Alexander Bowen: We have not merely let foxes into the hen houses – we’ve put the foxes in charge

Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

The case at the end of last week of a ‘depressed’ Ghanaian fraudster, Samuel Frimpong, who had been deported in 2013, being allowed to return is case in point. 

The Judge responsible, Abid Mahmood appointed in July of last year by Labour, is a first class example.

Highly experienced in the subject area, having completed the closest thing to a judicial cursus honorum, yes but with a CV that makes one thing clear: he is incapable of being an objective decision maker as far as migration & asylum cases are concerned. As his chambers helpfully profiled it is a CV defined by suing the Home Office whenever it attempted to run an independent and controlled migration policy – something as simple as David Cameron’s policy of a pre-entry English language requirement was something Mahmood took umbrage with.

One can of course attempt a defence of said CV, and insist that it was merely the cab rank rule but as one recent article put it “barristers, just like cabbies, can choose which rank to sit in and when”. The cab rank rule is at best a poor justification at best in the judicial system but outside it, where the rule does not even feign existence, the situation is much the same.

Look at any non-departmental public body, popularly called quangos, and the same circumstance of experts, but experts beyond objectivity, being appointed is true. The head of Natural England for instance, Tony Juniper, has decades of environmental and climate experience under his belt – it just so happens said experience includes decades of campaigning against GMOs and for the Green Party (including as a candidate). Whilst Mahmood may have been appointed by Labour, Juniper is a Conservative problem. Why an otherwise excellent Minister like Michael Gove saw it fit to appoint a degrowth Green to head Natural England, a body that has seemingly decided its primary purpose is blocking new construction projects, needs an explanation. 

Now no one should object to experienced specialists being appointed yet what becomes clear is that specialisation can so often serve as a form of auto-ideological capture. It is not some sinister conspiracy but rather a basic fact of human life – people do not go into fields that they are sceptical of. Someone is hardly likely to devote their entire legal career to human rights or to international law if they do not, at least to some extent, believe in the ‘transformational’ power of the field nor is a Professor of Business Management likely to believe that business need be abolished. 

The problem in quangos, the judiciary, and in academia is that despite these bodies claiming neutrality – or at least objectivity – they have created a soft form of selection bias distorting output. The vast majority, of course, are not overtly reproducing ideology in their work but for those that are, the selection effect enables them. That small minority that see themselves as descendants of the Theses on Feuerbach – that ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ – are accidentally enabled by the efforts of others. If all of social science has a replication crisis (the inability to find the same results if the same study is repeated) then there is too little time for rooting out the worst work. 

I have seen it myself in public health.

That famous 330,000 deaths from austerity figure that gets trotted (or should we say Trot-ted) out every 2 or 3 months is case in point. The actual paper does not prove anything – its methodology is simply applying the death rate fall from 1981-2011 to 2012-2019 and in doing so ignores the most fundamental principle of economics (marginality) and the most fundamental principle of public health (that public health gains are not linear). Indeed, their own study found austerity started killing people in 1999 – a decade before it was even conceived – and it was only thanks to an artificially imposed cutoff point did they manage to blame ‘Tory cuts’. They decided then that they would find “social murder” and “social murder” is what they found. 

That example is particularly egregious but across fields the accidental version takes place daily – you are not going to research the negative impacts of austerity on public health unless you believe that they exist and are large. This is despite the point of science being to test the null hypothesis. What is clear is that natural interest, and self sorting into fields, leads to self sorting of output.

What is to be done?

Well for a start we need the public to be rather more skeptical, we need journalists to start reading more than the conclusion of the papers they summarise, we need to rework academia so that ‘unsexy’ findings are not constraints on careers, and we need politicians to start asking questions about the political and policy priors of the experts they ask. 

On the last of those we are starting to get better at it – politicians have rightly started to realise that unions, like the BMA for instance, are not objective expert bodies but organisations that exist above all to serve the interests of its members. That is their prerogative of course but their output, be it lobbying against pharmacists, or lobbying against expanding medical school places or lobbying against the life saving increase in the delay between vaccine doses during the Covid-19 pandemic, need be treated for what it is. It is self interest not public interest.

Nevertheless, for groups that are not motivated by economist’s rents, that is to say money, politicians are still woefully bad at understanding priors. Though there has been, in recent weeks, some small gilmours of hope in that regard. Kemi Badenoch’s pushback against Lady Chief Justice’s insistence that opposing judicial imperialism in border control was undermining an independent judiciary, and Robert Jenrick’s pushback against the Sentencing Council’s attempt at policymaking coupled with its argument that sentencing was none of the government’s business, were both welcome.

Those cases aside, more of that infamous Gove-ian expert scepticism, including of the ones Gove himself appointed, would be rather useful about now.