Summer-notes: institutions, trust

A fun find (from 2017) - the King's Fund video description of how 'the NHS' works in England. I remember in 2015-16 piecing together much of this at Doteveryone. Still astoundingly complex, and so little known. (Six and a half minutes of video just for a whistlestop tour...)

There never was a Labour party "red wall," writes David Edgerton. Highlights mine.

The period from 1945 into the 1970s was without question Labour’s moment of success. Not only did it win elections, but it transformed British society. But over the last half century, as Labour’s halted forward march went into reverse, its vote share fell and oscillated wildly.

... At the national level we also need to distinguish clearly between what share of the overall vote a party gets, and whether they win. In 1935 Labour got 38% of the vote but only 25% of seats. In 2019 it got a lower share of votes but a higher share of seats. The perversity does not end there: although Labour was more popular with voters in 2019, when it got a larger share of the vote than in 1983, 1987, 2010 or 2015, it got a lower number of seats in 2019 than in any of these elections.

Indeed, once we look beyond the fallacious, Westminster-centric view of elections, which measures the popularity of a party according to how many seats they get rather than their share of the vote, a very different story of Labour leaders’ political success emerges. In 1997 Tony Blair did as well (but no better) than Hugh Gaitskill did in 1959, but Blair won a huge parliamentary majority whereas Gaitskell lost seats. In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn did slightly better in terms of vote share than Harold Wilson in 1974; but while Wilson won a parliamentary majority, Corbyn was only able to deprive Theresa May of hers. 

Nor should we think of the so-called red-wall seats as if they were stuck until recently in some unthinking Labourist la-la land. They followed national trends, not least electorally...

Even more absurd is the notion of an unchanging working class recently betrayed by Labour. The working class has changed radically since Labour’s heyday. Where once it was made up of miners and factory workers, today it includes (among others) health service, education and hospitality workers. There are no miners left, and far fewer factory workers today. The working class is more female, better educated and not captured by the 43% of the population whom advertisers class as “C2DE”, both because a quarter think of themselves as middle class but also because workers are not limited to the old “manual” occupations this archaic definition rests on.

The phenomenon of a working-class red wall is an ideological concoction that benefits Labour’s enemies. It makes little sociological or psephological sense today, and the fragment of the past it reflects is one of Tory working classes. Yet this group has come to define how Labour thinks of the working class.

 

https://twitter.com/thomasforth/status/1417246208217829384

The government plans to reduce the powers of the Electoral Commission [FT piece, paywall] seem bad. There's a petition against this on OpenBritain.

A rather depressing read about Chinese censorship in what you would think of as an international context - LinkedIn profiles, US movie and sports stars. Mark Hurst writes

American actor and former pro wrestler [John] Cena is apologizing. ... Cena’s massive breach of conduct, which brought on this self-abasing exercise, came during a recent promotional event in which Cena indicated... that Taiwan is a country.  ... what I find remarkable is that an American movie star, employed by an American movie studio, promoting an American movie, so enthusiastically and immediately bends to the wishes of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Jojje Olsson posts today that LinkedIn censored his profile after it mentioned the subject of his graduate thesis: the Tiananmen Square massacre. ...

when H&M spoke out about the camps in Xinjiang (where much of the world’s cotton is sourced), H&M suddenly disappeared from Chinese apps. Well-known Japanese retailer Muji went in the other direction, proudly advertising their use of Xinjiang cotton: “Heck yeah, we use forced labor, come and get it!” Muji stands to profit nicely, while H&M will lose money.

A somewhat gloomy long article by James Meek in the LRB about, well, several things. How renewable energy plant is built and the companies involved. How international companies operate, and how hard it might be to retain good jobs in the UK.

In 2017, Ørsted – under its original name of DONG Energy (Danish Oil and Natural Gas) – submitted its supply chain plan for Hornsea Two. It said it aimed to spend half the money it would cost to build the wind farm within Britain. Top of the list of ways Ørsted said it had developed ‘a strong UK supply chain’ was ‘the development and delivery’ of CS Wind’s Campbeltown factory into a plant capable of making offshore wind towers. The UK government approved the supply chain plan, and gave the wind farm the go-ahead. This year, Siemens installed the first turbines at Hornsea Two, 55 miles offshore. But in between the approval of the plan proclaiming Ørsted’s loyalty to Campbeltown and the start of work, Ørsted and Siemens gave up on the plant. Undertakings were clearly broken, yet there’s no sign Ørsted or Siemens will suffer a penalty. These immense enterprises decided that what seemed to be promises were not legally binding. Political assurances of the inevitability of green jobs for Britain turned out to be, as the climate politics researchers Stefan Aykut, Edouard Morena and Jean Foyer put it, an example of ‘incantatory governance’. The UK and Scottish governments, Black told me, ‘don’t say: “You must buy British.” They say: “We would very much like it if you would.”

...One British renewables consultant told me that rather than laying out a clear system of targets and penalties to encourage local content, the government’s only means of enforcement had been to implant ‘a slight sort of anxiety’ in the minds of wind development executives. It was clear that if the government tried to take away the wind giants’ licences because they hadn’t employed enough Brits, it would end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit. But, the consultant said, ‘there was still the feeling that there was something the government could do.’

...The British government intends to bring in a new rule that will allow it to impose a crippling penalty – cancellation of the guaranteed minimum price for a wind farm’s electricity – if a developer doesn’t provide the green British jobs it’s supposed to.

And looked at from Ørsted’s point of view, what would have happened if the British or Scottish government had forced it to take CS Wind’s towers? From 2016 to 2019, CS Wind had an absolute monopoly as the sole builder of offshore wind towers in the UK. If Ørsted had been compelled to use them, CS Wind could have charged what it liked. Green British jobs would have been protected, but would the energy still have been cheap?

... The British government has committed to the radical promise of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and filling the North and Irish Seas with wind farms is essential to that. But it’s not only the ‘cheap’, ‘green’ and ‘British’ aspects that make you think Britain is, once again, trying to have its cake and eat it. It’s also the contradiction between Britain the beacon of free markets and open global competition, and Britain the trade fortress, exercising protectionism in its own workers’ interests. The government says different things to different audiences. In response to a story in the Guardian about complaints in Europe that Britain’s local content rules for wind farms could be in breach of the Brexit deal, a UK government spokesman said: ‘There are no mandatory requirements for supply chains to use UK products.’ The same government department had made it clear to me a few days earlier that it had every intention of taking the opposite approach.

... The equivalent of almost all Scotland’s electricity is now supplied by renewables, and when demand is low and the weather blustery, wind turbines generate two-thirds of the wattage Britain needs. You might accept that Britain has ceded tech sovereignty to overseas multinationals, and say, well, let them at least be competent and effective ones, like Siemens and Vestas. But even as I write this, it has a hollow ring. Suppose I make the distinction between a false populist portrayal of the wind energy revolution as a triumph of national ingenuity and my own understanding of it as a vital endeavour engaging the whole species – one in which the greater ingenuity, foresight and can-do spirit has, this time, been shown by the Danes. The trouble is that these narratives aren’t very far apart. If the Boris Johnson version is neo-aristocratic, boasting of improvements to the landed estate that is Britain, mine is neo-romantic: humanity, and the version of nature we know, may yet be saved! The trouble is that the aristocrat and the romantic have much in common. Each tends to overlook those who do the spade-work, those whose hand holds the welding rod. It shouldn’t be more important that the North Sea wind farms get built than that some of their towers are made by low-paid labourers working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week; and yet the immense utopian project to decarbonise human activity forges ahead, while the equally utopian project to end the setting of ‘low income country’ worker against ‘high income country’ worker barely exists. The mad dream of a green energy transition might just be starting to come true, with much of the credit due to stubborn activists, clever engineers and a handful of far-sighted policymakers. But it is also happening for the unlikely reason that it has been redefined as a global capitalist-consumerist project. It realises utopian goals while simultaneously keeping stock markets ticking over, making the rich richer and spreading a general sense of virtue. The system has been able to turn the green energy transition into a set of products – electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines –but the transition to a world of better-treated workers involves systemic changes that are the antithesis of commodification.

... The trouble is that to treat the issue as one of good/bad for British workers and good/bad for Vietnamese workers is to obscure the fundamental question of whether something is good or bad for people. It is hard to find an excuse to treat stories like this one as anything other than a challenge to organised labour to go global. A world factory demands a world trade union. The cry that higher wages mean higher unemployment is the oldest scare in capital’s playbook. And if we call a global minimum wage – or a global maximum working week, or a global minimum healthcare standard – pie in the sky, we’re saying that the green energy transition is the possible, necessary utopia, and fair pay and conditions the impossible, unnecessary one.

Both journeys have a terribly long way to go.

Matt Webb observes that there are many things now where the sheer number of options online means it's impossible to know what (or who) to trust, as it's impossible to tell the difference between scams and invisible intermediaries and good traders or products.

What spam is to communication, scams are to marketplaces.

Only there’s no way I can install an anti-scam filter.

My hunch is that after 20+ years of scaling marketplaces of all kinds, reducing friction and increasing activity, we’re hitting a wall similar to the malware wall hit by Windows (and ultimately “solved” by the shift to managed computing led by iOS), the spam wall hit by email (Gmail’s spam filter was a band-aid; ultimately comms moved off email into WhatsApp and corporate messaging), and the disinfo wall hit by large social network...

So assume this problem is getting worse. What is to be done?

Two solutions from history no longer work in 2021:

• Brands. A brand is a hostage – you know the company won’t do anything awful because they risk a brand which has taken time, money, and good behaviour to develop. Call it reputation. But we consumers can’t tell reputation directly, we can only look for signifiers: have we encountered the brand a lot; do other people appear to transact with it; does it look expensive; etc. And online, all of those signifiers are cheap to fake. A new scam brand can be indistinguishable from a established yet new-to-me trustworthy one.
• Retailers. The other problem with brands is that you do want to buy from new ones, so one role of trusted retailers - in the past - has been to pass on that trust to the brands they select. Our brains believe that trust is a transitive property. But it isn’t: trusting Amazon doesn’t mean you can trust the merchants; trusting LinkedIn doesn’t mean you can trust the approaches you get there.
  

Mark Hurst notes that treating bitcoin as a religion, or eliminating crime in America, may seem like jokes; but suggesting Silicon Valley companies may cause problems is seen as a joke by some tech investors. We need to remember that these radically different perspectives are out there. The difference is the level of power and money behind the two.

In similar vein, talking to someone who works in venture capital, who was slightly alarmed to find there are people out there, in positions of significant power/influence and theoretically working in future-oriented activities, who are only now starting to acknowledge climate issues, and only because Bill Gates has a book out about the topic.

https://twitter.com/peterbihr/status/1404432548575514627

I think this insight from Peter in this is interesting. But it's hard to sustain in other formats of institution too.  Sean McDonald's long article about the story and closure of FrontlineSMS is both inspiring (as Frontline has always been) and challenging.  I feel I ought to be picking some highlights, but the length and complexity of the story are in many ways the value of it too. Also my highlights would likely be shaped by my current work ponderings!

Thanks also to Peter Bihr (indirectly) for the Buxton Index - the length of the period over which an entity makes its plans.

Alastair Parvin [in January this year] says we need new operating systems - in the sense of systems by which we organise our world, and our institutions. There are so many contradictions -

"We live in a wealthy country, where no one thinks it is acceptable for a child to go hungry. And yet today one third of children in the UK live in poverty, and 17% live in hungry households.

Our homes have never been worth more money. And yet many are small, dark, unhealthy, unsafe, socially isolating and unfit to spend any significant amount of time in.

We publicly applaud essential workers, and yet at the same time they are underpaid, overworked and demoralised."

It's not that we aren't changing some systems. But "we find ourselves using 21st century information systems that are underpinned by 19th century models of ownership, governance and accountability" for instance.

The IPCC report 'gratitude' Twitter thread from Elizabeth Sawin is a reminder of how many people are working on climate issues in different places and ways.

https://twitter.com/webmink/status/1413609157572403201

 

And finally - in 2020 there were a bunch of reports about people receiving mysterious seeds in the post from China. After discarding theories about biological warfare, it seemed that it was an ecommerce scam. However, this was also wrong - after a deep investigation, Chris Heath found that the reality was that these people had, actually, ordered the seeds online themselves. Astonishing.