Politics Advice to my Grandchildren

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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.

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The Blue Bag Enigma - another UX triumph

The Blue Bag Enigma

For the last few months, I’ve been conscientiously collecting marginally-recyclable stuff - cling film, chocolate wrappers, plastic lids - into one of those translucent blue bags issued by Mendip Council for recycling. The scheme, I understand, is a trial.

I finally ran out of the bags - which on their flexible blue bodies advertise no hint as to how to replace themselves.

I assumed I could order more. Mendip Council has a website, a portal for the use of the locals. Where is the button marked "Request more recycling bags"?

The site, labyrinthine and bureaucratically unhelpful, offered no mention, no hint, even, of the scheme’s existence. Google did not help: its pointer to 'My Waste Services' was a maze to nowhere.

It was ChatGPT which finally cracked the puzzle: a secondary, modified, covert copy of that main waste-recycling webpage. It's the home of FlexCollect (the pilot programme). You may request more bags, but only here.

Why did finding it require the use of an AI system trained on the accumulated, posted wisdom of the entire human race? Because the public website interface design mirrors the mind of the bureaucracy, not the citizen. The service is imagined only from the inside: defined by council IT staff working for the bureaucracy and trapped in their functional reality.

We, the people, meanwhile, observe from the outside. We're totally ignorant of the layout of the council, its offices and its baroque division of labour. 

We had this argument back in the 1980s. “User-centred design” we called it back then. But such ideas remain exotic to monopoly institutions. After all, if your customers can’t switch supplier, why waste effort and money by trying to think like the customer?

After all, we don't really know how they think, do we?

The failure to create a 'United States of Europe'

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Why Europe Cannot Become a “United States of Europe”

The question is often posed with a note of bafflement, sometimes irritation: in a world that is plainly becoming harsher, more coercive and more dangerous, why does Europe still struggle to act as a single political, economic and military unit? Why, when the logic of scale, deterrence and strategic autonomy seems obvious, does the European Union fail to harden into a true “United States of Europe”?

The short answer is that Europe is not failing to become a superstate by accident. It is behaving exactly as its institutional design, political economy and historical memory would predict. It is also worth recalling that even the United States did not emerge as a coherent federal power by design alone: it required a shared revolutionary origin, a long period of internal bargaining, and ultimately a civil war - which settled the question of sovereignty by force.

The EU as a regulatory state, not a sovereign one

The EU is strongest where coercion is weakest. It excels at rules, standards, market integration, competition law and trade policy. These are domains where authority can be exercised through law, process and courts rather than force. What it conspicuously lacks is a thick fiscal core and a unified coercive apparatus. Its budget is small, its taxation powers negligible, and its ability to borrow jointly remains politically exceptional rather than normal.

States, however, ultimately cohere through money and force. War, deterrence and large-scale redistribution are paid for through taxation and debt, and enforced through command structures that answer to a single political authority. Europe can coordinate, consult and regulate; it struggles to command. This is not an accident.

National sovereignty as an alarm system

The EU’s much-criticised vetoes and unanimity rules are often described as design flaws. In fact they are better understood as sovereignty alarm systems. They exist precisely to prevent national elites from being dragged into commitments - financial, military or constitutional - that they cannot control domestically and which adversely affect their interests.

Under calm conditions, these vetoes look like bureaucratic inertia. Under stress, they become political tripwires. A single election, coalition collapse or captured party system in a medium-sized member state can paralyse collective action. From the perspective of national elites, this is not a bug; it's insurance.

Olson, Schumpeter and the politics of capture

Mancur Olson’s logic of collective action applies with brutal clarity to Europe. Each member state already contains a dense web of special interests: regulated industries, “national champions”, unions, NGOs, quangos and professionalised lobby groups. These actors are highly motivated, well-organised and intensely defensive of their rents.

European integration cannot and does not dissolve this structure; it duplicates it. Some interests lobby Brussels to entrench advantages. Others lobby national governments to block EU initiatives that threaten domestic arrangements. Free-riding is rational, resistance is organised, and the costs of fragmentation are diffused across electorates that rarely mobilise in favour of abstract continental goods and services.

Joseph Schumpeter’s profound insight - that democracy is often a valued enabler of competition between elites rather than an unmediated expression of 'popular will' - only sharpens the point. European publics are not clamouring for a supranational state that taxes them directly, drafts their children or reallocates resources across borders indefinitely. National elites know this, and are happy to leverage such sentiments.

“Integration through crisis” has limits

The architects of European integration were not naïve. They understood that centralisation could only advance incrementally, often under the cover of necessity. Crises could justify new instruments: common rules, emergency funds, shared borrowing. This ratchet worked tolerably well in financial and regulatory domains.

But existential crises cut both ways. They do not merely enable integration; they politicise it. When costs become visible and unevenly distributed - energy prices, industrial decline, migration pressure, military risk - national interests harden. “Solidarity” turns into an argument about who pays, who benefits, and who is cheating.

At that point, the logic of Olson reasserts itself with a vengeance. Blocking becomes profitable. Defection becomes electorally attractive. The centre weakens precisely when it would have needed to harden.

Military power remains national

Despite years of initiatives, Europe does not possess a unified military force with a single chain of command answerable to a European executive. Defence remains national, shaped by deeply different strategic cultures, threat perceptions, historical memories and above all different national interests.

Eastern and northern states see immediate existential danger; southern and western states see instability, energy risk and trade exposure. These are not trivial differences of emphasis; they shape willingness to spend, to escalate, and to accept casualties. A common army without a common political community is both paralysed and dangerous (who in the end gets to direct it?).

The shadow of history

The last attempt to unify Europe under a single authority occurred during the Second World War, and it arrived in the form of conquest, the only way to truly break the power of the elites in the conquered nations. The diverse national elites of today don't see that as a model which works for them: unity imposed through domination, leading to their permanent subordination, is intolerable.

What is more likely than a superstate?

The most plausible future for the EU is neither neat consolidation nor outright collapse, but fragmentation-within-framework. The EU will persist as a powerful economic and regulatory platform. Security and deterrence will increasingly run through NATO if it survives as a functional arrangement, bilateral arrangements and ad hoc coalitions of the willing. Joint action will occur where interests align sharply and visibly; paralysis will return where they do not.

Conclusion

Europe struggles to become a “United States of Europe” because such a state would require what Europe does not yet possess: a unified demos, a thick common treasury, a shared strategic culture, and national political and economic elites willing to surrender veto power over war, money and destiny - that is, over their own vital interests.

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Fascism: birth, growth, victory, decay, death

Fascism as Systemic Outcome: An Applied Cliodynamic Analysis

The term “fascism” is often used polemically, as shorthand for repression or violence. Yet if we set aside the rhetoric and instead treat fascism as an institutional form, a different picture emerges.

At its endpoint, a fascist regime is one in which all autonomous structures that could mobilize in opposition to the leadership of the state have been dismantled. Trade unions, media outlets, political parties, voluntary associations: all are homogenized, subordinated, or destroyed. Opponents who resist are violently removed from office or silenced. Civil society ceases to operate as a check. The regime stands as a victorious political–military elite commanding a simplified social field.

Understanding fascism solely as this endpoint, however, obscures the process by which societies arrive there. Fascism is not a sudden eruption of ideology but rather one possible systemic resolution of accumulated blockages within the political economy.

The best analytical framework for grasping this sequence is provided by Mancur Olson’s theory of special interest group sclerosis, Peter Turchin’s cliodynamic accounts of elite overproduction and instability, and Joseph Schumpeter’s insights on creative destruction. Together they show how fascism can emerge as a brutal form of “political–institutional restructuring” when all other mechanisms fail.

1. Institutional sclerosis

Olson argued that as societies mature, entrenched interest groups - whether unions, business lobbies, bureaucratic cliques, or sectors of the state apparatus - accumulate bargaining power. Each group expands and defends its own rents and privileges, blocking reforms that might disadvantage it. Over time, this produces sclerosis: the economy cannot grow, political institutions become rigid and society becomes jammed. Increasingly, the parasitised state bloats, unable to fund itself.

Turchin adds a demographic and elite dimension. As more aspirants compete for limited elite positions, “elite overproduction” heightens competition, polarizes politics, and increases the intensity of factional conflict. Both mechanisms converge: reform stalls, while demands for advancement multiply.

2. Crisis of legitimacy

When sclerosis persists, living standards for the mass of people stagnate or fall. Ordinary citizens lose hope of social mobility. The state, captured by expensive rent-seekers, struggles to finance itself effectively. Public goods deteriorate, and legitimacy drains away. The perception spreads that the normal channels of politics cannot deliver change.

3. Extra-legal contestation

Blocked within institutional frameworks, groups increasingly bypass rules. Strikes, lockouts, militant demonstrations, politicised policing, and paramilitary clashes become normalised. Violence is not yet structural, but it is routinised. The arena of politics moves from parliaments and courts to the streets.

Note that different sections of the elite may back different groups and 'sides': the advent of fascism is always a civil war.

4. Elite convergence on destruction

At some point, fractions of the elite conclude that institutional demolition is the only way forward. They calculate that the destruction of obstructive interests - what they see as “negative institutions” - is a precondition for renewed growth and stability.

They therefore fund or endorse paramilitary movements willing to wield coercion against rivals. It is at this juncture that fascism begins to crystallize: not as an ideological crusade but as a violent simplification of society, clearing away accumulated blockages on the streets.

5. Autonomy of the fascist leadership

If victorious, fascist leadership enjoys a remarkable degree of autonomy. The destruction of free trade unions, independent media, voluntary associations, and opposing political parties leaves bankers, industrialists, and other economic elites with few levers of institutional influence; they are reduced to personal lobbying. 

Scholars of the interwar regimes noted how political–military elites in fascist states exercised radical independence from the remaining fragments of civil society. The fascist state is, in this sense, a spoil of victory for the faction that prevails.

6. Stability without renewal

Where fascist regimes are not ended by military defeat, they may persist for decades. Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal are cases in point. Yet they preside over a simplified and impoverished civic environment.

The brutal truth is that fascism works: its focused violence destroys those rent-seeking structures which caused the crisis, and may well remove the elite overproduction which fuelled it (by mass-killing of opponents, or by forcing them into lower strata of society).

But the original crisis that sponsored their emergence eventually passes: the specific oppositional forces they smashed no longer exist. A new period of growth now occurs, with the broader elite seeking new avenues of economic and cultural advancement. The absence of a plural civil society, once functional in clearing blockages, becomes an obstacle to modernisation and development. In victory, fascism begins its slide into irrelevance.

7. Slow decay and restoration

In such conditions, civil society begins to regrow covertly. Informal associations, cultural networks, and economic institutions accumulate beneath the surface. Over time, as generational turnover occurs and no-longer-needed repression relaxes, these networks quietly reconstitute a plural field. Eventually the authoritarian façade crumbles, often peacefully. In both Spain and Portugal, democratic structures were restored not by sudden insurrection but by the long, covert reassembly of social complexity.

Conclusion

Fascism is not best seen as an aberrant eruption of ideology or pathology - due to crazed ideologues. It is a systemic trajectory in which accumulated special interests and elite competition render normal politics impossible.

The violent destruction of civil society appears as a brutal and political variant of Schumpeterian creative destruction, clearing away obstructive institutions (at the cost of long-term vitality). Once established, fascism decays slowly, because the very simplification that makes it effective in crisis deprives it of the complexity needed for renewal.

This analysis shifts attention from the moral vocabulary of “evil regimes” to the structural dynamics of political economy. Fascism is one possible resolution of sclerosis, not chosen because it is desired in name but because, in moments of crisis, it can seem the only way out.

Its rise and its withering alike can be understood not as mysteries but as the working out of systemic pressures that Olson, Turchin, and Schumpeter each in their own way help us to map.

'Mancur Olson': on the UK's AI future

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The Robot Reckoning: An Olsonian Autopsy of Britain’s Future

Mancur Olson died on February 19, 1998, at the age of 66. He was a professor of economics at the University of Maryland at the time of his death and a key figure in the development of public choice theory and institutional economics.

But imagine Mancur Olson returns from the grave in 2040, tweed rustling, spectacles glinting, to inspect a Britain where every household can afford an omniskilled humanoid and a chat-bot cleverer than a barrister. Would he preach a new dawn of growth?

Hardly. He would reach for his usual instruments—coalitions, incentives, institutional sclerosis—and start dissecting.

How to Think about the Problem

Olson never stared at the gadget; he stared at the interests swirling around it. Three questions organise his diagnosis:

• Who owns the robots and the models? Outright ownership diffuses power; subscription models funnel rents up the chain. Follow the deeds and the IP licences.
• Can institutions bend before they break? Parliament, courts, regulators and councils must rewrite the rules at speed. If they dither, yesterday’s cartels will colonise tomorrow’s platforms.
• Which coalitions organise best? Winners are concentrated—platform firms, data landlords, property holders. Losers—the displaced and the diffuse—rarely coordinate. That asymmetry decides the spoils.

What Household Robots Actually Do

First, a labour shock. When every family commands cheap, tireless digital servants, human labour loses leverage in routine tasks. Wages fall where code competes. The remaining human niches cluster round status, intimacy and regulation: think bespoke cabinetry, personalised therapy, safeguarding-intensive caring.

Second, mass capital without capitalists—maybe. If the robots are truly owned (no hidden cloud leash), Britain experiences an unprecedented spread of productive assets. But if usage is gated by subscriptions, data tolls and perpetual updates, we are merely tenants on silicon estates.

Third, the public sector convulses. Triage bots slash NHS wait-lists, AI tutors threaten classrooms, council payrolls shrink under algorithmic case-work. Each advance delights the Treasury and terrifies the unions. Expect pitched battles couched in the language of ethics and safeguarding.

Fourth, regulation turns into trench warfare. Incumbent professions will demand “safety” rules designed to delay rivals. Ethical white papers multiply; their subtext is market-share protection.

Will Robots Break Britain’s Cartels?

Olson would walk borough by borough and conclude: not automatically.

The property lobby will scarcely notice; robots do not create land. Finance will sack half its back-office, pocket the gains and double its lobbying budget. Professional guilds will fracture—conveyancers may vanish, but surgeons will wrap themselves in ever-thicker credentialing. Public-sector unions will fight, fragment, then pivot to co-manage the very AI they decry.

Old coalitions thin, new ones fatten. What emerges is churn, not emancipation.

Two Futures

Creative destruction works. Open hardware, portable models, muscular antitrust and—crucially—land-use reform let robot productivity flow into cheaper goods and higher living standards. GDP per head lifts decisively, inequality narrows, politics grows turbulent but vital.

Cartel perpetuation. Robots are cloud-tethered, IP is ironclad, planning remains frozen, regulators tiptoe. Output potential rises but the dividend concentrates in platform equity and land rents. Median wages stagnate, discontent ferments, Britain’s productivity puzzle deepens to a lament.

On recent form—housing gridlock, regulatory drift, Whitehall capture—Olson would wager on the second path unless a genuine crisis forces reform.

What Would Olson Do?

1. Crack model monopolies. Mandate portability and open-weights once a system crosses a market-share threshold.
2. Shift taxes from robots to land. Let automation run free while recapturing gains embedded in property.
3. Sunset every professional monopoly. Licences expire unless periodically re-justified in open hearings.
4. Liberalise planning. Robot labour is useless if walls, roads and houses remain rationed.
5. Seed universal capital stakes. A sovereign AI fund can grant each citizen equity, so the silicon surplus arrives in wallets, not trickles.

The Verdict

Household androids and genius chat-bots will not, by themselves, drag Britain from its doldrums. Potential output will soar, but without radical institutional renovation the surplus will be skimmed by the very coalitions that jam the gears today—augmented by a new layer of platform barons. In short, the robot revolution will either pry open Britain’s cartel state or varnish it with chrome.

Unless Parliament finds the nerve to tax rents, break monopolies and liberate land, we may soon queue at food-banks under the watchful eye of cheerful, cloud-leased butlers supervised by very advanced police drones—proof that even universal automation cannot compensate for human political inertia.

The Feminisation of Society in Mancur Olson’s Political Economy - ChatGPT

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The Feminisation of Society in Mancur Olson’s Political Economy

There is a fundamental tension between Mancur Olson’s public choice analysis of distributional coalitions and the observable shift in modern polities toward what might loosely be called the feminisation of public life: a tendency toward risk-aversion, consensus-seeking, and care-oriented institutional priorities. Let’s see what Olson’s framework, properly extended, might make of it.

1. Olson’s Distributional Coalitions and Institutional Drift

In The Rise and Decline of Nations, Olson's thesis is that over time, stable societies accumulate special-interest groups which hijack political and economic institutions for narrow gain. These coalitions are typically conservative (in the structural, not ideological sense), resistant to innovation, and fiercely protective of their privileges. Olson’s paradigmatic examples were trade unions, professional guilds, and industrial lobbies—hard-nosed, usually male-dominated, and oriented toward rent-extraction.

But there is no principled reason why Olson’s logic would not apply equally to any stable, internally-organising interest group—so long as the group is:

• Relatively small (so can overcome collective action problems),
• Incentivised by selective benefits, and
• Operating in a stable institutional environment where rules can be bent but not broken.

Healthcare bureaucracies, teaching unions, social work professional bodies, and even activist NGOs—especially those with progressive, feminised staffing—meet these criteria. They are, in effect, Olsonian coalitions, though they present themselves under the moral banner of care, equity, and public service.

But as with all distributional coalitions, their internal goal is self-replication and insulation from reform. That they are largely feminised is historically contingent, but structurally irrelevant to Olson's core diagnosis: their function is rent-seeking disguised as moral necessity.

2. Feminisation as Institutional Capture by Soft Coalitions

Olson tended to focus on hard coalitions: dockworkers, steel producers, grain cartels. But late-modern institutions—particularly in the social democratic West—have drifted toward soft coalitions, often composed of civil servants, educators, and healthcare professionals. Their rents are not primarily monetary (though pensions, job security, and work-life balance certainly count), but moral-political: control over discourse, policy priorities, and cultural capital. These coalitions are harder to attack precisely because they cloak their self-interest in moral universalism. They are also, as you note, statistically and temperamentally feminised.

Here’s where your insight bites: the moral economy of these feminised institutions tends toward proceduralism, consensus, and safety. The risk-taking, iconoclastic, and combative Schumpeterian entrepreneur is delegitimised as dangerous, toxic, or disruptive. Even the language shifts: creative destruction becomes unsafe workplace restructuring. Challenge to orthodoxy is recast as violence.

Olson would likely see this feminisation not as some alien force, but as a natural extension of the same entropic process he identified: the proliferation of rent-seeking groups who grow in number, influence, and veto power as institutional inertia increases. The only difference is that the newer coalitions work through soft power, moral suasion, and ideological capture—not strikes, tariffs, and bribes.

3. The Gendered Political Economy of the Welfare State

Postwar welfare states, particularly in Scandinavia, offered a natural bureaucratic home for the expansion of feminised labour. This is not sinister; it was an expression of genuine need and postwar consensus. But as women entered these sectors in increasing numbers, they became politically salient constituencies. And like any political constituency, they organised around their interests: working conditions, job security, ideological consonance (e.g., DEI, safeguarding, trauma awareness, "lived experience" as epistemic trump card). These became new institutional shibboleths—no less opaque or self-serving than the old trade guilds Olson railed against.

Feminist activists, in this context, act as shock troops for institutional capture, pushing for expanded influence of care-values across sectors (education, policing, business, even defence). The result is not a conspiracy, but an emergent equilibrium: institutions become more caring, more cautious, and more administratively swollen—and much harder to reform.

4. Creative Destruction and the Taboo Against Masculine Antagonism

Schumpeter’s entrepreneur is not just masculine in tone; he is politically taboo. He breaks things. He does not consult the feelings of the HR department or check the trauma register of every policy. He cuts through consensus and dismantles legacy structures. No wonder, in a feminised institutional culture, he is reframed as an abuser.

This redefinition is not accidental—it is part of the ideological immune system of feminised coalitions. Olson’s prediction was that as distributional coalitions become entrenched, societies lose their capacity to restructure in the face of external shocks. What feminised coalitions add is an additional psychological armour, in which the very will to restructure is stigmatised.

In effect: feminisation retools Olson’s sclerosis, giving it a velvet glove.

5. Final Provocation: What Breaks the Spell?

Olson believed that only catastrophe—war, collapse, foreign domination—clears the decks. In 1945, Germany and Japan got rebooted. But short of such calamities, feminised rent-seeking institutions are like kudzu: elegant, soft-leaved, and utterly strangling.

Can a society re-masculinise its institutions enough to permit reform? History is not encouraging. And any attempt to do so will be met with moral panic and a fusillade of emotional invective.

So, if Olson were alive today, he would likely see feminisation not as a distinct phenomenon but as a culturally particular instantiation of the same degenerative dynamics he identified: interest groups cloaking rent-seeking in moral legitimacy, slowly calcifying the arteries of economic and institutional renewal.

Whether the hand on the lever is calloused or manicured, it grips the same rent-seeking apparatus. That is Olson’s genius—and his bleakness.

Mancur Olson's great theory is self-sabotaging

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Mancur Olson, the Economist No One Teaches

There’s a curious amnesia that afflicts economics departments and political salons alike. Certain thinkers, despite being manifestly correct, vanish from the syllabus, their insights quietly shelved. Not because they were wrong, but because they were right about the wrong people.

Enter Mancur Olson.

Olson, in his bleak and brilliant The Rise and Decline of Nations, offered a theory so lucid it ought to be inscribed on the walls of the Treasury. Societies that enjoy long periods of peace and stability accumulate what he called “distributional coalitions”—interest groups, cartels, professional associations, trade bodies, all dedicated to the slow, relentless extraction of rents.

Not bandits, but guilds. Not revolutionaries, but consultants. Not robber barons, but regulators.

As these groups multiply, they jam the gears of the economy: lobbying for protections, closing ranks against innovation, turning policy into a maze of self-serving exceptions. Monopolistic underproduction stifles growth. Lethargic, self-protecting decision-making kills dynamism. The economy sprawls: fat, stupid, and self-congratulatory—until liberated by the destructive crash, the crushing military defeat, or the elite-vanquishing coup.

It’s Schumpeter without the pulse-raising romance, Marx without the bloody revolution. Olson doesn’t see class viciously suppressing class. He just needs a long timeline and a civil service pension scheme.

So why is Olson rarely mentioned?

Because Olson was not, like so many economists, engaged in comforting abstraction. He named names—implicitly, yes, but unmistakably. He made it clear that the main obstacles to development, reform, and renewal are not the unwashed masses or rogue venture capitalists but the respectable, the credentialed, the professionalised—the very people who decide what ideas are “serious”.

Olson’s real target is:

• Your local NHS consultant who lobbies against foreign-trained doctors
• The university HR committee that mandates DEI statements while stifling heterodox ideas
• The corporate lobbyist who co-writes the regulations their firm already complies with.

In fact, the entire structure of elite consensus that speaks in the passive voice and never declares an interest.

This, of course, cannot be admitted.

So Olson is placed in the academic attic: acknowledged, perhaps, in a footnote, but never allowed to shape the conversation. His books are not denounced; they are simply not assigned.

Reading The Rise and Decline of Nations in Olson's trademark calm, detached, erudite style—watching his ideas about special interest groups lock macroeconomics into real history and real human behaviour—one begins to wonder why he never turned the spotlight on academic economics itself. 

Did the Emperor thank the tailor who revealed his nakedness?

No Marxist, Olson’s crime was subtler: to be right without theatrics. He posed no threat to capitalism—only to those profiting from its decay. That made him too dangerous to associate with. His toolkit was too accurate, too generalisable, too unsettling.

It’s also what makes him essential.

If you want to understand why the UK can’t build a railway, why housing is unaffordable, why the civil service is paralysed, why productivity flatlines while LinkedIn thrives—read Olson.

Then ask yourself why almost no one in public life ever quotes him.

They don’t forget.
They remember perfectly well.
That’s why they look away.

A Political Economist Looks at Rome

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In his popular economics book, The Rise and Decline of Nations, Mancur Olson sketches a grimly plausible picture of economic sclerosis. Over time, he argues, stable societies become overrun by small, well-organised special interest groups - what he calls distributional coalitions - that pursue their own advantage at the expense of the wider collective. These coalitions don’t need to be malicious. They need only be persistent, inward-facing, and difficult to dislodge. Their genius lies in their very inertia.

Olson’s thesis, born of Cold War economic puzzles - why Germany and Japan surged after defeat, while Britain languished in post-war fog - has since been extended to trade unions, agricultural subsidies, and the modern lobbying-industrial complex. But what happens if we take his idea and point it at something older and stranger than industry: the Catholic Church?

At first glance, Olson might seem ill-equipped for ecclesiology. His tools are rent-seeking and cost-benefit analysis. The Church is a voluntary organisation, offering unclear benefits to loosely affiliated members, some of whom give up a good portion of their time and money without any obvious return. But that’s precisely why it’s interesting. Because despite this apparent imbalance - no salaries, no perks, no obvious mundane utility - it persists. Flourishes, even. It’s hard to think of a more enduring global coalition.

The Church as Distributional Coalition

Let’s be clear: the Catholic Church doesn’t operate as a classic economic cartel. It doesn’t rig markets or lobby governments for direct cash infusions: at least, not with much success. But Olson’s analysis was always broader than mere economic interests. He was interested in how groups sustain themselves over time, even in the face of dwindling returns and increasing complexity.

In that light, the Church is textbook:

• It provides selective incentives, though not in the form of wages or tax breaks. Instead, it offers social standing, ritual belonging, and moral certainty. These are powerful currencies, especially for older generations whose secular roles may have diminished in retirement.

• It deters exit not through coercion, but through identity. Leaving the Church doesn’t just mean abandoning a Sunday routine, it can feel like cultural and spiritual dislocation. Volunteers may grumble about rotas and finance committees, but they rarely walk away. The cost is existential.

• It builds status structures. The Church, like any durable coalition, excels at symbolic hierarchy. Roles proliferate: sacristan, Eucharistic minister, deanery representative, parish safeguarding lead. Each a small honour, an anchor of meaning.

Olson would note with interest how little material reward is required to sustain these structures. Meaning and duty are enough. Occasionally, a bishop’s thank-you letter might arrive, typed and perhaps unsigned.

Decline Without Collapse

One of Olson’s key claims is that distributional coalitions, once embedded, resist change. They slow down decision-making, prioritise internal interests, and choke off innovation. Sound familiar?

The post-Vatican II Church has all the symptoms. Its structures are Byzantine, its capacity for reform sluggish. Clericalism operates as a kind of protected guild system: hard to enter, harder to expel. Parish life is increasingly run by an ageing laity whose loyalty outpaces their numbers. It's not a system geared for agility or growth, but that’s the point: it doesn’t need to be.

Olson’s coalitions don’t disappear when they stop being efficient. They persist because they’ve made themselves indispensable to their members’ sense of self. If you imagine trying to dissolve a parish council, you’d understand the scale of the task.

Regional Realities: Olson's Global View

So, would Olson say the Church is currently in equilibrium? Unlikely. He would see a global institution in slow and uneven decline, with pockets of growth masking deeper systemic sclerosis. His analysis would be regional.

Western Europe: The Overripe Coalition

The Catholic Church here is the textbook case of institutional senescence.

• Barriers to entry are high (time-consuming and arcane rituals; an insider-culture deeply counterintuitive to the secular world).

• Selective incentives have faded (no longer the hub of community life; rarely a career pathway).

• Exit costs have collapsed (nobody notices when you drift away).

The machine still turns, but the gears grind.

North America: Institutional Gridlock

Some vitality remains, especially among immigrant communities, but Olson would spot the warning signs:

• Polarised sub-factions (social-justice Catholics vs. trad-revivalists).

• Legal and financial overhang from abuse scandals.

• Too many conservative veto players, nowhere near enough vision.

A classic case of sclerosis disguised as diversity.

Latin America: Losing the Monopoly

Once the hegemon, the Church here faces competition from Pentecostal and Evangelical groups:

• The religious 'market' has opened up.

• Charisma and spontaneity undercut bureaucratic Catholicism.

• The Church remains dominant, but no longer central.

Africa and Asia: Growth With Frictions

Olson would register the expansion with guarded interest:

• Growth is real, but often subsidy-driven.

• New coalitions are forming, which may themselves ossify.

• Clerical formation often lags behind ordinations.

Vibrant now, but structurally precarious and porous to indigenous religious culture.

The Persistence of Meaning

And what of the volunteers? Olson’s analysis doesn’t require them to be deluded or exploited. It’s enough that the cost of defection outweighs the benefits. Parishioners aren’t stupid. They know the roof has its problems and that fundraising is a nightmare. But they also know that leaving the Church would mean losing a moral vocabulary, a ritual home, a community where people support each other, that still brings food to the sick and lights candles for the dead.

Not Pascal’s wager; social embeddedness.

Conclusion

Olson might conclude that the Catholic Church is the purest form of a rent-free cartel: distributing grace, collecting loyalty, and resisting dissolution through nothing more than habit, myth, and the quiet heroism of volunteers.

Not efficient, not innovative, not even especially coherent. But, for now, enduring: a brilliantly dysfunctional kind of resilience.

Britain and the world: the next ten years through Mancur Olson’s lens

The Olson Lens: A Refresher

Mancur Olson was not interested in moral failings; he was interested in structural ones. In The Rise and Decline of Nations he argues that the longer a country enjoys political stability the more it accumulates “distributional coalitions”: organised minorities – unions, trade associations, professional guilds, land-owning interests, regional caucuses, defense contractors, take your pick – that discover how to convert the state into a machine for providing them with rents.

Each cartel is small enough to internally co-ordinate, focused enough to lobby, and shameless enough to extract privileges that are invisible when spread across the wider population which pays for them. Over time these rent-seekers gum up regulatory arteries, stall productivity growth and leave the nation decrepit.

The remedy, alas, is usually an exogenous shock: war, financial collapse, pandemic, revolution – anything that smashes the established veto network and clears the political undergrowth.

Britain, 2025-2035: A Kingdom of Comfortable Compromises

By Olson’s reckoning Britain is a prime exhibit of advanced sclerosis. Planning laws freeze housing supply, a tax system cossets entrenched property wealth, and whole sectors – finance, utilities, defence, the National Health Service – are stitched up by comfortably ensconced cartels. Productivity has been flat-lining since the 2008 crash; public debt hovers in the high nineties as a share of GDP yet rises every Budget; the current account remains firmly in the red.

Meanwhile the first-past-the-post electoral system amplifies narrow interests: a handful of swing-seat home-owners enjoys more leverage in Westminster than millions of impoverished renters in Greater Manchester or Birmingham.

Assuming no thunderbolt, the next decade looks like this: trend growth around one per cent, debt climbing past the century mark, infrastructure fraying, defence spending climbing only if Washington scolds London hard enough.

The most likely disruptive event is neither an AI miracle nor the planning reforms that politicians keep promising and abandoning, but a currency scare – a run on gilts that forces the Treasury to slash sacred subsidies and confront the housing cartel. Short of such a panic, Britain will muddle through, steadily poorer relative to the more turbulent but nimbler economy across the Atlantic and, for a while longer, in the East.

Continental Europe: Leisurely March into Middle Age

The euro area shares Britain’s addiction to interest-group politics but benefits from a different pathology. Because Brussels is constitutionally incapable of moving quickly, each cartel must fight through 27 committees before a subsidy cheque is cut or a regulation amended. That slows down sclerosis as well as reform.

The €800-billion Next Generation EU fund is an illustrative stalemate: money exists, but disbursement dribbles out only once national ministries tick dozens of “milestones”. Add a sprinkle of German fiscal caution, plus France’s eternal fondness for dirigisme, and you get growth stuck just below one per cent, debt trending toward ninety, and no catastrophe unless the Russian army hits the Polish border or Italian spreads explode.

The United States: Boom, Bust, and the Churn that Saves It

In Olsonian terms America is not healthier than Britain; it is simply younger at heart. Corporate lobbying is vast – a record four-and-a-half-billion dollars in the first quarter of 2025 – and the Trump administration’s return to office has already promised a 20 per cent “universal tariff”.

Yet every time a cartel grows complacent, another state, or a venture-capital fund in a hangar somewhere in Austin, emerges to disrupt it. 

Federalism, immigration, deep capital markets and cultural taste for creative destruction delay sclerosis even as Washington’s balance sheet bloats. Expect violent economic mood-swings: a tariff-induced recession, followed by a stimulus binge, followed by another stand-off over the debt ceiling. Still, by 2035 the US will remain richer and faster-growing than any European peer – proof that chaos can be a competitive advantage if it stops interest groups coalescing into stone.

China: The Ageing Leviathan

China entered the twenty-first century as Olson’s counter-example: rapid growth in the absence of entrenched cartels. That grace period is now ending. State-owned enterprises, provincial cadres and the new techno-national champions form a tight triangle of interests. Local-government financing vehicles creak under mountains of off-balance-sheet debt; the workforce is shrinking; urban youth unemployment refuses to budge below fifteen per cent.

Growth will slip toward three per cent by 2030, then two-something by 2035, respectable by Western standards but a comedown from the old double digits. Without drastic privatisation or open capital markets – both anathema in Zhongnanhai – China’s “Olson clock” is ticking loudly.

Russia: War-Time Stagnation

A command economy run by siloviki is, paradoxically, both cartel and monopoly. War spending props up headline GDP while sanctions slice away technology imports and demographic decay erodes the labour pool. 

Unless the Kremlin suffers a military humiliation that strips the security apparatus of its privileges, the current coalition – defence ministry, state-banks, oil-and-gas barons – will remain unshakeable. Growth may hover around one-and-a-half per cent, but living standards will slide as barter arrangements and ersatz technology replace genuine trade.

Does War Clear the Underbrush?

History offers cruel optimism. The world wars obliterated European cartels and ushered in thirty years of unprecedented expansion. Yet war among nuclear peers in the 2020s could equally obliterate the capacity for growth. Limited wars and arms races, meanwhile, often spawn new distributional coalitions – defence contractors, veterans’ organisations – that cling to their subsidies long after the guns fall silent.

An arms build-up in response to, say, a Baltic flashpoint may stimulate orders at BAE and Rheinmetall but is unlikely to loosen the structural choke-points of planning law in England or regulation in Saxony. In Olson’s probabilistic calculus, war is neither necessary nor sufficient for rejuvenation; it is simply the most common historical occasion on which entrenched interests are broken apart, sometimes along with cities.

The View from 2035

If nothing ruptures the rent-seeking equilibrium, Britain in 2035 will still be a nation of elegant decay – splendid though underfunded museums, dismal productivity, housing as patrimony, public debt politically untouchable.

Continental Europe will be only marginally less sluggish, its sclerosis moderated by the fiscal crutch of common borrowing.

The United States will remain the outlier: hectic, polarised and debt-soaked, yet still refreshingly willing to put old industries to the sword. 

China will settle into a middle-income plateau, its technocrats congratulating themselves on stability while the young grow restive. 

Russia will trundle on, a militarised petro-state too brittle to reform and too repressive to collapse.

In other words: everybody is ageing at once, but some are blessed with a shorter memory, or a larger frontier, or a wilder electorate that smashes cartels before they calcify. Britain’s misfortune is to possess none of those release valves.

Olson would close his notebook with the same dictum he used for Italy a generation ago: “Decline by a thousand comfortable compromises.” 

Unless a panic, a war, or an unexpectedly heroic parliament tears up the cosy gentlemen’s agreements, expect not catastrophe, but the slow soft slide to provinciality – a country growing old with dignity, and very little dynamism.