When failure succeeds

In politics, failure sometimes works better than success. This is the message of this piece by Janan Ganesh, wherein he argues that it is in Trump’s interest to fail on his promise to control immigration, because if he does so it will remain a big issue which will attract voters to him. Janan says:

It is perverse, I know, that a president could make so little progress on his number-one priority during four years in office, only to be rewarded for it. 

Maybe not so perverse. There are other examples.

One, as he says, is Brexit. If Brexiters get their way, voters will see that it is in fact no solution to our problems. And Farage would then lose his schtick of being able to claim that the political class is out of touch with the people. If you are practicing the politics of grievance, the last thing you want is for the grievance to disappear.

But there are other examples. Authoritarian governments use crime, unrest or terrorism as excuses for removing freedoms. For them, failing to suppress crime works better than succeeding. Technocrats and managerialists need to maintain the prospect of further incremental improvements, which requires them to maintain a gap between the actual and the feasible best.

And rightists have sometimes accused leftist parties of wanting to create a “dependency culture” and to maintain inequality and poverty, because doing so ensures the continuation of a constituency that will vote for them. As Gilles Saint-Paul and colleagues write:

Policies that reduce the income of the poor relative to the average income, such as failing to upgrade the skills of the workers and preventing their erosion by new, skill-biased, technologies, paradoxically consolidates the political power of the Left. This is because these policies make the natural constituency of a left-wing party endogenously more dependent on it.

The converse is also true. Success can be failure. Post-war social democracy worked well in raising real wages; it was one of the greatest peacetime policy successes in history. But this helped to foster individualist consumerism which supplanted class consciousness and reduced support for collectivist institutions.  As Nye Bevan wrote in 1952, in anticipation of J.K.Galbraith’s theory of “private affluence, public squalor”:

As modern industry produces new and attractive forms of private consumption, the individual citizen is made all the more reluctant to see his income taken away from him for remote purposes. (In Place of Fear, p134 in my copy)

As Avner Offer has written more recently:

Towards the end of the 1960s, attitudes began a slow shift away from the common welfare and public services as sources of well-being, and towards private benefits…The choice to “go private”, which is widely perceived as a driver of affluence, is perhaps one of the consequences of affluence. (The Challenge of Affluence, p7-8)

In the same vein, the creation of high-quality council houses created a constituency with a strong interest in buying them cheaply from Thatcher.

In these ways, social democrats’ success was also their failure. Corbynomics might suffer the same fate. If it succeeds in the medium-term, it will enable young people to buy houses – but this will create a client base of older property-owners in future who’ll have an incentive to support the status quo.

My point here is a simple one. We flatter ourselves that we live in a meritocracy in which success is rewarded and failure punished. But in many cases, this is a myth. Sometimes we live instead in the world of snake-oil salesmen as brilliantly described (pdf) by Werner Troesken, in which it is failure that is rewarded. Our economic and political institutions are all selection mechanisms, and sometimes they select not for success but for failure.

Note: my target audience is discerning enough to understand the picture reference. 

Comments

[Marc Mulholland]

Very good.

That Offer quote should be "... is perhaps one of the consequences of affluence."

[chris]

Thanks! Correction made.

[Scratch]

"In the same vein, the creation of high-quality council houses created a constituency with a strong interest in buying them cheaply from Thatcher."

The half-century long refusal to build more (and the capture by and distribution of the remaining public housing stock in the most irritating manner possible by bourgeois elements) - despite mass un/under/subsistence employment is kind of telling.

Creating a surfeit is the ultimate medicinal compound for neoprimitive accumulation.

[David Brown]

Fabulous paper by Werner Troesken in the link above. Well worth a read.

[georgesdelatour]

“Authoritarian governments use crime, unrest or terrorism as excuses for removing freedoms. For them, failing to suppress crime works better than succeeding.”

The USSR used to hide the fact that it had any crime, unrest or terrorism. It even denied it had natural disasters. Apparently only capitalist countries had earthquakes.

I used to listen to Radio Moscow in the 1980s. Listeners would write in with questions about the USSR, to which the answers were always hilariously panglossian. Question: “What’s the rate of inflation in the Soviet Union?”. Answer: “As amazing as it may seem, since October 1917 there has been no inflation in the Soviet Union”…

The main crime the Brezhnev-era USSR effectively turned a blind eye to was black marketeering. In reality they needed it. But they didn’t highlight it, or use it as the primary justification for having a police state.

[georgesdelatour]

“We flatter ourselves that we live in a meritocracy in which success is rewarded and failure punished. But in many cases, this is a myth.”

Most of the time, narrative trumps reality. The economists who advocated UK membership of the ERM or Greek membership of the Euro didn’t suffer any reputational damage from being wrong, and their opponents didn’t gain any reputational enhancement from being right. At a subliminal level, everyone understood that both sets of economists were for or against political union for political reasons, and the economics was just post hoc justification.

[Robert Mitchell]

Shouldn't economists put their money where their mouths are and place bets on outcomes like Greece joining the EU, and publish public profit and loss statements? An economist's models should be judged on the basis of the profitability of their predictions. Thus you all should be looking at the research JP Morgan and other big financial institutions are producing, because their predictions are tested in the market. Economists are just telling stories.

[Sean]

For your younger readers, please explain the picture reference!

[Peter]

I think that’s The Scaffold. One of the earliest songs I can remember from Top of the Pops.