all the right words, but not necessarily in the right order

a glossary of sorts, part 2

Haven’t done one of these for a while – a glossary is often a useful way into anything, as focusing on the jargon helps you think about why something like that might be needed. These are a few concepts and images that I find myself repeatedly using on “Back of Mind Dot Substack Dot Com”, sometimes in unusual or perverse contexts. The idea of this blog was always to be the policy and management equivalent of ambient music, with not quite so many actual arguments, but more attempts to create funny little hooks that stick in your mind. I think it's drifted a bit from the original manifesto, but this is my attempt to drag it back.

“slate heaps”. From a post on the demise of the Welsh slate industry. This (to a greater or lesser extent, from a half remembered museum caption) was not so much due to working out the quarries, or to changing tastes, but simply because the spoil heaps had been badly thought out and located in the early days of the quarry, making the place far too dangerous to work even though it was economically viable. In general, the unpleasant tendency of current options to be constrained by the consequences of past decisions which might have seemed trivial or unimportant to the people who were making them.

“tradeoffs”. Tends to be mentioned purely in pejorative context on this blog. The idea that “if you have this then that means you can’t have that” is obviously important. But in my opinion, the use of this word seems to inexorably lead to assumptions that there is a smooth, comprehensible and unique function linking the two (or more) quantities of interest. When there often isn’t. Even if there is, there’s an implicit assumption that you’re already on the efficient frontier with no win-win gains possible, which ought to be checked rather than assumed.

“flat cap corporatism”. From a weird piece of fictionalised nonfiction set in 1970s Northern England. Basically, when regulation and governance has a human scale and face, meaning that you can sit down with it (in a pub or elsewhere) and talk to it about your problems and their possible solutions. Obviously a massive conflict of interest problem waiting to happen, but in my view not necessarily always bad even admitting that.

“plumbing and architecture”. The difference is that if something is plumbing, you can change it. Becomes very important to know which is which in crisis situations, where things which previously looked like important constraints suddenly become policy levers because it’s become worthwhile to someone to change them.

“spiritual exercise”. An exercise in difficult mathematical modelling, or scenario analysis, or legislative parsing, or what not, which is carried out not because you think that is the right way to get to the answer, but in order to give you and others the confidence to believe that the answer you had arrived at in some less easily demonstrable way is going to be the right one.

“risk surface”. A concept introduced with, in retrospect, not enough explanation in my Niskanen Center paper. The idea that decision making on large investment projects does not always follow the net-present value or cost/benefit rules, but instead starts by identifying all the possible factors which could cause the project to fail or be forbidden, and then proceeds by identifying the cost of eliminating enough of those factors to bring the overall probability of failure below some threshold level. The more information you gather (or the more that is presented to you by people who gain from doing so), the larger the perceived risk surface and therefore the more expensive the project.

“bats and newts”. When used by me (also “fish discos”), usually referring to an unattractive habit of infrastructure policy types to pretend that the problem isn’t much more likely to be voters, property owners, or other parties that might be capable of having a go back.

“the Elizabeth Line”. A new one, but it still greatly annoys me that the fact that the passenger number forecasts for this project were underestimated by a factor of nearly a half, and that this is treated as great news, rather than a horrible planning failure equivalent to a cost overrun of 100%, mandating urgent research into which other projects might have been delayed or cancelled because of what seems like an utterly broken cost/benefit process.