Evidence
Orienting services toward cooperative clients, or clients who respond to treatment, allows street-level bureaucrats to believe that they are optimizing their use of resources. At the same time these perceptions help condone service denials (or even routine treatment) by permitting the private judgment that some clients absorb more than their fair share of resources. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1124
Categorization
- SEED: Possible essay on how ‘efficiency’ reasoning becomes the respectable veneer for discretionary rationing that encodes sloppy stereotypes.
- XREF: connects to: Totalizing truth-seeking theory gets co-opted by the system’s optimization — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 154; Even well-intentioned technology can embed hidden functional biases — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 1143; Efficient-markets and random-walk theory legitimized options against their scandalous reputation. — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 62
Broader Connections
- Totalizing truth-seeking theory gets co-opted by the system’s optimization
#expands(0.85) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 154 - Even well-intentioned technology can embed hidden functional biases
#exemplifies(0.80) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 1143 - Efficient-markets and random-walk theory legitimized options against their scandalous reputation.
#exemplifies(0.75) — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 62