intellectual repairs

The cloud has just now lifted from the tops of Piatra Crauilui mountain range at the back of the house - where it seems to have been ensconced for the past few weeks. Perhaps a sign of a break in the weather – although the thick grey cloud cover still hovers ominously over the peaks.
This morning was spent in Zarnesti – the best access to the peaks apparently – although I was there to have the car serviced after its 10,000 kms tour. The Bosch garage there is an excellent one – and, according to young Catalin, the owner’s son, attracts a wide custom. Mechanic Nicolae – who hails from Bran (where apparently people are called Scots!) and has a house in Rasnov - certainly identified some important issue s in my stalwart 14 year old Cielo – broken light bulbs, dangerous mix of brake fluid, poorly performing sparking plugs (which the Americans call glowplugs??) and a leak in the small radiator the car apparently has for the Freon I need for the air-conditioner. I’m a bit optimistic perhaps about the need for the latter – but do want to go next week to Bulgaria where the weather is currently more normal.
While I’m waiting, I read more of Basic Instincts – human nature and the new economics (2010) by Peter Lunn which is a great overview of what behavioural economics is bringing to the subject I suddenly decided in 1962 to make the focus (with political science) of my university studies. Up until then I was heading for an Honours Degree in French and German - but then deserted this to pursue the bright promise which the social sciences then offered. “Bliss was it in that dawn ....”!.
But I had so much difficulty with the theory of the firm and knew within my heart what a lot of nonsense the marginal approach to decision-making was. But it has taken another 35 years to expose the nakedness of the Emperor. It is this discredited model of economics which is the basis of the New Public Management which has done so much damage to the public sector in the past 20 years. It will be interesting to see who first unravels that intellectually and puts a new template in place! My website "key papers"have a couple of papers which do the first part.

new approaches to government

The richness of the web is sometimes too much. This morning I wanted to write something about complexity, social interventions and policy tools – on the basis of Matthew Taylor’s blog today (you can get the website in links on the right hand side). He had been reading a couple of draft pamphlets which will appear shortly on the Royal Society of Arts website about different approaches to government interventions.

 Between the 1970s and 1990s I had the opportunity to experiment with different approaches to policy-making – at both the local and regional levels. The Tavistock Institute invited me to join a project in the 1970s which was beginning to think about the network approach to policy-making. And I felt that one of the best things I ever did was to bring together and support over a 2 year period something we called a network of urban change agents officials, councillors from both Districts and the Region, academics and NGO reps who were invited to attend on the basis of their commitment to deal with the conditions of social injustice.

Since then I have read various key authors such as Mary Douglas, Margeret Wheatley, James Scott and Paul Ormerod who recognise the limitations of crude managerialism. In a way the argument goes back to the writings of such 20th century anarchists as Ivan Illich and Paulo Freiere.

Taylor says simply that Traditional policy interventions – particularly in relation to social problems – have these characteristics:
• They are large scale and expensive.
• They aim for relatively marginal improvement in outcomes e.g. a few percent lower unemployment or higher pupil attainment.
• They seek to minimise risk through systems of regulation, audit, and accountability.
But these design features do not fit the characteristics of social networks interventions, which are:
• They will usually fail.
• Occasionally small interventions will have major impact through contagion effects.
• Sometimes interventions will have an impact very different to those planned (sometimes good, sometimes not).
An emphasis on social networks changes not just the focus and design of public policy, but the whole way we think about success and failure.

From this blog, I was led on to the various papers on this theme on the RSA website and suddenly found myself on the Scribd. Site – which allows me not only to download a whole variety of material but also to upload my own papers! Needeless to say I spent half an hour exploring, inserting a profile and uploading a paper - Searching for the Holy Grail in which I try to set out what I feel I have learned from my 40 years' experience of trying to help different government systems operate more in the public interest. All very interesting - but basically it diverted me from the writing which is the only way to make sense of the stuff founf on the internet!

Let me, at any rate, share a couple of the papers I came across on subjects close to my heart - one a book which had just appeared on Reforming the worst government in the world -
The other is a useful paper on the Azerbaijan government system -

Neo-liberalism hardens

Tuesday I quoted from a 2009 pamphlet about the continuing strength of neo-liberalism in British ruling circles and suggested that the authors needed to do a bit more work on how this insidious virus might be defeated. Coincidentally one of the authors – Gerry Hassan – has returned to the theme. He reveals the details of a very interesting recent conference which brought business leaders together with key members of the Cabinet to look at priorities for government. Its summary of recommendations has been given to the Cabinet and makes for fascinating reading. The tenor of the discussions is rather frightening – with the target very much being those on low incomes and, as Hassan says, no signs of humility about the role of the private sector in creating the crisis which confronts the world! His article also puts the scale of the British public spending cuts in perspective - several times greater than the radical cuts of the Swedes and canadians some years back (which are apprently serving as models)For the meat of the argument see -
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/gerry-hassan/coming-british-revolution
Apart from Hassan’s piece, the conference seems to have gone unnoticed So all credit to him for giving it the profile it warrants – but I’m still waiting for some more coherent prescriptions from him about an alternative path. Another article on The Open Democracy site offers, however, a useful framework for such a discussion. It suggests that the critiques of neo-liberalism can perhaps be divided into 4 schools - left communitarianism, left republicanism, centre republicanism and right communitarianism. For the details see -
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/stuart-white/where-does-coalition-stand-on-new-ideological-map
The article drew my attention to another 2009 pamphlet one of whose authors is now an adviser to the Lib-Dem Deputy Prime Minister and which is apparently now required reading amongst British civil servants.
http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/theliberalrepublic
A quick skim leaves me deeply dissatisfied – it’s more a clever undergraduate essay than a serious political pamphlet and gives me the feeling that we are now seeing a new generation of think-tankers take over in England who will inflict the same clever nonsense on the dumb politicians which people such as Geoff Mulgan and Peri 6 did 15 years or so ago. That’s a bit too simplistic - I enjoyed their writing – but it did lead, for example, to the rather arrogant strategy papers of the UK Cabinet Unit after 1997 (when Mulgan was the Head) which carried the assumption that the world was a new place with no lessons to be learned from the past – and certainly nothing good about it. Although China and Britain are very similar in their neo-liberalism, they are poles apart on the issue of tradition and novelty and how new policies are to be justified. In China you have to fight for the new – in Britain “new” is elevated to a religious value. After “New Labour”, quickly came “New politics”. What next? “New man”?
Having said that, I do need to get up to speed with these new people. I have just ordered the book by one of the more intriguing of the new breed – Phillip Blond – whose Red Tory has brought praise from even Jon Cruddas the Labour MP considered to be the leader of the left in parliament. A review of the book gives an indiaction of the challenge it represents!
http://www.opendemocracy.net/michael-merrick/red-tory-liberalism-and-loss-of-liberty

Hay, rain, Windows and democracy

A mixed bag of goodies this morning.
I did indeed do some scything yesterday morning – before the rains came yet again. And this morning also dawns wet – very unusual weather for here.
Now a moan about Microsoft and PC producers. I never expected to pay 600 euros tor a laptop boasting it had the latest Windows 7 – only to discover that it gave me Word only for 2 months (and requiring a special downloading) and that I am then expected to pay for it. By all means make us pay for the frills (as they do on cut-price flying) – but Word is so basic that it must surely be illegal to offer a PC which boasts it has Windows when it lacks Word?

The short visit I made recently to China (and the preparatory reading I did for it) opened up some interesting perspectives for me. I have never been a simplistic human rights advocate – but was appalled to read of the scale and nature of the continuing repression of those, for example, who dared to try to defend citizens against the injustices perpetrated by rapacious municipalities. However the Chinese authorities at various levels do try to take account of public opinion in various ways (they have to since they live in fear of losing their monoploy of power)– I and am a realist about how little power citizens of western democracies actually have to change things. I was brought up on the Schumpeterian diction about democracy only being a method choosing between competing elites – and that is certainly the case in American and Britain.
Last week an iconoclastic lecture was delivered in the august British Academy of Sciences by James Fishkin, director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, which related to this issue.
I excerpt the key sections below in italics. For the full article (and paper) go here Professor Fishkin claimed that we’ve known that liberal democracy doesn’t work since 1957, when Anthony Downs published his ‘rational ignorance’ theorem. Put simply, Downs proved that there’s no point in voters taking the considerable trouble to study the issues in sufficient depth to vote intelligently as their individual vote has a negligible effect on the outcome of the election. Or, as Russell Hardin memorably put it: ‘Having the liberty to cast my vote is roughly as valuable as having the liberty to cast a vote on whether the sun will shine tomorrow.’ Even after Schumpeter’s demonstration that voting is just a way of alternating elites, we still hang on to the illusion that liberal democracy is democratic. Fishkin and his colleague Bruce Ackerman are delightfully rude about our tendency to ‘vote for the politicians with the biggest smile or the biggest handout’, and are equally scornful of computer sampling models which enable politicians to ‘learn precisely which combinations of myth and greed might work to generate the support from key voting groups.’
Fishkin’s solution to the problem of rational ignorance is random selection by lot to create temporary deliberative assemblies to debate the issue(s) on hand and vote on the outcome. Like most people working in the field (including Anthony Barnett and the present author) Fishkin thought he had invented this system (known technically as ‘sortition’) only to discover that the Athenians beat him to it 2,400 years ago The Stanford sortition experiments have demonstrated that, given balanced advocacy and careful moderation, ordinary people will take the time to study and deliberate the issues before making an informed decision (via a secret ballot). Fishkin is opposed to the pressure to consensus that afflicts the Habermasian model of deliberative democracy and also claims that his institutional design overcomes the polarising tendencies of group deliberation recently outlined by Cass Sunstein.
Step forward China - Fishkin was contacted in 2004 by the party leadership in Zegou township, Wenling City (about 300 km south of Shanghai) who had a problem prioritising infrastructure projects – they had identified thirty potential projects but only had funding for ten. Although party leaders had their own preferences they commissioned Fishkin to introduce a randomly-selected deliberative assembly (235 members), who deliberated for a day over the various projects and voted on the outcome. Although the winning priorities on the deliberative poll were very different from those of the local leadership, the results were duly implemented. Coincidentally, I then came across a very useful booklet which has just been published exposing the way big business has intensified its penetration of EU policy-making.

can neo-liberalism be defeated?

The aftermath of the death of a laptop and the purchase of a new one may be annoying and time-consuming - with all the software downloading and file and website transfer it involves. It does, however, also has its positive side. It makes you look at many of the papers, files and websites which were just lying in the database! One of the papers I came across was a Compass pamphlet Breaking out of Britain's neo-liberlism produced in January 2009 and written by Gerry Hassan and Anthony Barnett (the latter the editor of the admirable Open Democracy website).
Given what I said in my last post, I thought it was worth excerpting some of it -
Across British public life, in public institutions and discourse, the last decade of New Labour has been characterised by the debasement of values and meaning. To talk about the future of our society we have been obliged to walk through a linguistic supermarket where sterile, vacuum packed in-words are provided by the supply-lines of the new elite. This has had many casualties, as government white papers and documents once renowned for their plain English have become inflated by gobble-de-gook obesity. Economic development agencies have abandoned talking seriously about political economy, and instead invoke “creativity”, “innovation” and “doing the step change”. Think-tanks evacuated any efforts at considering political economy. University departments scrambled for research funding by peer assessing each other’s publications in journals of barely-read-studies. City-wide and regional bodies stressed their aspirations to be “world class cities” basing their growth forecasts on shopping and tourism while discarding the solid revenues of manufacturing provincialism. In all parts of the UK, from London to Liverpool, Glasgow to “Newcastle/Gateshead”, this has been an age of gloss and superficiality and financial considerations based on “neverland”.
This debasement of our language and public discourse has been mirrored by the triumphalism of our political classes. The belief in “the end of decline” in the political elite has seen the shift from Britain being seen as “the sick man of Europe” to a country which from the mid-1980s “put the great back into Britain”.
Neo-liberalism bent and contorted all of Britain’s political parties, institutions and philosophies, while changing the notion of “the self” as personal neo-liberalism psychologised and individualised every issue and concern. These developments have seen the slow, gradual entrenchment of the neo-liberal order across all British public life, to the extent that people advocate and voice its values often without realising it.
The current set of events, uncertainty and instability shows the failure of the world that neo-liberalism brought about. This is an historic opportunity and challenge to all of us: whether we be progressives, liberals, conservatives, nationalists, or just concerned about the future of Britain and the world.

SEVEN INITIAL STEPS TO BEGIN TO CHALLENGE NEO-LIBERALISM:
1. We need to identify “the official future” – the mantra of globalisation wherever it is – nationally, internationally, in the public and private realms, and critique it, defeat it and supplant it;
2. The world view of the bloviators – the Malcolm Gladwells and others – who have offered themselves as voices and apologists for the winners and the global order, needs to be seen as part of the problem, along with the damage they have done and their role in legitimising the “new conservatism”;
3. Government and public agencies need to fundamentally rethink how they conceive and think of policy, the language and values in documents, and whose voice and interest such processes are serving;
4. The British “public” overall does not see itself in the language of “consumers” and “customers” in relation to public service. For the last thirty years, the public have been force-fed a diet of New Public Management, choice and privatisation, and still they don’t find it attractive or buy it. Sadly nor do people see themselves in the idea of “citizens”. We need to think, nurture and organise public services in new ways which are neither New Right nor the technical fixes of co-production;
5. There is a direct link between the micro-policy and management of the Blair-Brown years – legislation “overload” and command and control – and the suffocating consensus of the mainstream, which shuts down open discussion of the macro-questions about the economy and society;
6. The nature of the British state is fundamental to the current crisis and laid the basis for the acute nature of the problems Britain faces in the global downturn. The British regime formed over the thirty years of Thatcher to Brown has seen an inter-twinning of the economic, social and political into a neo-liberal state and polity that commands the loyalty of all the main parties. An escape route has yet to be discovered given the closed nature of the British system.
7. Any such escape needs the people of the United Kingdom to make their own claim upon public power with a modern form of citizenship which aids an emancipatory state, culture and society. This will involve a political culture and system which recognises the centrality of fundamental human rights that protect minorities as well as a modern liberty that stops the development of an authoritarian, database state. All of which will require a way of retelling and reimagining the stories of the peoples and the nations of the UK.

OK the first steps are rather shaky and tentative. The writings of David Marquand are relevant to point 6 - and the Power2010 movement to the last point. I hope the two come back to these issues - soon and more coherently - and with a braoder European dimension.

UK's new coalition government

I realise that I have said nothing in the last month about the political developments in Britain – the first real peace-time coalition in the UK since the 1920s. What England does (like its football team) is, frankly, of less and less significance to the world. Aggressive, adversarial... choose whatever epithet you like, its systems have been for some time dysfunctional and, increasingly, in bad taste. And the United Kingdom is less and less united – since 1999, the Scottish parliament and devolved government have bucked the English trends both in policy and voting aspects (Labour increased its share of the vote in Scotland in June). The coalition process which UK people are amazed to find themselves with has been the norm in the rest of Europe for the past half-century. London Review of Books issue of 10 June had a good overview of the situation – led by Ross McKibbin’s magisterial piece - http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n11/ross-mckibbin/time-to-repent
So far the focus of the new government has been public spending cuts – and there has been little indication of where the new government stands on the management structures and culture of the public service. New Labour had continued indeed intensified the strange combination of neo-liberalism (marketisation) and of central controls and targets of their predecessors. The results had been widely critiqued – by academics and consultants such as John Seddon http://www.thesystemsthinkingreview.co.uk/
I have already mentioned the detailed critique by Allyson Pollock of how this approach has impacted on the health service. However, none of this critique seems to have found political expression – since New Labour had outflanked the Tories on the right on this (and other) issue. True, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Administration had looked at these issues of choice, targets and control – but their various reports lacked rigour.
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-archive/public-administration-select-committee/pasc-inquiries/
A quick skim of the UK Think Tanks to see what advice the new coalition is being offered unearthed only one report – The Reform of Government – from the right-wing Policy Exchange. http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/pdfs/TROG.pdf

scything days and the state of universities

The day has dawned idyllic - and no further excuses therefore for avoiding the scything which the tall grass around the house demands! Elsewhere in the village yesterday, the work was getting underway - the occasional sharpening of the blades echoing around the place.
Eurozine is a useful European (electronic?) journal which selects articles and themes from offbeat cultural journals throughout the region and focuses in its latest issue on the discontent which is apparently rife at the moment in European universities - see http://www.eurozine.com/articles/article_2010-07-01-editorial-en.html