Jim Yong Kim at World Economic Forum: “Good governance is critical for all countries around the world today. When it doesn’t exist, many governments fail to deliver public services effectively, health and education services are often substandard and corruption persists in rich and poor countries alike, choking opportunity and growth. It will be difficult to reduce extreme poverty — let alone end it — without addressing the importance of good governance.
But this is not a hopeless situation. In fact, a new wave of progress on governance suggests we may be on the threshold of a transformational era. Countries are tapping into some of the most powerful forces in the world today to improve services and transparency. These forces include the spread of information technology and its convergence with grassroots movements for transparency, accountability and citizen empowerment. In some places, this convergence is easing the path to better-performing and more accountable governments.
The Philippines is a good example of a country embracing good governance. During a recent visit, I spoke with President Benigno Aquino about his plans to reduce poverty, create jobs, and ensure that economic growth is inclusive. He talked in great detail about how improving governance is a fundamentally important part of their strategy. The government has opened government data and contract information so citizens can see how their tax money is spent. The Foreign Aid Transparency Hub, launched after Typhoon Yolanda, offers a real-time look at pledges made and money delivered for typhoon recovery. Geo-tagging tools monitor assistance for people affected by the typhoon.
Opening budgets to scrutiny
This type of openness is spreading. Now many countries that once withheld information are opening their data and budgets to public scrutiny.
Late last year, my organization, the World Bank Group, established the Open Budgets Portal, a repository for budget data worldwide. So far, 13 countries have posted their entire public spending datasets online — including Togo, the first fragile state to do so.
In 2011, we helped Moldova become the first country in central Europe to launch an open data portal and put its expenditures online. Now the public and media can access more than 700 datasets, and are asking for more.
The original epicenter of the Arab Spring, Tunisia, recently passed a new constitution and is developing the first open budget data portal in the Middle East and North Africa. Tunisia has taken steps towards citizen engagement by developing a citizens’ budget and civil society-led platforms such as Marsoum41, to support freedom of information requests, including via mobile.
Using technology to improve services
Countries also are tapping into technology to improve public and private services. Estonia is famous for building an information technology infrastructure that has permitted widespread use of electronic services — everything from filing taxes online to filling doctors’ drug prescriptions.
In La Paz, Bolivia, a citizen feedback system known as OnTrack allows residents of one of the city’s marginalized neighbourhoods to send a text message on their mobile phones to provide feedback, make suggestions or report a problem related to public services.
In Pakistan, government departments in Punjab are using smart phones to collect real-time data on the activities of government field staff — including photos and geo-tags — to help reduce absenteeism and lax performance….”
Chief Executive of Nesta on the Future of Government Innovation
Interview between Rahim Kanani and Geoff Mulgan, CEO of NESTA and member of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance: “Our aspiration is to become a global center of expertise on all kinds of innovation, from how to back creative business start-ups and how to shape innovations tools such as challenge prizes, to helping governments act as catalysts for new solutions,” explained Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation. In an interview with Mulgan, we discussed their new report, published in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, which highlights 20 of the world’s top innovation teams in government. Mulgan and I also discussed the founding and evolution of Nesta over the past few years, and leadership lessons from his time inside and outside government.
Rahim Kanani: When we talk about ‘innovations in government’, isn’t that an oxymoron?
Geoff Mulgan: Governments have always innovated. The Internet and World Wide Web both originated in public organizations, and governments are constantly developing new ideas, from public health systems to carbon trading schemes, online tax filing to high speed rail networks. But they’re much less systematic at innovation than the best in business and science. There are very few job roles, especially at senior levels, few budgets, and few teams or units. So although there are plenty of creative individuals in the public sector, they succeed despite, not because of the systems around them. Risk-taking is punished not rewarded. Over the last century, by contrast, the best businesses have learned how to run R&D departments, product development teams, open innovation processes and reasonably sophisticated ways of tracking investments and returns.
Kanani: This new report, published in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, highlights 20 of the world’s most effective innovation teams in government working to address a range of issues, from reducing murder rates to promoting economic growth. Before I get to the results, how did this project come about, and why is it so important?
Mulgan: If you fail to generate new ideas, test them and scale the ones that work, it’s inevitable that productivity will stagnate and governments will fail to keep up with public expectations, particularly when waves of new technology—from smart phones and the cloud to big data—are opening up dramatic new possibilities. Mayor Bloomberg has been a leading advocate for innovation in the public sector, and in New York he showed the virtues of energetic experiment, combined with rigorous measurement of results. In the UK, organizations like Nesta have approached innovation in a very similar way, so it seemed timely to collaborate on a study of the state of the field, particularly since we were regularly being approached by governments wanting to set up new teams and asking for guidance.
Kanani: Where are some of the most effective innovation teams working on these issues, and how did you find them?
Mulgan: In our own work at Nesta, we’ve regularly sought out the best innovation teams that we could learn from and this study made it possible to do that more systematically, focusing in particular on the teams within national and city governments. They vary greatly, but all the best ones are achieving impact with relatively slim resources. Some are based in central governments, like Mindlab in Denmark, which has pioneered the use of design methods to reshape government services, from small business licensing to welfare. SITRA in Finland has been going for decades as a public technology agency, and more recently has switched its attention to innovation in public services. For example, providing mobile tools to help patients manage their own healthcare. In the city of Seoul, the Mayor set up an innovation team to accelerate the adoption of ‘sharing’ tools, so that people could share things like cars, freeing money for other things. In south Australia the government set up an innovation agency that has been pioneering radical ways of helping troubled families, mobilizing families to help other families.
Kanani: What surprised you the most about the outcomes of this research?
Mulgan: Perhaps the biggest surprise has been the speed with which this idea is spreading. Since we started the research, we’ve come across new teams being created in dozens of countries, from Canada and New Zealand to Cambodia and Chile. China has set up a mobile technology lab for city governments. Mexico City and many others have set up labs focused on creative uses of open data. A batch of cities across the US supported by Bloomberg Philanthropy—from Memphis and New Orleans to Boston and Philadelphia—are now showing impressive results and persuading others to copy them.
Are the Authoritarians Winning?
Review of several books by Michael Ignatieff in the New York Review of Books: “In the 1930s travelers returned from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany praising the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there, compared to which their own democracies seemed weak, inefficient, and pusillanimous.
Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. Authoritarian competitors are aglow with arrogant confidence. In the 1930s, Westerners went to Russia to admire Stalin’s Moscow subway stations; today they go to China to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai, and just as in the 1930s, they return wondering why autocracies can build high-speed railroad lines seemingly overnight, while democracies can take forty years to decide they cannot even begin. The Francis Fukuyama moment—when in 1989 Westerners were told that liberal democracy was the final form toward which all political striving was directed—now looks like a quaint artifact of a vanished unipolar moment.
For the first time since the end of the cold war, the advance of democratic constitutionalism has stopped. The army has staged a coup in Thailand and it’s unclear whether the generals will allow democracy to take root in Burma. For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Côte d’Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.
In Latin America, democracy has sunk solid roots in Chile, but in Mexico and Colombia it is threatened by violence, while in Argentina it struggles to shake off the dead weight of Peronism. In Brazil, the millions who took to the streets last June to protest corruption seem to have had no impact on the cronyism in Brasília. In the Middle East, democracy has a foothold in Tunisia, but in Syria there is chaos; in Egypt, plebiscitary authoritarianism rules; and in the monarchies, absolutism is ascendant.
In Europe, the policy elites keep insisting that the remedy for their continent’s woes is “more Europe” while a third of their electorate is saying they want less of it. From Hungary to Holland, including in France and the UK, the anti-European right gains ground by opposing the European Union generally and immigration in particular. In Russia the democratic moment of the 1990s now seems as distant as the brief constitutional interlude between 1905 and 1914 under the tsar….
It is not at all apparent that “governance innovation,” a bauble Micklethwait and Wooldridge chase across three continents, watching innovators at work making government more efficient in Chicago, Sacramento, Singapore, and Stockholm, will do the trick. The problem of the liberal state is not that it lacks modern management technique, good software, or different schemes to improve the “interface” between the bureaucrats and the public. By focusing on government innovation, Micklethwait and Wooldridge assume that the problem is improving the efficiency of government. But what is required is both more radical and more traditional: a return to constitutional democracy itself, to courts and regulatory bodies that are freed from the power of money and the influence of the powerful; to legislatures that cease to be circuses and return to holding the executive branch to public account while cooperating on measures for which there is a broad consensus; to elected chief executives who understand that they are not entertainers but leaders….”
Books reviewed:
Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America’s House in Order
by Richard N. Haass
Basic Books, 195 pp., $15.99 (paper)
Restraint: A New Foundation for US Grand Strategy
by Barry R. Posen
Cornell University Press, 234 pp., $29.95
The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Penguin, 305 pp., $27.95
Reforming Taxation to Promote Growth and Equity
a white paper by Joseph Stiglitz
Roosevelt Institute, 28 pp., May 28, 2014; available at rooseveltinstitute.org“
Twiplomacy Study 2014
Twiplomacy: “World leaders vie for attention, connections and followers on Twitter, that’s the latest finding of Burson-Marsteller’s Twiplomacy study 2014, an annual global study looking at the use of Twitter by heads of state and government and ministers of foreign affairs.
While some heads of state and government continue to amass large followings, foreign ministers have established a virtual diplomatic network by following each other on the social media platform.
For many diplomats Twitter has becomes a powerful channel for digital diplomacy and 21st century statecraft and not all Twitter exchanges are diplomatic, real world differences are spilling over reflected on Twitter and sometimes end up in hashtag wars.
“I am a firm believer in the power of technology and social media to communicate with people across the world,” India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote in his inaugural message on his new website. Within weeks of his election in May 2014, the @NarendraModi account has moved into the top four most followed Twitter accounts of world leaders with close to five million followers.
More than half of the world’s foreign ministers and their institutions are active on the social networking site. Twitter has become an indispensable diplomatic networking and communication tool. As Finnish Prime Minister @AlexStubb wrote in a tweet in March 2014: “Most people who criticize Twitter are often not on it. I love this place. Best source of info. Great way to stay tuned and communicate.”
As of 25 June 2014, the vast majority (83 percent) of the 193 UN member countries have a presence on Twitter. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of all heads of state and heads of government have personal accounts on the social network.
As of 24 June 2014, the vast majority (83 percent) of the 193 UN member countries have a presence on Twitter. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of all heads of state and heads of government have personal accounts on the social network.
Most Followed World Leaders
Since his election in late May 2014, India’s new Prime Minister @NarendraModi has skyrocketed into fourth place, surpassing the the @WhiteHouse on 25 June 2014 and dropping Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül (@cbabdullahgul) and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (@RT_Erdogan) into sixth and seventh place with more than 4 million followers each.
Modi still has a ways to go to best U.S. President @BarackObama, who tops the world-leader list with a colossal 43.7 million followers, with Pope Francis @Pontifex) with 14 million followers on his nine different language accounts and Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono @SBYudhoyono, who has more than five million followers and surpassed President Obama’s official administration account @WhiteHouse on 13 February 2014.
In Latin America Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the President of Argentina @CFKArgentina is slightly ahead of Colombia’s President @JuanManSantos with 2,894,864 and 2,885,752 followers respectively. Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto @EPN, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff @dilmabr and Venezuela’s @NicolasMaduro complete the Latin American top five, with more than two million followers each.
Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta @UKenyatta is Africa’s most followed president with 457,307 followers, ahead of Rwanda’s @PaulKagame (407,515 followers) and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma (@SAPresident) (325,876 followers).
Turkey’s @Ahmet_Davutoglu is the most followed foreign minister with 1,511,772 followers, ahead of India’s @SushmaSwaraj (1,274,704 followers) and the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates @ABZayed (1,201,364 followers)…”
Every citizen a scientist? An EU project tries to change the face of research
Every citizen can be a scientist
The project helps usher in new advances in everything from astronomy to social science.
‘One breakthrough is our increased capacity to reproduce, analyse and understand complex issues thanks to the engagement of large groups of volunteers,’ says Mr Fermin Serrano Sanz, researcher at the University of Zaragoza and Project Coordinator of SOCIENTIZE. ‘And everyone can be a neuron in our digitally-enabled brain.’
But how can ordinary citizens help with such extraordinary science? The key, says Mr Serrano Sanz, is in harnessing the efforts of thousands of volunteers to collect and classify data. ‘We are already gathering huge amounts of user-generated data from the participants using their mobile phones and surrounding knowledge,’ he says.
For example, the experiment ‘SavingEnergy@Home’ asks users to submit data about the temperatures in their homes and neighbourhoods in order to build up a clearer picture of temperatures in cities across the EU, while in Spain, GripeNet.es asks citizens to report when they catch the flu in order to monitor outbreaks and predict possible epidemics.
Many Hands Make Light Work
But citizens can also help analyse data. Even the most advanced computers are not very good at recognising things like sun spots or cells, whereas people can tell the difference between living and dying cells very easily, given only a short training.
The SOCIENTIZE projects ‘Sun4All’ and ‘Cell Spotting’ ask volunteers to label images of solar activity and cancer cells from an application on their phone or computer. With Cell Spotting, for instance, participants can observe cell cultures being studied with a microscope in order to determine their state and the effectiveness of medicines. Analysing this data would take years and cost hundreds of thousands of euros if left to a small team of scientists – but with thousands of volunteers helping the effort, researchers can make important breakthroughs quickly and more cheaply than ever before.
But in addition to bringing citizens closer to science, SOCIENTIZE also brings science closer to citizens. On 12-14 June, the project participated in the SONAR festival with ‘A Collective Music Experiment’ (CME). ‘Two hundred people joined professional DJs and created musical patterns using a web tool; participants shared their creations and re-used other parts in real time. The activity in the festival also included a live show of RdeRumba and Mercadal playing amateurs rhythms’ Mr. Serrano Sanz explains.
The experiment – which will be presented in a mini-documentary to raise awareness about citizen science – is expected to help understand other innovation processes observed in emergent social, technological, economic or political transformations. ‘This kind of event brings together a really diverse set of participants. The diversity does not only enrich the data; it improves the dialogue between professionals and volunteers. As a result, we see some new and innovative approaches to research.’
The EUR 0.7 million project brings together 6 partners from 4 countries: Spain (University of Zaragoza and TECNARA), Portugal (Museu da Ciência-Coimbra, MUSC ; Universidade de Coimbra), Austria (Zentrum für Soziale Innovation) and Brazil (Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, UFCG).
SOCIENTIZE will end in October 2104 after bringing together 12000 citizens in different phases of research activities for 24 months.”
App pays commuters to take routes that ease congestion
Springwise: “Congestion at peak hours is a major problem in the world’s busiest city centres. We’ve recently seen Gothenburg in Sweden offering free bicycles to ease the burden on public transport services, but now a new app is looking to take a different approach to the same problem. Urban Engines uses algorithms to help cities determine key congestion choke points and times, and can then reward commuters for avoiding them.
The Urban Engines system is based on commuters using the smart commuter cards already found in many major cities. The company tracks journeys made with those commuter cards, and uses that data to identify main areas of congestion, and at what times the congestion occurs. The system has already been employed in Washington, D.C, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, helping provide valuable data for work with city planners.
It’s in Singapore, however, where the most interesting work has been achieved so far. There, commuters who have signed up and registered their commuter cards can earn rewards when they travel. They will earn one point for every kilometre travelled during peak hours, or triple that when travelling off-peak. The points earned can then be converted into discounts on future journeys, or put towards an in-app raffle game, where they have the opportunity to win sums of money. Urban Engines claim there’s been a 7 to 13 percent reduction in journeys made during peak hours, with 200,000 commuters taking part.
The company is based on an original experiment carried out in Bangalore. The rewards program there, carried out among 20,000 employees of the Indian company Infosys, lead to 17 percent of traffic shifting to off-peak travel times in six months. A similarly successful experiment has also been carried out on the Stanford University campus, and the plan is to now expand to other major cities…”
New Book on 25 Years of Participatory Budgeting
Tiago Peixoto at Democracy Spot: “A little while ago I mentioned the launch of the Portuguese version of the book organized by Nelson Dias, “Hope for Democracy: 25 Years of Participatory Budgeting Worldwide”.
The good news is that the English version is finally out. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
This book represents the effort of more than forty authors and many other direct and indirect contributions that spread across different continents seek to provide an overview on the Participatory Budgeting (PB) in the World. They do so from different backgrounds. Some are researchers, others are consultants, and others are activists connected to several groups and social movements. The texts reflect this diversity of approaches and perspectives well, and we do not try to influence that.
(….)
The pages that follow are an invitation to a fascinating journey on the path of democratic innovation in very diverse cultural, political, social and administrative settings. From North America to Asia, Oceania to Europe, from Latin America to Africa, the reader will find many reasons to closely follow the proposals of the different authors.
The book can be downloaded here [PDF]. I had the pleasure of being one of the book’s contributors, co-authoring an article with Rafael Sampaio on the use of ICT in PB processes: “Electronic Participatory Budgeting: False Dilemmas and True Complexities” [PDF]...”
Open Government Will Reshape Latin America
Alejandro Guerrero at Medium: “When people think on the place for innovations, they typically think on innovation being spurred by large firms and small startups based in the US. And particularly in that narrow stretch of land and water called Silicon Valley.
However, the flux of innovation taking place in the intersection between technology and government is phenomenal and emerging everywhere. From the marble hallways of parliaments everywhere —including Latin America’s legislative houses— to office hubs of tech-savvy non-profits full of enthusiastic social changers —also including Latin American startups— a driving force is starting to challenge our conception of how government and citizens can and should interact. And few people are discussing or analyzing these developments.
Open Government in Latin America
The potential for Open Government to improve government’s decision-making and performance is huge. And it is particularly immense in middle income countries such as the ones in Latin America, where the combination of growing incomes, more sophisticated citizens’ demands, and broken public services is generating a large bottom-up pressure and requesting more creative solutions from governments to meet the enormous social needs, while cutting down corruption and improving governance.
It is unsurprising that citizens from all over Latin America are increasingly taking the streets and demanding better public services and more transparent institutions.
While these protests are necessarily short-lived and unarticulated —a product of growing frustration with government— they are a symptom with deeper causes that won’t go easily away, and these protests will most likely come back with increasing frequency and the unresolved frustration may eventually transmute in political platforms with more radical ideas to challenge the status quo.
Behind the scene, governments across the region still face enormous weaknesses in public management, ill-prepared and underpaid public officials carry on with their duties as the platonic idea of a demotivated workforce, and the opportunities for corruption, waste, and nepotism are plenty. The growing segment of more affluent citizens simply opt out from government and resort to private alternatives, thus exacerbating inequalities in the already most unequal region in the world. The crumbling middle classes and the poor can just resort to voicing their complaints. And they are increasingly doing so.
And here is where open government initiatives might play a transformative role, disrupting the way governments make decisions and work while empowering citizens in the process.
The preconditions for OpenGov are almost here
In Latin America, connectivity rates are growing fast (reaching 61% in 2013 for the Americas as a whole), close to 90% of the population owns a cellphone, and access to higher levels of education keeps growing (as an example, the latest PISA report indicates that Mexico went from 58% in 2003 to 70% high-schoolers in 2012). The social conditions for a stronger role of citizens in government are increasingly there.
Moreover, most Latin American countries passed transparency laws during the 2000s, creating the enabling environment for open government initiatives to flourish. It is thus unsurprising that the next generation of young government bureaucrats, on average more internet-savvy and better educated than its predecessors, is taking over and embracing innovations in government. And they are finding echo (and suppliers of ideas and apps!) among local startups and civil society groups, while also being courted by large tech corporations (think of Google or Microsoft) behind succulent government contracts associated with this form of “doing good”.
This is an emerging galaxy of social innovators, technologically-savvy bureaucrats, and engaged citizens providing a large crowd-sourcing community and an opportunity to test different approaches. And the underlying tectonic shifts are pushing governments towards that direction. For a sampler, check out the latest developments for Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Chile, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and (why not?) my own country, which I will include in the review often for the surprisingly limited progress of open government in this OECD member, which shares similar institutions and challenges with Latin America.
A Road Full of Promise…and Obstacles
Most of the progress in Latin America is quite recent, and the real impact is still often more limited once you abandon the halls of the Digital Government directorates and secretarías or look if you look beyond the typical government data portal. The resistance to change is as human as laughing, but it is particularly intense among the public sector side of human beings. Politics also typically plays a enormous role in resisting transparency open government, and in a context of weak institutions and pervasive corruption, the temptation to politically block or water down open data/open government projects is just too high. Selective release of data (if any) is too frequent, government agencies often act as silos by not sharing information with other government departments, and irrational fears by policy-makers combined with adoption barriers (well explained here) all contribute to deter the progress of the open government promise in Latin America…”
Citizen participation and technology
ICTlogy: “The recent, rapid rise in the use of digital technology is changing relationships between citizens, organizations and public institutions, and expanding political participation. But while technology has the potential to amplify citizens’ voices, it must be accompanied by clear political goals and other factors to increase their clout.
Those are among the conclusions of a new NDI study, “Citizen Participation and Technology,” that examines the role digital technologies – such as social media, interactive websites and SMS systems – play in increasing citizen participation and fostering accountability in government. The study was driven by the recognition that better insights are needed into the relationship between new technologies, citizen participation programs and the outcomes they aim to achieve.
Using case studies from countries such as Burma, Mexico and Uganda, the study explores whether the use of technology in citizen participation programs amplifies citizen voices and increases government responsiveness and accountability, and whether the use of digital technology increases the political clout of citizens.
The research shows that while more people are using technology—such as social media for mobile organizing, and interactive websites and text messaging systems that enable direct communication between constituents and elected officials or crowdsourcing election day experiences— the type and quality of their political participation, and therefore its impact on democratization, varies. It also suggests that, in order to leverage technology’s potential, there is a need to focus on non-technological areas such as political organizing, leadership skills and political analysis.
For example, the “2% and More Women in Politics” coalition led by Mexico’s National Institute for Women (INMUJERES) used a social media campaign and an online petition to call successfully for reforms that would allocate two percent of political party funding for women’s leadership training. Technology helped the activists reach a wider audience, but women from the different political parties who made up the coalition might not have come together without NDI’s role as a neutral convener.
The study, which was conducted with support from the National Endowment for Democracy, provides an overview of NDI’s approach to citizen participation, and examines how the integration of technologies affects its programs in order to inform the work of NDI, other democracy assistance practitioners, donors, and civic groups.
Observations:
Key findings:
- Technology can be used to readily create spaces and opportunities for citizens to express their voices, but making these voices politically stronger and the spaces more meaningful is a harder challenge that is political and not technological in nature.
- Technology that was used to purposefully connect citizens’ groups and amplify their voices had more political impact.
- There is a scarcity of data on specific demographic groups’ use of, and barriers to technology for political participation. Programs seeking to close the digital divide as an instrument of narrowing the political divide should be informed by more research into barriers to access to both politics and technology.
- There is a blurring of the meaning between the technologies of open government data and the politics of open government that clouds program strategies and implementation.
- Attempts to simply crowdsource public inputs will not result in users self-organizing into politically influential groups, since citizens lack the opportunities to develop leadership, unity, and commitment around a shared vision necessary for meaningful collective action.
- Political will and the technical capacity to engage citizens in policy making, or providing accurate data on government performance are lacking in many emerging democracies. Technology may have changed institutions’ ability to respond to citizen demands but its mere presence has not fundamentally changed actual government responsiveness.”
What happened to the idea of the Great Society?
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in the Financial Times: “Most of the interesting experiments in government are taking place far from Washington: in Singapore, which delivers much better public services at a fraction of the cost; in Brazil, with its “conditional” welfare payments, dependent on behaviour; in Scandinavia, where “socialist” Sweden has cut state spending from 67 per cent of GDP in 1993 to 49 per cent, introduced school vouchers and brought entitlements into balance by raising the retirement age. In the US, the dynamic bits of government are in its cities, where pragmatic mayors are experimenting with technology.
What will replace the Great Society? For Republicans, the answer looks easy: just shrink government. But this gut instinct runs up against two big problems. The assumption that government is evil means they never take it seriously (Singapore has a tiny state but pays its best civil servants $2m a year). And, in practice, American conservatives are addicted to Big Government: hence the $1.3tn of exemptions in the US tax code, most of which are in effect a welfare state for the rich.
For Democrats, the problem is even worse. Having become used to promising ever more entitlements to voters, they face a series of unedifying choices: whether to serve society at large (by making schools better) or to protect public sector unions (teachers account for many of their activists); and whether to offer ever less generous universal benefits to the entire population or to target spending on the disadvantaged.
This is where the politics of the future will be fought, on both sides of the Atlantic. It will not be as inspiring as the Great Society. It will be about slimming and modernising government, tying pensions to life expectancy and unleashing technology on the public sector.
But what the US – and Europe – needs is cool-headed pragmatism. Government is neither a monster nor a saviour but an indispensable part of a decent society that, like most organisations, works best when it focuses on doing a few things well.”