Fintan O’Toole: Truss’ gospel of disruption is to move fast and break things

The great difference between politics and science is not that the first is full of chancers and the second isn’t. Every sphere of human activity has its share of impostors.

In science, there are outright fraudsters who rig trial results to advance their careers or to please corporate bosses. There are those who, through ambition or missionary zeal, convince themselves they are making stunning breakthroughs and become wilfully blind to all contrary evidence. There are hack professors with lucrative sidelines as consultants to pharma companies, who stifle doubts that might sink their patrons’ profits. All the varieties of chancer common to political life can be found in science too.

The difference is simply that, in science, bogus ideas get found out eventually. For all the limitations of the scientific method, claims are tested against evidence and, as the evidence accumulates, bad science is exposed. It often takes far too long for this to happen and far too much damage is done in the meantime. But when a fraud is revealed, the ideas that it spawned are killed off.

Even on the nonfascist right, there are two related ideas, both bogus, both long since found out, but both newly potent, especially in Britain

In politics, however, it seems that nothing is ever really found out for good and all. Bad ideas persist and resurface. They are found out but then refound all over again.

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Authoritarian regimes have no mechanism for excising the bad ideas of the authorities. They use violence and propaganda to enforce the acceptance even of absurdities. (Putin’s Russia is an interesting current test case for how far this can go in a society with some vestiges of a free civil society.)

Democracies do have mechanisms for questioning and checking: free media, active citizens, open debate, independent research. Yet they still find it very hard to kill off theories that have been tried out in real life and found to be rubbish.

The worst example at the moment is fascism. It brought unspeakable catastrophe to Europe, yet here it is again, rising in modified forms but driven by the same impulses and appealing to the same destructive instincts.

But even on the nonfascist right, there are two related ideas, both bogus, both long since found out, but both newly potent, especially in Britain. One is “disruption”. The other is “trickle down”.

“Whenever there is change,” Liz Truss told her Conservative Party conference last week, “there is disruption. Not everyone will be in favour. But everyone will benefit from the result — a growing economy and a better future.”

This is the gospel of disruption: move fast and break things, be reckless and ruthless or you will die, ignore the complaints of those whose yelps of pain are the birth-cries of necessary innovation.

Like a lot of the nonsense that infested democratic politics in the late 20th century, this comes from business-speak. In this case it spread outwards from the theories of Clayton Christensen, developed in the late 1990s at Harvard Business School.

The idea is essentially this: established companies fall prey to “disruptive” upstart rivals who create a cheaper, poorer-quality product that eventually takes all or most of their market share.

Does this happen sometimes? Of course it does. Ryanair destroyed Aer Lingus’s cosy model of very expensive short-haul flights. Uber, in much of the world, has elbowed aside the old taxi industry.

But is this a universal truth? Of course not. Even when applied to businesses, it’s hit and miss. The vast majority of upstart companies who take on the established market leaders fail miserably. Most of those expensive incumbents survive very nicely.

Only confirmation bias obscures these truths. The believers count only the exceptional cases because the other ones don’t fit the narrative.

If trickle-down economics were a new drug, it probably would have got approval from regulators in the 1980s, simply because very powerful people had so much to gain

Yet I still shaved this morning with blades made by Gillette, which has been doing its thing since 1900. I am typing this on a machine made by Apple, which has been in business since 1976.

There are plenty of cheaper options for blades or laptops. But Gillette and Apple thrive by investing, over the long term, in innovation. They don’t move fast and break things. They think carefully, research deeply and make the things they produce steadily better.

I am flying this evening on Aer Lingus, which is still going, and still making profits, in spite of Ryanair. I will take a taxi home from Dublin Airport. These old modes have not been “disrupted” out of existence — they’ve adapted, as almost every organisation does, to change and challenge.

Even in the business world, therefore, disruption is a limited way of understanding what is going on. But when applied to democratic politics (or to public institutions like schools, universities and hospitals) it is idiotic.

In politics, what the brilliant American historian Jill Lepore has called (in a seminal essay in the New Yorker in 2014) “the rhetoric of disruption — a language of panic, fear, asymmetry, and disorder”, is not “creative destruction”. It is merely destruction.

It goes against the most basic function of government, which is to try to provide its citizens with as much security as is possible in an unpredictable world.

Governments are not like scrappy little entrepreneurs, who can move in, grab a quick buck, and move on. Governments have to be stable. The countries they rule aspire to being around for a very long time.

Governments also have to think, not just about whether a particular change is immediately profitable, but whether it serves the common good. Some innovations make things worse — sometimes the job of democratic politicians is to stop them. When politicians start fantasising that they are the new Uber, they don’t just break things, they break people and they break democracy.

And then there’s “trickle down” economics. The trials have been done many times and on vast scales: notably in the US and Britain in the 1980s, and again under Donald Trump.

The results are consistent and overwhelming: the rich get richer, ordinary incomes improve very little if at all, inequality widens and government debt balloons. Big tax cuts for the rich don’t “pay for themselves”.

If trickle-down economics were a new drug, it probably would have got approval from regulators in the 1980s, simply because very powerful people had so much to gain and because there were so many academic zealots willing to vouch for it.

But eventually, as the evidence accumulated, it would have shown that the drug did nothing to cure social or economic ills and had many dangerous side effects. It would have been withdrawn from the market and written off as, at best an embarrassing failure and at worst a fraud.

The left, in general, has done this with bad ideas. All but the lunatic fringe has dumped the belief that the entire economy can be centrally controlled, or the notion that farms should be forcibly collectivised.

But the right keeps recycling old garbage. In this, if in little else, it is environmentally friendly — no clapped-out nonsense goes to waste.