You are the crowd: milling friends in London at the weekend. Credit: Ollie Millington/Getty
There is a saying, which I think comes originally from a German government transport campaign but became an advertising slogan and general meme: “You’re not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.”
It seems relevant, now we’re in lockdown. I’d been thinking about it a lot recently with all the images of Columbia Road Flower Market, and the Tube, and various Norfolk coastal resorts, all rammed with people. Presumably those photos were taken by humans who were at the time in Columbia Road Flower Market, or on the Tube. You’re not in a crowd; you are a crowd. No doubt you have excellent reasons for being there, but no doubt so does everyone else. Hence, I presume, the lockdown.
It’s the same with panic-buying (with the caveat that true “panic-buying” and major stockpiling probably isn’t actually going on very much, as the excellent Stephen Bush of the New Statesman points out). In a chemist’s near my house, a parent was grumbling that all the Calpol had gone: “It’s so selfish. What if my kid gets ill?” But, of course, everyone else is thinking the exact same thing; that’s why there are no Calpols.
These concerns all map on very neatly to game theory, and specifically to the game-theory ideas known as “coordination problems”. The most famous two are probably the “prisoners’ dilemma” and the “tragedy of the commons”.
In the prisoners’ dilemma, two people are suspected of a crime, and are locked up separately. The police have enough evidence to convict them on a lesser charge, but they’re told – separately – that if they grass up their accomplice, the accomplice will get a longer sentence and they will go free. Of course, if they both turn grass, then they’ll both get long sentences (but these won’t be as long as if they were to stay schtum while their buddy narks on them).
The options are called “cooperate” (with your accomplice) or “defect”. So if you both cooperate, you get one year. If you both defect, you get two years. But if you defect and your accomplice cooperates, you walk free and they get three years (and vice versa).
Obviously, the best outcome from the point of view of minimising the total number of years served is for both to cooperate. You each serve one year; it’s just two years in total. But if you know your buddy is going to cooperate, it’s best to defect, because then you get away.
But your buddy knows that too! So he will defect. But then: if he defects, it’s still best for you to defect, so you get two years rather than three.
So even though you both could have got out after one year by cooperating, the optimal, “rational” (in the economic sense) decision is always to defect, so you end up serving two years. (Watch this gameshow clip for a remarkably dramatic demonstration; it’s so illustrative of the dilemma that it attracted academic attention.)
The tragedy of the commons is a similar but grander-scale idea. Imagine you have some common resource: a meadow where everyone can graze their livestock. There’s enough grass to graze 100 sheep comfortably and there are 10 farmers; if everyone keeps a flock of 10, the meadow will remain healthy and the animals will have enough to eat.
But if one farmer decides to add an 11th sheep, he gains all the value of that sheep, but pays only 10% of the cost to the resource. Of course, the other farmers make the exact same calculation, so everyone puts on an 11th sheep, and a 12th. The meadow gets overgrazed; the sheep become malnourished; and everyone ends up poorer than they would have if they’d just cooperated, but everyone was acting perfectly rationally (again, in the economic sense) at every juncture.
If you could coordinate the responses of the different agents – the prisoners or the farmers – the best outcome would be easy to achieve. If the prisoners could just talk, or some authority simply ordered the farmers to stick to 10 and punished those who didn’t, that would be the end of the problem. But the prisoners can’t talk, and there’s no Farming Czar to step in.
These are just thought experiments, but they turn up in real life. In the Cold War, the USA and USSR could have spent billions of dollars/roubles on hospitals and schools and made everyone’s life better, or on lots of big missiles with nuclear bombs on the top. You can cooperate and build the schools, or you can defect and build the missiles. As the thought experiment would predict, they ended up building the missiles.
And the parallels between the tragedy of the commons and the climate situation — it’s in everyone’s interest if we all reduce carbon use, but if you do emit carbon, you gain all the benefit of your economic activity while paying only a tiny fraction of the cost — are almost too obvious to state. (Although I did just state them anyway.) Again, if some world government were to be set up and punish countries for emitting too much, it would be simple to solve; but no real world government exists, so coordination remains hard.
In the time of the coronavirus these problems are being illustrated amazingly starkly. It’s in everyone’s interests if everyone strictly self-isolates and washes their hands 10 times a day. But these actions are costly – self-isolation is lonely, and thanks to the washing my hands at least are red and cracked and look like they’ve aged 20 years. So if everyone else were to do it, but you carried on walking around, licking lampposts, cuddling strangers and never washing your hands, just as normal, then you’d gain all the benefit of that while (assuming you’re relatively young and healthy) paying only a fraction of the increased risk.
Similarly, it’s in everyone’s best interests if we all agree to only buy one bottle of Calpol so the shelves are always full – but if you don’t trust other people to do that, it’s in your interest to buy extra, to make sure you have some. So everyone buys more than they need, spending too much money, and other people end up with none, even though there’s enough to go around.
That’s before you get into the utilitarian calculus: the moral mathematics of “if I do X, it will probably cause X good things but Y bad things; is X bigger or smaller than Y?” Doctors are going to have to decide who lives and who dies. Decisions made by politicians will do the same, and not always as obviously as you might think; Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, points out that during the Ebola crisis, more people died of malaria than the actual epidemic, because all the resources that would have been directed to curing them went to stopping the spread of the disease.
But even on a personal level, we are going to have to make those sorts of decisions. If I take my children to the park — even if I am incredibly careful — I am slightly increasing the risk that they or I will pass on the disease. There is a small but non-zero chance that someone will die because of that decision. But if I don’t take them to the park, their lives will very probably be slightly worse. How do you trade low-probability but high-impact events off against high-probability, low-impact ones like that? How many days at the park is worth one death? The answer is not “infinity”; we don’t think that lives are infinitely valuable. We take small risks of terrible things happening all the time, in order for nice things to very likely happen: we cross the road to the restaurant, we drive to the seaside.
Now, though, those decisions are being made starkly obvious. And the awful thing is that sometimes it is rational, on the utilitarian calculus. If your children gain +10 Happiness Points from going to the park, someone dying is worth -100,000 Happiness Points, and the risk of someone dying from your specific actions is 0.005%, then since 0.005% of -100,000 is -5, the park visit is worth it. How do you factor that in, when you’re already struggling to overcome the Molochian trap of the coordination problem?
I should admit: at the weekend, we took our children to a local park, moved as far away from others as we could, and played football and frisbee just between the four of us. Around us – at a distance – we could see dozens of others, all slowly moving around in their families or other groups. It looked like everyone was horribly aware of the utilitarian trade-off they were making, even if they weren’t thinking in actual numbers.
Millions of people around the country have been finding themselves in the middle of a massive multiplayer game of something like the coordination problems described above, played for real-world stakes of lives and happiness. People are having to try to work out what the right thing to do is, and sometimes having to do the right thing even though it is technically irrational — it will have worse outcomes for that person whatever everyone else does. I don’t blame them for not solving problems on the fly that people have spent entire PhDs on.
Coordination problems are not impossible to solve for the actors involved. The Cold War ended; progress has been made on carbon emissions. But it’s hard, and it takes time we don’t have. The Government’s lockdown represents the equivalent of the Farming Czar coming in and ordering everyone to cooperate. We’re not stuck in traffic, we are traffic, and right now we need the roads to be clear.
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SubscribeI appreciate that the article focussed more on the methodology rather than the underlying political position, but there is no getting away from the fact that Fabianism is, at heart, Socialism.
Does depend what one means by Socialism. Like Capitalism, Socialism is a spectrum.
The use of both phrases probably too manichean. It’s much more nuanced.
I guess that is true. I would say that the positions espoused by Jeremy Corbyn are Socialist. There was a time I would have said the same about Ed Miliband.
Fabianism is first and foremost dishonest. It isn’t called Fabianism because of pragmatism but because the Webbs intended to use Fabius-like tactics of distraction, delay, and attrition to deliver socialism rather than directly fighting and winning the battle of ideas and votes. It’s founding action was the disguised permeation of socialism through universities and institutions. A socialism managed by upper middle class types who considered themselves intellectual superiors. It is exactly that dishonesty and managerialism that is the cause of our division and debilitation today. It is the spread of Fabianist action throughout universities and institutions that has delivered their disfunction and slow collapse.
The author writes the “original Fabians found themselves in a fraught political climate. Faced with a complacent establishment that despised socialism” but neglects to mention socialism was despised by a majority of all classes and was never going to win at the ballot box. The innovation Fabianism offered was that instead of socialism by bullet they’d deliver it by gradualist stealth.
The author does acknowledge the gradualism of Fabian action but fails to extrapolate what this means: any current political moderation is a pretence, merely the next small but necessary gradual step on the road to socialism. By very many small steps they march through the institutions… Most who live in the UK will recognise the universities, civil service, and judiciary are now saturated with left wing politics exactly as the Fabians set out to do. This leads directly to our biggest crisis: a Fabian managerial class governing for all of us without any mandate and beyond accountability. I don’t totally doubt their well meaning sincerity, but a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim is still a tyranny.
As a footnote, the Webbs went on to write the very influential book Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? It was an entirely uncritical review of Stalin’s farming collectivisation, his creation of the gulags, and the purges of the 1930s. It was pure Soviet propaganda justifying mass murder written by two unapologetic socialists who just happened to be the founders of Fabianism. The Webbs and the motives of Fabians should be talked about in the same way we talk about National Socialists. There is never, ever any good in the greater good.
Indeed. The level of naivety in the article is disturbing. The author purports to advocate “sensible” policies (who doesn’t!) but there’s a dissonance between his interpretation of Fabianism and the authoritarian mindset that currently prevails.
What this suggests is that our so-called “intellectuals” are unable to free themselves from the very groupthink which they purport to be seeking to critique.
One of the ‘signifiers’ is the frequent use if the word “even”. If an author uses this word as a device to seek to elucidate their argument, i think of the term “special pleading”. I lost count of the number of times it occurs in this article.
‘What this suggests is that our so-called “intellectuals” are unable to free themselves from the very groupthink which they purport to be seeking to critique.’
I find this very true of the BBC. People like Andrew Marr seem utterly convinced of the self-evident nature of their position on any particular topic, to the extent that you get the impression he is oblivious to the concept that his position is necessarily a partial one and is reflective of a particular time, place and class.
Any deviation from the narrative (see John Lydon on his show recently) is seen as merely a lack of accurate information and perspective, benevolently bestowed upon us by people like Andrew.
Plus, you didn’t win. She had questions in advance. With the cat meme, it looks like the debate is working against Harris . And if Starmer’s moderation won, it seems to have been a pyrrhic victory. Joel is normally much better than this. The Fabians, Starmer and Harris are all extremists. Trump is much more of a centrist than any of them. A narcissistic celebrity for sure. But basically a centrist.
So true. There is never any good in the greater good.
As a Christian I firmly believe the fabian society along with most similar organisations and think tanks are bad at best and probably Satanically inspired.
Correct me if I’m wrong but the fabian society emblem is straight out the Bible… a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
They are a link in a chain in a movement to totalitarian control over humanity.
Whether they’re aware of it or not they are pawns of Satan.
For similar reasons Islam specifically hates Jews and Christians.
Anthony Hutton wrote well about part of this movement in his Skull and Bones book.
Marx was in to the occult I believe.
Yes, the Fabian Society coat of arms is a wolf in a sheep’s clothing. An odd choice for an organisation claiming not to have any ulterior motives… I’m reminded of That Mitchell and Webb Look comedy sketch where two SS soldiers ponder if they’re actually not the good guys because they have a skull and crossbones on their caps.
“our biggest crisis: a Fabian managerial class governing for all of us without any mandate and beyond accountability”.
True enough but when has the managerial class ever had any mandate or been accountable? I mean anywhere, ever, from modern Britain to ancient China? Sounds like hankering for a time when the ruling class shared your worldview rather than a memory of a golden age when mandarins implemented the will of the people and were held to account when they failed.
I didn’t think the author really understood what Fabianism is at all. I hope he reads your excellent comment.
Pretty first-rate analysis.
How did they manage this practice? In a word: moderation.
There’s something bland and weak about this as a way forward. I can’t think of any part of anyone’s history that’s taken a successful leap with moderation. Moderation feels like a watered down version of life itself. It just doesn’t feel likely that human progress has been the result of moderation. Circumstances may force upon us, without us choosing, something in between as the road forward (which may look like moderation in retrospect) but only because the two extremes confronted each other. Choosing moderation seems to me a weak foundation for leaping into the future.
And yet it’s the essence of Britishness and has been for some centuries.
And look at the state of the country.
Not true.
The British Empire wasn’t acquired by moderation !
In those days we executed Admiral Byng for not fighting at Menorca. His moderation may have been reasonable, but it certainly wasn’t acceptable in those days.
Of course, these days someone like Gareth Southgate will doubtless be getting a knighthood for his exemplary moderation in not taking the risk of winning at football.
One could argue even the British Empire was more moderate than some without entire rose tinted specs.
The point more that our politics has emerged through evolution and not revolution. You have to go back to 1640s for a revolution, and even then we reverted back within a decade or so to a much more organic development. Whilst Europe has history of convulsions we are much more often moderate and tolerant
1688
Common sense, moderation, practical solutions and less performative rhetoric. Fairly radical stuff at the moment.
Not going to play well of course with the Unherd base.
You could of course tell us why, rather than stating it as fact. There’s a laughable op-ed written by Gordon Brown in today’s Guardian… that right JW, The Guardian. Those ghastly proles not voting the right way again.
I suppose we can give the Fabians a break when they were formed but it’s been proved time and time again that ideologies fail and utopia cannot exist because of paradox. It’s funny how utopia always requires coercion then authoritarianism, which leads to corruption and collapse. You’d thought “enlightened” people would know this.
And not very Fabian.
If you think that’s Fabianism you desperately need to read some history.
This article meanders all over the place and is in places, downright silly. We are meant to agree with a lot of the proposed ideas because they seem calm and quiet and sensible. It forgets one very important point: vested interests.
I agree with the author that the climate change lobby has run out of steam but Ed isn’t going to turn around and say, “Let’s slow things down a bit”, because he would then lose control and lose status. The same is true of the scientists who advise him. The feeling of power, of control, gets in the way of all of these cosy ideas. In London the mayor is using his power to control people, to make them do stupid things, to have power over them. He will not give that up. Nor would his successors (if he would ever allow a successor).
Fabianism, or Communism, has failed everywhere because people want power over other people.
The vast majority of the public understand that you cannot stop immigration altogether. Not without addressing a multiplicity of issues over generations.
I know the author is using it to present a balanced pro-Fabian argument, whilst having a swipe at the proles. But it’s a malicious lie.
Freddie, please don’t let this lazy stuff through.
Immigration whilst maintaining a national culture and a sustainable welfare state should not be beyond the wit of our political class, Tory, Labour or Fabian, when we have 70 years experience of what works and what doesn’t.
Why they ignore that unrivalled experience, in favour of untested treaties and international compacts to signal a nation’s virtue, is a mystery to everyone. Maybe let’s have an article on that.
You think Britain is a racist country? Name one country with a welfare state and a better track record that we could learn from. Without including those in the EU that have now erected manned borders and commenced deportations.
The Webbs famously espoused eugenics and selective breeding programmes. Doesn’t scream ‘moderate’ to me.
Yes. Time someone pointed that out. They were also massive fans of Stalin who conspired to keep news of the holomodor out of the media.
Their worst crime though, both then and now, was to hijack the Labour Party and turn it into a vehicle for middle class busybodying. We’re still living with the consequences.
All the progressives were. Global warming policies will be viewed in the same way 100 years from now.
Fabianism as our way foreward?….I hope not. Fabianism was not really “pragmatic”; it was just a bit less frenzied than more recent iterations of the ideology of “Progress”….(ie progress brought about by political means rather than as a by-product of technology and enterprise). And the Bloomsbury set were brimful of vanity and sentimentality. A much better pointer to what we need would be Edmund Burke. “Edmund Burke – father of modern conservatism – expressed this caution in this axiom: “frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.” Few people are outright opposed to political change but Progressives seem permanently hungry for it and believe that politics is the way to make it happen. Recent history suggests that they are right in this belief but paradoxically are unlikely to actually be all that happy with the changes they have helped bring about.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/mrs-thatcher-and-the-good-life
lol at the USA having a ‘lively welfare state’
Moderate Communists. But immoderate eugenicists.
“and Kamala Harris proved in her debate with Donald Trump — remaining level-headed wins debates and often elections.”
Are you referring to that ABC inspired hit job debate, fact checking Trump, while letting Kamala coast? Might want to check out her recent solo interview by an ABC affiliate in Philadelphia for another take!
As Keir Starmer has shown — and Kamala Harris proved in her debate with Donald Trump — remaining level-headed wins debates and often elections.
It was at this point that I scrolled to the comments. Did I miss anything of value between that line and here?
Not much.
Kotkin uses “Fabianism” as a synonym for – variously – gradualism, pragmatism and realism. This is not the historical or, for those who carry it on, current meaning of Fabianism, which is a centrist branch of socialism with specific political aims.
You could equally well have a gradualist right wing group or a pragmatic anti-authoritarian movement, but they wouldn’t be Fabians.
Perhaps Kotkin would be better using the term “Fabius-ism” but really I think he’s trying to lump too many concepts together.
While I acknowledge and share the rejection of Fabianism and its founders, the article brings up good points that are hard to reject. To what degree are those ideas Fabianist? I guess avoiding to mention the Fabians alltogether would have spared the author most of the flak he attracted. He must have had a different idea when he wrote the piece. But which?
Most of the Commenters miss a very important point.
Here in the US, Franklin Delano Roosevelt used Socialism (lite) to save Capitalism (viscous) from its own excesses. Most of his programs failed or never got through Congress. But enough of them stuck that we went on to help win a very serious war and then had the best decades of our existence. Social Security, a sharply graduated income tax, fair labor laws, farm security, industrial recovery, banking regulation and deposit insurance, etc; without FDR we would be unrecognizable.
(Unfortunately, in the 80s and 90s various “leaders” came along and hobbled most of it. Then we got globalization. And here we are, barely limping along.)
The “New Deal” might have been necessary given the conditions that prevailed in the 1930s, but the US fortunately moved in a rather more capitalist direction thereafter.
“And here we are, barely limping along.”
Whatever issues we face, Socialism isn’t the answer.
Indeed. It was especially the renewed New Deal policies and the sound agreements of Bretton Woods after the war that brought the most stable period in recent history. Trade was facilitated, innovation was very high but capital and speculation was restrained. The backlash in the 80s against this system has been explained as simple class warfare by many scholars. The Rand corporation estimated that about 50 trillion was transferred from the lower classes to the upper class in the first waves of neoliberalisation.
“Centrist socialists”….so the Fabians incrementally screw up everything, and destroy their society slowly and respectfully…no thanks.
When one considers the leadership imposed damage being inglicted on the West we are apparently already led by wolves in sheep’s clothing, the symbol of the Fabians
If anything I think that there is actually way too little radical change in the face of a system that essentially already collapsed after 2008. Yes, there is a lot of radial rhetoric – especially since that 2008 crisis – but it mostly just remains rhetoric. The extreme center, first and foremost, aims to protect the status quo as it was established in the 80s. It seems they rather drag everyone down with them than allowing serious reforms.
The problem with planning to be in the middle is that the extremes tell you where it’s at.
I think this article portrays the Fabians as benign and enlightening. But if one delves into the research, their legacy becomes rather more pernicious.
last thing we need if the Fabians, David Lammy say he is one and I would not trust him as far as I could throw him, Zionist rat.
Fabian scientic rationalism and gradulist socialism has included advocacy of euthanasia, colonial imperialism and some nasty racist attitudes, while its influence on the British Labour has not always been beneficent.