48 Britain The EconomistAugust 22nd 2020
I
n one ofhis travels Gulliver finds himself on the flying island of
Laputa. The king, “observing how ill I was clad”, sends a tailor to
make him a suit. The tailor “first took my altitude by a quadrant,
and then, with a rule and compasses, described the dimensions
and outlines of my whole body, all of which he entered upon pa-
per.” Six days later he “brought my clothes very ill made, and quite
out of shape, by happening to mistake a figure in the calculation”.
This week much the same happened to the British exam sys-
tem. An algorithm designed to solve the problem posed by the pan-
demic, which prevented children from sitting their exams, instead
created another of the disasters which have punctuated the gov-
ernment’s crisis-management. Thousands of children got lower
grades than they expected and the government was forced to per-
form a screeching u-turn. The algorithm has now been junked and
children are being classified on the basis of teacher assessments.
But the decision to use quadrants, rules and compasses to mea-
sure children was not the consequence of the crisis. It is in keeping
with the notion of scientific management which pervades Brit-
ain’s public sector.
Scientific management rests on four pillars: handing power
from front-line workers to general managers; measuring every-
thing you can; setting goals and targets; and linking targets to re-
wards. The term was invented by Frederick Taylor, an early 20th-
century American management guru, who used targets to improve
the production of pig iron. But it has deeper roots in Britain. Je-
remy Bentham, a philosopher, dreamed of turning government
into a utility-maximising machine. Robert Lowe, a Liberal politi-
cian, introduced a system for paying schools by results in 1867.
Scientific management retreated in the face of popular fury:
Charles Dickens satirised it in the person of Mr Gradgrind, who
wanted to “weigh and measure every parcel of human nature”. F.R.
Leavis, a literary critic, dubbed it “technologico-Benthamism”. But
it returned with a vengeance in the 1980s, driven by a combination
of Thatcherism and it. The defeat of trade unions shifted power to
managers. Centralisation encouraged government to favour
Whitehall wisdom over local knowledge. The fashion for perma-
nent reorganisation created yet more demand for managers. Tony
Blair’s New Labour identified managerialism with modernisation.Thereismuchtobesaid for scientific management if it is care-
fully applied. In schools, standardised tests can reveal whether
children are learning. In policing, statistics can be used to focus re-
sources effectively. In development, targets to vaccinate entire
populations have been effective.
But badly applied, scientific management can lead to disaster.
The a-level mess was a classic. Individuals were judged on the ba-
sis not just of their own performance, but also of their institutions’
performance the previous year. The gross unfairness was com-
pounded by the fact that the system favoured private schools.
Targets create three common problems. They produce perverse
results when people focus excessively on them. They tempt man-
agers to manipulate numbers. The obsession with measurement
diverts people from useful activity to filling in forms.
The department of health provided a fine example of the first
when it penalised hospitals whose emergency departments took
too long to treat patients after ambulances had dropped them off.
Hospitals responded by keeping patients waiting in ambulances
rather than in emergency departments. The Metropolitan Police il-
lustrated the second, after it linked pay and promotion to achiev-
ing a crime-reduction target. A police whistle-blower told a parlia-
mentary committee that downgrading or underreporting crime
had become “an ingrained part of police culture”. The universities
to which a-level students are struggling to get admitted provide an
example of the third. Tenure and promotion are awarded on the
basis of the production of articles (which can be measured) rather
than teaching (which can’t), so students suffer.
Mr Johnson’s government should be sensitive to the problem.
Brexit was driven in part by a revolt against distant bureaucrats
making decisions on the basis of abstract formulae. Tories love to
complain about “so-called experts” and “targets gone mad”. One of
the party’s favourite philosophers, Michael Oakeshott, put his fin-
ger on what is wrong with what he called “rationalism”. Rational-
ism rests on the idea that the most important form of knowledge is
technical knowledge which can be reduced to formulas or recipes.
But the most important form of knowledge is often the practical
sort which is embedded in the heads of front-line workers.
Rather than preserving what is best in scientific management
and mixing it with pragmatism and local knowledge, Mr Johnson
is making the problem worse. The government remains fixated on
targets: Gavin Williamson, the secretary of state for education,
stuck to his algorithm because he was more concerned with pre-
venting grade inflation than working out a fair outcome for stu-
dents. It also remains besotted with the science of management:
the boss of the body that is replacing Public Health England, axed
for supposed mismanagement of the pandemic, is not a public-
health expert but the former boss of a telecoms company.
Given the government’s record, you don’t need a fancy algo-
rithm to predict that there is worse to come. Mr Johnson’s key ad-
viser, Dominic Cummings, often acts as if he comes from Laputa
rather than Durham. The Laputans live on a floating rock and
spend their time contemplating geometry and counting comets.
Mr Cummings fills his blog with admiring references to “cognitive
technologies” and predicts a future in which “there will be trillions
of self-replicating robots on the asteroid belt”. The Laputans build
houses without right angles, wear clothes that don’t fit, and get so
lost in “intense speculations” that they have to be periodically
brought back to reality by being hit on the head with bladders filled
with pebbles. They lack the one thing that is essential to good gov-
ernment: the gift of common sense. 7Bagehot Rule by algorithm
The over-enthusiastic application of scientific management is weakening the public sector