Stumbling and Mumbling

What's the mechanism?

The late great Andrew Glyn always asked: “what’s the mechanism?” The west’s abject failure in Afghanistan highlights both the importance of this question and the fact that too many policy-makers and influencers fail to give it sufficient attention.

President Biden says “we did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build.” Which poses Andrew’s question: what, then, was the mechanism through which the Taliban would be defeated? We know for certain that it was not the ones actually operating: western military strategy as it was implemented failed.  

Exactly why this was the case is another matter, and one not relevant for my purpose*. Instead, my point is that the failure to satisfactorily ask and answer Andrew’s question was not confined to those supporting the military adventure in Afghanistan (or Iraq, or Libya). In fact, the failure is widespread.

For example, Anna Soubry still defends Tory-Lib Dem fiscal austerity, even though it caused (at the margin) the Brexit she detests. She is, even now, in denial of the mechanism that led to Brexit.

And then there are those centrists and Tories who now deplore Johnson’s corruption and incompetence but who failed to prevent it in 2019 by the only means possible – supporting Labour. In the 2019 election supporting Corbyn was the only means of preventing a Johnson premiership. Not doing so was to fail to ask: what’s the mechanism?

Much of the Labour right always fails to ask: through what mechanism can Labour win power if not (as a necessary but not sufficient condition) having a mass party to combat the effect of the mass media?

This failure, though, is not confined to airhead MPs and columnists. Even Nobel laureates are guilty of it. In Deaths of Despair Angus Deaton and Anne Case, having documented how American capitalism has been a force for mass social murder, write:

Capitalism needs to be better monitored and regulated.

They omit to ask: what’s the mechanism whereby this will be accomplished? There are many obstacles to it – one of which they themselves document: the fortunes spent on lobbying by big business. Humane, well-regulated capitalism requires a particular conjunction of class forces – one in which capitalists perceive that what’s good for workers is also good for them, and in which there is countervailing power (such as strong trades unions) to the tendency for capitalism to degenerate into cronyism. This conjunction existed in the post-war decades, but no longer does so. In its absence, the better-regulated capitalism urged by Deaton is as fantastically utopian as he believes socialism to be.

What we have here, then, is a widespread error. In not asking “what’s the mechanism?” we neglect the crucial importance of ground truth and implementation – the conditions of policy success or failure. Without these, however, policy-making is mere wishful thinking. This error of course is fuelled by a media bias: windbag opinion-mongers and Westminster gossips distract policy-makers and voters from facts on the ground, mechanisms and levers of power.

Which gives us a descent into crude identity politics. If you are not asking “what is the mechanism by which we defeat the Taliban, or Johnson, or Brexit?” you are left merely asserting your moral superiority without doing the hard work of thinking, discovering ground truth and – yes - making compromises. Which leaves you with little more than narcissism.

* I know nothing at all about foreign affairs, which it seems puts me on a par with the State Department and Foreign Office.

Ambition in capitalist society

Ambition, writes Lucy Kellaway, is both necessary and corrosive. She omits an important aspect here, which adds to its corrosiveness – class.

Class influences the level of ambition through two channels. One is that it distorts your awareness of opportunity. In Michael Apted’s superb TV series Up, the privately-educated Andrew knew (16'21" in) at the age of seven that he would go to Cambridge and become a lawyer. For the rest of us, our path to even modest success is not so pre-determined. I never thought about Oxford University until a teacher told me I could get in, and I never met anyone with a degree who wasn’t a teacher until I was in my 20s. If you’re not aware of the possibilities, you are less likely to be ambitious.

Another mechanism is that class sets the reference level of our income. When I realized that I would not have to worry about the leccy bill or becoming homeless, my ambition drained away. I was once one of those men brilliantly described by Adam Smith – a “poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition”. But I was lucky enough to have learned before my deathbed that “wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility.” If you’ve nobody you want to impress, money soon loses its point.

By contrast, those from posher backgrounds can feel failures if they don’t emulate their father’s success. For many of them, wealth and greatness are not of frivolous utility but are instead the benchmarks by which they compare themselves to their parents and contemporaries.

Both these mechanisms help explain the fact that people who have experienced poverty as children earn less as adults even controlling for education.

But they also tell us something else. What seems to be ambition is in fact fear – whether it be the fear of poverty or the fear of falling short of parental expectations.

In this context, Lucy’s advice that we must sometimes slough off ambition is a counsel of perfection. It’s fine for those of us who have paid off the mortgage and so no longer fear homelessness. Younger people facing high rents or mortgage payments cannot afford a lack of ambition, even if they are consumed by anger when it is thwarted.

Again, class matters. It limits your options.

Here, though, we must ask: ambitious for what? Alasdair MacIntyre distinguished between goods of excellence such as mastery of a craft and goods of effectiveness such as wealth and power. Sometimes, pursuit of one brings the other: achieving the good of excellence in football will bring with it wealth, fame and at least some influence: Marcus Rashford’s campaign against child poverty would have been less successful if he’d played for Stockport County.

In other cases, however, the two conflict. I doubt that the country’s most excellent journalists are the best-paid. Being an excellent academic won’t necessarily bring you the big money that comes from being university vice-chancellor. Prime Ministers aren’t always drawn from the most excellent MPs or ministers. And bosses aren’t necessarily the people who were best at the jobs their underlings do.

One component of that slippery term “neoliberalism” is, I suspect, the valorization of wealth, power and hierarchy over goods of excellence such as professional standards and craft skills.

Ambition for the goods of effectiveness can, though, be corrosive not just for individuals but for the economy. The man who is hungry for power and income will seek advancement even where he is not equipped for the job. And because employers (and voters) don’t always know (pdf) what they are doing they will sometimes hire that man. Hence the Dilbert principle, of which Gavin Williamson is perhaps only the most prominent of many examples.

Here, incentives matter. Where there are disproportionate rewards in terms of income, power and status for advancement, people will seek promotion even when they are unsuited for it. You might prefer to be a first-rate coder than a third rate boss, but if being that boss means a big pay rise you will go for it. And so talent will be misallocated. What we have here therefore is yet another way (of many) in which big inequalities are bad for the economy.

To see my point, imagine an egalitarian socialistic society in which inequalities of power and income are small; there is less social distance between rich and poor families; and whose culture celebrates the goods of excellence in professional and craft work more than those of effectiveness: it would be a MacIntyrean or Walzerian-type utopia.

In this society, there’d be less incentive to be Dilberts like Gavin Williamson because you could earn a decent living as a first-rate coder (or third-rate fireplace salesman) and so have less need to “get on”. What John Stuart Mill called “the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels” would diminish. And those who did “get on” would find their new roles, and the people they surround themselves with, less alien. So their ambition would not be the curse Smith thought it was. In these ways ambition would be less damaging to individuals and society.

You might think it hard to imagine such an environment. But then, as someone said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Embracing Blair's legacy

Sir Keir Starmer wants Labour to “embrace Tony Blair’s political legacy.” Which poses the question: what is that legacy?

The usual response is merely an exchange of tribal grunts: “Iraq” versus “won three elections”. The truth is more interesting.

Blair’s (and Brown’s) great genius was to see that social democracy had to adapt to new times. So, for example, his expansion of universities was a response to the increased wage inequality between graduates and non-graduates; tax credits were an attempt to tackle the prevalence of low pay caused in part by the weakness of trades unions and globalization; fiscal rules were a reaction to high real interest rates; and the granting of independence to the Bank of England represented the awareness that policy uncertainty had contributed to economic instability.

This was serious, sensible economics. And it contributed to some genuine achievements. New Labour cut child and pensioner poverty – it’s easy to forget that the latter was a big problem in the 90s – improved the NHS, and the expansion of universities helped to create a large progressive-liberal constituency.

But he also had grave faults. The biggest of these, I suspect, was his managerialism, his faith in the ability of bosses and governments to impose order from the top down. It was this that underpinned the target culture that demoralized public sector workers; the excessive deference to bosses and tolerance of the increased power and wealth of the 1%; the clampdown on migrants and benefit recipients; and the illiberalism that spawned thousands of new criminal offences.

I would argue that the Iraq war was a consequence of this. It arose from what James C. Scott has called “high modernist ideology” - too much confidence in the possibility of centralized knowledge (and the wisdom of leaders) which led to an under-valuing of ground truth.

Which brings me to why Starmer is dead right. Labour must embrace Blair’s legacy, in the sense that it must do what he did and adapt to new conditions. For example:

 - In contrast to the 90s, real interest rates are now negative. This means tight fiscal policy is neither necessary nor – given the zero lower bound – desirable.

 - In the 90s, Labour, like most economists, thought that a stable macroeconomic policy framework was sufficient to achieve stable economic growth. The financial crisis and subsequent productivity stagnation has shown this to be too optimistic. To promote growth, government must be more activist.

 - Peter Mandelson was famously “intensely relaxed” about the very rich getting richer – a view consonant with Blair and Brown’s deference to business leaders. This can no longer be the case. It is very possible that the wealth- and power-grab of the top 1% is a cause of our poor economic performance.

 - New Labour thought that education was the route to prosperity. Given the degradation of erstwhile “middle class” jobs and the unaffordability of housing, this is now doubtful.

 - We have learned that there are limits what bosses and top-down management can do. New Labour’s excessive faith in these contributed to stagnant (pdf) public sector productivity and the financial crisis: bosses, it turned out, could stop banks going bust.  

My personal view is that answers to these issues should entail more democratisation of economic life. But that's not my main point. It is instead that we should embrace Blair’s legacy by addressing the question he asked and answered: “what does a modern social democracy look like?” He rejected the idea that Labour could live in the world as it was twenty years previously. We should follow him in that rejection. In this sense, Blair had a wisdom which is wholly missing in his epigones.

The social mobility con

Strange as it might seem, we owe some thanks to Digby Jones – because he has reminded us that social mobility is a con.

Over the weekend he tweeted:

Enough! I can’t stand it anymore! Alex Scott spoils a good presentational job on the BBC Olympics Team with her very noticeable inability to pronounce her ‘g’s at the end of a word. Competitors are NOT taking part, Alex, in the fencin, rowin, boxin, kayakin, weightliftin & swimmin.

Now, Ms Scott epitomizes the meritocratic ideal of someone coming from a poor background and succeeding through personal ability. She is a child of Thatcher:

 it doesn't matter what your background is. I believe in merit, I belong to meritocracy, and I don't care two hoots what your background is. What I am concerned with is whatever your background, you have a chance to climb to the top.

Jones by contrast is telling us that background does matter. However brilliant a working class person might be, he will find a way of hating them.

Of course, not all of those in the establishment blurt out their hatred as crassly as Jones did. Just as many racists avoid using the N-word, so class haters are rarely so explicit. Nevertheless, his attitude is widespread. Here for example is Sajid Javid: 

He describes going for an early interview at Rothschild and being confronted by a row of white men in pin-striped suits who asked him what his father did and where he went to school. “The British merchant banks in those days would always go to the old school tie. If you didn’t go to the right country parties and spend the weekends in the right place you had got no connection,” he says. “I thought even if they offer me a job I’m never going to fit in.” 

Everybody of obviously working class origin has experienced a degree of froideur in our encounters with posher colleagues, clients or bosses. With better men than Jones – and you can carve a better man than him from a turd – this will be subtle: those Rothschilds men were no doubt impeccably charming. But there is always a sense of being othered, a mutual awareness of difference – which, if you point it out, invites the accusation of chippiness. There is always, always, an undertow.

The best relationship the upwardly mobile can expect with posher colleagues is that of a trusted NCO with a good commissioned officer: it might be friendly and effective, but both sides always know there’s a difference.

One effect of all this is to depress social mobility. Sure, some people like Javid and myself can find well-paid jobs outside Rothschilds. But there are fewer places for us than there are for the posh boy.

And this can happen without overt class hatred of the sort displayed by Jones. It’s wholly reasonable for employers to want people they can trust or who look like they are safer bets. Like hires like – which diminishes the chances of people from working class backgrounds, or women, or ethnic minorities, or the disabled.

And those who overcome these barriers face another problem. We can never fully transcend the class of our birth. People from working-class backgrounds earn less than those from posh ones even when they have the same levels of experience and education. That’s because networks operate to their disadvantage.

Such networks diminish social opportunities as well as career ones. Men from poor homes are less likely to be married in later life (pdf), even controlling for their own incomes. This isolation, allied to the subtle stresses of living a life in unfamiliar surroundings is bad for our heath. As Michael Marmot has written:

Where you come from does matter for your health…Family background, measured as parents’ education and father’s social class, are related to risk of heart disease.

We know that immigrants tend to suffer from worse mental health than others. Perhaps migration across class borders has a similar effect.

All of which makes me think that Adam Smith had a point:

The poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition…labours night and day to acquire talents superior to all his competitors. He endeavours next to bring those talents into public view, and with equal assiduity solicits every opportunity of employment. For this purpose he makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises. Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it. It is then, in the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled by the memory of a thousand injuries and disappointments which he imagines he has met with from the injustice of his enemies, or from the perfidy and ingratitude of his friends, that he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility.

The point of all this is not to say that young working class people should not be ambitious. Instead, it is to suggest that social mobility is no substitute for genuine equality.