I missed a couple of announcements on personal finance issues in the last week or so. The Guardian covered them.
The first is that the Financial Conduct Authority has urged all car leasing companies to grant payment holiday, contract extensions and interest charge deferments, without penalties applying.
The second is that credit card and other personal loan suppliers are being expected to do the same.
I welcome these. The trouble is I called for them on 18 March - a month before they happened.
I am not bragging here. But I am making a point. If it was glaringly obvious to me by 18 March that such moves were essential why was it that it took a further month for action to happen? Just like this country was far too late in dealing with the medical crisis that we face so too has it been disastrously slow in dealing with the financial aspects as well.
When all of this is over there will need to be reflection, and learning. The biggest questions of all will revolve around three issues.
First, why are we so bad in this country at identifying problems?
Second, why when we identify a problem are we so good at procrastination with regard to it?
And third, why when we act are we so incapable of doing so at appropriate scale?
All three questions suggest there is a fundamental inability in the UK to accurately observe, diagnose, decide, and act appropriately.
There must be a reason why we are so bad at this.
Thoughts?
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All centralized systems suffer from this. All research shows the UK to be far, far too centralised. When you add in a political system with one of the worst correlations between votes cast and representation, there is another risk multiplier. When you add in a poorly educated electorate, the combined consequences are inevitable. Finally, there are no formal checks to the use of power, so “power is delightful, and absolute power is absolutely delightful”.
I’m guessing the education system bears a lot of the blame for this. Kids are made to pass exams. That’s it. There seems no learning relating to practical matters. Kids don’t understand how to screw or unscrew a screw. They can’t cook. They aren’t taught to use maths to work out how much their shopping will cost despite passing an algebra test. Kids I work with don’t understand fractions. I think school trains for obedience and creates an aversion to making mistakes. It ruins kids’ natural ability for creative thinking and imagination. Parents are complicit in focusing on exam results. For many skills, passing an exam is a useless method for assessing learning.
The people in charge are scared of making mistakes, have no imagination and don’t care about producing beneficial outcomes for everyone else, just their own achievements within their institution?
Much I agree with there
But what really annoys me is that they aren’t even taught how to write essays – which I have seen time and again at university
Basic writing skills are the building block of most advancement and yet young people don’t have them
I saw graphs only yesterday highlighting that the UK and US (surprise, surprise) have the highest levels of insufficient literacy and numeracy amongst developed countries, an indictment of how we choose to approach education.
Ive also long thought that there is a link between control, financialisation, short termism, risk taking and systems thinking. Its a potentially long piece but to be brief:
With the prevailing, controlling mindset, one is looking for certainty and the avoidance of risk which inclines one to think short term – epitomised by todays financialised businesses. So called risk management usually means trying to pass the risk to someone else, often part of outsourcing rationale (even though when your outsource supplier goes bust and your business comes to a halt, your customers and bankers wont think much of it as an excuse!).
Its not just short-term in time terms, its reductionist thinking as opposed to systems thinking, deluding oneself into believing that you can ignore factors and externalities. Typified by so many economic ‘models’. Serious decisions always involve uncertainty and a lack of perfect information so judgement and experience come into play – heuristics. Hardly surprising that a cabinet made up of people who seem to have had very little and/or narrow experience of life, are incapable of making good difficult decisions.
Back to education and upbringing, parents and authorities who demand so much of their teachers and at the same time are not prepared to allow children to be exposed to any form of risk. Syllabuses narrowing and external activities cut back. At the risk of sounding like Python’s 4 Yorkshiremen, its also about being allowed to play out on their own, engaging in ‘dangerous’ activities, cycling to school. Are the risks to children greater these days? I dont believe thats what the data tells us
Its a complex topic with no simple answer. What I am sure about is that decisions in the public sector are almost always far more complex with many more variables, than those in the the private sector, even in the largest of companies. Ive worked with both at senior levels. With honourable exceptions, business people moving into the public sector struggle with the far great number of ambiguities and uncertainties involved.
Your last point is very important
There is incomprehension in business as to what public sector thinking requires
But we now only reach people for private sector thinking and ape it all the time
That is the issue
Joe
I saw an article where Finland teaches students how to deal with ‘fake news’ i.e. to recognise misinformation and media manipulation. It is not just taught to young people.
https://apolitical.co/en/solution_article/how-finland-shuts-down-fake-news
I would put this into our curricular along with emotional intelligence. In my old age I invigilate GCSE exams and a lot of what I see in maths papers is unlikely ever to be used again.
I used to mark the history evidence paper. It is a vital part of eduction to be able to evaluate sources and in that sense, was an advance on O level. But Richard is right, one needs to be able to write an essay. And know some information. Fourteen years ago when I left teaching, there were some who said all the facts can be looked up. We don’t need to teach them. But unless one has a framework , it is difficult to understand or know what is relevant or not. We see a lot of people on social media who have read something and advocate it as ‘gospel’, because they have never encountered other points of view.
Agreed Ian
And on the maths too
I think the Finnish have some interesting ideas about education.
Sorry Richard
Totally unrelated to your article but just had a thought this morning.
On the Newsnight last night, it showed that there is spare capacity in the NHS for treating covid 19 patients. The Nightingale hospitals are not being used yet.
Yet deaths in Care Homes are as high as in hospitals. (If not higher)
How come the serious Care Home covid 19 cases aren’t being sent to hospital?
I am told that basically the rout5e fr0om care home to hospital is pretty much blocked in most cases
And when it is opened it is often too late
”How come the serious Care Home covid 19 cases aren’t being sent to hospital?”
The answer is simply that there has been a conscious decision – at least in the region where I work in a hospital – to inhibit transfers from residential and nursing homes to hospital, in order to protect the hospitals. Any such transfer could cause a lot of pain, presenting a huge infection risk to staff and other patients, for not much gain. In other words, hospital treatment of these cases would be unlikely to help the sick care home resident in many cases, but just contribute to overwhelming the hospitals. This policy is likely to be one of the reasons my part of the country is doing relatively well with hospital-based deaths.
I know that is happening
I also know that in care homes people are dying much worse deaths than they need to e.g. the Shipman Laws are not being relaxed so that pain relief for those dying can be given at short notice when there is a stock on hand
That is a Priti Patel decision
So the elderly in care homes are suffering unnecessarily as a result – and the seat rate data is being distorted
I figured as much.
So Care Homes are being left to let covid 19 run it’s course!
With no attempt to get them in hospitals, the death toll is going to be very high.
Maybe that is why there has been no attempt to accurately count deaths in Care Homes.
As Boris said, they are going to have to “take it on the chin”.
God help those poor people who are going to have to try and look after them.
We are running a programme of herd immunity – and I suspect hundreds of thousands will die in the end as a result
This has only just begun
I fear that you are right Richard. It would provide an explanation for the government’s behaviour throughout..
I’m not sure which is worst – the callousness of their approach or their persistent dishonesty.
I came to the same conclusion as you Richard.
But why has the MSM not picked up on it?
I can understand prioritising when hospitals are overwhelmed, but the story coming out is that they are not. This is represented as a success in the MSM. Yet they also know that Care Home deaths are as high as in hospitals. Why have they not joined up the dots?
And why have Care Home managers not been voicing their frustrations louder? They are on the front line.
Some care home managers are shouting
Getting heard is another issue
The elderly do not matter, apparently
See the blog just posted for my explanation of this
The old adage “prevention is better than cure” does not apply to most political and business decisions.
If you expend resources preventing bad things from happening and bad things do not happen, you wasted resources on something that wasn’t going to happen. If, on the other hand, you don’t bother with prevention but wait for bad things to happen and then muddle through somehow then you can (a) blame the bad thing on someone else and (b) take credit for having cured it.
Almost every aspect of the UK government’s response to the current plague illustrates this vividly.
This was not how it was
When my father was a quite senior engineer in the nationalised electricity industry he used to say they had the resources for all eventualities – and they could always be absolutely on topof routine maintenance in the rest of times
I worked for the electricity supply industry in research and when I started – 1970 – the ethos was that we were employed to make the company an informed buyer. In general, we knew more about the science behind things that the guys trying to do business with us. By the time I left – 1998 – the most regular advice I got was – don’t do a Rolls Royce job if a Ford will do. All the guys like me were retired. The research dept closed down. We’re now buying a reactor at way above the price we should have paid. We make decisions all right, they’re just the wrong ones.
That’s about it
My father went in 89
on procrastination I can only refer to a supposed quote from Churchill when discussing whether the USA would enter WW2,
he said: “you can rely on the Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted every other possible alternative’
I don’t think the British are bad at making wise decisions individually, but collectively we do seem very good at electing the most incompetent to the highest office,
we’ve long been aware of the shortcomings of British politics, back in the early part of the 20th century Earnest Benn said:
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
I think our problems lie with only a tiny portion of the population, unfortunately they mostly seem to be politicians!
Bloody annoying, if I might so say, that you may well be right 🙂
The truth is that, while there are certainly some excellent and gifted senior people, our leading echelons are heavily burdened with third-raters ill-equipped to tackling complexity and so habituated to avoiding and deferring difficult decisions.
These people are where they are because we have over-valued simplistic thinking and soundbite communications.
As For Churchill’s quote it was made out of desperation rather than reality. The americans did not do the right thing till they were bombed into at pearl harbour. First this is not a anti american rant.
During the war the americans charged the British top prices for their weapons and they would not accept sterling as payment. They wanted gold and lots of it. So the brits transferred $400-300bn (2020) in gold and securities – operation fish was the name for that transfer. However that was not all, the brits offered the americans the atom bomb research (see the maud committee), radar, the jet engine and a caribbean Island. The british public were forced by law to hand over their securities, so the govt could sell them to the americans.
While this was going on america was getting rich and pontificating how the brits should sort out europe but not bothering to take the same responsibility as a great imperial power on the world stage. It seemed fighting nazism was not on their check list of freeing the people of the Europe. They did use that rechiotic to free up the empire from british hands so the colonies could be set free for american debt and products.
The amount of gold taken off the brits was so severe it was denting the war effort and when the americans came into the war, they released quickly they had bled the brits to near exhaustion of its wealth and its ability to fight the war. So the lend lease was brought in and by the war’s end the americans had given $34bn of war goods which was written off. Also the brits were in such a dire straits after the war they were the highest recipient of the marshall aide and got a few billion dollars more. I am not sure if the loan of 1946 was part of that or not The point is america did not give money away freely as a kind gesture, it was certainly not true at the start of the war it was pure self interest . The americans released if they did not help out the shattered nations of europe especially the british, starvation would take place, the war had a big impact on this ,but so did american plundering of british wealth. The americans did mitigate this in a small way, just enough to keep the old powers of europe functioning so they can trade but not enough to challenge the US as the dominant power. Was the americans wrong to ripe the brits off that way, in great power politics no but in the war against nazism yes.
However when the americans entered the war they could of just concentrated on japan and forget europe. Hitler forced their hand but it would not have mattered, as the american elite wanted to fight germany eventually but at their own choosing. They would of come in much later in the war if they had a choice much like in WW1. Still they funded the british and the soviets to fight as well them getting stuck in a big way and this is appreciated no matter what they did at the start.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Marshall-Plan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/maud-committee-report
https://www.bankofcanadamuseum.ca/2018/05/operation-fish/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/06/05/gold-world-war-ii-and-operation-fish/#169a19fc255b
https://medium.com/@interestingshit/how-the-largest-transfer-of-wealth-in-history-took-place-operation-fish-a0d1fc39f9b1
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/the-real-story-of-how-america-became-an-economic-superpower/384034/
I like the analysis by Michael Hudson best. If a major political party allows itself to be sponsored by a sector of the community (finance sector) that’s interested in indebting as many of a country’s citizens as possible in order to make money then of course there’s going to be a campaign to persuade the citizens there’s no such thing as public money creation and consequently amongst other things a tight budget for a public education service!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/08/dirk-bezemer-and-michael-hudson-finance-is-not-the-economy.html
I think the main reason for the UK being bad at decision making is that those in power either don’t believe they have the capability to create money or like to deceive us that money is limited and to hide where money comes from.
That’s why the ‘we won’t be able to save everyone’ narrative is getting trotted out. (Looking after everyone is surely government’s very purpose.) And then we’ll have to borrow it all. Saddling the next generation with debt &c
So this means that even if you identify a problem you cannot decide what to do about it – probably call in some consultants, because the state is powerless and we have to borrow money
Whereas Continental states whilst probably also not understanding money, do still believe in the power of the state – you only have to glance at their police and at their bureaucracies.
Good points
I think the problem is not too much centralisation but the opposite!
The old nationalised utilities could reach decisions and implement these throughout the organisation eg the power industry. Apparently now issues have arisen with low demand and problems with feeding “green power” into the grid. We have numerous generators and distribution (owned by China?) all owned separately so getting common consent and policies implemented must be laborious and time consuming!
As far as Coronavirus is concerned the response has been made less centralised in the the Health & Social Care Act has, again, fragmented the whole health system with, it seems, the Heath Secretary only nominally in charge of the whole system!
The privatisation of the elderly care system has also shown that that sector, much run by hedge funds, is good at sucking money out of the system but the fragmented nature of the “industry” means it finds it difficult to organise and work together to protect the lives of our old people!
I can’t understand why with a Dept of Health & Social Care why Social Care is not an integrated part of the NHS rather than the responsibility passed to local authorities to oversee!
Sadly, this epidemic has exposed the weakness of outsourcing and privatised functions leading to no-one in overall control and a massive opportunity for buck passing.
Who, even in Government, over the pass few months has really been in control?
Good question
Lack of humility.
The belief of those in a position of authority that they know the answer.
People wanting to be in power for the wrong reason. (For the prestige not for the advancement of the common good)
The debating chamber of the House of Commons not being conducive to good decision making, just shallow arguments and cliche sound bites.
The media on the whole being childish. (I heard First Minister Sturgeon give her speech – I want to treat people as adults, and what was the first question from the BBC? along the lines of “Does that mean you think the British government isn’t?” – bringing us back to the juvenile level.)
There are so many reasons. I think at some point the country must have dumbed down.
Thanks
I don’t think we are bad at making decisions. Trouble is, we are good at making bad decisions and bad at making good decisions.
I would guess that if we could exclude:
– the lust for personal power and gain
– making decisions in the best interests of political dogma
– an aversion to learning from past mistakes
And refocus on what is a better choice for the planet and the common good, all would be well. Can I ever see that happening, of course not.
Well, I hope you are wrong for once Bob with that last comment
I am not sure you are
I just hope so
I would suggest as the result of giving priority to the wrong objectives: so politicians (hence government) prioritise winning future elections; and business prioritises finance.
(A thought I had: Why are Boeings falling out of the sky? Because Boeing are now a profit maker, not a plane maker, so they don’t worry about things like that)
Something I read somewhere was that in antiquity (and a bit more recently) the function of a king was – in the ultimate – to defend his kingdom, his people, from the apocalyptic horsemen (famine, pestilence, war, death) – or die in the attempt – or (same result) make the ultimate sacrifice.
You are right de Boeing
Indeed, all corporations
Once they had to state their purpose
Since 2006 making profit gas been enough in the U.K.
It is a false claim: as the evidence shows, profit without purpose is not possible in the end. You forget what it is that is of value
And, right on cue, in today’s Observer/Guardian, in a piece by Jay Rayner, restaurant critic, at https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/apr/26/chain-reaction-the-ups-and-downs-of-britains-high-street-stalwarts “Which points up the real issue with restaurant chains: the tension between making money and making food.”
And there have comments in the sports pages as well, over football’s conflict between pounds and goals as a means of achieving, and measure, of success.
Wrong people in positions of power.
True
So how do we get the right ones?
A long list.
1. Abolish house of Lords and peerages.
2. Fund state education at the same level as private.
3. PR similar to German system with combination of local MPs and national list.
4. Apply quotas for privately educated in public sector professions including MPs.
5. Make expert advisory committees, e. g. SAGE and on climate, energy policy etc. are chosen by their profession rather than politicians. Some of this happens but the SAGE example suggests it could be improved on.
6. More openness in government. Only matters of national security need to be closed.
I am sure there are better ones?
I would be happy with all those
I look forward to the day you stand up in the House of Commons, Richard, to give your first budget speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer. (Well, you have written it already!)
It’s pretty unlikely….
I think it was Chris Hedges that said, that it’s not just a case of getting better or the right people in place and then everything will be Ok. The problems are deeply systemic, therefore the “right” people will be rejected very early in the processes in running for positions of authority.
Paul Mason laughs when he is confronted with people asking him to stand as an independent etc, and repeats the sentiments of what Chris Hedges states.
No rocking the boat in the UK will be tolerated. No playing inside the labyrinth.
People in positions of wrong power.
I don’t think this answers the three questions but may address the context.
In the last three decades or so, the media has become very partisan and IMHO the level of debate has fallen. Eighty percent of the newspapers are “one party states” and the Overton window narrows the scope of debate. Our politics , especially those of the Right, have followed the American model of win at -almost-any price, including that of truth. Having unleashed the dogs of a rottweiller press, they are intimidated by their own creation. The , possibly imagined, audience becomes the inhibiting factor and sensible solutions are less important than the presentation. If they get if wrong, there are many things to distract popular attention and it can pushed into the past. Maybe why after the 2008 crisis we did little to reform the system to prevent it happening again.
The other institutions of a pluralist society, unions, the law, universities, local politicians, intellectuals and so on are marginalised and less able to speak to the public interest.
The interests of a small section of society , the financial sector, have more dominance than was the case a few decades ago. It is a sector which can’t or doesn’t care to speak for the common interest. When problems occur they have few solutions and can’t draw on a range of views. They dare not share the power and we have panicky measures.
That’s my offering for what it’s worth. It is a very good question and I hope we find some answers.
One reason is the way our media, with few exceptions, have connived with the UK Government to hide the worst of their behaviour. The BBC’s habit of publicising what the print media says just makes this much worse. The general public are therefore persuaded that we must cut the government some slack – even if they get it wrong, we must allow them to play catch-up. This is evident on almost every BBC programme I hear, such as Any Questions on Radio 4 (I had to stop listening when it was Lisa Nandy’s turn). Chancellor Sunak is praised for his non-ideological (huh!) approach, his speed of response, and for listening to feedback. That the feedback demonstrates his failures is to be hushed up – and we might be allowed to raise it when all this is over.
Off-topic, but related: On the medical front, it might be a bit more appropriate to give them some slack since this is a new virus, but they seem to keep blundering along and pretending that WHO advice is only for others. Hence, I’m please to see that the Scottish Government is happy to admit they they are not infallible. One of the most vocal critics of the UK Government approach to tackling the virus is Professor Devi Sridhar of the University of Edinburgh. The fact that she was appointed to the Scottish Government’s advisory group on Covid-19 hardly gets a mention in the media, which is very odd given she was appointed at least 23 days ago. It seems highly likely that her appointment has been instrumental in the Scottish Government’s recent emphasis on test, track and isolate as part of the strategy.
Professor Sridhar finds it odd, to say the least, that Matt Hancock and others are promoting test, track and trace – what’s the difference between track and trace, and where did isolate disappear to?
Did you see her on Channel 4 last night?
She was forthright…
Yes, she is both forthright and right (correct).
“Professor Sridhar finds it odd, to say the least, that Matt Hancock and others are promoting test, track and trace — what’s the difference between track and trace, and where did isolate disappear to?”
Another good,well researched post by Richard North,link below.
Basically test and trace was always the best method of treating this kind of virus,just the gov had the wrong plan for the wrong disease,we planed for a flu virus not a SARS one,the timeline for this goes back to 2005 and successive governments. WHO always advocated a test and trace system,it has took us two months to realise this should be the correct exit strategy,isolation is a last resort,a sign of failure.
We also still have not learnt that allowing hopsitals to treat COVI19 sufferers is a mistake ,even the Chinese realised in February and that’s why they set up islolation hospitals,so hopsitals remained free of the disease. We need the sufferers out of our hopsitals and into the mostly so far underused Nightinggale hospitals and so away from those most vulnerable( the old and sick). Who knows how many othesr are dying for lack of hospital care since the hospitals are now too full of COVID19 patients. They are simply infecting the nhs staff and other patients. It’s like watching a slow motion car crash.
http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87588#disqus_thread
You have to transfer staff in that case
We didn’t
Hospitals are actually quite empty right now – well under normal rates
I think that might be because the hospitals have stopped most other treatments,our hospitals have become just coronovirus hospitals.
Correct
So people are now dying of other things
You could not make this up
Promoting an idea and government implementing in 5 weeks! This must be some kind of record!
The crisis was apparent only in January, even to us with a gift of Prophecy, Has anyone else seen governments act so fast?
The key questions are:-
Are the decisions seeking to maximise on short term, medium term or long term?
Are the decisions seeking to maximise for an elite, a nation, mankind, or the global ecosystem?
Which ever two you choose from each list give a totally different policy.
(Other decision dimensions are available)
It started with the Blessed Margaret.
Firstly, she started the corruption of culture in Whitehall by asking of virtually everybody “Is he ( invariably in those days) one of us?”,and if they were, they generally got on.
Secondly, she decided that “loony left” Labour councils had to be stymied, so began the process completed by New Labour’s Local Government Act of 2002, of the centralisation of almost all decision-making in Whitehall, the removal of all serious strategic financial powers from local government, and the removal of authority and standing from councillors not in the ruling cabinets. The writings of the late Peter Latham are excellent in describing this.
Add to this the loss of strategic capacity in the field of infrastructure- for example, the ludicrous situation over railway electrification – and one can see where we are, and why.
And a hard Brexit, which is the aim of the current regime, will set in concrete our route to banana republic-with-a-monarchy status.
Ideology run riot !
Interesting question with no short answer. Without going into the long history of appalling English management, US-style business schools have a lot to answer for – as elucidated in this article from the Guardian in 2018 : ‘Why we should bulldoze the business school’ – https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/27/bulldoze-the-business-school.
Although they exist in all major economies, they have especially flourished here where our cultural history (Imperialism, class differentials, private education, etc.) has been conducive to producing a certain type of top-down, arrogant management ethos which differs (negatively) to that which I have personally experienced in other European countries, especially Scandinavian. You could call it ‘management exceptionalism’. Many Graduates then go on to work for the likes of McKinsey, Accenture, et al. where this exclusive culture is reinforced and perpetuated.
JOHN D
Fascinating link on business schools. Michael Hudson, an economist I respect, said business schools were created as economics courses didn’t prepare people for the real world. My first encounter with formal economics was foundation course in social studies (there were other subjects there as well ) for the OU. I remember Samuelson and graphs. That’s about all.
I did a lot more reading after the financial crisis.
In 2018 I went to a course “Neo-liberalism and the cult of managerialism” . Had a range of speakers including Stedman -Jones who wrote a history of neo-Liberalism. Most of the audience were counsellors or psychotherapists .
My interest came from my clients who worked in local govt. and many of whom had unrealistic targets imposed on them and when they couldn’t cope were sent to counselling. To be fair, I think the ‘senders’ felt they were doing their best in a bad situation. An incautious remark on my part got reported back and they didn’t want me working for them any more.
One part of the conference remains with me from a speaker who had been a professor of sociology and was a psychotherapist. He said he was seeing clients that his training and experience had not prepared him for. They were presenting with the problems I had seen. His conclusion was ‘shame was a way of disciplining an educated workforce’.
It is as if mangerialism is a sort of ideology to which people had to profess as their creed. Almost like Communism in the Soviet Union.
The bottom line is that it doesn’t deal with reality and human nature. People are forced into a mould -perhaps like the Greek myth of Procrustes.
That seems to be the thread which runs through all of these. Enforcing things which don’t accord with reality. That must be doomed to fail. Many , most can see it but for some reason we feel impelled to go along with it. I saw in the school education system too.
I hope for a Ceaucescu style moment -if you recall the dictator was making one of his speeches when the crowd decided they could be silent no longer.
Rant over.
Rant away
I don’t know so I’ll just have to make something up.
🙂
We’re not bad at it. You’re a perfect example.
It’s just that we live in a junta state.
Absolutely Clickid . Don’t hear about it around O-G do we?
The hard brexit nexus are trying to keep their powder dry, hiding their heads in their ‘fake virus’ holes. Bozo the Clown and the Fartage, one trick ponies. Cummings and his stormtroopers in government subverting the truth and science and coordinating the hard brexit by hook and crook.
Their army of trolls at work here there and everywhere.
Even the Telegraph can’t ignore it any longer.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/22/germany-got-right-fight-against-coronavirus/
The truth is we have to organise at grassroots and draw a line and put our bodies on the line.
No further! Get out!
Today on Marr, the BBC managed to find a German who was happy to say that there’s not much difference between the UK and Germany, and any difference is probably down to luck.
Consults notes: he is about to be the German ambassador to the UK.
That was very bizarre indeed
1) Why should I have to think if somebody instructs me what to do & does the thinking for me….(It’s not my concern)?
Narrow-mindedness of the population.
2 & 3) Plutocractic kakistocracy opinion mentioned again…too many cooks spoil the broth, running around like headless chickens.
Once those in a position to make decisions realise that they too are limited in their capacity to think BROADLY & have ascended into position by virtue of a combination of being a lily-livered sycophant along with a good dose of cronyism. Panic sets in.
All the above stifles effective action.
Also, it doesn’t assist modern societal cohesion when too many people can think for themselves, because then they become less dependent on a service based economy.
Lastly, we need more Xenophon’s. People who can actually think beyond their own nose & are chosen from amongst & by their equals, because they can think for the benefit of the majority they lead.
Leadership was never designed to enable the devious & manipulative to take advantage of those you are sworn to serve as part of your civic duty….the PEOPLE.
It is an honour to be bestowed upon those who have displayed by their right thought & actions, devotedness to the populace.
Before I forget…
Our capacity to actually think for ourselves has been limited by technology.
What I mean by that is, a great majority of people have become reliant on technology to think for them.
(On a personal note, I love technology & advancement; it is a necessary ‘trade-off’ to delegate some thinking to our technology.
We ALL don’t need to be able to understand the intracicies of how technology works, but just how to think enough to operate it.)
We must ensure that rather than just being able to think sufficiently to acquire an answer or solution that someone else has devised from a repository; we can actually work out for ourselves how someone devised that & understand it.
As Edward De Bono said years ago we need to teach people HOW to think in more ways than one.
Blind adherence to logic only gets humanity so far.
In this respect de Bono was right
I read him a long time ago
Would any recent government have been elected by an informed, educated electorate? I rather doubt it, and I imagine they’re well aware of that too, hence we have conditioning instead of education. The lockdown, ironically, might do some good as it exposes home-schooled youngsters to learning potentially outside the curriculum and might give them a taste for more. Perhaps some original thinkers might come from these strange days.
According to the Independent 8% of adults in the UK believe the coronavirus is being spread by 5G technology. That’s how lousy the education system is and was in the UK!
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-5g-conspiracy-theories-man-made-uk-poll-bleach-a9484066.html
That is really quite scary
Lot’s of really good reflection here.
I think one of the engines of poor decision making is what I see as an increasing lack of accountability in public life – in other words they do it because they think they can get away with it, and largely do. Look at Blair and Iraq and I am not sure Messrs Osbourne, Cameron and Lansley will be held liable for the piss poor performance concerning PPE, testing etc.
Today I had to suffer (on the Tory mouthpiece that is Radio 4) a favourable profile of Matt Hancock (Tigger) with a glowing reference from the Economic Damian George Osbourne talking up the man he has literally stitched up because of his austerity measures.
My God – those Tories know how to stick together – I’ll give ’em that. Labour – are you fucking watching?
I also think your contributors touched on a point too about emotions driving politics in this country and I think that you could add that it drives Government public policy decisions too.
Another thing I see is the ‘if it feels good do it’ approach – it is important do be seen doing things, not be to be seen thinking about it too much. I see this in the public sector a lot and it usually leads to waste – borrowed from the private sector as your other contributors point out. Thinking is seen as a form of weakness.
We don’t seem to value thinking anymore. As Stafford Beer recommended – ‘Think before Think’.
I think that those here who have pointed out that it is related to a lack of understanding of the sovereign power of Government auto-finance amongst politicians are onto something. If you are ignorant of this power, then your mindset is one of just going from one crisis to another – reacting all of the time, and not thinking.
P.S. MBA = May Be Avoided.
The subject of MBAs and the like having been raised, I recalled https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckinsey-destroyed-middle-class/605878/ .
And something a fellow student came up with many years ago “How to be a Management Consultant. Step 1 Buy a Management Consultant Shirt and Tie…” (it got no better). A telling comment on those you are employing to advise you what decisions to make.
And another quote, from Jean-Claude Juncker who, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, wistfully declared, “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it”. Going back to politicians priorities…
I did my PhD on power politics in the nuclear industry, and used Steven Lukes’ three dimensions of power to analyse how and why the U.K. government switched from indigenous reactor design after 25 years to importing a US design. The special US-U.K. atomic relationship running from 1955 played its part: but so did non- decisions and undecisions, non actions with consequences. I suspect inertia and aloud incumbency play their part too
I
I think many, if not all, of these regulator type bodies are too much in bed with the people they regulate so can never really be neutral on these matters.
Now that businesses up and down the country are being denied “business continuity” insurance claims it’ll be interesting too see which side they fall on – probably the insurers. T&C’s are, in my experience, the only thing that matters even if they run to one hundred pages and need a lawyer to read.
Sorry – MBA = Maybe Best Avoided.
I go back to this quote from Peter Drucker:
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things”.
So it’s all down to Boris really at the moment but it applies to any political party at any time. Effective decisions are related to the quality of leadership.
Have our Tories been doing the right things? BREXIT? Immigration policy? Austerity? Covid-19?
It also strikes me that in this over centralised country (as mentioned above), the politicos try to become managers as well as leaders which makes things worst.
Good management is based a lot on experience and domain knowledge which cannot be taught by MBA courses. Being a minister is like a revolving door really – with ministers not able to get a real grip of the brief – a minister might have a background in say finance but will not understand social housing policy. Result? Oh dear.
So I think that it is our political system that is to blame for poor decision making ultimately and its over-centralisation which negates local knowledge (or even that knowledge owned by central civil service offices) gathered over the years by a weakened Local Government role, where good management should reside really – at the coal face.
Then, if you add in an unhealthy dose of ideology or whatever hostilities the politicians bring with them to the roles, you have a perfect storm of incompetence and ignorance which seems to destroy us as an effective nation.
We are bad at the decision making here in the UK I suspect for the following reasons:
1. We have hollowed out the corporate memory, but getting rid of those who knew how to do their jobs.
2. As others have said those who want power but really shouldn’t have it (think the likes of Cummings)
3. Because in this “modern world” bad decisions by all forms of government, National, County or District means savings do not require that efficiencies be recorded net of up-front investment costs i.e. if you spend money to save money, you count the money saved but not the money spent in the process. By this logic, scrapping posts and hiring in consultants and temporary staff counts as a total saving and this is something all levels of Govt will continue to do.
4. The bad decisions they make might even be deliberate as there is an estimated £190bn pounds worth of fraud in the UK and who wants to stop that when its paying for the holidays, the cars etc – (See page 6) http://www.crowe.ie/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/The-Financial-Cost-of-Fraud-2019.pdf
5 And finally because those below the power are all too often sheep and will not rock the boat.
Thanks
Can’t help thinking that aeons of FPTP voting, and power shifting from one side to t’other has a lot to do with it. Short termism. Power.
I look to Scandinavia, enviously.
A major factor in your question is that an overwhelming majority of decision makers come from the same place educationally and culturally. Consequently they all believe and think the same way.
Public school, Oxbridge and a professional qualification. With that environment you get a constantly repeated outcome.
Personally, I’d like to see troubleshooting becoming a much larger part of our official decision-making. I’ve witnessed too many it’ll-be-all-right-on-the-night decisions taken, without any depth of thought put into what could go wrong–or what changes might not actually be intended.
I like to think of myself as a troubleshooter and problem solver. When I think about a new idea and point out what might go wrong with it, I’m often accused of ‘negativity.’
I don’t agree. Negativity is saying, ‘Oh, no, that will never work, end of. I hate change, end of.’
Positive troubleshooting is saying, ‘That’s a good idea, but what if ‘this’ happens?’ And then figuring out a reasonable way to tackle that situation, if it arises–before the new idea gets adopted.
Yeah, it takes more time to set things in motion than just acting instantly on the first idea that pops up, but comprehensive troubleshooting can certainly pay off. Troubleshooting usually takes a lot less time than dealing with unfortunate consequences that could have been forseen–had anybody bothered to look.
And yes, sooner or later, you have to run risks. But recognising what those risks might be and planning to deal with them isn’t negativity. It’s just common sense, leading to good decision-making. In my opinion, anyway.
A few factors, not in any particular order:
1. British exceptionalism: we are different, superior, we have nothing to learn from other countries. This is a post-imperial hangover, and it is strongest amongst nostalgists for the empire like Johnson.
2. The Tory ruling elite’s public school education teaches them how to lie with total conviction and confidence, and the British public is easily conned by both. ‘Debating’, they learn, is about winning, not finding the truth. From the same public school source comes the ‘strategic survival personality’, as Nick Duffell calls it (see his book Wounded Leaders): having been abandoned by their parents, they have to deny their own vulnerability in order to avoid bullying and have to learn to exploit others’ vulnerability and trust no-one.
3. Rentier interests dominate the government: they confuse asset inflation with economic development. They have low regard for manufacturing; in their world, things (e.g. PPE) don’t have to be produced, they can just be bought and sold in the seamless global market. In this respect they are supported by mainstream economics which treats buying and selling, rather than production as the fundamental economic activity.
Much to agree with
Slightly unrelated, but possibly an example of the type of wrong decisions routinely made by our government: the world is quickly running out of oil storage space, meaning production will have to be physically shut down for lack of anywhere to put it. This is a costly and apparently difficult process, which oil producing companies and nations will want to avoid. Given that oil producers enjoy priority access to government, their priorities, naturally become government priorities. Its a bit like the way humans large optical nerve connections to the brain determine the priority visual input receive in the brain. The act of blinking to protect the eye is reflex. Likewise, for government, action to protect the oil industry is taken as reflex. In view of the oil storage crisis emerging, I fully expect a lifting of travel restrictions within the next two weeks in order to inject demand for oil back into world markets, and so protect oil production worldwide.
That would be a disaster….
The suggestion by government that some of the industries that will see an imminment easing of lockdown restrictions include the car manufacturing sector would appear to support your suspicions…
There is another facet to the management consultant debate, having been one myself – but after l had done real jobs for 20 years!
Too often it’s senior management in organisations in all sectors who bring in MCs (Masters of Ceremonies…?!) to tell them what decisions to take. If they are not capable of taking those decisions, should they be in the job? They can then say ‘not our fault, McKinseys told us…’. They also insult the intelligence of their staff and management who are alienated by not being consulted – and will then take a perverse pleasure in seeing the MC’s recommendations fail.
I’d also observe that very often middle and quite senior management just don’t have the skills you’d expect and so MCs are brought in to do things they ought to be able to do themselves. That is a reflection of the failure to invest in development and training of staff and management- there is data out there to back up the assertion. Those of us who cut our teeth in 60/70/80s would have benefitted from, graduate, apprentice and other training programmes, not just when we first joined but as we developed and needed new skills.
Dare I say it, even McKinsey themselves have reported on the lack of skills of British management. Ironic really
Agreed
Public decision making is hardly helped when journalists like Andrew Rawnsley can make the following comment completely oblivious to the fact that government policy is preventing elderly residents of care homes being taken to hospital ICU’s for coronavirus treatment.
“Fears that the NHS would be overwhelmed by coronavirus victims have not, so far, been realised.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/26/will-boris-johnsons-brush-with-death-prompt-him-to-talk-more-honestly-andrew-rawnsley
Quite
It’s the old question. There have been some fascinating replies here. For me, and many others of my age, the shorthand term is the Baker Reforms: when critical thinking was intentionally pushed out of education. Probably Thatcher’s most pernicious legacy.
This is an excellent thread — apologies for being somewhat late in contributing:
I think there has been a total lack of training and practice in critical thinking in our junior and secondary education systems. This has resulted in people aged 16 and upwards being unable to critically evaluate what they have been told in further education, their newspapers and what they hear from their peer group or managers.
In the 1970s and 80s I worked for three multinational corporations and was surrounded by managers with no managerial training as such, who were wedded to the corporate ideals of creating shareholder value rather than listening to consumers or to employees.
Lack of critical thinking ability will always lead to defective personal, corporate and political vision and poor outcomes in any decision-making process.
Problem-solving falls into two categories —
Firstly there are the practical problems. These always require drilling down into all the details in order to provide the process whereby the outcome will be good for all involved – given enough time, resources and knowledge.
Secondly there are the psychological problems involved in executing any project. The personal problems and worldview of any participant may get in the way of a good outcome and will require tremendous expertise by managers to overcome may prove be impossible to resolve.
In the political arena decision-makers may choose not to use the relevant expertise to get all the detail, and even if they do, they may be hampered by their personal political viewpoint, particularly if they have not honed their critical thinking skills or choose to ignore or distort the facts that surround them or the populous large.
From my experience, the mantras for successful management are:
– The success is in the detail — get the homework done and the rest should fall into place
– No surprises — get everyone committed to the outcome and communicating well with each other.
– It’s all about delivery — that means being clear what the objectives are and who will be totally satisfied with the end result.
These three mantras are excellent for practical problems with very well defined objectives. They are probably almost impossible to reconcile when attempting to run projects within the socio-political and economic arena in which neo-liberal capitalism operates.
f we started to teach primary school children the rudiments of critical thinking today and expanded it into a a core subject in secondary education, then we might – in about two generations time – achieve some fundamental changes in the way we are managed by business managers and politicians.
Let’s start by encouraging changes in two areas — demand critical thinking in schools from infants through to 16 — demand the change in our electoral system from FPTP to PR.
I like the recommendations
Part of the reason for being poor at decision making is:
Civil Service at senior levels no longer has the expertise I can say this with some confidence with respect to HMRC re Tax and Customs affairs and the Institute of Government has also reported on lack of skills across Whitehall. But I think its made worse by the following:
a) Senior Civil Servants no longer stay in post long enough to develop deep understanding before they move on or are reorganised
b) Constant tendency to hire externally for some senior roles on a 3 year basis with many leaving within the 3 years and with all the expertise that has been built in that individual is of course lost.
c) Senior Civil Servants moving to the Private Sector.
d) Ministers tend to be surrounded by advisors its actually quite difficult to get to see the Minister which means they are shielded from too much of what is going on. Historically getting to see Brown or Ed Balls was very difficult and testing.
e) Civil Servants when they do get to see Ministers do not want to deliver difficult messages because of the repercussions. There is a tendency to dress things up for consumption not lying but perhaps not being as frank, detailed and as candid perhaps as the situation demands. Constantly summarising for those above you who lack experience and detailed understanding of the business issues/risks can be poor tool especially when those doing the summarising lack detailed understanding & insight themselves.
f) Outsourcing and Sub-contracting has sometimes made the situation much worse as the Civil Servants in charge no longer understands the detail its all been lost along with the staff to the Private Sector and the activity is just something to be procured.
These things have contributed to ensuring decision making in government is not as good as it should be and need addressing.
Funnily enough, pretty much all of that applies to the private sector as well. I’ve seen both close up at senior levels.
The point has also been made about institutional learning or memory – little understood and not valued at all. Least of all in the report and accounts. Show me an organisation with high levels of management and staff turnover and I’ll guarantee nobody knows how it really works and how it relates to its customers, service users and suppliers. Join a new organisation and it takes you 6-9 months before you know how it really works and during that time your productivity is greatly reduced. The true cost of high staff turnover is greatly underestimated.
As anecdotal example, I had an extended run in with BT/Openreach over 9 months when my connection was dreadful. Having worked in tech sector I have some idea how a good service organisation works. Eventually I found the email of the BT CEO and wrote a polite note to him pointing out the cost to his organisation, the causes, and offered to put a team together to resolve it. Basically the engineers turning up had no record of what had happened before. I’d investigated and the CEO Of Openreach was exPC World and before that marketing HSBC – neither organisation known for their customer service!
People drift into these well paid jobs, spend 2-3 years, then move on to another, without apparently having any appreciation of the business or how to run the organisation. Tells you something about the bizarre world of headhunters as well.
On which subject, cue another rant…
Bizarrely Openreach have installed fibre cable in my road and many around it
But they won’t turn it on….
It is available elsewhere
I understand that the Prime Minister of New Zealand has deservedly come in for a fair bit of praise for how she has led during the outbreak.
But the latest is that she is offering to take a 20% pay cut during the outbreak.
As much as I admire that, wouldn’t it be better if she just printed the money and helped out her population that way? As Drucker said, it’s about doing the right thing.
The right thing is to keep the economy oiled with money so that people can maintain their incomes and also be in a stronger position as they come out of it. Taking money out of the economy as well as lockdown is not going to help and could make matters worse.
It is going to be interesting seeing what happens next.
She could have done both of course
In financial terms her (and her ministers’) pay cut is immaterial – a drop in the proverbial ocean.
Its importance is political: it says ‘I am in this with you’. In terms of hard cash. Which speaks loudly.
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere,
diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedy.” — Groucho Marx
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men.” — Lord Acton
“Politicians like to panic; it’s their substitute for achievement.” – Yes Prime Minister
“Government is very important; I’ve just never met anyone who’s
doing it.” — Yes Minister
Are all reasonable quotes as to why we are bad at making decisions.
Is it just the UK?
(Though we may be particularly good at being bad at it!)
Societies are becoming more and more complex. Technology is running ahead at such a pace. Each “field” is becoming more specialised. How can anyone understand the whole picture in order to make informed decisions?
The interrelational webs are so vast and ever expanding. Eventually the whole thing must become un-governable?
As hunter gatherers, we would have known each other by our first names and everyone would have know how the “society” worked.
There’s much misconception that what drives the Scottish Independence movement is dislike/hatred of the English. There’s a lot of history to get over and a competitive rivalry for sure, but what lies behind it is a long-standing perception that governance of the UK is often chaotic (for many of the reasons given in this thread) and rarely takes Scotland’s needs into account. Over time this has led to a widely-held view that we couldn’t make a bigger hash of running our country than has been done on our behalf (and frequently without consultation or consent). I’d add a caveat to that: it would be hard to make a bigger hash of things provided we have our own sovereign currency.
Impossible, I’d say….
“As hunter gatherers, we would have known each other by our first names and everyone would have know how the “society” worked”
I think this hits at the heart of it – good decisions are made when people work together and are open about what they are doing. It isn’t a public sector vs private sector thing.
In every organisation, there are people who have remarkable insight, perhaps in only a very small area. The reason why some management consultants can be good at their roles, is that they get amongst the coal shovellers, technicians, cleaners and the person whose job nobody else knows what they do..)
So much of what we have – NHS, railways, youth crime, obesity, medicalising old age, business – can be vastly improved by casting much wider for the talent and insight.
The great sadness is that, in many areas, we know the answers that can work – but in every organisation, we have people like the Donald who are in charge.
In short, it is the lack of transparency / openness that blocks good decisions.
As an aside, it’s notable that this blog post has attracted a huge number of responses. Must have touched a nerve.
Perhaps it’s the combination of particularly inept politicians (on both sides) and massive challenges that have exposed the vulnerabilities of a creakingly outdated set of political structures and processes. Optimistically I think most of the components of what’s needed are out there. They’d include:
– a modernised parliament building and voting processes
– decentralisation and much stronger (properly funded) local government
– citizen engagement and councils (where tech could play a positive role)
– tougher regulation of media (both tech and traditional)
– far greater transparency (again tech can play a positive role)
and of course some form of proportional voting.
So which political party or grouping might be brave enough to push this kind of agenda?
If only
I know you have an answer Robin…
I wish I could be so confident!!
There is a military aphorism that of the four possible courses open to the enemy, he will choose the sixth.
Too many of those now responsible for decision making don’t how understand how messy the world is, and can only think of the first two, and assume that everyone follows one or the other.
Add to that:
‘No plan survives contact with the enemy’ – Clausewitz
‘ Planning is essential, but plans are useless’ – Eisenhower
What they are both saying, is that detailed planning is critical to prepare as many options as possible. Then when the unexpected does turn up, at least you’ll have the basics and place and can concentrate on what’s different.
However in today’s world, too many senior managers and financially driven managers in particular, don’t want to hear about contingency planning and any deviation from plan is regarded as failure. Even on complex multi year projects where uncertainty and change is inevitable. Invariably it’s the project manager who gets the rap. Been there, got the T shirt
COVID is a case in point. They did the planning – the CYGNUS exercise that looked at the impact of a potential pandemic and told them what to do. So they ignored it. And 40,000+ deaths are a consequence
There’s another military expression – PPPPPP
(Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance)
We’re spoiled for choice of diagnoses!
At the risk of adding one, I’d like to highlight the reference to judgment. The problem with organisations everywhere is that they prefer process to judgment. Judgment is awkward, it argues from experience, it refuses to go quietly, it is confident of its ends. Process is mild, anybody can join in, the means is everything and nobody can fail at it. Judgment is expensive, process is cheap. Trying asking (or even finding) a lawyer to tell you what you should do, rather than what your options are, and you will soon see the difference!
There is a well known phenomenon in medicine of “charting the patient to death”: the churning horde of nurses and doctors, junior and senior, pass by the bed and diligently note the vital signs according to process; nobody takes the leap of judgment to draw the conclusions and take the action.