For ten years, from finishing university to starting work at the Social Market Foundation, I kept a blog. If you want a sense of the sorts of things I'm likely to write about on here, the easiest way is probably to look over my old posts there. I'll be trying to understand politics and policy, relate ideas from moral and political philosophy to the real world, and make economics understandable to intelligent and interested non-experts.
But to give you a deeper sense of why I'm starting this now, it's worth reviewing why I stopped blogging for four years. When I started at SMF, my boss James Kirkup said “It’s great that you’ve been writing a blog, but hopefully you won’t need to any more. I’d like to think those ideas should find a home as SMF papers or separate opinion pieces”. He was mostly right. It is one of the great privileges of working at a think tank like SMF that I can write up whatever I think is interesting and important and get it published with the logo of a venerable Westminster institution at the top. And working at SMF helped me get my thoughts published in places like the FT or the New Statesman, which seemed obviously preferable to sticking them on Wordpress.
But my job is a bit different now to how it was in the early days. I now have less time and capacity to do my own research. I spend more time helping others think through problems, which is wonderful and rewarding in its own right, but less means space to think for myself. And while working for a think tank mostly brings immense freedom, it also carries certain expectations to be topical, to have policy recommendations, most of all to have an answer.
I think what I’m missing is a space to speculate, throw out theories, refine ideas. Robert Nozick has a lovely section at the start of Anarchy, State, and Utopia where he says:
I believe there is also a place and a function in our ongoing intellectual life for a less complete work, containing unfinished presentations, conjectures, open questions and problems, leads, side connections, as well as a main line of argument. There is room for words on subjects other than last words.
Those lines represent the animating spirit of this Substack. Think tank reports and op eds often feel like last words. My pieces here will be intended to be anything but.
So this Substack comes mostly from personal need and frustration, but I think there’s more than that. More ambitiously, I’m hoping to try and influence the way we talk and think about politics and policy. This will not be a place for polemics and disquisitions where I try to persuade you of what I think. I will strive hard not to be partisan, nor to be too tied to any ideological position. Rather, what I want to do here is to create a space to analyse how we should approach and think about different issues and problems.
When I was thinking of a title, I went with Social Problems Are Like Maths because it’s the familiar name from my old blog. Its origins are a little embarrassing.1 It is, to be clear, intended to be tongue-in-cheek, reflecting a sort of technocratic optimism that I find attractive but am not quite naive enough to fully believe in.
The alternative name I considered for five seconds and discarded was Doing It With Models. This would have been cringeworthy – naff t-shirt humour is not the vibe I’m going for – and maybe even sexist. But it would have reflected something I’m planning to do here which is to find and test models.
Now the concept of a “model” is easily misunderstood. In particular, quantitative forecast models are regularly treated as black box oracles which give us answers through complex and obscure processes. That is not what I’m interested in. What I’m after are theories or frameworks that we can simplify the world in order to understand it. They don’t need to be quantitative: we can make claims about whether X causes Y, or which of A or B should be the priority if we want to achieve C, without putting numbers on them. But numbers might also be helpful, even if they are often rough or indicative.
That’s all quite abstract. Here’s an example, one that I’ve thought about but frankly been a bit scared to write about with an SMF hat on. Right now the UK and Scottish parliaments are both considering bills to legalise assisted dying. There are lots of – often heated – arguments flying around about, including from my SMF colleagues. I have my own views, but more than anything I’ve been struggling to figure out how to even approach the question. How should we model the problem?
In the case of assisted dying, my best answer, for what it’s worth, is that the crux is over the ratio of “false positives” to “false negatives”. How many people would inappropriately end their lives prematurely and how many would be forced to continue with lives that they would be better off being able to end? That of course raises questions about where to draw the line over appropriate and inappropriate cases, and empirically over how common each type is. Putting numbers against these parameters is tricky, to say the least, but I think it could be clarifying for many people.
Maybe that’s not the right way to think about assisted dying. Point is that it involves asking the sorts of questions I want to use this blog to explore, on a range of issues. What is the crux? What would shift someone from being for to against, or vice versa? To what extent is the disagreement about normative moral principles, and to what extent is it over empirical facts? Are those empirical facts knowable, and what are our best guesses?
There will be a lot of speculation and guesswork, trying out different assumptions and using rough figures. Hopefully that’s OK because these posts aren’t meant to be the final word. But that relies on you, the readers continuing the conversation. It’s January 1st, and I will aim to write a post every week this year. The most likely reason I will fail or get discouraged is if this becomes entirely solipsistic - if I’m writing into the void. So please, do subscribe, do respond - let’s think through some stuff together.
It’s a line from an ode to Jeremy Bentham from the Ben & Aveek’s Road to Destiny EP Philosophers & Sophists. No you absolutely cannot hear it.