Tag Archives: review

The narrow path from votes of despair

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I read Sam Freedman’s Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It with a mixture of nods of recognition and gasps of disbelief. It’s all too apparent  that – as the subtitle puts it – nothing works in aspects of life in the UK dependent in some way on the successful design and implementation of government policy (which is most aspects tbh). Those of us who have engaged with the policy world in some way will have our own experiences; the relevant chapters of the book reflect my own very accurately. What makes this an incredibly sobering book (although well-written, with humour) is the accumulation of evidence across all eight chapters, covering everything from parliament and the excessive growth of executive power, the House of Lords, political parties and the character of MPs, the judiciary, the criminal justice system, the civil service, local government, non-departmental public bodies and the media. A relentless accumulation of depressing dysfunction.

I’m very much on board with the book‘s main recommended fix, substantial devolution of power from central to sub-national governments – this is a journey I’ve been advocating since first getting involved with Greater Manchester’s case for greater powers from 2008 on. But this is not a simple matter. Many people point to the hollowing out of capacity in local government – true to some extent but one can see how to tackle that. Harder are the questions of accountability that raises. But – as the book argues – it’s hard to see any other plausible change that would shift the dial on interconnected institutional reforms. And equally hard to see how nothing can change: “Public trust in politicians and politics – never high – has crashed through the floor.” The governance travails of the Labour Government in the few weeks since the election suggest the time for something to change can’t be far away – surely? There has at least being slowly growing consensus about the need for decentralisation from Whitehall and Westminster, as a potentially feasible path for reducing the powers of an over-dominant executive branch that can’t deliver and can’t cope.

This book joins other incisive critiques and reviews of how the UK is governed – my colleague Mike Kenny led a major inquiry into the constitution, the Institute for Government documents failures across the board, and others such as Martin Stanley are excellent on specific aspects (the civil service and regulatory state in his case). It’s cold comfort that other countries are experiencing similar failures against a background of slow growth and hyper-fast social media, and colder still that in so many extremist parties are capturing the votes of despair. It’s a narrow path from today’s failures to a less disturbing outcome. The book ends posing a question to those in central government with the power and opportunity to start the process of change: if the UK goes down the path of crisis and reaction, “Politicians will find themselves asking: why didn’t we do things differently when we had the chance?”

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The welcome application of good sense to AI hype

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Summer over in a flash, autumn wind and rain outside – perhaps cosy evenings will speed up both my reading and review-posting.

I just finished AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, having long been a fan of the blog of the same name. The book is a really useful guide through the current hype. It distinguishes 3 kinds of AI: generative, predictive and content moderation AI – an interesting categorisation.

On the generative AI so much in the air since ChatGPT was launched in late 2022, and the persuasive debunking here is of the idea that we are anywhere close to ‘general’ machine intelligence, and of the notion that such models pose existential risks. The authors are far more concerned with the risks associated with the use of predictive AI in decision-making. These chapters provide an overview of the dangers: from data bias to model fragility or overfitting to the broad observation that social phenomena are fundamentally more complicated than any model can predict. As Professor Kevin Fong said in his evidence to the Covid inquiry last week, “There is more to know than you can count.” An important message in these times of excessive belief in the power of data.

The section on the challenges of content moderation were particularly interesting to me, as I’ve not thought much about it. The book argues that content moderation AI is no silver bullet to tackle the harms related to social media – in the authors’ view it is impossible to remove human judgement about context and appropriateness. They would like social media companies to spend far more on humans and on setting up redress mechanisms for when the automated moderation makes the wrong call: people currently have no recourse. They also point out that social media is set up with an internal AI conflict: content moderation algorithms are moderating the content the platform’s recommendation algorithms are recommending. The latter have the upper hand because it doesn’t involve delicate judgements about content, only tracking the behaviour of platform users to amplify popular posts.

There have been a lot of new books about AI this year, and I’ve read many good ones. AI Snake Oil joins the stack: it’s well-informed, clear and persuasive – the cool breeze of knowledge and good sense are a good antidote to anybody inclined to believe the hyped claims and fears.

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Techno-financial imperium

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Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman is a rip-roaring read and simultaneously terrifying. The reader is left with the clear impression of fragility in the world financial system – bad enough in itself – that could tip over into armed conflict. Eek.

The book is about the intersection of the discovery by the US of physical choke-points in the global internet with legal choke points in the world economy and financial system, globalized as it has become. Specifically, the NSA started to find it convenient, post 9/11, to start gathering data on a massive scale on financial movements through the internet. Just seven sites in the US act as bottlenecks for internet traffic, while in other countries there are a similarly small number of such sites. This realisation became the Underground Empire of the title, the deployment of a set of technical and financial mechanisms using these choke points, allowing the US “to cut off businesses and even whole countries from access to key global networks that wove the world’s economy together.”

As the book goes on to describe, the initial post-9/11 responses merged into a haphazard but ever more extensive set of policies and legal tools that enabled the US to extert increasing leverage over extra-territorial entities – not only businesses but also governments. These have included using the power and reach of the US dollar as a reserve currency and currency of trade to “persuade” the Swift network into applying US requirements to exclude for example North Korean and Iranian entities from international payments, and more recently sanctions on US chip technology or IP being exported. The authors write: “From outside, the underground empire seems like a relentless machine of domination, the product of decades of engineering. From inside, it looks quite different, a haphazard construction lashed together from ad hoc bureaucratic decisions and repurposed legal authorities.”

And yet it is a powerful empire and has contributed to increasing geopolitical tensions, and in particular US-China rivalry – although it has also, thanks to its increasingly evident power, prompted countervailing efforts to escape imperial power. But the book concludes “There is no visible exit from the underground empire. … The roots of imperium go far too deep ever to be fully torn out.” The globalisation dream of peace through markets has turned into a nightmare of potential conflict thanks to the realisation elsewhere that markets are built on the foundations of American physical, financial and intangible infrastructure. The book concludes that it is up to the US now to turn the empire into more of a commonwealth, serving the interests of others as well as itself – something hard to see happening in the current political moment.

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Standards

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Colleen Dunlavy’s Small, Medium, Large is an interesting and thought provoking read – and relevant to today’s debate on industrial policy. It’s a relatively short book, a history of the emergence of standards in US goods in the 1910s and 1920s. For example, in 1918-21 there were 78 different mattress sizes on the market and in 1922 the industry agreed to bring this down to 4 standard sizes, the ones we still use in the US and UK (apart from Ikea’s!). I write ’emergence’ but the book tells the fascinating history of the way industry agreements were brokered by the US government. During the years of US participation on World War 1 this was for reasons of prioritising production capacity and materials for the war effort. In the 1920s and beyond it continued at the behest of Herbert Hoover as Commerce Secretary in a drive to improve the productivity of US manufacturing. This took places under the auspices of a division ofhte Department with the wonderful name of Division of Simplified Practice (‘Simplified Practice’ sounded less socialist than ‘standardisation’.) Making multiple models in short production runs meant US firms could not capture economies of scale. Meanwhile in the UK and Germany separate standardisation drives were under way.

Of course, this meant not giving customers what they had wanted in terms of variety and choice – it was the Henry Ford approach of any colour you like as long as it’s black. A Ford executive is quoted as saying, “We standardized the customers.”  Officials railed against the “excessive mulitiplicity of styles” as wasteful.  The customers got mass production and lower prices in return, but they were kept out of the government-organisaed co-ordination between producers. Of course, another word for this might be ‘collusion’ and the book notes the obvious tension with anti-trust policy. By definition, if competition occurs over price rather than variety or attributes, this kills small producers.

Anyway, the history was new to me, and the book set me thinking about the role of standards. There has been a proliferation of variety and personalisation of goods because the technological possibilities have made this cheap enough to do without losing the benefits of flexible and rapid manufacturing. Yet as the well-known Marc Levinson book The Box pointed out, some standards have transformative productivity effects – the GSM mobile phone standard would be another example. This seems a highly relevant question now as we continue the ‘war on carbon’ – when is avoiding waste a good rationale for enforced co-operation over technical standards? At what level of the production or technology stack should governments want standardisation – requiring collaboration – so as to enable competition and variety at higher levels – for example in generative AI now? The dimensions along which firms compete are to some extent a social choice variable.

 

Industrial policy – the long and the short of it.

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I’ve been dipping into the proofs of a substantial book, Industrial Policy for the United States by Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher, due out in September. It will prove a significant resource for anybody interested in the issue. The book starts with the economic case for strategic government interventions in the supply side structure, arguments that have been gaining traction recently as the utlra-free marketism paradigm fades in the US and elsewhere. The authors focus particularly on increasing returns and technological innovation.They bring a certain zero sum mentality to the analysis – the US must win, other countries must lose – which I don’t share; the technological frontier is broad and granular. But the demolition of the idea that a ‘free’ market is the way to organise the economy at a time of significant structural change is spot on.

The second section explores brief country case studies (“Chapter 10, Britain: No Theory and Little Execution” puts it in a nutshell for the UK: “Britain has become a byword for ineffective industrial policy.”). These are for the most part short factual histories for readers who have no prior knowledge of the countries concerned, with an introductory commentary. The book is wholly US-focused.

The third section is a history of industrial policy in the US from colonial times and Hamilton onwards, while the fourth moves into the US innovation system. It paints a picture of government support for innovation as a de facto industrial policy even during periods when political rhetoric emphasised markets. And it describes the innovation system as the ultimate private-public partnership. The section argues the case for a shift to more active Federal government innovation programmes using both market-creating policies, innovations induced by regulatory requirements and a role for novel types of innovation organisation in the system – manufacturing institutes, for example.

The final two sections consist of industry case studies and regional case studies. In the former are the well-known semiconductor example, and also nanotechnology (“Is America Losing the Future?”, this one is titled. The regional examples are life sciences in Massachussetts and emiconductors in upstae New York.

The book ends with recommendations for the US. While welcoming the Biden policies, the CHIPS and the Inflation Reduction Act, the authors want more: “The challenge now is to maje industrial policy comprehensive, coherent, institutionalized, and a fixture of the policy consensus.” The US needs to focus on its most dynamic industries and develop them as oligopolies to enjoy economies of scale and the profitability for continuing innovation, they argue. They see a national security as well as an economic need for the US to stay at the frontier in multiple industries – just as the Cold War imperatives drove policy in the 1950s and 60s. The final chapter has a lengthy set of specific recommendations for different actors in the US political and industrial systems.

At 670 pages of text and 150 pages of notes and bibliography, has the obvious advantages and disadvantages of its sweep and scale – a superb place to start on any aspect of US industrial policy, but only a starting point for depth on any particular aspect. I found the parts I’ve read very interesting given my relative lack of knowledge about the institutional and historical details in the US. But I applaud the ambition and think the historical perspective suggests the authors are right in drawing a curtain on what – it turns out – is the aberrational period of policy free-marketism.Screenshot 2024-07-23 at 11.23.05