The transformational merit of personal advocacy and advice.

The public sphere only represents narrow interests and obsessions because most of us undervalue investment in it. Fix that problem and you will transform society.

Economists have shown that, for most voters, it’s quite irrational to even bother advocating politically for our own interests most of the time. There is even have a term for it – Rational Ignorance. 

While it may be rational for most people to abstain from active politicking for ourselves and our families, the theory shows that there is a subset of the population who are positively compelled to engage in politics, because it is a very satisfying and rewarding venture for them - even in the short term. 

Because the rest of us don’t invest time and money in politics, those privileged, highly-motivated, time-rich active and narrow minorities - rentiers - can dominate our democratic polity with their demands and vetoes. 

Mancur Olson’s 1982 classic, ‘The Rise and Decline of Nations’ wisely foresees a future that we can all recognise today. Olson knew that modern states would get weaker in the face of such active and purposeful minorities. That it would result in rigidities that will slowly strangle growth and bring the economy to a halt.

He knew that it was not only anti-democratic – it was also economically crippling.

None of our official safeguards are of much help either. The media-ish space where we are supposed to come together to solve our own problems and hold power to account – what Jürgen Habermas described as the public sphere - is in private ownership, flooded with other people’s money. We’ve always known this, of course, but public-interest journalism is more defunded than ever before, with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos painting this problem all over our consciousness in big stripes of primary colours.

Even the ballot paper is little help to us. Elections offer a menu that is too focussed on the concerns of lobbyists, political hobbyists, cranks, and grifters via the political parties that they dominate. The global populist clustershambles of 2024 was always going to be our destination.

Solve the problem of exclusion-through-rational-ignorance and we can transform our economy while also reawakening our sense of democratic optimism. But … but, but, problem we will encounter is that all of the obvious fixes – state funding of political parties, censorship, or even regulation of the media, etc – are rightly unpalatable in a liberal democracy.

So, how can we encourage everyone to become an investor in the public sphere?

Economists use the term ‘Merit Goods’ to help even the most convinced free-marketeer to support sensible government interventions. For example, if we left education to the hidden hands of the market, most of us would have had much poorer schooling, and – crucially – the market would work less effectively.

We also talk about roads, healthcare, social housing or public transport – things that people are unlikely to pay for personally, but that society needs to function – as Merit Goods. We solve this problem of rational private pennypinching by legitimising collective provision of the things a good society needs to function.

So here is our solution: We can solve the problem of Rational Ignorance simply by correcting the very human tendency to undervalue personal advice, representation and advocacy.

Try to imagine, for a moment, if we could all somehow find a way of motivating ourselves to pay for this kind of help, because we've seen that when we don't pay for it, we become part of the service that is sold to those who do. Leaving the problem of political participation aside, we would all suddenly budget more effectively and spend more wisely if we had good impartial advice.

Wiser personal expenditure would mean our personal budgeting would be much more rewarding. Capitalism would be better focussed on human needs and desires. We’d be better savers and investors if we had a budget for financial advice and a right to take paid time off work to be advised well. Our personal savings would be in a better place (to the relief of the welfare state). With this quality of advice and advocacy, the economy would suddenly develop better feedback loops.

This alone would justify doing this.

Also, when we turn to the question of self-interested political advocacy, most of us don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to get into the weeds of policy detail. But imagine we were all suddenly willing to contribute towards having lobbyists paid to understand and represent our interests, competing with those who only represent narrow sectional interests (almost the sole purpose of the entire lobbying industry).

People who would bargain with the government on our behalf, and ensure that we all feel heard for the first time in a long while.

If we did, the public sphere would start to fill up with money intended to serve individual interests more than the sectional interests which currently dominate. The public sphere would suddenly be full of well-capitalised research, commentary and campaigning on behalf of the interests of the politically inactive. Journalists would suddenly find it easier to get a new job. And – best of all – our politics and government would stop being gummed up by so many over-powerful veto groups. Without rentier interests dominating, the productivity-pay gap may even start to close again.

Simply by treating personal advice and advocacy as a Merit Good, so many other problems would unravel. It would take us a small step towards solving one of humanity’s biggest problems – the collapse of the democratic and political structures that we rely on for our future peace and security.

If we do this, our only remaining challenge is how we find imaginative ways to pay for it without annoying fickle taxpayers (most of whom would benefit hugely if we do). I think there are a few politically popular candidates (i.e., not ‘working people’) for the funding of this idea I will post some ideas on how we can find this money in due course.

Layered delegate elections

 I saw this from the inestimable Dave Snowden (and probably blogged about it) back in 2008 but it's interesting to revisit it:

"I have often thought that you should really only vote for people of whom you can have some knowledge. By the time we get to electing European Parliament Members we are so divorced from any knowledge of the individual in question that we are just voting my numbers, or rather tribal loyalties or sound-bites.

Maybe if we had layered delegate elections it would work better? I vote for my district councillors, who vote for members of parliament, who vote for the European Parliament. Each layer has knowledge of the individuals and their capability to hold office. 

Come to think of it, that was the way the founding fathers designed the American Constitution. They realised that the President was too powerful an office to be subject to the Tyranny of a mass plebiscite and instead took the approach of an electoral college."

Electoral politicians want to be liked - and be seen to be virtous - too much

About 25 mins into this BBC profile of Machiavelli, we hear some lessons for modern politicians.

Was it a critique of princely duplicity? Or some ruthless morality? (I believe, the latter, and so does Quentin Skinner).

What we really really want

This discussion of the work of Edward Tolman is fascinating - not just for the ‘what do we want’ question, including the resolve of economists to settle on 'revealed preferences'.

"Edward Tolman was an American psychologist who worked mostly in the 1920s to 1950s, and spent most of his career at the University of Berkeley (their psychology building was named ‘Tolman Hall’ in his honour until it was demolished in 2019). He was a member of the so-called ‘neo-behaviourist’ generation, the cohort of psychologists, with figures like Clark Hull and B.F. Skinner, who took up the banner of behaviourism in the middle of the 20th century. They developed it into a robust research framework and succeeded in making it the dominant experimental paradigm – especially in the United States – for several decades."

Have the 'elites' really changed much?

 Here's a deep dive into David Brooks' Bohos/Bobos thesis - this time from Peter Levine. 

Levine is tempted to agree with Brooks but a close look at the data told him otherwise.

"It is true that elites have become somewhat more liberal since 2000, but the changes are small. Overall, elites were more liberal than non-elites in the 1970s and still are today. (To be sure, what it means to be “liberal” has changed, but this is still a reason to doubt a story of ideological realignment.)"

Protesting versus democracy

Apropos the debate around the right to protest, this is something I've written about a few times in passing and directly here.

Last week, a Jewish man - Gideon Falter - was challenged by the police near to a 'pro-Palestinian' protests. As the BBC reported, 

"On 13 April Mr Falter, who was wearing a kippah skull-cap, was threatened with arrest and told by police his presence was causing a "breach of peace". He has called for the Met's commissioner to resign."

It was interesting to read the perspective of the Community Security Trust - a charity helping UK Jews with security and antisemitism. 

Our problem is that 'protest' and activism are valorised and treated as indispensable parts of our political discourse. In my view, they are often counter-democratic.

Popperian v Bayesian

Here. the science writer Tom Chivers reviews Lee McIntyre's book "How to Talk to a Science Denier".

"I think the basic problem is that McIntyre is a Popperian. That is, in hugely oversimplified terms, he believes that no amount of evidence can confirm a theory: but evidence can falsify it. “If we find only evidence that fits our theory, then it might be true,” he writes. “But if we find any evidence that disconfirms our theory, it must be ruled out.”

I, on the other hand, am a Bayesian. I have some prior belief and I assign some level of probability to it: “climate change is real and dangerous”: 90%; “the world is flat”, 0.1%. And then each new piece of evidence shifts my belief a little: if next year NASA say “we got new photos in, looks like Earth is sitting on the back of a turtle”, then I’ll upgrade my belief in a flat earth to, I dunno, 1.5% (but also upgrade my belief in there being mad people at NASA to 95%)."

I think I agree with this conclusion:

"He recognises that beliefs are part of people’s identity, and that that makes it hard to change them – but again, applies the lesson only to the weird, wrong, other people, not to himself and people like him. The near-total lack of introspection renders the whole grand project largely meaningless. I am right, you are wrong, the only thing we need to discuss is how to make you realise how wrong you are."

In a world where politics is a legitimate - evan a valorised - hobby, introspection is a handicap. 

Law v Politics

Law is about making promises and other commitments into binding obligations

Politics is about making promises and other commitments sound as if they are binding obligations - 'triple lock', 'enshrined in law', 'manifesto commitment', 'sign the pledge', 'mandate'.

A point that is repeatedly made by David Allen Green - here, here and here for example.

Philipino citizens and their understanding of how disinformation works

This article from a few years ago - on how the Philipines ("the petri dish of the global disinformation epidemic") has responded with citizen initiatives. The full report is here [pdf] but the article itself is a good summary.

To be honest, some of the conclusions chime so uncannily close to my own, that I'm a little suspicious. It's interesting just how sophisticated the conclusions of those consulted are on the roots of disinfo.

Mancur Olson's dictum - that “the deliberation about the allocation of public goods should itself be public good” seems to be one that this citizens panel totally understands. They talk about how expensive fake news is to manufacture, how defunded journalism drives it, and how the growing distrust in the media can largely be explained by the fact that the media is allied to some political and economic interests and not others.

I would be interested to see a deep dive into how rigorously this citizens' initiative was managed - did the citizens concerned find themselves steered by the biases of the organisers or not. If this exercise was a valid one, for me (as someone who argues these points repeatedly, treats them as self-evident truths, regarding myself as some kind of voice in the wilderness on this stuff) its conclusions are huge.

Libertarianism v liberty - latest

This looks interesting, particularly for those who define ‘liberty’ in opposition to the state, and in the light of Proudhon’s objection to being “…watched, inspected, spied upon, numbered…. enrolled ….checked, estimated, valued…”

theordinalsociety.com

Is white working-class racism an overstated problem?

Political success depends upon donations from wealthy purposeful groups.

In pandering to Wall St donors, are the US Democrats determined to point to something other than the socially-useless brutality of markets as reasons why voters (many of whom are actually socially liberal) vote against them?

From here:

"....most people assume layoffs are just cold hard economic reality, the unavoidable result of market forces taking their toll on uncompetitive businesses. But it’s not always true. Healthy companies will cut jobs just to up share prices for executives, who increasingly are compensated in company equity. Leopold cites a stat saying 85% of executive compensation comes in the form of stock awards, creating massive incentives to spend on buybacks. I’ve seen both higher and lower numbers, but even the low end (Harvard Business Review put the number at 59% globally and 75% in “the Americas”) is significant.

In the end, Leopold posits that while Democratic voters believe they need to shift to more illiberal positions to win working class voters, they’d more likely need to emphasize mass layoffs as a root of rural anger, which would force them to choose between Wall Street donors and rural votes."

As a sidebar question, I wonder if there are plenty of people who actually hold socially-liberal attitudes themselves, but regard themselves as part of a tribe that ostensibly doesn't? 

Adam Smith - a man of the left?

A nice thread on Twitter from Branko Milanovic. I'm not sure how long Twitter will allow people to ... er.... read stuff on Twitter, or licence threadreader to 'unroll' threads (as they have done here) so I'm going to take a chance and copy this thread out here:

When in my recent talk in Edinburgh I claimed that Adam Smith could be seen as "a man of the left" (these terms btw are not used in the Visions of Inequality) this was based on the following: 

Smith's extraordinary strong critique of how the rich have acquired their wealth (plunder, corruption, collusion, trade companies, monopoly, colonialism). That critique is often stronger than Marx's critique of "primitive accumulation". 

Smith's view that of all social classes, only the interests of employers are opposed to the social interest because advancement of society implies a decrease in the rate of profit, and hence lower income for them. Netherlands is often cited there.

Smith's string belief that capitalists' advice should not influence govt policy. This is so because their interest runs counter social interest (previous point), and in addition b/c they are good in proffering sophistry. 

Smith's view that the division of labor (which of course leads to greater productivity) simultaneously makes workers less interested in the rest; so the low orders are always "dumber" in richer than in poorer countries, in towns than in countryside. 

This requires free elementary public education (a big step for 1776).

Even Smith's distrust of the govt can be seen, in part, as left-wing b/c the govts then were formed by the rich and powerful and not by popular vote. 

Finally, Smith's criticism of the wealth of the few (Spain and Portugal are mentioned there) which have left the rest of the nation in the "beggarly" condition. 

Revolutionary politics as a hobby

 Via Nigel: from Summer 1978, Intervention No2 - contributions to Marxist studies.

Bohos and Bobos

This - by David Brooks in The Atlantic - about 'Bohos' and 'Bobos' [£] is very good on shifting modern social hierarchies that allow people with high-end power-boats to think of themselves as downtrodden (Bobos). But also on the Bohos as well....

"....highly educated, curious, ironic, wittily countercultural. X people tend to underdress for social occasions, Fussell wrote. They know the best wine stores and delis. They have risen above the muck of mainstream culture to a higher, hipper sensibility."

And...

"Spending lots of money on any room formerly used by the servants was socially defensible: A $7,000 crystal chandelier in the living room was vulgar, but a $10,000, 59-inch AGA stove in the kitchen was acceptable, a sign of your foodie expertise. When it came to aesthetics, smoothness was artificial, but texture was authentic. The new elite distressed their furniture, used refurbished factory floorboards in their great rooms, and wore nubby sweaters made by formerly oppressed peoples from Peru."

MP's second jobs

Are second jobs for MPs such a good idea?

Well, one thing we know about them is that the types of second jobs that MPs have skew dramatically towards financial services and PR/lobbying. Draw your own conclusions from that.

There's a good round-up of the issue in the FT here from a couple of years ago [£] here: 

"In declarations made since the last election in 2019, some of which relate to the year before the vote, 37 MPs have registered income of various kinds from financial services companies — the largest such bloc of corporate income. The sector accounts for 8.1 per cent of UK GDP....

By contrast, just 13 MPs have received income from manufacturers, which contribute 9.9 per cent of GDP. Just 8 MPs have financial links to retailers, which contribute 4.9 per cent. Public relations or lobbying companies have employed 30 MPs."

Since the 2019 election, we've seen a number of MPs using their status to promote the interests of the companies that pay them in unacceptable ways.

There's a lot more to this, as that article shows, but I'm left with one question:

No question sharing the experiences and perspectives of the people that they represent is good for democracy. As Edmund Burke put it in the classical rendition of the role of an elected representative...

"Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

But surely we could find a way of doing it in a way that is less open to corruption or even the perception of it?

A new class of class politics

 Here Jon Cruddas, Paul Thompson, Jo Ingold and Fredrick Harry Pitts struggle to make sense of the relationship between class, work, experience, agency and political destiny. I'm not sure that they come up with any answers but the discussion is illuminating.

Why we chose the wrong leaders

It may be worth your while getting to know about Brian Klaas. Brian is a political scientist who writes for (among others) the Washington Post, and he does a podcast called Power Corrupts which is worth a listen.

Brian's main argument, in his recent book Corruptible, is less that power corrupts, but that power attracts the wrong people in the first place - it's less a matter of power corrupting people, but that political power skews towards people who will be corrupt.

Here is a New Statesman profile of him:

“I conducted 500 interviews with some of the worst people around – and they weren’t normal,” he recalled. “There are quirks about them, there’s something wrong with some of them, but they’re all very, very good at getting into power. And that’s not an accident. There are ways you can counteract that tendency or amplify it, and I think we’re unfortunately amplifying it quite a lot.”

And...

"...power-hungry people are, by definition, more likely to seek power. Whether running for national office or applying to manage the local homeowners’ association, those who get off on the idea of controlling others naturally put themselves forward, while most people look at the stress, scrutiny and public pressure, and politely decline."

It's an interesting side-point that the way politics is conducted - and particularly in the social media age - we seem to be creating a climate in which only people who have very thick skins, and who are ruthless can survive. So, when bad actors deliberately poison public discourse, it has a profoundly anti-democratic outcome (which is the intention). And when people with low stakes in a debate weigh in, promoting distrust, it exacerbates it further.

The importance of James Burnham

"...the view that politics is largely a matter of mystification and trickery, and that the idea of a neutral state is a myth that serves power-hungry ruling elites."

This, from The Tablet (2nd September 2021) is worth a read. I'm not sure I share much of the author's viewpoint, but it's a good round-up of a square peg, and a reminder that agnosticism and pluralism create the space for ideas that become useful in their own time.

How have economists thought about the environment?

 This is a fine, learned and comprehensive free-to-view post on the history of how economists have considered the environment.

Crude populism and TINA

 Here, Jan-Werner Müller offers [pdf] what is, for the most part, a fairly standard synthesis of what populism is. However, this line did leap out at me:

"What might be less obvious is that technocracy and populism seem like two extremes opposed to each other – and yet they share an important characteristic: they are both forms of anti-pluralism. Technocrats hold that there’s only one correct policy solution; populists claim that there is only one authentic will of the people (and only they represent it); whoever disagrees with them, reveals themselves as traitor to the people. For both sides, there is no point in exchanging arguments, no space for debate, and, in the end, no real need for an institution like parliament.

In short: both pose dangers to democracy, and the fact that they can perversely reinforce each other compounds the peril."

The idea that there is no alternative (TINA) is as dangerous as it seemed at the time. 

Werner Müller is really worth reading - particularly for his insights (in the LRB - a long read [£]) into the German intellectual malaise that is particularly noticeable after the invasion of Ukraine.

Has social media created conditions in which liberal democracy can't survive?

Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic (Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid -11th April 2022 - [£]) is very good on the whole issue of social media making democracy more stupid and unsustainable, and more to the point, it's a good all-purpose post on the impact of social media on Representative Democracy.

"In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?"

And... 

"It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side." 

And...

"The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death."

For me, one of the interesting points is the question of 'why are people stupid, all of a sudden?'

I'd argue that we are all quite stupid most of the time, but social media has made it evident, aggregated it, and created conditions which (as I predicted back in 2004) were damaging to Representative Democracy - the only real success story of the democratic west. Many of the authoritarian currents on the crude-populist left can be explained by a political school of thought that had a priesthood, of sorts, and one that understood which paths (e.g., identity) had dragons waiting on them. That priesthood has now been overwhelmed by low-stakes day-trippers - the political hobbyists.

Democracy as a Guiding Star - Max Shachtman

 Here (via Democratiya) is Max Schachtman on "Democracy as a Guiding Star" [pdf] - which includes one perfect heading: 

"Democracy as the road to socialism, socialism as the fulfillment of democracy"

‘The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas,’

 A free-to-read post from conservative blogger Ed West reviewing Paul Johnson's 'Intellectuals' - a take-down of Rousseau, Marx, Bertrand Russell, Sartre and Kenneth Tynan, among many others.

How the fear of being duped makes you an anxious sucker

 A good, free to read post over on Aeon on the fear of being a sucker, and the way that this fear often provides people with an easy alternative to a more useful understanding of power relations. I'm going to give this post a new tag - 'victimhood' - a real vulnerability that is exploited by crude populists.

Understanding vanguardism.

 

A very useful post on Bob from Brockley (from 2013) - understanding Leninism and 'vanguardism':

"The principle of the vanguard party came from Lenin's conviction (based on the thought of his two intellectual mentors, George Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky) that the "the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness," and not able to develop true class consciousness by itself. Thus - whereas Marx argued that the working class could only be emancipated by its own hand and that "communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties because] they have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat" - Lenin saw a need for a vanguard to bring class consciousness to the workers. This means, inevitably, that an enormous investment is made in the truth of the party's positions: only the party is able to pierce the veil of illusion under which the rest of us labour.

And the principle of democratic centralism (fully formulated by the Bolsheviks in 1905, with an increasing emphasis on the "centralism" bit rather than the "democratic" bit only later) is that a party can come to a decision democratically but once it does it must carry it out without dissent.

These principles were passed into the hands of the megalomaniac psychopaths who have flourished in the movement since Lenin's death. Both principles are used to enforce absolute obedience to the party leadership, and to stifle all criticism. Criticism, however trivial, undermines the party's claim on truth, exposing that it lacks the true consciousness the workers expect of it."

Bob goes on to think through the way that the far-left is so easily captured by psychopaths. 

Left authoritarianism

According to Sally Satel, the experts somehow overlooked authoritarians to the left (The Atlantic, September 25th 2021) [£]  - quoting a study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Carl Schmidt and Political Romanticism

Via Roger - from the introduction to this translation of 'Political Romanticism' [pdf] - you can read more about it here. I have been reminded that Schmidt - who eventually became an unrepentant Nazi - is not an unproblematic writer. Still, this passage rings a few bells....

[click on the image for a clearer read]