10. 'Simplism' vs. complexity

Or why the incoming Starmer government needs to 'tame the elephant' and get on with governing

Let me get it out there quickly and say I am rejoicing at the election of a new administration in our battered isle. But one of the themes that has quickly emerged that interests me, is the ‘grown-upness’ of the new set-up. After a long and painful era of performative Government we finally seem to be entering an era of operative Government.

What interests me most about this (other than the obvious improved outlook for my children) is the striking contrast between the reactive impulse and the responsive impulse. I have seen countless responses to incoming Cabinet Secretary announcements that go something like this:

• Incoming politician says something about the changes she will make in her brief

• Relieved, experienced person with practical knowledge responds saying - “Absolutely this - and here are some things we need to look at to get there”

The thing that all these threads have in common is that they seek to understand causes instead of responding to effects. Now I don’t want to offer some cosy Blairesque homily about being tough on the causes of problems, not just the problem. I want to instead explore why we have been governed in such a performative, reactive manner that pushes simple answers over complex trial and error learning.

Sean Jones KC, has posted an interesting thread about this on the website formerly known as Twitter. Jones explains some early research he undertook into deterrence in the criminal justice system.

I remember reading interviews with burglars. When asked whether they would be deterred by the thought of long prison terms, their answer was essentially: "It would if I thought about it, so I don't think about it". Things were not as simple as I had thought they were. That was because people were not simple. It made me sceptical of "simplism" in politics more generally (emphasis mine).

Behavioural science tells us a lot about this phenomenon. Without trying to mansplain fairly uncontroversial concepts, here is a quick introduction. Our brains have complex interdependent elements that allow us (among many other things) to think, form memories and respond to threats. The amygdala is our smoke detector - the thing that screams at us whenever we encounter anything that threatens our survival. And yes, according to the metaphor that is endlessly trotted out, the problem is that we have lizard brains responding to threats in a modern world. So our smoke alarm goes off in response to psychological stress not just immediate physical threat.

Now in a volatile, threatening world, our brains will indulge in hypervigilant cycling. We will look for threats everywhere and our brains will have little time to settle. This has implications for our bodies too - hypervigilance is the enemy of the rest and digest response so at difficult times, we see an increase in inflammatory illnesses, deaths of despair and so forth. When our amygdala is ascendant, we can’t think. No, seriously - our cognitive function is impaired by stress. When we experience stress:

“… a series of chemical events weaken the influence of the pre-frontal cortex while strengthening the dominance of the older parts of the brain. In essence, it transfers high level control over thought and emotion from the pre-frontal cortex to primal, evolutionary brain systems …”

Social scientist, Jon Haidt, describes this well in his excellent book: The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.” He uses the metaphor of a rider (the pre-frontal cortex) and elephant (the amygdala) to describe our behaviour at times of uncertainty. When the elephant is calm, the rider is in control and can give it instructions. When the animal is spooked, the rider can do nothing but hang on for the ride.

For most of history, the elephant has been in control. And this is probably reasonable when we consider periods of resource scarcity and conflict that presented genuine physical threats. But the most successful civilisations tame the elephant (or box the chimp to use a metaphor employed by acclaimed sports psychologist, Professor Steve Peters) and allow themselves to make plans rather than simply respond to proximate threats in a hypervigilant manner. Taming the Chimp is no easy task but it helps, a lot, to reduce feelings of threat by increasing feelings of confidence in the future.

This is something intuitively understood by John Maynard Keynes, here quoted in Zachary Carter’s excellent biography: The Price of Peace, Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes:

Particularly during hard times, people exhibited a powerful liquidity preference - the desire to hold cash on hand rather than tie up their money in investment vehicles. Even bankers, eyeing the economic landscape could be reluctant to approve longer term loans, opting either to hold on to cash or devote it to quick projects that would return the money fast.

Keynes had explored these ideas in his ‘Treatise on Probability’ in which he saw the limitations of probabilistic reasoning regarding complex outcomes. By the time he wrote "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" in 1936, he had refined these ideas to incorporate the importance of confidence in decision making under conditions of uncertainty.

I feel confident that the sun will rise tomorrow. I feel slightly less confident than this that I will have a job tomorrow. I feel slightly less confident that it will be the same job I have today and slightly less that I will earn the same income. But circumstances can be arranged in which my confidence will be damaged or depleted.

Now Keynes was talking about money here but we can see the same issue in the policy making of the recent administration. Instead of creating policy that invests in long term outcomes, these politicians have responded to the depleted confidence of their voters by showing a preference for “quick projects that would return money (read: votes) fast”.

When leaders tame the elephant, they recognise that these fast thinking, System 1 felt reactions will not tame uncertainty. They may fix a problem over here only to cause 10 more over there. But democratic methods of Government have no choice but to inflect towards System 1, hypervigilant manifestations of the collective will, because this is how they win votes. This is not a post in favour of cancelling democracy, but I wish to point out the limitations of a system that rewards fast, reactive, emotionally salient soundbite, performative governance over slow, planned, responsive, emotionally quiet, trial and error governance. We can get away with it in extended periods of resource abundance and decreased external threats (e.g. during “the great moderation”) but at times of scarcity, uncertainty or collective threat, appeals to a hypervigilant amygdala will be considerably more effective than appeals to the executive functions (planning, self regulation, control) of the pre-frontal cortex.

This is why the Prime Minister’s (God it feels good to say that!) Ming Vase strategy was so important. What was represented as over-caution or lack of vision, was in fact a careful strategy to calm hypervigilance. We do live in times of huge uncertainty. The rise of oligarchy post 2008, the climate crisis and break-down in the Bretton Woods order, all pose significant threats to Western societies. Not to mention the elephant in the room - the energy crisis as we attempt to transition away from high density sources of fuel to less dense or more risky delivery models. These sources of uncertainty have been clanging away since 2008 and we have seen this reflected in the rise of populist - read: parties that leverage hypervigilance - parties. It has prevented Western governments from responding to threats with well planned, reversible trial and error policies and forced them into reactive, all or nothing proximate governance. In Britain, we need only look at Brexit, immigration or Covid to see how intelligent, rational policy makers (Cameron, May, Sunak) were pushed into reactive, performative nonsense to try and control the stampeding elephant. NONE OF THIS HAS WORKED. It has just increased the elephant’s fury.

As Keynes understood, the only way to tame the elephant is to increase its sense of security. Once animal spirits improve, the amygdala quietens and there is space for analysis, planning, thinking and unpacking of uncertainty. The incoming Government doesn’t need to fix the problems to improve animal spirits and get on with policy making. It just needs to calm everything down. To steer clear of the nonsense that spooks the elephant and treat it as a frightened creature in need of reassurance. That Starmer appears to understand this is extremely encouraging. It gives me real hope that we will finally see a stable, ordered policy making environment that can look at underlying causes of problems and offer sensible, evidence based solutions. Simple, proximate, reactive policy making may finally give way to complex, long term, adaptive policy making that will get us out of this hole. Here’s hoping anyway!