Feb 7, 2022·edited Feb 7, 2022Liked by Sam Freedman
A lot of this piece feels like an echo of Scott Alexander's mistake/conflict dichotomy. Basically, mistake theorists believe that society is flawed because its problems are difficult to solve; conflict theorists believe that society is flawed because the wrong people are in charge.
This puts Cummings in an unusual position, of being a conflict theorist who talks like a mistake theorist. His language is one of institutions and incentives and it doesn't moralise anything; but ultimately his thesis is "clever weirdos (like me) should run everything with no democratic oversight". (He also hates with a burning passion people who don't think like him, another hallmark of the conflict theorist.)
This seems like a narrow prescription for organisations and change. I wonder if the absence of any of the social, human and interpersonal perspective is also another area where DC gets things wrong. Behaviour and modelling are powerful social contributors to organisational effectiveness and development. Bullying, aggression, leaking etc behaviour might have immediate impacts but they are unlikely to be positive or last long. What sometimes people see as the blob rolling back against change is merely a longer term collective reaction to behaviour that is amoral, anti-social, and blaming which has alienated rather than recruited people to the project.
Feb 7, 2022·edited Feb 7, 2022Liked by Sam Freedman
It might be worth reading 'Pentagon Wars' which Dom cites with abandon as it hits all his buttons and seems to be an overdetermined element in his worldview (although I obviously have learned more about his worldview from learning about it from you rather than any great insights from afar of my own). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars
To your point, there is almost a Calvinist air that institutions are doomed to be corrupt and only an elect are able to be saved and save us all in turn...
In the current structure the wrong people end up in the wrong jobs, which leads to a massively suboptimal outcome for society as a whole. Anyone with a decent degree in a subject requiring a soupcon of mathematic ability ends up in the City. They do not even consider careers in teaching or science or in many cases medicine because to do so would mean surrendering to the structure, to the blob, and who can be bothered with that? The end result is that whole swathes of society are staffed by people whose interest is ONLY in the structure and in navigating and gaming it, rather than in excellence.
My sense is that a lot of the problems you and Cummings identify have arisen from the Left's reaction to Reagan / Thatcher - the 'long march through the institutions'. Yes, bureaucracies naturally resist reform - as a refugee from 20 years in the Civil Service / NHS, I can attest to that (and I believed in devolution even when in those roles!) - but look at the people recruited into those institutions. I am one of very few 'right-wingers' I ever came across in my career in the permanent bureaucracy - why is that? Well, first, people with right-ish views may not be attracted to a career in government (you can make more money outside, government does stuff it shouldn't and you alone can't change that, the Sir Humphreys, success in the powerful departments is limited to public school / Oxbridge types, as a white male you will be discriminated against, etc.).
But even more than that, the Left has chosen to colonise those institutions in reaction to their inability to win elections on an openly-left wing platform. The universities have, quite simply, gone insane in their Wokeness, and those are the institutions that are educating the graduates that go into the civil service and the rest of the public sector. Those people will find any reason to block any even vaguely right-wing policy. Even 'evidence-based policy' - the term used by the Left since Blair - is designed to block right-wing views by including unchallengeable assumptions about the return from government spending ('investment') being positive (despite all evidence to the contrary) and its limitations on consideration of views beyond the Overton window (so no-one's allowed to challenge the Climate Change BS or point out that disparities between the underclass and the rest are probably caused a) by cultural attitudes to education, b) crap parenting, and c) by the fact that intelligence is highly hereditary). Tbf Blair got some of it at the end (e.g. his comment that you can predict by the time they're 5 which children will have problems with the criminal law).
I don't know whether a party could win an election on the platform I would propose to tackle this: find a level of taxation that people could see was reasonable, and fix that first, with all spending having to live within it. It would force even the bureaucrats I describe above to face reality. I would say that everyone should be entitled to keep enough of their own money to meet a basic standard of living, say 20k, then a flat tax (zero exemptions for the well connected) of 20% on everything else. Government has to live within that. People can vote locally for local taxes to supplement that if they wish, but that's it for central government. Benefits can't exceed the tax allowance level. Health should be via a Dutch-style social insurance system (thus removing the dead hand of the Treasury from health policy) and education through electronic vouchers to allow parents to bypass the education establishment. Once you set parameters for government around that, then you might get real change.
One thing I think Cummings has benefited from in. his career but doesn't seem to incorporate into his expressed views so much is the element of opponents making big mistakes that end up making you look good.
In the North East Assembly battle the pro assembly side had all major political parties, almost every council in the North East, legions of quangos and charities and what have you, and most if not all of the media.
Against this was a North East businessman, sort of regional Alan Sugar, John Elliott of EBAC who had a young Dominic Cummings trying out his ideas on media management..and a big inflatable white elephant.
While the elephant was a good idea always bobbing behind John Elliott on interviews, and he is good at authenticity AND sound bitery, and the Elephant beat the politicians by virtually 80% to 20% when the referendum was in, I do think a big chunk of that 80% came more from thebbig political guns shooting themselves in the foot by referring to it over and over again as *a Geordie Parliament*.
Carried away by this little soundbite they all wheeled it out at regular intervals, as if the around 200 or 300 thousand Geordies were as loved by one and a half million Mackems, Smoggies, Durham people and Northumbrians as much as they are loved by themselves.
People across the region who had become heartily sick of Newcastle being used casually as a synonym for *the North East* and didn't want Newcastle to have even more over them.
I think these sorts of things...Hilary Clinton's *Basket of deplorables* is perhaps another example...have a lot to do with deciding the outcome of political issues at vote time, far more than the Cummings', Mandelsons', Crosbys' et al would like to admit.
“Change happens one person at a time, for their reasons not yours.”
I’ve been involved in a lot of the kind of stuff he’s been trying to do (edutech, video in courts, dashboards for top brass) and while a lot of what he says makes sense…
… he seems to lack the soft skills to make it happen on the ground.
That said, he does seem to know how to get under your skin. I am particularly enjoying each expertly tied and cast fly that is landing on the nose, as he dismembers Johnson.
Civil Service, Electoral Commission, House of Lords, Schools, Universities & lots of woke institutions need detoxifying. I agree that a few boffins would meet with the same response in trying to do this and that MPs ultimately must help with the change, but look at the material he was trying to work with? The CINO Tories who supported May's submission to the EU, the knee benders to an anarchist antipolice minority, climate obsessed bunch that seem to dominate the Lords. The reason why Boris is rudderless is because his rudder in the form of Dominic has left - he needs another iconoclast like DM. How is DM's objective in Science leading the way faring. If we put some of the best minds on green issues rather than taxing the poor with heating levies then that would be a way forward for the government. Bringing back manufacturing from china and undoing the damage caused by the useful idiots like Osborne in cosying up them whilst creating the monster they now are (in terms of dictatorship, genocide (Uighurs, Tibet) and suppression of basic freedoms would be a key objective too. If not Dom - then who?
Interesting. When DC was a SPAD at Education under Michael Gove I was amazed by the Machiavellian tactics employed by him and fellow SPADS. At the time I was a Conservative Councillor in a Conservative run council with 3 Conservative MPs. We were fully signed up to the concept of academisation of our schools. Indeed we had been outsourcing many council services for 20 years - long before it became the norm. The only question was to which academy group did we award the academy programme to for a group of schools. The DfE were keen on a particularly group. We wanted a proper tendering process which would consider a range of providers. A confidential letter between the department and the Council concerning the matter was leaked in an effort to bounce the Council into accepting their favourite. At the time the Council initiated an inquiry among it's staff to establish who was the leaker. It turned out the source of the leak was a DfE SPAD. Conservative Councillors and MPs were furious. I was quite shocked that SPADS could behave in this way to a sympathetic local authority who were fully signed up in principle to the policies of their department.
The problem with Cummings is the English obsession with the concept of elite. The highest possible educational attainment for a kid on free school meals is to make it through the state education system and get into an Oxbridge college. Once there the kid has supposedly made it into the elite.
Both Boris Johnson and Ghislaine Maxwell had expensive educations and finished up at Balliol College Oggsford. Is it coincidence they both seemed to have missed the courses on ethics and morals?
Class and snobery still dominate England. Possibly this has been true for 1000 years. Cummings is the product of the elite end of a class based education system. The Cummings solution is to replace one elite with another or have a super elite dominate the regular elite. Once you identify an elite it justifies giving it the lions share of resources.
Consider a military analogy. Elite military forces are better equipped and better trained than regular forces. They have more money spent on them.
What we need is change from the very top. When QEII decides to leave the stage the question of an English republic is on the agenda. A referendum on voting for an elected head of state is possible. The man I would like to see running the Republican campagin is of cource Dominic Cummings.
Very interesting though way off the mark on Trump, he may be a sociopath & a narcissist but his policies were very much on the money, whereas Biden-Harris are probably the worst US president and VP ever How can you say Trump is a bad actor when Biden's corruption (via hunter) Pelosi's corruption (via her share dealings) and the woke democratic in bed with China continues to mask Chinas responsibility for releasing Covid on the world aided possibly unwitttingly by equally corrupt Fauci? 10m migrants over the souther border, $11b of asset left in afghanistan, -and on and on - and you have the nerve to say Trump is a bad actor? Framed for 6/1/21 by the CIA implants (Ray Ebbs etc). Biden has weakened the US to feather his own nest and now Taiwan, Ukraine,Israel pay the price. Trump major success in the Abraham accords too. Just beggars belief!
“He just wanted some success metrics based on exams and if the schools passed then that’s fine. ..It was the same with assessment. He wanted to scrap all GCSEs except for English and Maths as he could see the perverse incentives GCSEs create for schools and the amount of time they spend jumping through the hoops necessary to meet them.”
So he wanted to judge schools entirely by exam results, and also scrap most exams?
And he both praises a bunch of American military development projects and simultaneously denounces the Pentagon as useless?
I’m beginning to wonder how much attention he pays to his own opinions.
The sad thing is I think you’re probably both correct. He in his perception of institutions as self interested entities that resist change. You in your practical knowledge of how those institutions would simply reform themselves. His solution is to burn it down and create a Thiel-like demagogue(s) to put everything right and then disappear. Yours is to focus on incremental reform through expert technocracy. Either route triggers a populace to protect itself because neither is particularly democratic and the disconnect between the governed and those who govern us is the part that is already causing the problem. It’s entirely possible that all available routes end badly because... events.
A lot of this piece feels like an echo of Scott Alexander's mistake/conflict dichotomy. Basically, mistake theorists believe that society is flawed because its problems are difficult to solve; conflict theorists believe that society is flawed because the wrong people are in charge.
This puts Cummings in an unusual position, of being a conflict theorist who talks like a mistake theorist. His language is one of institutions and incentives and it doesn't moralise anything; but ultimately his thesis is "clever weirdos (like me) should run everything with no democratic oversight". (He also hates with a burning passion people who don't think like him, another hallmark of the conflict theorist.)
This seems like a narrow prescription for organisations and change. I wonder if the absence of any of the social, human and interpersonal perspective is also another area where DC gets things wrong. Behaviour and modelling are powerful social contributors to organisational effectiveness and development. Bullying, aggression, leaking etc behaviour might have immediate impacts but they are unlikely to be positive or last long. What sometimes people see as the blob rolling back against change is merely a longer term collective reaction to behaviour that is amoral, anti-social, and blaming which has alienated rather than recruited people to the project.
It might be worth reading 'Pentagon Wars' which Dom cites with abandon as it hits all his buttons and seems to be an overdetermined element in his worldview (although I obviously have learned more about his worldview from learning about it from you rather than any great insights from afar of my own). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars
To your point, there is almost a Calvinist air that institutions are doomed to be corrupt and only an elect are able to be saved and save us all in turn...
Very interesting piece - I've just been doing a little research into Cummings, so this is most useful thank you!
In the current structure the wrong people end up in the wrong jobs, which leads to a massively suboptimal outcome for society as a whole. Anyone with a decent degree in a subject requiring a soupcon of mathematic ability ends up in the City. They do not even consider careers in teaching or science or in many cases medicine because to do so would mean surrendering to the structure, to the blob, and who can be bothered with that? The end result is that whole swathes of society are staffed by people whose interest is ONLY in the structure and in navigating and gaming it, rather than in excellence.
My sense is that a lot of the problems you and Cummings identify have arisen from the Left's reaction to Reagan / Thatcher - the 'long march through the institutions'. Yes, bureaucracies naturally resist reform - as a refugee from 20 years in the Civil Service / NHS, I can attest to that (and I believed in devolution even when in those roles!) - but look at the people recruited into those institutions. I am one of very few 'right-wingers' I ever came across in my career in the permanent bureaucracy - why is that? Well, first, people with right-ish views may not be attracted to a career in government (you can make more money outside, government does stuff it shouldn't and you alone can't change that, the Sir Humphreys, success in the powerful departments is limited to public school / Oxbridge types, as a white male you will be discriminated against, etc.).
But even more than that, the Left has chosen to colonise those institutions in reaction to their inability to win elections on an openly-left wing platform. The universities have, quite simply, gone insane in their Wokeness, and those are the institutions that are educating the graduates that go into the civil service and the rest of the public sector. Those people will find any reason to block any even vaguely right-wing policy. Even 'evidence-based policy' - the term used by the Left since Blair - is designed to block right-wing views by including unchallengeable assumptions about the return from government spending ('investment') being positive (despite all evidence to the contrary) and its limitations on consideration of views beyond the Overton window (so no-one's allowed to challenge the Climate Change BS or point out that disparities between the underclass and the rest are probably caused a) by cultural attitudes to education, b) crap parenting, and c) by the fact that intelligence is highly hereditary). Tbf Blair got some of it at the end (e.g. his comment that you can predict by the time they're 5 which children will have problems with the criminal law).
I don't know whether a party could win an election on the platform I would propose to tackle this: find a level of taxation that people could see was reasonable, and fix that first, with all spending having to live within it. It would force even the bureaucrats I describe above to face reality. I would say that everyone should be entitled to keep enough of their own money to meet a basic standard of living, say 20k, then a flat tax (zero exemptions for the well connected) of 20% on everything else. Government has to live within that. People can vote locally for local taxes to supplement that if they wish, but that's it for central government. Benefits can't exceed the tax allowance level. Health should be via a Dutch-style social insurance system (thus removing the dead hand of the Treasury from health policy) and education through electronic vouchers to allow parents to bypass the education establishment. Once you set parameters for government around that, then you might get real change.
One thing I think Cummings has benefited from in. his career but doesn't seem to incorporate into his expressed views so much is the element of opponents making big mistakes that end up making you look good.
In the North East Assembly battle the pro assembly side had all major political parties, almost every council in the North East, legions of quangos and charities and what have you, and most if not all of the media.
Against this was a North East businessman, sort of regional Alan Sugar, John Elliott of EBAC who had a young Dominic Cummings trying out his ideas on media management..and a big inflatable white elephant.
While the elephant was a good idea always bobbing behind John Elliott on interviews, and he is good at authenticity AND sound bitery, and the Elephant beat the politicians by virtually 80% to 20% when the referendum was in, I do think a big chunk of that 80% came more from thebbig political guns shooting themselves in the foot by referring to it over and over again as *a Geordie Parliament*.
Carried away by this little soundbite they all wheeled it out at regular intervals, as if the around 200 or 300 thousand Geordies were as loved by one and a half million Mackems, Smoggies, Durham people and Northumbrians as much as they are loved by themselves.
People across the region who had become heartily sick of Newcastle being used casually as a synonym for *the North East* and didn't want Newcastle to have even more over them.
I think these sorts of things...Hilary Clinton's *Basket of deplorables* is perhaps another example...have a lot to do with deciding the outcome of political issues at vote time, far more than the Cummings', Mandelsons', Crosbys' et al would like to admit.
“Change happens one person at a time, for their reasons not yours.”
I’ve been involved in a lot of the kind of stuff he’s been trying to do (edutech, video in courts, dashboards for top brass) and while a lot of what he says makes sense…
… he seems to lack the soft skills to make it happen on the ground.
That said, he does seem to know how to get under your skin. I am particularly enjoying each expertly tied and cast fly that is landing on the nose, as he dismembers Johnson.
Civil Service, Electoral Commission, House of Lords, Schools, Universities & lots of woke institutions need detoxifying. I agree that a few boffins would meet with the same response in trying to do this and that MPs ultimately must help with the change, but look at the material he was trying to work with? The CINO Tories who supported May's submission to the EU, the knee benders to an anarchist antipolice minority, climate obsessed bunch that seem to dominate the Lords. The reason why Boris is rudderless is because his rudder in the form of Dominic has left - he needs another iconoclast like DM. How is DM's objective in Science leading the way faring. If we put some of the best minds on green issues rather than taxing the poor with heating levies then that would be a way forward for the government. Bringing back manufacturing from china and undoing the damage caused by the useful idiots like Osborne in cosying up them whilst creating the monster they now are (in terms of dictatorship, genocide (Uighurs, Tibet) and suppression of basic freedoms would be a key objective too. If not Dom - then who?
Interesting. When DC was a SPAD at Education under Michael Gove I was amazed by the Machiavellian tactics employed by him and fellow SPADS. At the time I was a Conservative Councillor in a Conservative run council with 3 Conservative MPs. We were fully signed up to the concept of academisation of our schools. Indeed we had been outsourcing many council services for 20 years - long before it became the norm. The only question was to which academy group did we award the academy programme to for a group of schools. The DfE were keen on a particularly group. We wanted a proper tendering process which would consider a range of providers. A confidential letter between the department and the Council concerning the matter was leaked in an effort to bounce the Council into accepting their favourite. At the time the Council initiated an inquiry among it's staff to establish who was the leaker. It turned out the source of the leak was a DfE SPAD. Conservative Councillors and MPs were furious. I was quite shocked that SPADS could behave in this way to a sympathetic local authority who were fully signed up in principle to the policies of their department.
The problem with Cummings is the English obsession with the concept of elite. The highest possible educational attainment for a kid on free school meals is to make it through the state education system and get into an Oxbridge college. Once there the kid has supposedly made it into the elite.
Both Boris Johnson and Ghislaine Maxwell had expensive educations and finished up at Balliol College Oggsford. Is it coincidence they both seemed to have missed the courses on ethics and morals?
Class and snobery still dominate England. Possibly this has been true for 1000 years. Cummings is the product of the elite end of a class based education system. The Cummings solution is to replace one elite with another or have a super elite dominate the regular elite. Once you identify an elite it justifies giving it the lions share of resources.
Consider a military analogy. Elite military forces are better equipped and better trained than regular forces. They have more money spent on them.
What we need is change from the very top. When QEII decides to leave the stage the question of an English republic is on the agenda. A referendum on voting for an elected head of state is possible. The man I would like to see running the Republican campagin is of cource Dominic Cummings.
Very interesting though way off the mark on Trump, he may be a sociopath & a narcissist but his policies were very much on the money, whereas Biden-Harris are probably the worst US president and VP ever How can you say Trump is a bad actor when Biden's corruption (via hunter) Pelosi's corruption (via her share dealings) and the woke democratic in bed with China continues to mask Chinas responsibility for releasing Covid on the world aided possibly unwitttingly by equally corrupt Fauci? 10m migrants over the souther border, $11b of asset left in afghanistan, -and on and on - and you have the nerve to say Trump is a bad actor? Framed for 6/1/21 by the CIA implants (Ray Ebbs etc). Biden has weakened the US to feather his own nest and now Taiwan, Ukraine,Israel pay the price. Trump major success in the Abraham accords too. Just beggars belief!
“He just wanted some success metrics based on exams and if the schools passed then that’s fine. ..It was the same with assessment. He wanted to scrap all GCSEs except for English and Maths as he could see the perverse incentives GCSEs create for schools and the amount of time they spend jumping through the hoops necessary to meet them.”
So he wanted to judge schools entirely by exam results, and also scrap most exams?
And he both praises a bunch of American military development projects and simultaneously denounces the Pentagon as useless?
I’m beginning to wonder how much attention he pays to his own opinions.
The sad thing is I think you’re probably both correct. He in his perception of institutions as self interested entities that resist change. You in your practical knowledge of how those institutions would simply reform themselves. His solution is to burn it down and create a Thiel-like demagogue(s) to put everything right and then disappear. Yours is to focus on incremental reform through expert technocracy. Either route triggers a populace to protect itself because neither is particularly democratic and the disconnect between the governed and those who govern us is the part that is already causing the problem. It’s entirely possible that all available routes end badly because... events.
Pity about the spelling mistake in your end note - 'I before E, except after C'. Of course Cummings brand genii don't care about spelling. You might enjoy my piece on Cummings at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/too-weird-whitehall-enough-cummings-james-morton/?trackingId=JREnmR8OUlNm%2FmeWksXAjA%3D%3D