Pournelle's Law

The Economist quotes Sir Keir Starmer:

Policy churn is the 'single most important reason' for the [UK's] economic malaise. Sir Keir Starmer: bureaucrat first, politician second, the 'Economist', 24 February

There is some truth there, but what explains policy churn? Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy tells us that: 

[I]n any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

I've written (here, for example) about the swerving of organisations away from their ideals and ultimately becoming self-perpetuation. I think it applies to every type of organisation, public- and private-sector. In my understanding, policy churn follows from this: it's a result of politicians wishing to retain control over their bureaucracies. Whereas, under a Social Policy Bond regime, the incentives to achieve society's targeted goals would cascade downwards, under our current political systems the incentives of our publicly-funded bodies are to maintain their income in an environment that, thanks to policy churn, is  constantly changing. The result is the short-term thinking and learned helplessness of our bureaucracies. A bond regime would encourage the creation of a new type of organisation: one whose structure and every activity would be entirely subordinate to society's targeted goals.

In no-strings philanthropy I trust

The Economist writes:

[T]he great expansion of higher education has coincided with a productivity slowdown. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s workers’ output per hour across the rich world rose by 4% a year, in the decade before the covid-19 pandemic 1% a year was the norm. Even with the wave of innovation in artificial intelligence, productivity growth remains weak—less than 1% a year, on a rough estimate—which is bad news for economic growth. A new paper by Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Larisa C. Cioaca, Lia Sheer and Hansen Zhang, five economists, suggests that universities’ blistering growth and the rich world’s stagnant productivity could be two sides of the same coin. ...

Businesses had more responsibility for achieving scientific breakthroughs: in America during the 1950s they spent four times as much on research as universities. ...[W]hen it came to delivering productivity gains the old, big-business model of science worked better than the new, university-led one. ... Free from the demands of corporate overlords, [university] research focuses more on satisfying geeks' curiosity or boosting citation counts than it does on finding breakthrough that will change the world or make money.  Universities are failing to boost economic growth, the 'Economist', 5 February

To me, this speaks to the value of incentives. Research of the type done by universities is similar to the way that our social and environmental goals are pursued: they are done by large organisations whose employees are not rewarded in ways that correlate with their success. Those who work for government or government-dependent bodies are, consciously or not, disinclined to rock the boat. The funding of these bodies is hardly, if at all, linked to their success in coming up with problem-solving initiatives. Sadly, most of our important social and environmental goals fall under the remit of such government-dependent bodies. These include the elimination of poverty and crime, the reduction of environmental depredations and, on a global level, the solution to such trans-national problems such as over-fishing and war. Research is just one of the activities that government has brought into its purview, with the disappointing results that Arora et al relate. 

How is it that government constantly expands its remit? There is the sense that some things are too important to be left to the private sector, and that only government can be impartial as to the allocation of funding. This sense pervades such critical debates as to whether the UK's National Health Service should be partly or completely privatised. That debate rarely considers health outcomes or, indeed, any outcomes at all: instead, ideology and vested interests set the debate's terms. Some concerns are genuine: markets have been abused and undermined such that they, in many cases, are rightly discredited in the eyes of the public. 

Social Policy Bonds could combine the best elements of both the public and private sectors. Under a bond regime, government could articulate society's wishes and raise the revenue for their fulfilment; these are things that democratic governments can do well. But where they perform badly is in actually achieving society's goals, largely because of the incentive structures they put in place: the structures that reward activity regardless of outcome. The effect of a Social Policy Bond regime, however, would be to contract out society's goals to those best placed to the achieve them. In economic theory and on all the evidence, that is what competitive markets do best. An obstacle in the way of implementing the Social Policy Bond concept is the unwillingness of government and its funded bodies to relinquish their control over activities ostensibly directed at the public good. Rather than wait for government to do that, perhaps the best hope for a no-strings philanthropist to get the ball rolling....

The question nobody asks: are the cows actually better off?

The effort highlights a glaring cow-related contradiction in the BJP's [Bharatiya Janata Party's] Hindu nationalist ideology. The party says it wants to protect cows, which are associated with divine beneficence and venerated by Hindus. Yet its pro-cow policies, including bans on cow slaughter, appear to be detrimental to cattle welfare. They are thought to be causing an increase in stray cows, typically male calves and aged milkers which, having little commercial value, are let loose by their owners. Abandoned, they feed on plastic bags and other rubbish, cause car crashes and raid farmers’ crops. The Hindu right’s pro-cow policies are terrible for India’s cows, the 'Economist', 3 February

It shouldn't surprise us. The stated aim of a policy in today's policymaking environment need have no relationship to its result. The two may, as here, even be conflict. Collectively, we rarely hold the people who make a policy responsible for its outcome. In the private sector it's different: there are the disciplines of the market and competition, and reliable, visible, constantly readable indicators of the success or failure of an enterprise. But in the public sector: 

 [G]overnment bureaucracies non-self-evaluate. At a minimum, agencies with evaluative responsibilities are not invited to evaluate - they are kept out of the loop, their opinions unsought. At a maximum, government agencies actively suppress their own internal evaluative units and are discouraged from evaluating the beliefs and policies of other agencies. Why States Believe Foolish Ideas: Non-Self-Evaluation By States And Societies (pdf), Stephen Van Evera, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Political Science Department and Security Studies Program, 2002

So politicians can get away with selling their policies according to what they say they will achieve. In the absence of data we choose politicians who have lofty-sounding goals, or who look good on camera. We vote for people, or personalities, or out of tribal loyalty to political parties. 

A Social Policy Bond regime would be different. We'd vote for social and environmental outcomes, rather than the people or policies who say they'll achieve them. Politicians would retain their roles of articulators of society's wishes and revenue raisers, but their role of allocating finance and determining the structure of bodies charged with achieving society's goals would be diminished. Those decisions would be taken by bondholders, who would make them according to the sole criterion of efficiency in achieving the targeted goal at minimum cost. Bondholders would face the discipline of the market: if they are inefficient, their bonds would be bought up by more efficient operators. A transition to such a regime should be made gradually, partly for pragmatic reasons, but partly also to give existing bodies a chance to evaluate and improve their performance. (I discuss such a transition in my book.) There would be a gradual focus away from politicians and their antics, and more on the elements that make up society's well-being. So rather than be swayed by such rhetoric as how a particular policy would be good for cows in India, say, we'd look instead at whether things are actually improving for cows. Such a way judging is perfectly acceptable in the private sector; extending it to goals currently the remit of the public sector, could greatly benefit society.