Whatever happened to Rationality?

I was deeply affected by the “rationalistic turn” in the social sciences which coincided with my University days from 1960-64. My initial field of study had been modern languages simply because I had been good in school at French and German but I was soon seduced by economics and politics and duly switched in my final two Honours years to those subjects 

It’s only recently that some books have started to appear pointing to just how much military funding and the Cold War had contributed to the new focus of the social sciences on rationality. Robert McNamara best embodied the spirit of calculation first in the Ford Company, then in the US Department of Defence – where he introduced the idea of PPBS during the Vietnam war - and finally in the World Bank

But it was to be a decade later before I got properly into the works of people such as Herbert Simon, Etzioni, Lindblom and Wildavsky and indeed I studied them closely only in the 1980s as part of the UK’s first MSc course in Policy Analysis with Lewis Gunn in which I enrolled in the early 1980s

And it was 1992 before I came across “Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of Reason in the Western World” which I barely understood but loved - and was to be an early warning shot across the bows of the technocrats in what has, since the onslaught of populism in the past 5 years, become a continuous salvo. 

So it’s about time we sought some clarity - and perhaps balance – in this fraught debate about rationality and The Enlightenment. Particularly because the latest knight to present himself in the lists - in all his shining armour – is none other than Steven Pinker, the Panglossian Optimist and author of Enlightenment Now who has a new book called “Rationality – what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters” with the embedded discussion thread being fairly useful. 

I sense, however, that getting through the bibliography below is going to be a long haul – so let me just flag the key reading up and we’ll see how it goes 

Background Reading

Crisis of expertise CEU 2021 syllabus A fascinating outline of a recent course run by the Central European University

The Dialectic of Enlightenment; by Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) It was these German emigrees of the 1930s who brought to America the critique of the enlightenment which arguably sparked the recent right-wing backlash. Ironic that they did so at a time when scientism was taking off with a vengeance!

The Origins of American Social Science Dorothy Ross (1990) Focusing on the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, and history, this book examines how American social science came to model itself on natural science and liberal politics. Professor Ross argues that American social science receives its distinctive stamp from the ideology of American exceptionalism, the idea that America occupies an exceptional place in history, based on her republican government and wide economic opportunity. Under the influence of this national self-conception, Americans believed that their history was set on a millennial course, exempted from historical change and from the mass poverty and class conflict of Europe. Before the Civil War, this vision of American exceptionalism drew social scientists into the national effort to stay the hand of time. Not until after the Civil War did industrialization force Americans to confront the idea and reality of historical change. The social science disciplines had their origin in that crisis and their development is a story of efforts to evade and tame historical transformation in the interest of exceptionalist ideals. This is the first book to look broadly at American social science in its historical context and to demonstrate the central importance of the national ideology of American exceptionalism to the development of the social sciences and to American social thought generally. 

Reclaiming the Enlightenment – toward a politics of radical engagement by Stephen Eric Bronner (2004) The start of the left’s comeback 

Shaky Foundations – the politics-social science nexus in post-war america Mark Solovey (2013) embraced a strategy that rested on two key commitments, to scientism and to social engineering. The first commitment involved accepting, in a broad sense, a unity- of- science viewpoint, which assumed that the social sciences lagged behind the more mature natural sciences and which posited that the former should follow in the footsteps of the latter. Often this viewpoint meant the social sciences needed to rid themselves of their involvement with a wide array of humanistic forms of inquiry, including “soft” qualitative, philosophical, historical, and normative forms of analysis. Just as importantly, social scientists had to establish a clear distinction between scientific social inquiry and other value- laden spheres of social action, such as politics, social reform, and ideology, and especially Marxist or socialist perspectives.

More positively, this viewpoint implied that the path to scientific credibility and progress lay in the pursuit of more rigorous, systematic, and quantitative investigations that promised to yield accurate predictions about what individuals, social groups, and social systems, including economic and political systems, would do under stated conditions. The other key commitment, concerning the social sciences’ practical value, indicated that this work would contribute to the national welfare and human betterment more generally through social engineering applications. This commitment often rested on an instrumental viewpoint, which regarded social science knowledge, techniques of analysis, and expertise as apolitical, nonideological, and value free. A very common idea associated with this position suggested that basic or pure scientific inquiry, whether in the social or the natural sciences, produced value- neutral knowledge of a fundamental sort. Such knowledge, in turn, provided the basis for realizing desired practical goals in a couple of ways, depending on the specific domains of investigation. Certain lines of investigation sought to place the processes of decision making on a rational basis. Other lines promised to facilitate control over individuals, social groups, and social systems. Both manners of realizing social sciences’ practical value rested on a technocratic outlook, as their proponents generally assumed that leaders and managers in various sectors of society, especially in government, comprised the most relevant audiences for social science knowledge

As the first chapter’s consideration of the NSF debate indicates and as subsequent chapters explain more fully, basic questions about the scientific identity, practical utility, and political import of the social sciences attracted extensive attention and provoked considerable controversy in the early postwar years. The second, third, and fourth chapters examine the stories of the military, the Ford Foundation, and the new NSF, respectively, to describe how each patron staked out its importance within the context of a transformed and largely new Cold War patronage system, to analyze the ways patrons and the scholars who worked most closely with them addressed long- standing questions and contemporary disputes about the social sciences and their funding, and to illuminate pointed challenges that arose as these patrons sought to advance scholarship grounded in scientistic and social engineering commitments.

By midcentury nobody doubted that the recently unified Department of Defense (DOD) was and would remain the dominant patron of American science for the foreseeable future. So for social scientists seeking support for their work in the Cold War years, the enormous defense science establishment naturally had great significance. Building on a sizable body of work about the military– social science partnership that includes many excellent accounts of specific disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of inquiry, chapter 2 focuses on the development of military funding policies and programs and examines the struggles of social scientists to establish their presence in the natural science–oriented defense science establishment. These scholars encountered persistent conservative suspicions and often found it hard to gain support from their superiors in the defense science establishment, including skeptical physical scientists.

Under these conditions, social scientists had little choice but to argue strongly for scientistic forms of inquiry and their social engineering applications. Such ideas then became pervasive in military social science agencies and programs, thereby providing valuable support to many influential fields of research in ways consistent with those social engineering commitments. Moreover, these developments stimulated the growth of the military– social science partnership, which became increasingly important to American military operations and Cold War strategy by the time of the Kennedy administration. 

Cold war social sciences – knowledge production, liberal democracy and human nature  ed M Solovey and H Cravens (2012)

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/06/10/book-review-cold-war-social-science-knowledge-production-liberal-democracy-and-human-nature/

https://www.academia.edu/7398929/Cold_War_Social_Science_Specter_Reality_or_Useful_Concept

The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis; Aaron Wildavsky (originally 1979) but special edition with foreward by B Guy Peters (2018). This was the analyst who almost single-handedly held the rationalist school up to ridicule and showed how political judgement came into every key decision....

Nervous States – Democracy and the decline of Reason; William Davies (2019) A Fantastic and highly original book - reviewed here by one of my favourite political science writers - David Runciman

"When Michael Gove announced before the Brexit vote that the British public had had enough of experts, he was thought to have introduced something new and shocking into our politics. As his interviewer Faisal Islam responded incredulously at the time, Gove sounded like an “Oxbridge Trump”. Davies’s book wants to give us a sense of perspective on this feeling of outrage. We shouldn’t really be so shocked, because what Gove said is at some basic level true: the claim to expertise is deeply alienating to many people. And for that reason it is nothing new – the battle between the experts and their critics has been going on for centuries.

Davies traces it back to the 17th century and to two key developments in the evolution of modern politics: the attempt to distinguish reason from emotion and the desire to separate out war from peace. A peaceful politics built on reason created the space for expertise to flourish, including the birth of modern science and the launch of learned societies to champion its cause. Experts depend on stable politics to make their case – if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying – and stable politics depends on the authority of the state. The problem is that these categories can quickly get jumbled up. Experts start to present themselves as the ultimate authorities and to view their specialist knowledge as the voice of reason. Instead of politics making expertise possible, experts come to assume that they are the ones making politics possible. That arrogance is what alienates people, and it helps to undermine the basic distinction between reason and emotion on which modern politics depends. It makes us feel bad.

Experts depend on stable politics to make their case – if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying. This book does a good job of showing that the two-way contest between experts and the people is really a three-way relationship: both are fighting to claim the authority of the state. Davies also identifies many of the reasons why this fight has become so fraught in recent years. Some of it has to do with the pace of change. Expertise depends on our ability to fix the world in place long enough for an agreed version of the facts to take hold: it needs time to stand still for a moment. That doesn’t happen any more. As Davies writes: “The promise of digital computing, by contrast, is to maximise sensitivity to a changing environment.” Disruption is the watchword of Silicon Valley and it spells the death knell of conventional expertise.

The other great advantage that the new breed of data analysts has over technocrats and bureaucrats is that it appears to be on the side of our emotions in an increasingly emotional age. “The hostility directed towards experts stems from a deep-lying sense that, in their attention to mathematical laws and models, they are not really interested in individual people, their desires, fears and lives. Facebook doesn’t suffer the same alienation because its ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ are so utterly different. Its users express themselves in their own words and feelings.” Unlike analogue expertise, the digital version hides behind a touchy-feely interface, notwithstanding that what lies underneath is more technically complex than ever. “As the maths has become more and more sophisticated, the user no longer even experiences it as mathematical.”

These are sparkling insights, but Nervous States can’t decide whether we are living in unprecedented times or not. As a publishing strategy, it makes sense to talk up the novelty of the current moment, but the argument frequently cuts against that. Just as the idea of post-truth starts to lose its edge when we try to find an age of truth to contrast it with (there aren’t any), so the notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon.

For an account that is rightly sceptical of many inflated claims to expertise, Davies’s argument is often based on versions of the same. In one instance, he uses surveys to describe the current state of popular opinion without saying anything about the limitations of such an approach. He cites a 2017 survey that showed that while 53% of Ukip supporters believe torture works, 56% think it should be permitted, meaning 3% of Ukip supporters think that we should torture people just for the hell of it. “This is a political vision,” Davies writes, “in which the infliction of physical pain, and even death, is how authority should work, whether that be in the criminal justice system, school, security services or the family.” But that is a big claim to base on the views of such a tiny number of people (given Ukip supporters in this survey would have been a minute fraction of the whole, since almost no one was voting Ukip in 2017, we are talking about only a handful of respondents). What four or five people might think doesn’t sound like the basis of a political vision to me.

The notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon. Where it is useful to his account, he uses factual evidence to bolster his case, yet he often undercuts it at the same time. He draws on the statistical work of the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to show that falling life expectancy in the US is driving feelings of insecurity, particularly in regions that voted for Trump. But he also wants to argue that these same people feel more insecure because experts routinely ignore their bodily experiences. No doubt evidence of suffering and ignorance of suffering are both part of the story. But Davies does not explain how they are related. Sometimes the facts he uses are simply wrong. He states that we now live in societies where “around 50% of people go to university and 50% don’t”, something that divides us down the middle. But while it is true that around half of young people now go to university, among older generations the figures are much lower, which means that the large majority are still not university educated. Brexit is inexplicable unless this fact is taken into account.

This is an ambitious book with plenty to commend it, which covers many concerns in our age of political upheaval – from drone warfare and safe spaces to imperialism and the Anthropocene. It represents an attempt to join up the myriad dots of our anxieties, but I could not see a way through its maze of facts and feelings, authorities and counter-authorities.

Focus on what;s important

Exactly ten years ago I presented a paper at the Black Sea resort of Varna to the NISPAcee annual Conference (Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Admin in central and eastern Europe). The paper was called “The Long Game – not the logframe” and exposed the superficiality of the assumptions EC bureaucrats seemed to be making in its Technical Assistance programmes  about what I called the kleptocracy or “impervious regimes” which prevailed in most ex-communist countries. The paper

·       argued that the variety of terms used to try to describe the nature of the regimes which control both the countries targeted by the EC’s Neighbourhood Policy and wider afield indicate weak understanding of the structure of power

·       suggested the term ”impervious” regime as a useful description of an all-too common system which can ride rough-shod over its subjects’ concerns in the pursuit of its own selfish goals

·       asked what we expect administrative reform to deliver in such systems

·       questioned the efficacy of the tools which international bodies favour in the reform of state bodies in such contexts

·       looked briefly at the (scanty) literature about the results from these tools

·       explored the concept of ”windows of opportunity”

·       concluded that technical assistance is built on shaky foundations

·       not least in relation to the knowledge base of westerners and their sensitivity to context 

Basically my argument was that more attention needed to be paid to creating the conditions whereby senior politicians in the Region would actually want reform….

These were the tools which the paper examined which transition countries were being asked to use to get a system of public administration more responsive to public need[1] –

• Judicial reform; to embed properly the principle of the rule of law[2]
• Budgetary reform; to ensure the integrity and transparency of public resources
• Civil service laws, structures and training institutions – to encourage professionalism and less politicization of staff of state bodies
• Impact assessment – to try to move the transition systems away from a legalistic approach and force policy-makers to carry out consultations and assess the financial and other effects of draft legislation
• Functional Review – to try to remove those functions of state bodies which are no longer necessary or are best handled by another sector or body[3].
• Institutional twinning – to help build the capacity of those state bodies whose performance is crucial to the implementation of the Acquis Communautaire
• Development of local government and NGOs – to try to ensure that a redistribution of power takes place
• Anti-corruption strategies[4] – which incorporate elements of the first three of the above
• Performance measurement and management eg EFQM
• report-cards[5] -  

Needless to say, my paper went down like a lead balloon. My audience, after all, were the directors and teachers of central European schools of public administration – and I was asking them to take on the additional task of networking with politicians to persuade them of the need for change!       

Seven years later a small but astonishing report was submitted to the EC as part of an EC-funded programme which stated quite baldly that very little was known about the way public administration was organised in the Region – but broadly confirming the tenor of my paper 

At the same time, the EC, World Bank and OECD were producing Manuals such as Quality of Public Administration – toolbox for practitioners (EC 2017 edition) and Principles of Public Administration (SIGMA 2018) to make sure that new and aspiring member states properly understood what was expected of them. A somewhat belated recognition that several states had been allowed to join the European Union before they had actually achieved the relevant capacity – not just in the contentious judicial field but in basic aspects of good government.  

The SIGMA guidelines, for example, state that 

Modern public service is regarded as possible only when a set of conditions is in place that ensures:  

·       separation between the public and private spheres;  

·       separation between politics and administration;  

·       individual accountability of public servants;  

·       sufficient job protection, levels of pay and stability, and clearly defined rights and obligations for public servants;  

·       recruitment and promotion based on merit 

The EC contribution to the development of capacity in state institutions is massive - billions of euros of Structural Funds and accounts for at least a quarter of the new investment in the Region. But the EC Toolbox (coming in at 487 pages) is quite unrealistic in its expectations and has clearly forgotten the excellent advice in 2002 of Merilee Grindle in her article Good Enough Governance – namely to focus on the important things….

---

[1] The Governance  and Social Development Resource Centre published in 2011 an interesting overview of ”Current trends in governance support”- at  http://www.gsdrc.org/docs/open/HD755.pdf

[2] see http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/Rule_of_Law_Temptations.pdf

[3] a rare set of guidelines was given in 2001 by Manning et al http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2005/06/22/000090341_20050622142938/Rendered/PDF/32699.pdf

[4] the sociologists and anthropologists have given us a useful critique of the role of anti-corruption

[5] consumer feedback on public services - one of the tools summarised in a useful meniu published by the World Bank in 2005 http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/civilservice/ACSRCourse2007/Session%208/IncreasingGovEffectiveness.pdf

Yes, Minister

Not so long ago, I spent almost a decade of my life on “civil service reform” in countries ruled until 1989 by communist parties which brooked no dissent. It wasn’t exactly the easiest of tasks to convince the new breed of politicians that they needed a civil service system which was less subservient – particularly because the model most of us westerners brought was one where politicians took the decisions - for civil servants to implement.

In reality, of course, the dynamic was somewhat different – with the role of senior civil servants being to bring the more expert institutional wisdom to challenge the generally naïve and over-simplistic ideas of politicians new to office. But, in Britain, Margaret Thatcher started a politicisation continued by New Labour which has become ever more intense. "Are you one of us?" became Thatcher's catchphrase - and Bliar just assumed that, after 18 years of Tory rule, senior civil servants were untrustworthy.....

I know that many readers’ eyes will have glazed over from the very first mention of the phrase “civil service” but bear with me as I quickly cover the background to what is a crucial subject to our days – how to get policies that work 

Cronyism was endemic in government until the late 19^th century - it was indeed the infamous charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 during the Crimean War which created the conditions which led to the creation of the British civil service system which remained intact for more than 100 years.  

A Royal Commission on the Civil Service (Northcote-Trevelyan) had been set up in the early 1850s but had been labouring until that military action exposed the disastrous nature of the aristocratic leadership in the country – it was the spark which led to the demands for a more meritocratic approach…..

And the early 1960s saw strong questioning again of British administrative traditions – epitomized in the establishment in 1966 of the Royal (or Fulton) Commission on the Civil Service which laid the foundations to a much more managerial approach in the 1970s which became increasingly aggressive in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. Richard Chapman’s The Civil Service Commission – a bureau biography 1855-1991 (2005) is the best guide to this process – although B Guy Peters’ The Politics of Bureaucracy – an introduction to comparative public administration; (1978) was the first comparative and sociological approach to the subject. 

Guy Peters returned to the issue very recently in a short article which explored the effects of the populist mood on the relationship between politicians and civil servants 

the traditional conception of a stark separation of the competencies and the careers of civil servants and politicians was becoming more a useful myth for both parties, the spread of populism and other forms of “democratic backsliding” have altered these relationships.

In the contemporary populist era of governance there tends to be a stark separation between political leaders and their civil servants. The assumption by many, if not most of those political leaders, is that the bureaucrats are members of the “Deep State” that seeks to maintain its own power in the face of the will of “the people”.

While even when there were conflicts between politicians and bureaucrats in previous decades, they were still “different players on the same team”. However, today politicians and bureaucrats are often on different teams with different goals.

The political leaders in some countries, including some in the Visegrád Four countries, have sidelined their civil servants in favor of political appointees and cronies. The same has been true in the United States, Brazil and to a lesser extent in some West European countries. The civil servants may remain in place but are largely ignored by the political leaders. 

But there is an even more insidious force at work 

Prime ministers have tended to draw control over government to themselves, even from their ministerial colleagues, demanding greater loyalty from public servants in the process. The same process has affected the individual ministers who also want control over their civil servants, as opposed to “frank and fearless advice”. 

So much for the recent efforts of people like Matt Syed (“Rebel Ideas”) and Gillian Tett (“The Silo Effect”) to challenge the “groupthink” at the heart of government” 

Both the growing power of populist movements and the general increase of political polarization within government and society have been contributing to an increased level of politicization of civil servants and an increased use of patronage.

The concept of a neutral, expert civil service is now less acceptable to political leaders, and a variety of methods are being used to reduce the autonomy and independence of the civil service to ensure the loyalty of civil servants, even in countries with long histories of civil-service independence. 

The emphasis on political loyalty and adherence to the policy ideas of the government of the day is especially interesting in an era of (presumably) “evidence-based policymaking” (Cairney 2016).

The increased availability of evidence about policy both within individual countries and across countries should make the contemporary period one of applying expertise to solve policy problems.

But expertise has become politicized, and only those experts who support the policy ideas of the incumbent government are likely to have any influence. 

And then one for Emanuel Macron – 

While individual countries and the world are confronted with a host of wicked problems – notably climate change – the responses from governments may be very tame. Due to the relative lack of preparation for governing of populist governments, and their unwillingness to use the expertise available within the civil service, developing forceful and creative solutions will be difficult. This is all the more so given that any real solutions to problems such as climate change will involve upsetting existing patterns of life for “the people” who are the presumed beneficiaries of populist governments.

In Macron’s case, of course, the system still had the expertise which he tried to follow – but was outboxed by the gilets jaunes.

Why the Shortages??

There’s a lot of nonsense (understandably) being talked about the shortages being experienced at the moment in the developed world – in the UK, Europe and America alike. Initially, I assumed it was an obvious result of Brexit – with Britain famously relying on Russian and Ukrainian long-distance lorry drivers and treating them like shit. It’s only on the continent that decent facilities for truckers are available.

But it seems that things are more complicated – and much more to do with food prices and climate, globalisation and “just-in-time delivery”

By far and away the best article on the crisis is this one on the situation in America

There’s a quiet panic happening in the US economy. Medical labs are running out of supplies, restaurants are having trouble getting food, and automobile, paint, and electronics firms are curtailing production because they can’t get semiconductors.

The problem seems to be getting worse, as the shortages pile on top of each other like a snake eating its tail. For instance, the inability to fix trucks means that truck drivers can’t haul boxes of goods, which might actually contain the parts needed to fix the trucks, and so forth.

 

There are multiple arguments about why the problem is as bad as it is. Everyone agrees that the Covid pandemic and chaotic changes in consumption habits have caused inevitable short-term price hikes and shortages.

But what we’re experiencing is also the net result of decades of policy choices starting in the 1970s that emphasized consumer sovereignty over citizenship. The consolidation of power into the hands of private equity financiers and monopolists over the last four decades has left us uniquely unprepared to manage a supply shock. Our hyper-efficient globalized supply chain, once romanticized by men like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat, is the problem. Like the financial system before the 2008 crash, this kind of economic order hides its fragility. It seems to work quite well, until it doesn’t.

 

The specific policies that led to our supply constrained world are lax antitrust, deregulation of basic infrastructure industries like shipping, railroads, and trucking, disinvestment in domestic production, and trade policy emphasizing finance over manufacturing.

 

Take biopharmaceutical equipment necessary to make vaccines. There’s a shortage of fancy plastic bags that you mix chemicals in to make medicine, which isn’t surprising in a pandemic. But the reason for the shortage isn’t just Covid but a merger wave; over the last 15 years, four firms bought up the biopharmaceutical equipment industry, without any antitrust agency taking meaningful action. These firms now have market power, and dominate their competitors, by ensuring their bags can only interoperate with their specific mixing machines. It’s like not having enough Keurig coffee machine pods; the shortage isn’t the coffee, it’s the artificial bottleneck used to lock in customers.

 

Another example is railroads. Since deregulation in 1980, Wall Street consolidated 33 firms into just seven. And because the Surface Transportation Board lacks authority, Wall Street-owned railroads cut their workforce by 33% over the last six years, degrading our public shipping capacity. The Union Pacific closed a giant Chicago sorting facility in 2019; it now has so much backed up traffic that it suspended traffic from west coast ports.

 

Ocean shipping is the same. The 1997 Ocean Shipping Reform Act legalized secret rebates and led to a merger wave. The entire industry has now consolidated globally into three giant alliances that occasionally crash their too-big-to-sail ships into the side of the Suez canal.

 

Then there’s trucking. Talk to most businesspeople who make or move things and they will complain about the driver shortage. This too is a story of deregulation. In the 1970s, the end of public rate-setting forced trucking firms to compete against each other to offer lower shipping prices. The way they did this was by lowering pay to their drivers. Trucking on a firm-level became unpredictable and financially fragile, so for drivers schedules became unsustainable, even if the pay during boom times could be high. Today, even though pay is going up, the scheduling is crushing drivers. The result is a shortage of truckers.

There are more problems that strike at the heart of our economy. The most obvious is semiconductors. Production of high-end chips has gone offshore to East Asia because of deliberate policy to disinvest in the hard process of making things. In addition, the firm that now controls the industry, Taiwan Semiconductor, holds a near monopoly position with a substantial technological lead and a track record in the 1990s and early 2000s of dumping chips at below cost.

 

Fortunately, policymakers have noticed. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Beige Book, a report on the economy that is published eight times a year, mentions “shortage” 80 times, and FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra recently pointed out that shortages are slowing the economic recovery. Surface Transportation Board Chair Martin Oberman noted that railroads stripping down their operations to please Wall Street resulted in container congestions at US ports, a significant chokepoint for imports. And Congress is on the verge of funding tens of billions of dollars to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

Even business leaders are getting it. Chemical firms are asking regulators to act. And at last week’s Intermodal Association of North America’s Intermodal Expo, where representatives from the shipping, rail, ports and drayage industries spoke, one executive said, “Without fear of regulation, I don’t know what will motivate all stakeholders to be at the table.” Fundamentally, America – and the world - has to move away from the goal of seeking cheap stuff made abroad for consumers in a low-wage economy. That means rearranging our hierarchies of power so finance, consulting and capital-light tech leaders became less important than people who know how to make things. The problem we have is shortages, so it’s time to put people in charge who value production. 

In the UK, gas prices are increasing by no less than 70%. And this article certainly suggests that (although there is pressure on global prices) the culprit is privatisation – with few companies providing reserves and therefore being caught short when demand increases. No fewer than 8 suppliers have gone bankrupt.

There is also the little factor of Covid19 which caused first lockdown and a huge slowdown in production followed by massive "injections" of government cash to both workers and companies. Containers may have kept most global goods flowing - but the uncertainty combined with initial reduction of supplies and then renewed demand has completely upset the balance of demand and supply in many commodities as Boffy's comment emphasises.   

update; When you have a British Prime Minister actually saying that the 

Queues for petrol and mass culls of pigs at farms because of a lack of abattoir workers are part of a necessary transition for Britain to emerge from a broken economic model based on low wages 

then it’s clear I have to walk back a bit my suggestion that the current British crisis is simply part of a wider global phenomenon.  Now I see that it’s part of a Johnson “cunning plan”!! It remains, however, too easy to blame Brexit completely. Things, as always, are more complicated.  

update; an interesting German take on the issue

and one of the best explanations - courtesy of Dave Pollard's fantastic monthly roundup

an even better https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Gail-Tverberg-Our-Fossil-Fuel-Energy-Predicament-Nov-9.pdf

Am I the only person in the world finding Adam Tooze's regular bulletins totally incoherent? eg https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-51-explaining-the-energy

What about Me?

Exactly two years ago I asked whether our social DNA was changing. I conceded that older generations have this annoying habit of finding fault with the latest generation – in our case things like the “attention deficit” which modern IT gadgets seem to develop, “instant gratification” and how this might affect future “character”.

Surveys such as the World Values and Eurobarometer do indicate a large and significant trend since the early 1970s toward more individualistic, selfish and less trusting societies….And the post quoted the studies on this of people such as Daniel Bell (Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism), Richard Sennett (The Culture of the New Capitalism), Francis Fukuyama (The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order) – ending with Reckless Opportunists – elites at the end of the establishment (2018) with its ruthless exposure of the almost criminal damage which a new breed of elites have inflicted on a once proud nation. 

But we have to be careful – none of these writers have any particular claims to psychological insights into people’s souls. They are, rather, social commentators. I read the occasional psychology book – Robin Skynner and John Cleese’s "Life and How to Survive it" (1993) made a big impact. Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” was much appreciated – Steven Pinker less so.

"What about Me? the struggle for identity in a market-based society" by a Dutch psychotherapist, Paul Verhaege, came out in 2014 and was quite an unusual choice for me. It lay on the shelf for some time before I opened it – to discover a real gem.  It ranges through intellectual history, sociology and ethics before suggesting that the last few decades have seen a radical new self-identity being engineered – which he calls “The Enron Society”. 

The book starts by contrasting our two basic urges as individuals - the initial sense of "belonging" and the growing need for "separation" - and how this expresses itself in later struggles eg "self-respect" v "self-hatred". 

From his initial discussion of "identity", he then moves onto a fascinating discussion of values and morality - showing how the Greeks had an integrated view of our character which Christianity destroyed when it placed God as an external power. The Enlightenment dethroned religion to an extent – although Verhaeghe argues that Diderot’s emphasis on reason, passion and empathy was set aside by an unholy coalition of Voltaire and Rousseau who basically helped the French state set up a new religion. He also argues that true rationality started only after the second WW – which fits with the more recent arguments of people like Nicolas Guilhot who are beginning to analyse the role of the military in the post-war social sciences. 

It’s the chapter on the Enron Society where he really lets rip – “The west has never had it so good – but never felt so bad!” leads to a discussion on mental illness and the pharma industry. How, he asks, has 30 years of neoliberalism affected our DNA – with its “Rank and Yank” systems of management; Universities as knowledge businesses; anonymous call-centres; CCTV; ubiquitous contracts, rules, regulations, league tables, fear, uncertainty - but no real accountability 

Typically, however, it’s the final section which lets him down. Apart from repeating Mintzberg’s call for “balance” and praising the Wilkinson/Pickett line on equality, his only advice seems to be for greater activism – “Ditch the cynicism!”!!

But it’s good to have a text from outwith the anglo-american core – with several interesting discoveries in his little bibliography (which doesn’t, however, mention Kenneth Gergen’s “TheSaturated Self” or “Life and How to Survive it”)

In the same spirit, I was disappointed to notice that William Davies’ Nervous States – how feeling took over the world (2018) didn’t mention Verhaeghe;s book

The Power Elite

It’s not so easy to have a serious discussion about power since those who are paid to consider (academics) have carved up the market so that political scientists focus only on what they call “Politico-administrative relations”; and sociologists on those with economic or (these days) financial power. Since economists, for their part, won’t even talk about power, they are left to focus on “the market” - although even they will concede that it often displays “oligopolistic” tendencies

In the absence of the academics, journalists (and Marxists) are about the only people left willing and able to analyse power. In Britain, for example, that means the likes of Owen Jones (“The Establishment”), Peter Oborne (“The Triumph of the Political Class”), Frederic Mount (“The New Few”), Stuart Weir (the annual Democratic Audit), John Foster, Susan George or Susan Watkins

My experience before and after 1990 operating in the no-man’s land between the political system and the bureaucracy places me firmly in the political science category – although I have great respect for what journalists, historians, anthropologists let alone political economists such as Mark Blyth bring to the feast  

Initially I belonged to the school which felt that the bureaucracy had too much power. A combination of Thatcher, “Yes, Minister” and New Labour saw things swing back to the political system. More recently, the technocrats seemed to have wrested power back – only for Trump and Brexit to remind us that “the people” also have a voice.

The grand old man of this field is B Guy Peters whose The Politics of Bureaucracy first came out in the 1970s, is now in its 5^th edition and is considered the bible on this issue. He has been an inspiration and active presence since 1990 in the network of schools of public administration in central and eastern Europe (NISPAcee) – Politico-Administrative Relations – Who Rules? (2001) very much showing his influence.

That this is still an important issue in the region is evident from recent publications such as The Principles of Public Administration produced by SIGMA (OECD) in 2016 and Quality of Public Administration – a toolbox for practitioners (EU 2017).

However, a lot of what the global community preaches as “good practice” in government structures is actually of very recent vintage in their own countries and is still often more rhetoric than actual practice.

Of course public appointments, for example, should be made on merit – and not on the basis of family, ethnic or religious networks. 

·       But civil service appointments and political structures in Belgium and Netherlands, to name but two European examples, were – until very recently – influenced by religious and party considerations. Rules were set aside to keep religious and political blocks (or pillars) happy. 

·       In some countries indeed such as Northern Ireland (until recently). the form and rhetoric of objective administration in the public were completely undermined by religious divisions. All public goods (eg housing and appointments) were, until the end of the 20th century, made in favour of Protestants.

·       The Italian system has for decades been notorious for the systemic abuse of the machinery of the state by various powerful groups – with eventually the Mafia itself clearly controlling some key parts of it. American influence played a powerful part in sustaining this in the post-war period – but the collapse of communism removed that influence and has allowed the Italians to have a serious attempt at reforming the system. At least for a few years – before Berlusconi scuppered it all   

These are well-known cases – but the more we look, the more we find that countries which have long boasted of their fair and objective public administration systems have in fact suffered serious intrusions by sectional interests.

The British and French indeed have invented words to describe the informal systems which perverted the apparent neutrality and openness of their public administration –

·       the “old boy network” which was still the basis of the senior civil service in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s a century after the first major reform.

·       And the elitist and closed nature of the French ENArque system has, in the new millennium, become the subject of heated debate in that country. And Macron recently decided to close the school 

It is clear that national european systems are becoming more politicised. This trend was started by Margaret Thatcher who simply did not trust the senior civil service to do what she needed. She brought in individuals who had proved their worth in the private sector and came into government service for a limited period of time (sometimes part-time and unpaid) to do a specific task which the Minister or Prime Minister judged the civil servants to be incapable of doing. Her critique of the UK Civil Service was twofold –

-       first that those at the top were so balanced and objective in their advice that they lacked the appetite to help lead and implement the changes she considered British society needed; and

-       second that those further down the ladder lacked the management skills necessary to manage public services. The Labour Government since 1997 inherited a civil service they considered somewhat contaminated by 18 years of such dominant political government – and had more than 200 such political appointees. 

Such trends are very worrying for the civil service which has lost the influence and constraining force they once had. 

The two decades since then have seen national reputations for integrity challenged – the British judicial system, for example, took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” Ed by D Whyte appeared – followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).   

Conclusion; Too much of the commentary of international bodies on transition countries seems oblivious to this history and these realities – and imagines that a mixture of persuasive rhetoric and arm-twisting can lead to relevant, rapid and significant changes. A bit more humility is needed – and more thought about the realistic trajectory of change. To recognize this is not, however, to condone a system of recruitment by connections – “people we know”. Celebration of cultural differences can sometimes be used to legitimize practices which undermine social coherence and organizational effectiveness. The acid test of a State body is whether the public thinks they are getting good public services delivered in an acceptable way!