Some Early Thoughts on The Machinery of Government

I'm enjoying Joseph Heath's latest book, The Machinery of Government. It has particular relevance to me at present, as a UK civil servant currently working on implementation of the NI Protocol, where the UK Government is currently taking what we might describe as a "high legal risk" approach.

At present I've read the first three chapters ("Taking Public administration Seriously", "A General Framework for the Ethics of Public Administration", "Liberalism: From Classical to Modern"), skipped the fourth and fifth on the welfare state and cost-benefit analysis, and am half-way through the sixth on administrative discretion. I assume that chapters four and five are more developed versions of his previous papers on these topics, but may have missed things which would rebut my criticisms below.

Some things I've enjoyed:

• Heath makes a convincing case that the topic is under-studied: state officials wield vast vast power which really doesn't have a good democratic justification. He also, I think, provides a solid explanation of where this justification does come from.
• I have serious disagreements with his interpretation of liberalism, but it's a very clear statement of why he believes it.
• It's also by far the best defence I've read of the Communitarian/Habermasian idea that moral philosophy is about uncovering the principles implicit in our practices, rather than trying to divine an eternal moral law. He compares it to his business ethics, collected in the earlier volume Morality, Competition, and the Firm: "One of the major problems with traditional business ethics is that it treats morality as something entirely external to the practice of business. As a result, the pronouncements of ethicists tend to arrive like an alien imposition, which in turn gives businesspeople license to ignore them, on the grounds that the expectations are simply incompatible with the demands of running a successful business. My approach, therefore, has been to focus on the moral obligations that are already implicit in market relations, and that are advanced through commercial and competition law, as well as regulation." (page x)
• To this end, he talks largely about an existing ethos, various written and unwritten norms which exist around civil service practice. I have been thoroughly convinced that this is the correct approach, as opposed to attempting to derive morality separately and then apply it in this case - despite my utilitarian inclinations.

Some things I've thought less of:

• Every one of Heath's books contains a long history of the topic at hand. His defence of this is that, as a student of Habermas, he believes you can only understand our moral practices through understanding the journey by which we arrived at them. Fair enough - but do you really need 60 pages to do this in a 400 page book?
• Moreover - it's striking that for all that he talks about the history of liberalism, he does not any attempt to give the history of Westminster-style civil services, despite the obvious relevance of this. If one is aiming to defend a particular view of the principles inherent in civil service, it's fair enough to think that John Locke is more important than the Northcote-Trevelyan Reforms, but I'd expect you to at least make the case. For example, I am not aware of any mention of the latter in The Machinery of Government. Nor is there analysis of actually-existing civil service codes beyond the (admittedly, in my experience accurate) statements that they are often vague and give little to no guidance on how to weigh different values like objectivity, neutrality, etc.
• Going deep into history inevitably involves a great deal of historical interpretation. There are some glaringly "controversial" examples - to take one which clearly doesn't affect the main thesis, his claim that "Napoleon was able to conquer most of Europe, not because of any technological or tactical superiority, but rather because of the superior organisation capacity of the French state, not least its power to impose universal male conscription upon the population, which made it possible for Napoleon to field massive armies." (p120). He attributes this to liberalism. Conscription was clearly a boon but:
• (a) logistical innovations which allowed French armies to travel faster, enabling things like the Ulm Maneuvre, were clearly much more important;
• (b) Napoleon didn't exactly outnumber the Russian and Austrian armies he faced, conscription was at most an equalising force;
• (c) this really needs a comparison to the Revolutionary Government which preceded Napoleon;
• (d) why would you use this as your example of liberalism boosting military capacity rather than the well-known example of the UK being able to borrow at lower rates of interest?
• That example merely raises questions of attention to detail. One which I'll admit to not exactly being expert in, but which frankly seems fatal to his thesis if my understanding is correct - the Wars of Religion were ended not by agreement for states to stay out of religion - to follow liberal neutrality - but agreeing, at the Peace of Westphalia, that each ruler would control religion in his own land, and they would not try to force religion on each others' lands. This did not prevent wars, of course, but it prevented the religious wars which Heath claims liberalism arrived to prevent.
• Maybe Hath would say "That's in Germany, I'm talking about the Westminster model; religious wars continued well past 1648 in England." True, but (a) we were also oppressing Catholics much longer than that - the Test Acts were repealed in 1828 - and (b) many of the key things which Heath would attribute to liberalism preceded this.
• His advocacy of a purely political liberalism is fine so far as it goes, but does rather take a lot of the force out of his claims that we don't recognise liberalism for the same reason fish don't recognise water.

We Already Have A Voting Lottery

When, on that fateful day last year, the UK voted to leave the European Union, there was a great deal left as yet undecided. There were a great many paths we could have pursued, ranging from the Norway+ options that would have removed us from the European parliament and little else, to the economists' nightmare No Deal scenario. None of these options could at that point be declared "undemocratic", since the referendum gave us an answer to only a single question. Theresa May - or whoever else might have become Prime Minister - could have, if they so wished, declared that "52% to 48% is no mandate for radical change. We will leave the EU, but smoothly and cautiously" and changed very little.

Instead, the narrative very quickly became that the referendum had ultimately been about immigration, and that the British People had ultimately voted to Take Back Control Of The Borders. It's not hard to see why the notoriously anti-immigration Theresa May wished for this narrative to prevail. Moreover, it's not totally absurd - the campaign for Brexit did, after all, emphasise this as a reason in favour of Brexit (though by no means the only one, or even the main one - remember that bus about the money which could go to the NHS?). What is puzzling, however, is the lack of pushback against this narrative. Theresa May may not have wanted to suggest the vote was anything less than an endorsement of radical change, but why have so many other actors, including many who are in principle in favour of immigration, colluded in this narrative and not challenged this interpretation of the vote?

The answer, of course, is that it is a correct interpretation. Not that you could tell this from the Brexit vote alone, of course - referenda are, much like general elections, a quite incredible effort to extract the minimal possible sliver of information from voters. But we have a great many other surveys and polls of public opinion, conducted with great regularity and on a much richer array of questions than the usual choices offered at the polling station. We know that Brits want less immigration, but this is not because given a choice of two highly uncertain prospects, they chose the one likely to involve less immigration: rather, it is because people from YouGov have asked them exactly what their views of immigration are.



An alternative to universal suffrage that almost only ever appears in the academic literature is the "voting lottery". The idea of this is that rather than collect votes from every single person, we select a certain much smaller number of citizens - say, 1000 - and only ask their votes. This would have three key advantages: firstly it would be cheaper ("But you can't put a financial value on democracy!" "Sure you can. In 2011 we rejected AV because it would be too expensive.") Secondly, by increasing the power of those who actually get to vote, it would give them more of an incentive to seriously consider their vote and its impact. Perhaps most importantly, it would provide an opportunity to stratify the sample of voters. Currently certain groups - in particular, the young and various ethnic minorities - are grossly underrepresented by democracy because of their lower turnout. A voting lottery would allow us to ensure that these groups are counted in accordance with their proportion of the total population, not merely the their proportion of the population that turns up to vote.

Now of course many people who encounter this idea have a strong aversion to it. The point of democracy, they say, is in the mass participation. But the fact that our assessment of public opinion comes not from five-yearly general elections but from weekly polls rather pulls the rug out from under this. Voting in an election is screaming into the void: real political participation is happening to be selected for a YouGov survey, and giving your opinion there.

Another common concern is that a sample of 1000 people cannot hope to fully capture the views of an electorate of millions. I'm not married to the 1000 number - in fact, I think it could stand to be more like 10,000. But the basis of all modern polling is the Law of Large Numbers, which in essence states that when you have a process consisting of many small things which are themselves error-prone, but whose errors can cancel each other out - the errors will tend to cancel themselves out. Hence a poll of 1000 people will be within 3% of the true values 95% of the time, and a poll of 2000 people will be within 2% 95% of the time, for example. Yes, the newspaper polls can be wrong, but this is more often due to bias in the way they have selected voters - asking by telephone, or at a particular time of day, or with certain incorrect assumptions about who is likely to vote - which we could eliminate by selecting voters directly from government records.

It ought to be clear where this is leading. How about, rather than maintaining our thin veneer of universal suffrage with all its attendant problems of unrepresentativeness, we acknowledge the fact that we already live in a political system dominated by the voting lottery, and adjust accordingly? Of course there are costs, but there are also real benefits, benefits which we would be much better equipped to realise if we were honest about our political system and learned to live with it.

People have every reason to worry about attempts to disenfranchise them. In the USA, very significant effort goes into attempts to disenfranchise black voters due to their tendency to vote for the Democrat party. But the voting lottery is different both in its intention and its effects: while we would stop even pretending to care about most voters as individuals (as though we ever could in a nation of 65 million!), we would give much greater weight to their views as members of groups. And voting is far from the only way to engage in politics: so long as we have free speech and a free press, those who are not randomly selected for the ballot will have the opportunity to influence the votes of those who do vote though force of persuasion.

There's a Chesterton-like paradox to the suggestion that we should improve our democracy by removing the votes of most citizens. But the idea, I maintain, is not ridiculous. Certainly no more ridiculous than the idea that rather than vote on every single decision, we should delegate this to some 650 people, mostly white men, all living primarily in central London. I urge you to consider being explicit about the voting lottery which we already have - and to consider how it might be put to better use.

Two brief thoughts

Some thoughts that I really ought to write up properly, but don't presently have the time for:

-Many people appear to think either that (P) all social constructions are bad, or (P*) that belief in (P) is central to SJWism. Hence much mockery has aimed not to point to clearly beneficial social constructs (e.g. respect, love, money) but to suggest that almost anything can be a social construct (e.g. the penis).

A more sophisticated view is that something's being a social construct points not to it being bad, but to it being replaceable or at least malleable. But even this is perhaps too simplistic. Musical harmony is a social construct - while in the West we use a 12-tone scale, many other cultures (or composers within the West, e.g. Harry Partch) use different scales with greater or smaller intervals between notes - it is hard to see how we could overturn many aspects of harmony. (Though we could of course tweak it in particular ways, e.g. moving from equal temperament to just intonation).

(edited to add: this is probably old hat to anyone who reads my blog. I'm not trying to say anything especially original here, but it occurs to me that it would be useful to have something to point to, making this point, which isn't the length of a Slate Star Codex post or three)

-In a liberal society, we want both a principle of exclusion and a principle of inclusion. Thus our society can take in and integrate outsiders, but need not roll over in the face of those who threaten it. A "Propositional Nation" goes much of the way towards this - anyone who affirms the key propositions can become a citizen, people who do not affirm those principles cannot. Contrast this with historical or blood-and-soil nationhood, as exists e.g. in UK and Scandinavia. (France is a weird case - it ought to be a kind of propositional nation given the way French nationhood developed after the revolution, but it's still more of a blood-and-soil nation). Blood-and-soil has practical advantages - among other things, a country can hardly expel native-born citizens for their political views - but lacks such an easy criterion of inclusion. Should places like the UK aim to become more "propositional" in terms of their national spirit? Can they do so without abandoning their present identities? (Can "loyalty to the queen" function as the kind of proposition that would bind a nation?)

Christiano's Renewed Defence of Democracy; or, Rule By The People For The People, Except Without The People

These are interesting times at CEU, but that did not prevent a public lecture by the famous political philosopher Thomas Christiano from going ahead. Christiano is perhaps the world's leading democratic theorist, having put more sustained thought and brainpower than anyone else alive into the defence of this ideal. His talk was specifically responding to a series of critiques made in recent years by Bryan Caplan, Jason Brennan, and Ilya Somin, all of whom argue that democracy is undermined by the poor quality of voters.

Christiano began by briefly setting out a key claim, difficult to dispute, that on a variety of metrics - economic growth, protection of human rights, avoidance of war - democratic nations have tended to enjoy greater success than alternative regimes. This is something that our social scientific theories ought to be able to explain.

He followed this by introducing Caplan's theory of the "rational irrationality" of voters. This theory emerged as a response to the "rational choice" theory of voting behaviour, which held that voters behave in their own interest - that is, voting for the parties and policies which stand to benefit them, as individuals, to the greatest extent. Caplan noted that this assumes voters already know which parties and policies best serve their interests, and pointed out that due to the vanishingly small chance that one's vote could ever change the outcome of a national election, the expected benefit of voting wisely could never exceed or even equal the costs of acquiring such knowledge. Indeed, from a rational choice standpoint, it is difficult to explain why one even takes the ten minutes to walk or drive to and from the polling station. So we have a morass of deeply uninformed voters, who are in no way suited to the task of choosing a government and its priorities. Caplan's argument is borne out by multiple surveys which find the average member of the public to be comically ignorant of fairly basic facts of day-to-day politics. If one cannot name the chancellor of the exchequer, what hope does one have when trying to assess complicated macroeconomic theories which do not even command agreement among experts?

Next, Christiano discussed Brennan's argument for how ideology corrupts our political judgements. Brennan provides three models of individual voters: "Hobbits", "Hooligans", and "Vulcans". Hobbits correspond largely to Caplan's picture of people with no clue of even the most trivial facts of politics; Hooligans are arguably worse, possessing some degree of political knowledge but also being highly ideological and more interested in ensuring the victory of their team than in seeking the best outcome overall. Vulcans, by comparison, consider all available evidence in a relatively impartial way, and contribute honest and valuable information to democratic decisions. A democracy of Vulcans might very well be a good system, Brennan says - but the world in which we live is one in which most people are hobbits, the overwhelming majority of the rest are hooligans, and Vulcans - if they even exist - are a microscopic minority. This is all backed up with social science to demonstrate that most people are as Brennan claims them to be. So while it might be nice to live in a world of Vulcans, Brennan says, that fact is that we do not - and our institutions ought to reflect this, in a way that universal democracy simply does not.

From here, Christiano said, Brennan, Caplan, and Somin - libertarians all - conclude that we ought to adopt alternative systems, with Brennan and Caplan suggesting the rule of experts and Somin suggesting a sharp reduction in the role the government is allowed to play in our lives. In particular, all three advocate a greater role for markets in decision-making.

I don't think this is really a fair characterisation of their positions. In fact, I would say it is an outright misrepresentation of Brennan's position. It is unfair on several counts:
-By "epistocracy" Brennan doesn't mean confining politics to the elites with no-one else able to break in. Rather, he has in mind tests of political knowledge, which one would be required to pass in order to vote.
-More fundamentally, Brennan does not actually advocate epistocracy! Rather, he suggests that it is a potentially-viable alternative to democracy, and that our institutions should not be built on the assumption that all citizens will behave as Vulcans. This is an understandable mistake, given Brennan's other writings; on the other hand, both he and Caplan are avowed anarcho-capitalists, so the only sense in which they can possibly be seen as supporting epistocracy is as an improvement over what we have rather than as an end goal.
-While they indeed believe that markets should play a greater role in our society, and believe (in line with the evidence showing that both social and economic liberalism correlate positively with both intelligence and with being politically informed) that the effects of a higher-quality voting population would be to give markets such a role, this is not (at least for Brennan) a core claim. The argument is that better voters would give a better set of political institutions, without any claims about what those institutions would necessarily be except as illustrations of how our current institutions are ludicrously sub-optimal.

Christiano then boils the debate to the following argument:

(1) Voters are subject to rational irrationality, ideology, and other such biases.
(2) If voters are subject to rational irrationality, ideology, and other such biases, then democracy will fail to work well.
(3) Democracy will not work well.

This, then, is the anti-democratic theorists' view in its simplest form, as a simple modus ponens. But, as he said at the beginning, the conclusion is false! Therefore, since the argument is valid, we know that something must be awry with at least one of the premises. Christiano suggests that Brennan et al overplay the evidence for (1), but does not wish to challenge it too much. The problem, he suggests, is therefore with the assumption that these various biases preclude voters from making good choices about who to vote for.

How can this be? To point towards a solution, Christiano attempts to turn his opponents own arguments against their views, by suggesting that the same problems which they attribute to democratic choice apply in the same way to ordinary decisions made within markets. There is then a dilemma for the anti-democratic theorists: either they admit that markets are just as flawed and so democracy may nevertheless be the best system we can get, or we identify some mechanisms by which individual ignorance can be translated into rational decisions.

There is undoubtedly some small truth to this. I have no idea how to repair a car, but this lack of knowledge on my part does not prevent me from hiring a mechanic - that is to say, from outsourcing the relevant expertise. I do not have the time to form opinions on an especially wide range of books, but I can outsource this to people whose comparative advantage lies in quickly reading and accurately assessing the merits of books.

So, Christiano suggests, such sources of information exist for politics. Moreover, they are often available at little or no cost, and include the following:
-newspapers and television
-political parties.
-friends and colleagues.
-many educated people need to understand political events for their work, and so understanding it for voting purposes comes at no marginal cost
-labour unions
-churches

One worry he admitted to this is that these institutions for informing people need "warning lights" for when they are failing to accurately transmit information. When one goes to a mechanic, it is usually quite clear whether the mechanic genuinely has their claimed skills, due to the success condition in which your car starts moving again (or passes its MOT, or whatever). It is not clear exactly what these are intended to be with regard to politics - The Guardian criticises Theresa May but as a left-wing paper they would say that, wouldn't they? And if one takes the criticism seriously, then without becoming something of an expert oneself, how can one establish whether or not the criticism is accurate?

One possibility, which I'm reading into him though not, I think, unreasonably, is for there to be legal requirements of neutrality or truthfulness applying to political broadcasters, as exist in the UK and Canada but not, infamously, the USA. The big worry with this, as Christiano notes, is that in principle democracy is rule by the people made on their own terms. Is it not contrary to this spirit to compel certain terms of discourse upon them?

OK, so that's Christiano's perspective, presented in what I think is a fairly reasonable and sympathetic way. I have a fair few criticisms, and will work up form smallest to largest.

First, his admittedly-only-a-hypothesis about the role of unions seems highly dubious. He suggested that the decline of unions made working-class populations vulnerable to demagoguery and so is responsible for the current malaise of "the US, the UK and France." But this just seems empirically ridiculous: first, demagoguery was just as potent a force in the days when union bosses would trip into Number Ten for beer and sandwiches. Second, Thatcher gutted the unions in the 80s: why did it then take more than thirty years for demagogues to come along for the working class vote? And finally, France suffering from not enough unions? Are you joking, or are you merely unaware that their transport systems are routinely shut down by disgruntled farmers, taxi-drivers, or whoever else is the angry industry of the day?

Second, I think Christiano overestimates the extent to which even intellectually demanding jobs require one to know about politics, and the extent to which such knowledge represents a very thin and impoverished of the infinitely complex reality. As an example: my dad works in estate and property management for the University of Birmingham, and had a great grievance with the EU that whenever he wished to outsource some work, anti-corruption legislation originating in Brussels required him - as an employee of an organisation recieving significant EU funding - to put it out to tender (including, of course, an expensive advert in a Brussels-based EU-approved journal) and placed certain restrictions upon who he could hire. As a result of this, such outsourcing decisions became vastly slower and vastly more expensive, since in the absence of such regulations he would simply have called up a handful of small local firms, asked for quotes, and gone with the cheapest who he thought could actually deliver at the price they gave. (Of course, the regulations require that he hire the cheapest firm, with the result than from time to time they will not manage to keep to the agreed price, and it is rare that this situation does not end up costing the university further money).

My dad has a deep knowledge of one particular aspect of the way the EU affects Britain. Does this equate to a knowledge, or even a reasonable idea, of what the EU is like as a whole? Of course not. (Incidentally, my dad was turned off by xenophobic messaging of the Leave campaign during the last few days before the referendum, and ended up abstaining; since the referendum, he has been quite enthusiastic about its result).

Third, and moving on to more serious criticisms: Christiano appears to go straight from the uncontroversial claim that democracy correlates with various desirable outcomes to the highly dubious claim that democracy works well, i.e. that it is causally responsible for these outcomes. I've seen a plausible case that democracies can enjoy lower borrowing costs, but otherwise this seems entirely to get the causal direction the wrong way round: countries liberalise economically, this creates a growing middle class, and so a demand for democracy. The economic success of the Asian Tigers is not to be explained in terms of their (anaemic) democracy but in terms of their liberal economic institutions. (And before one tries to argue that they have failed to respect human rights, (1) be careful you're not assuming your conclusion by taking democracy to be a human right, and (2) economic growth is highly underrated as a means to securing people's vital rights to food and shelter).

Fourth, Christiano seems to me to ignore, in an utterly irresponsible way, the quality of information being received. To quote him almost word-for-word: "In the US, I find that I agree with the values of the Democrat party... and this means that they can act as a way to distill complicated information to me." If I had not heard this from his own mouth, I would have assumed anyone attributing these words to him to be creating a strawman. Yet on the grounds that they share his goal of helping the poor more explicitly than their opponents, he is apparently willing on precious little further authority to commit to controversial views on a wide range of topics - the optimal minimum wage, the optimal response to global warming, the optimal level of US involvement in the Middle East...

Fifth, and to the extent that it succeeds most damningly, how different is what Christiano proposes from that which he opposes? If all were to vote the party line, we would have an esoteric epistocracy in which the relevant measure of knowledge would be "Are you a party leader?" It will not be this extreme, of course, with hopefully a range of alternative media sources. But insofar as his vision of democracy is parties telling voters what to think, and the voters consequently choosing parties to implement their policies - why not cut out the middleman, and let the social elites get on with ruling the country untrammelled by the inconvenience of needing to face election? (This, I should note, is the criticism in which I have least confidence).

Perhaps an argument could be made that voters don't really need the knowledge that Brennan thinks they do. More information is not always good, after all.  Apart from this, there are plausible cases for democracy which do not rely at all upon claims about its ability to make decisions. But Christiano's case for this is thoroughly unconvincing, to the point where I was inclined to wonder if his claims to know little of day-to-day politics were not, in fact, just modesty.

Various splurges on localism, devolution, state-building, and standardisation

NB: quite possibly conflating issues which are superficially related but really ought to be kept separate. Anecdotal evidence and guys with blogs remain anecdotal evidence and guys with blogs, and should be treated as such.
Also, names have been changed.

Back for Christmas, I've recently been catching up with various people I grew up with. In particular, the half a dozen or so lads who are my age or slightly older at the church in which I grew up. Lucias is my oldest friend, who was my best friend in primary school. He studied Maths at Bristol, did a one-year Masters, and is now doing a Ministry Traineeship at his church there. In a few months he will be getting married to a girl he met there.

Jason and Thomas are a pair of brothers who studied Engineering at Cambridge and Geography at Durham respectively; again, I believe they both have Masters' Degrees. They are now both living in London - Jason putting his degree into direct use in designing things, while Thomas (who was a keen athlete in school, having once placed in the top 30 of the Birmingham half-marathon) is now working in sports marketing - he enthused that next year's World Athletics Championship, which he is involved in promoting, will be Usain Bolt's last race as a professional.

Simon and John are the two older siblings of their family. I can't remember exactly what Simon studies, but am fairly confident that Spanish was part of it; he now works in London. John did Geography and French at Manchester, and is now working for the council there while angling towards going for a Master's.

Finally, there's me. PPE at Manchester, then jetted off to Budapest to study for a Master's in Philosophy. Currently applying for PhD programs, with an eye on Toronto. Long-term, intending to move back to the UK and very vaguely hoping to find a job at Oxbridge.

What, apart from our Christian upbringings, do we have in common? We're all bright, well-educated young men who remember Birmingham fondly and want it to do well. But none of us see our futures here.

This is, I think, the kind of thing Tom Forth likes to go on about on Twitter. We'll come back at holidays, maybe chip in to things - my own contributions are primarily playing piano and organ at church, but people really like hearing that organ played, mind you - but in terms of the lasting contributions that any of us could make to our communities, those contributions will be made elsewhere. Thomas noted that of his friends from Durham, "like 99% of them" have also moved down to London. That's simply where the jobs are.

This doesn't seem good for Birmingham. I don't endorse brain drain as a reason to compel people to stay in the third world, and nor do I endorse it as a reason to compel people to stay in Birmingham. But we've received a lot - of the six people I describe, five of us went to schools run by the King Edwards Foundation - and it's hard to see what, if anything, our home city is getting back.



An interesting essay linked to yesterday by Byrne: "The Strange Death of Municipal England". Key claims:
-government should be doing lots of things
-however, these should be done specifically by local government
-in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was what actually happened
-however, since WWII local authorities have increasingly had powers nationalised
-the tendency is now towards privatisation of such things, to the detriment of quality/equality of service

The essay is good and worth reading, but at the end I was left with a feeling that if you asked the author why (say) libraries should be government-run but food shops should not, you would not get any kind of a convincing answer. Most egregious is the following passage:

In truth, Britain no longer has a government, but rather a system of governance, the term political scientists use to describe ‘the relationships between governmental and non-governmental forces and how they work together’. This is another way of saying that we live in a half-democracy. 

David Schmidtz has the most articulate and developed response to this way of thinking, which is (roughly) that the fact that we aim to realise particular principles with our institutions does not mean that the institutions ought to aim specifically at the realisation of those principles. This is a line of thought going all the way back to Adam Smith, with the immortal line (and also the only line of The Wealth of Nations that I actually remember):

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, baker, or brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.

That's my key point of disagreement with the essay: I don't think the changes it herald are necessarily bad. But that's not why I bring it up here. It's because of the tension it argues for between the national and the local, and the argument (which I am entirely open to, perhaps even favourable to) that nationalisation of politics is bad for most local areas.



The other evening, I had an exchange with Tom Forth on Twitter. We agreed that there are many types of policies which, in terms of total impact, are bad, but are good (or at least perceived as good) by the communities which make them. Examples include import tariffs, US cities bribing sports teams to stay in town, favouring domestic companies for fulfilling government contracts, etc. We agreed it is good that the EU prevents member governments from such practices. Our disagreement, I think, is whether the UK government should prevent localities from such practices. (I'm not certain what these would be, but let's assume that they exist and that more powerful councils would practise them). I, motivated by an overriding moral commitment to the wellbeing of individuals, think that it should. He, motivated by a belief in democracy and in particular local democracy, thinks that it should not. (At least, this is how I understand the disagreement).

If such beggar-thy-neighbour policies exist at the city level, it seems at least plausible that the success of London relative to the rest of the UK is to a fair extent due to it being the only city able to pursue them. Let us suppose that this is a good model for how the UK actually works. In that case, there are three obvious choices we could attempt:
(a) No-one, including London, gets to play beggar-thy-neighbour
(b) Everyone gets to play beggar-thy-neighbour
(c) The status quo: London, and no-one else, may play beggar-thy-neighbour

(a) and (b) have the advantages of moral consistency: (c) is desperately unfair on everywhere except London. But (a) may be entirely impossible to practice, and (b) is surrendering to the collective action problem. So (c) may well be the best option available; indeed, given this empirical model of the world, I would take (a) to be impossible and so advocate (c): in practice, clamping down on decentralisation.




A discussion of the increase in federal power, in particular since WWII, in the US. Worth reading for itself, but a real "huh, that seems obvious in retrospect" moment for me was the point that what we think of as common law bears little to no relation to law as experienced by most people for most of Anglo-American history. Rather, there was a whole mess of conflicting local norms, which in the early 20th century were standardised and codified by reformers.

On a related note, the professor in a Gender Studies course I audited this semester noted that we have records of men in 19th century England selling their wives. Clearly this wasn't a common thing, but it happened in certain places. Legal standardisation, of course, put a stop to that.



The point that I'm getting towards, I think, is an attempt at rebutting the arguments made by James Scott and Jacob Levy against centralisation of power. Or rather, I want to accept all of their claims about what High Modernism causes, and say that it was probably worth it. Or maybe it wasn't. The problem is perhaps inherently unsolvable, since it is very difficult to know what the average state of society was prior to the building of the nation-state. The standardisation which destroyed local knowledge and practice was also what made it possible, even in principle, to assess how individual people's lives were going.

Some people - including people I know personally - would argue that communities ought to be protected and preserved, even if they are what we would regard as backward. But again, I state my belief in moral individualism: people are what matters, and communities are only a means towards the flourishing of people. Perhaps they are important, even crucial means, but when society holds its members back, society is to be cast into the fire.

Does legal standardisation relate to modern devolution? I think it does, in a sense. Forcing the young men formerly of St. Stephen's Church to stay in Birmingham would have been good for Birmingham, and quite possibly good for the other people of Birmingham. But it's no way to treat individuals, it's no way to turn London into the growth engine which will eventually realise the post-scarcity society (or as near to that as possible), and... I don't know. The world is complicated, I don't know. I don't know.

Political Fracture and the Consent of the Governed

It has been a commonplace of liberal, and in particular democratic, political rhetoric that government rests solely upon the consent of the governed. The logical conclusion of this principle, of course, is that every single individual ought to be able to determine the exact nature of the polity in which they choose to live. This is of course an utterly unachievable goal, but it is worth considering how far we can move in that direction - and whether such moves are likely to be desirable.

So far, the closest we have come to achieving this kind of choice is to allow for collective decision-making about how governance should take place. This is, however, a pale shadow of the ideal we are aiming for: collective choice may reflect the preferences of all in a group of four or five friends, but in a nation of thousands - let alone millions, or even hundreds of millions - the individual voice is a mere drop in the ocean.

Another possible way to move in the direction of individual consent is to institute a variety of polities, and allow free movement between these. There are still problems with this system (call it "Archipelago"), both in terms of individual choice and in terms of the practical problems it throws up, but it remains perhaps the closest to utopia we are ever likely to reach. I'm not going to defend it here, but section III of the linked article provides one person's attempts to expose and subsequently resolve the problems with it. As I see it, the principal differences between Archipelago and one inhabited by modern-day Europeans are few but highly significant. These differences can be bridged, but would require substantial, and highly controversial, changes to the current political set-up.

A first difference lies in the vast legal and logistical difficulties faced by anyone attempting to move from one polity to another. The EU has done a considerable amount to reduce the legal barriers, but there are nevertheless very considerable costs to moving. There are the large financial costs, the friends and family with whom you have considerably less contact, the difficulties of learning a new language (or reduced quality of life if you don't learn it), as well as all the frictional costs of adapting to a new set of cultural institutions. Some of these costs are unavoidable, but others could, I think, be much reduced.

The key step to be made here is the abolition of the nation-state. Or rather, the splitting of nations into several different states. The costs of moving from Aldershot to Bath are much smaller than the costs of moving from Austria to Belgium, and that would continue to be the case if Hampshire and Somerset were separate states. It is true that political differences can lead to cultural differences which magnify over time, but the fact remains that after more than 200 years of independence the USA remains the number-two destination for British emigrants - topped only by another former British colony, Australia. In terms of the existing stock of British expats, five of the top six destinations are Australia, the USA, Canada, the Republic of Ireland, and New Zealand. Splitting the UK into anywhere between a dozen and twenty smaller states would allow Brits a real choice of political entities in which to abide.

The second, and perhaps the biggest, difference between Archipelago and the real world is that real world states really aren't all that different from one another. There are differences, but you'll struggle to find a single first-world economy that has anything other than a welfare-state vaguely-capitalist mixed economy. Switzerland has genuine variation between its cantons, with some places such as Zug levying almost no taxes whereas Geneva will tax anything you can shake a stick at, but they are entirely the exception (and of course anyone wishing to move into Switzerland from the outside faces some of the strictest borders in Europe). Achieving Archipelago means being willing to see people recreate communism, fail, and ruin decades of their lives. It means being willing to see first-world countries where women are not allowed to vote and where homosexuals leave as soon as they can. Above all, it means trusting that there will be states like Estonia who try new, exciting and above all good ideas, who will lead the way for everyone else to follow.

Government House Democracy

Grief at losing the EU referendum is causing many people on the left of British politics to wake up to something libertarians have been saying for years: democracy is kind of a stupid system. I won't go over the many problems with democracy as it is practised, although it should be noted that they go far beyond the fact that sometimes The People make stupid decisions. My concern here is to ask: why do we have a democracy, and how could it work better?

Here is a simple suggestion for why democracy is a relatively good system: people accept it. That is to say, countries which are democratic are significantly less likely than non-democratic countries to experience violent rebellions or civil wars. This applies not only to the relatively mature and open democracies of Scandinavia and the Anglosphere, but also to the corrupt tinpot democracies which dominate Africa and South America. There is no particular connection between democracy and good governance, but if you can achieve good governance then democracy makes it much more stable.

In what way does it become more stable? Primarily because people feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have a voice and are being listened to. People will be less likely to oppose a system when they feel that they have some role of authorship in it. By voting, people contribute to two things: firstly, they help fool themselves into thinking they have a significant voice, and secondly, they make it easier for others to believe this idea.

By voting, you demonstrate your buying in to this collective myth and thus your membership in (and hence acceptance of) the political community. This is a falsity, and patently so: the idea that one ordinary person can influence a polity of sixty-five million is utterly ridiculous. But so long as everyone pretends to believe it, we can get along.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to be enough. Perhaps it was never enough, and we relied upon other signals that people were being listened to for stability - the close links between trade unions and the Labour Party, for example. Perhaps libertarians have been the little boy shouting that the emperor has no clothes (I don't think we're that influential, but who knows?). Either way, the fact is that enough people are feeling unlistened to that our political culture is under threat.

What, then, can be done to recreate the myth that people are being listened to? E-petitions are a valiant attempt at this, but are aimed at a fundamentally different audience from the one that voted for Brexit. E-petitions are a tool of the young and politically engaged; Brexit, as we have all heard repeatedly, was foisted upon the young by their unemployed and uneducated elders.

MP's surgeries are probably fairly effective for those people who are aware of how to attend them and have the forethought to book a session. But my suspicion would be that a very substantial constituency is simply unaware that surgeries are a thing - they're not something that we talk about a great deal, after all. And quite apart from that, there's the whole question of whether MPs could really handle a move towards mass use of surgeries. They have other things to do with their time, after all, and do you really want to spend every single Saturday listening to people, most of whom are expressing similar concerns in inarticulate (and often in an angry, perhaps even threatening, manner), concerns which you simply do not have the power to do anything about?

I don't really have a good answer to the second problem I'm posing. How do you get disenfranchised people to feel they are being listened to? (Should we care? What will they do if they don't - more shootings, or will it just contribute to what, in a vague sense, we call "the decline of social trust"?) My hope, however, is that by putting it in terms of perceptions of listening rather than actual listening, I can move us closer to a real solution.

Raz on the Value of Democracy

Over the weekend CEU hosted a conference on "The Values of Liberal Democracies: Themes from the Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz". The keynote speech, given by Raz himself, was an attempt to articulate why he thinks democracy is such a good system. His answer? Because people think it is.

That's an oversimplified way of putting it. To slightly flesh out the argument:

• People tend to believe that democracy is both necessary and sufficient for democracy.
• Clearly democracy is not inherently just and legitimate: actual democracies contain and indeed rely upon many anti-democratic elements (e.g. independent, unelected judiciaries)
• However, the combination of democracy and a belief in democracy's legitimacy allows us to achieve certain benefits, in particular relating to the stability of political institutions and the peacefulness of political transitions.

Although Raz did not draw out the political implications explicitly, he hinted at some and there are others which I think one can reasonably read into the argument:

• Monarchy is not necessarily contrary to the values of democracy. (One might even argue that constitutional monarchies tend to be more stable than presidential democracies, although you might have trouble establishing the direction of causation there).
• What I believe he was getting at: it doesn't really matter if supra-national institutions such as the EU and the UN aren't really very democratic. Most of the benefits of democracy are to be achieved at the national level, and in any case what we fundamentally want out of political institutions is not that they are democratic (though this may well be desirable) but that they work.

Notes on a Conversation with Will Kymlicka

Will Kymlicka is Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University and Kingston, Visiting Professor of Nationalism Studies at Central European University (CEU), and the world's leading theorist of multiculturalism. He is currently teaching a course at CEU entitled "The Global Diffusion of Minority Rights"; this morning I was able to have a conversation with him relating to issues raised in that course and in the study of multiculturalism more generally. These are my notes on the conversation, so as to keep a permanent record in a readable format. The answers attributed to Professor Kymlicka are almost entirely summaries rather than direct quotations. My questions are in bold, Kymlicka's answers are in normal type, and my thoughts are in italics. Since (a) this was an offhand conversation, not a published article, (b) while I am trying to reproduce what he said faithfully but my memory is not perfect, and (c) this is just a blogpost which for all you know I might entirely be making up, Professor Kymlicka should of course not be held responsible for anything I attribute to him here.

ATP: In your discussion of multiculturalism in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, you note that in the early days of multicultural theory people drew a lot of associations between multiculturalism and communitarianism. But multiculturalism started to be practiced around 1967-73, whereas communitarianism didn't appear until the 1980s. How does this fit together?

WK: Essentially, we did multicultural practice without having any theory of it for about twenty years. Then, in the early 80s, communitarianism came along. You're too young to remember this, but back then it was massive. When I was an undergrad, the communitarian critique of liberalism was all the rage, the great issue of the day. So people started casting around for other issues which might be illuminated by communitarianism, and noticed multiculturalism. In my view this was a big mistake, getting the justification for multiculturalism entirely wrong, but that's how it happened.


ATP: The perpetual concern when granting minority rights is that these rights will simply allow the suppression of individual liberty. I'd like to suggest that this is far more common than we often think - in particular, that the practice of teaching minority languages in schools represents a limitation of the liberty of schoolchildren. (I had in my notes a comparison to teaching Klingon in schools, which no-one would advocate, but did not use this in our actual conversation). Time and effort spent teaching a minority language represents time spent not teaching things which may actually be useful to the children.

WK: Yes, Thomas Pogge advocated that position in a book chapter for a book I edited, called "Ethnicity and Group Rights". He argued that the teaching of Spanish in American schools violates the rights of pupils. What I would say is that in general, minorities want to teach their own languages alongside the majority language, and, oddly enough, it so happens that empirically people who learn multiple languages end up better at both of them. [This seems somewhat most-convenient possible universe to me, but then again it's not at all obviously wrong. Certainly, as a result of learning German, I understand grammar far better than I would if I only spoke English].

The other thing I would say is that children don't have a right that education be organised to their maximum benefit - the idea that they do is just implausible. So it's not at all clear to me that such a limitation, if it were a limitation, would be a violation of the rights of children.

ATP: Pogge seems to take it rather further than I had in mind - I had in mind the teaching of Welsh, a language which - though beautiful - is utterly useless. Given the advantages of bilingualism, then, the case to be made is not "Welsh & English" versus just English so much as Welsh versus French - a case which seems to be rather easier to make.

WK: Or Spanish, or Mandarin, yes. That points to what I think is an important mistake in the way many people talk abut multiculturalism, which is to confuse multiculturalism with diversity. Originally people would justify minority rights in terms of justice, but nowadays they often try to advocate the same policies with talk of diversity. Because everyone likes diversity, right? But that raises the question of why you favour this particular form of diversity, rather than a completely different culture. No: multiculturalism and diversity are different concerns: multiculturalism is motivated by concerns about justice, whereas diversity is a value all of its own.

It's also worth saying that the kind of argument you're making doesn't just cut against minority rights. In many cases it may also cut against majority rights too. Think about Estonia - would Estonian children be better off learning in English and German rather than Estonian? Quite probably. Do they have a right to be taught in these languages? I don't think so.


ATP: Speaking of Estonia, do you think the history of how a minority came to be matters? Estonia has a significant ethnic Russian minority, as do many states in the Balkans. But whereas the Balkan minorities exist because the ethnic borders between nations overlap but the state borders don't, the Russian minority exists in Estonia because they were moved in by the Russian state when it militarily occupied the Baltic states. Presumably that has some moral relevance?

WK: Yes, it surely does have moral relevance. I would suggest that the ethnic Russians in Estonia should be seen as immigrants rather than a national minority - that means that they should be accorded certain rights, but not to the full group rights which we might think a national minority ought to have. We can't visit the sins of the fathers on their children: the ethnic Russians have to be able to have Estonian citizenship, you can't leave people stateless from birth. But yes, as a group I think they lack many of the rights that we would attribute to most national minorities.


ATP: In the lectures we discussed the issue of secession, and you were rather down on what you called "Vanity Secessions", since you view a multi-ethnic as being entirely compatible with justice. But is there anything actually wrong with vanity secessions? After all, there are plenty of things that democracies do which fail to contribute to justice, but we don't think that makes these policies wrong.

WK: Let me put it this way. I don't think Quebec has a right to secede; I don't think that the rest of Canada has a right to make them stay. It's hard to make the case that Quebec somehow has a duty to stay. This isn't something where I really know what I think. I would suggest that rather than have a theory of what justifies individual secessions, then, we want a theory of what ought to be the procedure for achieving secession. There are a number of dangers relating to these matters. First, if this is seen as a one-off, irreversible decision, then people can be pushed to a choice which they would not otherwise make for fear of the option being closed off to them permanently. The corresponding danger in drawn-out processes is that one part of the country can use the threat of secession to extract concessions on other matters from the rest of the country. So we want to permit secessions, but we want perhaps to channel secession movements down certain paths to ensure that secession is in response to a genuine grievance.

ATP: Couldn't that work as a criticism of democratic decisions in general? Democratic practice falls, even in the best cases, far short of the standards which political philosophers tend to think it should achieve.

WK: Yes, to some extent. The thing to keep in mind is that most democratic decisions are reversable. But I recently read a paper arguing that for certain irreversible decisions, in particular those relating to the environment, we ought to limit or restrict the scope of democracy, and instead find of way of calculating what is owed to future generations. I'm not certain exactly how that would work, but there is definitely a case to be made.


ATP: Thank you for your time.

On Democracy

(Partly inspired by reading Richard Arneson's "Democratic Rights at the National Level")

Democracy is not magic. It does not make political action virtuous, it has no inherent superiority to other forms of government. The right to vote is not itself a morally important freedom. But given the indelible association in many people's mind between freedom and democracy, democracy is nevertheless an inevitable result of people being made free.