Brit living in Belgium and earning an income from building interfaces. Interestes include science, science fiction, technology, and European news and politics
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The class base of bad government

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Everybody from the centre-right leftwards agrees that we have been unusually badly governed for the last few years. As Ian Dunt tweeted.

Quite a thing, isn't it. Reading about someone of the stature of Alistair Darling while watching someone as minuscule as Matt Hancock. A testament to how far we've fallen.

But why have we so fallen?

There's a tendency among some centrists to attribute it merely to bad people doing stupid things; the word "cockwomble" occurs with worrying frequency. This is too superficial. It's what I've called schoolteacher politics, the notion that bad policy is mere intellectual or moral error that could be avoided if only we had better people in charge (where, of course, "better" means more like us).

Instead, bad government is endogenous. It's the product of dysfunctional capitalism allied to our unusually toxic class system.

Let's start with the rise of illiberal reaction and the Tories' perceived need to appeal to the far-right. This hasn't occurred because the British people had a bang on the head, or were fooled by media barons, or succumbed to the elegant wit Tommy Robinson. Instead, it's yet another example of what Ben Friedman pointed out in 2006:

The history of each of the large Western democracies – America, Britain, France and Germany – is replete with instances in which [a] turn away from openness and tolerance, and often the weakening of democratic political institutions, followed in the wake of economic stagnation.

His point has since been corroborated by many others. Thiemo Fezmer has shown that - at the margin - austerity caused Brexit. Markus Brueckner and Hans Peter Gruener have shown that "lower growth rates are associated with a significant increase in right-wing extremism." And Ana Sofia Pessoa and colleagues have shown how "fiscal consolidations lead to a significant increase in extreme parties' vote share." This could be because a weak economy breeds discontent with the incumbent parties; or because people look for somebody to blame and that somebody is often the outsiders and marginalized; or because bad times generate a yearning for a past, one in which minorities were quieter. Whatever the reason, Marx was right:

The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

The far-right has tapped into this richer seam of reaction and illiberalism.

But why have we got stagnation? Austerity is part of the story. But austerity was endogenous - a reaction to the increased public debt caused by the financial crisis. As the late Nick Crafts said, "Brexit is a legacy of the banking crisis."

And that crisis was also endogenous.

To see why, imagine that there had been an abundance of profit-making opportunities in the early 00s. The fall in real interest rates we saw then would then have led to rising capital spending and R&D and to greater productive capacity. We'd have had faster GDP growth.

Which didn't happen. Growth was actually slowing even before the crisis. There was, as Ben Bernanke said, a "dearth" of such opportunities. That meant that lower rates fuelled not faster sustainable growth but rather a boom in housing and in illiquid mortgage derivatives and stretched bank balance sheets, which led to the crash. In this sense, that crash was a symptom (pdf) of a stagnant economy, not (just) a cause.

Exactly why the economy has been stagnating since the early 2000s is a matter of debate: an ageing population; difficulty in adapting to the rise of India and China; lack of innovation; falling profit rates; and so on. For my purposes now, however, this debate doesn't much matter. The fact is that capitalism is not working as well as it once did, and this is shaping the political climate by fuelling antipathy to migrants and benefit claimants and by stoking up culture wars.

Of course, in theory such reactionary politics could be led by politicians of substance rather than the charlatans and inadequates we've actually had. But the low calibre of politicians isn't mere bad luck. It's another effect of our class system.

One reason for this is simply that high pay in the financial sector attracts talent away from politics. If we're lucky, this leaves the profession open to those with a sense of public service. If not, it attracts second-rate egomaniacs. Also, private schools inculcate more confidence than ability - people who, in the American phrase, were born on third base but think they've hit a triple. David Cameron, for example, wanted to become PM because he thought he’d be “rather good” at it - an opinion not shared by posterity. And the Covid inquiry has heard how Johnson was "bamboozled" and "confused" by statistics. Sir Patrick Valance wrote:

Watching the PM get his head around stats is awful. He finds relative and absolute risk almost impossible to understand.

Such ignorance matters. Being Prime Minister isn't like being a newspaper columnist. It's about taking decisions under uncertainty. To do that doesn't require one to be a great statistician. But it does require that one be awake to the most common ways of misunderstanding numbers, which requires a basic statistical literacy. Lectern_HP_PA

That Johnson thought he could be PM without such habits of mind shows his arrogant overconfidence. And that other people thought he could is another effect of class. Like attracts like. To a media dominated by public schoolboys, Johnson seemed a familiar jovial figure ("Boris") rather than someone with profound intellectual and moral defects.

Of course, this is not to say that class is the only explanation for our bad politicians. Our mechanisms for selecting them are also dysfunctional; politicians must now appeal more to a handful of cranks be they party members or journalists; the disappearance of public intellectuals has deprived us a a benign influence on the political class; our narcissistic age demands that politicians echo our own prejudices rather than display competence or independence of mind; and so on.

Even if politicians weren't overconfident inadequates, however, there'd still be a problem. The Tories have no economic offer to make to voters because to do so requires them to address difficult questions: how do we kickstart the economy when doing so requires more than the state stepping back? What if inequality is itself a barrier to growth? How do you increase growth when so many of your supporters (financiers, nimbys, monopolists, Brexiters) are opposed to it? Faced with these questions, even the ablest of Tory politicians would struggle.

That last question brings us to a further problem. A lot of powerful people have an interest in sustaining bad and corrupt government, and the power to do so. I'm not thinking only of the media here, or those who exchange for party donations for government money. Businesses also buy MPs (and regulators) through donations or the prospect of cushy jobs after leaving office. And as Michal Kalecki noted, "everything which may shake the state of confidence must be carefully avoided because it would cause an economic crisis”: one (albeit bad) justification for fiscal austerity was the fear of a bond market sell-off if debt were not being seen to be reduced.

We can put this another way. In the post-war decades government achieved some worthwhile things: full employment; a better welfare state; and decent economic growth. This wasn't merely because politicians were of greater moral and intellectual calibre back then. It was because full employment was in the interests of much of capital - mass producers needed a market for their goods whereas financial capital require low interest rates - and because capital's more rapacious instincts were constrained by powerful trades unions. In the absence of these conditions, we have what we have now.

And as if all this were not enough, Tories have also sustained in office by simple deference - the habit of mind which leads people to atrribute merit to those in power. You don't need Marxian theories of ideology to believe this (though they help!). It was Adam Smith who wrote:

We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent…The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness.

All these things mean that the feedback mechanisms whereby bad governments are kicked out and bad policies reversed are not as strong as they might be.

My point here is simple. There's more to politics than the mere assertion of one's own moral and intellectual superiority. We must also understand why we are badly governed, and this requires us to appreciate that politics does not exist in a vacuum but instead is shaped by socio-economic conditions. You can't understand politics without understanding capitalism.

Of course, it's likely that we have only a few more months of this awful government: there are limits to how far reactionary rentiers can sustain an egregiously incompetent government in office. But many of the pressures that gave it us will still be in place: economic stagnation and the power of the media, finance, and other regressive sections of capital. And they will constrain even the most competent and best-intentioned Labour government. The idea that we can have good government if only good people were in charge is too hopeful. Centrists, at least as much as leftists, are prone to utopian fantasies.

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PaulPritchard
1 day ago
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"There's more to politics than the mere assertion of one's own moral and intellectual superiority. We must also understand why we are badly governed, and this requires us to appreciate that politics does not exist in a vacuum but instead is shaped by socio-economic conditions."
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You can't deepfake diversity, and that's a good thing

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Fresh thinking and new approaches can only come from varied cohorts of people

Opinion  "My other car is a Porsche" was never the most convincing of claims you could make while out drinking on a Friday night, but it's as real as the Pope's Catholicism compared to the speaker list for the DevTernity developer conference. There, the otherwise pure male roster was de-bro-ed by "Anna Boyko, purportedly a staff engineer at Coinbase and Ethereum core contributor."…

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PaulPritchard
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"Diversity is not optional. It's how to prosper in a changing world. It's matching the work you do and the things you make to the biggest market they can reach. It doesn't come for free, you can't tick-box it in, you have to treat it as you do any other aspect of your organizational and working life – with intelligence, curiosity, investment and long-term strategy."
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I Fight For The Users

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If you haven't been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year (if that), I can't blame you. There's a lot going on right now. It's a busy time. But let's pause and take a moment to celebrate that Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. I can't possibly say it better than Paul Ford (how could I?) so I'll just refer you there:

Every five or six minutes, someone in the social sciences publishes a PDF with a title like “Humans 95 Percent Happier in Small Towns, Waving at Neighbors and Eating Sandwiches.” When we gather in groups of more than, say, eight, it’s a disaster. Yet there is something fundamental in our nature that desperately wants to get everyone together in one big room, to “solve it.” Our smarter, richer betters (in Babel times, the king’s name was Nimrod) often preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a centralized hub of discourse and entertainment—and we listen. But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”

It's been clear for quite some time that the early social media strategery of "jam a million people in a colosseum and let them fight it out with free speech" isn't panning out, but never has it been more clear than now, under the Elon Musk regime, that being beholden to the whims of a billionaire going through a midlife crisis isn't exactly healthy for society. Or you. Or me. Or anyone, really.

I tried to be fair; I gave the post-Elon Twitter era a week, thinking "how bad could it possibly be?" and good lord, it was so much worse than I could have possibly ever imagined. It's like Elon read the Dilbert pointy-haired-manager book on management and bonked his head on every rung of the ladder going down, generating an ever-growing laundry list of terrible things no manager should ever do. And he kept going!

It's undeniably sad. I really liked Twitter, warts and all, from 2007 onward. In fact, it was the only "social network" I liked at all. Even when it became clear in the Trump era that Twitter was unhealthy for human minds, I soldiered on, gleaning what I could. I'm not alone in that; Clay Shirky's moribund signoff at the end of 2022 was about how I felt:

alt

Indeed, Twitter was murdered at the whims of a billionaire high on Ketamine while it was (mostly) healthy, because of the "trans woke virus".

I encourage you, all of you, to disavow Twitter and never look at it again. No one who cares about their mental health should be on Twitter at this point, or linking to Twitter and feeding it the attention it thrives on. We should entomb Twitter deep in concrete with this public warning on its capstone:

This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here ...nothing valued is here.

In the end, I begrudgingly realized, as did Paul Ford, that Elon unwittingly did us a favor by killing Twitter. He demonstrated the very real dangers of becoming beholden to any platform run by a king, a dictator, a tyrant, a despot, an autocrat. You can have all your content rug-pulled out from under you at any time, or watch in horror as your favorite bar... slowly transforms into a nazi bar.

alt

I've been saying for a long time that decentralization is the way to go. We can and should have sane centralized services, of course, but it's imperative that we also build decentralized services which empower users and give them control, rather than treating them like digital sharecroppers. That's what our Discourse project is all about. I propose collective ownership of the content and the communities we build online. Yeah, it's more work, it's not "free" (sorry not sorry), but I have some uncomfortable news from you: those so-called "free" services aren't really free.

Geek-and-poke-pigs-free

Which, again, is not to say that "free" services don't have a place in the world, they do, but please don't harbor any illusions about what you are giving up in the name of "free". Grow up.

I take a rather Tron-like view of the world when it comes to this stuff; in the software industry, our goal should be to empower users (with strong moderation tools), not control them.

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So I encourage you to explore alternatives to Twitter, ideally open source, federated alternatives. Is it messy? Hell yes it's messy. But so is democracy; it's worth the work, because it's the only survivable long term path forward. Anything worth doing is never easy.

I'm currently on Mastodon, an open source, federated Twitter alternative at https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror – I urge you to join me on the Mastodon server of your choice, or quite literally any other platform besides Twitter. Really, whatever works for you. Pick what you like. Help make it better for everyone.

To encourage that leap of faith, I am currently auctioning off, with all funds to benefit the Trevor Project which offers assistance to LGBTQ youth, these 10 museum quality brass plaques of what I consider to be the best tweet of all time, hands down:

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(Blissfully, @horse_ebooks is also on Mastodon. As they should be. As should you. Because everything happens so much.)

If you'd like to bid on the 10 brass plaques, follow these links to eBay, and please remember, it's for a great cause, and will piss Elon off, which makes it even sweeter:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895658859
https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895658395
https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895657953
https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895656856
https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895655560
https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895655243
https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895654889
https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895654391
https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895654002
https://www.ebay.com/itm/225895653408

I will sign the back of every plaque, because each one comes with my personal guarantee that it will easily outlive what's left of Twitter.

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PaulPritchard
8 days ago
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Spotify Wrapped is creepy, meaningless – and shows just how much data big tech has on you

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The annual summary of your listening habits has become a phenomenon – but marketing wheeze aside, Wrapped doesn’t reflect what we truly love

As a marketing exercise, it’s hard not to be hugely impressed by Spotify Wrapped. In less than a decade, the streaming giant has somehow managed to turn what’s essentially a bit of automated data-scraping into a global event. It’s a triumphant exercise in underlining the platform’s dominance in its field – this year, it arrives with the slogan Wrapped Or It Didn’t Happen, as if music consumed via Spotify is the only music that matters – and indeed in getting free advertising by encouraging users to share on social media Spotify’s personalised and heavily branded lists of most-streamed artists and listening trends. This year, the arrival of Spotify Wrapped results was heralded by a huge billboard advertising campaign, brand partnerships ranging from Amazon to FC Barcelona, a London launch gig that stars Sam Smith, Charli XCX and Chase and Status and the launch of the “Spotify Island experience” on wildly popular online game platform Roblox. It has provoked features everywhere from Teen Vogue to the New York Times, from Variety to this very newspaper. The latter’s report was enlivened by quotes from a Spotify employee, who compared Wrapped both to “election night” and the arrival of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

Said employee was presumably speaking from their desk in Spotify’s legendary Department of Laying It on a Bit Thick, but empirical evidence suggests that Wrapped has become a surprisingly big deal. This week, my teenage daughters eagerly checked their results against each others’ and those of their friends. The results are more elaborately presented than ever: they now come with a “character archetype” based on the way you use the streaming platform – fans of “light upbeat music” are Luminaries, those reliant on algorithms to pick the next track are Roboticists and so on – and an add-on that tells you where in the world you’re most likely to find people with similar music tastes to you. But my kids appeared less interested in the way their ostensibly “favourite” artists were ranked than in the amount of time they’d spent listening and the number of songs they had listened to. In a world where streaming is the main means by which music is consumed these figures appear to act as a badge of honour, “proof” of how into music you are, a 2020s equivalent of walking around school with an album you were either borrowing or lending tucked under your arm to signify the seriousness of your commitment to prog or punk or metal or soul.

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PaulPritchard
8 days ago
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After years of Tory failure, getting Britain growing again will be Labour’s greatest test | Andrew Rawnsley

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A Starmer government will inherit a nation with miserable productivity, emasculated public services, big debts, high tax levels and acute inequalities

Yogi Berra, the revered baseball player and coach, would have called it deja vu all over again. A Tory chancellor telling the country it has “turned a corner”, while scattering around a few tax cuts when a general election is looming was not the only reason Jeremy Hunt’s bag of tricks felt so familiar. The sense of having been here before was heightened because of another aspect of his financial statement, a budget in all but name. The chancellor also flourished a “plan for growth”.

He spoke as if getting more out of the economy was a novel idea that had never occurred to anyone before, but his is the 12th growth plan the Tories have fanfared since 2010, which makes it one for almost every year they have been in power. If the Tories had been as prolific at generating growth as they have at producing plans, we’d have no need for another one because the world would be beating a path to our door to discover how the genius UK had become a land overflowing with milk and honey.

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PaulPritchard
13 days ago
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Geert Wilders’ win shows the far right is being normalised. Mainstream parties must act | Stijn van Kessel

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The Party for Freedom leader succeeded last week because he has become part of the Dutch political furniture. This disturbing trend needs to be halted

• Read more: Riots, race and the end of the ‘Irish welcome’

Election results lend themselves to different stories, certainly in the Netherlands, where so many old and new parties compete for votes. Yet the 2023 election will be remembered for one reason: a far-right party topped the polls for the first time, and by a large margin. Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) is set to win 37 of the 150 seats in Dutch parliament, more than doubling its 2021 tally.

Far-right parties in Europe primarily attract voters on their core issues of immigration and multiculturalism. Most also express a populist message, criticising political elites and calling for popular sovereignty. Wilders’ PVV is no different.

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PaulPritchard
13 days ago
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