The world is not an engineering problem - an argument against technocracy

Chris Dillow has an interesting blog post about the problems with what he calls 'liberal technocracy':

This urge to express all arguments in consequentialist terms is an admission that liberal technocracy has won. The only acceptable arguments for any policy, it is believed, are consequentialist ones – ideally, along the lines of making us materially better off. And everybody seems to accept Mill’s harm principle, and thus argue for bans on the – often elusive – grounds that the activity in question does indeed impose harms onto others.

You only need look at the new found 'neoliberalism' of the Adam Smith Institute to see the onward march of this "what works is what's right" approach to policy-making. Dillow speaks of how some things are, as it were, felt rather than analysed - the "best case for Brexit is an intrinsic one – that it’ll give us a sense of independence and sovereignty" and when advocates try to set out economic utilitarian gains from leaving their argument weakens. I once wrote a similar thing about Scottish independence:

It's the idea of Scotland in that quote from Henry Scott Riddell's 'Scotland Yet' - not about some idea of superiority, certainly no hatred or dislike, just a message of pride, joy and love for the place. And the nation - that thing we try to define with grand words - is all those who share those emotions, that association.

When Kipling wrote about men having small hearts it was about these feelings - we cannot love everywhere and we cannot expect everyone to love the place we love. But we can share that love with those who do and that is nationhood. No government, no kings, no lords, no oil, no First Minister. Just people placing their boots in the soil and saying "this is my country and I'll work with you to make it better".

If you want independence for reason of blood, for reason of hatred or for reason of greed then you deserve to lose. But if you want independence for pride, joy and love of the place that is Scotland then - for what it's worth - you have my blessing and I wish you well.

The idea here is something we've lost from our thinking, one of those virtues Deirdre McCloskey writes about, the idea of faith, that there are things we have to take as felt not as demonstrated by science. This rejection of maximising utility as the only purpose of public policy is perhaps the single most important thing in McCloskey's triology on bourgeois virtues - that ideas matter as much as science does. And it is true since the things we feel cannot be defined by utilitarian or consequentialist argument - here's economist Don Boudreaux:

There are no scientific ‘solutions’ to society's problems. This reality is so in part because in many cases people legitimately disagree over what arranged changes are desirable and which are undesirable. For example, some people join me in celebrating marijuana legalization; other people disagree sincerely and deeply even if there is no disagreement over the predicted health and behavioral effects of marijuana use. There is no scientific ‘solution’ to this disagreement or to any other disagreement that turns on differences in values and preferences.

This reminds me of P J O'Rourke speaking of his politics - "I'm personally conservative" says O'Rourke but believes government, public policy, should be as libertarian as possible. So a man who believes drinking and smoking are sinful can, at the same time as holding these views, support the liberalisation of their use. But, it is more likely that such a person for reasons of faith - belief without evidence - will oppose liberal drinking laws and even propose stricter temperance or prohibition.

Back at university we coined the term "soft loo-paper conservatism" to describe the approach to student politics where the only care was the good management of the student union and its services to the student body (such as, hence the phrase, insisting on better toilet paper in the union buildings' loos). Management was all that matters - Boudreaux quotes a cynical comment from James Buchanan on economists and public policy:

Once he has defined his social welfare function, his public interest, he can advance solutions to all of society’s economic ills, solutions that government, as deus ex machina, is, of course, expected to implement.

The problem is that politics just doesn't work like this - people have views, felt experiences, faith meaning that the answer might be a different one from that produced through the expert's systems. Nor can we ever be perfectly sure that the expert's answer isn't sub-optimal - there are plenty of examples of technocratic solutions to perceived problems that have failed or, in solving one problem, merely acted to create three new ones. Raising the duty on fags seems to work as a means of reducing their consumption but there's a point at which it creates an opportunity for criminal arbitrage - the cost of making a cigarette is so much lower that the sale price it's worth the risk for the criminal to create a black market.

It seems right that government should seek the 'right' solutions in its policy-making but this assumes that there is such a solution and, indeed, that the negatives of such a policy don't outweigh the benefits of the solution. After all, if we take the utilitarian argument in its entirety, it begins to make the case for a sort of Huxley-esque benign authoritarianism, a Singapore-on-Steroids. For my part, I prefer things a little messy because not only are the solutions so often dependent on coercion but they also require that the ordinary citizen's faith and feelings are denied. Maximising utility seems a good thing but it is not the main reason why people do things like set up business, create charities, build village halls, paint, sing, create or innovate. Technocracy treats the world as an engineering problem when it's an unfolding story, explorers in a dense jungle not white-coated scientists in a laboratory.

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A combination of fussbucketry, economic illiteracy and the denial of liberty - welcome to Conservative policy-making

Conservative policy-making is in a bit of a pickle. It's not that there isn't any thinking about policy just that the thinking seems rooted in focus groups, the received wisdom of government policy wonks and a seemingly obsessive desire to be liked. The best place to start in explaining this is a set of "principles" set out by centrist Tory think-tank, "Bright Blue". These principles purport to be an encapsulation of something called 'liberal conservatism'. Now, leaving aside the slightly oxymoronic nature of the tag (Americans would probably pop if they were faced with such an apparent contradiction), it seems that the nice folk of Bright Blue have confused having an activist state with 'liberalism' - here's a couple of examples:

We should be open-minded to new thinking, applying solutions to public policy problems on the basis of good ideas rather than tired ideology.

Markets are the best way of allocating resources, but they can be inefficient and inequitable, so government and social institutions can help correct market problems.

Both of these statements doubtless tick the box for bureaucrats and assorted inheritors of Blair's actualist ideal of "what matters is what works" but they are essentially illiberal and, to make matters worse, contradictory. Describing your positioning as 'liberal conservative' is a statement of ideology even if, like Blair did, you adopt a sort of rhetoric that denies ideology while promoting an approach that sees government intervention as central to policy. Bright Blue are ideological in the same way and it is likely that their policy proscriptions will involve the state intervening in the interactions of private individuals - the very antithesis of liberalism.

This illiberal position is underscored by the essentially anti-market stance of Bright Blue's "pro-market, not free-market". If you are a liberal then the free part of free market is the bit that matters - liberals should be making markets more free not believing that government can "correct" market problems. These contradictions and confusions can only result in similarly contradictory and confusing policy proposals. Indeed scrolling though the titles in Bright Blue's library, there is a sense that the environment and climate change, human rights and how capitalism is in some sort of crisis seem to dominate. I may be doing an injustice but I've a feeling that, while these things matter, they are not the basis for a cogent conservative position appealing to the wider electorate.

From this same camp - a sort of slightly squishy centrist world where policy gimmicks dominate - comes Onward, another conservative think tank. It's the brainchild of Neil O'Brien MP (who used to policy wonk for George Osborne when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer) and they are a step ahead of Bright Blue by looking at something that does seem to matter - housing. The problem is that, having identified the problem (there aren't enough houses), Onward sets out proposals that seem designed to make development less likely. After all the cost of land is a big chunk of the reason why we don't building enough houses where people want to live but nowhere in its proposals does Onward set out any way to reduce the cost of land. Instead O'Brien tells us that the high land values are a boon because we can tax them and use the money to build "vital" infrastructure (although it's not so vital that private-funded initiative delivers it).

In truth Onward and O'Brien are trying to square the circle of needing development while pretending this can be done without building on green belt sites. O'Brien also gets confused between landowner and developer (a common problem with the public but one a bright young MP who worked at the treasury shouldn't be making): "(a) thing that drives my constituents mad is the way that developers make a killing when they get planning permission..." says O'Brien when it isn't the developer who cleans up on the land value but the landowner who the housebuilder bought the land from. The only impact of infrastructure contributions, a sort of CIL on steroids, would be to make development more costly, more slow and, in a lot of locations, uneconomic.

Onward has the jump on Bright Blue making proposals that, while they are entirely counter-productive, at least reflect the fears and concerns of likely Conservative voters. The problem, however, is that Bright Blue and Onward assume that the resolution to policy challenges must lie in action by government - tax this, regulate that, control the other - and most commonly by central government. For all Bright Blue's talk of institutions, the only ones they seem to feel matter are the institutions of state - local, private and civil society institutions can be commissioned by the state to deliver policy, there is no sense that those institutions can do the business without requiring the direction of national government.

Policy development in this centrist Tory world seems to consist of manufacturing crisis and then setting out proposals to resolve the crisis, proposals that almost always require significant government intervention, new laws, new taxes and bans. Mark Wallace at Conservative Home, in what amounted to a cry of pain, described the current Conservative obsession with banning things and concluded:

"...meddling in people’s lives might temporarily satisfy some politicians’ itchy need to “do something”, or to paint themselves as go-getters, but the cumulative price is to paint the Government as increasingly dour, gloomy and authoritarian in both tone and policy. Some positivity, some joy, some creation of new opportunity and liberty would not go amiss."

I fear that this pain will be ignored - even attacked - by those developing policy for Conservatives. We are stuck in the world of "something must be done" with the finest example being the new "Obesity Strategy" filled with pettifogging fussbucketry like trying to get Sid's Caff on the A49 to count the calories in his full English breakfast. Even worse there's its pretence that somehow these proposals are based on evidence when they're just another list of nannying gimmicks from astroturf campaign groups like Action on Sugar - ban ads, force manufacturers to reformulate, stop offers like two-for-one, and ban sweets at the checkout. Plus taxes, more taxes and yet more taxes.

Yet, as I noted in criticising the New Puritan Left, the response from ministers when challenged on this is to say that we're doing it to protect the NHS - asked about the obesity strategy's fussbucketry by Phillip Davies, the current public health minister replied:

“This is a publicly funded health service that we all believe in and all love. If we want it to celebrate its 140th birthday, we need to protect it, and that means getting serious about prevention and stopping people coming into the service and getting sick."

The same lie as the left's new puritan nannies - the NHS is under strain and it's your fault because you're too fat, you drink to much and have too many bad habits. All followed up by proposals for bans, controls, taxes and regulations to make you change your bad behaviour. It's a lie - obesity isn't rising and NHS costs are going up because we've got better and better at staying alive. Everyone - even the NHS - knows this, ignores it and proposes a new bunch of nannying, fussbucketing interventions that amount to a nudging us with a baseball bat.

To close the loop here, the same goes for housing. Everyone knows that the problem is that we've spent 30 years or more not building the homes we need resulting in hugely over-valued housing, sky-high rents, homelessness and a resentful young generation. And we also know that the reason we've not built those houses is our planning system, a system that's now wholly-owned by NIMBYs and BANANAs. Yet nobody does anything beyond tinkering for fear of upsetting those (few) constituents who moan to Neil O'Brien about heavy vehicles delivering to development sites or (a loud handful of) campaigners fighting hard to protect a bunch of ugly buildings in a derelict airfield because 70 years ago some brave Americans flew bombers from that field.

There is almost nothing about current Conservative policy-making - whether in think tanks or inside the government - that gives me, as a conservative, any confidence. Our core values of localism, self-reliance, community, enterprise and liberty have been swamped by technocratic solutions based on questionable evidence devised by bright young things with barely the first idea about the communities those policies will affect. It's not just fussbucketry, although that drives me mad, but also the ignorance of basic business economics and the belief that freedom is somehow a 'nice-to-have' rather than something absolutely central to what we believe as conservatives. The next generation of policy will be set by these people and it will be a putrid combination of fussbucketry, economic illiteracy and the denial of liberty. It won't be conservatism.

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The politics of fudge and muddle (centrist politics and the pretence of evidence-based policy)

Tony Blair and his acolytes used the idea of political triangulation to create what they dubbed the "third way". This always brought to mind the old joke about the priest sternly imploring his congregation to "keep firmly to the narrow path between good and evil". The term comes originally from Dick Morris one of Bill Clinton's top campaign advisors:

“Take the best from each party’s agenda, and come to a solution somewhere above the positions of each party. So from the left, take the idea that we need day care and food supplements for people on welfare. From the right, take the idea that they have to work for a living, and that there are time limits. But discard the nonsense of the left, which is that there shouldn’t be work requirements; and the nonsense of the right, which is you should punish single mothers. Get rid of the garbage of each position, that the people didn’t believe in; take the best from each position; and move up to a third way. And that became a triangle, which was triangulation.”

This is, of course, good politics since whenever people are asked their position on a left-right political scale they mostly plump for somewhere near the middle - we all consider ourselves centrists and the other guys extremists. So camping out in a position deliberately distanced from both left and right makes for good political tactics.The question is, however, whether this approach makes for good policy or is merely an effective marketing strategy. There's also an issue when more than one campaign adopts the approach - the centre becomes crowded and the arguments become dominated by details rather than setting a vision.

The policy consequences of this approach tend to fall into two camps - technocratic fixes and populist, often media-driven interventions. In the former camp sit things like universal credit, HS2 and city-region devolution while the latter encompasses such ideas as banning the sale of energy drinks to children, fixing energy prices and charging 10p for plastic bags. Where this centrist ground is contested, the game becomes a battle between impressive sounding technical solutions to apparent problems and a shopping basket filled with gimmicky policies, "quick wins" as the campaign advisors like to call them.

Nowhere in all of this is there any room for even the most modest consideration of policy utility because what we're concerned with is not being painted as ideological or dogmatic. Instead we're encouraged to consider how the policy feels, how it will "play out" with one or other group of voters, not whether it will actually achieve the outcome desired. The ban on energy drinks enjoys popular support (as do most proposals founded on "won't someone think of the children") so it doesn't really matter whether such a ban has any positive health outcomes. The government has responded to popular concerns (or more accurately concerns that became popular because a high profile celebrity chef used his platform to make them popular) and this is enough.

This process repeats itself in every part of government, transport policy is driven by railway nostalgia, health policy by emotional attachment to "Our NHS", and education policy by a seemingly endless list of further things that children should be taught at school (on top of proper subjects like maths, English and science). Charities create moral panics over the environment (check out the absolute froth over plastic straws), children (see the Children's Society's latest "teenaged girls are under too much pressure" report) and public health (witness the anti-sugar campaigns from Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall). What links nearly all of this policy-making is that it's government "doing something" that matters not whether the outcome of that action is positive, or for that matter measurable.

Meanwhile the technocracy of bureaucracy, academia, third sector and consultancy excludes lay involvement other than in the form of 'consultation', a process designed either to produce corroboration of the expected technocratic solution or else to give the impression of taking note of what the people the policy is affecting might think about the matter. Every now and then (as we saw with the 'consultation' on the EU's Tobacco Products Directive) the technocracy comes clean by, in effect, saying that representation and input from ordinary people counts for less than responses from organisations linked to the technocrats.

All of this means that there is little clarity to political decisions, that those decisions are made on the basis of sentiment rather than evidence or outcomes, and that these sentiments are given credence by the misuse of social science. None of this means that sensibility is altogether a bad thing, we need to care, but it does mean that too many policies are just mushy virtue-signalling rather than robust, evidenced and effective. It is the politics of fudge and muddle presented to the public as "evidence-based policy-making". Moreover the policies don't work thereby requiring (in the eyes of the technocracy) more extensive, intrusive or comprehensive policies to meet the deficiencies of the earlier policy. At no point does anyone say, "enough of all this, let's start again at the beginning" since that would be an admission of error and bureaucracy does not err:

One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.

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Why London dominates (or how the London problem isn't really a London problem)

Aaron Renn picks up on how tech superstar, Peter Thiel sort of accidently exposed the truth about Chicago (in Chicago):

“If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”

The problem for Thiel was that he said this while speaking at an event in Chicago. No surprise, it didn’t go over well. An enquiring questioner wanted to know, “Who comes to Chicago if first-rate people go to New York or Silicon Valley?”

Now leaving aside the responses from miffed Chicago fans (the city that is not the band) Renn raises and explores an interesting point about the USA. Here he borrows from Charles Murray to make his point:

[I]t is difficult to hold a nationally influential job in politics, public policy, finance, business, academia, information technology, or the media and not live in the areas surrounding New York, Washington, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. In a few cases, it can be done by living in Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, or Houston—and Bentonville, Arkansas—but not many other places.

For those not up on US billionaires, Bentonville in the HQ of Walmart.

Transfer this observation out of the USA and we have the elements of a thesis about why London dominates the UK - indeed, why London is so dominant in Europe. It seems likely that, just as Peter Thiel says, smart people head to one or two places - Renn reports that a quarter of HPY (Harvard, Princeton, Yale) graduates live in or around New York. I've no data for the UK but does anyone want to bet against Oxbridge graduates overwhelmingly living in and around London? We know it's true of tertiary education in general:

Given that most persons aged 30–34 will have completed their tertiary education prior to the age of 30, this indicator may be used to assess the attractiveness (or ‘pull effects’) of regions with respect to the employment opportunities they offer graduates. Map 5 shows tertiary educational attainment by NUTS level 2 region for 2015: the darkest shade of orange highlights those regions where at least half of the population aged 30–34 had attained a tertiary level of education. By far the highest share was recorded in one of the two capital city regions of the United Kingdom — Inner London - West — where more than four fifths (80.8 %) of the population aged 30–34 possessed a tertiary level of educational attainment. The second, third and fourth highest shares were also recorded in the United Kingdom, namely in: Outer London - South (69.3 %), the other capital city region of Inner London - East (68.2 %), and North Eastern Scotland (66.1 %); note that all four regions in Scotland recorded shares above 50%.

The three regions in Europe with the highest concentrations of graduates are all in London which seems to repeat what we've seen from the USA where New York, Boston, Washington and San Francisco dominate. And it means that the UK, by defining its regional achievement through comparison with London, has created an economic development problem. The city's success creates a virtuous circle - the clever, ambitious people are in London doing clever ambitious things meaning that clever ambitious people from elsewhere in the UK - perhaps even in Europe - head to London because that's where clever, ambitious people go to be clever and ambitious. With the obvious result that, the occasional Bentonville or Omaha proving the rule, places elsewhere have to make do with less clever, less ambitious people and as a consequence slower economic growth.

The European data on tertiary education tells us that this supercharged agglomeration effect is pretty consistent - everywhere capital cities and places with a lot of research infrastructure suck up the graduates leaving other places with less of the talent needed to achieve that aim of 'closing the gap' between successful places and less successful places. The problem with London, New York and San Francisco (and, no doubt, were we to look: Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai) is that their agglomeration effect sucks the brightest and most able from places that, of themselves, are seen as relatively successful. Clever and ambitious Parisians head to London, just as the brightest in Chicago switch to San Francisco, Washington or New York.

For London - regardless of Brexit - this process is likely to continue and, in doing so, for the problems of London (expensive housing, the occasional late train, crime, air pollution and so forth) inevitably become the problems of the UK. Planning policies are adapted to fit London's housing crisis, health policies to reflect the worries of a thirty- and forty-something population, and transport policies designed for the needs of big city commuters. The dominance of London - The London Problem - doesn't just skew the UK's economy but it also profoundly influences the complete range of national government policies. That London Problem isn't really a London problem but results in a national policy programme suited to the clever and ambitious who have - because that's where the opportunities are - headed to London.

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Foucault's Truth - or why most public heath spending is a waste of money

I don't like what's called public health very much. Not because I think there are no environmental contributors to poor health but because what we now call public health isn't about removing things like pollution, exterminating disease-carrying vermin or making the air more breathable. It's about adopting the view that, because government funds healthcare, you have fewer rights over what you consume.

Yesterday I clicked through to a more-or-less incomprehensible blog post written (I think) by a chap called Robert Dalziel*. The post is titled "Nudge, Nudge, Public Health England and Behaviour Change" so is positioned right at the heart of what ought to be the public health debate. It even quotes a critical review of Thaler and Sunstein's 'Nudge':

Though costumed in the guise of pop economics, complete with a cute logo – Nudge is, in fact, a manifesto for the new paternalism… don’t be fooled.

So far, so good. We've a critique of nudge - what I call the sledgehammer approach to implementing behaviour insights - and the hope that the writer is going to reject such paternalism, cast aside the nannying fussbucketry of today's public health, and return the idea to its roots in making our environment more healthy. Sadly, this appears not to be the case:

So what is ‘dispiriting’ you and me Mark is an ostensibly ’arms length’ PHE resourcing and implementing a paternalistic libertarian approach to health improvement driven by the Behavioural Insights Team based on nudge theory and clearly supported by senior Tory politicians and Civil Servants.

Our writer's objection isn't a liberal objection to 'nudge' but is a belief that it's all a cunning Tory plan to undermine what's described in the previous paragraph as an "old-fashioned finger wagging approach to health behaviour change". The unmentioned issue here is the familiar one of more intervention - more bans, more taxes, more compulsion, more mandatory lessons in schools, more forced diets, more 'othering' of people who make the 'wrong' choices. All wrapped up in the cuddly pseudo-sciences of psychology, sociology and ethnography. The sneering use of the word 'libertarian' is a classic illustration of the author's ideological baggage.

This is further illustrated by the author's quoting of Foucault as his philosopher of choice:

“predicated on our societal regime of truth, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”

Strip away the flash language and we have a definition of relativism. Truth isn't defined by scientific equiry but is determined by society and those who have the status to say what is true. Suffice it to say that you can't - as this author does - criticise others for using 'policy driven evidence' rather than 'evidence driven practice' and then use a post-structuralist philosopher as the supposed source of your ideology. The whole point about Foucault is that truth is defined by the prevailing ideology not vice versa - he says change the ideology not change the truth.

Looking at this, however, and we can see yet again that real scientific evidence is of no consequence to much of public decision-making in health (nudge theory, for all that I find it morally dubious, at least has the merit of some practical scientific basis). As I wrote the other day ideology - the received wisdom - is everything and no evidence that challenges this orthodoxy can be admitted:

The limited evidence we actually received was ignored in favour of signalling that we are "doing something" about obesity. This is despite that "something" being a strategy based on things like planning controls over fast food takeaways, fussing about portion sizes in restaurants and promoting inadequate dinners for primary school children. None of which ideas has any evidence demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing rates of obesity.

Put bluntly, we will (well not me but a majority of the Health & Wellbeing Board) agree to waste over £2 million of public money every year just to indulge an ideological, all-population approach to obesity that isn't justified by the data or supported by evidence. And if this is repeated across England that probably means over £200 million of your and my taxes spend to indulge the ignorant ideological vanity of public health.

When you strip public health back to its basic objectives, we're really left with one fundamental truth: the richer the society the better the health outcomes and the lower the health inequalities. Therefore, the right way to improve those health outcomes isn't nannying the hell out of us about smoking, drinking, bad sex and too many burgers but to invest in those things that make society richer. Suffice it to say that current public health spending (by local government especially) does not contribute to making us richer and is probably a complete waste of money.

I'll grant you a case for looking to improve things such as air quality and providing the means to respond to epidemics (although you'll note that epidemics are also much rarer in richer societies). Everything else. All of it. The last scrap of that nagging about salt, fussing about fags, bothering about booze and flapping about fat or sugar - all the 'interventions' beloved of the fussbuckets who make up public health. It is a waste of money.

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*The post is on Mark Gamsu's blog but it's clear it's a guest posting.

The "phone a friend" approach to evidence in policy-making

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When we read about evidence-based policy-making, we're encouraged to believe that the people doing this stuff are carefully sifting the academic literature, testing their ideas against the body of knowledge and exploring new approaches based on this work.

You'd be wrong - they're just phoning a friend:

Unsurprisingly, good relationships and collaborations between researchers and policymakers help research use. This is a common finding—we already knew that policymakers often prefer to get information and advice from friends and colleagues, rather than papers and journals. One consequence is that policymakers may take advice from academics they already know through university or school. In the UK, that tends to mean Oxbridge, LSE, UCL and Kings.

In our everyday lives, we seek advice from friends and colleagues; we don’t trust people who have been wrong before, or who seem to be biased – or with whom we just don’t get along. Exactly the same applies to the process of policymaking and, in our experience, in the process of research collaboration. Negative stereotypes abound on both sides, and our review found that personal experiences, judgments, and values were important factors in whether evidence was used.

Yes folks that thing you thought was evidence-based could well be just as partial as designing policy via an impromptu focus group over lunch in the Dog and Partridge.

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Ideology, ideology, ideology!

At first the term "ideology" referred to the study of ideas and their origins. Over time this has transmogrified into our modern, familiar - I might say comfortable - definition:

...a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.

It is for this reason that ideology is important yet it has become something of a pejorative term - I recall someone upset by my thoughts on public health sending a screaming tweet: "Ideology, ideology, ideology" it said, as if I would be upset by my observations being basis on a more-or-less coherent set of thoughts.

We have arrived at the point where, in the minds of too many, there are two distinct positions in any debate or discussion - "ideology" and "evidence-based" - where the latter is deemed to be superior. The problem I have is that, without a premise for your proposal, prescription or policy, any amount of evidence won't necessarily tell you that it's the right (or wrong) thing to do.

We're told - repeatedly - that alcohol can be damaging to our health. I'm guessing that nearly all adults and most children are aware of the risks (although not necessarily how to assess or quantify those risk) involved in drinking. Let's assume that some evidence is presented showing that, if we increase the price of drink, then consumption will fall and fewer people will damage their health as a result. Indeed, since there's lots of evidence that increasing price reduces consumption, we could apply the evidence to any activity or product that has negative social consequences.

The point isn't what the evidence says but whether we should enact some policy on the basis of that evidence - is it right to make booze more expensive for everyone because a small number abuse alcohol? This isn't a decision you can make on the basis of evidence, it can only be made on the basis of ideology - a premise that says all population intervention in personal choice is justified on health grounds. The evidence says the decision - putting up the price of beer - will have a positive impact on health but the decision to restrict choice (for that is what a price intervention is) is ideological.

As of course would be the opposite decision - not increasing price because personal choice trumps public health.

Ideology matters.

Our public administration has adopted an ideology that needs, in the interests of democracy and freedom, to be challenged. Yet whenever a challenge to the premise (essentially that government intervention is always justified) is made, the response isn't to present a logical rationale for that ideology but to gather together "evidence" showing how government intervention is a good thing. "What matters is what works", as Tony Blair would have put it.

The result of this outlook - a sort of anti-ideology ideology - is a sterile debate conducted on the basis of fact-checking, appeals to (evidence-supplying) authority and attacks on the critic for basing his argument on 'ideology'. The irony of this is that debates between, say, Marxists and libertarians are more honest and interesting than the faux-debate that dominates much of our current political discourse.

Take a look at the debate over Scottish independence. The Scottish government under its Scottish Nationalist Party leadership has produced a vast tomes setting out the "evidence" for independence with the emphasis on the economic case. And those opposed to independence have, likewise, set out their case for retaining the United Kingdom.

However, the argument isn't about the economy at all. Nor is it about the welfare state or the army or nuclear bombs or any of the other aspects of the debate. The argument is ideological - should Scotland be independent or not. And the voters will, in the main, make their decision to for 'yes' or 'no' on the basis of this ideological debate. Or rather on the basis of an ideological debate that simply hasn't happened because we've forgotten how to lift politics out from the banal and pragmatic and into the realm of ideas.

Accusing someone of "ideology, ideology, ideology" isn't an insult, that base of ideas allows us to make policy choices where the evidence doesn't direct us to a choice - the world of macroeconomics is filled with such choices, for example. And ideology provides the basis for these choices, big and important choices that affect everyone's lives, to be debated and discussed.

Ideology really does matter and we should use it more often.

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Secrecy is inevitable and probably necessary

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Secrecy is necessary.

I don’t say this as some form of defence for authoritarian government, for the gagging of journalists or to defend “national security”. These are spurious explanations for secrecy.

No, we need secrecy. And shall have that secrecy.

To illustrate, let me tell you a story about a former colleague, now an MP. Whenever there was something he wanted to say – a discussion needed – he would suggest we went for a walk. At the time, I assumed that the reason was to allow us a talk and smoke – but now I realise that the point was to avoid being overheard and to ensure that anything said was unattributable. Secrecy was protected since only the two of us knew what was said and, as importantly, every thing said was deniable. I know a great deal about that former colleague.

The theft of diplomatic cables and their transfer to a third party has been lauded by some as a kind of ultimate freedom of information success. Yet if we stop and think for a minute or two, we’ll realise that the result of these ‘leaks’ – the consequence of insecure systems – will be to end the documentation of opinion and analysis. This creates a less transparent, riskier and more corruptible policy and decision-making process. We have seen the degree to which our masters are trustworthy and having a yet more opaque system would act only to increase the opportunity for self-interest and greed to dominate choices made by politicians, civil servants and other public servants.

You may revel in this new age of open-ness – where theft is excusable because of some cod interpretation of public interest. But we will all pay for it since the response of governments will be to make undocumented decisions wherever possible. We will become a land governed even more by tittle-tattle, back-stabbing and slander rather than an more open, more democratic society.

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A mad economist writes (some tips on policy-making from over the pond)

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The Whited Sepulchre reminds us – and a welcome reminder it is to – about some economic truths that too many commenters ignore. The good blogger asks a series of questions to which you might respond with one of these: 1) Strongly Agree, 2) Somewhat Agree, 3) Somewhat Disagree, 4) Strongly Disagree, or 5) Not Sure.

The questions are:

Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services.

Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago.

Rent control leads to housing shortages.

A company with the largest market share is not a monopoly.

Third World workers working for American companies overseas are not being exploited.

Free trade does not leads to unemployment.

Minimum wage laws raise unemployment.

Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.

Now I know The Whited Sepulchre is an American and they speak slightly differently from us but these are important questions. And it is important that we understand the right answers and what they mean for policy making.

The right answer, dear reader, is either ‘strongly agree’ or ‘agree’ in every case (and don’t go trying all that ‘ethical’, ‘socially responsible’ stuff – this is economics we’re talking here and economics is amoral). Having established this we can make informed policy decisions rather than emotive appeals to specific target audiences or ideological obsessions.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have minimum wages, development control or rent measures but we do at least know that these decisions have a downside (which may or may not be significant). And we’ll get away from nonsensical statements like these:

Raising the minimum wage will increase employment by getting people off benefits

The planning system has no influence on house prices

Making trainers in Vietnam is immoral

…and so on. We allow what we would like to be the case to govern our decisions rather than what actually is the case. I’m reminded as ever of the wise words of P.J. O’Rourke:

I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God's heavenly country club. Santa Claus is another matter. He's cute. He's nonthreatening. He's always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who's been naughty and who's been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he's famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.

Were Santa Claus an Englishman he would vote Labour. We already know God’s a Tory!

Soft outcomes need hard measures to be acceptable in policy-making

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Julian Dobson writes Living with Rats – you should all read it. Not only is it well-written, insightful and thoughtful but he talks about things that matter to real people outside the bureaucratic circle – why some places are crap, why regeneration is about people rather than buildings and why too often local initiative is stifled by the demands of national government, big business or great institutions. He’s also a Hammer.

However, sometimes Julian lets his writerliness get ahead of things and this post, “Why is it so hard to be soft?”, is one example. What follows is a gentle fisk – responding to a series of questions posed by Julian. At the heart of this is the common fallacy that economics is about money (it isn’t) and that opinion or feeling is impossible to quantify (let me introduce the Opinion Poll). Julian’s words are in italics:

It's hard to measure the quality of a person's life. But you'd have to be a bit soft to think you could do it entirely by calculating their income.

Well yes of course which is why we don’t measure quality of life using income measures – we use other objective measures: what we consume, our health, our conditions of living, our ability to act freely. All of these are strong quantitative measures to which can be added the tremendous contribution of market research towards the quantitative measurement of opinion.

It's hard to assess the success of a policy against a range of desirables, such as economic output, sustainability and equality. But you'd have to be a bit soft to think the one that's easiest to measure numerically is by definition a good proxy for all the others.

No it’s not – so long as we set clear quantifiable outcomes (and such exist for economic output, sustainability and equality) then measurement is merely a matter of collecting and assessing the necessary data. If a policy does not have, say, equality objectives then to measure it against such “objectives” is mistaken and bad research – a classic flaw in policy evaluation is that the scope of the evaluation is set in hindsight without consideration of the original intentions behind the policy-making.

It's hard to measure how worthwhile and rewarding a person's job is, and harder still to measure it across a workforce. But you'd have to be a bit soft to think that the net number of jobs was more important than the sense of self-worth, motivation and aspiration people feel in doing them.

It seems obvious that, for the quarter of the working age population without a job, the “net number” (not sure what it’s netted from) of jobs is of crucial importance. And the knowledge that, if they had a job, it would be worthwhile and rewarding ain’t much comfort!

It's hard to calculate the value of a cultural asset like a theatre or art gallery or public artwork or live music venue. But you'd have to be a bit soft to think you could do it just by bums on seats or spending on merchandise and tickets.

There are real measures of cultural value beyond ticket sales, market price or merchandise. Crucially, approaches seek to capture either the opportunity cost (life without the cultural asset) or to price culture. Simply saying “oo isn’t it lovely” doesn’t wash!

It's hard to calculate how people feel about where they live and how involved they are in their communities. But you'd have to be a bit soft to imagine the price of houses or the proportion of people voting will tell you the whole story

First, house prices are a nice proxy for what people generally think of a place – that thinking may not reflect everything but it does reveal where people want to live! We can measure involvement (and be “shocked” at how low it is), we can use self-referenced definitions of community and we can use good old opinion research to ascertain what they think about where they live.

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The point of all this isn’t to dismiss qualitative “research” – if you want to frame a question, get an instant response to an idea, provide some context to research or guide our tactical decision-making. But qualitative research must not lull us into rejecting scientific method – the testing of hypotheses with repeatable experiments with results that are quantitatively comparable.

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