tom wein

A recent piece for Elina Halonen’s Indecision Blog, where I’m now a contributor, laying out a three part research agenda for moving forward in the behaviour change field.

The three priorities are:

“linking linear behaviour change with our understanding of complex systems;

developing a good basis for selecting behaviours to change; and

understanding what we mean by behaviour in the first place.

Underlying all of this, a constant presence, is the need to check our work and replicate our findings.”

Nothing holds back development so much as conflict. It is one of the most important factors in determining levels of development. Consequently, understanding conflict, and devising ways to predict, avoid and mitigate it, is a task for which every development actor has a responsibility.

I recently published an article with BehaviouralEconomics.com, charting some of those efforts to comprehend conflict, by academics and by governments, that have been informed by psychology and ideas from behavioural science.

An excerpt from that piece:

In the academy, there have also been attempts to integrate psychology into conflict studies. The study of norms has long been a central plank of political science, and groupthink has been extensively examined; there have been several attempts to integrate political psychology into international relations. There has been important, exciting and often brave work on behaviour in conflict. Jason Lyall and colleagues have done much empirical work around identity and decisions in Afghanistan and beyond - their list and endorsement experiments have also offered a way forward in the face of fearsome field research challenges. Kenneth Payne, of KCL’s well-regarded War Studies department, has made a major contribution with his study ‘The Psychology of Strategy’. Oliver Kaplan has sought to understand how armed groups might be ‘nudged’ into taking different paths. Vera Mironova and her co-researchers have conducted a series of fascinating experiments among combatants and civilians in Syria and Ukraine. To that we can add some longstanding efforts to understand and model the behaviour and decision-making of terrorism and radicalisation. More widely, some of the best work at this nexus can be tracked by following the Political Violence @ a Glance blog.

Think for a moment about Lord of the Rings. A rollicking fantasy adventure that can read and enjoyed by nearly anyone, that also provides the depth to delight a legion of fans for whom the term hardcore is inadequate. How does it please these two very different audiences?

One of the secrets lies in the appendices. At the end of The Return of the King, lie Appendices A-F – 120 pages of extra detail. It is this extra detail (and many of the other publications of Middle Earth could be considered supplements or appendices to the main story) that allows the two audiences to find such satisfaction. Those who want the story can stick to the story; those who want more know where to go to find it.

You are always writing for different audiences with different interests. Writing policy reports, I imagine three different audiences: decision-makers, who want snappy recommendations; desk specialists, who want nuanced findings about their area; and scientists, who care about epistemology and methodology. As an academic, you must concisely advance the field for your peers in ways that can be understood and appreciated by a lowly undergraduate, or a visitor from an adjacent area of study.

It’s rarely possible to please all those audiences within the flow of a single piece of prose. Good signposting and clear structures will help, of course, but real depth on an issue will unbalance a narrative and frustrate at least some of your readers.

There are no page limits on the internet; the only limitation on length is what people are prepared to read. More and more journals now expect the publication of statistical code and of data alongside an article. Why stop there? If in the course of your research you prepared a database of relevant organisations, or profiled a particular aspect of policy, or transcribed interviews, why not post them? The body of the article, the peer-reviewed bit, remains sacrosanct, but you could transform someone else’s research by providing additional material beyond that.

Labour supporters, your ballots will arrive today.

For those of you planning on voting, I urge you to reject Jeremy Corbyn. I think his policies are wrong on their merits, and I am horrified by his foreign policy positions - not because he talks to unpleasant groups, which is commendable, but because he actively supports them.

But most of all, because politics is not a game of self-affirmation - it is a duty of service. We serve those in need best from the centre of the stage. Speeches and marches are worthy tools, but they pale in comparison to what can be achieved in just a day - if that day is spent in power, in government.

And government is within Labour's grasp. The Conservative majority is just twelve - and after two terms, it will surely not increase. If the party readies itself quickly, campaigns well and shows itself to be a credible alternative government, then it can win. But not with Corbyn.

Corbyn is a misdiagnosis. What he offers is honesty. Those who say that he will win can only say it if they believe that dishonesty - and only dishonesty - is what kept us from power. It is true that people want honest politicians. But they also want politicians who can lead and unite - which he can't - and who proffer wise and effective policies for the management of the country - which he does not even try to do.

“Behavioural economics, as a discipline, has been unusually blessed in the fluency of its leading lights. Kahneman, Sunstein, Halpern, Ariely and Mullainathan are all persuasive, entertaining communicators. That fact has surely contributed to the popular success of its ideas, which have now gone so far beyond the Academy. Thaler’s talk, studded with witticisms and catty asides, was economics leavened with star power; there was even a tentative whoop as he took the stage.”

“Three years of reading theories of sociology prepared Mike Kelly not at all for “the brutality of power” he experienced in counselling ministers, at the Health Development Agency and latterly as Director of the Centre of Public Health Excellence at NICE. Yet he is resolute in saying that this was not a bad thing; merely politicians doing their jobs, in roughly the way that they ought to. In a remarkably wide-ranging talk at the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, he argued that the onus is on scientists to understand the messiness of real change, and to adapt accordingly.”

A piece for the always-essential Stirling Behavioural Science Blog, on applying this discipline to international development - the progress we’ve made so far, and the challenges that remain. 

A taster extract:

“Finally, what can behavioural science do to ensure that it is fit for purpose in developing countries? I believe its standard bearers can better engage with existing debates about behaviour in development, including the use of Theories of Change and efforts to leverage the power of communities. As a discipline, it can emphasize parsimony, both in its research questionnaires and in its models. For the latter work, the UCL team’s Behaviour Change Wheel deserves particular acclaim; 'Capabilities, Opportunities and Motivations' is accessible enough to be jotted down on the back of an envelope – even in an ancient Toyota on awful dirt roads. Behavioural scientists must recognise that development professionals have long been trying to change behaviour, and that behavioural science is there to improve and supplement, not replace. Above all, they can continue to ensure that behavioural science remains a discipline that seeks not just to understand but to respond; methods and models must have the clearest possible link from data to specific, actionable recommendations, because development does not need more vague advice from learned thinkers.”

I don’t hate this government. I am wearied by the smallness of their vision, and I believe that by derailing a nascent recovery in 2011 they caused considerable unnecessary suffering, but I don’t hate them. I just think we could do better.

Governance in Britain is basically done by one of two clumps of centrists, supported by different shades of wingnuttery. You choose the group with the most competent centrists and the least offensive fools.

I find Labour’s outer wings far more congenial than the Tories’, but more importantly I think their centrists will be more effective. The Coalition government has amassed only a handful of effective ministers – Hague did good work at the Foreign Office, and Gove made progress on autonomy for schools, but few others distinguished themselves.

Above all, the central partnership has not been up to scratch. Cameron is a leaderly type who doesn’t do much leading. He spent the first half of the parliament buying off his backbenchers with promises of damaging referenda; he’s spent the second half pissing away the Union to buy a few English votes. Throughout he’s flitted from one big idea to the next: from big society moderniser to Europe’s reformer to saviour of Libya. Osborne is by all accounts a witty dinner companion, but he devotes at least as much time to hatching opportunistic political wheezes as to the economy. Neither has shown sufficient strategic vision.

By contrast, Miliband and Balls are the sort of people you would want in charge. Detailed, intelligent, geeky, careful. Ed Balls is the best economist in the Commons; Ed Miliband the most thoughtful of MPs. Both have already spent a decade at the heart of government. If we can have all that, and the major drawback is a rather nasal speaking style, then that’s a deal I’ll take.

Under another electoral system, I might be tempted to reward the Lib Dems for a reasonably effective, fairly responsible, stint in government. Or even the Greens, whose principles deserve a hearing even if their maths is suspect. But First Past the Post, even now, is a system which rewards ‘parties of government’, and your best bet for influence remains picking the right one and seeking to advance your views within it. For me, that one is Labour. I will vote for them and I hope you will too.

The Israelis’ and Arabs’ war demands your response. It has among wars a unique motive power; a coercive effect on observers that insists we speak or act or watch in awful silence. We cannot simply let it go on, as for other wars (wars more pertinent to our security, such as that in nuclear Pakistan). When we ignore it, we cannot set it from our mind, but must expend energy pushing it away.

So we – we writers and thinkers – try to find the words to express the rending sense that the world and the parties are failing. And we can’t. The terms are too clogged by political contest and competing narrative. There are walls and barriers and security fences; there are bombers and martyrs and murderers and fighters and a hundred other terms, each its own shade of sympathy and reproach. Palestine is the OPT is the Palestinian Territories, or Judea and Samaria or Gaza and the West Bank, and all the terms invite assault – people die for every choice. Euphemism is a potent tool; we can all spot the atrocity hidden in “martyrdom operations”, but who can hear the pain behind “Zone A”? The studied dullness of the term is too much, it squashes empathy. Of course, the least of our deaths is words, when so much else dies too, but the death of words is the death that abandons to oblivion all the other losses.

We may, when we strive honestly, find the words to lament each detail, and greater artists might succeed in mourning the whole great tragedy. What we cannot do is describe or analyse. It feels as if we may be doomed forever to talk past each other, then shout for the lack of hearing, then shoot.

So what are we to do? Attempt a common narrative, of course, but there is faint hope of that. We certainly need good history, and before that good reporting to record with care the mass of data and experience. We will need to record ‘just the facts’ (and oral history to record ‘just the lives’). Yet the conflict is too efficient; there simply isn’t a neutral middle ground and the accumulation of data will not provide one. Perhaps time and distance will reveal it, but this conflict is seventy years and two millennia in the festering – how long will we have to wait?

We might seek escape in verbosity. Let us include every firm fact, in the longest of books. Dull inclusiveness will save us, and if it’s all there, who can claim they are left out? We can even computerize the book, such that the facts appear in random order, to save protests about prominence. The absurdity of such a book is clear; what truth would that be, when it cannot be read and cannot occasion empathy? We can see a hint of its failure in action in the Wikipedia articles on the conflict, which are revised until they are a mass of non-sequential details and alternately biased statements, all of them [citation needed] and [in dispute].

What else? We could read coherent pieces and accept their bias. View an object from enough angles, and you will see it in the round. Call it a sort of historical cubism. We could read Leon Uris and Raja Shehadeh, and Darwish and Oz and all the rest, and the historians with their viewpoints, and hope to triangulate to the middle view, which we might take to be the truth. Martin Crimp’s play Attempts on Her Life gives the viewer 17 angles on a woman, and we might repeat the process here. But surely we have tried that, and been frustrated, and found our words still gone, as Crimp’s audience found the woman absent?

It is not enough. Plenty find solace in choosing a side, selected for them by their own biography or through sympathy for an underdog. We cannot hope for that peaceful certainty, if we are to help the parties to more than mere victory. (For some too, as for me, biographical ties clash with the inclination to tilt against power).

So are we left with silence? “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Is there an honourable attentive silence, studying the history and preparing for some change in the deadlock? But it may get worse as we do, because to remain silent abandons the field to those who aren’t even trying – to those who pursue victory rather than truth or justice. Can that be right, to remain silent while watching suffering?

This war is always inchoate. Enemies switch and multiply and rename and franchise themselves.  We attack new countries (or carry out operations within them), sometimes openly and sometimes secretly and sometimes while denying common knowledge. The war itself changes name periodically. We don’t know much for sure; we can only occasionally agree on spellings.

To that vagueness, add scale. For the 11th September attacks did not assault any one particular aspect of Western power; they targeted all of it, commerce and firepower and politics in one. The ambition was absolute and anti-specific. 

Faced with so broad an assault, we struggle to comprehend – our explanations end up either general and racist or mired in sociological notions of limited predictive power – or, like J.M. Berger and his professional colleagues, we are forever immersed in individual details.  The hopelessness of the databases we use to order the conflict (of proscribed groups, or no fly lists) tells its own tale.

The attacks on Charlie Hebdo, its staff and its protectors, are different. The choice of target reveals a concrete political objective – dissuading those who would publish cartoons of Muhammad.  The right to do so, we all agree, is an important one. The relative sophistication of the attackers excuses us from fretting about disaffected youth – these were not mixed up teens, but deliberate militants, and we can assign guilt to them as adults making a conscious choice to kill.

An old house. A large family, through three generations. The sweep of European history, echoing and illustrated by domestic dramas. These are the constituent parts of a solid theatrical formula. The question therefore lies in the skill of execution.

And in that regard, 3 Winters makes for a very amiable evening. The capacious drama is given space to breathe. The political ironies are well-flagged, and the jokes are well-delivered. All of the performances are good, and some are better than that  (Bebe Sander’s Alisa deserves special mention).

One might hope though for a little more refinement. There are few truly poetic phrasings, and the characterisations could aspire to greater specificity. Nothing is quite as finely pointed as it might be, from the variably Northern accents onwards, and it is an exercise to remember exactly who’s who.

A new project in which I review the 70 titles in Penguin's 70th anniversary box set.

http://seventypenguins.tumblr.com/

  Dear Scotland,

    It is one of Britain's great achievements to have built our national pride on welcoming others. Though I like our flag, I am proudest of our tolerance. After the terribly bloody twentieth century, and as wars of religious passion wrack the world - wars of the sort that once divided our island - that sort of post-national pragmatism, in which we just try to get on, and get along, is a grand political experiment. It is as ambitious in its way as the American one. And we may say that Scots have been at the beating heart of that experiment. Where the English have often lagged, comfortable with our dominance, it was Scots and Irish who battled anti-Catholic prejudice, and Scots and Welsh who guarded the non-conformist tradition. Scotland's greatest philosopher, David Hume, gave sturdy defences of religious tolerance (and, by the by, devolved governance). It has often been Scots, too, who have urged the great social reforms that mean birth is no barrier to health or dignity, from Lister and Lind and Fleming in medicine to suffragettes such as Elsie Inglis and socialists like Keir Hardie. That is not to mention the Welshman working in Scotland, Robert Owen, who gave his workers decency, and taught the rest of the country to do the same.  

'So what?', one may say. 'That's the past. Scotland will still produce great figures'. And of course it will. But in separating, we will abandon that tradition of tolerance, long in the building, in favour of two separate nationalisms. Those nationalisms will be too busy reasserting themselves to pay much mind to who they shut out. Wind-blown flags are very fine, and it is easy to get excited about being with people like oneself. Yet it is a finer thing still to take part in this experiment in mildness, which is more revolutionary than it seems.  

When this country was most threatened, a great invention, radar, was put by the Scottish Watson-Watt at the service of another great Scot, Air Chief Marshall Dowding - thus was Britain saved. We are not called again to face such threats, but we face a battle of sorts, and our joint tradition of tolerance is our best armour and sharpest sword. The English have come, in no small part thanks to Scots, to understand its value. We implore you to stay, and help build it into the future.

Why Nations Fail is a masterpiece. Acemoglu and Robinson marshall an astonishing breadth of evidence in support of their theory that states succeed when they build inclusive economic and political institutions, and few could fail to be convinced by their case. That they do so in prose which is always clear and is often very elegant is a considerable bonus.

It is a tribute to their achievement that I read all 460 pages so closely, and that my brain was firing throughout. I hope they will not object, therefore, if I offer some friendly criticisms of their work. None torpedo their central case, but the book would be better still if it dealt with them – perhaps a second edition might.

The authors rely heavily on two motors of history: contingency and critical junctures. That they include the former is gratifying; few theorists have much time for historical chance. Yet critical junctures are seriously undertheorized. If they offer a definition of them, it is a circular one: critical junctures are major events that provide opportunities for institutional change, or for the acceleration of those changes, and we may identify them by the changes they caused. This is not a falsifiable proposition.

In one case, they seem to rather overstretch the evidence. In a crucial passage on the Natufian civilisation, they seek to refute Jared Diamond’s geographical argument by demonstrating that the Natufians developed institutions before they farmed. It is a fascinating, exotic example, but archaeology at ten millenia’s remove is a business of tantalizing inference. The evidence, as they present it, hints at their interpretation, but it proves neither.

Similarly, several odd flaws creep in in the somewhat rushed closing chapters. Of course each case study has its particularities, but they are in a few cases not adequately recognised as the authors flit from one country to the next. Why, for instance, was a gang of Botswanan cattle-owning elites a sufficiently diverse coalition to bring on pluralism, when in other situations they would have been described as precisely the sort of narrow sectoral group who would have most to gain from throwing up barriers to entry? Why, in Colombia, do Uribe’s paramilitary friends represent a failure of centralisation, but his expansion of police control in FARC areas not mention a countervailing mention? No doubt specialists will be able to spot further examples. The authors cover a fearsome amount of material, but here they might do well to cover a little less.

One particular irritation is the authors’ tendency to refer to entire, diverse continents at once. Clearly in a book of this sort some generalisation will be necessary, but a work which sets out to refute geographic hypotheses of development should be more careful. The habit jars most in relation to Africa, because the assumption of homogeneity has been most pernicious there, but it is as common in their references to Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Acemoglu and Robinson make considerable play of the fact that some states were insufficiently centralised to provide basic security. In some of the cases they suggest, that is an illuminating point. Yet they occasionally fall into judging a country’s centralisation by its modern borders – as for instance they do with Somalia in Chapter 8. Yet many of the confederations in the area we call Somalia would have exhibited extremely high degrees of centralisation (others would not). What they seem to be hinting at is that a polity needs a certain degree of centralisation and a certain scale – as might for instance be borne out by the success of post-Bismarck Germany. They do not explicitly argue this.

Linked to that, and somewhat more egregious, is their uncritical use of nationhood, a slippery concept which remains undiscussed. In some cases, we might accept an elision between state and nation, but one of their examples is the American South. Perhaps arguments can be made for the nationhood of Dixie, but they are not made here, and it is certainly no foregone conclusion. They are on more complex political territory when they suggest that part of centralisation is the ability of the state to create a heterogeneous national culture, as (they explain) did Botswana after independence when it banned all but one local language. Perhaps this is vital, but it has some unpleasant implications for a great many oppressed minorities, and if the point is to be made then it deserves to be made properly.

Throughout the work, because I agree with it, I wanted them to answer the question ‘how much?’ I understand that more inclusive institutions are better, but how inclusive need they be to deliver sustained growth? It is rather an unreasonable question, given the book’s huge scope. But I rather suspect there are hints in the way they describe the Roman Republic as inclusive “at least by the standards of their time” and in the characterisation of post-1688 Britain as better able than France or Spain to exploit Atlantic trade. What they seem to be implying – but never make explicit – is that the benefits of good institutions are partly absolute, but also partly relative. The role of competition between polities is glossed over, even as they extol creative destruction within them. The issue recurs in their treatment of extractive institutions: the Soviet Union, they say, won more growth in part because it was relatively poorer, and had a lot of ‘easy’ catching up to do.

It seems to me that while the authors claim principally to be talking about absolute wealth, in fact they are often showing how institutions produce growth. This allows them to call the Western Roman Empire a failure, because having ditched its inclusive institutions, it collapsed after five centuries of slow growth or recession. No doubt China’s leaders will be greatly reassured, if this is the kind of failure they are warning of.

In fact, problems of time periods recur. If five centuries is an allowable time period, does Western Europe really deserve the economic laurels they bestow on it, four centuries after its rise? The Ethiopian Derg condemned for failing to produce inclusive institutions forty years since its establishment, but the French Revolution is applauded for producing them after decades of Terror, continental war, imperial control and counter-revolution.

In Cromwell’s nascent state, power projection is everything. If they are to excuse potted roads and poverty, the masses must see majesty, not the squabbling at court. Hence coronations, summer progresses, public executions and all the pomp of Henry’s reign. These plays work a similar trick: a towering set, mighty performances and very big dresses leave you feeling you have seen a little more than you have. Where Mantel’s books achieve a unique marriage of the human and historical, the play goes for something a little less noble, in joining history with comedy.

To sweeten the Reformation medicine, there are plenty of hearty gags, including a Frenchman of the Monty Python school and lines – “Ipswich is a lost cause” – cribbed from the lost notebook of Alan Ayckbourn. Lord Norwich (Nicholas Day) channels Melchett and Stephen Gardiner Captain Darling.

The choice is probably the right one – Mantel’s psychological depth would have taken hours. Audiences would have rebelled and actors collapsed. And it is all carried off with an astonishing exactitude of touch, in which there is never too much of anything. That is supported by marvellous lighting and economical (if sometimes prosaic) dialogue, which keeps the politics clear and the plot brisk.

Fine performances do the same. Nathaniel Parker’s Henry VIII, Lucy Briers’ Katherine of Aragon and Lydia Leonard’s Anne Boleyn are all believably human (no mean feat given the historical weight they carry), while Leah Brotherhead is gauche, gamine and persuasive as Jane Seymour. Above all, there is Ben Miles’ Cromwell. He is given much to work with, and much work to do, and to have marshalled it all into a consistent and powerful character is a hefty achievement.