Monthly Archive for June, 2008

What the web thinks about politicians

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 29, 2008
in United States
. 1 Comment

Barack Obama’s ability to raise money from literally millions of supporters online has already, and justifiably, attained the status of legend: it’s the kind of watershed in campaigning that only comes along once in a generation. Despite all the coverage, however, I hadn’t quite realised how impressive his online edge over Hillary Clinton has been over the last twelve months until I typed both their names into google trends. The result, which portrays as a graph the number of times each of their names has been entered into google as a search term, can be seen here.

Then again, if all Hillary’s supporters could spell, we might have seen something rather different…

Obviously, the Democratic primary contest has hogged the bulk of the US news cycle. Still, google’s current Obama/McCain match-up must be of concern to Republicans: it shows a worse-than two-to-one deficit online. George Bush, meanwhile and predictably enough, trails both candidates. And don’t even ask about Gordon Brown, who as far as the internet is concerned has barely crept ahead of a certain predecessor even after a year in power.

Here’s a challenge, though. Can you think of another politican who might rival Obama in the google stakes; or is he truly the world’s most sought-after political figure? Come to think of it, is there someone else whom Obama-mania may be toppling from even His lofty perch?

Weekend reading

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 27, 2008
in Elsewhere on the web
. 0 Comments

I’d hate to distract you from all the goodies in our Gülen-flecked July issue, but you may be interested to know that our man in France Profonde, Tim King, has kicked his Prospect blog back into life just in time for the beginning of the French presidency of the EU. He’s writing regularly on defence, Sarkozy, Europe and other such matters over here. And check out intermittently amusing Onion-style news spoofing over at new site Newsbiscuit—I particularly enjoyed this report, on Gideon Gono, head of the Bank of Zimbabwe, being forced to write a letter to Robert Mugabe explaining why the country has yet again failed to meet its inflation target of 1,000,000%.

Prospect’s new issue—a victory for the surfing Sufis

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 26, 2008
in Europe, In the news and Inside Prospect
. 10 Comments

The surprise winner of the Prospect/Foreign Policy global intellectuals poll is Fethullah Gülen, a US-based Turkish Sufi cleric with an international network of 5m followers, many hundreds of thousands of whom propelled him to a landslide victory (see the full results here).

Those who had a pop at Prospect for pandering to the forces of pseudo-democratic populism by running such a poll will feel vindicated by the result. After all, the fact that the Fethullahçi—the collective noun for Gülen’s followers—successfully mounted an orchestrated campaign for their man does away with any claim of objectivity made for the poll (not a claim we ever made, of course).

Yet on the other hand, as I describe in my piece that accompanies the results,  perhaps we can see in Gülen’s victory the emergence of a new kind of public intellectual: one whose influence is expressed through a personal network, with the help of the internet, rather than more traditional institutions like journals or universities.

And Gülen himself has strong links to Turkey’s ruling AK party, which finds itself on the receiving end of an attempt to ban it by the country’s secular establishment. As David Goodhart describes in his editorial, this is probably the biggest political battle in Europe—and anything that draws our attention to it must be a good thing. (Ehsan Masood explores Gülen’s life and work here.)

If you have any questions about the poll, or the various voting campaigns that it spawned, post them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Our man in Harare

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 26, 2008
in Africa and Elections
. 0 Comments

Prospect’s Zimbabwe correspondent is sending—anonymously, for obvious reasons—regular dispatches from Harare as the election drama continues to unfold, exclusively for Prospect online. We hope to provide readers with more-or-less daily updates over the next week or so.

Forever blowing bubbles?

Published
by
Jonathan Ford
on June 26, 2008
in Economics and Inside Prospect
. 12 Comments

There’s no end in sight, it seems, to the financial crisis that started last summer. But how bad is it and what can we do to prevent another one? Prospect assembled a panel of top financial experts, including renowned investor George Soros, economic pundits Anatole Kaletsky and Martin Wolf, and Bank of England deputy governor John Gieve to discuss these questions. It considered who was to blame for the crisis, how much worse it may get, and how we can avoid asset bubbles blowing up in future.

The shock phase of the crisis may now be past, but the panel were sceptical about an early recovery, fearing that the conjunction of a banking crisis and a commodity boom may lead to stagflation (where growth slows while inflation rises) and this could cause a serious shock in the real economy. The financial authorities came in for some stick about the way the crisis was handled, and for being too slow to spot the dangers. Gieve, who was in charge of financial stability at the Bank of England (he has since announced he’s going to leave the post early), admitted the authorities would in future have to be far more intrusive in the way they regulated the financial system. Even poking around in banker’s pay packets (how much, and are they being paid in the right way?) is now something the watchdogs are thinking about.

Other panel members suggested more severe penalties for bankers who cause big losses by taking reckless bets. Soros even suggested they should be shot. There was general agreement that banks should be made to pay—perhaps through higher taxes—for the implicit guarantees they receive through the financial system that the authorities will bail them out if things go wrong. And there was a general feeling that it would be a good thing if the financial system shrank, although most doubted that it would do so. Lastly, looking to the future, the panel expressed some foreboding that this shock may prove to be insufficient to change behaviour. If that’s true, we may be on course for a mega-bubble that will, in Kaletsky’s words, “totally blow up the financial system.”

George Osborne: Tory saviour

Published
by
Jonathan Ford
on June 26, 2008
in British politics and Inside Prospect
. 1 Comment

The last nine months have seen an astonishing revival in the fortunes of the Conservative party. From a ten-point deficit in the polls last autumn, the Tories now enjoy a 20-point lead. And following a crushing by-election victory at Crewe and Nantwich last month, they are increasingly seen as the government-in-waiting. George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, is one of the key figures behind the revival. His speech at last year’s Conservative party conference—promising cuts in inheritance tax and stamp duty—is credited with rattling Gordon Brown sufficiently to make him bottle plans for a snap election he would probably have won.

Osborne is one of David Cameron’s key lieutenants in the mission to modernise the Tories and “decontaminate the brand.” At the astonishingly young age of 37, he has already become one of the most influential politicians in the country. Osborne emerges in my profile as a shrewd and disciplined tactician—sufficiently scarred by past failures in opposition to sacrifice ideology in pursuit of power. But in some areas it’s been easy for him to jettison some past Tory baggage: he’s a libertarian who has no problems with alternative lifestyles. He presents himself as someone who is genuinely comfortable with the modern world. His courage and tactical astuteness are not in doubt. But it remains unclear to what end will those talents be put if and when the Tories win power again. Please comment below.

How Nicholas Stern will save the world

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 26, 2008
in Environment
. 1 Comment

When Nicholas Stern’s review on the economics of climate change came out in late 2006, it changed the terms of the climate debate. The warnings from scientists and environmental campaigners about the dangers posed by global warming had been growing increasingly loud, but here, for the first time, was a detailed and hard-headed examination of the economics of the subject. Stern demonstrated to many people’s satisfaction that without drastic global action to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, the world faced the risk of economic meltdown.

Now Stern has a political plan to add to his economic review: a six-point manifesto for a global deal on climate change that he says will take in both the rich and poor worlds, and exploit the power of technology and markets to reduce carbon emissions as effectively and efficiently as possible.

What are the plan’s chances of success? Alun Anderson interviewed Stern for the current issue of Prospect to find out.

Writing Tiananmen

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 26, 2008
in China
. 0 Comments

I’ve visited China six times in the last six years, and every time I’ve gone I feel like I’ve visited a different place. The pace of change is simply incredible, as is the scale of variations between its mountains, plains, towns, cities and regions. China is a crowded, dazzling nation, and one that has begun to enthrall the world. Yet, for those of us on the outside, understanding what it means to be Chinese today, and what it might mean to be Chinese in the future, can seem unassailably alien questions.

The barriers to understanding are at once linguistic, cultural and political. China is ancient, yet there are deafening silences in its official history. Its culture is among the world’s richest, yet it remains constrained by official channels narrower and more zealously regulated than those in any other similarly affluent, influential nation. This month, I met one of China’s most significant modern authors, Ma Jian—a writer who has worked from Britain in self-imposed exile since 1997—and discussed his monumental recent fictional account of the 1989 Tiananmen protests and their aftermath, Beijing Coma.

Beijing Coma embodies many of the contradictions of modern Chinese self-exploration. A work quietly raging at the suppression of both historical accounting and individual rights, it won’t be printed in mainland China; its greatest impact is likely to be in the English translation crafted by Ma’s wife, Flora, which will make its way both online and through the international reading world. Yet it’s a delicate, hopeful book, which suggests the enduring force of introspection, and the ways in which a thoroughly Chinese literature might come to address those events forbidden from public discourse—and unlock the lessons they contain.

Ruling the White House: competence or loyalty?

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 26, 2008
in United States
. 7 Comments

In this month’s lead opinion, David Frum—former special assistant to George W Bush—looks back at the internal politics of the Bush administration in the light of Scott McClellan’s incendiary recent memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong with Washington (PublicAffairs).

McClellan cuts, Frum argues, a sad and sympathetic figure despite the bitter tone of his memoir. Here was a man clearly deficient in his job as White House press secretary, yet compelled to discharge his duty day after day; an official at once supported and ensnared by his bullying, chummy and ruthless commander-in-chief, who selected his inner circles on the basis of loyalty rather than competence.

It was a cynical form of failure. As Frum explains, the gravest internal defects of the Bush administration were the products of conscious design. Yet in trying to correct these, Bush’s successor faces perhaps the most problematic paradox of government—that there is no wholly successful way of running a White House.

Grin and bear it

Published
by
William Davies
on June 20, 2008
in British politics
. 3 Comments

There are two simple errors that people have been making about bureaucracies for over a century. The first is that they are so successful in governing people’s behaviour, that they entirely oust any scope for human autonomy, and this is a bad thing. The second is that they are so successful in governing people’s behaviour, that they entirely oust any scope for human failure, and this is a good thing. Lets call these, respectively, the romantic error and the policy error.

If the Tories are serious in their quest for a ‘post-bureaucratic state‘, then they look set to make both errors at the same time. Let me guess - this ‘post-bureaucratic state’ will restore the autonomy of public sector professionals, but without risking any additional human failure? No wonder they’re known as the ’stupid party’.

Elsewhere, The Guardian reports that nurses will be assessed on their smile and affection output, as a means of delivering better value to customers of the NHS (sic). Plucked from a much larger policy package and stuck on the front page, the implication is that this is the new frontier in the drift towards a cold, routinised society. Now that even smiles are measured, what spontaneity is left? This must be what Max Weber intended when he wrote “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness”.

Between the romantic error and the policy error lies a truth that is surely obvious to anyone who has ever worked in a large hierachical organisation: bureaucracies can change behaviour, but they can not determine it. A rule will govern, but never completely. One lesson to take from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is that no rule can tell you how it should be obeyed. Or to put it in H L A Hart’s terms, any law is also dependent on the ‘rule of recognition’, a necessarily unwritten rule that the law be viewed as law.

The same is true of bureaucratic rules. The measurement of smiles will obviously not make nurses any happier. It probably won’t even make them smile more. But it will change behaviour, primarily to produce an economy of smiling, such that smiles start to be treated as part of the currency of nursing. The smiles that are produced might be made more public or more obvious. They will no doubt be summoned more frequently if there is the suspicion of auditting. Perhaps they will even become tradable in some way, and different categories of smile will develop, such that a ‘grin’ becomes neglected in favour of the full ‘beam’ that has more chance of penetrating the dosed-up patient’s gaze. It would be as wrong to claim that the nurses have been enslaved as it would be to say that their frostiness has been erradicated. Between the romantic error and the policy error lies the truth, namely that the nurse is free to find his or her own means of satisfying the auditor, then getting on with nursing.

This is being performed up and down the country. Successful academics now recognise that target-setting in higher education is not something that could feasibly be done ‘correctly’ or can realistically be abandoned, but offers a set of rules within which each individual must find space for themselves. Between romantic despair and policy sincerity, ironic professional engagement is the most honest way of dealing with an audit.

What the Tories are misunderstanding, therefore, is that ‘actually existing’ bureaucracies are already post-bureaucratic (at least in the sense the Tories intend). Only the person who spends his or her life in Whitehall surrounded by documents could have so much respect and distaste for bureaucracy as the Tories. As things actually take place, public services have always been a jumble of rules, judgements, successes and failures. Of course it’s more attractive to stress the judgements and the successes than the rules and the failures - and to call this ‘post-bureaucratic’ - but the overall mix will remain exactly the same as it was when Weber was writing.

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