The Origin and Meaning of Miles' Law

Abstract

Parkinson and Peter propounded and published their principles in popular publications and parlayed them into a pretty penny. Miles more modestly and mindlessly marketed his memorable maxim by mouth. Parkinson and Peter obviously were much smarter. Miles does not have a single cent to show for his authorship of Miles' Law and, to make matters worse, sees his law occasionally attributed to other, more famous pundits. It is time to put a stop to this by recording in the proper place-The Public Administration Review-the genesis of this widely quoted, but not fully appreciated, aphorism. Miles' Law says: Where you stand depends on where you sit. The concept is probably as old as Plato, but this particular phraseology arose in the Bureau of the Budget as a result of events that occurred in late 1948 and early 1949. I was chief of the labor and welfare branch of the division of estimates of the Bureau, with responsibility for the budgets of the Federal Security Agency, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Labor, and several lesser agencies. One of my examiners came to me and said that he had been offered a position in the agency whose budget he reviewed, a job at a grade higher than he held in the Bureau. This examiner had been particularly critical, within the confines of the Bureau, of the agency that had offered him the job. It became clear that he would prefer not to accept the offer. Rather, he sought to use it as the basis for obtaining a grade raise where he was. He had three children, as I recall it, and laid understandable stress on the economics of the matter. But he emphasized his preference for work in the Bureau of the Budget, other things equal. To have given him the raise would have upset the grade structure of the division. I told him that I appreciated his strong sense of loyalty to the Bureau, but that a raise was out of the question. He would have to make up his mind, I said, whether the job milieu or the salary was more impor-