A new practice of government
We have new intellectual material to work with (2/7)
This is the second in a little series of posts exploring the question: What has changed since 1997 that bears on the way we should govern?
This was prompted by the slightly discomfiting realisation that the year 2050 is now closer than the day of Labour’s 1997 general election victory.
In the first post I focused on a change to the way our society and economy work that has played out since 1997, thanks to the rise of a digital practice of production.
I suggested that this requires us to organise the state differently and to bring new methods and mentalities to the way we govern, but also to rethink the way we regulate markets. This goes further than what people tend to mean by ‘digital transformation’.
In the next two posts, I’ll take a different angle, thinking less about changes in the world and more about changes in how we understand the world. What fresh intellectual material does Labour have to work with that wasn’t readily available in 1997?
Intellectual dynamism
This might seem like an odd claim to make when politics feels so stale and repetitive, but I think the period since 1997 has been a time of unusual intellectual dynamism.
What I mean is that, sure, day-to-day politics feels a bit groundhoggy, at least on the centre-left and centre-right. But if you dive down deeper into the currents of academic discourse, the last 25 years have seen some big shifts of intellectual momentum.
One consequence of this paradox — the way centrist politics seems to have gotten stuck, even as the flow of ideas has quickened — is that a lot of new intellectual material has built up unused.
What I mean is that there is now a big backlog of insights or approaches that are well-established in academia, or in expert-practitioner communities, but that haven’t yet translated into the premises by which we govern.
This is one reason I think it’s not crazy to think we might be building up to a political or cultural tipping point. Because there’s a lot of energy pent up in the system — energy that could be unleashed if a political party or movement could only unstick things by translating this new material into a new way of governing.
And this means, in turn, that a lot of the work to be done at this point in the cycle is work of translation.
Translation partly in the sense that someone needs to take this new material and make it usable by the system — i.e. we need to take all these fresh theories and insights and turn them into a set of governing institutions, tools, processes, and capabilities.
But also translation in the sense that we need to take this new material and make it intuitive or sensible to people. i.e. we need to take what are often quite novel or unintuitive theories and turn them into a new vernacular and a new spirit of government. A way of governing that feels of the moment.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. What is the new material?
It would be silly to try to summarise every intellectual development since 1997 so I’ll just give two examples, both of which feel to me like meaningful intellectual advances since 1997 that have the potential to transform the way we govern.
Behaviour
The first intellectual revolution I have in mind is the rise of behavioural science, which in the years since 1997 has upended how we conceive of human decision-making.
I know it might feel disappointing to say we have lots of fresh material to work with and then talk about behavioural science. After all, the book that brought the field to mainstream attention, Nudge, was published 15 years ago, and even then it was mainly an act of curation, bringing together insights that had built up over decades.
Yet although the behavioural revolution is now many years old, I think its translation into government is only just beginning.
I say this for two different reasons.
First, I don’t think we’ve come close yet to following through the full implications of 2010-vintage behavioural science — the idea that governments can nudge people to healthy behaviours.
It’s true that in the last 15 years governments around the world have made some important behaviourally-informed policy changes. Thanks in part to the Behavioural Insights Team — full disclosure: I work there now! — the list of successful behavioural interventions now runs a long way beyond classics like pension auto-enrolment.
These policy changes have had a big impact. But I think it’s fair to say that the insights of behavioural science still aren’t treated as the default premise for public policy. i.e. in the core areas of policy — from tax policy to social security to active labour market policy — the state still runs on rationalist plumbing.
Beyond this, I think we’re still in the earliest days of the wider revolution of which behavioural science is a part, namely the push for empiricism and continual learning in the way we do public policy and law-making.
The observation made by David Halpern back in the early days of BIT — that most public policy, and most public spending, is never evaluated and isn’t based on robust evidence — remains true today (despite good progress, thanks to the initiatives like the What Works movement).
Beyond simply evaluating policies and using good evidence, there’s even further to go until public policies are iterated using live data in the way that is now completely standard in any technologically capable organisation.
Plus of course we can now do much better than 2010 vintage behavioural science. And 2023 behavioural science brings a set of insights for policy that are richer and more sophisticated than those classic fly-on-the-urinal examples of nudging.
One interesting strand of research, for example, concerns the power of stories in policy-making and of narrative-based policy interventions. Another example is a line of research looking at the socio-cultural determinants of behaviour, in which behavioural science becomes almost a branch of political economy, helping us to understand — and perhaps even design — institutions. A more technical example is research into external validity, long the neglected sibling of internal validity, which promises to help policy-makers get better at transferring evidence from one context to another.
Finally, beyond even this, other disciplines with lots of energy behind them are now being used to enrich behavioural science. Data science, for example, makes it possible to design personalised and adaptive nudges, tailored to a person and circumstance. And design methods can be used to prototype and iterate policy interventions, and to design more intuitive and behaviorally-savvy interfaces between the state and the citizen.
So the point is: there’s still so much work to be done.
And my sense is that this work is much more powerful if it’s seen not as a series of standalone experiments, but as part of a modernisation agenda — upgrading the way we do policy-making.
Yet for all its importance, I’ve always thought that this first implication of behavioural science — using behavioural insights to make policies more dextrous and more human — is the less profound of the field’s two main implications for policy-making.
The second implication being that if the state can nudge people’s behaviour, then so can profit-making companies, and that maybe when companies nudge our behaviour they’ll do so for more self-interested reasons.
I sometimes think of this latter insight as the evil twin to nudge, long hidden away in the attic. And one way to think about the last 5–10 years is that the evil twin broke loose and started wreaking havoc. And if I was to stretch the metaphor past breaking point, which I’m going to do (sorry), I’d say the evil twin slipped out of the attic by uploading themselves to the internet.
Sludge
In the last few years, the digital economy has seemed to be on a mission to prove that we’re right to worry about nefarious applications of behavioural science.
For one thing, we’ve seen some of the world’s biggest technology companies land on a business model that is based on behaviour-shaping. A model that is summed up in that now cliched phrase: ‘if the service is free, then you’re the product’. The more accurate version being that the product is a set of capabilities and tools — intimate personal data, algorithmic optimisation, digital environments — that are sold or made available to other firms so that they can shape your behaviour.
Meanwhile, beyond big tech, we’ve seen the proliferation of a class of techniques for what is kindly called ‘behaviour optimisation’ or ‘customer conversion’. Now often referred to as deceptive patterns, these techniques — countdown clocks, scarcity warnings, pre-selected defaults, sticky subscriptions — have come to define the experience of being a consumer online, and are causing a headache for regulators.
I’ve written about behaviour manipulation at excessive length before (see here, here, and here) so I won’t labour the point. The short version is that these increasingly sophisticated techniques for behaviour-shaping don’t just raise concerns about fairness. They also make markets less effective by complicating keystone ideas like choice and revealed preferences.
At worst — as we see already in some markets, where technological and organisational capabilities are sufficiently advanced and certain other conditions are right — they flip the power of competition into its own evil twin. Firms end up competing less over who can make the best product and more over who can make the stickiest subscription or the most subtly deceptive checkout experience.
So it’s no surprise that, 13 years on from Nudge, we now have a sequel, Sludge, focused on these problematic applications of behavioural science.
And hence my feeling that, even 15 years into the work of translating these insights into policy-making, the behavioural revolution still could — in fact should — transform the way we approach policy-making.
I’ll stop there for now because (a) this is long enough already and (b) my next example of a post-1997 intellectual development is a tricky little ball of wool to unknot. It concerns the question of how we govern in and through complex systems. So that’s what I’ll cover in the next post.
To get the next post in the series, you can follow me on Medium or support my writing on Substack. In the meantime, if you’re interested in these themes, try my recent posts: How to govern human or How to solve complex problems. Or my book, End State.
