It Takes a Village You Didn't Build

I mentioned just a few posts ago the conceit that DC is a "town," to its residents. Many cities do this, as it is humorous and ironic for large and important places to pretend to modesty in that way. "If you want to get anything done in this town..." sounds like the advice of a wiser, older hand at whatever game is being played. Yet I noted that this is in many ways true about their attitude, that they do not much notice what happens elsewhere. All the important stuff is happening where they are.

It was thus interesting to hear Dominic Cummings (Brexit and Leave advisor to the Tories and Boris Johnson, who just barely took his advice) describe that Members of Parliament were not actually much motivated by power.  I have heard much the same about DC politicians, that the need for attention and notoriety is stronger. But Cummings went one surprising step further: MPs aren't motivated by getting re-elected either, which is the usual fallback description. Many districts are safe and those members can hold them as long as they like, and the remainder, once they have been established in London in this way can get important and prestigious jobs even if they get tossed by their voters.

The real motivation are the alliances and competitions within each party, jockeying for status and position there. They don't particularly care what solves a problem for the country, they care what faction of their party is going to be going up or down. That is, it's a village, with all the small-town pettiness that implies.

Dominic Cummings 

So the naive view of politics is that the people in charge actually are sitting in government, then when you actually meet them, and you realize that's obviously not the case that almost all of them have no real interest in government at all. But then the slightly updated version of that is okay, Well, they're not interested in the government, but they are at least interested in winning elections. But that also is not correct. One of the most interesting things about politics, I think, is that they're not actually even serious about winning elections. And one of the ways you know, that is because if you're serious about winning elections, then you would take polling seriously. And you can just see as a matter of unarguable fact that almost all politicians just don't even take politics seriously. And what they're actually optimizing for almost always is very short term horizons, in terms of how the media operate, and in group signaling that affects their careers, you know, so what the internal shifts, or the internal shifting Coalition on their own side, what they're thinking of very short term calculations about how you send signals to this coalition, and therefore do or do not get opportunities to ascend these hierarchies. And the feedback on these things is very short term, and it pretty much swamps actually calculating rationally, how you would win an election, if you actually want to win an election, that huge amount of behavior will be radically different than what you actually see

Steve Hsu
Is this situation somewhat different in the UK because you have a parliamentary system because having the support of the other Tories in the long run might be more important than a particular election? Whereas in the US, like the guys who want to become president, they do really care. Now, they may not really understand polling, either, but they do really want to win that election.

Dominic Cummings
So, no, I don't think I don't think it is different. I'll give you a classic example. Look at the Hillary campaign. If you look at the Hillary campaign, something like a third of the adverts that Hillary's campaign ran, not only were not even just a waste of time, they actively helped Trump and the adverts which got which had most money behind them, and got most attention and retweeting and kind of signal boosting from inside the Democratic coalition were precisely the adverts which most helped Trump and most harmed Hillary. So if you look at the Hillary campaign, they were absolute. I mean, it was a classic example that we'll be talking about, that they will, effectively the internal culture of the campaign was pulled far more towards, what's Washington thinking? What's the New York Times thinking? What are insiders thinking? What are our activists and our donors thinking? Not What do non-college whites in Wisconsin think? And that's why they lost the election? Which elect remains that they should never have lost?

Cummings finds it humorous that they were accused of nefarious deeds using Cambridge Analytics and other high-tech mastermind tactics both to pass Brexit and to elect Boris. In fact, they did simple polling and told everyone what they were up to.  What happens in these situations is that people don't want the simple answers and advice and won't take it, and then are puzzled later. He says the Tories are nearly as bad, and kept rejecting very simple advice based on very simple polling. He does say that the xbox polling is more valuable than people give it credit for, because even though it is slanted to young males, it covers a massive number of them, and shifts in that population, say from 65% to 71% for or against something, might reflect a shift from 49% to 52% in the population at large. His explanation why people reject this is 1) isolation in London (or NYC/DC/CA), so that they only confirmation-bias accept poll results that comport with what they see around them and 2) projection, that by refusing to see the simple answers because they don't like them, they conclude that the real answer must be some hidden, complicated, nefarious plot - because that's what they are trying to do. (Unsuccessfully, Cummings adds. Even polling companies don't believe polling!)

In other Cummings news he notes that Boris's GF hated them from the start and as soon as the election was over - even the next day - she separated him from them. He would not bother to meet with Johnson at this point, whom he states believes what he senses from media response more than data. Good times.

So with all that in mind, I thought of Hillary's "It takes a village" and Obama's "You didn't build that," which are both true in one sense, but both contain the unquestioned assumption that "It was our village that built this, so you need to put us back in charge of things." Both conservatives and liberals don't quite get that this is what is being said.  Conservatives want to applaud the entrepreneur or hard working man or woman who claim they did too build what they've got, even though they also have a village behind them.  Just not a government village.  Not the DC village. They had the founding fathers and good genes and decent role models. That village. Liberals don't get that the government village, for all its positives, may at this point be a net negative.  It certainly has externalities they don't consider.