Hedgehog Politicians Are Dangerous for Society
Policymakers need multiple models to deal with difficult problems
"Hedgehog" by david-gilmour is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided us with a great A/B experiment to compare populist (or anti-pluralist) politicians with their peers in the mainstream. Regular readers will probably be unsurprised to see that research shows that the populists tended to do significantly worse than non-populists. Populist governments were less aggressive in tackling the disease, saw lower compliance rates among the populations they governed and suffered worse mortality rates.
The rest of this week’s column will drill down into one possible reason why populists tend to be bad at governance and solving knotty problems. The idea that I want to explore hinges on the distinction between foxes and hedgehogs, which we have discussed many times before. Regular readers can skip the next paragraph!
Here’s a quick refresher: reality is complex. Foxes, who compare and contrast multiple models, will always have a better chance of aligning our thoughts with the world outside our heads than hedgehogs, who just have one catch-all model of reality. However, as simple-minded creatures, we will often find the black-and-white narratives of hedgehogs to be emotionally engaging.
Of course, populists will always tend to be hedgehogs. The populist worldview is based on the misconception that elections are meant to reveal “the will of the people” instead of providing a way to get rid of incumbents when they get past their sell-by dates. Narcissistic political leaders who buy into the populist fallacy will tend to imagine that they alone embody the will of the people. This makes them reluctant to accept the validity of the opposition or other parts of the system (like an independent press and judiciary) that are meant to hold them back. Populists who win power will tend to engage in democratic backsliding to make society less plural.
Populists of the right will tend to rail against cultural elites and ethnic minorities, while populists of the left will often have a problem with economic elites. Despite these obvious differences, there will often be surprising similarities between the two sides, such as Donald Trump talking about the “fake news media” from the right and Pedro Sánchez discussing “the mud-slinging machine” from the left. Both politicians hate impertinent journalists doing independent work.
One essential issue to bear in mind is that hedgehogs are prickly - they are particularly prone to cognitive dissonance (an uncomfortable feeling we all experience when contradicted); and will reject unwelcome feedback. The famous picture of Carles Puigdemont, the former populist First Minister of Catalonia, posing next to letters from judges warning him that he was about to break a number of serious laws with heavy penalties is perhaps the perfect image of a hedgehog rejecting feedback. Of course, he ran away when the judges turned out not to be bluffing.
I strongly believe that populists tend to be bad at governance because they are hedgehogs. Some interesting research backs up this idea. Nobel Prize-winning economist Jan Tinbergen proposed an influential guideline for policymakers often known as Tinbergen’s rule. It says “the best way to manage a certain number of targets (or objectives) is to have an equal number of instruments (or policies).” In other words, the most successful policymakers will always be foxes - they will deploy different models to tackle different problems.
Luckily, we have an example of a hedgehog taking disastrous but non-populist decisions in power to illustrate the point. Liz Truss, who was Prime Minister of the UK for 49 chaotic days in 2022, is a true hedgehog. Her single big idea is economic growth. If you had to pick one big idea, this is actually a pretty good one. Economic growth is the single biggest story of the contemporary world, bar none. It has transformed our lives; and will continue to do so for many more years to come, if we are lucky. It has come with environmental costs, true, but the central problem for our time is how to continue to grow the economy while promoting an energy transition.
"World GDP per capita 1500 to 2003" by Original: Qwfp Vector: EssensStrassen is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Politicians who want to win elections as incumbents have to think long and hard about economic growth. It is a very sensible policy nine times out of ten. Unfortunately for Truss, though, the absolutely worst time to grow the economy is when there is an inflation crisis and your country’s central bank is fighting back by tightening debt costs. This is exactly the circumstance that Truss encountered towards the end of 2022. As a hedgehog, she failed to understand the need to deploy a second model of reality until prices subsided.
In September 2022, Truss’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, presented a “mini-budget” aimed at growing the economy through tax cuts. The day beforehand, the Bank of England had raised interest rates by half a point to 2.25% in order to cool rampant inflation. The two policies clearly clashed and markets reacted badly. The pound fell against the dollar; and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) criticised the plan. Markets continued to provide negative feedback until Truss was forced to fire Kwarteng. The new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, reversed the majority of the tax cuts. Truss resigned shortly afterwards. It later emerged that Truss and Kwarteng’s negligence would cost the country some £30bn - a staggering amount.
Foxes, who are used to deploying multiple models to understand reality, have to ask ourselves which one is appropriate at which time. Truss and Kwarteng completely missed this memo. They had one model of reality; they tried to force it onto society; and they ignored feedback. The results were truly disastrous. Truss has since tried to become a star of the international libertarian right by misrepresenting her disastrous time in office and refusing to learn anything from it.
The world is about to get yet another chance to learn the lesson. Trump is a true hedgehog. He has been concerned about trade since at least the 1980s. His whole trade schtick is based on an intuitive misunderstanding trade balances, which he sees as being similar to the balance sheet of a business. Economists disagree about the alleged benefits of tariffs, which hard-won experience shows tend to be inflationary.
Sadly, hedgehogs, like Trump and all populists, always stand a chance in tight elections. We all like simple stories, giving hedgehogs a chance. This is the central problem for institutionalists, who support the institutions that are meant to protect diversity in society. How can we sell sensible and pragmatic policymaking based on multiple models to a population that prefers simple tales?
To see why one model of society will never work, let us finish this week’s essay with a rather good joke from Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges:
“We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight ! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
The comments are closed, as always when I discuss feedbackphile populists. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Cognitive dissonance and feedback
Institutionalism (part one and part two)
Further Reading
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Anthony Bonner)
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