Academics who see this as an academia-only thing don't understand that the same growth of bureaucracy that happened to them has happened in every large company too. It's kind of the natural order of things once the dedicated bureaucrats get a foothold.

Someone else has already alluded to this, but do you think it's possible for any organization of appreciable size to not develop "dedicated bureaucrats"?

One answer to a stagnant oligarchy is a populist king/dictator that gets absolute executive power and massively reduces complexity. But that can get very ugly...

I’m not an academic.

No idea why you’d include health premiums in that figure.

Remove that and I just don’t believe you, outside of the most bureaucratic and exceptional companies (eg Google, where the money printing machine has led the company to insane levels of “overhead”).

I’ve worked plenty in the private sector and it’s nonsense to suggest overheads are similar In general.

Every company I’ve ever worked for paid 50%+ of health insurance. That’s thousands per year.

The figure I gave doesn't include health insurance... the UK doesn't do that, generally speaking. So you'd have to take that out.

Why, given that I'm comparing to the US private sector?

I guess his point is that your comparison is pointless.