Reading Week - part III

The second full category of books in my library are those which I have read but which need to be read and reread for their full value to be extracted. There are a lot in this category – but let me select the two which have so far made it onto my desk -

Political Order and Political Decay; Francis Fukuyama (2014) is the second volume of magnum opus of 1,300 pages and is one of these rare books of which I keep duplicate copies – although it can be freely downloaded in full from the internet.

Its introduction summarises the first volume and the opening chapter set out his framework -  showing the link between economic, social and political development; and how ideas about legitimacy have shaped our understanding of the three basic building blocks of “modern” government – “the state”, “rule of law” and “democratic accountability” (see the figure at p43)

This first chapter spells out how very different social conditions and traditions in the various continents have affected the shape and integrity of government systems (The sequencing of bureaucracy and challenge to political power is of particular interest)

Doughnut economics – 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist by Kate Raworth (2017) is another example of a book benefiting from a reread. She’s an Oxford economist whose book has made quite an impact. Indeed it’s one of a fairly short list of books I recommended last year for people wanting a different approach to economics.

Right from the start her text engages – with an explanation of how she was put off by the subject initially but came back to it almost 2 decades later….And then a rare exploration of the importance not only of “framing” but of diagrams and visuals – and how diagrams were used by Paul Samuelson in 1948 in the first popular economics textbook to plant false perceptions in student minds.  

Chapter one – “Change the Goal” - discusses how the measurement of an economy as know it today (GNP) was invented only in the late 1930s and how it was subsequently used by Roosevelt to measure the impact of the New Deal; and to prepare the US for war. Also how its inventor (Simon Kuznets) came quickly to see the crudities and deficiencies of the measure but remained a prophet in the wilderness. The rest of the chapter reminds us of the things which are left out of this metric – and the recent history of the attempts to bring in more suitable metrics  

The doughnut is her metaphor for the point we humans have reached – with us exposed on its outer rim to the limits of 9 planetary boundaries with climate change; land conversion; biodiversity loss; and nitrogen and phosphorous loading have already reached its limits….

The doughnut’s inner rim is composed of what she calls the “social foundation” which includes not only food, water and housing but gender equality and political voice…   

The book devotes a chapter apiece to the seven ways she offers for changing the way we think about economics – but with headings which lack punch and clarity. Her second chapter “Seeing the Big Picture” draws a brilliant parallel between the Economics narrative, on the one hand, and a play/film on the other. Each has its plot, goodies and baddies….There’s a good interview with her here

The early pages of Raworth’s book alerted me to a great book which, some 8 years ago, identified and explored this issue of our being taken over by a new ideology – what the French used to call “La Pensee Unique”, It is Monoculture – how one story is changing everything by FS Michaels and makes a fitting fanfare for the next post which will explore the world of books freely downloadable from the internet

The virus affecting our systems

One of the many dystopian themes which figure in contemporary novels and films is that of the pandemic - of a new virus being let loose in the world and causing havoc. In fact, it’s already happened – it’s called neoliberalism and its gestation can be traced back to a conference in 1947 in the Swiss resort of Mont Pelerin attended by such luminaries as Hayek and .Popper

The full story of how the corporate world has patiently, over the past half-century and more, funded the setting up of hundreds of right-wing think tanks who have unceasingly pumped out their anti-government message is told in The road from Mont Pelerin – the making of the neoliberal thought collective; P Mirowski (2009)

And it wasn’t just economic doctrine that was affected – it was also how we thought government services should be organised. Academia in particular has had a strange fixation over the past 30 years with the idea of organizational improvements of public services called..."New Public Management" (NPM)

In the late 60s I was an early “reformer” – pushing at the open door offered by the 2 Royal Commissions on Local Government which operated in the UK between 1966-68 and which led to the wholesale reorganization of that system in both Scotland and England and Wales in the mid-1970s.

The only academic discipline covering such developments at the time was that of public administration whose intellectual fare was every bit as boring as its name suggests – although my politics tutor, John P Macintosh, wrote a powerful and prescient book in 1968 on “The Devolution of Power – local government, regionalism and nationalism”. 
And another academic, John Stewart, was shortly to start electrifying a new generation of officials  at Birmingham’s Institute for Local Government (INLOGOV) with a new vision of local power - centred on a more open and flexible system of local government – which, sadly, failed to materialize.

Since the mid 1970s, the search for the silver bullet of organizational improvement (or reform) in its public services has been endless. 50 years ago we thought that the right rules (and strategies) – fairly managed by well-intentioned officials and politicians in a system of accountable power – was the way forward…

We threw that model away in the 1980s and bought into the “theory of the market” – believing that citizens would be better off being able to choose between competitive suppliers.

David Osborne’s "Reinventing Government" (1992) was the book which really opened the floodgates – with its notion of “Steering…not rowing..”

The only problem was that most of the relevant services have this basic reality of being chunky monopolies ….Overnight therefore a system of regulators had to be created – bringing forth an Audit Explosion.

By 2000 it was obvious that wasn’t working – but it took 2008 to blow the thing apart.

But although another way of organizing things, whether in the economy or government, has been actively explored for many decades we still do not have a consensus about a better way….In 2015 the UNDP published a good summary of what it called the three types of public management we have seen in the past half century. There are different ways of describing the final column but this one gives a sense of the values which have been trying to find expression..

The three types of public management

	Old Public Admin	New Public Management	New Public Service
Theoretical foundation	Political theory	Economic theory	Democratic theory
Model of behaviour	Public interest	self-interest	Citizen interest
Concept of public interest	Political, enshrined in law	Aggregation of individual interests	Dialogue about shared values
To whom civil servants responsive	Client	Customer	citizen
Role of government	Rowing	Steering	Serving, negotiating
Mechanism for achieving policy	Programme	Incentives	Building coalitions
Approach to accountability	Hierarchic	Market	Public servants within law, professional ethics, values
Admin discretion	Limited	Wide	Constrained
Assumed organisational structure	Top down	Decentralised	collaborative
Assumed motivation of officials	Conditions of service	Entrepreneurial, drive to reduce scope of government	Public service, desire to contribute

But NPM - like neoliberalism - just seems to have too strong a grip. And we still await a replacement
This is the story I try to tell in my little book “Hos did Administrative Reform get to be so Sexy?” whose current version you can access here.

Update;
I have just come across a great book which identified and explored this issue of our being taken over by a new ideology – what the French used to call “La Pensee Unique”, It is Monoculture – how one story is changing everything by FS Michaels (2011).