Policy Ascertainment Bias

In Defence of Being Nasty

There's a lot we need to do in this party of ours. Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies. You know what some people call us -- the Nasty Party. 

Theresa May MP 2002

It was in 2002 that the politician Theresa May, referred to her own party, the right-wing British Conservative Party, as ‘the Nasty Party’ - which sounds an awful lot like ‘Nazi Party’. She was attacking her rivals and their policy views on education, healthcare, the economy and in particular, minorities, for being mean. 

I was reminded of this history after seeing the response to last week’s National Conservatism Conference. The event, which I was rather sympathetic to, aimed to energise and inspire radical right-wing thought. The conference was interrupted by protestors claiming that National Conservatism was actually *ahem* ‘Nat-C’. Journalists referred to the conference as having a ‘toxic ideology’, being ‘divisive, far right’. Conservative, Former Health Secretary, Matt Hancock called the ideas at the conference ‘Trumpian’, ‘offensive’ and ‘so wrong’.

In other words, the national conservatives were nasty. 

And in a sense it is true, the beliefs of right-wing types and myself really are nasty. When I think of the greatest policy issues facing Britain, the problems closest to my heart, the only answers are mean. To be frank about limiting immigration is to be xenophobic, or to use hate speech if you are too blunt. To reform the state-owned health care system is to not care for the poor, as is of course to reform welfare, tax or any economic policy. To support the life sciences is to be a eugenicist. To be concerned about the “triple lock” on pensions is to hate old people. To build new homes is to neglect mother nature. To worry about energy security and the cost is to support nuclear, isn’t that what they make weapons with?!?  To confront feminism is to be sexist. And to fight affirmative action? Racist. 

You see all ‘based’, right-wing policy concerns are explicitly coded as nasty. Why is that? 

It could just be that right-wingers are genuinely mean people. And to be fair, er yeah, that’s actually true. Agreeableness predicts left-wing views. Being relatively higher in the “care” and “fairness” moral foundations predicts liberalism. The only mental illness to predict right-wing views is anti-social personality disorder. 

But what I mean is, how can we, the Nasty Party, rightly believe that all the best policy prescriptions just so happen to be mean? My explanation is Policy Ascertainment Bias. 

Statisticians are typically interested in associations within populations, but they can only study smaller samples from the populations. When this sampling is not random, associations that exist in the population can disappear in the sample, and associations that don’t exist in the population can occur in the sample. This is selection bias or ascertainment bias.

For example, let’s say we run a study on students at an elite university. To get in you need a high IQ or you need to be hard-working. As such, the hardest working students to get in won’t always need to be so smart. The smartest won’t always need to be so hard-working. In our sample, the smarter people will tend to also be the lazier people, an association that does not exist in the total population of the country.

Or imagine you are dating. You want a girl who is hot and not crazy, yet the hottest, least crazy girls can acquire better suitors than you. So you find that you are faced with a trade-off between hot and not crazy among the best girls who are into you.

Now let’s get back to politics. Imagine you’re a policy maker: a politician, a civil servant or even just an influential journalist, think tanker or academic (bloggers don’t make the cut). You know there are many policy ideas out there. You could lower taxes VAT (sales tax), lower requirements to immigrate, increase welfare payments, maybe even increase R&D spending? But those aren’t the only options. You could increase requirements to immigrate, kill the poor and raise VAT, start World War Three or, heaven forbid, privatise the health care system!

You see, some policies are better than others. You notice some policies are good for the country and some policies are bad. But that’s not the only difference. Some policies are nice and some are nasty. You plot all possible policies along these dimensions in the graph below. You may think privatising the healthcare system is good, but that doesn’t seem nice. Likewise, printing lots of money might not be very good, but it might make you look very nice. Do you really want your friends, the newspapers and your mum to think you’re a bad person? And think of the girls! 70% of Democrats refuse to date a Trump supporter. Do you really want to knock yourself out of the gene pool that quickly?

So our imagined policymaker acts rationally and performs some virtue signalling. He only executes policies that are sufficiently nice and sufficiently good. Which leaves us in the below world. Of all of the policies executed, the nastiest are disproportionately good policies. By contrast, the nice policies executed are on average less good - hell, some bad policies are executed just because they happen to be nice. 

Let’s look at the policies that aren’t accepted (in the red and yellow areas). All of the good policies are mean. The meaner the policy the better it is likely to be. Every nice policy is bad. If you want to improve politics then you have to promote nasty ideas.

If you are engaged in politics and find yourself arguing for a nice idea then stop and ask yourself, “If my idea is so nice and so good, why has it not already been implemented?” Good answers may include the policy not being technologically feasible before, or that it solves a new problem. If you cannot answer the question, then your policies are probably bad. This is ultimately why leftists have the concept of “false consciousness”. Antonio Gramsci could not understand why the workers would not support Communism, which is very nice and very good, so he had to claim they were being deluded by nefarious capitalists.

The situation gets worse if we substitute “policy” for “idea”, moving from Politics to Epistemology. Then we find that all the best ideas you haven’t heard of are too nasty to be spoken.

Now of course a model is a simplification of a reality. For one, in my plots, I implicitly assumed the nastiness and goodness of policies were independent. But aren’t nasty policies often nasty because the type of cruel effects they have are just bad? Even if we allow goodness and niceness to correlate positively in the population of all possible policies, of policies that are in the yellow area, just on the verge of implementation, the good policies will still be nasty. 

How do we respond to Policy Ascertainment Bias? Public relations! We can spend money and time trying to make our favoured policies seem nicer or better so that they can be executed. This is what think tanks do and they have a concept for describing this process - shifting the Overton Window.

But this is no solution. Public relations is expensive, time-consuming and often ineffective. Good luck with making privatising social security into a palatable, nice-sounding policy. But most importantly, the Nice party has its own think tanks and public relations teams working at the same time undoing all your hard work. 

Let’s imagine all the possible political activist organisations we could fund as hypothetical donors. Now donors know there are two dimensions to activist organisations - how good their policies are and how nice they are… You see where this is going. Debate and public relations are also subject to policy ascertainment bias. 

If we really want to solve the problem we have to think bigger, beyond politics and into the realm of “meta-politics” that is designing the institutions of political systems. We need to make policymakers less responsive to how nasty a policy is. In this new system, politicians only judge policies by how good they are.

One way of doing this is to give politicians greater immunity from accountability from stakeholders and voters. Longer terms in office, followed by forced and wealthy retirement could help this. To go further, a leader with absolute and secure power need not care if others consider his policies nasty. Of course, I’m sure you can see potential costs to such reforms - making politicians less accountable to the concerns of stakeholders may make them care less about being nice, but it will also make them care less about being corrupt.

Alternatively, we can consider the issue as a personnel problem. We need leaders and voters who care less about being nice and more about being smart - able to distinguish good policies from bad policies. Some fellow writers and academics have related this personnel problem to sex and demographic factors both in regard to political policy and policies within academia. Alas, I will end the blog post here without making any further comment. I don’t want to say anything nasty.