Stumbling and Mumbling

Stealing "libertarianism"

What exactly is libertarianism? I ask because of something Janash Ganesh says about Trump:

His populism tends more to the libertarian than the repressive. The mask-spurning, the cavalier gatherings, the call to not let the virus “dominate”: it is personal freedom to which the president has shown a heedless attachment.

Now, the notion that Trump is a libertarian will come as news to the families of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or the 829 other people killed by the American police this year. It'll also come as news to the tens of thousands of people imprisoned for trivial offences. A true libertarian would surely be more troubled by these horrific denials of freedom than they would by wearing masks.

The misuse of the word "libertarian" is however not confined to Janan's description of Trump. We see a similar thing in the UK. Opponents of enforced mask-wearing are described as libertarians. And yet one of the most prominent of these - Tory MP Desmond Swayne for example - has voted against the legalization of cannabis and has failed to oppose the bill to permit the security services to break the law. What sort of libertarian is so angry about enforced mask-wearing, but so relaxed about other, greater, infringements of liberty?

The obverse of this is also a puzzle. It is mostly leftists who oppose the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill, favour cannabis legalization, are most vocal in support of Black Lives Matter: "defund the police" is a purely libertarian slogan. By any logic, it is these who should be called libertarians, not the likes of Trump or Swayne.

What's going on?

We should, I think, regard Trump and Swayne not as libertarians but as something different. What they are doing is not asserting liberty so much as denying the existence of collective action problems. Sometimes, what each individual wants to do is bad for all individuals. Not wearing masks is one such example. We'd all rather not wear them, but without them the risk of catching and spreading Covid is greater. Wearing masks thus imposes mild discomfort upon us for a greater benefit. Maskphobics such as Trump and Swayne reject this. They think their desires should over-ride others' benefit. This is not so much libertarianism as solipsistic narcissism.

Of course, this is a bastardized form of libertarianism. Better libertarians and liberals - such as Hayek - have argued for liberty and free markets precisely because they promote the collective good.

What it is instead is conservatism. One strand of Tory thinking in recent years has been the denial of collective action problems. Supporters of fiscal austerity, for example, failed to see that if enough people try to save, the results are self-defeating. Policies to make work pay might incentivize any individual to move from welfare to work, but if there aren't enough jobs these individual desires for work cannot all be fulfilled. Hostility to masks is just the latest manifestation of this denial.

But why would anybody call this "libertarianism"? It's because rightists have stolen the word. What they mean by freedom is the freedom for rich white men to oppress and exploit others. Which is why they hate wearing masks. It denies them the privilege of acting how they damn well please to the detriment of others, and so undermines their place at the top of hierarchies. This is why Cold Warriors opposed the USSR whilst supporting Pinochet, apartheid and the criminalization of homosexuality. As Corey Robin wrote:

When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.

Whether the word "libertarian" can be reclaimed for more proper purposes is, however, not clear.

On feudal exploitation

“We have abolished capitalism in Poland. Now we must abolish feudalism.” So said Michal Kalecki in the 60s. I suspect that western economies today face a similar task, as feudalism is still rife.

By this, I don’t mean merely that we have the high inequality and low social mobility that characterised feudalism, nor that immigration controls are a form of feudalism in that they ensure that one’s life chances are determined at birth.

Instead, I’m thinking of modes of exploitation.

We must distinguish between capitalist exploitation as Marx understood it and feudal exploitation. The former is an economic phenomenon, arising from capital’s greater economic power over labour. The labour market, thought Marx, was “a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.” Such apparent liberal equality facilitated and disguised exploitation and oppression.

Feudal exploitation, by contrast, is more obvious. Markets play no role in it. Instead, as Ellen Meiksins Wood wrote:

When surplus labour has been appropriated by exploiters, it has been done by what Marx called “extra-economic” means- that is, by means of direct coercion, exercised by landlords or states employing their superior force, their privileged access to military, political and judicial power. (The Origin of Capitalism, p95-96)

Exploitation of this form is still widespread – perhaps increasingly so.

Why, for example, was Dido Harding put in charge of Test and Trace? It’s not because market competition showed her to be the most competent, but because she has achieved the modern equivalent of winning the favour of the king. She’s exploiting political not economic power. As indeed, might be many other outsourcers.

Another form of feudal exploitation is simply buying political favour, as when property developers gave money to the Tory party just before Robert Jenrick changed planning regulations to their advantage.

Yet another expression of privileged access to political and judicial power is what Robert Kuttner and Katherine Stone call “a one-way seizure of private power and law by elites”. As Martin Wolf says:

The activities of companies, as lobbyists, funders of research and donors, play a decisive role in creating the rules of the political game…Corporations are not players of the game, playing according to rules set by others. They play the game according to rules they largely set themselves.

Pharmaceutical companies, for example, have in effect legalized opiate trading; banks have ensured they operate on low capital requirements, thus profiting themselves at the expense of greater risk for the rest of us. And firms generally use restrictive patent law to increase their profits.

And then there has been the use of the state to directly strengthen capital to the detriment of labour, by weakening trades unions or pursuing austerity policies. As Lance Taylor says of wage repression, “something other than the market is at work here – like power relations.”

Indeed, we can think of neoliberalism not as a simple assertion of free markets but rather as the use of the state to increase the power of bosses.

Marx famously said that “the executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” He failed to add that this management would often be done not in a way unique to liberal democratic capitalism but in a manner which pre-capitalist monarchs might recognise.

On top of all this, there are hybrid forms of exploitation, wherein power derived from the market is exercised in quasi-political ways – as we see in the rise of guard labour, in the use of technologies such as  CCTV to control labour, or in surveillance capitalism.

But there’s something else. Another distinction between capitalist and feudal exploitation is that the former drives up productivity as capitals compete to intensify their use of labour whereas the latter occurs without much change in technical efficiency.

The stagnant labour productivity we’ve seen in the last decade is, in this sense, a feature of feudal exploitation, not capitalist.

The relation between modern feudalism and stagnation is perhaps both cause and effect. On the one hand, incumbents’ use of political power has suppressed competition and dynamism – a process described by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles in The Captured Economy and Thomas Philippon in The Great Reversal. Also, feudal-type power relations in the workplace demotivate workers and detract from productivity. On the other hand, though, feudal exploitation can be the result of stagnation. If it’s so hard to raise productivity, why bother? Why not simply seek wealth extraction rather than wealth creation?

All this, however, brings us to a problem. In the UK (and indeed in many western economies other than the US) wage and profit shares of GDP haven’t changed much for decades. Before Q2’s Covid-induced rise, labour’s share was much the same as it was in the early 80s. And the profit share was the same as in the early 60s*. This means that if – as is likely - feudal exploitation has increased since the 1970s, it is at the expense of capitalist exploitation.

Which leads us to some nice paradoxes. From this point of view post-war social democratic economies with their institutions of countervailing power were more capitalist than are today’s economies, insofar as they delivered capitalist rather than feudal exploitation. And Thatcher was (in effect if not in intention) not so much a capitalist revolutionary as a feudalist counter-revolutionary. And it means that it is perhaps social democrats who want to restrain corporate political power who are more capitalist than are those who defend our current inequalities.

* The numbers in my chart don’t sum to 100 as I’ve excluded other incomes such as those of the self-employed, rents and taxes.

Savers, capitalism & self-interest

Do people vote in their own material interests? I ask because of the decision last week by NS&I to cut interest rates to almost nothing.

In doing so, it is only bringing its rates into line with market rates. Which tells us two big things.

One is tha the pandemic has exacerbated a long-term downtrend in interest rates.

The second is that from the point of view of savers (let alone anybody else) the government is not borrowing enough. One reason for NS&I’s decision is that it was raising more cash than the government needed – in part because the same pandemic that has raised government borrowing has also made forced savers of many of us and so raised the savings to pay for that borrowing.

From all this, savers should infer two things. One is that capitalism is serving them badly. Economists disagree upon exactly why rates have trended down. Some blame an ageing (pdf) population, others a savings glut or shortage of safe assets, whilst others blame a falling global rate of profit. What’s more, low rates reflect lower trend growth, which itself might be due to not just lower profits but declining R&D efficiency, a fear that future innovations will make today’s ones unprofitable, lower innovative possibilities, a general difficulty in monetizing the benefits of innovation, or simply an end of the things that caused growth in the first place. Whatever the explanation, the fact is that there are forces within capitalism that have clobbered savers.

 Secondly, from this perspective, “fiscal discipline” and austerity is a menace. In depressing growth (or not raising it enough) it exacerbates the pressures for lower rates. Ten years of Tory government have thus added to savers’ pain.

And who are these savers? Moderately wealthy retired people. That’s who. It is these, therefore, that should be critical of capitalism and the Tory party.

Which, of course, most are not: instead they are the stereotypical Tory voter.

Hence my question: in supporting Tories, are older savers acting in their own material interests?

Possibly. The same low rates that destroy their incomes also push up house prices and help support shares.

But I’m not sure this is sufficient answer to my question. For one thing, unless you downsize (which many older people are loath to do) a higher house price is little use: equity release schemes are not great value. And even for landlords, years of weak growth have held down rents. And for another, many of the factors that lay behind lower interest rates have also weighed down share prices, such as secular stagnation and the falling rate of profit. Shareholders, more than most, should be alive to the shortcomings of capitalism. 

So why aren’t we seeing more discontent with capitalism and the Tories from older folk?

Part of the answer lies in a paper by David Leiser and Zeev Kril. They show that non-economists are terrible at making causal connections between economic phenomena*. They therefore just don’t connect fiscal austerity and long-term trends within capitalism to the fact that they’re incomes have disappeared.

In this, they are not helped by the media. The problem here is NOT that it has a rightist bias. Rather, it is that the news by definition under-reports slow-moving changes such as the downtrend in interest rates and the causes thereof. And the media’s concern for human interest stories means it under-reports emergent phenomena which arise without any individual’s intent. The media does not report social science.  

Which creates a vacuum to be filled by something else, as described by Phil. Retired people, he says:

are dependent on impersonal forces beyond their control for prosperity or misfortune. This antagonises the general unease underpinning the pensioner position and turns them, politically speaking, into nervous wrecks. These anxieties and fears sublimate into lashing out against things exemplifying uncertainty and change, like young people, the socially liberal trajectory of popular culture, and people traditionally positioned as outside the mainstream and used as scapegoats: sexual minorities, travellers, and immigrants. The flip side of anxiety is a longing for surety, and what provides this better than the smack of firm government?

In this way, what should be an economic debate becomes a front in the culture war. During my adulthood the Tories have performed an amazing transformation. Whereas Thatcher could credibly appeal to voters’ material self-interest, Johnson’s Tories don’t even try to do so. They have figured out – perhaps by accident – that the best response to capitalism's failures is not to talk about economics.

* This isn’t to say they are irrational or stupid. I know nothing about plumbing, so why should I expect a plumber to know about economics?

Blaming the voters

In the Times, Matthew Parris wrote: "this Prime Minister is ultimately our [the electorate's] fault." I tweeted that this was absolutely right, but got a little pushback. I should therefore elaborate.

What I and Matthew meant was that Johnson is not doing anything unexpected. He is merely living down to what everybody knew about him. As Matthew wrote:

There was never any reason for confidence in Boris Johnson’s diligence, his honesty, his directness, his mastery of debate, his people-skills with colleagues, his executive ability or his policy grip. We’d seen no early demonstration of any of these qualities but we just blanked that out.

Voters, then, are getting what they voted for. Those who voted Labour in 2001 could say of the Iraq war “I never voted for that”. Those who voted Lib Dem in 2010 could say of the tripling of tuition fees “I never voted for that.” Those who voted Tory last year, however, cannot say the same. They got what they wanted. They should own it.

There are some objections to this, most of which I find inadequate.

The first is that voters were deceived by our dishonest grifter media. There’s some truth in this. The media does have some influence, if less than its critics claim.

But people have agency. They are responsible for believing the media’s lies: the victims of conmen are not always wholly deserving of our sympathy. And voters are quite capable of being wrong without the media’s help. They are systematically mistaken about many social facts, such as how many immigrants there are. They don’t understand economics (or, I suspect, the social sciences generally). Some of their preferences – for benefit cuts and a hostile environment for immigrants - are plain vicious. And they have cognitive biases which support inequality. The media amplify these failings. But to believe they are the sole cause of them is to regard voters as childlike noble savages who are corrupted by a few billionaires. That’s just romantic twaddle.

You don’t need to believe in Marxian ideas of false consciousness (a phrase Marx never used) to accept this. Bryan Caplan and Jason Brennan have said similar things from a non-Marxian point of view.

Another objection to Parris’s claim is that the Tories got only a minority of the vote and so it is our electoral system to blame rather than the voters.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the electorate support this system: they rejected mild reform in the 2011 referendum. And let’s also leave aside the fact that it’s not just Tory voters to blame. Those who abstained or voted Lib Dem thereby allowing a Tory candidate to win in their constituency are also guilty.

And let’s also leave aside the fact those using this argument must be careful – because it will undoubtedly be weaponized by the right to delegitimize even a mildly social democratic government.

Instead, there’s another problem. If voters do have vicious, biased and ill-informed preferences – whether caused by the media or anything else – then the last thing we should want is for parliament to better reflect these. (Of course, some Labour supporters might have such bad preferences too.)

Our problem is not how to get a more representative parliament but rather how to filter voters’ preferences so they reflect the wisdom rather than stupidity of crowds.

 Traditionally, small-c conservatives have been alive to this question. It is why Edmund Burke thought that MPs’ judgment should over-ride the “hasty opinion” of their constituents. And it’s why they have prized an independent civil service and judiciary, as these too restrain hasty, silly and nasty preferences: it is no accident that populists everywhere attack such institutions.

But there is a more radical alternative – to use devices of deliberative (pdf) democracy such as citizens juries to increase our chances of getting the best rather than worst of public opinion. It is these we need more than electoral reform.

You might object here that it is futile to complain about the electorate as we must work with the world as it is, not as we’d like it.

Public opinion, however, is malleable – a fact our most successful recent Prime Ministers have recognised. Thatcher sought to change it not just by persuasion but by introducing a property-owning democracy to incentivize people to vote Tory. And Blair’s expansion of higher education has (inadvertently?) created a large cohort of liberal-minded youngsters: there’s a reason why Tories are attacking universities.

 There’s a further objection to Parris’s claim. Some of us (not enough!) voted Labour. Surely we’re not to blame?

There’s an irony here. Many people using this to exculpate themselves also believe in the idea of collective guilt – that, for example, Britons collectively were responsible for the slave trade and imperialism. But if our ancestors, many of whom never owned slaves or participated in imperialism, were collectively guilty of these crimes, mightn’t we too be collectively responsible for the Tory government?

Mightn’t even we Labour supporters be partly to blame by for example not campaigning sufficiently or sufficiently well or for making bad political choices ourselves – be they choosing a Labour leader who didn’t appeal sufficiently to voters or not accepting the Brexit referendum result?

Which brings me to another irony. Part of Johnson’s appeal is like Trump’s: it’s a backlash against metropolitan elites who think they know better than “the people”. And yet those of us who claim that (some) voters are ill-informed and vicious are making the same mistake Hillary Clinton made when she called Trump supporters “deplorables”: we’re inviting a backlash against us arrogant know-alls.

This is a dilemma. The solution to it – if there is one – is to try to separate talk about outcomes from talk about process. We must ask: what sort of processes and institutions are likely to best deliver policies that are both good (by whatever lights you want) and democratic? Few people, however, want such a debate.

Conceptions of politics

There is a great and overlooked political division today – between those who think policy matters, and those who think it doesn’t.

Here are some examples of what I mean.

First, Ed Miliband’s speech on the Internal Market Bill was that of a man who thinks a consistent policy would be a good thing. He is exercised by the fact that a man who greeted the signing of the Withdrawal Agreement as a “fantastic moment” now regards it as “contradictory”. Johnson, however, seems to attach no importance to the need for a consistent policy.

Secondly, Rishi Sunak has the highest approval rating of all cabinet ministers among Tory members, even though employment is slumping: the ONS reported today that payrolls have dropped by 629,000 in the last 12 months, a trend economists expect to continue. A massive policy failure is no handicap to popularity.

 Not that indifference to the need for coherent policy is confined to Tories. Bridget Phillipson said recently that Labour must listen to voters, whilst telling us little about her own policies or philosophy other than the need for “disciplined” spending promises. To use Tony Benn’s distinction, she is a weathervane, blowing in the wind, rather than a signpost.

Which raises the question: if politics isn’t about policy, what is it about?

One conception – which Ms Phillipson is using – sees it as a form of marketing. It consists in giving voters what they want, even if their preferences are ill-informed, contradictory and endogenous.

A second conception regards it as a debased form of theatre, a form of play-acting in which appearance and presentation are everything: Sunak’s popularity owes much more to his plausibility at a podium than it does to his material achievements.

Closely related to this is the tendency to see it as a game. I don’t have to tell you that, too often, this is the media’s conception. There’s jockeying for position, gossip and backbiting in which confidence, fluency and “credibility” are prized more than actual mastery of policy or managerial skill. Although its players, and the media, like to see this as a vicious sport, it is in fact often a matey process among jolly good chaps in which the worst that can happen is to conduct a “car crash interview” and where the losers retire to overpriced sheds or sinecures with investment banks. As for the fact that politics actually costs thousands of people their lives, well who cares? They are only the little people. 

But there’s another conception, which has grown in recent years. This regards politics not as a matter of solving (or at least ameliorating) social problems with coherent policy, but rather as unifying your tribe – for example by inventing culture wars. This serves the Tory party well. Labour has always been an awkward alliance between metropolitan liberals and the working class (a point clear in, for example, Orwell’s writing), and a culture war can drive a wedge between the two.

This, I think, explains Johnson’s otherwise incoherent attitude to his own Withdrawal Agreement. He hopes that voters will see this not as a breach of international law nor as an admission that his own negotiation and commendation of that Agreement were faulty, but rather as him “standing up” to the EU.

And given that we have a media which devalues intellect, coherence and prosperity and instead celebrates posturing, he might get away with this.

The Hayek question

Thatcher was right. This is my reaction to reports that Dominic Cummings regards Brexit as a way of getting out of limits on state aid and so enabling the government to funnel cash towards the UK’s own future big tech companies.

The problem with this is that, as Thatcher said, the state cannot pick winners. Corporate growth is largely unpredictable. “The stochastic element is predominant” concluded Alex Coad in one survey. “Corporate growth rates are random” found Paul Geroski in another (pdf). “There is low predictability [of corporate earnings growth] even with a wide variety of predictor variables” found (pdf) Louis Chan, Josef Lakonishok and Jason Karceski in a third.

This fact explains why fund managers don’t beat the market. David Blake has concluded: "the vast majority of fund managers in our data set were not simply unlucky, they were genuinely unskilled." It's also why the performance of venture capital trusts has been very variable. In the last five years, one fund trebled investors’ money but two others lost half of it. A big reason for this is that, as Charlie Cai has shown, it is prodigiously difficult for companies to grow and investors often under-estimate all the obstacles to growth.

Investors cannot, then, pick winners. Success is unpredictable. And not just in the corporate sector. It’s true in films: United Artists and Universal both rejected Star Wars. It’s true in publishing: J.K Rowling and C.S Lewis saw their manuscripts rejected many times. And in music: Elvis Presley was told to go back to truck-driving and Decca famously rejected the Beatles on the grounds that "guitar groups are on the way out."

 As William Goldman said, nobody knows anything.” In particular - as my examples show - extreme success seems unpredictable.

This isn’t to say that Thatcher’s laisser-faire approach to industrial policy was right. There’s much that governments can do: fund and promote basic research; ensure that start-ups and small firms aren’t held back by a lack of finance or by the wrong intellectual property regime; ensure a good supply of skilled workers, some from overseas; and so on.

What they cannot do, though, is spot winners.

This is because Thatcher’s mentor Friedrich Hayek was right. Markets are complex processes, knowledge of which is dispersed, fragmented, tacit and not collectable by a single mind:

In the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process…will hardly ever be fully known or measurable…[We] cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.

The issue here is a fundamental one - what can governments know? - that should be behind many issues in economic policy. For example:

 - How can we run counter-cyclical policy, given that nobody can reliably predict recessions? For me, this is an argument for stronger automatic stabilizers such as better welfare benefits. It’s also a case for having the right policy infrastructure in place, so that (for example) the Bank of England can quickly write us all a cheque.

 - Do local authorities really have sufficient knowledge of what worthwhile things need doing, and the ability to scale these up and down, to make a job guarantee feasible? For me it is this question, rather than macroeconomic considerations, that is key to the desirability of scheme.

 - Can governments know enough about low-income families to target support to them? Many, of example, move in and out of work often and see their hours fluctuate. Can we design a benefit system that responds to such variation, or is a high citizens income a simpler alternative?

 - How best should banks be regulated? The trend has been towards increased complexity. But Andy Haldane has argued:

As you do not fight fire with fire, you do not fight complexity with complexity. Because complexity generates uncertainty, not risk, it requires a regulatory response grounded in simplicity, not complexity.

It might be that high capital requirements, or even nationalization, are simpler alternatives.

 - Can bosses know enough to control large organizations? If, on the other hand, knowledge of the organization is also fragmented, there’s a case for greater workers’ say.

Hayek’s question – what can governments know? – should then be a fundamental, ubiquitous one.

But it’s not. This, I fear, is due partly to a selection effect. Politics and opinion-mongering selects in favour of bumptious prats who over-estimate their knowledge. Which is an obstacle to good policy.

Cummings is, I think, wrong to think the state can pick winners. His error is not an idiosyncratic one, however, but rather the product of systemic dysfunction.

On press freedom

In The Enigma of Reason Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that the main use of reason is to justify and explain conclusions that we have arrived at sub-rationally. Some reactions to Extinction Rebellion’s blockading of newspaper distribution centres seem to me to illustrate their point.

For example, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said their action “damage[s] our democracy”. Johnson said: “A free press is vital in holding the government and other powerful institutions to account.” And Ian Murray, executive director of the Society of Editors, said that “shutting down free speech and an independent media is the first action of totalitarian regimes and dictators.”

Such fancy talk attributes to the press a sanctity it does not merit. And it’s not needed. If XR had blockaded a Cheesy Wotsits factory you might reasonably object that it was interrupting people’s right to earn a living: you wouldn’t need to argue for the gustatory merits of the Wotsit. Equally, you don’t need to attribute virtues of the press in order to defend its freedom. To do so is to seek an unwarranted justification for your priors.

Instead, this issue raises some interesting questions. One is: do we actually have a free press? Rightists say we do. Which is true in the sense of there being little state control, except for onerous libel laws (and guess who they benefit). Leftists say we don’t, as a handful of billionaires control most of it. This split reflects a general divide about the nature of freedom. The right has traditionally identified this with an absence of state intervention. The left has replied that freedom in this sense often permits too much private sector inequality – for example, in working conditions. As Corey Robin argued in The Reactionary Mind, Conservatives’ talk of freedom often disguises what is really a love of hierarchy. The issue here is what type of freedom we value rather than the nature of the press itself.

If we accept, arguendo, the rightist conception of freedom here, another question arises. How much good or harm does the exercise of this freedom do?

You might think here that I’ll object to its Tory bias. In this context, I won’t. Yes, there is some evidence that the media does boost (pdf) the Tory and UKIP (pdf) vote. But people have a right to advocate voting Tory, And the media is not the only source of ideas I believe to be mistaken. Pro-capitalist ideology can arise without the aid of the press.

Instead, there are other costs.

One is that far from embodying a diversity of opinion, the media actually narrows it down. Market forces tell us this. Since it became technologically possible, we’ve seen an explosion of blogs, podcasts and alternative online publications. This would not have happened if people had been satisfied with the range of opinion they were getting from the old media. If the media were truly diverse, you’d not be reading this.

Another is that the media systematically fosters false ideas. Simon Wren-Lewis has accused it, rightly, of promoting a false picture of economics. And the admirable Mic Wright documents many other shortcomings. These are not always matters of left-right bias. The media is also biased against the social sciences. It under-reports slow but important changes, ignores the countless unseen mechanisms that create our world; and looks too much for human agency where in fact there is emergence.

Surveys show that the public is woefully ill-informed about many social facts – albeit no more so in the UK than elsewhere. This is surely a clue that the media isn’t doing the job that its advocates claim.

There’s a further problem. Contrary to Johnson’s claim, the press does not adequately hold the government to account. This is not a new phenomenon. 25 years ago Patrick Dunleavy wrote (pdf) that:

Britain now stands out amongst comparable European countries, and perhaps amongst liberal democracies as a whole, as a state unusually prone to make large-scale, avoidable policy mistakes.

This was corroborated by Ivor Crewe and Anthony King in The Blunders of our Governments.

Which points to a longstanding failure of the press to improve the standard of government – perhaps because forensic policy analysis does not shift units.

I suspect that our democracy would work better if the mass media did not exist. In such a world, people would vote more on the basis of their local knowledge and one source of correlated opinion would disappear. The conditions required for there to be wisdom in crowds would therefore be closer to being fulfilled.

Which leads to a further problem: should anything be done about this?

One strong answer is nothing, at least legally.

Breaking up the Murdoch empire would not shift the press to the left: there are lots more right-wing billionaires who might buy up his papers.

Also, there are trade-offs between values. Perhaps we must sacrifice some good governance in order to have free speech, just as with Brexit we sacrifice some prosperity for democracy. This is especially true because it is woefully naïve to think restrictions on the press will impinge only upon the Sun and Telegraph. The law is often a weapon against the weak and marginalized. Restricting free speech would mean silencing bloggers, not the Sun.

Why not instead just let market forces and demographics do their job? Newspaper circulation is dropping, and is low among the young. They are losing relevance.

Which raises another possibility. Could we use countervailing power?

We know this can work. Capitalism was much more successful – even by its own lights – when trades unions restrained management. Might a similar thing be true of the press?

I’m not thinking here merely of XR blockades, nor even of the growing influence of new media. For me, one priority for a future Labour government would be the creation of institutions of deliberative (pdf) democracy such as citizens juries. These would provide space for people to consider policy issues on the basis of evidence provided by expert witnesses. Policy formation would then become insulated from press pressure, similar to how judges strive to ensure newspapers have no influence upon criminal trials. The press would then lose its political relevance.

Libertarian Marxists have traditionally looked forward to the state withering away. With some effort we might, more justifiably, look forward to the press doing so.

On Marxist Tories

In one respect, the right-wing conspiracy loons are right: Marxists have captured some of our major institutions – the institutions being the government and Tory party.

I say this because of the campaign to stop us working from home and to get us back into offices. Such a demand is justifiable only if you take a very dark opinion of capitalism.

Those who have faith in capitalism see upside in home-working. Andrew Sentance tweeted:

Why are so many people focussing on the negatives of working from home? It is a great opportunity to reduce transport emissions, stop spread of disease through commuting and mingling at work/in city centres, and provides a more flexible and family-friendly working environment.

To this we should add that whilst WFH does depress demand for retail businesses close to offices, it should boost it in those near where we live, and revive local high streets. The money that home-workers save on commuting and on Pret’s sandwiches can be spent nearer home.

Better still, we have quasi-experimental evidence from Nick Bloom and colleagues that WFH can boost productivity (pdf) a lot as workers face fewer distractions than in offices. Granted, not all firms who have tried WFH during the pandemic have enjoyed such gains, but it’s possible that as firms and workers learn, and if they get the right policy support, productivity will improve as these teething troubles are cured.

How then can one regard WFH as a bad thing? You can only do so if you are very pessimistic about capitalism.

For example, you’ll oppose WFH if you believe that capitalists are so lacking in entrepreneurial nous that they cannot spot new business opportunities created by home-workers. Alternatively, you might believe  they are constrained from exploiting these by financial constraints or by the inability of capital and labour to shift to new uses – even if those shifts are small (for example if sandwich-makers move from city centres to outlying areas which might well be closer to where they live).

If you believe this, they you must believe that capitalism has become stagnant and sclerotic - that capitalistic relations of production have become "fetters" on the development of our productive potential.  

You might also oppose WFH if you fear that the collapse in demand for city centre offices will crater the commercial property market and in doing so create bad loans. This requires one to accept that financialized capitalism is unstable and crisis-prone.

You’ll also oppose it if you think Kalecki was right (pdf) – that “'discipline in the factories' and 'political stability' are more appreciated than profits by business leaders.” If bosses want the sense of security and power that comes from directly overseeing their workers they’ll want people back in harness. This is perhaps what Jeremy Hunt had in mind when he said people might come to miss the “fizz and excitement you get in a good workplace.” His own employees never experienced such fizz, but perhaps egomaniacs who want to oversee an empire of minions do.

And let’s remember something else. Sarah O’Connor is right. The pre-pandemic economy was not working for millions of people. It trapped many into cramped over-priced homes and forced others into long and stressful commutes. The belief that capitalism requires such discomfort is one we Marxists can readily accept. I’m surprised, though, to see the Tory party adopt it.

There’s a devastating implication here. If you think this is what capitalism requires, then you are saying that capitalism must force people to be in places they don’t want to be. Which vindicates a point made by Peter Doyle about slavery – that capitalism denies people economic agency (pdf). As Marx put it, capitalism turns a “free” man into a mere factor of production, “one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.”  

And then, of course, there is the brute fact that dragooning people back into offices endangers their health. Which of course, vindicates Marx again:

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.

Not only do the Tories seem to believe Marx’s ideas, but they are actively striving to make them even truer.

As a Marxist myself, I find all this weird. Even I am not this pessimistic about capitalism. I suspect the economy can adjust to meet the new demands of home-workers and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many big employers have adopted home-working.

Now, the sight of some people being more Marxist than me is a familiar one. When I was university, several of my fellow students were. I just never suspected that Boris Johnson was one of them. But perhaps this is to give him far too much credit, and to impute to him a coherent idea where in fact there is no such thing.

Clarity - who needs it?

Tim Pitt calls on the government to set out “a renewed Conservative economic philosophy.” I’m not sure this is wise. Having a clear philosophy requires you to think, which is not a self-evidently good thing in life or in politics. Worse still, it gives people something to disagree with, and so invites party disunity. Constructive ambiguity can be a good thing.

I say this because a new Conservative economic philosophy requires the party to answer loads of tricky questions. Here are a few.

Are you pro-business or pro-markets? Pro-market policies would promote competition by for example relaxing intellectual property laws, reducing planning restrictions, simplifying regulations,  expanding the British Business Bank to encourage start-ups and imposing tougher rules against mergers and monopolies.  All of these, however, would threaten the profits of incumbents.

Which leads to another issue. What should be the rules on state aid, procurement and outsourcing? These can in theory be used to promote competition by encouraging contracts from outside the usual suspects of Serco, Capita and G4S or by favouring start-ups. Or they can entrench power by giving handouts to the powerful and well-connected, as when the government spent millions on worthless PPE provided by an advisor to Liz Truss. Which is it to be?

And then there’s the question of competition versus community. We learned in the 80s that when industries collapse workers do not easily move to other jobs: as Duflo and Banerjee show in Good Economics for Hard Times, economies are stickier than Thatcherites assumed. Instead, we see the decline of whole areas. Should today’s Conservatives do more therefore to protect jobs, or to help people move jobs? What sort of regional and training policies does this require?

But there’s not just a divide between start-ups and incumbents. There’s also a conflict between landlords and businesses. More working from home and decline in the high street require that many rents be cut. Should the government facilitate this by outlawing upward-only rent reviews? Which side are the Tories on?

 Which leads to another question: what should be the tax base? There is a case for shifting tax from profits to land, because the latter cannot move. But of course, this hits landlords whilst benefiting other businesses.

Then there is the fiscal policy issue. How much should policy be tightened and how soon? If we need an early tightening, why? Why are bond markets wrong to lend to the government at favourable rates?

If you favour such a tightening, other question arise. What should be the mix of tax rises and spending cuts.  If the latter, where might the cuts fall given that local government in particular has already been stripped back so much? If the former, how much can be raised from the wealthy alone, or do we need to tax the middlingly rich whose numbers and inability to move mean they might generate more revenue? And then there’s the question: what form should the offsetting monetary loosening take? Is conventional QE sufficient? Or dual interest rates? Or do you support helicopter drops? And if you don’t favour an early fiscal tightening, what has changed since the austerity of 2010-17 that many Tories supported?

The questions don’t stop there. Another is: why has productivity stagnated since the mid-00s? We lefties can blame inequality, or fiscal austerity, or the effects of the banking crisis which itself was caused by lax regulation. It’s not so clear what a Conservative answer would be.

And yet the productivity stagnation undermines a central plank of the Conservative thinking of the 80s – a plank which New Labour inherited to a large extent. They believed that the economy would grow nicely if the state stepped back, and provided only the right framework of rules. It now looks as if this isn’t true. Kickstarting productivity might well require greater state intervention. But what would a distinctively Conservative approach to this look like?

A Conservative economic philosophy must answer other questions. One is: are we in a wage-led regime (pdf) – in which fuller employment and greater equality are necessary for growth – or are we instead in a profit-led regime, wherein growth requires the restoration of profit margins? Separately from this, where do we draw the trade-off between legitimation and accumulation? Some policies (such as Brexit?) are justifiable not because they promote growth but because they buy off discontent, or at least channel it away from capitalism. How many such policies are needed?

And then there’s the question: what role should public opinion play in this? It favours leftist policies such as more nationalization and taxes on the rich. Should Conservatism accommodate these views or argue against them. If so, how?

All of us have answers to these questions – though many of them should be tentative. But do you have answers that are coherent, evidence-based, and distinctively Conservative? That’s a much tougher one.  

The point here is that a Conservative economic philosophy requires a lot of issues to be addressed which in turn provides lots of potential to anger and alienate lots of voters and indeed Tory supporters.

And they face a massive handicap in developing such answers. There are pretty much no distinguished Conservative economists, at least in academia: Patrick Minford’s views lost their relevance at about the same time that Haysi Fantayzee split up. Whereas Thatcher could and did call upon Nobel Laureates such as Freidman and Hayek, Johnson can call upon…well, who?

If I were a Tory, I would reject Tim’s call. The party won an 80-seat majority without having to think about economics. Why jeopardize things now? Intellectual coherence is not always necessary for political success.

Tories against Thatcher

Be careful what you wish for. This old saying applies to us lefties. For years, we’ve wanted to see the end of Thatcherism. And we’ve now got it. And it’s an ugly sight.

I say this because of Johnson’s campaign to end working from home and get us back into the office. This is anti-Thatcherite in two senses.

For one thing, Johnson is contradicting two of Thatcher’s favourite principles – that “you can’t buck the market” and that managers have a right to manage. Many big employers are happy for staff to continue working from home. So why should the government say otherwise? Ryan Bourne expresses the spirit of Thatcherism when he says it is “quite frankly none of the govt’s business” to tell us what we should be doing.

Also, Johnson is motivated by a fear that city centres are becoming ghost towns. Thatcher, however, was content for large areas of the country – mining towns – to meet this fate. She thought that miners could move to better jobs. A genuine Thatcherite would think the same should be true of sandwich makers.

These, however, are not the only differences between Johnsonism and Thatcherism. There are others, even if we disregard the massive increase in state intervention triggered by Covid-19.

First, Thatcher placed great emphasis upon the importance of stability, believing this to be necessary to help businesses plan and invest:

An economy will work best when it is built on a framework of clear and predictable rules on which individuals and companies can depend when making their own plans.  Government's primary economic task is to frame and enforce such rules.

Today’s Tories, by contrast preside over huge and continued instability. Since the start of 2016 policy uncertainty, as measured by Baker, Bloom and Davis, has averaged twice as much as it did from 1998 to 2015.

Secondly, Thatcher was an architect of the single market, which she saw as “a fantastic prospect for our industry and commerce!” which offered “complete freedom for our manufacturers, our road hauliers, our banks, our insurance firms, our professions to compete.” Johnson, of course, is destroying that achievement. And whereas Thatcher wanted to cut red tape, Johnson is imposing it at a cost of billions. Johnson once said “fuck business” – a sentiment as far from Thatcherism as you can get.

Thirdly, Thatcherism was in many ways a modernising project. She wanted to modernise industry by removing over-manning and restrictive practices – which she did in the nationalized industries before selling them, as David Edgerton points out in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation. She attacked Labour for wanting to “put back the clock” whilst celebrating “the wealth creators, the scientists, the engineers, the designers, the managers, the inventors—all those on whom we rely to create the industries and jobs of the future.”

Today’s Tories, by contrast, offer no such modernising project. Instead, their vision is an atavistic yearning for an imagined past. Whereas Thatcher offered young people hope – not least the hope of owning their own home - today’s Tories do not. Yes Thatcher wanted to achieve cultural change, but she saw economics as the means of achieving that.

Hence another stark difference between Thatcher and Johnson. Thatcherism was popular with young people. In the 1987 election, the Tories beat Labour by 39-33% among 25-34 year olds. In the 2019 election, they trailed massively. Thatcher created from young graduates a bunch of shoulder-padded, big-haired, champagne-swilling yuppies. From the same material, the Tories now have created a mass of discontent. 

In all these respects, the Tory party is now fundamentally anti-Thatcherite. In one sense, it has to be, as Thatcherism failed, and not just because it ran out of other people's assets to sell. 

And yet for all its intellectual revolutions the Tory party is still the Tory party. Just as Trigger’s broom had 17 new heads and 14 new handles but stayed the same, so the Tory party is still the Tory party. So where’s the consistency?

It lies, I suspect in the reason why Johnson wants to get us back to the office. It’s not because he cares about sandwich shop workers (many of whom are migrants) but because he’s worried about the landlords of office blocks. As Marx said in 1852:

The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

The politics of life & death

What, if anything, is wrong with the Kaldor-Hicks principle? This is the question raised by Chris Whitty’s argument that the benefits of reopening schools outweigh the costs of doing so.

Even if we suppose that this is factually correct - which it might not be – it does not follow that it is right to reopen schools. As David Hume said, we cannot derive “ought” from “is”.

Which is where the Kaldor-Hicks principle comes in. It says that a policy change is an improvement if the beneficiaries of it could compensate the losers and still remain better off – even if compensation is not actually paid. This idea fills the Humean gap between the statements “the benefits of reopening schools exceed the costs” and “schools should reopen”.

Which leads to the question I started with. I fear there are two problems with it, one philosophical, the other psychological.

The psychological problem is that it’s very easy to glide from “the benefits exceed the costs” to “the benefits are high: the costs are low.” Johnson might be guilty of this when he says the risk of getting Covid-19 in schools is "very small"; he forgets that a small chance of a nasty event is something to be avoided. On the Today programme this morning Tory MP Huw Merriman went further, declaring schools to be safe.  

Brexit gives us another example of this. Many Leavers – especially those whose media profile is disproportionate to their cognitive skills - have gone from “the benefits of Brexit outweigh the costs” to downplaying any costs at all.

Rather than face tricky, marginal decisions we exaggerate benefits and understate costs. Psychologists call this the choice-supportive bias.

The philosophical problem arises from the fact that the winners and losers from reopening schools are different people. Children win by getting a better education, but school staff and their families lose because they face a higher risk of catching Covid-19. And even a small extra risk across tens of thousands of people adds up to a few certain deaths. How is it legitimate to impose death upon some so that others benefit, especially when they are not being compensated for that risk?

There’s a long tradition which says it is not. John Rawls objected that the Kaldor-Hicks principle (which is just a refinement of classical utilitarianism) “does not take seriously the distinction between persons.” And from a different perspective, Robert Nozick wrote:

There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall social good covers this up (intentionally?) To use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. He does not get some overbalancing good from his sacrifice, and no one is entitled to force this upon him. (Anarchy, State and Utopia, p32-33).

Reopening schools is, however, not the only example of the government ignoring Rawls and Nozick’s objections. The awarding of A levels did the same thing. Until the government over-rode it, Ofqual graded students not just on the basis of their own abilities but on the basis of their school’s past performance. As Frances says, “the algorithm did not treat people as individuals. It reduced them to points on a curve.” It too did not take seriously the distinction between persons.

In truth, policy often does this. And the costs it imposes are often not just pecuniary as they are with taxes or Brexit. Fiscal austerity and benefit sanctions killed thousands of people so that the media could get the sense that the public finances were under control. And wars in Iraq and Afghanistan killed tens of thousands in the hope of benign regime change.

Such decisions are not always the result of bad policy (not that bad policy is always avoidable). Whenever a local authority decides not to reduce a speed limit it is in effect imposing a higher risk of death or injury so we can benefit from greater convenience on the roads. As Tom says, “at government level, everyone’s a utilitarian.”

Even in a liberal democracy, people are sometimes killed for the greater good. Rather than face this fact and think about it seriously, governments simply forget Rawls and Nozick’s objections.

Which brings us to a problem. Whilst we accept this in some contexts, we rail against it in others. Here’s James Bloodworth on the “useful idiots” who defend repressive regimes:

What is contemptible is the relegation of other human beings to pawns in the supposed historical process. The latter results in people uttering glib phrases about “omelettes not being possible without broken eggs” when bouts of mass killing threaten to undermine a favoured cause.

For me, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was as much an attack upon classical utilitarianism – the idea that some should suffer or die for the greater good – as it was upon Soviet communism.

There is, then, an inconsistency here. Sometimes we accept deaths for the greater good and sometimes we don’t*, preferring to pretend that we cannot put a price on human life even though we often must.  

This is not to accuse anybody of hypocrisy. Very few of us apply moral principles consistently (and perhaps we shouldn't). The brute fact is, though, that politics is sometimes a matter of life and death. This fact is like the first Mrs Rochester: we’d like to lock it away and forget it, but we cannot.

* I’m not sure this can be resolved merely by the fact that critics of the Soviet Union were in fact objecting to the ideal of communism rather than its implementation.

For (and against) a sovereign wealth fund

In their excellent Angrynomics Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan recommend that the government borrows at negative yields to establish a sovereign wealth fund. There’s more to be said for this than they think, because the UK is better situated than many countries to have such a fund.

My chart shows why. It shows that sterling tends to fall when house prices do. In the mid-90s, 2008, 2011 and last year weakness in the housing market was accompanied by a weak pound.

Now, I’m using house prices here as a proxy for something more general – bad times for the UK economy generally.  The chart therefore tells us that a UK-based investor makes a profit on foreign currency assets when the UK economy faces hard times. Although house prices didn’t fall then, the Brexit referendum in  2016 is another datapoint in support of this hypothesis: the markdown in UK growth expectations was accompanied by a markdown in sterling.

This isn’t merely because demand for sterling depends upon actual and expected economic activity. It’s also because sterling is regarded by global investors as a riskier currency than dollars, euros or Swiss francs -  which means that in hard times, when risk aversion increases, they dump sterling. This is why sterling fell during the worst of the stock market falls this year.

This means that for the UK a SWF could be a countercyclical asset. In recessions a falling pound would mitigate losses on overseas equities and generate profits on gold, overseas bonds and foreign currency.

This year’s experience demonstrates this. In the day job I showed that a simple portfolio of dollars, gold, global equities cash and gilts would have lost barely anything during the worst of this year’s stock market falls even with half its money in equities – thanks to profits on gold and dollars. Slightly more cautious portfolios would have risen.

Because a UK SWF would hold up in bad times it can be a counter-cyclical device. Payments from the fund could be raised (slightly) in hard times without greatly jeopardizing its long-run returns.

Better still, it needs no skill to achieve this. The weights in my portfolio were based on no more than reasonable round numbers. That vindicates a point made by the LBS’s Victor DeMiguel, that naïve diversification works well (pdf) (which itself is a specific instance of Robyn Dawes point (pdf) that there is a “robust beauty” in improper linear models.) We don’t therefore need a genius to run the fund. All we need is a mediocrity with a plausible manner to lend it authority. And the UK has an abundant supply of mediocrities with plausible manners.

Sadly, though, I fear this oversells a SWF.

One problem is that it will come under political pressure to invest domestically and to bail out struggling UK firms rather than to diversify internationally. I’m not sure Eric and Mark are selling an SWF when they suggest it bails out UK airlines. For the SWF, that should be a pure investment decision not a political one. If you think UK firms are starved of finance – and I’m not at all sure airlines would be exhibit A for this hypothesis - the solution is a national investment bank, not a SWF.

A second problem is that a SWF that was sufficiently cautiously managed to hold up in bad times would under-perform or lose money in good. Logically, this is no problem at all. One of the basic principles of financial economics is that what matters is your portfolio as a whole. If the SWF loses money when our other assets are doing well – our human capital and domestic businesses – there is therefore no problem. Quite the opposite: the SWF is doing exactly what it should.

Sadly, however, economic logic and the media are not often even nodding acquaintances. We can see this from today’s reports of UK government borrowing, which reveal an utter ignorance of the basic facts that balance sheets have two sides and that one person’s debt is another’s asset. The moment the SWF loses money – which of course even the best funds do sometimes – the idiotmedia will run stories of the “scandal” of “taxpayers’” money being wasted.

From a portfolio management point of view, running a SWF is easy. From a political point of view, it is not.

Cents and sensibility

Would Labour have handled the A level fiasco better than the Tories? There’s a reason to think so, and it has nothing to do with the parties’ relative competence.

Instead, it’s because Labour ministers would have had different sensibilities, or sympathies. They would have been more awake than the Tories to the situation of 18-year-olds from poor schools and hence more alert to developments which might hurt them.

The point here is a Smithian one. Smith thought that sympathy “arise[s] from an imaginary change of situations with the person principally concerned.” But, as Smith saw, our imagination is limited. It’s easier to put yourself in someone’s shoes if you have actually been in them, or if you have friends or family in those shoes, or if you expect to be in them later. Although there are many exceptions on either side, Labour MPs therefore sympathize more with people from poor backgrounds whilst Tories are more likely to sympathize with landlords, bankers or bosses. For this reason, some sections of capital would have disproportionate influence over a Tory government even if not a single pound changed hands.

Not that capital wants to leave it at that. It’s the principle of sympathy that justifies JP Morgan hiring Sajid Javid. Politicians around the world will look at that and think “that could be me”. This feat of imagination will increase their sympathies with bankers.

Obvious as it seems, this Smithian idea explains a lot. It explains why some people sympathize more with migrants than others. If you feel an outsider in the UK – say because of your race, class, sexuality or just idiosyncratic temperament – you’ll find it easier to put yourselves in the shoes of those who feel compelled to leave their country. Logically, rightist lovers of freedom should support freedom of movement as much as leftists. But differences in sympathies mean that in fact things are otherwise.

It also explains why so many on the left had misgivings about New Labour, even though it did much to help working people such as introducing the minimum wage and tax credits. There was a feeling that its sympathies lay more with bosses and bankers than with working people.

It also explains the long-running electoral success of the Tories. Their sympathies make them instinctively more likely to placate enough of the rich and powerful to earn a reputation for competence. Nobody gives a damn if your policies hurt single parents in Wigan.

Which is why it matters that top jobs are dominated by people from private schools. Because we all find it easier to sympathize with people like us, the dominance of the privately educated therefore skews decision-making (not least in the media) towards the interests of the rich and against those of the poor. And this would be the case even if the decision-makers were honest and of good will. 

All this both justifies representative democracy and helps explain why it goes wrong.

Voters aren’t qualified to judge the technical competence of the parties, nor even their detailed policies – not even in aggregate, given that the conditions required for the wisdom of crowds are absent. What they can do, though, is say which set of sympathies they prefer. And that's reasonable. In politics there is an agency problem - the danger that the government won't act in our interests. Knowing that its sympathies are in line with our own, however, reduces this risk. 

Differences in sympathies, however, can also help explain some of the bigger policy failures of our times. Thatcher’s introduction of the poll tax arose from not sympathizing with people who didn’t own property. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan might have been less disastrous if New Labour had better sympathy with military men, and wouldn't have occurred at all if Blair had more sympathy for working people and less for George Bush. The introduction of Universal Credit would have gone better had there been sympathy for benefit recipients. And so on up to the A level mess. 

Which brings us to a problem. The greater are divisions within a society, the harder it is for one side to sympathize with the other. Which means that policy errors are more likely. As long ago as 1995 Patrick Dunleavy argued (pdf) that the UK was “unusually prone to make large-scale, avoidable policy mistakes” – a point confirmed by Ivor Crewe and Anthony King in The Blunders of our Governments and of course corroborated by subsequent events. Which poses the question. Might it be that this unusual proneness to error arises in part from our deep class divisions*? If so, then good technocratic government actually requires the abolition of those divisions.

* Dunleavy, Crewe and King offer more proximate explanations for bad government. But at least one of these - overconfidence - is most certainly a class issue.

Algorithms & reification

The A levels U-turn has prompted the question: what went wrong with the algorithm?

The answer is: nothing, zip, diddly, jack.

What went wrong wasn’t the equation, but people. People create algorithms and they do so according to the principle garbage in, garbage out. The error here was not of high-level maths. It was a basic failure to appreciate the nature of statistics. Statistics cannot discover what isn’t there. And the information we really needed – how to compare students across schools – just wasn’t there. As the great Dan Davies puts it:

No statistical method in the world is going to be able to give you good results if the information you’re looking for is fundamentally not there in the dataset that you’re trying to extract it from

The problem wasn’t the algo. It was that the people in charge of it combined stupidity with class hatred. And it is of course not good enough for Williamson to claim that “Ofqual didn't deliver the system that we had been reassured and believed that would be in place.” Ofqual isn’t some organic food company delivering a strange-looking vegetable. It is, or should be, under government control.

What’s going on here is in fact an old and widespread error. Its what Georg Lukacs called reification – the process whereby “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing”. What actually happened was that people in power allocated A level results. That’s a relation between people. But to some, this relation appears as a thing, an algorithm. Which effaces the basic fact that those in power are the enemy of young working class people.

With algorithms and big data becoming increasingly important, the danger is that the reification fallacy will increasingly serve as a means of effacing the reality of class power.

In fact, of course, it has done so for decades. When Luddites smashed machines, they were transferring their anger from people to things – just as people do today when they rail against IT systems failures rather than against the mismanagement that create them.

And in 1845, Marx described how capitalism appears to people not as the product of human action but rather as “an alien power existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they are no longer able to control.” Of course, this does not mean that specific individuals are always to blame as they are in the A level case: often, social outcomes are emergent, the product of human action but not human design. Nevertheless, they are human-made. 

A classic example of this reification is how some people use the phrase “market forces” to defend income inequality. What this misses is that “the market” is not some entity existing above us but is really only a relation between people. And it is a relation of power. As Rick said, “all pay is, ultimately, a function of power.” Bosses and bankers have power; they must be bribed not to misappropriate their firms’ assets. But care-workers do not – often because they are women and migrants who lack outside options.

All this, of course matters for the reason Marx thought it did. If we regard inequalities and inefficiencies as arising from abstractions – be they algos or market forces – we are apt to either attack the wrong target or, worse still, to resign ourselves to fate. We need not do either. Technology - which includes social technologies such as markets - is a human construct.

Empirical vs fantasy politics

News items this week have highlighted an under-appreciated political division – between issues that involve clear harm to identifiable individuals and those that don’t.

Contrast the crime* that is the mishandling of A levels with reports of migrants crossing the channel in dinghies. There’s a massive difference between the two. The mis-marking of A levels imposes real suffering upon identifiable people. But a few migrants in dinghies do not: even if you believe – wrongly – that immigration cuts wages and jobs, it is not the few desperate people who arrive in boats that are doing so.

The latter – what Chris Grey calls an “artificial emergency” - is not the only example of reified, unempirical politics that is unconcerned with real material harm. The BBC reports on record government borrowing without pointing to a single individual who is suffering because of it. Claims that borrowing imposes a burden on future generations miss the point that government borrowing is also an asset for some people, and that such borrowing bequeaths assets to future generations in the form of better infrastructure and education, and by preventing the loss of businesses and skills that would occur if borrowing were not so high.

Similarly, even the more articulate Brexiters often fail to point to a material harm done by being in the EU or a material benefit from leaving, preferring to speak of windy abstractions such as sovereignty. Of course, the EU like all human institutions has its faults, but leaving on account of its fisheries policy is like jumping out of a plane because you don’t like the in-flight meal. And if you really want to boost UK exports, there are countless better ways to do so than trying to negotiate new trade deals.

These are serious examples of unempirical politics, but there are unserious ones too. At a time when thousands of people are losing their livelihoods, futures and even lives because of government incompetence, the Times saw fit yesterday to run a piece fantasising about a Labour government nationalizing Marx and Spencer (ooh, my sides are splitting).

Compare all this to empirical people-based politics. Issues such as poverty, the inadequate benefits system, excess deaths from Covid-19, mass job losses and a decade of wage stagnation all involve real material suffering.

This division between the politics of empirical suffering and the politics of fantasy and abstraction overlaps to a large extent with the left-right divide. In recent years much of the left has focused upon the empirical harms of poverty and austerity whilst the right has been obsessed with sovereignty and “control of our borders.”

From one perspective, this is an odd inversion. Those of us formed in the 70s were told that conservatism was an empirical tendency concerned with the amelioration of identifiable evils whilst the left had abstract utopian visions. Here, for example, is Oakeshott (pdf):

[The conservative] thinks that an innovation which is a response to some specific defect, one designed to redress some specific disequilibrium, is more desirable than one which springs from a notion of a generally improved condition of human circumstances, and is far more desirable than one generated by a vision of perfection.

By this standard, it is the left that is conservative, worried about specific defects of poverty and the mismanagement of the exam system whilst it is the right that has a “vision of perfection”, a vision of perfect sovereignty and controllable borders.

 In this divide, the BBC – let alone the rest of the media - horribly fails to maintain due impartiality. Imagine the mass media didn’t exist so your only knowledge of political issues came from the personal experience of you and your family, friends and neighbours. How would politics appear to you?

Chances are, empirical issues would loom large. You would know people who hadn’t had a real pay rise for years; had missed a top university place; or was worried about their job or business. Most of you wouldn’t, though, feel any material harm from being in the EU and would not know a few dozen migrants were crossing the channel. In drawing our attention to the latter and diverting us from the former, the media biases us against empirical politics. “Due impartiality” is not merely a matter of how the BBC reports particular issues. It is about what it chooses to report.

But why has this left-right division between empirical and unempirical politics emerged? It’s a relatively recent development. Thatcher, for example, attempted to solve genuine problems such as inflation and our poor economic performance.

Personally, I doubt that it’s because rightists suffered a bang on the head all at the same time. Instead, I suspect it is because extractive rentier capitalism precludes – to a greater extent than used to be the case – remedies for specific defects. Which means that fantasy politics is all the right have got.

* I say “crime” because three unforgiveable errors are involved: the class war that has seen students from poor backgrounds hit hard; the fundamental misunderstanding of statistics (no method can uncover information that’s just not there); and the failure to appreciate that there was an obvious solution.