Out Of Control.

If there is hope, it lies in the PMC.

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Once upon a time, when the world was young and politicians knew how to do real politics, it was normal for a party in power to reward its supporters, sometimes at the expense of the those who had voted for other parties. So parties of the Left would introduce laws on working conditions and to improve social protections, whereas parties of the Right would reduce taxes for the rich. It was a common joke in Britain in the days of genuine alternative governments that the Conservative Party increased the tax on beer, whereas the Labour Party increased the tax on wine. Broadly, you knew where you were, and what you were voting for.

I’ve talked a lot in these essays about how, irrespective of considerations of ideology, or even morality, the fundamental problem with today’s western politicians is that they lack the traditional skills of politics: boring stuff like building support, getting elected, passing laws, staying in power and so forth. I suppose Mr Starmer’s government in the UK represents the epitome of this weakness, though it’s far from the only offender. It seems to have no idea what its purpose is, no concept of a political programme and no connection at all with what the British people have very articulately said they want. Indeed, it’s a legitimate question to ask what most modern western political parties are actually for, in terms of traditional representative politics.

Now in the case of the parties of the Notional Left, it is possible to trace their abandonment of their traditional base of support quite easily, and that sad story is sufficiently well understood that only a capsule version is needed here. Briefly, parties of the traditional Left progressively became dominated by middle-class university graduates, whose earliest conceptions of politics had been formed less in factories and coal-mines and trades union work than in posters about lectures on Maoism, the back covers of books by Marcuse, and late night conversations over mugs of instant coffee. If the early radicalism of youth soon faded, its underlying assumptions—the essential stupidity of the electorate and the need for a Vanguard movement to guide and direct them—remained very powerful, and are probably the dominant force in the Notional Left up to the present day. After all, as Mr Mandelson apparently claimed in the days of New Labour, that party’s traditional supporters had nowhere else to go, and their support could simply be taken for granted . Why not, therefore, plunge into the fascinating and exciting world of Post-Modern Identity Politics, and fight your battles and make your careers there, whilst at the same time adopting some of the economic policies of the Right, which on a personal basis you anyway found more congenial? The logical apotheosis of this has occurred in France, where Mr Mélenchon’s party has explicitly abandoned the Left’s traditional supporters—and indeed frequently insults them publicly—and has sought to embrace the “Real France,” of immigrants, Muslims, sexual minorities and urban professionals with liberal social ideas. Well, we’ll see how that works out.

Yet what is surprising is that this abandonment of the Left’s traditional support base has not been accompanied by any sustained and organised attempt to woo the more fortunate and prosperous instead. Oh, there have been tax cuts and various financial shenanigans, but what I’m going to suggest here is that many of the policies carried out by all governments of different persuasions since the 1980s have in fact disadvantaged the poor whilst not actually helping the better-off very much. After all, it’s recognised that the better-off use public services more than the poor, that their children stay longer in the education system, that their dealings with public bodies such as revenue authorities tend to be more complex. Yet in many cases, it is society as a whole that has suffered, and only the ultra-rich (which I’m excluding from this analysis for the moment) can really be said to have benefited, and even then only equivocally.

At first, and even second, sight, this is insane. But the fact is that the once-prosperous upper-middle classes have also suffered from the endless privatising, offshoring, contractorising, liberalisation, introduction of “competition” and many other initiatives of the past forty years. And this group—let’s haul out the term Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) once more—is now suffering what the lower orders of society have been suffering for decades, and it doesn’t like it. And for a power structure to attack the living standards and even the way of life of its most important supporters, even inadvertently, seems, well, odd. I’m not seeking sympathy for them, but I have argued in the past that their alienation from the centres of power is very dangerous politically. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that in the US there’s already a civil war between the rich and the richest, and that this will happen in other countries as well, soon. Let’s try to understand why this might come about.

We can take as our experimental subjects a PMC couple in their late 50s. One is a legal adviser to a top finance organisation, the other an accountant in what was once a public utility but was sold off to overseas owners long ago. They have a substantial annual income between them, a nice house, two cars, significant investments and take a couple of decent holidays every year. They live in a small, prosperous country town half-an-hour by train from the city in which they work. In Britain they probably voted for New Labour in 1997, and the Tories in 2010. In France they voted for Macron in 2017 and 2022. In Britain they were firm opponents of Brexit, in France they are terrified that Le Pen will take power. They regard themselves as socially liberal: they were enthusiastic supporters of homosexual marriage and favour unregulated immigration. They are strong supporters of Ukraine, but confused about Gaza. They believe in lower taxes and cutting public spending, except on the police and the military.

And tonight they are off to dinner with a couple of their own age and background they have recently met, and we’ll send a drone along to record the conversation, and when it gets back we’ll feed the recording into this wonderful new AI thingie, and it will summarise the conversation for us, and tell us what they and their friends said. And indeed we do this, and surprisingly enough, it turns out that they are unhappy about a lot of things. Let’s have a look at the summary of the dinner-table conversation.

For a start, there was all this nonsense about parking the car. The local authority has contracted out the parking services to someone they’ve never heard of, and they had to stand there in the rain, download an application to the iPhone, open an account, register a credit card and enter their details, just to park the **** car! Can you believe it? So they arrived late and wet and that’s not a very good way to start. And all because some company in Kazakhstan or somewhere wanted to send me advertising. I ask you!

Oh, the car. Well, I’ve always driven this mark—a bit expensive I suppose but we think its worth it—but then the new model seems to be mostly software, and the updates don’t always work and you even have to pay to unlock all sorts of things that we used to take for granted. And the local service centre has closed down because they can’t get staff, so I have to take it half an hour to some much bigger place where they charge the earth. I Mean! Yes, and it’s the same here, one of our cars is off the road because they can’t get a spare for it and they’re made in Romania now or something and it’s going to be weeks. I understand about efficiency and so on, but I don’t see how it can be more efficient to move a car around half a dozen countries sticking bits on it. Whose brilliant idea was that?

Thank goodness I don’t use it for work, says somebody. But you know, when we moved here, there was a good train service and it wasn’t that expensive. But we had so many people move out of town down here, and even further out, because it was so expensive to live in the centre, that when the train comes in the morning I often have to stand all the way. Can you imagine that? I really don’t know why they can’t run more trains or put more carriages on them. Oh, I agree, says someone else, I was asking some train driver about this and he said he can’t afford to live anywhere near the route so he has to get up at four in the morning and travel an hour to drive the first train, and last winter when they had snow half the drivers couldn’t get to work, which is why we were freezing to death on the platform, I remember. You’d think they could organise things better than that.

Then they went on to talk about house prices and the software noticed that instead of boasting about how much their house was worth, they seemed depressed. Yes, said one, I mean, our house is worth a fortune, in fact we couldn’t afford to buy it now. But it’s the kids … they’re both home from university now and they’re living with us in their old rooms. I don’t think they’re ever going to be able to buy a house, either of them, the way things are going. It’s not like they’re not qualified: one’s got a degree in International Law and the other’s in computer software, but all they can get is short-term work. It was a struggle just to get them internships when they were both students. And of course you can forget the social life we had at their age. And the fact is, we supported them both through university but there comes a point, you know …. yes, says another, our daughter is doing her term abroad and, well, we don’t mind contributing, it’s good that she gets the chance, but she’s got no idea what she can do when she graduates. Business studies is fine, but …. She was saying none of her friends can afford to live anywhere near where there’s work. I don’t know what’s happened to society.

The AI records some compliments about the food, and then the problems of finding decent quality produce. Yes, there was a market here, a big one, but a lot of the local producers have gone under now, sold out to the big combines. Market’s mostly clothes made in China now. And we used to buy a lot of organic from the supermarket, but the manager was saying they are closing most of their organic section because a lot of people just can’t afford to buy it any more. Funny that, you’d have thought it would cost more to soak stuff in chemicals than just to leave it alone. There’s an organic shop in the High Street but it’s on a knife-edge apparently, people don’t have the time any more. Yes, our High Street’s in a bad way as well, between charity shops, coffee shops, fast food and estate agents there’s not a lot left. Used to be a good bookshop, but it closed. Music shop as well. So of course we have to order from Amazon which we don’t like doing. I know what you mean: we had a parcel thrown over the garden gate in the rain not long ago, all the books were soaked. But what can you do? There’s a bookshop somewhere near the office, I think, but who has the time these days? Anyway, the poor sods who do the deliveries, they work twelve hours a day, often don’t have time to deliver everything from what I was reading. And a lot of them are immigrants because nobody else will work for those wages, so they don’t know the area and often they can’t read the addresses properly. I just can’t imagine how all that was allowed to happen, somebody should do something.

But it’s not all bad news, I mean it’s cheaper to travel these days, isn’t it? More choice and so on. Well, I won’t disagree with you, but our daughter and her friend went went to Prague for the week, and yes it was cheap, at least it looked cheap. But they had to take a bus to the airport which was an hour away, and then they had to buy food and drinks on the plane, oh and you had to pay just to choose your seat, and they landed at some godforsaken little airport an hour away from Prague and they had to pay some astronomic sum for a taxi. And don’t forget the way back, dear. That’s right, there was bad weather at the airport so all the flights were delayed and they got back eventually at what was it, two in the morning, and you had to go and pick them up by car … Didn’t turn out so cheap in the end. But then that’s the low end of the market, I suppose, you get what you pay for.

Well, yes, but have you looked at Business Class recently? I mean, can you imagine paying extra to choose your seat in Business Class? Actually, we thought we’d go to Vienna last summer and treat ourselves to Business Class. But you know, I used to fly around Europe, oh, a while ago, and Business Class was something in those days. This time, all we got was a couple of rows curtained off and a spare seat in the middle, and the kind of food they used to give you in Economy. So I asked about this at check-in, and they said, well, pressures of competition. But competition’s supposed to make things better isn’t it? I don’t know what’s got into these people. And remember we nearly couldn’t go because you had to renew your passport and it took, what, six months? That’s right and I complained and spoke to some Dalek who said it was the summer and they had a lot of demand. I mean, why couldn’t they have taken on more staff or something?

Then the conversation apparently turned to education and its effects. I mean, I don’t want to do the Young People Today thing, but it’s just a fact. One of my clients is a supermarket chain, and they can’t find people to do warehouse jobs, because they can’t count packages properly, and they can’t read some of the labels. It’s not their fault, they never learnt, and anyway they’re used to just looking stuff up. I know, we’re getting people ourselves who actually can’t write, because they’ve been getting AI to do it for them. I don’t know why they ever let computers in schools anyway. Mind you, when we say “computer literate” we get people who can just about construct a spreadsheet, but have no idea what the numbers mean, so they don’t realise when they make mistakes. Yes, I don’t know what they educate people for, these days. I mean, we bought this new washing machine, computer controlled, does everything but make the coffee, decent mark as well, made in Germany I think, cost a fortune and it started to fall apart after a year. We have a little man comes and does the repairs, has done for years, he said that these days even the big names use the cheapest components they can find. Oh, and he said he was retiring soon and closing his business because there were no youngsters in the trade any more. Nobody was interested. Don’t know where we’re going to get someone to replace him.

The AI couldn’t find much in the transcript after that. It suggested that the four started discussing violent revolutionary action against the government, but that’s almost certainly a hallucination. All this does make you think though, if the AI summary and the quotations are anything like accurate.

It’s easy, and perhaps salutary, to remind ourselves that most people would think there are more important issues than the decline in standards of Business Class travel in Europe (which is true, by the way.) After all there are people who are unemployed, cold and hungry not that far from where I am writing this. The problems of education, health provision, and food prices bear most heavily upon those with the fewest resources. At a hypermarket not far from where I’m sitting, the toilet roll holders in the toilets now have locks on them, to prevent theft.

Morally, this is an unanswerable argument. A lot of us would be glad if getting our expensive car serviced near our home was the biggest problem in our lives. Politically, though, it’s a disaster waiting to happen, and I’m going to spend the rest of the essay discussing that. It begins from the reality that nobody really understands the modern world, and especially the why of it. Oh, economists and others pretend to do so, and there’s an entire industry devoted to the proposition that the future is unavoidable and inevitable, and all we can do is lie down before the oncoming steamroller. But then almost all detailed predictions about the Future in my lifetime have proved to be at best massive over-generalisations, and at worst complete fantasy. (No, I’m not just talking about holidays on the Moon and flying cars, either.)

For reasons we’ll go into in a minute, the world—the western world anyway—has become too complicated to understand and so almost impossibly difficult to manage. And for related reasons we will also get to, it didn’t have to be like this, but it may well be too late to put more than a handful of the pieces back together again. The captains of technology, the kind of people who infest the corridors at Davos, and the allegedly distinguished op-ed writers, like to pretend that they can see the future, and perhaps they partly believe this. But given their consistent record of dismal failure, most people pay them no attention and look the other way. Indeed, for reasons we’ll go into, the world is now too chaotic to understand, never mind to predict. We can predict certain mega-trends—climate change for example—but we cannot predict them in detail, nor can we predict their consequences. There are two basic reasons for this.

The first is that the last forty years have seen the development and introduction of fundamentally chaotic systems, by which I mean systems whose operations we do not fully understand, and whose consequences we cannot foresee with any precision. Indeed, quite often, little attempt was made to foresee them anyway. But why should that have happened, you may reasonably ask? Well, the simple answer is that it was not supposed to be like this. Rather, the idea was that instead of being planned in advance, various elements of the economy were to be “freed,” such that the self-organising nature of the market would bring them into equilibrium. There were several obvious limitations to this theory. One is that it wasn’t even really a theory, because it couldn’t be tested: it was a quasi-religious belief in the perfect operation of markets, and since there was no prospect of running controlled trials, the likely results, and then meaning of the actual results when they arrived, were simply taken on faith. Nobody knew by what mysterious process markets were supposed to be self-organising, and indeed after a few drinks economists would tell you that it was only a simplifying theoretical assumption, not a pragmatic observation.

Another limitation is that the most that markets can do, even in theory, is to bring buyers and sellers together. That may produce an optimal outcome in terms of goods and services sold, but it will not produce an outcome which is reliably optimal in any other way. For example, if healthcare, once provided free by the state, is provided by private companies in a market, then the best care will go to those who can pay the most, and ordinary people may be pressed to find anything at all. The health of the nation will decline (as indeed has happened) people will have to retire earlier, disability benefits will increase, and so on and on. Doctors themselves will tend to specialise in lucrative areas of medicine and move to wealthy areas of the country. Economists like to dismiss these consequences, and many others like them, as “externalities,” but they are, in fact, what questions like healthcare are actually about. I’ve never heard anyone ask, for example, “can you recommend a cheap dentist?”

The second reason is that these chaotic systems are not in isolation from each other, but interact in ways that will always surprise us and generally exceed our ability to comprehend. For example, globalisation and the Internet and ease of international travel and the Schengen Zone, and the availability of automatic weapons from the wreckage of Eastern nations and developments in pharmaceutical technologies and developments in asylum and human rights law and the ease with which money can be transferred and the progressive removal of barriers to trade and movement and the development of Identity Politics are just some of the factors that have combined to install well-armed ethnic criminal gangs trafficking people and drugs in many western countries, to the point where several of them can fairly be described as incipient narco-states. Probably, no proponent of any of these single measures thought they were contributing to such a result, let alone imagined it would come about, and to be fair that would have been difficult to predict at the start. Moreover, political pressures—on asylum law changes, for example—were sufficiently strong that warnings that this kind of result might occur were disregarded. And various other combinations of these same factors have produced various other negative results, which are themselves the result of highly complex interactions.

One of the key observations in William Gibson’s groundbreaking 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer was that “the street finds its own uses for things.” We can generalise that insight into a wider law: the exploitation of new technologies, new “freedoms” and new legal frameworks will always bring the greatest benefits to those with the least scruples. This doesn’t mean that these uses are always illegal—though they may well be—but rather that the rewards go in preference to those who look first to see how they can extract the maximum financial advantage from them, without worrying too much about moral qualms. Take the corruption of community-based web sites, for example. Some years ago, a site called Le Bon Coin was created in France to enable neighbours and people in the same town to buy and sell things among themselves, ranging from children’s toys to houses and cars. Quite quickly, of course, scammers got involved, especially when substantial sums of money were involved. A couple of years ago, I was walking past the toy section of a hypermarket not long before Christmas, and saw a group of worried parents in front of an empty shelf of, I think it was, Pokemon toys. Where had they all gone, they asked? The harassed employee was trying to explain that organised groups came into the shop first thing in the morning and bought a few each, which were then sold on Le Bon Coin later in the day to desperate parents, for several times the normal price. Now this is probably not illegal, but it does reflect the fact that the moral direction of travel in the use of new technologies is generally downwards. There will always be an angle that enables people to make money quickly at your expense.

Indeed, one of the features of the style of life that has emerged in the last forty years—globalised, deregulated, competitive at least in theory— is that effectively no thought was given to the wider and longer-term implications of what was being done. In turn, this was because the originators of many of these ideas tended to be more greedy than intelligent, and to be sublimely uninterested in what would happen after their pet idea had made them lots of money or brought them political advantages. Famously, privatisation was not even mentioned in the 1979 Tory Party manifesto: it was a panic measure designed to raise money in the face of economic crisis, and little if any thought was given to the longer term. Our dinner-party couples probably did very well out of this at first: buying shares in the new “private” companies and watching them rise in value. It must have been fun. Then they noticed that these companies themselves were being bought and sold, sometimes to foreign companies with little presence at home. So if our notional dinner party couples were from Britain they would surely have been surprised to discover that, after multiple changes of ownership, their gas for cooking and heating was being supplied by the state-controlled Électricité de France. Except of course that the gas was supplied as it always had been, it was just that EDF was now collecting the money. And there’s no point in trying to contact them, because all you get is a chatbot. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

No, it wasn’t. But the problem now is that the resulting mess is so complex that it’s impossible to unravel. Partly, this is because ownership structures have been allowed to become so complex that actually working out who owns what, let alone where to find them, may be impossible. But this mess isn’t only organisational, it’s also procedural. After all, why cut back on customer service and rely on chatbots and call-centre staff in foreign countries? Isn’t that a good way to lose customers? Well, yes, but retaining customers with good service is expensive and time-consuming, and it’s easier just to lock them into contracts they can’t get out of and exploit them. But why do such a thing? Well, there’s the impact of all the parallel developments in gearing companies to short-term profit maximisation, executive pay and bonuses tied to three-monthly earnings and the end of the kind of long-term career which forces you to look beyond the end of your nose and consider the wider interest. Once again, a wide range of separate developments, all sharing the same prejudices, but introduced at different times for different reasons, have combined to make a poisonous new mixture. And it develops its own warped logic. After all, one way for competing companies to keep their market share is if everybody is as bad as everybody else. Levelling down, and thus saving more money for profits, is actually a sensible move for entire business sectors to adopt.

This is one of the reasons why there are no simple solutions to the hopeless and useless mess we now face. In Britain, pioneer of the car-boot sale theory of government, the failures of some privatised industries have become so blatant that even a Labour government has been forced to try to take some of them back into public ownership. But of course the problem is not only ownership: it involves a host of other factors, notably cultural and institutional. When natural monopolies were privatised (something that seemed incomprehensible to many, even at the time) career managers and technical specialists suddenly found themselves with private-sector salaries and conditions of work, company cars, expense accounts and heaven knows what. Senior managers relabelled themselves “CEOs” and everybody became obsessed with share prices. Thirty or forty years later, you can’t simply tell an organisation which has grown fat through a policy of Sod the Customer, that as of Monday the pirate ship has a new captain, and so will they please behave differently. Efficiently run public services, such as we used to have, are themselves the product of a wide range of different factors: political, social, institutional, financial, educational and cultural, among others. Most of these are gone, probably forever.

One effect of all these changes is that governments, and therefore voters and citizens, have effectively lost all influence over the way in which technology develops and what its consequences will be. All of this is in the hands of the private sector, and very largely of personalities whose fundamental skill is in conning money out of people and persuading them to invest in a loss-making company on the basis that they will be able to sell their investments to bigger fools later. Our dinner-party couples once owned shares in companies that made actual things and provided real services. Now, they are being bombarded with advertisements urging them not to miss out on galaxy-shaking new technologies, like this “AI” stuff which everybody is excited about, but I don’t really understand. I mean, do you? Not really, but apparently it’s going to take all our kids’ jobs away. The fact is that the theoretical trillionaires behind “AI” have no idea either, and don’t care, so long as they can continue to attract money from stupid investors. And of course most companies and governments are run by people who don’t have the faintest idea either.

All the other independent but complementary pressures I mentioned earlier will come into play. When it’s possible to move the share price of your company by just announcing that you plan to replace 10% of your workforce with AI in the future, then it’s fair to say that complete financial irrationality has arrived. And anyway, hidden within such bonus-inflating announcements are two major unanswered philosophical questions. One is whether it’s actually sensible to abandon an established system which has a small but known proportion of errors in it, for an untried but cheaper system whose proportion of errors is not only unknown but actually unknowable. The other is whether it’s sensible to rely on a system, however cheap, that is trained on material including its own errors and those of other systems, and thus mathematically becomes less reliable over time. I hope your instinctive answer to both is “no,” but it worries me that the sector which is already responsible for such economic growth as there is in the US, should be run by people who don’t even accept that these are even questions.

And yes, the lemming syndrome that governs the behaviour of most private companies and governments ensures that “AI” will be widely adopted, and the children of our dinner-party couples are going to have a tough time finding jobs. Then, after scandals and bankruptcies, organisations will finally start to move back to humans again, only to find that there aren’t enough of them. If you think organisations are dysfunctional now, that’s nothing to how they will be in the dying days of the ‘AI” craze.

Meanwhile, the upper middle classes and the PMC suffer too. This is sometimes presented as the result of long-term plans by the super-rich. Now we can grant that the super-rich may not be averse to even more concentration of wealth at the top, and also that they are not very bright, but there are limits. After all, they have not exactly distinguished themselves by long-term planning (“flights to the Moon in 2020,2022,2024,2026,2028, sometime”) and their leaders seem to live in an alternative reality made up of of bad science fiction films.

The fact is that no-one is in control, least of all those who deafen us with their optimistic prophecies. Had governments, for example, not given up telecommunications and broadcasting monopolies, had governments retained an in-house capability to assess the impact of technological developments on society, we would not have been in this mess now. But they did, they didn’t, and we are. It’s too late by some decades to put the cork back in the bottle now. The cumulative effect of all these measures is to create a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster, which is so complex and so interrelated that it’s hard to see, even theoretically, how you could go about taming it.

Take house ownership. For generations in Britain governments of the Left built public housing, partly to improve peoples’ lives, partly to secure votes. Huge estates were built (I was born in one) and people were generally happy. The Tory government of 1979 deliberately set out to create more Tory voters by forcing local Councils to sell off their housing stock and forbidding them to build any more. Whether this worked electorally is unclear, but it had the effect of taking a large part of the rented sector off the market, thus putting rents elsewhere up, forcing people to buy whether they wanted to or not, thus pushing house prices up, and forcing lenders to loosen ever further the qualifications for loans, miring many people in unpayable debts, and forcing those who could still buy to move somewhere, anywhere, where they could afford a house. And twenty-five years later, the proud owners of former public housing came to the sickening realisation that their own children would never be able to afford to buy a house. And all for a transitory political advantage. Clever that.

Such examples could be multiplied, but what’s not in doubt is that the PMC is now being ground under the wheels of the same uncontrollable process. Thirty years ago, a young professional couple could have been reasonably confident of buying a house on their joint salaries. Now it’s probably impossible, and anyway there are lawyers and accountants in India, trained in England, who can do your job for a third of the salary. So far, the anger and resentment has largely come from ordinary people, who have seen their jobs disappear, their factories closed and their public services destroyed. But things have a habit of rattling through unpredictably, and now the same problems are hitting the PMC. The problem is that there are no easy solutions: indeed, there may be no solutions at all. Somehow cutting house prices to affordable levels is not possible. Companies under the lash of quarterly results will continue to do self-mutilating things to appease shareholders. The train is running off the cliff, and the First Class carriages will go with the rest.

The hope—if that’s the word—is that the system itself, impossibly complex, tightly coupled, intolerant of delay and difficulty—will start to come apart. We have already had a foretaste of this with Brexit and Covid, and political crisis and economic warfare may well just make it worse. The transition is likely to be discontinuous, perhaps slow at first and then sudden and brutal, and to cause widespread political damage, irrespective of its other consequences. And then, I think, we will see the PMC become more overtly militant: it has the organisation and the social structures, and most of all it has sense of entitlement. “If there was hope, it lay in the Proles,” reflected Winston Smith in 1984. These days, it may be that any vestigial hope lies in the arrogance, the sense of superiority and the sense of entitlement of the PMC.