With government revenue, he who pays the piper ultimately calls the tune. For instance, a government that’s massively dependent on oil revenue to fund its public services pretty much has to pursue pro-oil-business policies. Similarly, if a government becomes heavily dependent on revenue raised from a tiny number of hyper-rich people/companies, adopting policies which might reduce those people’s/companies’ pre-tax income will become unthinkable. Imagine if the entire US government was funded solely by taxes on FAANG (Facebook Amazon Apple Netflix Google). In that situation, Congress would never dare do anything which might reduce those companies’ monopoly power. Suppose Ali Baba wants to set up in the US to compete with Amazon - the US government will block it. Suppose some angry consumers want to bring an anti-trust case against Google - again, the USG will block it. This ought to be obvious.
In both the UK and the US, politicians have worried that financialisation has gone too far; that our economies are too much about making money out of money, rather than using that money to make things. But both the City and Wall Street pay a lot of tax, and it’s that revenue dependence which thwarts government attempts to rebalance our economies.
So what should governments do? They should go back to doing the sort of thing they did between 1945 and the early 1970s. Back then, governments used Keynesian policies to raise the pre-tax earning capacity of the average worker. The Macmillan government commissions the building of the M1 Motorway; firms hire workers to build it; demand for workers rises across the whole economy; wages go up; workers pay more tax. That sort of thing. Such an approach resulted in a society with historically all-time low levels of inequality. This was tied to the fact that postwar governments were more dependent on taxes paid by the median worker than on taxes paid by billionaires. So back then the main way to raise government revenue was to increase the pre-tax earning capacity of the median worker, not the billionaire.
Today, pretty much the only policy any government has to boost economic growth is to increase aggregate demand through consumer spending. Increase the availability of credit so people will spend more, and maybe get some tax back from the corporations because we’ve raised their profits. Even if the government redistributes some profits back to the consumers who make the purchases, it’s weakened their ability to accumulate capital long term by burdening them with raised levels of debt.
If any government really wants to reduce inequality, it has to think about pre-tax inequality. Some economists call this approach "predistribution".
A society in which pre-tax inequality keeps rising to Brazil levels of income disparity ultimately won’t be able to rebalance everything purely through the tax system.
This is only a problem if one subscribes to the model that taxation funds government expenditure. This isn't actually the case (governments have a different set of constraints and running out of money isn't one of them) but it is indeed a persistent myth that pretty much everyone believes, hence resulting the constraints you describe.
Are you coming from a Modern Monetary Theory point of view? I don’t believe in MMT; I don’t absolutely disbelieve it either. I suspect it may work or seem to work in very special cases (e.g. when your national currency is also the world’s reserve currency, or when your country is relatively self-sufficient in important things like energy), but I’m sceptical of its general applicability.
But let’s assume it’s correct for a moment. According to MMT any government with its own currency (so NOT the 19 countries which use the Euro) can create and spend any amount of money into the economy and can do so without relying at all on taxes or borrowing. The purpose of taxation is purely to reduce inflation by depressing aggregate demand. The government taxes money out of the economy to reduce the amount of money available for spending, thereby dampening inflationary pressure.
If we assume MMT is true, Dominic Cummings is right to want to tax consumption directly, rather than income. In MMT, it’s only the income which people spend as consumption which governments need to tax. Money people save is not inflationary. And since rich people tend to save a higher proportion of their income than poor people, regressive taxes actually work better than progressive taxes.
Once again, I haven’t fully figured out my opinion on MMT. Please enlighten me if you think I have the basics wrong.
Yes I am. Perhaphs surprisingly it is generally applicable and doesn't rely on flakey evidence and belief like pretty much every other economic theory. It's based on the underlying accounting - debits and credits - so it's not really a matter of opinion, it's just a description of how things are. It doesn't say what we should do though.
I think peoples dislike of it mainly comes from the idea that its some lefty pie in the sky theory which says we can spend forever with no consequences but it's not like this at all. It merely points out that governments are inflation constrained and not budgetarily constrained i.e. the constraints are completely different to what is commonly believed. Where you go with it after that is totally down to politics, it's just the left have co-opted it first but the theory is neutral.
I agree that DC is right re taxing consumption. I would also tax certain kinds of capital hard (land & any under utitilised asset) and others lightly (small / medium business assets).
If you really want to get into MMT's relevane to the UK I recommend the paper at this link:
It's very long but the summary at the link above gives you a good overview of the paper. Again its accounting so if someone thinks it's wrong feel free to find the error in the debits/credits ;)
Fully agreed. I had to relearn much of economics after all the rubbish macro I was taught studying PPE. MMT is the most logically sound lens way to understand post Breton Woods macro and by far the most aligned with empirical evidence.
In this context of taxation what’s given less air and thinking time even within MMT debates is how much of our gdp (ultimately our human economic potential) is wasted through tax bureaucracy, compliance, and evasion/gaming/avoidance etc. Once you consider all the ancillary supporting actors and staff to these unnecessary activities and the mental drain (most entrepreneurs hate having to think about tax), it’s truly staggering how wasteful we are.
Warren Mosler has written most clearly about how a super simple tax regime could be created that is sufficient to create demand for the currency (which is the only thing a sovereign economy like the U.K. or US needs to do. The U.K. or US gov doesn’t need to ‘fund’ itself in the thing it has a monopoly to create. As per core MMT).
It's amazing isn't it? Almost hard to believe that people can be so wrong about something so important for so long. I completely agree re your point on tax bureaucracy. Looking through an MMT lens forces us to ask a key question about all expenditure:
Is this expenditure creating 'wealth' in some way?
It's pretty clear that complex admin and the costs associated with it are a complete drag on wealth creation and create no direct wealth themselves. Much better to employ those people in picking up litter / helping Grannies with their shopping etc as this creates much more 'wealth' in society than shuffling papers around. So instead of 'sack em all!' it becomes 'give them all different jobs!'
I'd cut normal income tax too but you want to try to flatten the tax structure somewhat and build support by removing clear unfairness - a deputy head on 55k shd not be paying 40% etc, and if theyre forced to they will increasingly support Corbyn types
My post wasn't about the why's of concern over immigration, which may or may not be justified. But one would be a fool to deny that, rightly or wrongly, this concern is widespead.
It sounds like your second paragraph sketches the main globalist argument for unlimited immigration. But can I point out that globalists are a tiny minority in the UK, and people like Tony Blair and Klaus Schwab of the WEF, however benevolent their aims may be, are widely derided and demonized by the vast majority.
Even idealistic young people who formerly embraced globalism are now, as they head into their thirties and forties with no house or family of their own due to sky high property prices, mostly caused by immigration, are rapidly having second thoughts and changing their tune.
As Macaulay might have said, yesterday's bright morning star is rapidly turning into tomorrow's glittering ominous portent of revelation ..
"how will politicians cope as advanced technology (e.g multimodal LLMs. text, video etc) force themselves into political debate, given they’re mostly bad at using TV;...aren't politicians there now to simply be people the public can rail against while big money+apparatchik managerial class decide to do what they feel like and come next election you change the politician and carry on boo hissing.Isn't it vital to demonstrate this is happening...people suspect it anyway. It isn't a situation that can be controlled the longer it goes on.So the critical thing now is"how will political entrepreneurs use new tools to break the power of the old parties/media, with echoes of how radio, cinema and TV changed politics". Where's the funding coming from and why? what are the tools? How to demarcate clearly the difference between Old Pols and New Pols.
FWIW, I've no doubt the main reason for the Brexit result was concern over excessive non-EU immigration, given the EU's free movement policy. Sure, a few people may have been swayed by the "save a few million pounds for the NHS" bus, and bendy banana rules, and Cameron's belated and futile attempt to gain a few concessions from the EU. But immigration was certainly the main issue.
I read somewhere that a year or two after the vote, a Tory politician at some dinner party remarked that public opposition to immigration seemed to be softening, and smugly concluded that as a result business as usual could continue, with more mass non-EU immigration.
It was staggering to realise how utterly deluded some otherwise presumably smart people can be, believing what they want to be true, and not realising in this case that if there was any softening in peoples' attitudes it was not because they were suddenly relaxed about immigration but that they assumed the extra control gained by Brexit over our borders meant immigration could start being curbed, and that they would feel doubly betrayed if this didn't happen, as it hasn't!
It's all about immigration but the lumpenproletariat have been conditioned to be discrete because 'racism' is bad and they are not sure what the difference is, so euphemisms spring up. I question the oft repeated 'we need immigrants' for a healthy economy - I do not see any evidence but again it is verboten to have a truly rational and objective discussion on this. DC is helpful with insight and commentary but is too establishment-centric to provide a way forward, which I suspect is something like democracy through direct internet participation and the elimination of agency ala MPs
What forms of political organisation that go beyond competing nation states do you envisage to replace the EU, UN etc? Would it be organisations such as space exploration as you mention, or/and climate change institutions to unite humanity under specific goals that distract from nuclear and AI war?
How do you rate the changes of Reform / Reclaim / Heritage of replacing the Tories? Do any of them embrace the startup style and systems thinking approaches that you advocate for?
0% chance. Heritage lacks the personality and the funds. Reclaim has the funds, but Fox, Hoskin, Bridgen constantly talk up issues which are a minor concern to most people. Their priorities are distorted. Neither Party has local councillors.
Reform UK has councillors and a better focus. However, its key architects are economic liberals. The average voter (or at least the ones RUK is going for) are very much not. Thus, there is a block on ability.
RUK is also adopting the UKIP approach of putting a candidate in every constituency and spreading out resources instead of targeting to get seats. A recipe for disaster.
I like the core message of 21st century technology and challenges with 20th century bureaucracy and institutions. With the rise of AI, it got me thinking. What if AI tells us how to solve all our problems and we just don’t listen because we don’t want to hear the answers? We already know how to solve 100s of problems but we don’t adopt the policies because of elite/insider preferences and social desirability bias.
Be careful what you wish for. One group asked an AI how to improve society (I’m afraid I can’t remember the exact wording). The AI’s solution was that every member of a certain ethnic group should be jailed.
the real problem is how to have a political system trying to solve big problems, many of them we know how to solve but arent trying - e.g much of healthcare
The manner in which some of the most able/capable people (‘builders’) have removed themselves from mainstream politics is alarming.
It indicates their lack of trust/faith in the seriousness/capabilities/ priorities of the current crop of political leaders and, in this, one can sympathise with them.
However, ‘Cicero’s garden’ will remain a haven for only so long (and let’s remember how things ended for Cicero himself), so surely many of these very clever, very creative and very driven people are thinking about the sort of ideas espoused in this essay.
If so, and if they want to actually do something apart from tend their gardens (courtesy of
Mexican illegal labourers) the big hurdle is ‘capture’. How do they capture political/social/media systems in a way that will be sufficient for them to start the process of change (or at least start the process of convincing enough people that change is a possibility).
I believe it is possible and that there is an ‘army’ of disillusioned citizens willing to get behind a thoroughgoing programme of reform of how we run our country.
But I have a question: the very people who might get behind such a programme are the sort of (common sense) people who are rightly suspicious of technocrats and ‘experts’ (like all the experts who told us Brexit would lead to Armageddon). How do we square this circle?
I’m American so I’ll answer from that perspective. What you need is someone with Trump’s ability to go around the media and/or use them along with a team that is actually interested in governing. I sense Dominic trying to get money from Silicon Valley behind a Trump like take over of the Republican Party with a dedicated cadre of people ready to seize power when they get elected. You probably need some sort of organization funded by them to recruit the right kind of people and to put the plan together. Something like Vote Leave on steroids. As long as Trump is around it won’t happen but maybe someone like Ron DeSantis would embrace it.
Good observation. Boris was meant to be our Trump (he could appeal directly to the public despite the fact that the MSM and establishment hated him).
When he won an 80 seat majority with Dom at his side I was optimistic we could start the process of change. Unfortunately Boris’s personal weaknesses killed that dream. Had he been more personally and politically disciplined we would now be well on the way to reforming the British state.
The trouble with outlier candidates like Trump and Boris is that their strengths can become their weaknesses when they win power.
has to be an alliance of entrepreneurs/builders with a set of middle class whove had enough of DEM madness plus working class - i think it's all doable IF you have an entity actuall focused on the real problems, and focused on how power really works (e.g Trump couldn't cope with the deep state), and focused on the public over the media. those 3 fundamental principles are needed
From the Dem side, RFK Jr seems to be saying the right things about the need for reforming the architecture of the state, although his vaccine views (not just Covid) empower many to dismiss him as a crank.
Nevertheless, his support among Dems is growing and he also has cross-party appeal, while even committed supporters of the Dem machine know that Biden is a dud. Any views on RFK and his campaign Dominic?
I remember that you mentioned Dean Acheson's remark that 'Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role' when formulating your initial national vision in 2014.
Similarly, I've been thinking what question would be good to frame a new political movement around. I think being purely reactive (ie 'anti-woke', 'anti-incompetence') fails to grasp the larger issues around the direction of society and why these problems seem to get worse without resolution.
Personally, I think the most vital question of our age is 'why bother engaging with the real world?'. We are already seeing rocketing usage of fentanyl and other narcotics hollowing out communities. This 'dropping out' is not just coming from 'traditional' drugs either. Porn usage is increasing and AI advancement makes it more attractive than before. Generation Z has more mental illnesses than any generation before it and these rates are set to be even higher in the generation that follows. People are not making families and are not having kids.
This is building on trends that have existed since the 60s relating to general health and birthrates. A society that does not reproduce will not continue. The Chinese understand and take this seriously, but in the UK even the question of crashing birth-rates and the fact we seem to be much more physically, mentally and spiritually sick as a people is not discussed.
This is a longer term issue and would not be a 'lead' issue to take into an election as it is too esoteric. However I think grappling with this question will be to fundamentally grasp the question of our age, which is somewhere any serious political movement should be.
It absolutely IS a lead issue. Just couch it in better words. We are told that society has never been better, but people arent experiencing it. The goal should be to help people see better.
Yes exactly. If you take Cicero's maxim that 'The health of the people is the supreme law' (Salus populi suprema lex esto) then our current regime is failing appallingly on every front (Mind, Body and Spirit).
I have mentioned previously that fixing the media may be a necessary precursor to fixing/improving politics.
When you look at the demented circus of performing clowns that constitutes our current media/political axis it is obvious why many of the best and smartest people steer well clear of it.
On a positive note, the green shoots of a new media landscape are growing stronger by the day: podcasts, Substack, de-censored Twitter, rivals to YouTube etc.
Meanwhile trust in 'mainstream' outlets like the BBC and CNN continues to decline. An increasing cohort of the public wants something better than what we have been getting and this demand is creating a supply.
Some of this essay centres on training, but currently a big problem with this is that on completing an expensive training course, many of the best graduates, or newly qualified doctors or whatever, simply hoof it off the US and use their expertise there!
One partial solution might be to provide British citizens with bursaries, covering tuition fees and accommodation etc in part or entirely, but only on condition the recipient agreed not to leave the country for longer than, say, two weeks at a time within any six month period for the next twenty years or until their student debt had been repaid in full.
If that sounds unreasonably onerous, or would hamper international studies and collaborations for example, then the condition could be that the student would agree not to undertake any occupation abroad whose pay would be liable for tax by a foreign country.
Human right lawyers might winge, but to no avail because British subjects have no constitutional right to possess a passport, nor thus the right to move or travel abroad. People say our constitution is unwritten, but funnily enough this principle is one that is. From the Constitution of Clarendon (1164), Article 4 :
"No archbishop, bishop, or other person of the kingdom may leave the kindom without the consent of the Lord King"
(It has been argued that "person" there may be what we would call "parson", i.e. a priest. But even if so, the goal of the document was to try and bring the church into line with laymen's established legal rights and obligations instead of being literally almost a law unto itself. So implicitly, the principle applied even then, just as it has ever since.)
Thanks and Agree, Ben Thompson has it figured out with user unique RSS feeds on his self built platform https://stratechery.com/2021/passport/ . Substack need to catchup
Last comment from me in this thread, unless tempted to reply, because I don't wish to overdo it, but ..
IMHO, the best way to improve standards of governance and economic management, in both the UK and internationally, would be to try and change one of politicians' primary incentives. This is currently to maximise and maintain growth of a pernicious and outdated measure of prosperity called GDP.
But changing this would be easier said than done, without international cooperation, including from the US, because many of our failing economic regulation mechanisms are tied to it, and gaming GDP is one of the few ways politicians can easily exert some control over it via one of its most malign features: It includes public spending.
Worse still, the largely ignorant public, encouraged by the media, has also been conditioned to accept GDP as a reliable and sound indicator of prosperity. So this ties in with politicians' other primary motive, which of course is to maximise votes.
Assessing a country's prosperity by its GDP is like judging someone's health solely by their weight, so that a 600 pound bedridden morbidly obese person, scoffing pizzas and crisps all day and watching daytime TV, is considered healthier than a slim marathon runner.
This explains why Tories for the last ten years, and Labour before them, have all relentlessly increased public spending, to maintain a false impression of genuine increase which is not mainly healthy growth but feverish swelling!
The game has intensified since the Covid epidemic, which itself was a heaven-sent opportunity for an insanely extravagent increase in public spending. But now we see the results: taxes at record levels, and genuine productivity level at a standstill for twenty years or more.
So in summary, there should be a measure of national prosperity which does not and cannot give politicians a perverse motive to manipulate and subvert genuine growth for short-term gain. And it ain't GDP!
In view of this law, finding a better prosperity measure that will remain so for long once politicians find ways to game it is easier said than done! But that doesn't mean that some effort should not be made to try.
It's out now!
With government revenue, he who pays the piper ultimately calls the tune. For instance, a government that’s massively dependent on oil revenue to fund its public services pretty much has to pursue pro-oil-business policies. Similarly, if a government becomes heavily dependent on revenue raised from a tiny number of hyper-rich people/companies, adopting policies which might reduce those people’s/companies’ pre-tax income will become unthinkable. Imagine if the entire US government was funded solely by taxes on FAANG (Facebook Amazon Apple Netflix Google). In that situation, Congress would never dare do anything which might reduce those companies’ monopoly power. Suppose Ali Baba wants to set up in the US to compete with Amazon - the US government will block it. Suppose some angry consumers want to bring an anti-trust case against Google - again, the USG will block it. This ought to be obvious.
In both the UK and the US, politicians have worried that financialisation has gone too far; that our economies are too much about making money out of money, rather than using that money to make things. But both the City and Wall Street pay a lot of tax, and it’s that revenue dependence which thwarts government attempts to rebalance our economies.
So what should governments do? They should go back to doing the sort of thing they did between 1945 and the early 1970s. Back then, governments used Keynesian policies to raise the pre-tax earning capacity of the average worker. The Macmillan government commissions the building of the M1 Motorway; firms hire workers to build it; demand for workers rises across the whole economy; wages go up; workers pay more tax. That sort of thing. Such an approach resulted in a society with historically all-time low levels of inequality. This was tied to the fact that postwar governments were more dependent on taxes paid by the median worker than on taxes paid by billionaires. So back then the main way to raise government revenue was to increase the pre-tax earning capacity of the median worker, not the billionaire.
Today, pretty much the only policy any government has to boost economic growth is to increase aggregate demand through consumer spending. Increase the availability of credit so people will spend more, and maybe get some tax back from the corporations because we’ve raised their profits. Even if the government redistributes some profits back to the consumers who make the purchases, it’s weakened their ability to accumulate capital long term by burdening them with raised levels of debt.
If any government really wants to reduce inequality, it has to think about pre-tax inequality. Some economists call this approach "predistribution".
A society in which pre-tax inequality keeps rising to Brazil levels of income disparity ultimately won’t be able to rebalance everything purely through the tax system.
This is only a problem if one subscribes to the model that taxation funds government expenditure. This isn't actually the case (governments have a different set of constraints and running out of money isn't one of them) but it is indeed a persistent myth that pretty much everyone believes, hence resulting the constraints you describe.
Are you coming from a Modern Monetary Theory point of view? I don’t believe in MMT; I don’t absolutely disbelieve it either. I suspect it may work or seem to work in very special cases (e.g. when your national currency is also the world’s reserve currency, or when your country is relatively self-sufficient in important things like energy), but I’m sceptical of its general applicability.
But let’s assume it’s correct for a moment. According to MMT any government with its own currency (so NOT the 19 countries which use the Euro) can create and spend any amount of money into the economy and can do so without relying at all on taxes or borrowing. The purpose of taxation is purely to reduce inflation by depressing aggregate demand. The government taxes money out of the economy to reduce the amount of money available for spending, thereby dampening inflationary pressure.
If we assume MMT is true, Dominic Cummings is right to want to tax consumption directly, rather than income. In MMT, it’s only the income which people spend as consumption which governments need to tax. Money people save is not inflationary. And since rich people tend to save a higher proportion of their income than poor people, regressive taxes actually work better than progressive taxes.
Once again, I haven’t fully figured out my opinion on MMT. Please enlighten me if you think I have the basics wrong.
Yes I am. Perhaphs surprisingly it is generally applicable and doesn't rely on flakey evidence and belief like pretty much every other economic theory. It's based on the underlying accounting - debits and credits - so it's not really a matter of opinion, it's just a description of how things are. It doesn't say what we should do though.
I think peoples dislike of it mainly comes from the idea that its some lefty pie in the sky theory which says we can spend forever with no consequences but it's not like this at all. It merely points out that governments are inflation constrained and not budgetarily constrained i.e. the constraints are completely different to what is commonly believed. Where you go with it after that is totally down to politics, it's just the left have co-opted it first but the theory is neutral.
I agree that DC is right re taxing consumption. I would also tax certain kinds of capital hard (land & any under utitilised asset) and others lightly (small / medium business assets).
If you really want to get into MMT's relevane to the UK I recommend the paper at this link:
https://gimms.org.uk/2022/01/25/an-accounting-model-of-the-uk-exchequer-the-paper-and-author-interviews/
It's very long but the summary at the link above gives you a good overview of the paper. Again its accounting so if someone thinks it's wrong feel free to find the error in the debits/credits ;)
Fully agreed. I had to relearn much of economics after all the rubbish macro I was taught studying PPE. MMT is the most logically sound lens way to understand post Breton Woods macro and by far the most aligned with empirical evidence.
In this context of taxation what’s given less air and thinking time even within MMT debates is how much of our gdp (ultimately our human economic potential) is wasted through tax bureaucracy, compliance, and evasion/gaming/avoidance etc. Once you consider all the ancillary supporting actors and staff to these unnecessary activities and the mental drain (most entrepreneurs hate having to think about tax), it’s truly staggering how wasteful we are.
Warren Mosler has written most clearly about how a super simple tax regime could be created that is sufficient to create demand for the currency (which is the only thing a sovereign economy like the U.K. or US needs to do. The U.K. or US gov doesn’t need to ‘fund’ itself in the thing it has a monopoly to create. As per core MMT).
It's amazing isn't it? Almost hard to believe that people can be so wrong about something so important for so long. I completely agree re your point on tax bureaucracy. Looking through an MMT lens forces us to ask a key question about all expenditure:
Is this expenditure creating 'wealth' in some way?
It's pretty clear that complex admin and the costs associated with it are a complete drag on wealth creation and create no direct wealth themselves. Much better to employ those people in picking up litter / helping Grannies with their shopping etc as this creates much more 'wealth' in society than shuffling papers around. So instead of 'sack em all!' it becomes 'give them all different jobs!'
taxes on labour are going to be more problematic given automation trends
I'd cut normal income tax too but you want to try to flatten the tax structure somewhat and build support by removing clear unfairness - a deputy head on 55k shd not be paying 40% etc, and if theyre forced to they will increasingly support Corbyn types
My post wasn't about the why's of concern over immigration, which may or may not be justified. But one would be a fool to deny that, rightly or wrongly, this concern is widespead.
It sounds like your second paragraph sketches the main globalist argument for unlimited immigration. But can I point out that globalists are a tiny minority in the UK, and people like Tony Blair and Klaus Schwab of the WEF, however benevolent their aims may be, are widely derided and demonized by the vast majority.
Even idealistic young people who formerly embraced globalism are now, as they head into their thirties and forties with no house or family of their own due to sky high property prices, mostly caused by immigration, are rapidly having second thoughts and changing their tune.
As Macaulay might have said, yesterday's bright morning star is rapidly turning into tomorrow's glittering ominous portent of revelation ..
"how will politicians cope as advanced technology (e.g multimodal LLMs. text, video etc) force themselves into political debate, given they’re mostly bad at using TV;...aren't politicians there now to simply be people the public can rail against while big money+apparatchik managerial class decide to do what they feel like and come next election you change the politician and carry on boo hissing.Isn't it vital to demonstrate this is happening...people suspect it anyway. It isn't a situation that can be controlled the longer it goes on.So the critical thing now is"how will political entrepreneurs use new tools to break the power of the old parties/media, with echoes of how radio, cinema and TV changed politics". Where's the funding coming from and why? what are the tools? How to demarcate clearly the difference between Old Pols and New Pols.
Do you rate sunaks team at all? Didn’t you hire booth smith?
will write about Sunak/team by August.
there are some good people but theyve got a bad plan
FWIW, I've no doubt the main reason for the Brexit result was concern over excessive non-EU immigration, given the EU's free movement policy. Sure, a few people may have been swayed by the "save a few million pounds for the NHS" bus, and bendy banana rules, and Cameron's belated and futile attempt to gain a few concessions from the EU. But immigration was certainly the main issue.
I read somewhere that a year or two after the vote, a Tory politician at some dinner party remarked that public opposition to immigration seemed to be softening, and smugly concluded that as a result business as usual could continue, with more mass non-EU immigration.
It was staggering to realise how utterly deluded some otherwise presumably smart people can be, believing what they want to be true, and not realising in this case that if there was any softening in peoples' attitudes it was not because they were suddenly relaxed about immigration but that they assumed the extra control gained by Brexit over our borders meant immigration could start being curbed, and that they would feel doubly betrayed if this didn't happen, as it hasn't!
It's all about immigration but the lumpenproletariat have been conditioned to be discrete because 'racism' is bad and they are not sure what the difference is, so euphemisms spring up. I question the oft repeated 'we need immigrants' for a healthy economy - I do not see any evidence but again it is verboten to have a truly rational and objective discussion on this. DC is helpful with insight and commentary but is too establishment-centric to provide a way forward, which I suspect is something like democracy through direct internet participation and the elimination of agency ala MPs
'too establishment centric', i shd have a t-shirt with that
What forms of political organisation that go beyond competing nation states do you envisage to replace the EU, UN etc? Would it be organisations such as space exploration as you mention, or/and climate change institutions to unite humanity under specific goals that distract from nuclear and AI war?
And perhaps more importantly, how can such future orgs be prevented from going the same way as the orgs they’re replacing?
everything decays, there is no permanent 'solution'
How do you rate the changes of Reform / Reclaim / Heritage of replacing the Tories? Do any of them embrace the startup style and systems thinking approaches that you advocate for?
0% chance. Heritage lacks the personality and the funds. Reclaim has the funds, but Fox, Hoskin, Bridgen constantly talk up issues which are a minor concern to most people. Their priorities are distorted. Neither Party has local councillors.
Reform UK has councillors and a better focus. However, its key architects are economic liberals. The average voter (or at least the ones RUK is going for) are very much not. Thus, there is a block on ability.
RUK is also adopting the UKIP approach of putting a candidate in every constituency and spreading out resources instead of targeting to get seats. A recipe for disaster.
zero
I like the core message of 21st century technology and challenges with 20th century bureaucracy and institutions. With the rise of AI, it got me thinking. What if AI tells us how to solve all our problems and we just don’t listen because we don’t want to hear the answers? We already know how to solve 100s of problems but we don’t adopt the policies because of elite/insider preferences and social desirability bias.
Be careful what you wish for. One group asked an AI how to improve society (I’m afraid I can’t remember the exact wording). The AI’s solution was that every member of a certain ethnic group should be jailed.
true.
the real problem is how to have a political system trying to solve big problems, many of them we know how to solve but arent trying - e.g much of healthcare
The manner in which some of the most able/capable people (‘builders’) have removed themselves from mainstream politics is alarming.
It indicates their lack of trust/faith in the seriousness/capabilities/ priorities of the current crop of political leaders and, in this, one can sympathise with them.
However, ‘Cicero’s garden’ will remain a haven for only so long (and let’s remember how things ended for Cicero himself), so surely many of these very clever, very creative and very driven people are thinking about the sort of ideas espoused in this essay.
If so, and if they want to actually do something apart from tend their gardens (courtesy of
Mexican illegal labourers) the big hurdle is ‘capture’. How do they capture political/social/media systems in a way that will be sufficient for them to start the process of change (or at least start the process of convincing enough people that change is a possibility).
I believe it is possible and that there is an ‘army’ of disillusioned citizens willing to get behind a thoroughgoing programme of reform of how we run our country.
But I have a question: the very people who might get behind such a programme are the sort of (common sense) people who are rightly suspicious of technocrats and ‘experts’ (like all the experts who told us Brexit would lead to Armageddon). How do we square this circle?
I’m American so I’ll answer from that perspective. What you need is someone with Trump’s ability to go around the media and/or use them along with a team that is actually interested in governing. I sense Dominic trying to get money from Silicon Valley behind a Trump like take over of the Republican Party with a dedicated cadre of people ready to seize power when they get elected. You probably need some sort of organization funded by them to recruit the right kind of people and to put the plan together. Something like Vote Leave on steroids. As long as Trump is around it won’t happen but maybe someone like Ron DeSantis would embrace it.
Good observation. Boris was meant to be our Trump (he could appeal directly to the public despite the fact that the MSM and establishment hated him).
When he won an 80 seat majority with Dom at his side I was optimistic we could start the process of change. Unfortunately Boris’s personal weaknesses killed that dream. Had he been more personally and politically disciplined we would now be well on the way to reforming the British state.
The trouble with outlier candidates like Trump and Boris is that their strengths can become their weaknesses when they win power.
I quite like the way Ramaswamy is campaigning at the moment.
In a world of lies his big campaign message is ‘TRUTH’.
yep he has it but is being ignored but at least he is in the Aug debate
has to be an alliance of entrepreneurs/builders with a set of middle class whove had enough of DEM madness plus working class - i think it's all doable IF you have an entity actuall focused on the real problems, and focused on how power really works (e.g Trump couldn't cope with the deep state), and focused on the public over the media. those 3 fundamental principles are needed
From the Dem side, RFK Jr seems to be saying the right things about the need for reforming the architecture of the state, although his vaccine views (not just Covid) empower many to dismiss him as a crank.
Nevertheless, his support among Dems is growing and he also has cross-party appeal, while even committed supporters of the Dem machine know that Biden is a dud. Any views on RFK and his campaign Dominic?
I remember that you mentioned Dean Acheson's remark that 'Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role' when formulating your initial national vision in 2014.
Similarly, I've been thinking what question would be good to frame a new political movement around. I think being purely reactive (ie 'anti-woke', 'anti-incompetence') fails to grasp the larger issues around the direction of society and why these problems seem to get worse without resolution.
Personally, I think the most vital question of our age is 'why bother engaging with the real world?'. We are already seeing rocketing usage of fentanyl and other narcotics hollowing out communities. This 'dropping out' is not just coming from 'traditional' drugs either. Porn usage is increasing and AI advancement makes it more attractive than before. Generation Z has more mental illnesses than any generation before it and these rates are set to be even higher in the generation that follows. People are not making families and are not having kids.
This is building on trends that have existed since the 60s relating to general health and birthrates. A society that does not reproduce will not continue. The Chinese understand and take this seriously, but in the UK even the question of crashing birth-rates and the fact we seem to be much more physically, mentally and spiritually sick as a people is not discussed.
This is a longer term issue and would not be a 'lead' issue to take into an election as it is too esoteric. However I think grappling with this question will be to fundamentally grasp the question of our age, which is somewhere any serious political movement should be.
It absolutely IS a lead issue. Just couch it in better words. We are told that society has never been better, but people arent experiencing it. The goal should be to help people see better.
"A Life Worth Living".
Yes exactly. If you take Cicero's maxim that 'The health of the people is the supreme law' (Salus populi suprema lex esto) then our current regime is failing appallingly on every front (Mind, Body and Spirit).
yup, now politicians are so busy chasing the frenzied media/SM they can't build arguments on such deep problems
I have mentioned previously that fixing the media may be a necessary precursor to fixing/improving politics.
When you look at the demented circus of performing clowns that constitutes our current media/political axis it is obvious why many of the best and smartest people steer well clear of it.
On a positive note, the green shoots of a new media landscape are growing stronger by the day: podcasts, Substack, de-censored Twitter, rivals to YouTube etc.
Meanwhile trust in 'mainstream' outlets like the BBC and CNN continues to decline. An increasing cohort of the public wants something better than what we have been getting and this demand is creating a supply.
Our host wrote:
> skimming through the essay I wrote in 2013 ..
Some of this essay centres on training, but currently a big problem with this is that on completing an expensive training course, many of the best graduates, or newly qualified doctors or whatever, simply hoof it off the US and use their expertise there!
One partial solution might be to provide British citizens with bursaries, covering tuition fees and accommodation etc in part or entirely, but only on condition the recipient agreed not to leave the country for longer than, say, two weeks at a time within any six month period for the next twenty years or until their student debt had been repaid in full.
If that sounds unreasonably onerous, or would hamper international studies and collaborations for example, then the condition could be that the student would agree not to undertake any occupation abroad whose pay would be liable for tax by a foreign country.
Human right lawyers might winge, but to no avail because British subjects have no constitutional right to possess a passport, nor thus the right to move or travel abroad. People say our constitution is unwritten, but funnily enough this principle is one that is. From the Constitution of Clarendon (1164), Article 4 :
"No archbishop, bishop, or other person of the kingdom may leave the kindom without the consent of the Lord King"
(It has been argued that "person" there may be what we would call "parson", i.e. a priest. But even if so, the goal of the document was to try and bring the church into line with laymen's established legal rights and obligations instead of being literally almost a law unto itself. So implicitly, the principle applied even then, just as it has ever since.)
Side question, any chance you can release an audio voiced version of your posts , e.g like stratechery?
Easier to consume and hearing arguments allowed is more powerful.
That's enormously time consuming!
Try copying to Word and using the associated sound software. No production standards, but reliable and clear.
Agree it's not a small effort, and difficult when posts are to be updated with edits.
There's something added by listening to arguments and thoughts from the voice of the writer which you don't get from a generated voice
am thinking about doing some podcasts - we need a substack feature to do podcasts just with paying subscribers
Thanks and Agree, Ben Thompson has it figured out with user unique RSS feeds on his self built platform https://stratechery.com/2021/passport/ . Substack need to catchup
Last comment from me in this thread, unless tempted to reply, because I don't wish to overdo it, but ..
IMHO, the best way to improve standards of governance and economic management, in both the UK and internationally, would be to try and change one of politicians' primary incentives. This is currently to maximise and maintain growth of a pernicious and outdated measure of prosperity called GDP.
But changing this would be easier said than done, without international cooperation, including from the US, because many of our failing economic regulation mechanisms are tied to it, and gaming GDP is one of the few ways politicians can easily exert some control over it via one of its most malign features: It includes public spending.
Worse still, the largely ignorant public, encouraged by the media, has also been conditioned to accept GDP as a reliable and sound indicator of prosperity. So this ties in with politicians' other primary motive, which of course is to maximise votes.
Assessing a country's prosperity by its GDP is like judging someone's health solely by their weight, so that a 600 pound bedridden morbidly obese person, scoffing pizzas and crisps all day and watching daytime TV, is considered healthier than a slim marathon runner.
This explains why Tories for the last ten years, and Labour before them, have all relentlessly increased public spending, to maintain a false impression of genuine increase which is not mainly healthy growth but feverish swelling!
The game has intensified since the Covid epidemic, which itself was a heaven-sent opportunity for an insanely extravagent increase in public spending. But now we see the results: taxes at record levels, and genuine productivity level at a standstill for twenty years or more.
So in summary, there should be a measure of national prosperity which does not and cannot give politicians a perverse motive to manipulate and subvert genuine growth for short-term gain. And it ain't GDP!
I'd suggest the rate of reported common-law felonies (per capita) as the primary metric for prosperity.
The snag is that would encourage politicians to make the justice system even more lenient than it is now, to keep felony conviction rates down.
I just remembered something called Goodhart's Law :
https://sketchplanations.com/goodharts-law
In view of this law, finding a better prosperity measure that will remain so for long once politicians find ways to game it is easier said than done! But that doesn't mean that some effort should not be made to try.
Very good stuff. At least somebody is paying attention.