Improving our Lot

Let me try to summarise what I have been trying to say in the various posts I’ve written this year about subjects such as good governance, anti-corruption and helping people help themselves…..

-       “Good governance” is an important concept

-       which has suffered from its patronising origins viz wanting to tell others what to do

-       and from the domination of the anti-corruption field by economists and political scientists

-       Most anti-corruption strategies are not worth the paper they are written on. Most AC Boards are sinecures used to hide real misdeeds 

-       Every country needs to take more seriously the question of how government can work better for its citizens

-       It is the sort of subject which could be tackled by a Citizen’s Jury – but only after municipalities have satisfactorily demonstrated the potential of that device.

-       Until that happens, social scientists and others should be cooperating in each country to summarise the various reports on improving the style and machinery of government already produced and to formulate practical propositions which could be used in such initiatives

-       On the basis, however, that only a consensual approach can help break down the high level of distrust which exists everywhere about government. Unilateral, top-down injunctions don’t work…

-       Accountability, effective public bodies, rule of law and transparency are not exactly the sort of words and phrases calculated to inspire people

-       The approach to change needs to be “sexier” 

And I’m not sure if “Happiness” is the silver bullet. I’ve just finished reading a little Pelican book “Can We Be Happier? Evidence and Ethics” by Richard Layard (2020) who was New Labour’s Happiness Tsar (clicking the title will give you a good summary by the author). I enjoyed the book – although others were deeply sceptical.

It is NOT one of these self-help books but very much directed at the sort of policy-makers who were persuaded in the early part of the millennium that the measurement of social progress needed to go beyond reliance on growth rates. Joseph Stiglitz has been one of the key figures in this development. Various countries – including Bhutan, New Zealand and Scotland have been sufficiently persuaded to set up special programmes…although “wellbeing” is often the word used rather than “happiness”

One of the interesting features of Layard’s book is that half of it consists of a consideration of how its basic message might be applied by a range of people – including health professionals, teachers, communities, scientists, economists, politicians and public servants. I was sad to see that the section on politicians and public managers contains none of the references I might have expected to see on the good government literature eg Bo Rothstein or Merilee Grindle particularly when the final chapter of Rothstein’s Good Government – the relevance of political science (2012) strongly argues that better government makes people happier