Thank you for this great piece. One note: as a Hungarian, I love nothing more than bragging about the Hungarian background of great social scientists (John Harsanyi, John von Neumann, etc.), but I think you are mistaken about Mancur Olson. He was US-born to a Norwegian immigrant family, it seems.
Interesting piece. I know it's rude to enter a political science discussion and reframe it through a different disciplinary lens, but I feel I have to. This is a systems problem, not a political problem. In brief, systems are clusters of parts that come together and then break down again. What stops a system from breaking is resilience - or adaptability. This allows a system to continue without breaking down. OK, systems operate at different scales in time and space. The example often given is a forest. This has seeds, saplings, trees, woods and eventually forests (parts coming together). The forest sits in a broader ecosystem still. Seeds and saplings fail a lot. Ecosystems fail very rarely and usually in response to one off big bang type impacts. Imagine an insurance tower in Lloyds. The bottom layer gets blown out pretty often. The top layers - and ultimately the market layer - hardly ever blows. It's a resilient system that can take a lot of pain without breaking the overall structure. So an important lesson here is that systems become resilient when lower levels can blow out (without sinking the vessel). But what if the lower levels are protected? Then you lose modularity in the system. The layers start to become increasingly interconnected. It becomes harder to adapt to change and the only way to change things is to crater the whole system. Again, the goto example here is forest fires. Lots of regular little forest fires are good for forest health. Putting out small fires compromises the system because dead wood builds up on the forest floor and turns into a huge conflagration. Hopefully, some of the very obvious parallels are becoming obvious here. Stewart Brand, a clever MIT chap, has applied some of these ideas to political systems. Instead of a seed / sapling / wood / ecosystem, he frames political systems as follows:
Fashion (changes very rapidly and frequently)
Commerce (changes pretty rapidly and frequently)
Infrastructure (changes every decade or two)
Governance (changes very infrequently)
Culture (changes over centuries)
Nature (changes over geological time)
The point about these layers is that each one represents an adaptive layer. A lot of collapses in the lower layers are healthy for the system. But collapses in the higher layers are pretty critical. Now when these lower level collapses are stopped for whatever socially / politically good reason, then the system becomes more interconnected and harder to change. Although I am sitting in a (sort of) heated house in a pretty market town, I am not alone in sensing that my control of my immediate environment has become increasingly constrained. This is because systems are becoming more and more closely coupled. My sense of being able to affect stuff at the top has diminished. The layers of local politics, special interest groups even Parliamentary democracy have all fused. So it feels like the only way to change anything is to kick out the entire system. In this context, we get to Bannon / Cummings / shock doctrine. Shock doctrine, in systems theory, is a phase shift. In a phase shift, all the old rules / paradigms etc; get collapsed and new stuff gallops into the gap. This is a little abstract and I explain it more deeply in my posts, but the point about a system level collapse is that you often see speciation. So the fossil record will show you lots of slow, incremental change - then bang, the asteroid hits and you see all these new species taking over. It is not, in my opinion, any coincidence that we saw super wealthy people speciating into a billionaire class after 2008. Now, any post on systems thinking has to mention Nicholas Taleb and if he wasn't such a self-regarding iconoclast, he might have written books in a Haynes manual style instead of as sacred texts that need three levels of interpretation. The point is, one of Taleb's big ideas (stolen from systems thinking) is that old things work because they've been around a long time. A jury is a useful thing but who knows why? A book is a useful thing. A knife is a useful thing. AI is not that useful. Maybe 10,000 years from now we'll have a different view. But right now, it's just a *fashionable* thing that hasn't been stress tested through a systems lens. So, back to the topic in hand. How do we know when to stick and when to twist? The answer is that *if* you want a stable, resilient system, you twist a lot at the bottom layer (in this case, this would be lots of experimentation in ways to improve democratic decision making at the level of the citizen) but very LITTLE change among the institutions. In the case of the civil service, you'd let them do all the repetitive, stable, ordered work AND you'd run some taskforces to accelerate & run experiments to keep improving the bottom layer. We have made a pretty good fist of making an adaptive political system with parish councils > local gov > MPs > Parliament etc; But the system has become too interconnected. It's not adaptive at teh local level. Everything is driven from the top. This means the system is fragile and very easy to push over (Cummings / Doge whatever). And mark my words, when you push over a big system like this, something new will emerge. In the UK, we are finding that pushing over the Brexit system is leading to cascades of damage to our economy. Reform is the beast that emerged. In the US you may even get fascism. I have now written so much i should have turned it into a post. Anyway, please read Stewart Brand's paper and, if you can bear the self-satisfied tone, all of Taleb's books. Then top this up with a healthy dose of James C Scott and suddenly, you'll be hit by a blinding light.
Thanks, and may I add a dollop of Clay Christensen to the mix? "Disrupt" is just fancy for "break up" but thanks to CC and "disruptive innovation" it's seen as a fundamental and laudable value in the tech/startup world that so influences Musk, Vance and also Cummings. If you're not disrupting, you're nor really trying...
Christensen had something quite specific in mind though: an innovation that either undercuts existing provision by offering "less for less", or targets a segment that existing markets don't cater to at all.
Neither seems a good fit for current public service challenges (in the UK at least). Who is asking govt to move into new areas, or go downmarket in existing ones (say, transport??)
As in the world of open source software, where it's important to distinguish free as in "puppy" from free as in "beer", we should ask, disruption as in "markets" or as in "rail services"? Suspect in most cases, it's the latter desssed up as the former.
Great article! However, I have a few quibbles. The happy medium between stasis and mayhem is progress. Incidentally, Trump has gone full mayhem, whilst Starmer is sobbing behind the sofa hoping it will all go away. A progressive he is not.
"You have very little power as a disruptive politician to make people who want certainty feel good about the uncertainty you have created." To paraphrase Mat McManus its certainty v progress. Certainty = 'backwards' looking reactionaries, and conservatives who just want mummy and daddy to stop shouting. Both ideologies are based on emotion whereas progressives use 'reason' to move 'forward'. Unfortunately, "do this or else 'X'!" is more compelling than ' on one hand this, but on the other..' Hey, that's politics.
POSIWID - we're not stupid, if nothing is getting better, parotting (unscientific) neoclassical claims that this time it'll be different (yes, you Reeves), falls on fallow ground. Storytellers rule the world and got to tell a compelling story of 'progress' rather than rehashing failed dogma.
Also, if wages are greater than profits (1970s) or if consumers lack disposable income (now), what is the incentive for capitalists to invest? Its about profits, stability is the excuse. For instance, 'price stability' = central banks making people unemployed whenever there is inflation to head-off uncertainty. Hmmm, what's the incentive here I wonder?
'Democracies are more stable still than monarchies', democracies are notoriously unstable – Mussolini and Hitler were voted in (dictators rarely arrive fully formed). In fact this is the core argument conservatives, elitists etc. use against democracy. Hopefully this isn't Trump but we will soon see how resilient democratic institutions are.
I've almost been begging everyone I know to read Olson in recent years. I've started a series of posts on here building on a lot of his stuff around how purposeful groups can operate - and the form our most pernicious bit of free-riding takes - our preference for free-riding on the advice and advocacy that is paid for by budding oligarchs.
Thank you for this great piece. One note: as a Hungarian, I love nothing more than bragging about the Hungarian background of great social scientists (John Harsanyi, John von Neumann, etc.), but I think you are mistaken about Mancur Olson. He was US-born to a Norwegian immigrant family, it seems.
Yes absolutely. Was also pointed out to me on Bluesky. Have edited. Thanks!
Interesting piece. I know it's rude to enter a political science discussion and reframe it through a different disciplinary lens, but I feel I have to. This is a systems problem, not a political problem. In brief, systems are clusters of parts that come together and then break down again. What stops a system from breaking is resilience - or adaptability. This allows a system to continue without breaking down. OK, systems operate at different scales in time and space. The example often given is a forest. This has seeds, saplings, trees, woods and eventually forests (parts coming together). The forest sits in a broader ecosystem still. Seeds and saplings fail a lot. Ecosystems fail very rarely and usually in response to one off big bang type impacts. Imagine an insurance tower in Lloyds. The bottom layer gets blown out pretty often. The top layers - and ultimately the market layer - hardly ever blows. It's a resilient system that can take a lot of pain without breaking the overall structure. So an important lesson here is that systems become resilient when lower levels can blow out (without sinking the vessel). But what if the lower levels are protected? Then you lose modularity in the system. The layers start to become increasingly interconnected. It becomes harder to adapt to change and the only way to change things is to crater the whole system. Again, the goto example here is forest fires. Lots of regular little forest fires are good for forest health. Putting out small fires compromises the system because dead wood builds up on the forest floor and turns into a huge conflagration. Hopefully, some of the very obvious parallels are becoming obvious here. Stewart Brand, a clever MIT chap, has applied some of these ideas to political systems. Instead of a seed / sapling / wood / ecosystem, he frames political systems as follows:
Fashion (changes very rapidly and frequently)
Commerce (changes pretty rapidly and frequently)
Infrastructure (changes every decade or two)
Governance (changes very infrequently)
Culture (changes over centuries)
Nature (changes over geological time)
The point about these layers is that each one represents an adaptive layer. A lot of collapses in the lower layers are healthy for the system. But collapses in the higher layers are pretty critical. Now when these lower level collapses are stopped for whatever socially / politically good reason, then the system becomes more interconnected and harder to change. Although I am sitting in a (sort of) heated house in a pretty market town, I am not alone in sensing that my control of my immediate environment has become increasingly constrained. This is because systems are becoming more and more closely coupled. My sense of being able to affect stuff at the top has diminished. The layers of local politics, special interest groups even Parliamentary democracy have all fused. So it feels like the only way to change anything is to kick out the entire system. In this context, we get to Bannon / Cummings / shock doctrine. Shock doctrine, in systems theory, is a phase shift. In a phase shift, all the old rules / paradigms etc; get collapsed and new stuff gallops into the gap. This is a little abstract and I explain it more deeply in my posts, but the point about a system level collapse is that you often see speciation. So the fossil record will show you lots of slow, incremental change - then bang, the asteroid hits and you see all these new species taking over. It is not, in my opinion, any coincidence that we saw super wealthy people speciating into a billionaire class after 2008. Now, any post on systems thinking has to mention Nicholas Taleb and if he wasn't such a self-regarding iconoclast, he might have written books in a Haynes manual style instead of as sacred texts that need three levels of interpretation. The point is, one of Taleb's big ideas (stolen from systems thinking) is that old things work because they've been around a long time. A jury is a useful thing but who knows why? A book is a useful thing. A knife is a useful thing. AI is not that useful. Maybe 10,000 years from now we'll have a different view. But right now, it's just a *fashionable* thing that hasn't been stress tested through a systems lens. So, back to the topic in hand. How do we know when to stick and when to twist? The answer is that *if* you want a stable, resilient system, you twist a lot at the bottom layer (in this case, this would be lots of experimentation in ways to improve democratic decision making at the level of the citizen) but very LITTLE change among the institutions. In the case of the civil service, you'd let them do all the repetitive, stable, ordered work AND you'd run some taskforces to accelerate & run experiments to keep improving the bottom layer. We have made a pretty good fist of making an adaptive political system with parish councils > local gov > MPs > Parliament etc; But the system has become too interconnected. It's not adaptive at teh local level. Everything is driven from the top. This means the system is fragile and very easy to push over (Cummings / Doge whatever). And mark my words, when you push over a big system like this, something new will emerge. In the UK, we are finding that pushing over the Brexit system is leading to cascades of damage to our economy. Reform is the beast that emerged. In the US you may even get fascism. I have now written so much i should have turned it into a post. Anyway, please read Stewart Brand's paper and, if you can bear the self-satisfied tone, all of Taleb's books. Then top this up with a healthy dose of James C Scott and suddenly, you'll be hit by a blinding light.
Very interesting and helpful! Thank you.
Thanks, and may I add a dollop of Clay Christensen to the mix? "Disrupt" is just fancy for "break up" but thanks to CC and "disruptive innovation" it's seen as a fundamental and laudable value in the tech/startup world that so influences Musk, Vance and also Cummings. If you're not disrupting, you're nor really trying...
Christensen had something quite specific in mind though: an innovation that either undercuts existing provision by offering "less for less", or targets a segment that existing markets don't cater to at all.
Neither seems a good fit for current public service challenges (in the UK at least). Who is asking govt to move into new areas, or go downmarket in existing ones (say, transport??)
As in the world of open source software, where it's important to distinguish free as in "puppy" from free as in "beer", we should ask, disruption as in "markets" or as in "rail services"? Suspect in most cases, it's the latter desssed up as the former.
From Kentucky United States thank you so much
I think it’s time to send all men like this to GITMO. They can pontificate to each other without doing any damage.
Great article! However, I have a few quibbles. The happy medium between stasis and mayhem is progress. Incidentally, Trump has gone full mayhem, whilst Starmer is sobbing behind the sofa hoping it will all go away. A progressive he is not.
"You have very little power as a disruptive politician to make people who want certainty feel good about the uncertainty you have created." To paraphrase Mat McManus its certainty v progress. Certainty = 'backwards' looking reactionaries, and conservatives who just want mummy and daddy to stop shouting. Both ideologies are based on emotion whereas progressives use 'reason' to move 'forward'. Unfortunately, "do this or else 'X'!" is more compelling than ' on one hand this, but on the other..' Hey, that's politics.
POSIWID - we're not stupid, if nothing is getting better, parotting (unscientific) neoclassical claims that this time it'll be different (yes, you Reeves), falls on fallow ground. Storytellers rule the world and got to tell a compelling story of 'progress' rather than rehashing failed dogma.
Also, if wages are greater than profits (1970s) or if consumers lack disposable income (now), what is the incentive for capitalists to invest? Its about profits, stability is the excuse. For instance, 'price stability' = central banks making people unemployed whenever there is inflation to head-off uncertainty. Hmmm, what's the incentive here I wonder?
'Democracies are more stable still than monarchies', democracies are notoriously unstable – Mussolini and Hitler were voted in (dictators rarely arrive fully formed). In fact this is the core argument conservatives, elitists etc. use against democracy. Hopefully this isn't Trump but we will soon see how resilient democratic institutions are.
I've almost been begging everyone I know to read Olson in recent years. I've started a series of posts on here building on a lot of his stuff around how purposeful groups can operate - and the form our most pernicious bit of free-riding takes - our preference for free-riding on the advice and advocacy that is paid for by budding oligarchs.
The first post is here but the ones that follow are follow-ups to it. https://substack.com/home/post/p-152446803
Thsnk you for a spirited and fascinating read. And thank you also for alerting me to Rethink, to which I have subscribed