The fall of the West is a recently-released radio programme, podcast and a prevalent idea. I think the right has a point: that we seem to be unwilling to stand up for our ideas. Much of this, though, is simply an unthinking respect for ‘strong’ men: bombastic, stern people who never change their minds, accept new evidence or rely on it at all.
But there is an idea here: is the fall inevitable? I think it is. I think that over a century of widespread franchise has inevitably led to creaking overburdened states that cannot cope with all the demands placed on them.
This is because of lobbying and the natural outcome of democratic politics: that political parties want to help special interest groups in specific ways in order to buy their votes, at the cost of the general public. People do not understand how countries or economies work, but they do vote for two or three things that are salient in their minds, and some sort of gift or privilege granted by government is very enticing. Democratic majorities are therefore built from coalitions of interested groups who vote for their own advancement even at the cost of others.
Democracy is supposedly a way that we all benefit from the wisdom of crowds, but the wisdom of crowds is not very wise: it’s a limited phenomenon and subject to both ignorance and standard human biases. People don’t vote for the benefit of the country: they see policies that give them simple and obvious benefits and don’t even think of other consequences.
The incentives that lead to the creation of specific benefits, carve-outs, laws and tax loopholes are intrinsic to our version of ill-educated democracy. They do not fade once the benefit has been in place for a while, so there is naturally an accumulation of these loopholes and benefits over time; people come to regard them as a right, and if anything become even more dedicated to having them then when they were first voted for, since people tend to hate losing things more than gaining something equivalent.
A small-scale benefit for a specific group is likely to be inherently unjust, inefficient to administer and even ineffective at achieving social goals.
Inefficient
Targeted benefits need targeting: someone needs to check that recipients meet all the criteria. Recipients might need to complete paperwork to assert their rights; civil servants will need to check and confirm whatever details politicians have seen fit to base the policy on, whether or not there are established, trustworthy data sources that include this information. If not, a government department might have to create one, or else might be required by politicians or bosses with too little funding and too much willingness to make the best of bad policy to forgo checking at all, leading to fraud.
There will always be court cases by people who are edge cases, and there will always be court cases by people who have warped their situation to fit the criteria and who challenge the government that by the letter of the badly-written law they deserve benefits too. And because we try to be a just country, which means following the law rather than what politicians meant the law to be if only we could read their minds, these grasping chancers often benefit from loopholes and inaccuracies. Even the best writing will contain some, and will need to be revisited after exposure to the ingenuity and foolishness of millions of people. But our politicians do not write anywhere near the best laws, because they are experts in buying votes and campaigning, not in watertight legalese that is somehow also intelligible to the common man or in administering a country well.
Governments don’t have the time or interest for revisiting old laws; the special interest group already has its benefits, and the fraudsters and chancers are, if anything likely to be party supporters and donors too.
Ineffective
Special interest laws and benefits are usually stated to serve a social purpose of helping people. To help someone requires a nuanced and thoughtful understanding of all the causes of their hardships to best use the levers of state on their behalf. Often representatives of the group themselves are only aware of the proximal causes of any trouble, and politicians are entirely ignorant and dim-witted, unaware of anything other than proximal causes. Action at a national level is often described with targets or physical goals that sound grand: ‘we will build hundreds of miles of bicycle loans’ and then implemented with as much simplicity as it takes to say the phrase. This is what gives us bicycle lanes only 5 metres long, lanes shared with the biggest, most polluting stop-start vehicles on the roads, lanes that give right of way to every other road user including cyclists using the normal road and a litany of other foolishnesses. Someone decided to fund bicycle lanes, not useful cyclist-friendly ones.
But when politicians promised to make roads better, cyclists imagined useful bike lanes and possibly voted for the government that wasted a lot of that investment. The same happens with new laws and new benefits. Entrepreneurs’ Relief was implemented as a tax benefit to encourage people to start small businesses. When I looked at it 10 years ago there was solid evidence showing it had no such effect at all, merely giving already-rich people £6bn of tax every year. But they still got the money and were grateful: the vote-buying purpose was fulfilled, even if the supposed social purpose was not.
Unjust
Edge cases are the bane of justice. The more fiddly boundaries we have with big consequences for people who fall on the wrong side, the harsher life will seem. Simple means-testing is a widespread example. At an arbitrary threshold some sort of benefit is removed. As discussed already, this means that someone in power must ascertain exactly how much wealth or income the recipient has, creating paperwork and fraud for everyone. But even if we pretend that this happens perfectly, as if by magic, it creates a strong boundary effect: at one income, say, you receive your benefit, and yet as you get marginally wealthier you lose the benefit, so your increasing income doesn’t feel that beneficial after all.
This is effectively a tax: money you had is no longer yours. At the time I examined Entrepreneurs’ Relief someone had calculated that for some households in the country the marginal tax rate was 120%: so many benefits were being withdrawn that they lost money from having higher salaries.
Some people will always be on the wrong side of whatever criteria we implement; some people will be in a similar situation but not quite whatever the politicians imagined; some people will be unable to prove their circumstances; some people will be enduring too much else in their lives to be able to work through complex bureaucracy. The most disadvantaged are typically the ones who can least manage some government paperwork.
Wealthy individuals and companies, on the other hand, can pay administrative staff or even technical experts to navigate complex bureaucracies. The more complex our laws, taxes and benefits, the worse we make it for the worst-off and the more we limit good things to people who are already doing well.
Our tax code is tens of thousands of dense pages; our legal system is thousands of laws and legal precedents, divided into specialist areas that take years of study to master but which could easily be relevant to any individual in the country. One extra benefit, tax break or legal privilege might seem innocuous, but at some point all the straw breaks the camel’s back. We are well past that point; the special carve-out for your interests harms us all.
A whole nation’s economy will be complex. We couldn’t run a fair, just modern society with, for example, the roughly 100 words of the 10 commandments as our only laws. Things will need clarification and detail. For example, the concept of a bicycle lane seems simple, but what is a bicycle? Are horses, unicycles, tricycles and low-power electric delivery vehicles allowed in bicycle lanes? What is the penalty for violating the vehicle restrictions? Is there only one penalty for all violations or a scale of punishments? Current law seems to be that a bicycle is a self- or low-powered wheeled vehicle. Roller skates and skateboards are therefore bicycles and belong on the road, not the footway.
But complexity, especially ever-evolving complexity, as we expect of modern economies and progressing societies (I wish!), creates the need for maintenance and evolution. The best way to create a complex service, whether it’s an IT project or just a bit of work for a manager, is through iteration. You try something, and by creating something workable you see what the challenges and benefits are; and quite possibly the person it’s for will also realise what matters most to him and will refine his requirements before you’ve invested too much time on something he did ask for but doesn’t want. Of course, many managers hate iteration and prefer divination and telepathy. Their ignorance makes them bad managers.
Maintenance and gradual improvement don’t win votes; they’re too gradual and too widespread. Why would I vote for everyone to get a pound richer in each of a thousand policies when I can vote for a policy that gives me £1,500 and costs everyone else £1? I never even realise that the other 999 policies cost me a £1 each; or if I do, it makes me even more determined to get my £1,500 to cover those costs.
This is why we have crumbling infrastructure: motorists and their lobby groups complaining about potholes, an electricity grid struggling to cope with demand and worried about the vast increases needed for electric cars; a gas grid without storage; a tax authority using computing and software from the 1990s; prisons so full we need to let sentenced criminals out even earlier; a probation service unable to cope; courts with multi-year backlogs; a health service also with multi-year waiting lists and crumbling buildings; schools with crumbling buildings, lessons in portacabins and playing fields sold off for development.
Alongside crumbling infrastructure, we have crumbled systems. We have to wait until something is so decrepit that a politician can make an issue out of revamping it; and over the years in which it failed people suffered. And even when a politician promises to renew a service he may not; every new intervention needs to be new, visible and is susceptible to ideological bias, corruption or plain incompetence. Funding hospital building maintenance is boring; renovating hospitals might make up for years of leaks, mildew, collapse, pests etc. But if the money is directed to private builders who can charge captive hospital trusts exorbitant rates then renovation can go wrong.
Of course, it’s not just politicians who can make mistakes when thinking up something new; yet another NHS reorganisation or school curriculum. Hospital managers who have spent their careers trying to hold together a failing building can also mess up renovation projects. But maintenance goes wrong in smaller ways, and people learn from those small mistakes, so that everyone in a well-maintained building knows exactly how to keep it functional as efficiently as possible.
Maintenance is the iterative (or, in IT jargon, the agile build-fast-and-break-things) approach to getting things right. The less noticeable and individually identifiable each piece is, the easier it is to iterate and get it perfectly right, gradually creating an efficient service. But the less noticeable and individually identifiable it is, the less political will there is for it.
When you employ someone; a gardener, a plumber or a junior team member, what qualities do you look for?
A primary attribute is typically an ability to do the job well. You don’t employ a gardener who plucks up the flowers and plants weeds, even if he has an exciting grand idea for grafting nasturtiums onto a fir tree. You don’t call the plumber who let the bath leak into the ceiling below it and forgot to connect your friend’s loo to the sewer even if he promises that he has a really good deal on jacuzzis. You certainly don’t trust your electrical wiring to a chatty drunkard from the pub just because he’s fun to chat to when you’re out.
If everything else is roughly similar, you might take the team member who has a couple of bright ideas about the work, or the builder who dabbles in decorative architecture. But 90% of your decision is about who will get the job done for a reasonable price.
Yet when we select politicians mostly for their charisma, and partly for their new ideas, with almost no attention paid to whether they’re any good at actually doing things. New ideas in order to progress as a society are important, but they have to be implemented well, on top of maintaining everything else. And some ideas simply cannot be enacted, however nice they sound. You might like the idea of a tree sprouting flowers, but nasturtiums cannot be grafted onto a tree, and if you try you will waste a lot of time and money creating a dead tree and dead nasturtiums. If, alongside this, you also let your garden get overgrown by weeds (i.e. fraudsters, tax-dodgers, near-monopolists, cartels etc.) then you haven’t progressed at all.
It’s hard to judge governments’ success at managing a country; so much of national measures depend on global events, have long delays between cause and effect or depend only partly on government. It’s even harder to judge whether an opposition selection of MPs will be good at managing the country.
But we should try. This should be our most important concern: will the shadow cabinet maintain what we already have well? We should judge this by politicians’ CVs. Not the CV where they pretend that a campaign leaflet is a local news source and let you know that they successfully got a local pothole filled in, or saved a wasteful, expensive school from closure; the CV where they list their skills and knowledge, with reference to jobs or training where they could legitimately have acquired these.
We should interview them not with challenges about whether they said the perfectly empathetic but also sensible thing about current events, or shouting matches in which they try to claim that their rivals have even worse judgement. We should interview them about whether they can make sensible judgements when running large organisations. If they can’t, then their new policies are pointless: they will implement them so poorly that the goal will never be achieved. Even if you think that the goal is the best use of public money, you’ll still be disappointed.
We have lost track of competence, which is another likely feature of long periods of democracy. We don’t want to spend the time learning what works, judging it carefully and voting for improvements or radical changes depending on whether we were mostly right or wrong. Democracy is susceptible to the free-rider problem: we want to rely on other people to do the job for us. We want to be busy earning promotions with all the hours in our lives while foolish bozos like me waste their free time working out who to vote for and not getting promotions. Then everyone else votes for what’s best for the country and we get a promotion.
Except that that’s not always how being a free-rider works. Either you break actual rules and risk getting found out (hence all the business complaints about over-regulation because they’re scared of getting found out or peeved that competitors are not found out) or everyone does it because there’s no penalty.
Free-ridership isn’t instant; it might be the optimum game-theoretical strategy, but the great tide of humanity takes time to form habits and behaviours (one problem with much economic theory, which assumes that the optimal equilibrium somehow happens instantly). Over years and generations people have gradually lost interest in the voting power that they once had.
Expertise which was hard-won deteriorates; people don’t bother to maintain it. A bit less always seems sufficient, and now we have a population that trusts ignorant commentators on the internet to tell them what to think about globally-important issues. We have degenerated to the oft-cited maxim “My ignorance is as good as your knowledge”, more commonly phrased as ‘everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs’. Only so far as they do not affect others, and voting does affect others. If I vote, my ignorance is your concern.
The effect of the internet, and the loss of media gatekeepers of authority has been written about extensively, but I think that the trend away from thoughtful, disinterested voting towards uninterested voting has merely been accelerated by the ‘information’ revolution.
Some people also ascribe this deterioration to moral relativism, which is an ignorant understanding of the fact that there is no universal, objective moral truth. We create morality ourselves. Some people lay all the blame on postmodernism and the philosophical belief that there is no truth or knowledge, and I’m sure that this has contributed too. But the free-rider problem would exist even if there weren’t ‘intellectuals’ encouraging people to wallow in ignorance.
Maintaining complexity requires work; and complexity that delivers communal benefits that are not specific to any subset of the community will always create the incentive not to bother with it. We could set up a complex society in which some benefitted especially (e.g. our billionaires, who cannot possibly deserve more money than a skilled worker could earn by working for longer than all human history) and then hope that they will be incentivised to maintain this favourable system. But as we experience every day, our super-rich prefer to corrupt the system to give them even more; tax relief hand-outs, tax deductibility of interest, especially offshore interest, lower taxes on capital gains etc.
The corruption and deterioration of our system (“Drain the swamp”!) is real; it’s not a figment of the imaginations of the radical left and disaffected right. But the solution is not in demagogues who go long on promises and short on delivery. They are the problem. The solution is in tedious, boring improvement and a commitment to fairness, even if we lose the privileges that we love most. This is the great legacy of the baby-boomer generation: ignorant voting as prosperity made them lazy and entitled, exemplified best in a pension system in which they have voted themselves well over double what an average pensioner will have paid in; and double (after accounting for inflation) what existed when they started working. A sub-group of society taking for itself at the expense of others, feeling entitled to it because it has the stamp of democracy.
Criticising pensions is not a popular approach; pensioners have the free time to be politically active and still regard it as a duty to vote. It’s a shame that so many of them don’t also regard it as a duty to vote sensibly. The snowflakes who have ruined the country can never repay the debt of Conservative governments and leaving the EU. Economic shocks are gradual deterioration made them long for the past, when infrastructure and systems seemed better-maintained, even if the overall quality of life was worse. So they voted for people who promised to reverse social progress, in the hope that reversing progress would somehow also reverse corruption. They voted for people who touted a macho approach to values and principles, in the naïve feeling that posturing strongmen and narcissistic charlatans would stand up for good principles.
There is another way. The feeling that the less complex structures of the past were more solid and reliable might not be wrong. But the way to put ourselves on a more solid footing is not to retread the ground that made us unstable; it’s to dig deep and lay solid, boring but vital foundations. We do need to stand up for our values; not by voting for the right-wing charlatans and bigots who have sold us neoliberal economics for decades, but by voting against them.
Strongmen seem firm of mind and resistant to corruption, but their unyielding dedication to whatever ignorance they first committed themselves to is a symbol of the degeneration of our values. Our complex, prosperous economies require constant analysis and a willingness to consider new evidence: to continually improve (as our technology and wealth has, broadly). To be rigid is not a way to resist deterioration; it's a way to guarantee it. A rigid ship made of stone will not sail. It needs to bend in the waves; the sails need to be furled and unfurled; barnacles must be removed; and paint replaced. Sailing is not idly drifting in the winds of fate even if they blow against us: we need to tack and fight, to work on our direction. We cannot simply anchor ourselves and pretend we'll be fine.
If pensioners really want to be remembered as anything other than a disaster for the Western world, and hence for the world in general, they need to vote for principled people who can discuss those principles in depth; they need to understand that it’s ridiculous that a basic state pension is triple some working-age benefits and gives more purchasing power than the minimum wage and yet some pensioners are claiming that they need special help because pensions can’t support life. That when they voted for younger people’s money before those young people were even born and now claim it as an entitlement that they were promised it’s selfishness, not righteousness.
Not that pensioners are the only
guilty group, nor that all of them are: there are thousands of carve-outs in
the economy. Pensioners are one of the biggest, most expensive groups. The rest
of us should not feel superior, but should realise that the whole country has
fallen, including us, and that we must all vote to improve it, not just our own
lives. Good democracy isn't voting for our own best interests, but knowing and voting for the country's best interests.
No comments:
Post a Comment