honestlyreal

I see, via the excellent Robert Brook mail-out (do please subscribe), that there’s another site out there trying to cut the biggest Gordian knot of all in the field of customer services. Of course customers want cheapness. Of course customers want quality. But the two are in tension against each other.

Unlike the cruder saynoto0870 about which I’ve written before, Get Human attempts a subtler combination of crowd-sourced wisdom not only on what channels prove to be the best for getting through to Customer Services, but also offering handy hints on how to navigate them more easily once you’re connected.

Sample: “dial 08xx… and keep pressing 0, ignoring all prompts, until you get to an operator.” Well, indeed. And it’s hardly a new discovery that banging away on the zero or the hash button can get you that elusive human voice.

But it’s still a hack. It’s still “defecting” in the vernacular of game theory – trying to find a way around the system rather than devising something that actually works, and doing it in a way that doesn’t involve subterfuge.

What’s missing – what’s always been missing – for me in all of this Customer First rhetoric is any real appreciation of why things are the way they are. It’s not all perverse behaviour on the part of organisations. Nor is it all blatant cost-cutting or profit-grabbing. It’s a trade-off.

“We put the customer first” is one of the most weaselly phrases imaginable, whether in public or private sector. It’s probably Shareholder (or Taxpayer) First, in reality. And is that so very wrong? What’s much worse is the masking of true intent behind these bizarre slogans.

The system may be optimised for a lower price. It may be optimised for speedy and free-flowing service. But it won’t be optimised for both.

When you have to indulge in odd behaviour in an attempt to change this optimisation (like that banging away at the 0 key) you know there’s some reality masking going on.

Here’s a little case study to make the point: Ever hired a car abroad? You go through a ton of online data entry to ensure your personal and driver details, and payment, are handed over as requested. In advance. All you have to do when you get to the airport desk is establish your identity and take your key – everything else has been done? Right?

Wrong.

Spend a few minutes listening to what’s going on in a queue like this. It’s fascinating. No transaction takes less than five minutes – many take at least ten. The queue always builds quickly. Always.

And what is going on? Well, transactions are being optimised for revenue, not speed.

Take the additional paper-filling that appears at this stage. It might be a “local police form”, or an additional statement of insurance liability. There’s absolutely nothing on these forms that hasn’t been already provided online (or could have been).

But the act of filling it in starts to work in other ways on the hapless victim. It’s a foreign country. See? Foreign form in front of you. Thoughts fly fast: they drive badly here – or do they? Shit. Best check. And what about the police? Mirrored shades, being pulled over on a dusty road, accused of goodness knows what. Gold teeth. Lip-smacking. Cash fines. Smelly cells. The images are set in train.

The swift passage from carousel to exit gate has been interrupted, and certainly not for your benefit.

And then the killer words come across the desk. A script that never fails to elicit a visceral response. “You agree you have taken the minimum insurance cover permissable. The excess will be a thousand euros. But you can wipe this out with a simple payment of just twenty a day…” And inevitably, beads of sweat now falling down, a judgement has to be made. Invariably on the side of cautiousness. The picture has been painted.

You had all this information back in your office a week ago. You made a rational judgement of the likelihood of you stacking the car, and made your choice. But now? Now it looks different. And the tapping and shuffling in the queue behind means you have to make a decision. Now. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Oh, and a good bit of time is often spent with customer saying “but I thought I’d already done all this…” Tick. Tick. Tick.

So. That’s what optimised for revenue looks like. Not customer comfort.

Let’s be honest, though. This is all fine. It is what it is: business.

The increase in revenue keeps the hire business afloat. Keeps it competitive in other ways. Allows for headline hire rates to be very low. Gets customers to the desk in the first place. And round it goes… Etc. etc. etc. Hardly the stuff of a management science PhD.

You just have to hack the bullshit process like this. For yourself. Every time.

Yawn.

My plea? Please just give me a signpost at the top of, well, any transaction really: “Give me convenience, or give me cheap.” At least let me decide what’s optimised.

Keep that separation right the way along the line: forms, queues, phone lines. Really. Because one day we’ll grow up about the psychology of customer service and wonder why we ever fell for games like this. Ever.

(I hope.)

——-

Postscript: Stefan C has pointed me in the direction of this neat little service, allowing you to buy your own excess reduction insurance. Nicely disruptive. More of these, please.

Or let me be more specific: my problem with the TPA. (Also applies to the Tea Parties of this world, and other proponents of what we might term small-state, individual-freedom libertarianism.)

It’s this.

At the very highest level of political/economic reasoning, it’s not that barking, really.

They believe the state should be small. That it should only do what a collectively-organised, representative and publicly-funded state should absolutely have to do. That it should be held to account, and kept out of the way as far as possible of a healthy, free-functioning market. Even when that market may do somewhat unwholesome things. The freedom to choose our degree of wholesomeness is critical.

It’s a reasonable argument. I happen to think it’s flawed in any form of implementation, but so are lots of other ideologies. Doesn’t mean you can’t argue downwards from the concept, provided you keep an honest anchor in your base principles.

No, my problem with the TPA is the way they go about this arguing.

It’s difficult to engage public sentiment about nebulous concepts like the -cracies. And it’s really hard to have a meaningful debate about the problems found in large, complex systems.

So instead they focus on scare stories – on shameful, but usually rare, negative outcomes. On “non-jobs”, bad technology, poor management. Invariably in the public sector.

They will rush to find and publicise “the thing that sounds so awful that you could hardly believe it to be true”. Often because it isn’t true. Or is stretched and exaggerated beyond all recognition. As a technique, it is lazy beyond belief; calculating, demeaning and wholly dishonest.

The TPA’s true talent lies in finding themes that will grab a mass public imagination, and then plague it.

The complicated reality of organisations? What you really have to do to administer any enterprise involving hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people-based transactions (whatever sector you’re in!) – management challenges as old as organisations themselves?

No, way too challenging for them.

Arguments about the misuse of public money are made using attempted parallels with the world of the household, with the micro-business, with the near-to-home. An iPad? It’s an entertainment system. It should never be bought with public money! Happiness surveys? Pah – no need for them round kitchen tables in the real world – just talk to each other. Or better still, just lump it. (Seriously, I could use a thousand more words finding egregious examples of this style. But you have Google.)

There are some rare examples of good work – particularly around issues of privacy and the implications of new technologies for the relationship between citizen and state. That’s what I find so baffling – these attempts to engage on strong points of principle are utterly undermined by this succession of cheap jibes tailored for the smaller-format newspapers.

(What they don’t focus on very much, ironically, is tax paying. But that’s a side point for this post.)

And if you still find temptation in your path – if you hear that little voice of the Daily Mail leader-writer in your ear (he visits us all, in dark times) whispering “just cut X or Y, or crack down hard on Z, you KNOW it makes sense,” bear this in mind:

Most shades of political thought have been tried. Human ingenuity and systemic inertia generally mean that things mooch on pretty much as they always have been, despite the rocks that various “leaders” might try to lob in from time to time. So if you’re wavering between left and right, and seeing points of recognition in both camps (and you should – to do otherwise would be a worrying sign of lazy thinking), how about putting your shoulder behind the one that doesn’t, every time and very rapidly, lead to policies which are about being vile to people?

Is that simple enough?

Fate, and the vermin who buy and sell marketing lists, have a strange way of mocking. When money’s never been tighter, my name and address seem to have been tagged with the hilariously inaccurate description: “high net worth, definitely a target for personal wealth management services”.

And as a result, what deep joy the postman brought me recently!

Imagine my delight, Trevor Downing–yes, you Trevor Downing, of the Trevor Downing Wealth Management Practice, Market Square, Westerham TN16 1BR–when the following little cartoon dropped out of the envelope.

You might, possibly, have sent that to the wrong person, Trev.

I know there are retired Colonels up and down the South East who’ll be clutching their highly-decorated boners under their dressing gowns at the sight of such anti-tax grot–their gnarled old hands frantically squeezing a last drop of life from the old soldier, spurred on by the prospect of keeping the Chancellor’s filthy mitts off what’s left of their Service pension.

But.

It might strike you, as it did me, that there’s something pretty horrible about marketing your services like this.

Or like this.

Look at her, up there on her nice white fluffy cloud. Nice, white-haired, white Mrs Hayward. Managed to “structure” things so that she won the game: maximum kudos for exiting with that marvellous sign-off “TAX PAID ZERO”. How those heavenly trumpets must have welcomed her!

I know. Of course I do. It’s all perfectly legal; it’s just making sure the right amount is paid… yeah yeah yeah. But it’s not about that, is it? It’s about an attitude. The attitude that says it’s absolutely fine to fuck around and fiddle with every last shareholding–to make the cat a director of your non-existent-trading-entity if it makes the most of some allowance somewhere. I do know someone rich who puts their pet dogs down on their tax return as “guard dogs”, for fuck’s sake. Really.

That attitude. The one that crows merrily about how having 500k liquid is an inherited (often literally) right, and there’s no bloody way that any of that is going on stuff for the poor. Coz they’ll only waste it.

The attitude that scours a workforce of tens of millions of public sector workers to find the handful of egregious examples that they can then spatter over the papers to make Mrs Hayward and Colonel Cunt (Retd) feel that much more justified about their little visit to see Mr Downing.

And this:

Yeah. They won too. More entitled white arseholes sitting on some massive fucking white golf club sofa in the sky. Well done. Big whoop.

Ah, Mr Sensible. Mr Selfish Shithead Sodding Sensible. You didn’t need that NHS ambulance when you tripped on your cliff-top walk with the Crown Green Bowlers, now did you? Nah, that stuff happens to other people, doesn’t it? You don’t need streetlights. Not where you live. Nor state education, nor environmental health protection (Mr S eats in nice places). Mental health services (are you crazy)? Income support? Disability benefit? Winter fuel? No. NO. NO!

That’s all for other people, isn’t it? Trevor’ll help you keep it that way, too.

You just carry on clinging on to your selfish, misanthropic, lazy sack of comforting lies: the state’s a thief, “public”=”wasted”, the less you contribute the more you win, and anyone less fortunate than you can just crawl away and die.

Nice one, Trevor. Nice one, son.

Remind me again: what’s the purpose of opening up all this public data?

Ah yes, that’s it. To create value. And you can’t get a much stronger example of real value in the real world than showing people how to save money when buying train tickets.

Fare pricing is a fairly hit-and-miss business, as you’ve probably noticed. We don’t have a straight relationship between distance and price. Far from it.

The many permutations of route, operator and ticket type throw up some strange results. We hear of first class tickets being cheaper than standard, returns cheaper than singles, and you can definitely get a lower overall price by buying your journey in parts, provided that the train stops at the place where the tickets join.

The rules here are a bit weird: although station staff have an obligation to quote the cheapest overall price for a particular route, they aren’t allowed to advertise “split-fare” deals, even where they know they exist. Huh?

Why this distinctly paternalistic approach? Well, say the operators: if a connection runs late, your second ticket might not be eligible, and there might be little details of the terms and conditions of component tickets that trip you up, and, and, and…well, it’s all just too complicated for you. Better you get a coherent through-price (and we pocket the higher fare, hem hem).

There’s no denying it is complicated. Precisely how to find the “split-fare” deal you need is a tiresome, labour-intensive process of examining every route, terms and price combination, and stitching together some sense out of it all. And, indeed, in taking on a bit of risk if some of those connections don’t run to time.

You might be lucky, and have an assistant who will hack through fares tables and separate websites to do you that for you. But you’d be really be wasting their time (and your money).

Because that sort of task is exactly what technology is good at.

Taking vast arrays of semi-structured data and finding coherent answers. Quickly. And if there’s some risk involved, making that clear. We’re grown-ups. We can cope.

There’s no doubt at all that the raw materials–the fares for individual journey segments–are public information. Nobody would ever want, or try, to hide a fare for a specific route.

So when my esteemed colleague Jonathan Raper–doyen of opening up travel-related information and making it useful–in his work at Placr and elsewhere, put his mind to the question of how new services could crunch up the underlying data to drive out better deals for passengers, I don’t doubt that some operators started to get very nervous indeed.

Jonathan got wind–after the November 2011 meeting of the Transport Sector Transparency Board–that a most intriguing piece of advice had been given by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) to the Department for Transport on the “impact of fare-splitting on rail ticket revenues”.

Well, you’d sort of expect an association which represents the interests of train operators to have a view on something that might be highly disruptive to their business models, wouldn’t you?

So what was that advice? He put in a Freedom of Information request to find out.

And has just had it refused, on grounds of commercial confidentiality.

This is pretty shocking–and will certainly be challenged, with good reason.

Perhaps more than most, I have some sympathy with issues of commercial reality in relation to operational data. We set up forms of “competition” between providers for contracts, and in order to make that real, it’s inevitable that some details–perhaps relating to detailed breakdowns of internal costs, or technical logistics data–might make a difference to subsequent market interest (and pricing strategy) were they all to be laid out on the table. I really do understand that.

But a fare is a fare. It’s a very public fact. It’s not hidden in any way. So what could ATOC have said to DfT that is so sensitive?

The excuse given by DfT that this advice itself is the sort of commercial detail that would prejudice future openness is, frankly, nonsense.

I look forward to the unmasking of this advice. And in due course to the freeing-up of detailed fares data.

And then to people like Jonathan and Money Saving Expert creating smart new business models that allow us to use information like it’s supposed to be used: to empower service users, to increase choice, and to deliver real, pound-notes value into the hands of real people.

That’s why we’re doing all this open data stuff, remember?

One of the most fascinating angles to emerge from the LA Fitness story is the differing perceptions people have of the value of goods and services.

Specifically, much of the public support for the contract holder undergoing hardship seems to be built on the premise that “they haven’t used the service yet; why shouldn’t they be able to walk away without penalty?”

It’s an interesting point. If they’d stopped making repayments for a car, there is a clear link to a tangible asset that they’d have to give back. Similarly with a mortgage and a property.

If you stop a handset-included mobile phone contract early, you can argue that you’re not consuming any more services, but you have of course got the benefit of the handset in your hand (the costs of which have been met by some of the projected revenue take over the life of your contract).

And what about a loan? The recipient has had the benefit: the lump of cash up front–would a massive interest burden in some way justify their cessation of repayment? It gets harder in this case, maybe because the defensible “asset” becomes less tangible?

And the point which I think was largely glossed over with LA Fitness was that although the customer might not be consuming any more of the service (which in any case seems to be common with many gym memberships) this forms part of an overall price/usage/investment/repayment model on which the business is founded.

If contract providers face a greater risk of early termination without penalty then they will adjust their model by raising prices to account for that greater risk. We know that 24 month contracts are cheaper than 12 month ones: it’s not as if we can really make an assumption of consumer naivety on that general principle any more.

And the “projected value of the contract” is just as real as a physical asset in other ways: for example to the sales rep whose commission is pegged to ongoing “good” business. Try telling them that early termination without penalty is an action without effect.

Similarly, to accountants and investors, a stream of known future revenue is as real an asset as a car in a showroom. That’s how businesses work.

None of which means that discretion can’t and shouldn’t have been exercised in this case. The company’s initial refusal to recognise the impact that their blunt decision would have (perhaps magnified by the “not a real consumer service” points above) was foolish, and eventually they had no choice but to cave in.

They would have had all sorts of discretionary powers: in case of contract holder death or disappearance, for example, and should have used them.

But I am left with the question: would we be as consistent with support for a hardship case where other services (or even goods) were involved? And is this rational?

Or was a collective folk-feeling of frustration–with all those thousands of gym memberships that are paid for and never used–in some way acting as an accelerant for this fire?

What is it that really makes you sign a petition?

I’ve given a lot of thought to this question today. Triggered by one particular petition that has seen an 11th hour surge of promotion through social networks. And I can’t help concluding that the nature of “deadlines” and “targets” does itself modify behaviour in these circumstances.

There’s a big difference between the phrasing: “sign this petition, it’s an incredibly good cause and by far the most appropriate way to address it”

and

“Person X has worked really hard to get this important issue heard. It’s only Y thousand signatures from success, with Z minutes to go.”

especially when you can get real-time updates of how Y and Z are racing each other to the wire. It’s a bit addictive like that, all this instant feedback.

NB. I am intentionally not referencing that precise petition here. To do so will take the argument into different territory than I am addressing: which is about mechanics and behaviours of mass, public, direct representation. You can obviously search it out if you choose, but I will give short shrift to comments that focus on it specifically.

So what is it that persuades someone to add their name to a petition? I can see a massive range of factors. It could be because: they believe it will make a difference, they’re angry, someone has asked them to, someone has told them to, everyone else is doing it, or maybe that they just want to see it “be a winner”. There are no absolute “good” and “bad” reasons. This is just how things are. That’s the nature of mass participation.

But it’s that last one that’s playing on my mind. The combination of target and deadline changes the dynamic. We start seeing “edge effects” at work. I’d say that something achieving 90% of its goal with 24 hours to spare can much more easily attract attention that something at 50% with three months to go. We like “the cause of the day”. (Indeed Twitter in particular now seems to be one long stream of them.)

And if that is true, then that target effectively shrinks slightly, as a result of this last-minute acceleration effect.

Is that a good thing? Has it been fully accounted for in the design of the system? What would happen if the “score” were kept masked (other than to say it exceeded a minimum threshold for consideration)? I’d be really interested to know.

Doing a bit of writing. Couldn’t remember whether tax payer was one word or two. Didn’t want to bother @danosirra. Googling gave mixed results. And it wasn’t in the ever-reliable Guardian Style guide.

So I dropped them a note:

From: p@ulclarke.com
To: style.guide@guardian.co.uk
cc:
Subject: Tax payer or taxpayer

Message:
————————————————————————–

would be a good one to add. I see wide variation, notably between BBC and Guardian

and there’s the TaxPayers’ [sic] Alliance…

–
Paul Clarke

…to which came the frankly epic reply:

From: style.guide@guardian.co.uk
To: p@ulclarke.com
Subject: Re: Tax payer or taxpayer

Message:
————————————————————————–

Thank you for your email.

Good suggestion. I will add them to the guide.

Our style is taxpayer (one word). As for the TaxPayers’ Alliance, I see they claim to be “non-partisan”, which is about as convincing as their spelling.

Best wishes,

Gotta love that. You can even show your love by buying their book.

It started with this pre-Christmas story. [Minister says we should strongly oppose discrimination against teenagers. Particularly when it's done using those mosquito device thingys.]

Mosquitos? Those ultra-high-pitched teenager-deterring screeching devices that provoked all that press attention a few years back? Are they still around?

Something about this story just wasn’t working for me. Was it that it smacked of grandstanding to win popularity amongst younger voters?

Or was it just that everything had gone so quiet about these devices that their sudden reappearance in a government policy speech could only mean that new cloth was being woven from old threads?

Was the Minister posing for photos, blowing the smoke from his shotgun, over a corpse that had died years ago?

I read the policy paper itself (yeah, dull old me, actually reading the underlying material). The only mention it makes of mosquito devices is to various successful campaigns for their removal.

Hmmm. Big hmmm.

So I asked about a bit: did anyone I know have any evidence of real, live mosquito use anywhere near them?

I got back a few comments like “well, I think there’s one outside a shop near me” but nobody could actually say they were sure one was being used.

Googling didn’t enlighten me much further. The suppliers of these devices seemed keen to trumpet their virtues, of course. [Here a Mr Gordon White of Plymouth City Council praises the reduction in vandalism they've seen since fitting them. When? Hmmm.]

So I looked a little harder at Plymouth. There was a lot of debate a while back–most of it either parroting Mr White’s claims, or concerning attempts to ban use of the things by the Council.

Yet more grandstanding, it would seem. On the one hand, hardliners trying to show residents how tough they can be on the causes of vandalism. On the other, more liberal voices courting teenage popularity by banning them.

But are they being used now? As Tim Loughton flings them around as so much salt and pepper on his speech?

A job for FOI…

Using the wonderful What Do They Know, I have a swift answer.

No. And the one they did have hadn’t been activated since 2008.

If you do have any evidence of real use, I’d be very interested to hear it. Not of previous installations, or claimed installations, or of a box on the wall that’s become part of local lore. Real evidence that they are switched on regularly, teenagers dispersed, and all that.

I mean, the Minister wouldn’t just use flimsy scare stories to brighten up a headline, now would he?

—–

Afterpiece: Jon Baines has dug out this interesting legal briefing to Tim Loughton on mosquitos.

Great word, isn’t it? And so many of them around, too. I mean, we all know one or two ourselves, don’t we? Don’t we?

So, where to start with all this stuff…Mr Byrne and Mr Miliband seem but the latest to come out swinging at all these parasites.

Problem is, like almost everyone else, the rhetoric and the thinking are all pointing the wrong way.

To see it another way, think of a few different…lines.

Imagine a line of people with the most ardent hardliner on “scrounger culture” at one end of it. He (just a wild guess, but it’s probably a he) will maintain that if you can’t support yourself, and have no family or handy charity who’ll help you out, then you shouldn’t exist. Harsh, but life is harsh…etc. etc. Under no circumstance should the state try to do so, given it will be funded by compulsory subscription from everyone else. It’s not their problem, is it?

At the other end of the same line is the biggest bleeding heart do-gooder you could possible think of. Great at writing cheques on other people’s bank accounts, especially if their money is channelled by a faceless intermediary in the shape of a paternalistic state. Who cares about a few “false positives” in terms of the needy being supported? Better that ten doubtful cases are helped than that one genuine person starves.

These are caricatures, of course. But we’re all on that line somewhere. Even if we’re not exactly sure where. Or change position over time, or according to the individual case we’re looking at. We’re all on it. The line of the judgers.

Imagine a second line, the line of the judged. This one has the genuine case at one end, and the complete liar at the other. We know the two extremes when we see them, of course. Because they’re extremes. And many of us think, from a distance, that we have a pretty good idea of where on the line we can draw that “magic” point: to one side, you’re deserving, to the other, you’re a scrounger.

A few problems creep in immediately: where you draw it can be based as much upon where you stand on the line of the judgers as where they stand on the line of the judged. And can you be a judger and judged at the same time? (Erm, yes.) Are you really judging circumstance, or character? Plight, or background? (I still wince when I remember that phrase from the old advertisements: “distressed gentlefolk”…)

But the real problem is that these lines aren’t lines in any geometric sense. The nice purity of division and classification falls apart like a cheap suit under any sort of scrutiny.

Think of the coastline. Yes, another line. Isn’t it? It’s obvious where it lies. One side land, the other sea. Now look more closely. Still sure about that? Still confident that you can draw, with perfect accuracy, a boundary between the two? One that doesn’t shift faster than you can study it? One in which every crevice, nook, cell and grain can be defined as being on one side or the other?

Of course you can’t. The coastline is a great theory, but a poor reality. It only exists at a distance, rather like our dividing line of the deserving from the undeserving.

No, like the coastline, both the judgers and the judged are fractals: the closer you look, the more complexity you see. And it seems to me that the national debate here totally overlooks what’s really at issue: these questions of judgement. It’s just infantile to keep on throwing around vague concepts like “a horde of scroungers”–because we find, time and time again, that when you look at the individual cases there are no easy judgements–if indeed you can be confident of a sound judgement at all.

Nobody at all, really, wants to reward the feckless. Or cause the needy to suffer, given that overall, we have resources to help them.

What we all want, surely, is accurate judgement.

And at this point, a problem creeps in. Our line of judgers is not symmetrical in its appetite for the dispensation of “fair” judgement. At its right-hand extreme, this looks like a further grotesque waste of resources, as only the state (or its agents) is really in a position to assess. And any effort by the state is itself a needless drain on everyone as a whole (they’d say). Whilst the inhabitants of the left-hand end would be happier to put more resource into fair assessment, and if savings had to be made, trimming the thresholds of entitlement. Not symmetrical.

So we see funny little tunes being played: we delegate assessment to the ATOSes of this world–close enough to the state to do the dirty work, but far enough away to take the drop if it all goes horribly wrong. We see campaigns for “class action” to entitle a whole group without the need for individual scrutiny. We get caught between facile statements like “ministers believe as many as one in four people claiming sickness benefit will be judged to be fit to work” and safety nets like the human rights legislation that we’ve fought to secure. Debates, clashes, contradictions.

Reality. A reality which will not be helped by any politician claiming to be able to stand at a distance from a line of people and to know where their worthiness lies.

So. Of course we love certainty. We like stories with endings. Some would rather have a few hundred deaths from malnutrition than all this pansying about trying to get it “right”.

I’m not one of them. I want to see a commitment from my leaders, not to more macho statements of generalisation, but to funded, forensic, detailed judgement. To the effective and sensible use of technology (in the right places) in supporting that judgement. To a separation of the person from the situation. To a more considered balance between individual rights and responsibilities. To an acknowledgement of the power of culture to make an impact here.

We don’t need any more of this “scrounger” crap. It’s divisive, demonising, and it gets us absolutely nowhere. And even worse than that, it distracts attention from any real effort on reviewing how we make these vital judgements.

A proposal:

At around age 14, set aside a week away from the standard education curriculum for kids to work, in groups, in a very focused way: on a project with a simple brief, but a complex reality.

What does that mean?

Well, it might be to design a way of giving everyone in the UK £100 (as an alternative quantitative easing approach). It might be to identify all public buildings to find better ways of using them. Or to model what would happen if jails were abolished (or if speeding convictions carried automatic jail sentences). Or to design a rail system that would be ultra-resilient to sudden, massive demand and freak weather conditions.

Anything really.

Or at least anything that would show that a bit more effort is required in reality to do some of the things that really matter in this world. Even though they might sound simple. So that first one: giving everyone £100? Well, you’d need to work out who “everyone” was…what would qualify as entitlement…how to get the money to them securely and trackably…how to deal with claims that it hadn’t been received (true and fraudulent)…how to deal with those who didn’t want to be on any state registers but still wanted their cash… You get the picture. Putting real world details around a nice, simple concept.

You’d cover analysis, planning, teamwork, logistics, consequences (seen and unforeseen). And probably a whole lot more. You’d learn about edge cases, the ability of a small number of difficult situations to eat up disproportionate resources, and how you have to design for the awkward, not just implement for the easy.

And out of all this, there might, just might, be a tiny chance that statements like “well, I don’t see why they can’t just…” or “how hard can it be to…” would be cast around just a little less lightly. And questioned a little harder when falling from the mouths of politicians.

Because the problem is this: when we’re small, our world is small. And simple. Decisions are clear, motives unambiguous, morality absolute. Things are, or they are not. Laws are clear, enforceable and enforced.

The King says “make it so!” and the Knights make it so. The Princess makes her choice, and the losing suitor slinks away, never to play a part in this or any other story.

And so it goes.

And then things change. Our world gets bigger, and more difficult. We realise that society is a loose patchwork of consents, of unwritten codes, of behaviours.

And do we change, too? Or are we content to carry on with an increasing pretence that the world is monochrome, that things can be made to happen by dictat, and that anything involving sixty million people need not be any more complicated than something involving a handful?

Do we continue with these childish fantasies, and follow leaders who–even if they believe in their hearts that what they propose is at most only partly achievable–must dance the dance of the simple: spouting policies that can never be delivered, just so they continue to look…like what? Like leaders. Right.

Left-wing and right-wing, we dance up and down the same spectrum of choices: of levers that can be pulled in various directions, of societal mores running from the brutal to the soft, the feudal to the flattened. We might choose different starting positions, and have certain favourite themes and moves. But if we get stuck with these lame little models of “why don’t they just…”, and come to believe that wickedly difficult problems are actually easy, then we’re all stuffed.

Because we do believe. On a mass scale. Because we were never taught any differently. We weren’t taught to think harder, to go deeper, to challenge rigorously, or to live the reality of what implementation might actually be like.

And so things like social and economic policy get very broken. Preposterous, simplistic “solutions” float around: hoodies marched to cashpoints, rioters’ families evicted, a single ID number, watertight borders, cities scoured of benefit claimants, a single central health record for everyone…the list goes on. (That last one would make a great school project, by the way. Starter: think who might need to view and/or change that record–including the patient–what their interests and motivations might be, and how all those agendas stack up against the benefits.)

It’s an awful lot easier to believe in simple magic than to work through hard science. And very much easier to whip a crowd up behind you, too. Asking those hard questions has become the antithesis of leadership. What a splendidly vicious circle!

And yet, it can be broken. With so many other large scale problems of capability or understanding, we try to fix things at source. Through education, for example. It beats me why we’ve never seriously attempted this route.

Would a more aware, canny, and yes perhaps cynical population really be that frightening? Or would we sniff out the stupid and actually become far more tolerant as a result?

I think it’s worth a try. Be a hell of an interesting week, anyway.

(It took me until I was 17, and half-way through A-level Economics, before the reality pennies started to drop. That transactions mostly have two sides to them. That someone’s good deal is often another’s bad one. That public finance doesn’t begin with some kind of magic money tree in the Treasury courtyard. That expectation can be as powerful an influence as factual evidence. That people don’t always do what you expect them to, even when we have laws to force them to. It felt like a real privilege to have my mind stretched like that, and I’ve always felt a bit more of it could go a long, long way.)