It’s the other Parkinson’s: the progressive degeneration of
a committee’s ability to make decisions as the committee adds more members.
English historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson observed in the
1950s that decision making is severely impaired in committees of more than 20
people. Now physicists have shown that the size of a country’s executive
cabinet appears to be linked to that country’s overall efficiency, and they
have found a possible mathematical explanation.
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