Soft paternalism is fascist

A few weeks back, Bruce Buena de Mesquita was doing the media rounds promoting a book in which he claims to be able to predict future political events by means of algorithm.

What a knob, thought I.

But I was sufficiently intrigued to see what else he'd written and spoken about in the past. Ten minutes searching brought me to an interview he'd given on http://www.econtalk.org/, an economics podcast with an archive of about 300 programmes going back to early 2006. Great, I thought. I'll load them up on my ipod and listen to them while commuting to work - this takes about two hours a day so 300 half hour programmes would keep me going for around four months or so. I feel it's always interesting to hear experts' views on stuff, even if you disagree with them.

So anyway, for the past couple of weeks, I've been ploughing my way through this online treasure trove of economic theory, conversation and misconception-busting. But there's just one problem - the host (and all his guests) dogmatically hold with the efficient market hypothesis, and then apply it to everything. So foreign aid is bad because it interferes with the market. All state-funded healthcare is bad because it intereferes with the market. And all public works - creating parks, laying roads, building sewers, etc - are bad because they interfere with the market.

But they often go on to talk in starkly different terms about markets. Subtly, they move from markets being instrumentally good because they are efficient in allocating resources, to markets being inherently good in and of themselves. So if roads aren't laid by private firms, it's not only efficient but it's also the way things should be. And if hospitals refuse to treat people because they can't afford the treatment, it's a good thing and it's to be celebrated as an example of the market working.

So we move from markets being good because they are efficient to markets being good irrespective of their efficiency.

It's at this point that I started to have second thoughts about this podcast. Do I really want to spend the next three months listening to this stuff on my way into work? Is there no hope that they might have some opposing views from within the economic sphere? Or possibly from different perspectives?

No, is the answer to all three.

The final straw came this morning when I was listening to a discussion about the economics of soft paternalism. "Soft paternalism" is the sort of horrid neologistic phrase we should have become used to by now - it's there in things like Nudge, all the talk in certain sorts of periodicals about behavioural economics. Persuasion by government rather than coercion, if you like.

But what do the good people at http://www.econtalk.org/ say about governments persuading people to, in the example they give, stop smoking and eat healthily? I'll quote from the interviewee on the podcast in question:

"I need not, sort of, y'know, remind people of how much, say for example, the Nazi regime was enormously fond of paternalistic policies, advocating for healthy exercise outdoors and various food related things. Hitler was a very big, erm, something of a food nut. He was a vegetarian and proselytised about its virtues.

The historical track record of paternalism [has] wandered afield into every form of human action, often with, y'know, quite disturbing results, right. I mean the sort of vilification of homosexuals leads towards, y'know, much worse actions. Erm, and likewise the, y'know, I mean, even think about, er, y'know, the, the sort of anti-semitism as starting as some form of soft paternalism, er, against Jews, and, and leading towards, y'know, leading, leading towards the, the gas chambers."

So there we have it - governments encouraging healthy exercise outdoors are analogous to the Nazi regime. "Five a day" is the sort of thing that leads inexorably to the gas chamber.

Later today, I'll be deleting econtalk from my list of subscribed podcasts and wondering why some, outwardly sane, people can get so taken in by dogma. It's very strange indeed.

Philosophy finished

Phew, my philsophy exam yesterday was a bit rotten. Three questions in three hours out of a choice of twelve questions. There was a choice of two questions per topic, and I'd decided beforehand to answer questions about freedom, the mind and religion.

So freedom came up and I could choose between Mill and Locke. I wrote about Locke. Easy, that one - I could've written it in my sleep.

Then the mind came up and the choice was between Descartes and Artificial Intelligence. I'd revised stuff about Searle and multiple realisability, but the wording of the question was so vague that I thought I'd be expected to include stuff I'd not got round to revising. So I stuck to Descartes. There didn't seem enough to talk about to go into enough detail for an hour, but I wrote everything I could think of on the topic, and a bit more besides. Hopefully that was OK.

And then it was onto religion. Should I talk about the argument from design, or should I go for bodily resurrection? I was done for - I'd not revised the argument from design at all, and the course staff had said that bodily resurrection was unlikely to come up because we'd already covered that in an essay previously on the course. Thanks, course staff. I'd actually concentrated on revising arguments for a moral order, Hume on miracles, Pascal's wager and a couple of other things - none of which were on the exam paper. So I was stuffed.

I chose to answer the question on bodily resurrection, but could barely remember any of the philosophers or their arguments, so I decided to write a piece about the apparent logical impossibility of believing in life after death in a totally material universe, going on to talk about the future possibility of neuroscience-aided corpse re-animation. Nice.

I reckon I've probably got through with around a 50% pass mark, but I'm not wholly convinced by that. The three questions were equally weighted, and I reckon I got around 27% of the total on the first question, around 15% on the second question and maybe if I'm lucky another 6% on the third question. So that would give me 48% and a pass.

Due to my stellar marks on the rest of the course, this module doesn't actually contribute to my degree classification. So as long as I get above the 40% pass mark, I'll be happy. Results are out 18 December, so fingers crossed.

Is this going to be the first viral General Election?

We could help it be.



From Liam Murray's blog. He doesn't think political parties could seriously use something like this. Neither do I. But I do seriously think political party members can. You online network twittering people who read my blog, go do the online equivalent of putting up a thousand posters in town overnight.

Because a Conservative victory is inevitable in the next General Election...

Given that the Conservatives are on course to win the next general election, those of us who oppose what the party has historically stood for - the interests of the privileged few, the suppression of minorities, opposition to the workings of the managed market - are given a new task. This task is to help minimise their victory, to keep their Parliamentary majority down as low as possible, to keep the mainstream of left-wing opinion in this country tethered firmly to the centre ground and in touch with the concerns of as many members of the population as possible, whilst changing the political weather sufficiently to allow the long-term interests of social democracy to be furthered.

To that end, it's time to give up on trying to win the next election. It's time to manage our expectations and counter the threat posed by a resurgent Conservative Party in the areas of the country that will make the difference between a small Tory victory and a large one.

If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. It's time to understand that the most vulnerable Parliamentary seats are likely already lost, and to go about working in the seats that'll be important as building blocks for a Labour return to power in 2014/15.

I'm out of the office this week so I've got a little more time than normal to research this stuff. I'll be crunching the numbers over the next few days and coming up with a list of the constituencies in the northwest of England that, should they switch parties, would make the difference between a small Tory majority and a large one. I'll then be looking to badger the relevant CLPs about what I can do to help over the next six months.

Whether or not I can make a difference is, obviously, unknown. But not even attempting to help is indefensible when a Labour Prime Minister is looking at leaving Downing Street for the first time in 31 years.

An open mind, not an empty mind

I'm studying at the moment with the Open University. For the past two and a half years, I've been slowly but surely ploughing my way through their PPE degree. If all goes to plan, I've only got 12 months left on it.

Anyway, there have been 27 essays and 2 exams so far, and there are another 12 essays, 2 projects and an exam to go. Most immediately, I've got a philosophy exam Thursday next week. And it's the one thing out of the whole course that I'm least looking forward to.

After a promising start to the philosophy module last February, I soon realised that what I was actually good at was political philosophy, and the other aspects of the module were both significantly different to that, and significantly more difficult. I've averaged 75% for the six essays on this module and am concerned that my exam mark will be quite a lot lower than that, despite revising for the past five weeks for the damn thing. It's not that I can't revise, or that I expect the exam to be notably more difficult than the rest of the module was. It's just that there is so much I'm supposed to know! I'll soon know what I should've revised anyway - like I said, the exam's next week.

And then it's straight back onto a politics module. This will be lasting until next June, by which time I hope to be halfway through an economics module and only four months off the end of the whole thing.

That's enough for now, though. I've got to bone up on what Clifford said about the limits of evidence, what Searle said about artificial intelligence and what Locke said about when you're allowed to beat people up for being Catholic. Oh joy.

Liberty and the Left

In an early episode of The West Wing from 1999, Sam Seabourne - a White House spin doctor - says this about the terrain over which political battles are fought:

[In the] 20s & 30s it was the role of government. 50s & 60s it was civil rights. The next 20 years it will be about privacy. The Internet. Cell phones. Health records. And who's gay and who's not. Besides, in a country born on the will to be free, what could be more fundamental than this?

Within two years, David Blunkett was leading the Labour government's drive towards what has been characterised - largely accurately - as a statist landgrab of personal information and individual freedom. Along the way, this has taken in issues on ID cards, DNA testing, CCTV cameras, medical records, childminding, working in schools, working in care homes, and even giving your son's friend a lift to the under 10s' football on a Saturday morning.

On a lot of these issues - although not on all of them - the social democratic nature of the government has been on show, and the decisions taken have been the correct ones. On some of them - and the ID card thing is the most egregious - the decisions taken have been catastrophically bad and the government (and, by extension, social democrats in general, irrespective of their own personal position) has found itself on the wrong side of the argument.

This is bad enough in and of itself - I never want a government I generally support to be on the wrong side of any argument. But it's even worse considering the stakes involved in privacy issues (see the West Wing quote above). Get this issue wrong, make the wrong call now, and we'll be living with the consequences of such judgments for decades to come.

So it was heartening to read Jon Cruddas's speech last month to Compass. He summed up Labour's attitude to such issues of liberty by referring to an over-arching idea that had shaped the party's policies to pretty much everything over the past 15 years:

By 2001, Labour's policies were built around continuous growth and affluence; policies always had to be indivualised. We believed people would only respond to a sour, illiberal politics about consuming more, rather than deeper ideas of fraternity, of collective experience, and what it is we aspire to be as a nation. To put this simply, we assumed the worst of the British people. Think the rationality of classical economics. Think The Selfish Gene. Think Ayn Rand.

Powerful stuff, to be sure. But his diagnosis was followed by the makings of a prescription:

Let's start with a return to our relationship to other traditions - notably Liberalism. It is wrong to think of Socialism as a tradition that stands in opposition to Liberalism. Yet we need to be very clear about which aspects of the Liberal tradition Labour can usefully embrace as its own. Mark Garnett identified two rival modes of Liberal thought; one he described as "fleshed-out", the other "hollowed-out". In its extreme laissez-faire variant, classical "hollowed-out" Liberalism assumes a model of human behaviour that is rational, acquisitive and ruthlessly self-interested. In contrast, "fleshed-out" New Liberalism was developed by the idealist philosopher TH Green, and taken up by LT Hobhouse and JA Hobson; it was optimistic. These thinkers are rightly considerer to be pioneers of the British tradition of ethical Socialism.

The 1997-2010 Labour government is/was the most successful left-of-centre government this country has had since the 1940s. Yet its faults were manifold and its successes hidden behind a rhetoric of "hollowed-out" Liberalism that soon infected its policies as well as the way it presented them. As Tony Blair himself said in 2003 apropos one of his least popular policies: "It's worse than that. I actually believe this stuff."

So now that the centre right politics of the Conservatives are again on the rise, how can the Left best rise to the challenge of reclaiming the ground of Liberal politics? How can the tensions between fraternity and individualism be resolved to the satisfaction of both? How can Labour regain the initiative on issues of privacy, security and civil liberties while remaining true to its core beliefs? And how can we best separate the hollowed-out Libertarian, Ayn Rand selfishness from the more ethical, socially caring, liberal approach of Roy Jenkins?

Make no mistake, this ground is still there to be won. But the Left really needs to get its act together and successfully marry the concerns of the individual to the needs of the community, while acting in a coherent way consistent with implementing its historical values in a 21st century context. If it doesn't, the Conservatives' flag will remain planted on the Liberal ground and its policies will be far more Libertarian, anti-state, anti-society, pro-individual, neo-Thatcherite than any sane person would ever want.

So I'd say the direction of travel should be obvious - reconnect the Social Democratic tradition to the Liberal tradition in a way that both benefit from. But the details of how to do that? Well, Sam Seabourne's comment can help there: "The internet. Cell phones. Health records." The leading players in the data and information industry are all incredibly powerful. Google, by whose means I publish these words, read my emails before I do. Whichever firm has got the contract to run the NHS Spine database will soon have an insurance goldmine of information on which to maximise profits. The hedgefunds behind Facebook even encourage me to confirm which political party I support.

An effective start on privacy issues could be to support those institutions that are there for the good of the people, rather than the good of the share price. The BBC should be encouraged to compete with Google, rather than kowtow to the likes of James Murdoch. The NHS's medical record keeping should be kept in-house. And the government should follow our European neighbours and take a stake in mobile communications firms.

There are plenty of other ways, I'm sure, in which the needs of the many can be met by addressing the concerns of the individual. But there's a long way to go before the battle is over, and there's a tough fight ahead to keep the Conservatives from indulging their Libertarian interests. This post is but a small part of how I'll help in that fight; I hope you'll join me.

Did David Cameron leak to the press against the Major government?

From the Evening Standard of March 25, 1993:

NO MORE LEAKS, SAYS MAJOR

Tired by political leaks, Major and Conservative Party chairman Sir Norman Fowler gathered together 20 political advisers at a meeting in Downing Street the other day.

Those present at the gathering included David Cameron. 'Your loyalty is to me and the Government, and not to individual ministers,' the Prime Minister told the assembled advisers. 'There is too much leaking going on,' he continued. 'This meeting is confidential and I don't want it appearing in the Press.'

Sadly Major has not been obeyed. 'He was furious and stamping his feet,' says one special adviser who was present but, out of loyalty, I cannot name.

Another recalls more convivial aspects of the meeting. 'It was generally a sociable gathering,' I'm told. 'Leaks were mentioned - they are an ongoing bete noire - but there was wine and some nice canapes as well.'

David Cameron leaking against his own Prime Minister? Surely not.