pet sounds and bagels

semi related topics for summer

Hi everyone – once more, the August lassitude has hit posting, it will return soon. In the meantime, this is Caramel, a big fluffy lump:

Caramel’s slight relevance to the topics of this Substack is that in my mind, he represents a certain kind of policy maker, who has a pet idea. It is usually one that is slightly out of step with their other beliefs; you might have a dyed in the wool neoliberal who really wants to ban private education, or a social democrat who thinks cryptocurrency should be deregulated. But very many people have their little fuzzy policy friend, who they keep in a hutch and feed lettuce to.

The adorable pet policy is the counterpart of the “bee in the bonnet”, of course. I try to warn readers that some of the views expressed here should not be argued against, because they are not arguments, they’re bees. Similarly, the affectionate and emotional dimension of politics should not be underestimated – a policy pet is often associated with a beloved mentor, or a particular formative career experience or something. In any case, if you’ve identified a pet there is no more point in trying to make the case against it to its owner than there would be in trying to assemble the evidence to me that so far from being “a very good boy” and “a very clever bunny”, Caramel is in fact quite greedy and destructive, and almost suicidally stupid. He’s not, he's a lovely clever little guy.

Organisations (particularly governments) which don’t have a sufficiently strong philosophy or ideology have a terrible tendency to turn into rule by everyone’s little cuddly pals, hopping around and poohing everywhere. The point of “System 5” in Stafford Beer’s system is to reconcile the ideas generated by the “intelligence” function with the constraints of the “optimisation” function – to make sure that while the operations are able to change in anticipation of a chaotic environment, they don’t have all their energy and bandwidth sapped by things which aren’t relevant to the purpose. Without this faculty or ability to enforce consistency, pet projects can become a significant part of the failure mode.

This thought crossed my brain while engaged in another of my attempts to understand “Reevesonomics”, or to extract a coherent economic model from the current UK chancellor. And I’m close to admitting defeat on that – I just don’t think it’s possible to base your theory of growth on deregulation, cutting red tape and supporting builders over bureaucrats, while simultaneously championing workers’ rights and restricting immigration of construction workers. The single biggest interaction that most employers have with the state is through employment law (and its overlap with immigration law) – if you’re going to be regulatory about that, business is not going to thank you no matter how easy you make it to concrete over the newts and bats. But someone has a deregulation pet, somebody has a trade union pet and so the only people who really get their own way are the anti-immigration politicians, who have the single big advantage of knowing what they want and being prepared to sacrifice other things in order to get it.

(Related to this “pet policy” thing, I was recently considering the American phrase “Everything-Bagel Liberalism” and using my habitual tactic of taking jokes seriously to see what they mean. And if you do that, you realise that an “everything bagel” is a bagel which has everything on it which is suitable to put on a bagel. If you ordered an everything bagel, you wouldn’t get one with honeycomb toffee, or masonry nails or porridge. The everything bagel should be the aspiration for Abundance types – you want to promote growth, while ensuring that the known externalities of various kinds of growth are internalised or regulated. The modern regulatory state, particularly with respect to building and environmental protection, came about as a reaction to the state of affairs described by JK Galbraith as “private opulence amid public squalor”. It’s achieved something that might be called “private stagnation amid public adequacy”, but the solution can’t be to go straight back. You need to keep the pets at home, not legislate for more boring bagels).