Conor here: Richard Murphy highlights a problem across most of the “rules-based order” world. What do readers think?
If you look at the upward flow of wealth in recent decades, perhaps politicians are plenty skilled to accomplish their true goal. So would it be necessary to test for character rather than just competency? And what to do about the likely fact that the owners of politicians don’t want anything more than for them to be competent enough to follow orders and aid in their looting?
By Richard Murphy, part-time Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School, director of the Corporate Accountability Network, member of Finance for the Future LLP, and director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Fund the Future.
How do we get competent politicians?
What we all know is that we haven’t got them. What we need is a way to guarantee that we get them.
My idea is that we should require that politicians take an exam before they’re even allowed to stand for Parliament.
After all, you can’t drive a car without a licence.
You can’t do a great many other things in this country without having proved your competence to do so. I required a piece of paper to prove that I was qualified to be a practising accountant. A doctor requires a qualification, a lawyer does, a teacher does, and on and on. But when it comes to politics, we don’t require any proof of competence whatsoever.
The people who are actually setting the rules for this country don’t need to prove they know how to do so. And that is absurd.
Just imagine what the job of a politician is for a moment. Most of the time, they’re looking at law. And yet, they need no training in what the law is.
Most of the time, they’re engaged in activities in the House of Commons, but nobody trains them in what those processes are before they get there.
They arrive and learn on the job.
Most of them have no idea about economics at all, even though the biggest political concern of most people in the UK is about economics. They don’t even know what money is, where it comes from, how the government creates it, how it expends it, and why tax exists to help control the economy as a whole and not to fund government spending.
When it comes to interest rates, which are one of the big concerns of most households in the country, they know they’ve abandoned responsibility for this to the Bank of England and therefore don’t worry themselves about what it is they should know.
And, as for inflation, most of them are deeply ignorant as to its causes and why it invariably passes if, as was the case in the recent bout of inflation, it was created by a source outside the UK.
These people are then deeply unable to appraise the problems that this country faces because they have no training in them.
They do not know how to appraise the problems, work out solutions. and enact them. As a vote of confidence goes, those last statements are pretty staggering. What they show is that we have people who are completely unfit to govern us, sitting in the House of Commons.
And that’s because we have not bothered to provide them with training.
Yes, I know that when they get to the House of Commons, they do get training on how to fill in their expenses form. And they are required to undertake some training on ethics in the House of Commons. Ethics including things like, wear a tie, and don’t say that somebody is lying, even though they obviously are.
But in the core subjects I’ve just referred to, there is no training at all. And my suggestion is that rather than require that people put up a deposit when they wish to stand for Parliament, which they have to at present and which they lose if they do not collect 5 per cent of the votes in a general election, they are instead required to take an exam to prove their competence to be a member of that Parliament.
We might even do the same, although somewhat less rigorously, of those who want to stand for councils, particularly large councils like county councils, because, again, the people who serve on those institutions need to know how they work. And they are, just as are politicians in parliament, responsible for the creation of law and for the expenditure of very large sums of money, which most of them will have little understanding of.
Why couldn’t we do that? Why wouldn’t we want to require that people take a training course?
The training course could be onerous. Why not? It should be. They want to become serious figures in our public life. If it takes a year for them to learn the material, and they have to sit an exam, which they must pass with an adequate mark, to be able to stand as a candidate, is that a problem?
I personally don’t think so. I think that’s the precondition of becoming an MP or a councillor. It would also stop the curse of people being dropped in by political parties late in the day on local constituencies who don’t really want them to be their MPs because those people would not have been prepared for this role. To be a politician in Parliament you need to have done your groundwork and preparation long before you ever get there.
Don’t we just know that from the failure of Labour? Now, it has a vast majority in the House of Commons but very clearly very little competence to govern.
This idea is a simple and straightforward one. It’s incredibly low cost. It would undoubtedly improve the quality of public life in this country. It would reduce the number of mistakes that politicians make and the stupid comments that they pass through the media. And we would all be better off as a result.
So, come on Parliament, change the rules, put this idea into operation, require that new members of Parliament should in the future have to pass an exam to be able to stand for election and that those who are already there should prove their competence through undertaking dedicated training to ensure that they know the same things that new candidates should.
Unless Parliament is willing to do that, it really doesn’t believe in its own importance or the requirement that it be competent to undertake its tasks. And unless it does that, it’s failing us all.
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What a rotten, undemocratic, idea–PMC mentality run amok. Who would make and grade such an exam? Could anybody be so naive as to think that this sort of procedure would not be used to exclude persons unwelcome to the incumbent elites?
No doubt examination of the voters would be next. It brings to mind the Canadian Green Party wanting their candidates vetted by the secret police. Same mentality.
More and more rules, more and more procedures, more and more crap.
Members of Parliament are Members of Parliament, not members of the civil service. Nor is Parliament a profession. There is a lot of procedure to learn, but you hire flunkeys to help you with that stuff–it is not central to the political business of being an MP.
Besides, at least in Canada, most of the House of Commons are already lawyers or other highly educated persons. If they govern against the interests of the majority of the people, it’s because they want to.
There can be no technical solution to a political problem.
Hence the solution is to replace elections by sortition.
Hear, hear!
Sortition plus a move to smaller, more distributed governments, as the larger budgets (think big states like CA and NY, plus the feds) offer too much scope for corruption.
I have mentioned this before, apparently to no effect, but there is a brilliant and sophisticated way of making sortition work and work well. It is called “Demarchy” and its originating text is John Burnheim’s “Is Democracy Possible? The alternative to electoral politics” (Uni California Press, 1985). A baby sketch can be found here:
https://www.newdemocracy.com.au/2015/06/06/demarchy/
East Chicago, Indiana, notoriously corrupt, population peaked under 60k, was half that in 2010. Louisiana, not a large state, once had a campaign for governor (1990 or 91) whose slogan was “vote for the crook.” Oakley, Michigan, population 294, had a police department so crooked it had more deputies (Kid Rock included) than residents. When the village tried to shut it down, the police chief said his department was self funded and it took years to get rid of him.
No pie is too small to be poked by the fingers of corruption.
I think that sortition is spurious. It is of no use to force unwilling persons into positions of responsibility. What will inevitably happen is that the reluctant sortees will simply become the proxies for ardent lobbyists. They’ll be as passive as the current typical backbencher, except the voters will no longer retain even the possibility of throwing them out in an election.
A juror is called upon to decide but one thing, on a single occasion, in a highly structured and rigidly formalized process. Even there, the juror most often lacks nerve to assert their proper authority, and becomes the thrall of the superintending experts.
It is better that political power be held by people grouped in parties, with an announced platform, who gain or lose office by general vote.
A parliamentary government can do socialism. There is no need to despair, and reduce ourselves to drawing lots.
Absolute Bollocks- the idea of training politicians.
Anuerin Bevan – radical,creator and driving force of the NHS – a self taught radical – who rivalled Churchill as a speaker in the H of C.
The epitomy of the Welsh working class.
More likely our future transformational leaders will come from outside the Oxbridge elite.ie Corbyn though of course he failed
the voters will no longer retain even the possibility of throwing them out in an election.
Irrelevant. With sortition, the probability of a person to become a deputee again is negligible.
Apart from that, throwing out an unwanted member of parliament is impossible in all those countries where one votes by electoral circle for a list of candidates. Those lists are drawn up by political parties and, with rare exceptions (e.g. Switzerland), they cannot be amended by voters.
I agree wrt sortition: I honestly think sortition is a Randian idea sneaking in through the back.door. it eliminates responsibility from the politicians entirely. It leaves all entry into and exit from politics to random chance, theoretically out of reach of anyone (in theory). It “works” only if you believe in the hand of god worming in mysterious ways or if the government has been rendered so small and weak that it can be drowned in kitchen sink. It won’t be a government that can command wide respect.
The real challenge, to me, is to restore respect in government–competence commands respect, while openly gaslighting people shrilly subverts respect very fast. Making government completely unworthy of respect (unless you believe in divine mysteries) is no solution, as far as i’m concerned.
So by lot I am chosen to represent the 1st district of Ruritania in Congress. Do I get paid? Enough to move to DC or to hire somebody to raise my kids for two years back here in Ruritania? Does the insurance stay the same?
I would enjoy telling lobbyists to f the f off, I grant you. But how would sortition work?
https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/files/2023/09/B_On-the-Abolition-of-All-Political-Parties-Weil-copy.pdf
A polity built on the competencies of citizens will do education differently, and will put a much more focus on ethics and civics, not let them shrivel and die in the hands of exhausted parents and/or disinterested clergy.
Also, transparency can be insured with proper monitoring and auditing. Plus generous compensation for the time. On the long run is much cheaper this way.
Also, people don’t need to be experts, there will be enough time to study problems as they come. The issue is how to deal with the bureaucracy supporting them. I guess the aids vetting would need to be much more exhaustive and exacting, with ethical behaviour at the forefront. It was done in the past, it can be done now.
Richard Murphy is actually against sortition, participatory and direct democracy, as his blog publications and comments illustrate.
His views on devolution are unclear. He favours Scottish independence, but, at best, is inconsistent about English regional government.
Government is not his area of expertise in any case, so that is probably a good thing.
Sadly, this is just another ill considered post in his transition from serious commentator on tax issues, his area of expertise, to becoming a general naysayer and polemicist.
His own page metric now regularly refers to his daily Youtube numbers, so his audience reach, but he seems to be regularly over-extending himself by posting superficial commentaries or brief videos, on MSM articles he has read in the FT or Guardian, but then not fully researched.
Never mind the quality feed the width.
He offers no meaningful political solutions during these increasingly ‘redtop rantings’, and this takes away from the very sensible tax reforms he has previously promoted, though it is worth noting he is against wealth redistribution, being highly critical of both LVT and wealth taxes, and only willing to consider taxing flows not stocks.
He has a very limited understanding of what constitutes democracy, and no academic background to support his perorations. This particular post on entry qualifications for politicians offers nothing except contradictions.
Any criticism of his views on his blog page will likely get you banned, as it is very much an echo chamber, and he aggressively defends his standpoints without debate, through personal attacks on persons expressing different views, even if these are well argued.
It is very sad to see such a respected commentator with such strong credentials on a particular set of issues, then diminish his previous contributions by over-reach.
The best argument supporting this idea comes from the Anglosphere, who uses trial by jurors selected at random from the peers of the accused… Yes, there is some vetting, which should be applied for a selection via sortition of politicians, but by and large, heavy cases, life and death cases, are entrusted to fellow citizens…
So do that for politicians as well!
Who runs the sortition? Musk?
AI, of course.
Agreed. Murphy’s Rx treats the symtoms, not the disease.
Let me be Ken Martin’s replacement as chair of the Minnesota DFL and I guarantee you would see better candidates. Our parties do not recruit the best talent, their recruitment strategy is too look for easily manipulated folks who do well on camera and are overly deferential to authority.
Yes, I think Richard Murphy begins with some relevant observations but then goes off the rails.
Fair point. So is Murphy recommending we provide them with training? No:
He only wants an exam, not training. Candidates would presumably be required to do that themselves, on their own dime (unless he’s envisaging this as a public service, which seems unlikely since he says it would be ‘incredibly low cost’). And the costs to candidates would be substantial:
Sounds like a great way to exclude anybody that isn’t heavily credentialed and independently wealthy from the democratic process! And does anybody really doubt that the ‘exam’ would be used to screen out anybody who refused to swear fealty to globalization and the ‘rules-based order’, for example?
As others have pointed out, highly credentialed and independently wealthy politicians are a huge part of the problem anyway.
We fall into the trap if we have ‘professional’ politicians.
Democracy is simple: random appointments for a limited period of time. Just like the Jury system.
Maybe a professional expert layer of public servants, to advise the randomly selected.
In Athens, it was only open to those not in debt and who were citizens. Athens was very small!
I do like the random appointments/sortition idea, but I’d add a few things.
First, in order to be part of the sortition pool, a person would need to pass a civics course administered in high school, similar to what immigrants are required to pass to become new citizens today.
Second, upon passing the civics exam, ask potential politicians if they want to serve. Anyone who answers ‘yes’ would be immediately disqualified.
And lastly, implement the ostrakon system that ancient Greece used. Every year, each citizen would be given a piece of broken pottery (an ostrakon) and would write the name of one other citizen on it. Whoever got the most votes was exiled for a decade (which is where we get the word ‘ostracize’). That would provide some incentive to do a good job!
Considering the lengths people will go to get out of jury duty, I think you might find that fewer people are interested in passing that civics exam than you would think.
To the extent that non-sociopaths are willing to put up with the PITA that is public service, it would have to be because they feel they are accomplishing something worthwhile, and I don’t see how anyone does that in a single term of office. Additionally, the ostensible lawmakers would likely be at the absolute mercy of the professional administrative types, who will doubtless be drawn from the ranks of the sociopaths currently vying for electoral power.
I would demand far more civics and ethics education than one course. Ethics and civics should be provided continuously since grade 5 to grade 12, in more and more detail, and complexity to be mixed with history, statistics, ethics, etc.
Hasn’t the World Bank — which promotes conservative economics — already had a large amount of control over the appointment of governments in places like Italy? How’s that worked out, again?
The common thread in Murphy’s writing is more rules.
Further it’s very easy to say they should be “trained”, but how? Currently UK ministers are often trained with a course called “PPE” and in France they are trained by “ENA”. Has that helped? No it has caused groupthink and technocratic consensus.
If he wants ‘better’ parliamentarians then he should stand!!
I would go in a different direction: I think his suggestion doesn’t go anywhere near far enough.
There is a post by ShanghaiPanda on Twitter, admittedly idealized, explaining how a young person (with leadership ambitions) joins the civil service, is given ever-increasing roles of responsibility based on hard work, luck, and constant 360-degree evaluation, eventually getting onto the Standing Committee of the PolitBureau, at which point you can be elected to head the committee.
At least here, you know that whoever rises has a record of competence in government service, an understanding of the system that they are supposed to control, and a support network inside that system.
And yes, politicians are civil servants, government workers; nothing special about being a member of parliament in that regard.
Without this background, the new Member of Parliament invariably ends up being controlled by the entrenched bureaucracy a la Yes Prime Minister.
REVOLUTION!
The structural problems need to be addressed, otherwhise ‘off with their heads would never suffice.
It never suffice, but it always provide temporary relief.
A competent politician will also be competent at abusing his position to make money. Politics will never improve until the bribery of politicians by corporations and billionaires in the name of donations is regulated.
Thank you, Ciroc.
It’s not just donations, but the understanding that one, whether a politician or an official, will be, ahem, looked after after the time in government.
Readers outside the UK, or even within, may not be aware of how often recently US, not so much, if at all, UK, investment firms have been invited to Downing Street to discuss a reboot of the UK economy.
I was stunned at the number of former senior Treasury officials working for these US firms. It explains a lot from when I engaged them on behalf of the City.
Over the week-end, I learnt that a friend, British envoy, will retire from the Foreign Office when the posting finishes mid-year and settle where they serve as envoy. The parents come from there. The sister emigrated a couple of years ago and set up a business. In our view, the UK is fcuked. There’s a fair bit of quiet quitting in our peer group and the children of the peer group. I hope to in the next couple of years.
One hopes former UK officials Anonymous 2, Aurelien / David, Froghole (?) and Harry chime in. I don’t know what it was like in their day, but can say that, in the past two decades or so, especially with Blair’s sofa government, encouragement of civil servants to get outside work experience if they want promotion recruitment of civil servants from the private sector and americanisation of the civil service, including US style job titles, the civil service has become corrupt*. It probably always was, but was masked by the Sir Humphrey types.
*There are serious allegations against two of the four candidates shortlisted to become head of the civil service. In recent years, over a dozen senior military officers have been court martialled and censured for fraud and misuse of property.
Thanks Colonel. In “my day” (late 1990s up to 2009), there were precisely no eyebrows raised that certain senior health economists would be “making the rules on what should be the cut-off for cost-effectiveness of a new pharmaceutical on behalf of NICE” 3 days a week, whilst permitted to spend the other 2 days a week doing the economic evaluations of new treatments under contract to pharmaceutical companies in a private capacity, should they wish.
I remember the hijinks at a UK conference when we tried to work out whether NICE’s “cuf-off point” for funding was really the rumoured £30,000 per Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) gained……and a graph of all the recent decisions showed a rather suspicious huge clustering of new meds coming in at circa £29,999 per QALY gain! Hmmmmm!
That contributed to my decision to move country in 2009.
Thanks. Removing profit making from the political equation looks to be the (only?) solution. How that is going to happen is beyond me.
Only solution.
Unfortunately, I think relentless propaganda from the right has convinced many Americans that politicians should become wealthy. Not Nancy P, because she’s a Dem, but so long as they’re on the other side they deserve and have earned vast riches.
The way to begin remedying that problem is for the Supreme Court to reverse the Buckley v Valeo decision that money equals free speech.
The First Amendment guarantees (rich) people and corporations the right to bribe politicians and candidates for public office because…money = free speech.
Nothing gets remedied until this gets remedied.
Thank you Colonel
“In my day,” (and it wasn’t yesterday) you joined the public service as a vocation, you worked your whole life there until retirement, and when you retired you looked around for something interesting and not too taxing to do for a few years. I can think of people who became bursars of colleges or schools, ran or helped run charities, went to think tanks, NGOs or foundations and similar bodies. A few top people from the Foreign Office might join the Boards of merchant banks, a few military officers might join defence companies to work on exports, that kind of thing. The vast majority, in my experience, simply disappeared into personal and family life.
As you say, this changed with Blair, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it was both a change of organisation and a change of culture. In the old public service, corruption was pretty much unknown because, bluntly, if you were interested in money you would never have joined. In addition, there were few or no opportunities for corruption anyway: you were paid your salary and that was it, and rules on hospitality were very strict. As I’ve always argued, people will follow the incentives you give them, and you can design corruption out of a system: if the temptation is not there, people won’t be tempted. But it’s also cultural: “in my day” there was a strict demarcation between public and private, and the kind of undemonstrative team players content to work in the background who typified the public sector were not especially interested in money, and would not have enjoyed the atmosphere of the private sector anyway. But by the time I left we were already attracting people for whom the public service was just a stepping-stone to a lucrative career elsewhere.
Thank you, Aurelien.
“Readers outside the UK, or even within, may not be aware of how often recently US, not so much, if at all, UK, investment firms have been invited to Downing Street to discuss a reboot of the UK economy.”
a) IIRC NC had an article a few weeks ago regarding US investment funds shopping for German enterprises.
b) Doesn’t your comment just reflect the massive “dry powder” of US PE funds and the current distress / malaise in the European economy that allows takeovers at reasonable valuations from existing owners that (correctly) anticipate continued distress / malaise and seek to cash out? I would expect better opportunities in the UK / Europe than US PE firms passing overleveraged entities amongst themselves.
c) After the Thatcher era, I wonder if there are substantial public assets, other than the NIH and healthcare providers, that can be acquired via sweetheart deals by offering government official lucrative PE “advisory” gigs after they migrate to the private sector.
Thank you.
Yes. That is true to some extent.
There’s also a lack of understanding, preparation and confidence on the part of ministers and far too much reliance on the Blair machine to do their thinking.
In addition, US firms pay well / better, so must be prioritised.
Colonel:
What do you think of Mark Carney?
Thank you, Ann. I’m glad you asked.
I have dealt with him in previous lives.
I think Canada is stuffed if he becomes PM. His allegiance is to his former employer and his wealth tied there, not Canada. That his influenced his official decision making for two decades.
Trump is forcing Carnage / the matinee idol from the colonies to stick up for Canada.
Thank you, Ann.
The sister of Carney’s wife is married to an Oxfordshire aristo, Lord Rotherwick. At a summer festival at the baron’s Cornbury estate, Carney was introduced to neighbours David Cameron and George Osborne. That set the ball rolling for the Bank of England governorship. Others need not apply.
Carney claims credit for saving Canada’s banks in 2008. That’s BS. According to three former Canadian officials, Carney and Ralph Goodale put pressure on OSFI’s Julie Nixon to relax rules on Canadian banks and align with the US. She used her independence to resist and was later appointed to the ECB.
One day in 2013 or 2014, I sent some figures to Andy Haldane’s economics teams at the Bank of England. Carney saw the figures and got one of the team to call me and have them revised downwards. Carney disputed my contention that inflation was a problem in the UK. I was puzzled as Carney was paid twice his predecessor’s salary and given favourable tax treatment even though his office was literally around the corner from mine and he lived in Hampstead. He and his English wife had complained about the cost of living in the UK and got a good deal from the government.
Thank you, Colonel
I was afraid of that. But Pierre Polievre, it seems to me, is worse.
Thank you, Ann. From the little I know from the UK, I reckon so, too.
Murphy seems to be unaware that:
a) most of the policies put forward by both Conservatives and Labour, have been by leadership drawn from Oxbridge
b) the policies put forward are primarily for the benefit of the elites, that pay their bills (for opticians and clothing in the case of Starmer; for speaking tours and consulting jollies in the case of Blair)
c) MPs are just there to rubber stamp their party’s initiatives, especially if they want to get ahead.
What our ”democracy” needs is MPs that actually care about and represent the people.
Murphy seems to be good on tax and economics, and rather naive on our political systems.
This article is schizophrenic. You start out with an admirably rational and intelligent point:
“If you look at the upward flow of wealth in recent decades, perhaps politicians are plenty skilled to accomplish their true goal. So would it be necessary to test for character rather than just competency? And what to do about the likely fact that the owners of politicians don’t want anything more than for them to be competent enough to follow orders and aid in their looting?”
But then you devolve into the exact opposite! A test for formal knowledge that has no bearing on whether the politicians are on our side or not! And of course, the ‘tests’ will soon be gamed to only select for people willing to sell out the public.
The science fiction writer Heinlein may have had a point: perhaps one truly useful test is whether the politician was willing to put his/her life on the line for the sake of the nation. It’s not a perfect test but perhaps better than nothing. There may be some small wisdom in the traditional respect for martial service in those who would hold power over us. At least, it’s better than a law degree.
I am convinced that many of our representatives could not pass a basic geography test…An unmarked map, for example, and correctly identify Afghanistan, Ukraine, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Somalia etc. They now have lobbyists and helpers who tell them what to say and how to vote. A general knowledge test should be required for voting and holding office. The notion that everyone should be able to vote if they can breathe is simply a strategy to allow the parties to cheat in even more ways. Plenty of votes are harvested in nursing homes. Such a test would also help prevent demented individuals from staying in office. Letting everyone vote no matter their mental state is fine if the US would confine its activities to the US in isolation with no large government programs but now that the US wants to be involved in world finance, politics, war and overall domination the demands are much greater.
Why should they have known where Grenada is? Do you know where the Pictairn Islands are (in case Trump decides to invade them)?
Because Grenada is where USA won a war.
But the politicians supposedly should have known before the war, if they had to make any relevant decisions.
Usually “preventon beats cure”. IMHO this is the example that disproves the rule. You can’t prevent people with sociopathic and/or idiotic tendencies from seeking office so maybe introduce punishments that are sufficiently nasty against terrible people that they think twice before killing people by spreadsheet.
I have always been against the death penalty as applied in places like parts of the USA (for “average person” crimes who can quite easily be wrongly convicted). I have to wonder if we need it to be on the table for CEOs, any member of the national Parliament etc. The government should fear the people, not vice versa.
Keep a UK style non-politicised Supreme Court, have a well-resourced expedited process for prosecuting bad politicians etc and a firing squad on hand. Might concentrate minds…..For the benefit of GCHQ, I’m just spitballling here……with an element of /s
Ottoman pashas and Chinese ministers were quite likely to lose their heads for incompetencw in various forms. I think there is a certain wisdom to it. (As, I guess, did Voltaire: hanging an admiral or two now amd then, pour encourage les autres.)
That reminds of something that might be rooted in real (ancient Chinese) history or might be something amusing that Terry Pratchett thought up in one of his great novels. Doctors only being paid when their patients were WELL.
It instantly makes things INCENTIVE-COMPATIBLE: your actions are automatically in line with your utility. It is a holy grail in survey research (you want respondents to be truthful and for lies to impose immense disutility upon them).
Why the past tense with China? For a while, we wondered if something like that had happened with Jack Ma.
I’m a fan of government by To-Do list, where you regularly update the public on how you’ve progressed against your previous To-Do list. If we’re going to vote for politicians, let’s vote for To-Do list and measure a politician against efficiency at working through their list. How honest they are in explaining it when they fail to achieve a checkpoint.
We could also practice direct participatory democracy, no elected politicians at all.
But if we insist on having politicians, we should bind them to ideological platforms such that when they deviate, they’re out. What the heck is happening when so-called Christian parties are anti-immigrant, for example That’s not what Jesus would do.
With Kamala, even though she supposedly represented the “progressive” society, emphasizing human rights, gay rights, etc., she nevertheless supported a war and a genocide, which contradicts that stance. In other words, she only supports human rights for Americans, the opposite for others. I’m suggesting that if you’re bound to a concrete political platform then all of your decisions would or should be logically consistent with that platform. It should somehow be less likely for someone who supports human rights for all to deny the same for particular groups.
But, yes, that brings us back to politicians need logical consistency which brings us back to needing qualifications. Hence why I’m a fan of direct participatory democracy instead.
This solution ranks right up there with the idea that political corruption can be fixed by implementing term limits. I find it a laughable idea. Yes, there are debatable merits to having politicians face term limits, but ending corruption is not one of them. My normal rebuttal on this line of logics is to ask the person if they really think that whoever is buying the politicians really cares whose name is on the check and how many times he has to change that name.
Testing politicians is just another gimmick to allow people to keep ignoring the underlying fundamental problem.
This isn’t one of Murphy’s better ideas. Among other things it’s a recipe for straitjacketing the entire political class (without exception) in a neoliberal mental prison constructed by the neoclassical orthodoxy even worse than the prevailing economic public discourse.
Lots of UK politicians have the full Oxford PPE qualifications, and that doesn’t seem to help.
There are many problems with western electoral systems, but a key one seems to be the rise of the professional political class. The ‘great’ politicians of the past almost all came via another sector – unions, business, the military. They had some notion of at least how some parts of the world works, and a wider general perspective. Even the left wing politicians I know now have mostly been full time activists since their teens, which indicates a strong commitment, but for the most part a complete absence of any knowledge of how real world systems work. And to make things worse, increasing specialisation right across management systems in the public and private sector has downgraded people with a wide, broad level of experience and knowledge.
It’s not a new thing to be recognised as a problem. In the 1920’s, in Ireland they created a second house, the Seanad, precisely to provide a channel for non-politicians to enter government. It was elected from specific interest groups, such as universities or agriculture. But only on very rare occasions has it worked as intended.
There are historical examples of very competent professional politicians, but this was mostly because they were smart enough to use the professional governmental structures to get things done. But in the UK at least, and probably most countries, these have gradually been weakened through the encroachment of neoliberalism (it’s not the only poison at work, but maybe the worst one).
So ultimately the problem is with how political parties work, and the manner in which they all seem to favour internal operators over bringing in people from the outside. One thing that could work would be to provide legal protection for people who leave permanent jobs to run for office – it is surely the fear of losing their pensions and income that prevent a lot of mid-career people going into politics. By a quirk of employment law, Irish teachers are allowed keep their posts indefinitely if they get elected to office – this has inevitably lead to a very large number of teachers in the Irish government. Not necessarily a good thing (although I’d prefer an ex teacher to a professional door knocker), but it shows that some minor legal changes could work in a positive way.
Whilst I don’t disagree with the rest of your post, the most severe problem is the Oxford PPE course and the Cambridge Economics equivalent themselves. I studied the latter and frankly I think both courses should be put into the School of Divinity. The 25% of the Tripos Part 1 of Economics in “British Economic History” in my day was the closest we ever got to proper “evidence based research”. Even then, it was a running battle between proper empiricists like my college Director of Studies who’d “teach us how things really worked, which turned out to be proto-MMT stuff, in the final 5 minutes of a supervision” and the “University lecturers” who’d become brainwashed by the Black-Scholes brigade and micro-foundations idiots.
The former Labour Chancellor (Ed Balls) and leader of the Lib Dems were just one year apart at my secondary school, both doing these types of uni courses. I was 5 or 6 years behind them. Neither has any idea why they’re utterly wrong. (Interviewing your WIFE and claiming objectivity on national TV? WTF?)
FWIW I think certain former teachers at my school are not very proud of the “PPE/Econ” brigade…..they were a real bunch of clever people who believed in empirical stuff and not the fancy targets our school met.
Thanks Terry, I was being a little sarcastic about the PPE thing (I’ve met a few of them and they’ve rarely impressed). But it does show that having theoretical knowledge of how the world works is very different from a real world appreciation.
Just to add to my above point, I can’t recall his name, but the one occasion in Ireland that the Seanad was used to bring in a ‘professional’ to a ministerial post was an academic foreign policy expert who was made the Minister for Foreign Affairs by the then Prime Minister, Garret Fitzgerald, as at the time there were very delicate negotiations with Thatcher over Northern Ireland. Although he came in to the job highly regarded, he failed quite badly. It’s one thing to know the theory of international affairs, it’s quite another thing to run a department and do direct negotiations.
Hehe yeah I should have been more on the ball spotting the sarcasm :)
I became utterly disillusioned about PPE/Economics around the time I started “paying more attention to actual history” and stopped following fancy models….. that kinda led me here.
I don’t know if this is truth or speculation but I remember that the Anglo Irish agreement supposedly got by Thatcher because she was more rattled by the Brighton bomb than she let on and the Brits underplayed a seemingly strong hand, given some “mis-hits” by the Fine Gael people you mention.
There are still lots of papers under wraps about that period, but there is no doubt that the Brighton Bomb concentrated a few minds, shall we say. Thatcher was notoriously bad at the sort of gland handling needed in international affairs – an old hand in the Irish civil service told me once that in EU meetings Thatcher was convinced that Fitzgerald and Mitterand were plotting against Britain because they always engaged in lively conversations in French (which she could not understand). In reality, they were always talking about their shared passion for obscure 20th century catholic French novelists.
The Irish government did play a weak hand very well – there was little real reason for London to concede so much apart from a desire to neutralise the IRA politically. Although the likely key reason was US pressure – the Irish government at the time was very good at utilising soft power in Washington.
This seems like an accounting professor’s version of the proposal that we should be ruled by philosopher-kings.
Actually, I like the idea of philosopher-kings. Unfortunately, in my lifetime those that demonstrated the greatest potential all seemed to be struck by a state of diffidence…this made them even more attractive to me, but it’s not a quality that bodes for success in the narcissistic, dog-eat political world. Eugene McCarthy a case in point.
I’m afraid that this post has it back to front. Unless you have politicians the caliber of Cincinnatus, trying to be better politicians is not going to succeed. We have to work with humans and not angels. They key here is not better politicians but better political systems. Many of us live under what is called a representative democracy. But we know through bitter experience that our elected politicians do not represent us but represent our very own oligarchs. It was on full display at Trump’s swearing-in where the front row had a whole bunch of billionaires sitting and smiling. But until you get the system right, it will not matter which people get elected or how they are elected.
Writing with U.S. experience. Representatives are just that; they are not expected or required to be experts or technocrats; that is what the large legislative legal bureaus are for. It’s not direct democracy, but for gigantic, populous territories, its meant to provide a semblance of democracy, or at least a democratic facade. Ideally, they would bring the views of their constituents to the larger fora and, you know, represent them. Of course, it doesn’t work that way in reality. They get in office and are overawed with what they do not know, and quickly delegate most of their job to legislative aides, or to lobbyists.
I have worked with candidates at the municipal and state level, and in almost every case they couldn’t pass high school civics. Most like the look of themselves in suits, and enjoy the firm handshakes and serious looks they get from other (mostly) men who consider themselves important. For a while, I thought that choosing to run for office should disqualify you from it.
Instead of this literacy test proposed, what we need is publicly funded elections. As it stands here, you need free time (money) to run a campaign, and money to win it. This precludes almost all working class people from even running for office, before they would have to face down corruption and compromise, as intended. If every candidate got the same funding from the state to run, including a living stipend for those who’d have to take time off from work, this would significantly level the playing field. Then, the whole ego-stroking process has at least a kernel of a whisper of a possibility to benefit poor and working people.
Would public funding prevent the groups who advocate, via side advertising or providing free labor and media advice, from helping candidates?
Then there is the media exposure/coverage that favored candidates can get for free because they are good copy.
Public funding might simply establish a base that is swamped by other important but not cash contributions from outside groups.
The problem is that there is too much money that can be harvested.
But the same happens in poor countries, as I remember news accounts of the Duvaliers in Haiti and the money they pulled out.
I don’t see a fix except when things get very bad such as another Great Depression, in which the financial industry is fixed, not rescued.
There are many obstacles to meaningful reform at every level. A high level one would be the fifth amendment, which makes it so the state cannot confiscate property without compensation, good in principle, except when you need to redistribute wealth. Here’s a local example: in Milwaukee, we need rent control. A recent (2012) budgetary bungle by the county meant we needed a bailout from the state, which as a condition, part of the package of legislation which bailed us out, made a law against municipalities enacting rent control. So we’d have to lobby the state, where the majority is against it. Publicly funded elections would aid in one part of that struggle, getting working people elected, who then might support a change. Of the issues you bring up, some could be addressed by a means test, which would exclude those who already have the means from the living stipend. Winning the support of organizations is still a core part of electoral politics.
The other day, NC posted a Law & Political Economy article which called into question the meaning of a policy focus by change-minded people in an environment in which democratic institutions are corrupted. I don’t find this a new, Trump 2 feature; I’ve run into this nearly my whole life. I’m increasingly of the mind that, in order to help others, we have to basically ignore large institutions. Still, to throw an idea out there hurts no one, and if anyone takes up that fight, I support it.
Lapham’s Quarterly has a full issue on Democracy.
Among articles are these onse:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/hiding-plain-sight
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/our-chief-danger
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” – H. L. Mencken
I guess “competent politicians” would be especially effective at distributing democracy to their constituents.
I tend to believe in the Madisonian idea on this front:
“But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks–no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.”
One important point that Madison raises is the idea of “virtue and intelligence in community,” which has been too badly neglected in this “Liberal” age. From the purely individualist perspective, the “Liberal” mindset, communities are a hindrance. But Arrow and others have shown that purely individualist collective decsionmaking, even if all the voters are mathematically rational as individuals, lead to, eh, funny issues. While this is not quite the points that these arguments have made, I tned to think that, even if the process might seem irrational at times, strong communities are fundamentally intelligent beyond the individuals that make them up, capable of monitoring their agents and articulating and defending their collective interests than any individual can. Individuals, however competent as singletons they might be, can be played by their supposed agents if only because there are many of them and are easily replaceable from the perspective of their alleged representatives. Encouraging the formation of and strengthening meaningful “communities,” whatever form they might ultimately take, is the most important step in keeping politicians accountable (they don’t really need to be “competent” beyond not being totally foolish–and even allegedly “competent” people can be plenty foolish.)
“Competency” is only part of the problem. So many well-meaning and idealistic politicians end up becoming tempted by the very system that they set out to change after they take office and gradually end up turning into “swamp-creatures” themselves. After all, look what happened when Nancy Pelosi first started her political career decades ago versus what she is now. AOC first showed promise when she first took office, now she has become another spineless Democratic Party careerist.
The problem is that the forces that are behind the scenes in most governments start twisting the outlooks of even the most well-meaning and noble candidates after they take office. This is not just a “government” problem, this is a human problem, as most people simply cannot resist the urge to take advantage of all of the personal opportunities that power brings and will almost invariably use it for personal gain whether they consciously realize it or not.
The blunt hard truth is there is no such thing as a “good” or “competent” politician. The very nature of position whether it is at a local, state, or national level leads to corruption, incompetence, self-dealing, and corporatism.
It doesn’t exist and will never exist and the only question is how much is too much or what the public is willing to accept?
I ran for office believing in the greater good and service to my community and it was by FAR the worst experience of my whole life and an eye opener as to how government / politics work.
So all discussions of how we get “competent” politicians is futile in the end …..
I am conflicted. I know from research that the rate of sociopathy/psychopathy and narcissism has been observed to be high (on existing personality scales) among people like CEOs and aspiring politicians. Which should make one think “if they want power, deny them it”.
Then again, there are people who want to “cut through the crap” and change things. I’d like to think that the latter group will win out. However, I gave my first “big” speech in my career in Whitehall to the board of NICE in 2009. I was utterly deflated by it all and I was SO glad that I already had my emigration sorted and flight booked from London to Sydney within 4 weeks.
Now we see stories that “Gen Z reject democracy and want a strong leader”. I don’t endorse this view but I certainly understand it. When there is such basic hypocrisy like idolising Adam Smith whilst refusing to acknowledge that he loathed rentiers and huge aspects of what we see in modern capitalism (try reading his Theory of Moral Sentiments to see how his thoughts were changing). If we can’t even be consistent ourselves then it becomes difficult to slag off Gen Z. PS I’m Gen X and hate you all ;-)
I’m Gen X and politically I am a mixed bag. Social liberal policies with Fiscal Conservative monetary policies. Closer to what a Libertarian should be without getting into the current state of Libertarian bastardized politics.
I grew up as an art school kid who loved business but have maintained a punk rock ethos every step of the way. And speaking purely on US politics, I realized early on that our Government is broken and has been broken far longer than anyone wants to admit. It broke slightly before I was born and has slid ever since and passed the tipping point somewhere around the new century. There has not been a “good” Presidential administration in my lifetime. I don’t know if there has been a good politician and I have been a pretty good student of history. I don’t believe there is anything to save and we need to burn it all down and then we can begin to figure out what comes next.
They should also, all, be tested for psychopathy and sociopathy. There are over represented numbers of both in Govt. Do we need people with the power of life and death, over millions who also happen to be sociopathic psychos?
Yep, I think we posted simultaneously. I once had a really good chat with a psychiatrist concerning the two “narcissistic scales” in the main PDQ personality questionnaire.
The “internal one” bothers the docs less because it’s more about “being seen to be good” – teachers, academics and actors are often the professions that score above the reference range.
This by itself isn’t worrying. It is when the patient ALSO is above the range in the OTHER narcissistic scale (which is called “external” though this is a tad misleading) which measures “how much you are willing to stomp on others to show your worth”. When you also score highly on that, some mental health professionals might be wondering about sociopathy since you not only value yourself highly but you think you are entitled to use this to crush others. I’m non-clinical so of course treat me as a random web person. However, I’ve had both personal experience and been a co-supervisor (alongside a mental health clinician) of a PhD student working in mental health so I hope I’ve picked up enough to at least prompt the average NC reader to go read up some more.
“They should also, all, be tested for psychopathy and sociopathy. There are over represented numbers of both in Govt. ” Over representation raises the worry about democratic aspects. What about idiots who are not sociopaths, a large part of the population, but are they represented at all?
I guess yes, but they rely on sociopath advisors.
From a wider perspective, can the voting public yearn for politicians that actually make sense? The adds that swamped the internet before the last elections suggested something different… and if they reflected the popular wishes, the picture of the society is rather sad.
Fix the money problem first. Disallow all sources of funds except a U.S. government salary – at mimimum wage for a forty hour week. End all other emoluments. Campaigns to be run with a set, LOW, amount of funding from the taxpayers and limited to an eight week period before the election. Then let’s see who runs.
Some very interesting reactions here, indeed. Even though Murphy correctly points out the politicians’ total lack of training for the job, many commenters seem to think it is unnecessary, or worse still an affront to the idea of democracy.
Some seem to think even that the ‘training’ would be misused by the ‘elite’ and also that those trained would use it to corrupt the system more! Party candidate selection processes already discriminate heavily, and those corrupt politicians already have plenty of ways of exercising their corrupt practices!
In reality, it is a profession, of sorts, just like medicine, law and others – that carries a lot of responsibility and requires a high degree of skill and knowledge to be effective. It is like being a member of the board of directors at an extremely large public company, accountable (supposedly) to the shareholders (voters). They are entrusted with a huge amount of responsibility.
But politics has always brought out the worst in groups and individuals, those in it have successfully avoided proper organisation, transparency and accountability, using systems and practices that are very ineffective, inefficient, and antiquated.
Murphy’s suggestion should still be taken seriously, even though it is the type of ‘reform’ that most, if not all, politicians would instantly reject for selfish personal reasons.
An exam will not work. You cannot reduce political skill to formal parameters that can be measured. We will only make things worse. Give managers and administrators even more of a stranglehold. Political competence is not techne. Political skill is metis.The problem with our is politicians is not that they are stupid. Why do we think that the answer to every problem is being smarter?
“The people who are actually setting the rules for this country don’t need to prove they know how to do so. And that is absurd.”
How do you prove something like that?
Method one: check the ability to interpret Analects of Confucius in the form of seven part essay. Changed by the British to
Check the ability to interpret Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius etc. Modernize to include Montesquieu, Locke, Hobbes…
but those were qualifications for Civil Service. For politicians it was different:
I grew so rich that I was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament.
I always voted at my party’s call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!
(First Lord of Admiralty. an important post those days)
It is a bit more complicated, but you should get the gist.
Dehumanize corporations.