6 July 2024: Policy | Music
The seven mistakes that governments make // Swift, Swiftonomics, Swiftology [#585]
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1: The seven mistakes that governments make. Or eight.
Since we have a new government that will be keen to show that it is Getting On And Doing Things, it seemed to be a good day to go back to Geoff Mulgan’s book The Art of Public Strategy, and in particular his list of seven patterns where things go wrong. By chance some notes turned up in something else I was looking at on the UK election day.
The book was published in 2009, after Mulgan’s period working in the Performance and Innovation Unit, and later the Cabinet Office, in Tony Blair’s government. This isn’t a review—just some highlights from one section. The book is recommended if you’re interested in public policy and public strategy, though.
(Photo: Andrew Curry CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The particular section is headed ‘Predictable Mistakes’. There are seven of them.
1. Failure of empathy
Robert MacNamara, who was the US Defense Secretary under Kennedy in the 1960s, said towards the end of his life that “governments’ biggest failings are generally those of empathy. This is, of course, true of diplomacy and international relations, but it is also true at home:
Within nations, too, lack of empathy explains a large proportion of errors, in particular failure to understand the resentments that powerless people feel towards the rational plans of the powerful, whether they are slum clearances and vasectomies in India or poll taxes in Britain.
Worldview and context matter much more than we think they do, as I mentioned in a post on prediction and forecasting a few weeks ago.
2. The ‘psychology of investing’
This is the political equivalent of ‘sunk cost fallacy’.
governments find it much harder to end policies and pro-grammes that have had significant past investment. Once a department or agency has spent years devising plans, commissioning consultants, and making public announcements, it is not easy to look rigorously at whether it is still worth proceeding.
There are lots of examples of programmes which go ahead despite “strong evidence” that they are not likely to succeed, or will be much more expensive than originally envisaged. Mulgan mentions New Labour’s Millennium Dome as an example.
3. Wishful thinking
Wishful thinking is about strategies that assume that present conditions will continue unabated, the operating environment won’t change, or a particular set of benign conditions will remain in place.
A particularly common type of wishful thinking is profligacy, which afflicts governments that put their faith in high rates of economic growth, as well as financial sectors which in every generation repeat the same mistakes of overstretch, soft credit, and weak controls.
Mulgan suggests the use of scenarios as a defence against this, although since I know he’s not a fan of scenario planning, he probably means here the use of ‘What if?’ questions to test alternatives.
4. Failure to understand dynamic processes
Many of the things that governments deal with are incremental and slow-moving: demographics, for example, or underlying health conditions. But (written in 2009, remember):
dynamics can run much further than appears likely or common sense... Epidemics can spread in an exponential way-again, more dramatically than the human mind is designed to expect. Many goverments simply did not believe the predictions made for the spread of AIDS in the mid-1980s because they seemed implausible.
His remedy is to immerse decision-makers in situations where they need to deal with dynamic environments. You could do this through role-playing and simulation games, in the same way that Peter Senge’s Beer Game trained business students to think about the way that delays in systems caused business failure.
5. Failure to understand normal probability patterns
People don’t understand probability very well, and especially they don’t understand that normal probability patterns mean that you get extreme and unexpected outcomes from time to time, especially in systems with many repeated outcomes. (He doesn’t use this example, but if you toss a coin five times, you have a 3% chance of getting five heads).
A one in a million possibility could happen well over sixty times in a nation of 60 million people. A variant of this is the difficulty governments have in understanding patterns of extreme evil. History tells us that almost any population is capable of extreme evil in the right conditions. Populations are equally capable of extreme good, of generosity and self-sacrifice.
6. Assumptions that happen to be wrong
This is also associated with groupthink. Mulgan references here David Halberstam’s book, The Brightest and the Best, which looked at the staffers who worked with President Kennedy in the run-up to the Bay of Pigs crisis and, come to that, during the escalation of the war in Vietnam:
They [had] shared perspectives on the world that squeezed out sceptics... Kennedy's administration almost led the world into a Third World War during the Cuba missile crisis because the narrow group with which he was surrounded, mainly men in their forties, and mainly from Harvard, saw the world in a particular way and left insufficient scope for internal argument and diversity to challenge assumptions.
(If I have one particular concern about the incoming Starmer government it is is this one, which has already led to the party’s missteps over the war in Gaza and seems to create a narrow view of economic policy.)
As Mulgan notes,
Every organisation finds it painful to dismantle its own world view even when it is clearly leading to failure.
7. Wanting to avoid difficult trade-offs
This is connected to the seventh mistake, which is also about worldview. Our brain works hard to maintain a coherent worldview, even when it leads to cognitive dissonance:
Today's most obvious example is the question of whether 'people, planet, and profit' can be aligned: there are very good reasons for wanting to believe that they can be. But it's possible that they can't, and past civilisations disappeared because of a failure to face up to profound incompatibilities between existing ways of life and the demands of the future.
Mulgan adds to this already long list. He points to “failures that come from ignoring truths that are simply too difficult to absorb.” As a futurist, I might call these “black elephant” questions—or the future that has already happened:
George W. Bush's resistance to the 'inconvenient truths' of climate change was a very visible example in the 2000s. Two decades before, when Britain's Central Policy Review Staff in the 1980s prepared a report looking at demographic change and pointed out that current pensions policies were simply not sustainable, its leak to the press forced Mrs Thatcher to disavow them. Not long afterwards they were closed down.
Related to this: people and governments are much less likely to invest in prevention rather than cure. There are both cognitive reasons for this (prevention is usually more uncertain and involves a complex chain), institutional reasons (‘cure’ organisations are often large and influential), and there are also political reasons (prevention is slower and you can’t be sure that you will get the credit for it):
I... remember a very senior Treasury official telling me in the mid-1990s why no government would ever invest significant sums of money into support for young children, however strong the evidence for the long-term payback.
This was probably an argument about the SureStart programme, one of the 1997 Labour Government’s successes.
In short: governments share the same cognitive biases that people do, and need to find ways to break of these. These include confirmation bias, narrative fallacies (we make connections where none exist), and believe credible stories over evidence.
2: Swift, Swiftonomics, Swiftology
I spent some of a train ride to Scotland recently listening to a conversation between my wife and two Americans about Taylor Swift. The Americans had been to see Swift at Wembley the previous night; it was apparently cheaper and even quicker for them to come to London from North Carolina to see her than to go to one of her American concerts.
They were full of stories of Swift’s generosity, for example the large bonuses she pays her tour crews. A few days later I read about the huge donations she’s made to food banks in every British city that she’s played in.
(Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Arlington, Texas, 2023. Photo: Ronald Woan/ flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
This is a slightly long way in to a piece written by the writer and musician Pat Kane about Swift, on his blog and in the Scots newspaper The National. She was about to play three nights at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh. By his own admission at the start:
I came here to write a snarky article about “Swiftonomics”. That’s the term that awed business journalists are using to name the multi-millions, indeed billions, that Taylor Swift’s “Eras” mega-tour is amassing globally.
He came to snark, but stayed to admire, at multiple levels, starting with the lyrics. As he observes, as a songwriter himself, the machinery of country music songs is often visible to the point of creaking. Swift’s lyrics have now moved way beyond this:
They reminded me more of Paul Simon or Elvis Costello than straight teen pop. “No rules in breakable heaven”, Taylor sings in Cruel Summer (2019) – that’s a perfect way to describe a season-specific relationship...
2021’s All Too Well movingly captures the disjunction in a lovers’ relationship: “And there we are again, when nobody had to know/You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath.”
The music, too, has moved way beyond country:
I find the style of her most recent records – electro and hip-hop soundscapes, providing the context for Nashville-strength melodies, end-rhymes and metaphors – to be exciting and properly dramatic.
Of course, Kane’s never going to be a Swiftie. He is completely the wrong demographic. The core audience is young women, in their teens and twenties. What he sees in the Swift videos, as he researches them for his piece, is audiences in a state of ‘parasocial activity’. The phrase is taken from social psychology. It
means they are utterly identifying with Swift and her journeys across emotional minefields. As if her romantic and existential struggles were entirely theirs.
And this is his route into a discussion of whatever ‘Swiftonomics’ is. She’s not the first artist to generate this—Kane also reference Beyonce and U2 here—but is is about “the commercial possibilities that lurk behind the desire for collective experience or epiphany.”
In the past, riffing on the old Iggy Pop song, I’ve called it an increasing “Lust For Live”. That means a yearning search for “real experience”, triggered by the pervasive spread of the simulated and the fake-digital.
This can operate at both ends of the music and entertainment spectrum. Kane suggests that at the intimate end, it might lead to the recovery of small arts and music venues (and let’s hope so, because in the UK, certainly, they are closing in numbers right now.)
At the other end, though, it’s about being willing to spend hundreds of pounds to be in the crowd when Swift, or another global band/brand, comes on stage. (Football fans, similarly, will pay huge amounts to be at their team’s special games.)
And here he hits a high note, quoting the philosopher Roberto Unger. Unger’s piece, ‘The World and Us’, is a reflection on the three hundred years in which a public and revolutionary movement, associated with democracy, liberalism, and socialism has been linked to a “personalist” movement associated with romanticism. The message of romanticism
is that “the ordinary man or woman is not so ordinary after all; he, she, is appointed to rise to a higher form of life: to find and give personal love against all the barriers imposed by the restraints of class and culture.”
We all have the opportunity for a share of divine transcendence, in other words. And one of the things that Swift does very well is to connect together love, romance, and political agency.
There’s thatfamous filmed altercation with her fatherin the 2020 documentary Miss Americana. He worried for her security during the last presidential election, as she came out for Biden and against Tennessee’s Republican candidate. “These aren’t your dad’s Republicans”, she tells her family, objecting to their prejudices against same-sex marriages.
The effect of celebrity political endorsements is contested, certainly, even though there is some far-right conspiracy talk in the US that Swift is in fact an FBI psy-op designed to influence the election.
And who knows what ambitions Swift might have, in the world of politics or of business, as her tours continue to generate billions of dollars and she joins the world’s billionaire list.
As Kane concludes,
a confident, progressive, expressive young woman is something powerful to see. We shall see whether she becomes Swiftology as well.
And it’s worth adding a note here. When I wrote about the radicalisation of young women here a few months ago, one of my readers suggested to me that one of the reasons might be the rise of “confident, progressive” young women as role models—young women like Taylor Swift, in other words.
(Photo: Trussell Trust via Twitter/X)
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