The Dinner Party Problem

Part one; the PPE state

On a recent podcast, the China analyst Dan Wang told Aaron Bastani that part of the Britain’s problems - and what makes our problems different to those faced by other nations - is the type of people that populate our government. As he put it;

China has government by engineers; America has government by lawyers; Britain has government by….PPE graduates.

Wang has recently published a book called Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (which I’ll be reviewing here soon). His contention is that, whereas the U.S. has a government “of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers,” engineers have “quite literally ruled modern China”. Wang argues that Deng Xiaoping systematically prioritised and promoted engineers throughout the 1980s and 1990s in reaction to the failures of Mao and the consequences of his less-than-scientific approach to policymaking;

By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee-the apex of the Communist Party-had trained as engineers. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams. His eight other colleagues could have run a Soviet heavy-industry conglomerate: with majors in electron--tube engineering and thermal engineering, from schools like the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute and the Harbin Institute of Technology, and work experience at the First Machine-Building Ministry and the Shanghai Artificial Board Machinery Factory.

Wang contends that China’s engineering bias has driven remarkable physical transformation, rapid productivity growth, and levels of wealth that would have been inconceivable at the close of Mao Zedong’s disastrous reign. Yet he also warns that this same technocratic impulse carries grave risks; Wang examines in detail China’s two most sweeping post-Mao social experiments - the one-child policy and the zero-Covid strategy - to illustrate the darker side of the engineering state. This contrasts with the United States, which Wang argues operates under a government shaped, steered, and sustained largely by a legal class that dominates its institutions, procedures, and political culture;

The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. Five out of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering. From 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee went to law school, but they make up many Republican Party elites as well as the top ranks of the civil service too. By contrast, only two American presidents worked as engineers: Herbert Hoover, who built a fortune in mining, and Jimmy Carter, who served as an engineering officer on a nuclear submarine. Hoover and Carter are remembered for many things, especially for their dismal political instincts that produced thumping electoral defeats.

This divergence in elite formation helps explain why China, governed by technocrats with hands-on experience in executing vast infrastructure schemes, consistently pushes forward with megaprojects - good or bad – whereas the United States, dominated by a legalistic elite whose procedural caution and litigation culture override momentum, tends to obstruct large-scale initiatives across the board - good and bad.

The interesting claim in Wang’s book is not really about engineering vs lawyerly societies, but that a government dominated by one elite formation will come to reflect that formation’s ways of thinking, its priorities and blind spots - and thus the manner in which policy is conceived, debated and delivered.

Over time, this homogeneity breeds an institutional monoculture in which certain assumptions go unchallenged, certain competencies are over- and under-valued, and alternative models of approaching problems are marginalised. This process is then further entrenched because both the elite themselves and the system itself prioritises and promotes those who fit within the institutional monoculture. As in Wang’s example, which examines both democratic and non-democratic systems of governance, this process occurs regardless of the type of government; an elite formation of engineers creates an engineering state, and an elite formation of lawyers creates a lawyerly state.

But Britain’s governing elite has neither the technical competence of China’s engineers or the legal exactitude of America’s lawyers; what we have is the rhetorical fluency of the PPE graduate.

So what does a PPE state look like?

The OS of the PPE state prioritises, above all else, communication. In practice, that results in a system that prioritises navigating media cycles, the ability to establish a dominant narrative and the confidence of generalists that breadth of judgement can substitute for expertise.

Britain’s political class (and one must remember this in general terms) in proficient in – and therefore prioritises – debate. Because theirs are tools that that win arguments, headlines – and, crucially, elections – they win out in democratic debate over subject experts, which leads the winners to believe they are better able to manage complex systems and areas of policy than those with experience or technical mastery.

This communicative dominance is not uniquely British; the importance of the contest of words in who governs and how policy is made is a broader Western tendency - noted and described ably, as I wrote in CapX recently, by Weber;

In a lecture titled ‘Politics as Vocation’, the philosopher Max Weber noted that: ‘To an outstanding degree, politics today is in fact conducted in public by means of the spoken or written word.’ It was true when he said it, in 1918; it is even more true now.

Much of Weber’s speech, given to Munich University, concerned ‘the significance of the lawyer in Occidental politics since the rise of parties’. This, he argued, was not random. Since the governance of politics through parties essentially translates to governance driven by interest groups – and the skill of a trained lawyer lies in effectively advocating for the interests of their clients – it follows that lawyers should ascend to dominate. To this list, he added journalists and ‘party officials’, a figure that, to him ‘belongs only to the development of the last decades and, in part, only to recent years’.

British politics is therefore increasingly dominated by those from the ‘communicating professions’ – law, education, journalism and public relations – that Weber would have recognised.

The snag is that the greater priority on narrative and debate, means, of course, there is less on execution and delivery. People skilled in their ability ‘to weigh the effect of the word properly,’ as Weber put it, put an overweighted emphasis on saying rather than doing, which neatly explains why our political class seems able to frame problems so persuasively yet struggles with the technical delivery and sustained oversight required to solve them.

That is why MPs reach for new laws instead of working out how to better enforce the ones we have, why the solution to most of the problems faced by public services is to throw more money at them, why needless regulation is mindlessly added to needless regulation and in particular why, for the last 14 years, Conservatives spent time raging about things they didn’t like on GB News instead of using their power to prevent them.

Nor is the ‘government by commentary’ problem exclusive to the right; an observable response the left is developing to Britain’s rightward turn is that they could ‘combat the far-right narrative’ if only they had ‘leadership’ with a ‘progressive voice’ ‘willing to talk about our values’ and delivering a ‘message of hope’. They cannot see any problem beyond the loss of narrative control; they think the turn is the result of losing narrative control, and can simply be reversed with good enough comms and strategy.

We have a political class that believes framing is equivalent to fixing; Anthony King’s warning that there is ‘always the possibility that those who are adept at the use of words will come to believe that words are enough, the words are just about as good as deeds and are, indeed, all but equivalent to deeds’ has come good.