A Letter to My Grandchildren When They Are Fifteen
When I was fifteen I listened to contemporary politicians, Wilson and Heath in the 1966 election, berating each other in morally heated terms. I wondered why there wasn't a clear right or wrong answer on these pressing policy matters. I wondered how to decide – what could be the methodology? – between the different parties' positions.
Unlike in the maths or physics I was studying, no one seemed to have a good theory.
Eventually – and after I learned some economics – I came to understand. Politics is not what it pretends to be: a search for correct answers as to how to run things (in the scientific sense). Not at all. It’s actually a system for distributing power between powerful people who represent conflicting interests, under conditions of uncertainty and limited knowledge - and varying degrees of competence, we might add.
Let’s listen to the economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950): democracy is not the rule of “the people” discovering the common good. Instead it’s a competition between political groupings, usually organised as parties, for the right to govern (see Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942). Elections are not moments of truth or attempts to achieve generalised optimality; they are moments of selection. You are choosing only between elite teams representing diverse interest groups.
Finally, the tone of political debate begins to make sense. Each side is not calmly reasoning toward a shared conclusion. Each side is attempting to win by mobilising its supporters while undermining its opponents. Moral language is part of the toolkit, galvanising ‘us’ and demonising ‘them’.
Incidentally, this is why the famous GOAT, the ‘Government of All the Talents’ is a non-starter except in times of national emergency - when domestic factional struggles get to be put on hold.
The Machinery Beneath the Stage
It’s after the election when Public Choice Theory intervenes to provide the next layer of our education. It begins with a simple observation: the people inside political systems – politicians, civil servants, advisers – are not saints or neutral calculators. Like all human beings, they respond to the incentives available to them.
Politicians seek re-election. Bureaucrats seek budget, stability, and expansion of their power and influence. Voters, for the most part, remain only lightly informed because people are busy, the effort required to master public policy is large, and the influence of any individual vote is small to negligible.
Meanwhile, smaller, organised groups – industrial cartels, unions, the professions – have strong incentives to lobby for policies that benefit them... and the power and focus to succeed in doing so.
The result is that government policy tends to reflect the pressure of organised minorities much more than the diffuse interests of the majority (noting that all governments wish to keep the masses politically atomised and quiescent, which is why Populism is deprecated as so dangerous).
This stance is accentuated when the dominant governing ideology is managerialism, with political leaders who pride themselves on lacking any overarching vision, but who are content to triangulate between interest groups, thinking their role is to compute some kind of political vector sum.
How Power Settles and Hardens
Mancur Olson became justifiably famous (The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, 1982) by observing that those elite fractions strong enough to gain real power do not merely exercise it ‘in the moment’; they institutionalise it. They construct legal frameworks, regulatory regimes, and administrative practices that lock in their advantages. What begins as a contingent victory becomes a durable structure.
Each such structure generates beneficiaries, and those beneficiaries organise to defend it. Over time, society accumulates a dense network of such layers incorporating protections, subsidies, rules and exceptional treatment. Each, in the moment, could be justified. Together they form a dense web that becomes increasingly resistant to change – a de facto veto network which locks-in a stagnant status quo.
So this is Olson’s central point: democratic societies tend to become sclerotic. Not because they suddenly become foolish, but because they become crowded with entrenched interests that resist the shock of the new. Reform is not blocked by ignorance so much as conscious, organised opposition.
Machiavelli saw this long before modern economics. He observed that “there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things” (The Prince, 1532).
Those who benefit from the old order resist fiercely; those who might benefit from the (untried and embryonic) new are uncertain, hesitant, or divided. Reform is intrinsically hard, even when it is vitally necessary for the larger society.
Why Change Requires Shock
As the web of special interest groups unfolds over decades, the system slows. It becomes less adaptive, less efficient, more preoccupied with managing its own accumulated complexity; the barriers to change are thus constructed.
Significant reform so often requires a countervailing force of unusual magnitude: economic crisis, political upheaval, war, or the arrival of disruptive technologies that make old arrangements untenable. Olson noted that societies experiencing social collapse, such as Germany and Japan after 1945, often exhibited faster growth in the following decades, partly because entrenched interests had been dismantled in defeat.
Marx, in his own way, grasped part of this dynamic. He spoke of a tension between the “forces of production” and the “relations of production”. When the former advance beyond what the latter can accommodate, strain builds. Something must eventually give. Despite Marx’s legendary revolutionary optimism, it’s far from a quick process.
The Role of the Public
Where does this leave “the people”? Not as sovereign masters in the romantic sense, nor as mere dupes. Most people are busy with their own lives; rationally inattentive to national politics. They rely on heuristics: party labels, reputations, broad impressions of competence or trustworthiness. People become aware in broad outlines when the current set-up is stalled and on a road to nowhere; when their own hopes of fulfilment are being dashed.
Why You Will Not Find a Single “Right Answer”
At fifteen, I wanted a method that would tell me the correct policies, the ones I should support, just like a calculation produces a correct result.
It took me a good few years to comprehend that there are no such methods, because political questions are not of that kind. They always involve trade-offs with winners and losers and everyone fights and obfuscates for their advantage. There is no neutral vantage point from which all interests align, although all parties will pretend the opposite.
So don't look for purity in politics. You will not find it. Look instead for cui bono: who benefits, who pays, who is organised, who is left in the cold. Watch out for bad arguments: specious narratives which make you wonder how anyone could ever believe that - special interests, dressed up in the garb of universal idealism, often look like that.
Hopefully you will see more clearly than I did at your age. You will not be seduced by moral hectoring, self-satisfied self-righteousness.
Instead, you may take quiet satisfaction in looking behind the curtain at those little men and women pulling the levers and pretending to be wizards.
