Society as a Playmobile diorama - Macron's vision of Europe

Raedwald describes M. Macron's vision of Europe's (sorry the EU's) glorious future:

Here is the barracks with the SimEU army, here the detention prison of the SimEU Office of Internal Security; here is the SimEU Central Bank and the SimEU Ministry of Finance. And the whole thing populated by busy and happy little SimEU citizens on SimEU minimum wage playing safely on social media regulated by the SimEU Prefecture for Internet Safety, after a hard day's work inventing innovative new Euro things at the SimEU Creative Foundation.

This captures the prevalent centrist (I can now use this term as a perjorative) idea that nothing at all happens correctly unless it is overseen, regulated or controlled by a benign government. Macron - and indeed most of the centrist elite he represents - sees government as a sort of Playmobile diorama with people inserted (with due consideration of diversity, naturally) into socially useful functions by a stern but caring emperor.

Macron's vision, uncritically reported by pretty much all of Europe's main news agencies, is for a European Union modelled on France - centralised, managed by an elite through government agencies, mistrusting of democracy and economically protectionist. At the heart of all this is the increasingly common belief that unspecified foreign agents are conspiring to attack the idea of Europe - those little playmobile figures clearly aren't bright enough to decide for themselves they must be tempted into this populism by sinister manipulative forces.

It is not, however, just democracy that Macron and the centrists mistrust - it's business too. I know that all of Europes Macron enthusiasts (do we call them Macaroons?) can summon up cuddly words about a mixed economy and all of them have mates who work for big private concerns but underneath this veneer is a sort of Faustian pact with big business: you go along with us on protectionism, environmentalism and social control, and we'll protect your international interests.

Despite government being very bad at innovation (it always helps to check how regional economic growth is entirely unrelated to government spending on research) our Macaroons want to pile money into government-sponsored research. There'll be an "innovation council" spending taxpayers cash on things like Artificial Intelligence - creating lots of well-paid jobs in universities but little else. And a further splurge of research agencies doing independent scientific research to combat the influence of corporate lobbies (except of course, as we saw with the TPD and with GMOs when those corporate lobbies are helpful to the anti-business, anti-choice ideology).

A lot of the criticism of Macron's vision focuses on how it "involves the EU gaining further powers and greater influence over people’s lives, at the expense of sovereign states" but I've a feeling this misses the point a bit - the vision of applying the French model of government to the EU is about reducing the choices available to communities and of a state that is not subject to the vageries of democracy or the creativity of the market.

The EU's battle lines (regardless of what the UK does in this matter) are drawn - an uncomfortable alliance of socialists, liberals, old-school conservatives and centrist technocrats versus a mish-mash of populists, proto-facists and Trotskyites. Right now it looks like the former will have enough MEPs to at least stem the populist tide. After May, unless there's an upheaval of unprecendented scale, there'll still be pretty much the same set of faces running the EU and speaking for "Europe" as there are now. And any new faces won't be populists or trotskyites, they'll be reliable career-minded technocracts. Which, of course, is why we need to leave.

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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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Is the problem technocracy not postmodernism?

The idea of a university as a circle of professorial peers, each with apprentices and each practicing a craft, tends to be replaced by the idea of a university as a set of research bureaucracies, each containing an elaborate division of labor, and hence of intellectual technicians. For the efficient use of these technicians, if for no other reason, the need increases to codify procedures in order that they may be readily learned.

I was struck by this observation - from C. Wright Mills, "The Sociological Imagination". It feels an essential truth, a description of the university's journey from a collegiate environment where knowledge is explored to a complex bureaucracy dedicated to the production of research. There are a lot of people culpable in this journey - Mills points to what others called the 'military-industrial complex' (with a side swipe at research-driven advertising agencies) and to 'human engineers' in bureaucracy:

To say that ‘the real and final aim of human engineering’ or of ‘social science’ is ‘to predict’ is to substitute a technocratic slogan for what ought to be a reasoned moral choice. That too is to assume the bureaucratic perspective within which—once it is fully adopted—there is much less moral choice available.

We hear from Jordan Peterson and others that the problem is postmodernism and relativism. I've a little inkling that empiricism, an obsession with uncontextualised data, is perhaps more of a problem. Technocracy is far more the core ideology of the 'liberal elite' than is postmodernism - it is the idea that bureaucracy can discover a solution through the collection and analysis of data without reference to any moral foundation that sits at the heart of our disconnection with government.

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So long as we're not free, we need democracy

Thurber's Very Proper Gander in full flow

I like and respect many Leavers, but I’ve never shared their enthusiasm for democracy – I want liberty and prosperity, and I don’t want to trade that in just to give my stupid next-door neighbours more power over my life.

What follows isn't about the recent EU referendum although, like much discussion and debate right now, it is inevitably framed by the issues surrounding our vote to leave the EU. The quotation above is from Sam Bowman, the Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute and it cuts to the heart of what I think will prove the dominant division in politics for the coming generations - the debate about democracy and its purposes. We will have a bickering coalition of collectivists and populists arguing that democracy is pretty much everything opposed by an equally troubled combination of technocrats and libertarians to tell us democracy is an anachronism.

In some respects, the argument for more democracy is akin to the argument for more railways - a nineteenth century solution to twenty-first century problems. yet, at the same time, we are vocal in our support for "having a say", "being consulted" - for votes, elections and polling. Public opinion, far more than evidence, ideology or reason is the driver of political decision-making - Sam Bowman's "stupid next-door neighbours" really are as important to what government's do as are the wise minds in Sam's think tank.

The advocate of democracy pipes up here - we're all equal in the eyes of the law and we all should have an equal say. This is the 'end of politics' envisioned by UKIP's Douglas Carswell:

Douglas Carswell, a British member of parliament, likens traditional politics to HMV, a chain of British record shops that went bust, in a world where people are used to calling up whatever music they want whenever they want via Spotify, a popular digital music-streaming service.

For Carswell, political systems of representative democracy are legacy systems, clunky, unresponsive, corrupt and not well-liked. We need, Carswell would argue, to embrace technology to create an iDemocracy filled with referendums, instant consultations and dispersed decision-making. It isn't democracy that is failing and out-of-date but the institutions of representative democracy - parliaments, parties, election days and preening politicians. Release democracy from these constraints and it will flourish, will once again capture Rousseau's 'general will' as the flow of information from and between people allows a fluid, data-driven iGovernment.

But is it so simple? Here's John Naughton reviewing historian Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow:

...modern society is organised round a combination of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market. And each of these foundations is being eaten away by 21st-century science and technology. The life sciences are undermining the individualism so celebrated by the humanist tradition with research suggesting that “the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms”.

We don't have to accept Harari's argument to recognise that, as every science fiction reader will tell you, for every optimistic technological future there's a frightening dystopia. Carswell's web-enabled democracy sits at odds to Harari's world - one more like H G Wells 'Time Machine' than a happy world of progress. Using that metaphor of nineteenth century technology beloved of so many tech writers, Harari depresses us with:

“the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand 21st century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.”

So which is it to be, Harari's world of Morlocks and Eloi or Carswell's liberated world filled with empowered citizens actively engaged in the new democracy through a new politics? Cynics, the wise ones at least, will recognise in Harari's world the realisation of that part of post-democracy we'd call technocracy. This is government by experts informed by ever more sophisticated 'Big Data' analyses. A world where there is no ideology merely data-driven answers to questions posed by the experts. A world where, if Harari and many others are right, the expert won't even be human. Public opinion plays no role in this decision-making other than as one imput to the expert system.

What we have is Hari Seldon's psychohistory, the idea that everything can be boiled down to a set of equations - algorhithms as we'd call them today:

“It is the first lesson you must unlearn. The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct. Instead, it is merely the best that could be done at the time. Over a dozen generations of men have pored over these equations, worked at them, taken them apart to the last decimal place, and put them together again. They’ve done more than that. They’ve watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they’ve checked reality, and they have learned.”

Although part of me suspects Gordon Dickson's Final Encyclopaedia is a better analogy, the lesson here is that there's just too much to know, that every model is a simplification and every trawl through 'Big Data' only touches a tiny part of the potential evidence. For all its wonders, technocracy does not provide the answers - the more we know, the more we're aware of what we don't know (unless, of course, you're a macroeconomist). And technocracy without democracy gets uncomfortably close to fascism even though its advocates do not see this problem and persist with ideas like basic income, depoliticised public services, industrial strategies and the belief that the economy can be directed from a room in the central bank.

There are two distinct responses to the EU referendum result. One is to reject the idea of referendums - to put Carswell's iDemocracy firmly back in its tin and screw the lid down really tightly. The other is to observe that the experts - the technocracy - were out-of-touch, unable to express their understanding other than through a patronising appeal to authority: "I'm an expert and you should therefore agree with me". The experts were not 'of the people' and, if the direction of technogical advance Harari describes is rights, future experts may not be people at all.

All this takes us back to Sam Bowman's quote where he rejects democracy in favour of "liberty and prosperity" and expresses the liberal view that his next-door neighbour (stupid or otherwise) should not have any power over his life. In some ways this libertarian viewpoint isn't set out often enough. Anyone who took an introductory course in political science will have pondered the essential conflict between freedom and democracy. Most usually this is dealt with by adopting the constitionalist view that liberties enshrined in law act as a check on the essential tyranny of democracy - the 55-45 or 52-48 problem.

By accepting liberties, whether we call them constitutional or human rights, our liberal democracy qualifies democracy and, as S E Finer put it, recognises that government is limited, society is pluralistic and that there is no "objective science of society or of morals". I take this as meaning that, when the chips are down, liberty trumps democracy. Just because you've 50% plus one behind you doesn't mean you can run me out of town on a rail. Nor, as Bowman hints, can you take decisions that damage my interests especially if they cause me harm.

The problem is that, while we nod in the direction of liberty, when faced with its realities we favour democracy. We see this in the debate around what is called "hate speech", in the French government banning the burka, and in a host of interventions designed to promote order at the expense of pleasure (because the majority disapprove of that particular pleasure). Perhaps because of its essential nature, our politics shouts more loudly about democracy than about freedom meaning that, too often, we lose the core idea of a government limited by the exercise of that freedom.

This, in a roundabout way, gets us to the problem with Sam Bowman's decision to vote to stay in the EU. As I noted at the start, we're not really concerned with the rights and wrongs of that vote but the real issue is whether the EU is liberal or technocratic. Bowman suggests the former because the institution insists on free movement of people and prevents the use of tax receipts to subsidise private business (there may be other examples but these are the two Bowman cites).

The problem is that these examples may not be the consequence of a commitment to freedom but rather a happy correlation between technocracy and liberalism. Such correlations are - as this note from Noah Smith tells us - pretty rare. Smith sets out a series of things he calls "free-market ideology" that, on reading, are all central elements of the currently dominant technocratic view - the weight of regulation's touch, the faux-privatisation of public services, public-private health systems and controlling monopolies. What matters isn't whether Smith is right but rather that he identifies the flaw in the technocratic ideal that 'Big Data' and the prophets of evidence-based policy have promised.

Bowman proposes supporting an undemocratic technocracy because, currently, it protects some freedoms he values. In the context of the recent referendum this makes sense - UK government is not significantly less technocratic except that, unlike the EU, it is more susceptible to democracy. And right now that democratic pressure is populist, it is Bowman's 'stupid next-door neighbour' demanding that something is done about the demons (and their witches) that infect our society. The result being the moral of Thurber's ' Very Proper Gander':

Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

Right now the main reason for having democracy is the scale of government and that this government does not respond to free choices made in a free market. In the UK government spends about £4 in every £10, it is a behemoth that dominates our society and economy simply because of its size. In other liberal democracies the governmental whale is even larger. We can, and rightly do, celebrate Tax Freedom Day when we start earning for ourselves not the government but this doesn't change the fact that the only brake on the desire of government to grow larger is the existence of democracy.

Until we are able to realise that those things we assume can only be provided by government - schools, roads, hospitals, drains, welfare - don't have to be provided by government, we need to keep that democracy and accept that sometimes Sam Bowman's neighbours get too much say over Sam's life. This is probably wrong but, until the case for libertarianism and a voluntary society is accepted, we really have no other way of keeping the Mr Creosote that is government from overeating.

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The New Fascism - a comment on economic nationalism

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I had a wry smile about Friedrich List. Here's the opening of his wikipedia entry:

Georg Friedrich List (August 6, 1789 – November 30, 1846) was a leading 19th-century German-American economist who developed the "National System" or what some would call today the National System of Innovation. He was a forefather of the German historical school of economics, and considered the original European unity theorist whose ideas were the basis for the European Economic Community.

Now one of the important things about Italian Fascism was the way in which it drew on List (and others) to provide the economic arguments supporting protectionist, centrally-directed economic policies. The central argument - familiar to development economists weaned on import-substitution - is that tariffs are needed to protect nascent industries. Moreover that the cost of this protection to consumers is an acceptable investment in the collective future of the nation.

This isn't to say that List was a Fascist but it is to point out that his economics provides an important rationale for nationalism since it is founded on both the idea of the nation state (not merely the idea of nationhood) and also the belief that nations, as collective identities, compete. You'll be familiar with this idea's associated rhetoric - "global race", "the only way Britain can win", "British jobs for British workers". Such language is appealing and populist, indeed it harks back to an age of one-sided "free trade", ever higher tariff barriers and protectionism.

A further, and essential, element of Fascist economics is the idea that only investment directed by the state - as the embodiment of nation - is good investment. Other investment - by big business especially - represents a drag away from the vital agenda of national development and progress.

This view persists today - here from an article in the FT:

...especially in an economic environment where the only productive use of capital is increasingly through government spending.

Private investment is anti-social, indeed it represents:

...the pursuit of personal gain over the common good in a nefarious and unproductive way for society.

Since the writer here isn't proposing a Stalinist command economy, the only conclusion is that she believes that the state, as the mirror of society's needs, must direct investment in the economy. And, just as was the case with Italian Fascism's drawing on List, a core policy is the rejection of consumption today in order that the state of the future may thrive. Today this policy is couched in terms of 'climate change', 'well-being', 'sustainability' and 'equality' rather than 'industrialisation', 'competitiveness' and 'national power' but it is otherwise indistinguishable.

Moreover, like fascism, these ideas are anti-democratic (or in modern parlance post-democratic):

Party government was formally suspended in Italy on 18 November 2011. On that day, less than a week after Silvio Berlusconi’s resignation, a new government led by the former European commissioner Mario Monti received the support of the Chamber of Deputies, with only the regionalist-populist Lega Nord (Northern League) voting against it. By an overwhelming majority, all but one of Italy’s parliamentary parties approved a government that contained not a single party representative or elected parliamentarian.

And this returns me to my wry smile about List:

...the original European unity theorist whose ideas were the basis for the European Economic Community

Leaving aside the admirable desire to avoid war, the European project was founded on the idea of state-directed, protectionist economics. The entire programme is the antithesis of laissez faire and the political imperative is both anti-democratic - as we have seen with the response to the Euro crisis - and anti-enterprise. Or rather against enterprise that falls outside the 'plan', does not confirm to the 'agenda' and lacks the endorsement of collective technocratic leadership.

Today we tend to characterise fascism as ignorance, jackboots and racism but the core economic ideas remain - nations, regions or cities competing, the state directing economic investment and the belief that technical expertise is better than democratic leadership. Above all there is this view that we have, as a nation (or in the EU's case 'group of nations') a 'common purpose', a greater mission than our personal, selfish interest. And that this purpose requires sacrifice - higher taxes, lower incomes, reduced choice - for the greater good of the nation.

This is the New Fascism.

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Forza La Tecnocrazia?

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The new Prime Minister of Italy remarks:

The absence of political personalities in the government will help rather than hinder a solid base of support for the government in the parliament and political parties because it will remove one ground for disagreement

It worries me - as does this:

He added that he had received “many signals of encouragement from our European partners and the international world,” for the new administration.

And we should take note of this comment - from a real, elected politician:

“We salute the Franco-German directorate before it officially takes control of the country...Maybe they'll let us speak Italian for a bit longer but the decisions are going to be taken elsewhere."

Forza La Tecnocrazia!

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All hail our new philosopher kings!

The governance model du jour appears to be “technocracy”:

Another response involves the surgical removal of elected leaders in Greece and Italy and their replacement with technocratic experts, trusted within the EU to pass economic reforms deemed appropriate by policymakers in Berlin, the bloc’s top paymaster, and at EU headquarters in Brussels. Europe this week prised open the lid of the dustbin of history to accommodate Mr Papandreou, Greece’s Socialist prime minister since October 2009, and Mr Berlusconi, the billionaire who has dominated Italian politics since 1994.

As we saw with the bureaucratic fury at Mr Papandreou’s plan for a referendum, Europe’s leaders have lost confidence in the choices that the people might make – democratic solutions are rejected something even the pro-Europe FT sees as momentous:

The sidelining of elected politicians in the continent that exported democracy to the world was, in its way, as momentous a development as this week’s debt market turmoil. In effect, eurozone policymakers have decided to suspend politics as normal in two countries because they judge it to be a mortal threat to Europe’s monetary union.

Yet the appeal to the expert in times of crisis is not new – indeed, the manner in which we are governed increasingly reflects a mistrust of the elected official (and an abject loathing of the idea of popular democracy through referendums or other participatory models). The ‘Man in Whitehall’ – or his equivalent in Brussels and in your local town hall – really does know best.

Technocracy’s origins lie – like so many of the slightly scary and mostly illiberal ideas of government – in the years between the two great wars of the twentieth century. At first it was a slightly cranky idea promoted by a self-educated engineer called Howard Scott that drew on the ideas of Thorstein Veblen (who is most remembered for coining the term “conspicuous consumption”). Veblen proposed a society and economy managed by a ‘soviet of engineers’:

As a matter of course, the powers and duties of the incoming directorate will be of a technological nature, in the main if not altogether; inasmuch as the purpose of its coming into control is the care of the community's material welfare by a more competent management of the country's industrial system.

In the US technocracy was swept away by the ‘New Deal’ and FDR’s National Recovery Administration – those almost fascist institutions of American recovery. Yet the idea of government by expert has never departed, we remain captivated by the idea that we can with the help of the wisest and brightest plan a better society. Here Naomi Klein advocates planning as the way to address an identified environmental crisis:

In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a serious response to the climate threat involves recovering an art that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: planning. Lots and lots of planning.

Once again we turn to the philosopher kings:

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils — no, nor the human race, as I believe — and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.

Great men can solve our problems but only if they are freed from having to pander to the demos – to the rabble, the swinish multitude, to ordinary men and women. Such is the mission of Europe today – government by central banker, administration by academic economist and rule by the bureaucrat. We have rediscovered the District Commissioner – no longer florid of face, swagger stick under the arm but now besuited by Armani, trained in the great institutions of governance, silver-haired, multi-lingual and international in perspective.

Twenty-first Century technocracy is government by such men – unelected, disdainful of democracy and charming of manner. We the people watch helpless as they slide smoothly from commission to cabinet, from governor’s mansion to state house and from academic sinecure to mahogany boardroom table. These are our philosopher kings riding to save us from the disaster of the market’s chaos and democracy’s failure.

At some point we will get a say – the new philosopher kings will permit this. But will it be the exercise of power or a sop to the idea of democracy, a fig leaf to cover the triumph of the technocrat?

And do these people really know better? Were they not in charge before it all went wrong?

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