Miscellany about institutions and political power

Starring: talented bureaucrats, Robert Caro, the civil service, and Thucydides

Robert Moses and his doomed Battery Bridge, 1939.

I am infinitely better at dreaming up ideas for blog posts than I am at actually sitting down and writing them. In a (doubtless futile) attempt to quash my to-do list, I thought I’d group together a few things I’ve been thinking about recently, all of which share something of a common theme, and serve them up as-is. You could call it “blogging, Cowen-style”, if you wanted to be polite.

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1. Bureaucracies and their talent pools

I am quite obsessed with bureaucracies, and with the people who run them. (Feel free to drop reading suggestions in the comments; I’ve put my current list in this footnote.¹) Two recent papers caught my eye:

Bureaucrats and the Korean export miracle (Barteska and Lee 2024):

This paper finds that the effect of an industrial policy changes tremendously with the implementing bureaucrat. […] Moving from a bureaucrat at the 20th percentile to the median is associated with a 40% increase in exports. This effect is comparable to that of opening an office [!]

Training policymakers in econometrics (Mehmood, Naseer, and Chen 2024):

We randomize incoming policymakers into an econometrics training program. Treated policymakers’ stated valuation of quantitative evidence and commissioning of RCTs in policymaking increases. One year after the training, treated policymakers are […] twice as likely to actually choose and triple the funding recommendation to the government for policies for which there is causal evidence.

Talent really matters.

Meanwhile, in the UK:

“Applications to the Civil Service Fast Stream have fallen dramatically for the second year in a row, with the 2023 scheme receiving less than half the number of applicants as in 2021 […] Former cabinet secretary Lord Gus O'Donnell told CSW the figures are "very worrying".”

Ah.

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2. On The Power Broker

Speaking of talent in bureaucracies, Dominic Cummings once said that ‘someone should run a prize for the best 10,000 word essay summarising [the] fundamental lessons’ of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker.

I think he chose the wrong Caro book. I adored The Years of Lyndon Johnson, parts I-IV, but The Power Broker left me… quite flat. I’m not sure it has all that many ‘fundamental lessons’ for Getting Things Done today.

The book I wish I could read about Robert Moses would be one about the rationalisation of New York’s bureaucratic and legal apparatuses, from Tammany Hall to the present. Which is, I think, the ‘real story’ lurking in the background of The Power Broker. Because Moses’s successes, if Caro’s book is to go by, were basically built around four fundamental principles:

1. “Once you sink that first stake, they'll never make you pull it up” (here);

2. If people are forced to choose between something imperfect and nothing at all, they will pick imperfection, so if you want to achieve something controversial, you should reduce their choice down to that binary;

3. Get the entire media to unquestioningly adore you;

4. Create a closed, completely unaccountable financial loop between infrastructure revenue and funding for new projects.

These gambits, interesting as they are, are obviously a product of Moses’s extremely unusual institutional context. In our present-day, no-less-dystopian age of spiralling proceduralism (on which I wholeheartedly recommend this), politics as a game of pure force-of-will is — for better and for worse — almost laughably foreign. Moses’s personality and opportunism is undeniably fascinating, but I don’t think it would count for nearly as much in a more recognisable political environment. And that’s what I find interesting.

Unfortunately, Caro is quiet on the details and trade-offs that come with Moses’s political environment. We never learn what would have happened in his absence; if, for example, the would-be ‘veto players’ of twentieth-century New York had been freed from the curbs of Moses’s authority, would the city have found itself in better or worse shape? As a morality tale about the need for procedural guardrails against executive authority, it feels, at best, incomplete.

I have other frustrations too. The Power Broker takes Moses’s motivation to be ‘power for power’s sake’. But the whole point of the story is that Moses obtained near-absolute power, at which point very few decisions had any real bearing on Moses’s authority. So why, then, did he do what he did? We very rarely find out. The thesis of Caro’s Johnson books is that ‘power reveals’. Power here reveals much less. Perhaps, at the height of his authority, Moses really did have ~no ideological ends in sight. Or perhaps there was more to it.

The Power Broker is worth reading if you’re curious about Robert Moses as a personality. But its ‘fundamental lessons’ are less enlightening than I hoped.

(Also, and less critically, Caro got induced demand wrong.)

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3. Technical expertise as counter-culture

One thing I did find worthwhile r.e. civil service reform was this speech by Sir John Kingsman, formerly Second Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, and head of UKRI (link; transcript). Particularly this part:

Substantial or deep domain knowledge and experience is still not really particularly valued — at any rate in the higher reaches of the policymaking civil service.

In 2003 […] I suggested there might be certain topics — corporate tax, say, or pensions, or the energy market — which were core Treasury business but which were also ferociously complex and technical, and perhaps not ideally suited to being left entirely to even brilliant 24-year-old generalists.

Why not, I naively suggested, create some new roles — outside the conventional hierarchy? These need not manage anyone; they might or might not spend lots of time with ministers; they could and should be reasonably well-paid (at least by the Treasury’s modest standards); they might (I thought) be rather attractive to people […] who are steeped in an area and interested in applying their knowledge at the heart of government.

[The idea] proved just too weird and counter-cultural. It died a quiet death.

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4. Resentment or participation; outside or in

[His] tone was in the friendly-advice category. He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders.

So wrote Elizabeth Warren about Larry Summers. I encountered this a while back, r.e. OpenAI. It seems to me to apply not only to organizations like OpenAI and to politics, but also to less formal associations, like communities.

On the politics front, Summers’s advice reminded me of an unpublished essay by Judith Shklar in 1972, called ‘Government’:

People become interested in the study of politics in response to an unacknowledged fantasy: they see themselves as occupying the seats of power. There are many ways of intellectualizing this fantasy, but most are really mixtures of two models. The first can be called the dream of resentment, the second the dream of participation.

Systematic political thinking begins with Thucydides and Plato, both of whom had been forced to withdraw from politics and expressed their contempt in the contemplation and public dissection of the entire political actuality around them. They thus set the pattern for those who succeeded them in this task of revenge.

The second fantasy[’s…] true ancestor is Aristotle. Far from hostile to the world he sees, he imagines himself to be an actor, and he translates this energetic feeling into a picture of politics as problem solving, the making of policies and the ins and outs of bargaining justice and favors.

Tag yourselves.

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5. Other things I’ve read recently that feel tangentially relevant:

1. ‘The Eric Adams smash-and-grab’

2. Stephen Manila’s ‘Energetic Aliens’

3. Sasha Chaplin’s ‘Moat of Low Status’, a moat that I am becoming… almost too acquainted with. What if you just never make it out?

4. Freddie deBoer’s ‘Planet of Cops’, which I think is relevant insofar as the question of talent is quite substantially dependent on the existence of conducive cultural norms (another doomed blog post idea)

5. ‘The road from serfdom’, from the new Works in Progress

6. ‘Moving past environmental proceduralism’ (mentioned above)

7. An anthropologist’s critique of Paul Collier’s popular development economics (academic paywall)

1. Here’s my ‘organizations and bureaucracy’ reading list, in no particular order:

1. The dream machine, by M. Mitchell Waldrop

2. Pieces of the action, by Vannevar Bush

3. The anti-politics machine, by James Ferguson

4. Britain against Napoleon: The organization of victory, 1793-1815,

5. Scaling people, by Claire Hughes Johnson

6. Now it can be told: The story of the Manhattan Project, by Leslie Groves

Plus a few biographies (Churchill, Nixon, Thatcher, Lee Kuan Yew).

I’m currently also trying to teach myself roughly primary school-level econometrics, so I look forward to being done with the above list in about 2047.

Ideas or advice extremely welcome.