“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome” said Charlie Munger. In politics, we can reverse this. We’ve seen the outcome, so what are the incentives?

The outcome, we know, is bad. Recent Prime Ministers have seen near-record levels of unpopularity. And no wonder, because they have failed even on their own terms: Cameron wanted to keep us in the EU but failed; May wanted a Brexit deal but failed; Johnson wanted to remain PM but failed; Truss wanted a tax-cutting Budget but failed; and Sunak wanted to save the Tory party but failed.

Bad outcomes suggest bad incentives. And these are bad for almost all actors in politics.

Let’s start with voters. These have no incentive to learn about politics because of the well=known problem of collective action. For any individual the cost of learning - time that could be spent on other things - is high whilst the benefits of doing so are negligible: the chances that your vote will be decisive are minuscule. This makes voting very different from other areas of life. If I under-estimate the dangers of smoking or the benefits of healthy eating I can ruin my life. But if I misunderstand social facts and so vote the wrong way, I as an individual do not suffer because my vote wasn’t decisive.

The outcome is what you’d expect from this incentive: very many voters are woefully ill-informed, as Ipsos’ polling has shown for years.

Over 20% of them think that either overseas aid, asylum seekers or MPs expenses are among the three things that government spends most on, when in fact these are tiny shares of spending. Only one in six voters were within an order of magnitude of estimating the overall size of public spending. And the median voter overestimates how much is spent on debt interest and under-estimates how much on pensions.

It wouldn’t matter so much if individuals’ errors cancel out. But they don’t. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum Ipsos found that:

We massively overestimate how many EU-born people now live in the UK...we overestimate how much we pay compared with other countries...we massively overestimate the proportion of Child Benefit awards given to families in other European countries...we massively overestimate how much of the EU’s budget is spent on administration.

These systematic errors act as a form of pollution - they impose costs onto others. As Bryan Caplan has written:

If one person pollutes the air, we barely notice; but if millions of people pollute the air, life can be very unpleasant indeed. Similarly, if one person holds irrational views about immigration, we barely notice; but if millions of people share these irrational views, socially harmful policies prevail by popular demand.

Bad incentives don’t just produce ignorant voters but also irrational ones. Jason Brennan writes:

Voters are not merely ignorant or misinformed but also epistemically irrational. The field of political psychology finds that most voters suffer deeply from a wide range of cognitive biases...These biases include motivated reasoning, intergroup bias, confirmation bias, and availability bias, among others. In general, voters tend to form political beliefs on the basis of little to no evidence, and then stick to those political beliefs no matter what new evidence they encounter. (When All Else Fails, p165)

I stress here that the problem isn’t that people are simply stupid: countless people who are irrational or ignorant at the polling station are quite clever in other contexts. The problem is that they are incentivized to be stupid. They re rationally ignorant and rationally irrational because the costs to any individual of correcting their errors exceed the benefits.

Nor, of course, does the media have any incentive to help voters correct their errors. Quite the opposite. For newspapers, the incentive is that for any declining industry - to hold onto existing customers. And these are increasingly disproportionately older right-wing people who can afford to live in a bubble of illusion. The upshot is that the papers pander to their prejudices rather than try to correct them. Hence columnists like Allister Heath or Daniel Hannen staying in work despite being consistently demonstrably provably wrong.

Nor is the BBC a counterweight to these, because its incentives are to pander to the right in an attempt to keep it quiet. Lewis Goodall says of it:

The tendency to move right is always stronger than left, because there is terror of the right in a way the BBC does not possess of liberalism or the left.

And so the right sets the BBC’s agenda. It spends more time reporting on migrants arriving in small boats than it does on, say, the wage stagnation of the last 20 years; echoes Tory party tropes; and has for years given Reform and Tufton Street junktanks more airtime than their parliamentary presence or intellectual heft warrants.

Not just that. It fails to provide factual corrections to Reform’s wrong statements about immigration, with the result that impartiality becomes indifference between truth and lies.

What’s more, says Tom Mills the BBC - being incentivized to not antagonize powerful people - “overwhelmingly defers to official politics, taking its cue from Westminster and the broader world of elite policy making, and to a lesser extent business representatives.” That leads to a bias against emergence, and hence against an understanding of society and the economy.

Nor do politicians have incentives to be good at governing. Osborne and Clegg have earned far more since leaving politics than they did in government. The financial incentives, therefore, are not for politicians to govern well: these two men did much to ruin the economy and public services. They are instead for ministers to promote, or at least not threaten, the interests of financiers and techbros.

Osborne and Clegg’s successors are behaving as if they’ve learned this lesson. In chasing non-existent Labour-Reform switchers to the neglect of its actual voters, the Labour right is behaving as if its incentives are not to win the next election but to get cushy jobs outside politics after it.

The MoD’s and NHS’s contracts with Palantir and the NHS’s “digital transformation” programme might well be motivated more by ministers’ wanting corporate handouts and tech jobs after leaving government than by a genuine concern to raise public sector efficiency: Streeting’s majority in Ilford North is a mere 528, so it’s only natural that he should think about his career prospects for his late 40s.

You might object that such contracting out will improve the public services. I’ve no strong view on this: transactions cost economics is all about detail and context. Even if this is true, though, there’s another problem of bad incentives: that good policy is sometimes worse for politicians than bad policy, even in narrow electoral terms.

Farage is an example of this. He remains one of our most influential politicians even though the principal policy he advocated for years has been a proven failure.

Those Brexiters who claimed that Brexit would allow us to better control immigration have also been proven wrong: net immigration rose sharply after leaving the EU. But this actually worked in their favour. It helped keep the immigration issue high on the media agenda, thereby serving right-wing purposes.

Failure works.

The converse is also true: success fails.

Of course, the evidence base for this is small given the paucity of sucessful policies in recent years. But one striking example is that the 1997-2010 Labour government greatly reduced pensioner poverty; the number on incomes less than 60% of the median after housing costs, for example, dropped by a million. Did this success turn pensioners into Labour voters? No, quite the opposite. They now feel no need to vote for parties that will protect the poor.

What’s going on here is partly what happens in any industry. Doing a good job is merely a basis for negotiating a possible reward, not a guarantee of getting one.

Also, these are examples of Gilles Saint-Paul’s theory of political entrenchment. Parties that successfully remove the problems of their client group, he says, also remove the reason for that group to vote for them. And so they have an incentive to not solve the problem. He gives the example of leftist parties failing to greatly raise the incomes of the poor, but I suspect the point broadens.

To see more bad incentives, consider why HS2 proved so expensive. The FT reports that, unlike in Japan where such projects are managed by a public body with technical skills, in the UK they were overseen by “government officials without technical expertise” and that contracts were awarded on a cost-plus basis, giving contractors little incentive to hold down costs.

One problem here is that civil servants are under-incentivized. “Too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” Sir Keir Starmer has said. Civil servants don’t suffer much if public projects go way over budget or gain much if they don’t. (One reason we don’t have such high-powered incentives is that if we did the idiot press would scream about “fat cat mandarins” every time something in government went well.)

Another problem is that, despite the slump in newspaper circulation, politicians still feel incentivized to chase good headlines, prioritizing short-term attention over longer-term concrete achievements. In his excellent Failed State, Sam Freedman writes:

Nothing came up more regularly in the interviews for this book than the impossibility of making good policy in a world where media management is the over-riding priority of government (p231.)

He gives the example of penal policy: tougher sentences is a good headline, but building prisons is a long-term slog that gets neglected. The same applies to infrastructure spending. New hospitals or railway lines are headlines, but getting them built on time and budget is a hard grind, and nobody is incentivized to undertake it.

There is an objection to all this. Incentives aren’t everything. People have intrinsic motives too. Politicians’ talk of public service is not always mindless cant. This isn’t a guarantee of sensible or even humane policy: more people have been killed by men who loved their country than by those who wanted to make a few bob. But it is a counterweight to economists’ conceit that incentives are everything.

But is it a strong enough counterweight?

No, and politicians themselves think not. If we could rely 100% on public spiritedness we would not need laws. But politicians make them, and rightly so because not everyone is public-spirited and in a good society incentives reinforce our better natures.

Our problem is that, in politics, incentives do not do this - in fact, quite the opposite.

Age-verification systems require collecting sensitive data to support the biometric information. In no time, the internet will become a fully surveilled digital panopticon

Over the past year, more than two dozen countries around the world have proposed bans on social media use for vast swathes of their public. These laws, often proposed under the guise of “child safety”, are ushering in an era of mass surveillance and widespread censorship, contributing to what scholars have called a “global free speech recession”.

Last year, Australia became the first country to ban anyone under the age of 16 from accessing social media. The move emboldened other countries around the world to quickly follow suit. Germany’s ruling party announced it was backing a social media ban. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, called for a ban on social media for under-15s. In the UK, Keir Starmer has sought to enact sweeping social media bans. Greece, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan have also pursued similar online identity verification laws.

Taylor Lorenz is a technology journalist who writes the newsletter User Mag and is the author of the bestselling book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

BRUSSELS — Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said Monday.

The warning comes as countries around the world move to bar children from social media, which requires some way of checking users’ ages to decide if they can access online services. In an open letter, 371 security and privacy academics across 29 countries said the technologies being rolled out are not effective and carry significant risks.

As companies including OpenAI, Roblox and Discord implement age checks in anticipation of being obliged to, the signatories said it is “dangerous and socially unacceptable to introduce a large-scale access control mechanism without a clear understanding of the implications” for security, privacy and people’s freedom and autonomy.

They are calling instead for a global pause “until the scientific consensus settles on the benefits and harms that age-assurance technologies can bring, and on the technical feasibility.” The signatories include Ronald Rivest, winner of the prestigious Turing Award in computing, and Bart Preneel, president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

France is planning to ban kids under 15 from social media as soon as September, while Germany, Denmark and Spain are also accelerating efforts. Australia became the first country in the world to introduce a ban in December 2025. Many leaders have expressed support on the basis it would protect children’s physical and mental health, but countries have yet to decide how bans would be implemented or enforced.

“We share the concerns about the negative effects that exposure to harmful content online has on children,” the academics write. But current plans “would require all users — minors and adults — to prove their age to converse with friends and family, read news, or search for information; well beyond what has ever happened in our offline lives.”

A robust age verification system would require checking “government-issued IDs with strong cryptographic protection for every single interaction with the service,” the academics write. Such infrastructure is not only hard to build and maintain on a global scale, but would add friction in services, meaning many providers would refuse to install age checks.

Using technologies like cryptography to solve the problem risks centralizing tools in the hands of the few companies that can deploy them at scale, the experts warn.

They also warn of the risks that governments would ban virtual private networks to stop people from getting around age bans. VPNs are frequently used by people looking to protect their identities from authoritarian regimes.

In Gorton and Denton, I heard again and again that people wanted seismic political change – Labour and the Tories are no longer part of that conversation

In the wake of Labour’s third-place showing at last Thursday’s Gorton and Denton byelection, Keir Starmer could have responded with a mixture of magnanimity, grit, and a clear appreciation of what had just happened.

He might have congratulated the Green party’s new MP Hannah Spencer, and insisted that the themes of inequality and everyday struggle she had so loudly emphasised throughout the campaign were at the top of his government’s priorities. He could also have combined that message with a show of determination to learn from the defeat and win back the voters his party lost, and an acknowledgment that Labour’s recent calamities and internal bickering had sent those people completely the wrong signals.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

There’s no end of analysis paralysis on Gorton and Denton, so I’ll keep this post brief. A first section on what it means for Labour and a second on the altogether stunning commentary on the rise of “sectarianism” in British politics.

Clearly, for Keir Starmer this result lessens whatever remains of his political authority. It was the Prime Minister who set the test for British politics in his conference speech last year. He argued, unwisely as I wrote at the time, that the Conservatives were finished and that the battle was between Labour and Reform. He set the essay question of politics as a technical one: who would be best to beat Farage? His implicit pitch to progressive voters was that you may not love me, but that you’ll really hate the alternative. In this, he set himself up as a curious mix of Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron.

As of this morning, he looks more like François Hollande. A leader of a mainstream centre-left party, who through a lack of vision, programme and communicative ability, sees his party haemorrhage votes to insurgents on his left and right. He has weakened himself because he is failing his own test. Voters appear to be adjudging that he was wrong: he is neither the only alternative nor the one who can best beat Farage. Partly because he distrusts ideas, Starmer has a habit of describing his political purpose in instrumentalist terms: he will be more competent, he will be less chaotic, he will be more managerial. His being the best vehicle to defeat Farage, by virtue of being the biggest anti-Farage party was the latest such wheeze and attempt to find purpose. The problem with this approach is that all of them are easy binaries- as soon as you’re not that thing, you’re instantly sunk. Ideas can’t be easily defeated. Instrumentalism can.

Weirdly, for a while at least, a Green surge might keep Starmer in place, for longer. Labour have had a poor electoral record these last 15 years, especially in old heartlands. But they’ve quietly built up new ones: becoming the hegemonic force in urban, progressive, metropolitan England. For the first time since the Iraq war Lib Dem surge, that is now seriously threatened. That will scare scores of Labour MPs who have become accustomed to weighing votes. If a leadership election were held now, the essay question therefore for Labour will not be, who can defeat Farage, but who can defeat Polanski. That will in turn scare the Labour right, who will cling to Starmer for fear of who might replace him. By-election dynamics are not replicable at a general election, and Polanski’s Greens have much work to do to neutralise problems, especially on defence and foreign policy. But make no mistake, the winds blown by Gorton and Denton voters will work their way through the Labour Party.

Subscribe now

Meanwhile, we see the right of British politics engaging in one almighty sulk. Reform performed well but not nearly as well as they might have done if their rise were as unassailable as has been talked about. Matthew Goodwin, their eccentric candidate for the seat, blamed his victory not on his performance or views but simply on “sectarianism.” Kemi Badenoch (whose Conservatives scored minor party status at less than 2% of the Gorton vote) went further. She issued a dark statement, kicking off with: “Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and yesterday that monster came back to bite them.” Much of the right in British politics has spent the morning talking about Muslim voters as if they are some sort of fifth column.

We need to separate out two distinct things here. There have been allegations of violations of the secret ballot in Gorton and “family voting.” This must be investigated as a potential serious problem. That goes for any violations of electoral law. There are pockets of Britain where clan, machine or braidhri politics have proven problematic, sometimes leading to electoral fraud. We shouldn’t be dewy eyed about this. I reported on it at Newsnight and wherever it happens it should be rooted out.

But the accusations we’re seeing go over and above that. We hear politicians and commentators suggesting that Muslims- uniquely- tend to vote as a group, and that that is illegitimate, wrong or dangerous. Absurdly, I’ve even seem the claim that it is the first time we’ve seen sectarian politics in Britain. Residents of Belfast, or Derry, or Glasgow, or Liverpool might have something to say about that. In fact it is completely normal, across democracies, for minorities to tend to vote in one direction. Yet it only seems to be problem, for these people, when Muslims are the ones doing it.

Was it sectarian when the Church of England used to be described as the “Tory Party at prayer?”. Or when the Liberal Party represented nonconformist interests? Was it sectarian when Labour aggressively courted Catholic votes in Glasgow and Liverpool? Is it sectarian when the Conservative Party courts British Indian voters, something they’ve very successfully done in recent years? Is it sectarian when they did the same with Jewish voters at the height of Labour’s problems over anti-Semitism? Was any of this wrong? The danger is not that minorities vote together. This is normal. The danger is when politicians decide that only some minorities are allowed to. British Muslims, like any other demographic group, tend to vote where they perceive their interests — economic, social or foreign policy — are best represented. That is coalition politics, not confessional politics.

Extraordinarily, I’ve heard politicians express bafflement and even disgust that the Green Party campaigned over Gaza and that voters chose to vote over the issue. That is quite literally what democracy is. It is a marketplace and the voters are the buyers. The real democratic question is not whether communities mobilise, but whether party structures remain transparent, meritocratic and open — something every party, in every era, has struggled to guarantee.

Right now, we have a situation where much of British politics consistently tells us that Islam and Muslims are a problem, or incompatible with British society and democracy, and then express fury when those same people choose not to vote for them. To put it another way, Reform and Conservative seem to have decided they don’t want to bother with British Muslims. They cannot be surprised when they decide they don’t wish to bother with them.

Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January’s government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of internet censorship. This was not merely blocking social media or foreign websites; it was a total communications shutdown.

Unlike previous Iranian internet shutdowns where Iran’s domestic intranet—the National Information Network (NIN)—remained functional to keep the banking and administrative sectors running, the 2026 blackout disrupted local infrastructure as well. Mobile networks, text messaging services, and landlines were disabled—even Starlink was blocked. And when a few domestic services became available, the state surgically removed social features, such as comment sections on news sites and chat boxes in online marketplaces. The objective seems clear. The Iranian government aimed to atomize the population, preventing not just the flow of information out of the country but the coordination of any activity within it.

This escalation marks a strategic shift from the shutdown observed during the “12-Day War” with Israel in mid-2025. Then, the government primarily blocked particular types of traffic while leaving the underlying internet remaining available. The regime’s actions this year entailed a more brute-force approach to internet censorship, where both the physical and logical layers of connectivity were dismantled.

The ability to disconnect a population is a feature of modern authoritarian network design. When a government treats connectivity as a faucet it can turn off at will, it asserts that the right to speak, assemble, and access information is revocable. The human right to the internet is not just about bandwidth; it is about the right to exist within the modern public square. Iran’s actions deny its citizens this existence, reducing them to subjects who can be silenced—and authoritarian governments elsewhere are taking note.

The current blackout is not an isolated panic reaction but a stress test for a long-term strategy, say advocacy groups—a two-tiered or “class-based” internet known as Internet-e-Tabaqati. Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, the country’s highest internet policy body, has been laying the legal and technical groundwork for this since 2009.

In July 2025, the council passed a regulation formally institutionalizing a two-tiered hierarchy. Under this system, access to the global internet is no longer a default for citizens, but instead a privilege granted based on loyalty and professional necessity. The implementation includes such things as “white SIM cards“: special mobile lines issued to government officials, security forces, and approved journalists that bypass the state’s filtering apparatus entirely.

While ordinary Iranians are forced to navigate a maze of unstable VPNs and blocked ports, holders of white SIMs enjoy unrestricted access to Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp. This tiered access is further enforced through whitelisting at the data center level, creating a digital apartheid where connectivity is a reward for compliance. The regime’s goal is to make the cost of a general shutdown manageable by ensuring that the state and its loyalists remain connected while plunging the public into darkness. (In the latest shutdown, for instance, white SIM holders regained connectivity earlier than the general population.)

The technical architecture of Iran’s shutdown reveals its primary purpose: social control through isolation. Over the years, the regime has learned that simple censorship—blocking specific URLs—is insufficient against a tech-savvy population armed with circumvention tools. The answer instead has been to build a “sovereign” network structure that allows for granular control.

By disabling local communication channels, the state prevents the “swarm” dynamics of modern unrest, where small protests coalesce into large movements through real-time coordination. In this way, the shutdown breaks the psychological momentum of the protests. The blocking of chat functions in nonpolitical apps (like ridesharing or shopping platforms) illustrates the regime’s paranoia: Any channel that allows two people to exchange text is seen as a threat.

The United Nations and various international bodies have increasingly recognized internet access as an enabler of other fundamental human rights. In the context of Iran, the internet is the only independent witness to history. By severing it, the regime creates a zone of impunity where atrocities can be committed without immediate consequence.

Iran’s digital repression model is distinct from, and in some ways more dangerous than, China’s “Great Firewall.” China built its digital ecosystem from the ground up with sovereignty in mind, creating domestic alternatives like WeChat and Weibo that it fully controls. Iran, by contrast, is building its controls on top of the standard global internet infrastructure.

Unlike China’s censorship regime, Iran’s overlay model is highly exportable. It demonstrates to other authoritarian regimes that they can still achieve high levels of control by retrofitting their existing networks. We are already seeing signs of “authoritarian learning,” where techniques tested in Tehran are being studied by regimes in unstable democracies and dictatorships alike. The most recent shutdown in Afghanistan, for example, was more sophisticated than previous ones. If Iran succeeds in normalizing tiered access to the internet, we can expect to see similar white SIM policies and tiered access models proliferate globally.

The international community must move beyond condemnation and treat connectivity as a humanitarian imperative. A coalition of civil society organizations has already launched a campaign calling for “direct-to-cell” (D2C) satellite connectivity. Unlike traditional satellite internet, which requires conspicuous and expensive dishes such as Starlink terminals, D2C technology connects directly to standard smartphones and is much more resilient to infrastructure shutdowns. The technology works; all it requires is implementation.

This is a technological measure, but it has a strong policy component as well. Regulators should require satellite providers to include humanitarian access protocols in their licensing, ensuring that services can be activated for civilians in designated crisis zones. Governments, particularly the United States, should ensure that technology sanctions do not inadvertently block the hardware and software needed to circumvent censorship. General licenses should be expanded to cover satellite connectivity explicitly. And funding should be directed toward technologies that are harder to whitelist or block, such as mesh networks and D2C solutions that bypass the choke points of state-controlled ISPs.

Deliberate internet shutdowns are commonplace throughout the world. The 2026 shutdown in Iran is a glimpse into a fractured internet. If we are to end countries’ ability to limit access to the rest of the world for their populations, we need to build resolute architectures. They don’t solve the problem, but they do give people in repressive countries a fighting chance.

This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy.