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Two years on from the general election, we still don’t know how the Tories intend to build back better.
Dominic Cummings had a pretty good idea of what needs to be done, but he’s long gone. And now Gove’s white paper on the levelling-up agenda has been delayed. Two big speeches from the Prime Minister this year were supposed to flesh out the agenda, but the first was a let-down and the second a major embarrassment.
The only hint of a guiding principle came in a third — Boris Johnson’s crowdpleaser at the Conservative Party conference. Here’s the key passage: “If you insist on the economic theory behind levelling-up it is contained in the insight of Wilfredo Pareto… that there are all kinds of improvements you can make to people’s lives he said without diminishing anyone else… we call these Pareto improvements.”
Why was the PM referring to a 19th century Italian economist? He claimed at the time that Pareto had merely “floated from the cobwebbed attic of my memories”. But I’m not so sure. I suspect he is foundational to Johnson’s entire political outlook.
Vilfredo Pareto was born in 1848 to an Italian father and a French mother. He trained as a civil engineer, but in mid-life switched to an academic career — in which he shaped the modern disciplines of economics and sociology. His theories are complex and contradictory. But paradoxically they’re also accessible through bite-size concepts such as Pareto improvements (see above), Pareto efficiency and, most famously, the Pareto principle.
This last one is also known as the 80-20 rule. It’s the idea that, in many situations, 80% of the consequences come from only 20% of the causes. This has been expressed in all sort of ways ever since — including the half-joke than in any organisation 20% of the people do 80% of the useful work. Pareto claimed that this basic pattern could be seen everywhere, which is why he thought that human society is naturally hierarchical.
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SubscribeI don’t think governors in the provinces has any useful future, but undoubtedly what a large section of the population would like to see is a vigorous shaking of the cornflake packet to dislodge the current leftist elites bedded down in quangos, the BBC, the NHS and other semi-autonomous authorities that are infested with people determined to frustrate any more conservative movement and determined to enforce an unwanted progressive woke agenda.
The problem is that Johnson seems to have stopped shaking the packet and in fact seems to have been captured by the elites in place. I fear his shaking is confined to his domestic sphere.
You only have to look at local police commissioners to see what a waste of time governors would be. Hardly anyone votes for them and when in office they are either incompetent, useless, or worse.
Labour have the answer to Boris’s Cornflake box – so it stops the big flakes always rising to the top, and the small ones always settling – just grind them all up to equal sized flour, and shake all you wish, and none are better off…so much more elegant than the current ‘Harrison Bergeron.’ system the Left are trying to implement.
Surely that should be “Grind them all down.”
Nils barstado carborundum
… inequalities — of wealth, power and achievement — were inevitable. While one might seek to order society for the benefit of “the many not the few”, hierarchy will always be the result if the few make most of the difference.
IMO, therein lies the immorality for the social justice left. The inevitability of inequality is the anathema to an emotional, feelings-based nurturing mindset. The realisation of this inevitability grounds the belief in social constructionism, such that natural variation in ability does not exist and is social in origin and therefore unjust, to be remedied by diversity and equity doctrines.
Right. As they used to say in the old Soviet Union, everyone is equal under Communism, but some are more equal than others.
Following Sir Philip Barton’s performance yesterday as Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, a timely article on our useless rotten elites .