Carney, Gross & the culture war

What does Mark Carney have in common with Christian Gross, erstwhile manager of Spurs?

The answer is not that they are foreigners charged with the impossible task of introducing adequacy into fifth-rate organizations. It's that both used the tube on their first day at work.

Here, though, the comparison ends. Whereas Gross was ridiculed for doing so, Carney was not.The difference highlights one of the big dilemmas facing public figures - be they football managers, politicians or central bankers.

What I mean is that they must try and send two very different - indeed, contradictory - signals. On the one hand, they must show that they are competent men in charge of events. On the other, they must show that they are in touch with people.

This is why Carney succeeded where Gross failed. Carney's technocratic credentials are secure (but give it time) whereas Gross's were not, at least in the eyes of a parochial media. So, whilst Carney's use of the tube humanized him, Gross's made him look like a buffoon.

Gross was of course not the last man to make this mistake. When Osborne tweeted that picture of him eating a burger, he was trying to look like a normal bloke. This would have worked if, like Carney, he previously built a reputation for competence. But because he hadn't he just looked silly.

These legitimation signals account for a large part of public affairs. Summit meetings, for example, are not about doing business - that can be done by conference calls and the "sherpas" - but about sending signals. They allow politicians to show that they are not trivial petty-minded nobodies being buffetted by events, but are instead statesmen bestriding the global stage. They are, as Walter Bagehot would have said, a dignified rather than efficient part of the constitution.

It's in this context that we should interpret the dilemma facing the Labour party. On the one hand, it wants to signal that it's in touch with the people. But on the other hand, some of us are hoping for signals of economic competence. The problem is that the two are mutually exclusive. Being in touch with the people requires a tough line on benefit claimants and immigrants, and the pretence that public borrowing is a big problem. Economic competence, however, requires the opposite.

For some of us, the Labour party is too much like Christian Gross and not enough like Mark Carney.

People on the populist end of this debate, such as David Goodhart and Simon Danczuk, at least have the wit to realize this mutual exclusivity between competence cues and populism. When Goodhart says "it is also not enough to sit in central London looking at databases, you also have to talk to real people" he's recognizing that scientific evidence collides with populism. And when Danczuk sneers at Owen for being "privileged", he's inviting viewers to think that anyone intelligent enough to get into Oxford (a low bar) must be out of touch. The same sneer, of course, is used when people aware of the economics of immigration are called a "metropolitian elite."

I say all this for two reasons. First, to repeat my point that populism (or perhaps even democracy) is incompatible with good policy-making. Second, I suggest that what we're starting to see here is the revival of a culture war between "eggheads" and populists. The fact that the populists are often themselves posh - David Goodhart went to Eton and Nigel Farage to Dulwich - merely vindicates Marx's point that when history repeats itself, the second time is farce.

Comments

[Chris Purnell]

Danczuk may feel that Owen is 'privileged' but he has a failed business behind him and so shares economic DNA with quite a few wide- boy Tories.

[pablopatito]

"populism (or perhaps even democracy) is incompatible with good policy-making"

I don't accept this. You just need someone who is able to persuade voters that your good policies are, indeed, good.

I'm not sure Thatcher and Obama came to power through following popular opinion, but rather through charisma and force of personality? Blair had this to a degree as well. The only real problem Labour have is Miliband and Balls have no personality.

People will queue overnight to buy inferior mobile phones if you have a charismatic enough person telling them to buy them, and politics is the same. You've posted before about the role of Labour in attempting to move the Overton window to the left, haven't you?

[Metatone]

Oblig - isn't there an interesting comparison to be made between Wenger and Gross? The shortsighted British football press could have easily taken against Wenger too...

As for the rest, Danczuk being treated seriously by the Times rather looks like an attempt to give Labour enough rope to hang themselves - naturally enough Danczuk obliged. I guess he didn't notice that his ad hominem on Jones also disqualifies Danczuk himself from representing his constituents. He may have been of humble origins, but he's a full-fledged UKIP wideboy now (as Chris Purnell suggests above.)

[FromArseToElbow]

@Metatone, the shortsighted British football press did take against Wenger initially and gleefully reported homegrown managers' derision (notably Alex Ferguson's) at his erudition and poncey methods.

The reason they stopped publicly deriding him (though the paedophile chants, which were part of that original "welcome", continued unabated) was that he won the Premiership and FA Cup double in his first full season.

[rogerh]

What seems curious is that political parties tend to attract a roughly equal proportion of the available votes. Now if the policies of one or another were demonstrably better or the track record of one or another demonstrably better I would
expect the competition to be much less evenly balanced. But in practice we stagger from one cycle of minor success and
dismal failure to another without the process seeming to improve along the way. One party seems just as rubbish as the
next.

This seems odd, the major industries seem to get better and better at what they do but public administration despite endless overhauls seems to fall into the same traps time after time. What is different? I suspect the cause is attempting to achieve contradictory goals - appeasing those with power and money at the same time as delivering bread, circuses, roads, rails, health, education etc whilst keeping the trade-offs secret. Not daring to tell uncomfortable truths seems the problem, to do so places a fatal weapon in the hands of the opposition - which is why whistleblowers get a hard time. Democracy's Achilles heel.

So we complete the circle, politicians depend on the cheerleaders, the cheerleaders depend on the powerful and no-one wants the trade-offs revealed - everyone except the (thoughtful) voter is happy.

[Nick]

'What seems curious is that political parties tend to attract a roughly equal proportion of the available votes. Now if the policies of one or another were demonstrably better or the track record of one or another demonstrably better I would expect the competition to be much less evenly balanced. But in practice we stagger from one cycle of minor success and
dismal failure to another without the process seeming to improve along the way. One party seems just as rubbish as the
next.'

Political parties that seriously contest elections tend to adopt similar strategies and policies for a number of reasons but mainly to attract the median voter in an election cycle. While private markets can seek out the marginal consumer, political parties are constrained to seek out the median. Imagine if every car or mobile phone had to be selected for everyone in the country by a housewife in hornchurch or an estate agent in basildon (where the median voter had been located in the past). Thats basically what politics is and why it usually sucks.