Purposive Government

Who could possibly disagree with the idea of governing with a sense of purpose??

But, as I look back over the past 50 years, I realise that such a notion has been – for all but a few years and in all but a few countries – treated with total incredulity

France was fairly exceptional, in the post-war period, with its system of national planning – although the UK very briefly toyed with the idea when the 1964 Wilson Government set up the Department of Economic Affairs as a rival to the Treasury.

But such aspirations were quickly stifled – with the Heath government of 1970 reasserting the market approach which was fully developed in the 1980s with the Thatcherite privatization programme. 

These forces were so powerful that, during the 1970s, writers on policy analysis seemed near to giving up on the possibility of government systems ever being able to effect coherent change - in the absence of national emergencies. This was reflected in such terms as “government overload” and "disjointed incrementalism": and in the growth of a new literature on the problems of "implementation" which recognised the power of the "street-level" bureaucrats.

Although the New Labour governments of 1997-2010 – particularly its “modernizing government” programme - used the language of strategy and targets, its ideology was an open continuation of the market-friendly and neoliberal policies of Thatcher 

Why “purposive government” is so difficult

·       the electoral cycle encourages short-term thinking

·       the 24-hour media ensures there is always a crisis for governments to deal with

·       programmes and priorities create sticks with which to beat politicians

·       politicians need to build and maintain coalitions of support - not give hostages to fortune. They therefore prefer to keep their options open and use vague rhetoric rather than commit themselves to programmes they won’t be around to gain benefit from

·       The machinery of government consists of a powerful set of "baronies" (Ministries/Departments), each with their own interests

·       the permanent civil servants have advantages of status, security, professional networks and time which effectively give them more power than politicians who often simply "present" what they are given.

·       a Government is a collection of individually ambitious politicians whose career path has rewarded skills of survival rather than those of achieving specific changes

Even before the pandemic, there were voices urging governments to snap out of their focus on short-term thinking and face up to the huge challenges facing all societies – be it the ageing of the population, AI or climate change. But it is not just the realities of politics which makes that difficult – it is the domination over the past 30 years of the financial calculus in business decisions with companies nervously checking the swings of share prices….

In theory Covid – and the realisation it has brought of the dangers of pandemics – strengthens the case for more strategic government. A senior Australian civil servant currently enjoying an academic sabbatical in the US has an interesting reflection on this -   

An important question is whether there is something about the practice of democracy today or the forces it is subjected to which make it harder for democracies to think strategically. It is possible that the ‘professionalisation’ of politics has created a cadre of apparatchiks hardened and motivated by political battle rather than policy challenges.²⁷ Perhaps feeding a rapid news cycle traps government and media alike in a short-term, reactive hamster-wheel that prioritises sensation over substance.²⁸ The rise of social media seems to have hardened partisan positions in the public, which bleeds into politics — and provides fertile ground for nefarious state and non-state actors to stoke for their own purposes using new technologies.²⁹ Moreover, perhaps the nature of the challenges that liberal democracies now face — such as climate change, or a China that is savvy about gaining ground without crossing the threshold of Western military responses — are not immediate enough to trigger the compulsion for national defence that usually switches democracies from tactical to strategic.

 

In the face of such an array of difficulties, it may be tempting for some to reach for a dramatic redesign of democracy as the only way to set the system straight. A better course of action may be to understand how to more routinely trigger democracies’ already existing capabilities to think and act strategically. For these triggers to work, they need to offer something to all stakeholders, and demonstrate value through tangible progress and real outcomes toward the risks and opportunities that democracies are facing. They would need to offer elected leaders something to challenge the current incentives that prioritise short-term competition and partisanship. And they would need to show the public something different — to allow them to feel more confident in the ability of their government to meet opportunities and challenges, and more confident that their society is on the right path.

What is impressive is that the article also recognises the importance of more direct forms of democracy 

One obstacle to a more strategic and ambitious policy in the United States and Australia is a view that there is little real public appetite for it. Voters may say they want vision and strong action, but if this requires more taxes it is a non-starter. In one Australian survey taken before the last federal election, seven out of ten Australians supported more spending on public services, but only very small percentages in each tax bracket felt that they were not paying enough tax.35 Few elected leaders want to take on this issue. However, questions like these may not be getting at the issue in the right way. Connecting taxes and revenue with specific choices over what public money buys may yield different results.

On a much smaller scale, the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, experimented with this concept more than a decade ago. When Chris Beutler was elected mayor in 2007, his administration faced circumstances familiar to many democratic governments large and small: not enough revenue to pay for services and a population hostile to the idea of tax increases, reductions in services and generally distrustful of political leaders.36

Beutler created an initiative called Taking Charge, which brought the community into the budget process as participants, not just observers. They engaged citizens directly on questions of specific trade-offs, like the costs of different levels of snow removal. This appears to have been an open and transparent conversation about the fiscal challenges the jurisdiction faced, and the available choices of cutting services, raising revenue or doing both. When engaged in this way, citizens supported some surprising outcomes. In one 2011 survey, a staggering 84 per cent were willing to raise property taxes to preserve services.37 The city found that citizens were willing to cut some ‘sacred cows’ from the budget when they understood the trade-offs; and — arguably just as important — this process endowed residents with a higher level of confidence in the city government. Not only did Taking Charge give the city’s leadership the space to pursue reform, but it also improved the conversation between public and government.

The challenge is how to take a local government model like the experiment in Nebraska and apply it at a national level, where the issues are more complex and the distance between political leaders and citizens is greater. Indeed, direct democracy is regarded with suspicion by some experts who see it as a pathway to community division rather than as a unifying tool.38 One low-risk, high-payoff way to make a start at the national level would be to identify a specific inspirational initiative each year, such as in exploration or big science. After an information campaign to inform the public about the initiative and what it would mean for them, voters would decide if they wanted to dedicate extra tax to its realisation. 

The Conversation is an excellent site encouraging scholars to contribute concise pieces which has been online for almost 5 years – and has an excellent discussion here on this subject.

Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, argues that our obsession with short-term planning may be a part of human nature – but possibly a surmountable one. Chris Zebrowski, an emergency governance specialist from Loughborough University, contends that our lack of preparedness, far from being natural, is a consequence of contemporary political and economic systems. Per Olsson, sustainability scientist and expert in sustainability transformations from the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, reflects on how crisis points can be used to change the future – drawing on examples from the past in order to learn how to be more resilient going into the future.

 

People Power

At the moment we cast a vote (or not) every few years - and then blame the government when things go wrong. Patently an absurd way to behave. We should rather choose a pressure group – or even join the relevant political party and get active there… Except that we are just one voice amongst millions….

Lobbyists are paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in retainers to advise companies on how to   ensure that legislation reflects their master’s interests – so what hope do we, the ordinary citizen, have?    

And, indeed, what right – we might also well ask – do we have to expect to be listened to? Psychologists have been lining up in the past decade to tell us how irrational we all are!

And that includes government ministers who are notoriously so rushed off their feet as to be unable to focus on the country’s long-term interests – even if they wanted to…

At the moment, the only people who are pressing governments to take a longer - more strategic – view of things are the Extinction campaigners.  

But the idea of “deliberative democracy” has slowly been emerging – principally via the device of “Citizen Juries” structured on randomly-selected groups of citizens being presented over several days with a range of evidence which is then discussed as at a jury. The Irish Republic used citizen juries before several significant referenda on social issues in recent years – with interesting results.

Indeed pressure groups should be uniting these days to insist that municipalities (in the first instance) experiment with citizen juries – to help build up a head of steam nationally behind the concept…

It’s all very well for academics to talk about the need for governments to develop a more long-term and strategic sense. The Club of Rome is one of the most influential global thinktanks and commissioned the most famous global policy advisor of the time, Yeheziekel Dror, to produce in 2001 a book on the subject - The capacity to govern. It sank without trace.

But that is perhaps too pessimistic a note on which to end....A few years back - before Brexit and Trump -  there was quite a buzz around these ideas of more deliberative democracy and here's one book which nicely summarises that discussion - Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porter (2013)  

How do we get a better world?

Bulgaria goes to the polls tomorrow – a country I wrote about last autumn. A journalist friend gives a good indication of the choice here. This post wants to explore the fundamental question of why, these days, people – particularly the younger generation – should bother going to the polls? Politicians have become fair game in the new millennium – but, for those who cared to look, the warning signs about democracy were evident a long time ago. In 1977, after almost a decade of helping local community activists and of studying the new literature of community development, I wrote a critical article about the claim of the British political system to be open and pluralist  

The modern political party was designed to perform the following functions…

- recruit political leaders

- represent community grievances, demands etc.

- implement party programmes - which may or may not be consistent with those community demands.

- extend public insight - by both media coverage of inter-party conflict and intra­party dialogue - into the nature of govern­mental decision-making (such insights can, of course, either defuse or inflame grievances!)

- protect decision-makers from the temptations and uncertainties of decision­-making. 

Of these five functions, it performs only the first with any effectiveness. Community development represents almost the opposite of everything that a modern political party stands for - is a critique, that is, not just of certain operational deficien­cies of liberal democracy but of its very essence. The modern political party has itself a hierarchical structure and expects others to have the same features. Its members accept this discipline because of their belief in the greater good which, it is assumed, will materialise from the occupation by their leaders of political power and/or the implementation of a particular pro­gramme. And modern parties share, to a greater or lesser extent, a belief in the capability of modern forms of government. structure (and of industrial organisation) viz, that plans and programmes conceived in essen­tially private processes imposed on society by traditional hierarchical structures will achieve specified aims with negligible negative byproducts.

Political parties are about achievement - even if that is only the overthrow of their rivals' dogma (or their own!). They are organised to achieve something - be that power or specific changes in policy. Community development, on the other hand, is about a process. Its theory, in a sense, is one of “permanent revolution" which despite its own gentleness and emphasis on trust and sharing, has to live with the uncomfortable recognition that societies based on modern technology -whatever their form of ownership - will subject minorities to more or less subtle forms of repression and exploitation.

Of the functions listed earlier, those badly performed by local government are the representative, the programmatic and the educational: of these it is perhaps the lack of the educational that is the more serious and where certainly recent com­munity development theory and practice in Britain have performed well

A recent post charged the political class with treating the public like idiots   

 “You have, for the past few decades, made the following assumptions about your fellows –

- They need to be worked hard - but given bread and circuses

- Told what to do and measured by how well they do it

- Given a choice at elections only of those who represent an ever-circulating elite

- you therefore feel that you no longer need to bother even going through the motions of serving up promises and manifesto programmes

- the public is so stupid and so easily distracted that they will believe any of your lies

- you can do whatever you want, safe in the knowledge that you have a servile media which knows that its basic task is to keep the public entertained” 

Countries like Bulgaria and Romania came to democracy in the worst of times – when the very notion of governing was being treated with scorn in the West and “the market” was seen as the answer to everyone’s problems. I vividly remember being invited to speak at a training school in Romania for Young Politicians in the mid 1990s and finding it infested with young americans zealously teaching their counterparts how to market themselves. But absolutely nothing was said about the tasks and responsibilities of governing – let alone the moral aspects. 

Why is it that politics is the one activity – at least in the West - which has managed to resist the call for professionalization?? In China, the political class is thoroughly trained and its progress through the layers of municipalities and companies closely monitored…. 

A recent book was, hopefully, a small sign that some people at least recognise the need for new skill-sets in government. That is, of course, part of a wider argument which people like Mariana Mazzucato have been pursuing for a more positive role for government.

“50 Economics Classics” – part II

I’m impressed with this book  - one of a very useful series by Tom Butler-Bowden which actually invite you in and keep you reading. Suffering as we do these days from a surfeit of choice (what the Germans poetically call “Die Qual der Wahl”), some people will be dismissive of such a “Reader’s Digest” approach. But when time is short and we are deluged with books – this is a quite brilliant idea. Of course we can all quibble with his selection (I passed on the books on investing) - but the book covers a 200 year period and includes figures whose work challenges what I detect in the summaries as an overly pro-market enthusiasm – such as Hirschman, Klein, Marx, Ostrom, Schumacher and Veblen.

I’ve made my own comments in the penultimate column. You can find Part I here

Book/author	date	Comment on selection	Argument offered by Butler-Bowdon
“The Rise and Fall of American Growth” Robert Gordon	2016	Bit too American – the idea of limits to growth has been developed by so many people	The greatest gains in living standards have already been made
“The Use of Knowledge” Hayek	1945	A short essay which gives the basic principles of Hayek’s challenge to the notion of planning	Societies prosper when they allow decentralisation of knowledge
“Exit, Voice and Loyalty” AO Hirschman	1970	A highly original thinker – whose work deserves to be rediscovered	Consumers have many options to get what they want
“The Economy of Cities” Jane Jacobs	1968	Challenged the trend toward scale and emphasised citizen choice	Cities have always been the main drivers of wealth
“The General Theory of Employment” JM Keynes	1936	Still a bible for my generation	Governments must actively manage the economy
“The Shock Doctrine” Naomi Klein	2007		Neoliberal doctrines have been a disaster for many developing countries
“Freakonomics” Steven Levitt	2005	An early book to challenge the religion of economics	Economics is not a moral science – more a study of how incentives work
“The Big Short” Michael Lewis	2010		Modern finance was meant to minimise risk – but has actually increased it
“Bourgeois Equality” Deirdre McCloskey	2016		The world became rich thanks to an idea – entrepreneurship
“An Essay on the Principle of Population” Thomas Malthus	1798	His shadow still looms over us	The world’s finite resources can’t cope with an increasing population
“Principles of Economics” Alfred Marshall	1890	One of the last clearly-written economics books	To understand people, watch their earning. Saving and investing
“Capital” Karl Marx	1867	A work which suffers from 150 years of exegesis	The interests of labour and capital always conflict
“Stabilising an Unstable Economy” Hyman Minsky	1986	A prophet honoured largely after his death	Capitalism is inherently unstable
“Human Action” Ludwig von Mises	1949	Surprised to find him included	Economics has laws which no person, society or government can escape
“Dead Aid”	2010	people like Bauer were much greater critics – but the author is a black woman	Countries grow rich be creating industries not by addiction to aid
“Governing the Commons” Elinor Ostrom	1990	Got the author a deserved Nobel prize	To stay healthy, common resources like air, water and forests need to be managed in novel ways
“Capital in the 21st Century” Thomas Pikety	2014	The book everyone has claimed to read – and noone has!	If inequality widens, there will be social upheaval
“The Great Transformation” Karl Polanyi	1944	An unreadable classic	Markets must serve society, not the other way around
“The Competitive Advantage of Nations” Michael Porter	1990	A very bad idea	Industry clusters and competition make nations rich
“Capitalism – the unknown Ideal” Ayn Rand	1966	I preferred “The Fountainhead”	Capitalism is the most moral form of political economy
“Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” David Ricardo	1817		A free-trading world will see each nation fulfil its potential
“The Globalization Paradox” Dani Rodrik	2011	One of the most original economists	Globalisation, national self-determination and democracy – only 2 are possible
“Economics” Paul Samuelson	1948		The best-performing economies combine classical and Keynesian approaches
“Small is Beautiful” EF Schumacher	1973	A brilliant mind ahead of his time	A new economics is needed which takes more account of people than outputs
“Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” Joseph Schumpeter	1942	A powerful book which justified the notion of democracy consisting of “the circulation of the elite”	The dynamics of capitalism and its “creative destruction” is superior to other systems
“Micromotives and Macrobehaviour” Thomas Schelling	1978	Schelling was part of the war-games military complex	Individual choices produce “tipping points” – with major effects
“Poverty and Famines” Amartya Sen	1981	An important thinker but not a good writer	People starve not because there isn’t enough food but because economic circumstances change (!!)
“The Ultimate Resource” Julian Simon	1996	Economics at its most arrogant	The world will never run out of resources – because ingenuity not labour, capital or materials
“The Wealth of Nations”  Smith	1776	The moral philosopher whose basic message has been twisted out of recognition	“the wealth of a nation is its people – not its government” (!!)
“The Mystery of Capital” Hernando de Soto	2000	A favourite of right-wingers	Property rights are the basis of prosperity
“The Euro” Joseph Stiglitz	2016	Highly readable	The ideological underpinnings of a failed currency
“Misbehaving – the making of behavioural economics” Richard Taler	2015	The more presentable face of economics	How psychology has transformed economics (??)
“The theory of the leisure class” Thorstein Veblen	1899	Odd to find in the selection	The great goal of capitalist life is not to work
“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” Max Weber	1890	Very influential book!	Culture and religion are the overlooked ingredients of economic success.