Against "if I were king" politics

The government should stop billionaires making big donations to political parties; should move towards rejoining the EU; should fine polluting water companies more heavily; should make a positive case for immigration; and revive local economies and redistribute income more in order to fight off the far-right.

All these suggestions, taken from a quick browse of Bluesky, seem like good, reasonable politics. Advocating sensible policies, however, is only half of what politics should be.

Of course, we need to do so if only to show that a better world is indeed possible. But we need more than this.

Such advocacy begs the question: if these are good ideas, why isn't the government pursuing them already?

It's not because it is stupid - although a party that talks of fiscal black holes and running out of money does invite the charge of mental incapacity. Instead, it's because powerful sectional interests have created incentives for the government not to do sensible things. To take just the issue leading recent headlines, the reason why governments have not yet tackled the problem of social care is that, as Nick Pearce says, the issue "does not generate institutional interests that are capable of powerful political expression" and that "older people using social care are not politically mobilised."

The point generalizes. The power of the media (by which I mean a handful of billionaire cranks) inhibits the positive case for migration or for rejoining the EU. Utilities and media companies have bought Ofwat, Ofgem and Ofcom, thus preventing proper regulation. Politicians hoping for a few crumbs from the tables of the mega-rich don't want strict limits on political funding. Lawyers and accountants don't want a simpler, more transparent tax system. And there's a network of interests - nimbys, incumbent monopolists, financiers and landlords - who don't want economic policies that derail their gravy trains even if these would raise growth.

Not that such people need always to actually do anything to exercise power. Adam Smith famously wrote that people have a "disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful". This alone might explain why Wes Streeting is "willing to work with Elon Musk" and is handing over millions to Palantir.

Politics is not about intellect but about power. And this is disproportionately possessed by the mega-rich.

The question is therefore not merely: what are good policies? It is: how can we achieve sufficient influence to get these policies implemented? Without this question, politics is a mere fantasy ("if I were king..."). Worse still, it can be moral posturing which leads to a fragmentation of the left as we fall out over competing but equally unachievable utopias.

Even the very cleverest of us are prone to this mistake: my bookshelves have a goodly number of volumes by Nobel prize-winners such as Angus Deaton, Joe Stiglitz, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee which commit it.

But mistake it is. A sensible politics needs to ask: how can we create constituencies of countervailing power to the regressive rich?

Marx was of course alive to this question. He was wary of what he called writing recipes for the cookshops of the future because he thought the first priority was to ensure the emergence of a working class consciousness, as it was this, he thought, more than the nice ideas of intellectuals, that would be a force for change.

Which it was, if not as much so as his followers hoped. The emergence of strong trades unions in the mid-20th century created a powerful voice for equality (pdf) and social democracy - a voice which capitalists heeded because they feared the alternative was communism. It's no accident that the triumph of neoliberalism, fall of the Soviet Union and weakening of unions all coincided.

If what I'm saying sounds Marxian, it shouldn't. Basic Econ101 says that people respond to incentives. Our problem today is that politicians have incentives not to pursue policies which promote general well-being, but those that serve the interests of the mega-rich (and, worse still, sometimes not their interests but their pet obsessions.) The challenge therefore is to change these incentives. Every parent knows that the way to get a child to do the right thing is to not merely ask it to, but to give it the right incentives. What's true of children is also true of politicians.

Thatcher knew this. In weakening unions and in selling-off council houses she greatly enlarged the number of voters whose interests were those of property owners and diminished the power of labour. That shifted incentives.

Of course, this government doesn't seem interested in creating constituencies for change. Nevertheless, there are reasons for optimism. Socio-economic change very often isn't the product of conscious top-down government policy but instead is emergent. And some social forces are building more powerful groups disposed towards change, whether we like it or not.

One, described by Phil Burton-Cartledge, is the growth of immaterial labour, that producing intangible items ranging from research to social care. Such work, he says, is "socially cooperative, drawing on the competencies, knowledges and innovation of the social commons." This generates a bias towards pro-social attitudes rather than atomized individualism and hence an antipathy towards neoliberalism's predation upon the commons.

A second reason for optimism lies in the increased number of university graduates. These don't just have liberal, anti-reactionary values - seen, for example, in their support for rejoining the EU. Many are also disenchanted with the fact that graduate jobs, even for those who get them, are not as good as they were in their parents' generation. Doctors and lawyers work gruelling hours often for little pay - and certainly only rarely enough to afford a decent house. That's a radicalizing force.

Thirdly, there's the fact that people no longer read newspapers: circulation has fallen by around two-thirds since 2000, though it's difficult to say by exactly how much because the Sun and Telegraph no longer report their figures. Younger people especially are no longer so directly exposed to billionaires' propaganda.

There are, therefore, forces creating a constituency potentially hostile to actually-existing capitalism. Indeed, a recent Yougov survey found that 45% of voters had an unfavourable opinion of capitalism and only 30% a favourable one. Of course, this group is barely politically mobilized: Corbyn did so, but his effort was quickly suppressed. But it could potentially be so again in a different form.

What form? I don't know; our ability to foresee political trends is puny. But this is the issue. The big political question is not: "what should the government do?" Any child can think of ways to improve policy. It is rather: "how can we create pressures that force governments into positive change?"

The late Charlie Munger once said, "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." What's true of business is also true of politics.

Comments

[Luis Enrique]

What sort of propaganda are the increased number of graduates who do not read newspapers exposed to instead?

The question you are asking here reminds me of similar arguments from development economics, about what changes the incentives of society's elites to that they see growth as being in their own interest. i.e. https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/gambling-on-development/

[Lee]

One way that we can create pressures to incentivise governments into positive change is expanding the franchise, something which this government had in their election manifesto (votes for 16 year olds).

[cgt101]

"if these are good ideas, why isn't the government pursuing them already?"

Interesting that the piece gives "making the positive case for immigration" as one such good idea, as opposed to immigration itself. Presumably because governments of all persuasions have in fact run immigration high over the past two decades, apparently contrary to public opinion.

How to explain governments doggedly pursuing the (presumably) "good idea" of immigration, but not that of making the positive case for it? One explanation is that this combination is exactly what suits the interests of the "mega-rich" - they get an unlimited reserve army of labour, and the politicians get the blame. This is consistent with the argument of the piece but presumably not a desirable example.

[James]

In the UK the power of the (established right wing) media to set the political agenda is diminishing as their reach (sales/viewers/readers) contracts. IMHO the decline over the last few years is accelerating. [ any links on this subject would be appreciated]
A key question is how to prevent the billionaire class from dominating the next generation of news / information dissemination. How can we (continue to)build a vibrant independent multi headed info ecosystem that is resistant to easy take over ?

[George Carty]

Aren't newspapers far more a billionaires' plaything (and thus more far-right) than they used to be, because the advertising revenue that used to make newspapers profitable has now been largely gobbled up by Google and Facebook?

Contrast a 1980s-era copy of the Daily Telegraph with one from today.

[Bob]

If I were king we would implement JG not BIG...

If you get £15 per hour whatever the weather, how many more £ per hour are required to get you to go to work for a firm? Quite a lot given you are being paid to do nothing. (and we know what it is empirically given that a living UBI is nothing more than a state pension from the age of 18 and we have data for people working after state pension age - as well as millions of data points from people who don't work because they receive the state pension).

Whereas with a Job Guarantee, a job is a job. There is no material difference between a £15 per hour JG job and a £15 per hour private job. Therefore the 'dead loss' of the reservation wage is eliminated from the macroeconomy, leading to lower prices and more output. And that's before you get to the main MMT point that the JG sets the price anchor for the economy by determining how many units of currency you get for giving up an hour of your time.

Ultimately it doesn't matter what somebody does on the JG. JG jobs be green jobs, artists and musicians. But they can be sat there with their fingers on their lips if the state lacks imagination, which is remarkably cheap to implement. What matters is those individuals don't get to consume their own work time, so that the £15 per hour private job remains attractive rather than the £25 or £30 per hour required to pull people away from their Xbox.

[Mike Parr]

"Utilities and media companies have bought Ofwat, Ofgem and Ofcom, thus preventing proper regulation."

You have comitted a category error. The problem is one of assymetry of information. The utilities companies will always know far more than the regulator. This makes "proper" regulation impossible. This leaves only some form of renationalisation. I'm not offering a PoV - this is a reality.

[rsm]

《What matters is those individuals don't get to consume their own work time, so that the £15 per hour private job remains attractive rather than the £25 or £30 per hour required to pull people away from their Xbox.》

If you index the basic income to (positive) inflation, so that real purchasing power is stable no matter what nominal prices do, why should nominal inflation be a constraint? So what if private business has to pay more? Whst if they improved working conditions so people were actually incentivized to produce because they want to?

[Nick]

Great post. The problem of "if I were king" politics sadly stretches to the enforcement of policy, not just its drafting. If EU law is anything to go by, even having the right rules in place is insufficient without appropriate implementation and enforcement.