Why don't we trust politicians any more? It's (largely) our fault

In her article Why no one trusts politicians any more, Camilla Cavendish writes about ways of closing the gap between politicians and the people they are supposed to represent:

The usual proposals - tightening the ministerial code, properly regulating the revolving door between public office and business and stopping abuses of the honours system - would all help. But they will not address the deeper issue of eroding faith in government: the lack of accountability for failure. Financial Times, 29 June 2024

I agree.

[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

Our politicians and bureaucrats can get away with this, because their stated goals are rarely expressed as meaningful, verifiable outcomes. They talk about vague, lofty ideals; or about policies, which are means to ends, rather than outcomes, which are ends in themselves, and which are more difficult to achieve. So low and entrenched are our expectations of our governments that even radical attempts to change things - see my previous post about injecting AI into politics - ask for no more than policy proposals when, in my view, we should be discussing, costing and prioritising policy goals.

That's not the whole answer

Another explanation for why our politicians disappoint is one that perhaps nobody in the media really wants to cite: the very high costs of becoming and being a member of a democratic government. These costs, borne by aspiring politicians and their families, include the intense, unceasing and merciless scrutiny of their current and past behaviour, the constant threats to their physical security and consequent the loss of privacy - which will continue when they leave office. The opportunity cost of entering politics has also risen in line with the relatively great financial rewards from alternative professions, such finance, the law, computing. As a result, the pool of potentially highly capable politicians who care about their country has shrunk. We are left with the mediocre, the thick-skinned, the power-seekers, the ideologues and the ones who cannot find employment elsewhere. There remain few who have any appealing long-term vision for their country.

A Social Policy Bond regime could help by taking away some of the powers of these democratic governments. Under a bond regime, governments would continue to do what they can do well: articulating society's wishes and raising the revenue for their achievement; but they would contract out the actual achievement of our goals to investors who would have incentives to achieve them efficiently and quickly. Politicians and officials would lose the power to allocate funding to their favoured bodies. That is a matter of resource allocation which in theory and practice has been shown to be best done by competitive markets.