The curse of the hero scientist

I have recently read David Edgerton’s book Britain’s War Machine (with thanks to Worcester Public Library). This looks at weapons production in the UK during the Second World War, and along the way shoots down several common myths. For instance, Edgerton notes that Britain was well-prepared for war in 1939, had an army that was more mechanised than Germany, was supported by a vast empire and did not therefore ‘stand alone’ after the fall of France. The most intriguing part of the book for me, however, is the discussion of innovation in weaponry. The British Government, from Churchill downwards, was fascinated by innovative weapons, and sought to make the best possible use of scientists. Yet although the most effective scientific and technological developments were achieved by teams working in industry, the military and the civil service, governments had a concept of the hero scientist, inspired and working alone. The figure of the hero scientist was encouraged after the War in films and books which incorrectly portrayed people like Frank Whittle and Barnes Wallace as lone visionaries struggling without official support against bureaucratic obstruction. Documentaries have subsequently given undue emphasis to innovations such as the Mulberry Harbour and the ‘bouncing bomb’, which had only a marginal impact on the outcome of the War.

Edgerton argues that this idea of hero scientist not only diverted resources from more effective forms of weapon production, but also led to an emphasis on equipment rather than effective strategy and tactics as the means of winning battles. The results could be seen in 1941, when British forces were defeated in Singapore by a smaller and poorly-equipped Japanese Army.

The idea of the hero scientist has been something of a curse in Britain ever since. Grand innovation imposed from above has often been prized above step-by-step technical improvements or enhancing the creativity and skill of the workforce. This can be seen in the British motor industry, which in the generation following the Second World War, produced many innovative designs, from the sports car, the Mini, front-wheel drive cars, cars with tailgates, to the luxury 4x4. Yet the industry paid much less attention to improving the reliability of its products by improving the organisation and skills of the men and women who built the cars. As a result, British cars lost market share, and British-owned companies became bankrupt. Most of the British motor vehicle industry in now owned by the Japanese, who focussed on redesigning the technology by which cars are produced, in co-operation with a skilled and motivated workforce.

Although British industry has now generally adopted Japanese production methods, the concept of the hero scientist is still dominant in many areas of British life, and particularly in the funding of higher education. This has two main streams of public funding for research: the research excellence framework (‘REF’ and formerly ‘RAE’), which allocates cash to departments on the basis of past performance; and the research councils, which allocate most of their funds as research grants to named individuals (called ‘principal investigators’) on the basis of future performance. Both methods are phenomenally expensive and capricious. I have looked at some of the problems with the RAE and the REF in previous postings. What about the allocation of research grants to named individuals by the research councils?

The cost incurred here is not just in the transaction costs involved in adjudicating applications for research grants (large panels of academic experts plus the research council overheads they incur), but in the time spent by university staff throughout the country in preparing the 80 or 90% of applications which are not approved for funding. Most of these failed applications are of high scientific quality, which means that the allocation process becomes determined in the end by politics, horse-trading and reputation rather than by quality. Those who get the money are not necessarily the best scientists, but the scientists who are best at getting the money.

Research council funding also destabilises University research. Grants go to named individuals (or groups of individuals), which means that they take the grant with them if they move to another university. Since grants are mainly used to pay the salaries of the researchers and postgraduate studentships associated with the project, these staff are usually required to move with their principal investigator, rather like a clutch of medieval peasants following their lord and master. This all creates a transfer market, in which hero scientists are bribed to move from one university to another. The effect on the department that loses in this bribery race can be dramatic: in a short time, it can lose not just its senior academic staff, but also a large chunk of its funding, several researchers and even some postgraduate research students.

This whole business is often justified in the same way as the free market in senior executive salaries is justified - that the best prizes go to the best people. But good research is not the product just of few hero scientists, but of teams with different skills that can work effectively together on a sustained basis. These skills should include, for instance, the abilities to conduct thorough field and laboratory work, to critically analyse data, to present results effectively, to apply results for clinical or commercial benefits, and so on. These skills will not all be present in one person, yet many of the members of a research team, however capable they are, will never be able to get major research grants in their own name. Universities have little commitment to developing long-term multi-disciplinary teams because funding is unstable, and because it is much cheaper to bribe a grant-holder to move in with their entire team from another university, rather than to spend years developing the skills of their own staff.

Indeed, the whole research enterprise in the UK is staggeringly wasteful of human talent. Scientists proceed through their three years of doctoral research (usually funded by research grants and other public money). This involves some training in research, in return for which the university gains a very cheap source of labour. After doctoral training, only a minority of the new graduates succeed in gaining university employment, usually as a postdoctoral research fellow funded from a time-limited research grant. This may be followed by other time-limited research fellowships, until the great majority drop out of academic life altogether. Years of research training and experience are thus lost - not because the staff who leave are substandard, but because they have the drive to find a job with an employer who, unlike the university sector, rewards talent and hard work with good pay and decent contracts of employment.

There is an alternative funding model. The research councils do grant some funds on a long-term basis to designated centres, and this model is also used with great success by charities such as Cancer Research UK. By providing stable funding, such centres can maintain multi-skill research teams and sustain the social capital needed for effective research.

We should therefore expand this model into by concentrating public funding for research on developing a limited number of specialised research centres which would be responsible not just for research, but also for training scientists to a high level of skills, retaining them in science, and applying scientific knowledge to the wider world. This long-term funding should replace grants to named individuals and the whole wasteful farce of the REF. Academics working within and outside these research centres would of course be able to continue to seek funding for research from charities and other bodies. Some, however, might realise that there is more to scholarship than the rather narrow concept of ‘research’, and may even come to understand that the main function of universities is to pass on knowledge, values and skills to the next generation. This task is not as heroic as being a lone scientist, but plays a greater part in maintaining our civilisation.



See also:http://stuartcumella.blogspot.com/2009/10/great-crackpot-ideas-of-past.html
http://stuartcumella.blogspot.com/2010/06/status-wars-in-universities.html

The Rise of Monarchy

Every year, the Economist magazine compiles a ranking of cities according to their ‘livability’. This is based on data relating to personal safety, availability of goods and services and infrastructure. Eight of the ten most liveable cities in the world are in countries with monarchies - actually with a single monarch - Queen Elizabeth II. It is notable that although Vancouver is top of this rating (with two other Canadian cities in the top ten), the highest ranked city in the USA (Pittsburgh) came only 29th. This surely is evidence that Americans were wrong to adopt a republican form of government, and should have stuck with a monarchy like their better-governed neighbours to the North.

Why should constitutional monarchy of the kind found in Commonwealth, Japan and Western Europe be associated with good government? One reason is that the monarch is an agreed national arbiter who, by inheriting their post, avoids all the enmities and political debts incurred by people who compete for power to get to the top. The very lack of power of the monarch also means that he or she does not get blamed for the disappointments and disasters inevitably associated with government. As a result, the monarch can provide a symbol of national unity and continuity in political life.

But monarchy also has a sort of magic, however humdrum the people who occupy these positions. This is partly a product of the wealth and status of the head of state, but also of the very continuity of the post. In the past, kings were seen as being divinely blessed, possessing some special virtue or charisma that set them apart from the rest of us. In England and France, it was even believed that being touched by the king would cure a person of the skin disease Scrofula. This magic continues even with the relatively powerless constitutional monarchs of today, making them (with their families) a focus for imagination, fantasy and envy.

There are several other hereditary regimes in countries that are nominally republics. In India, the Ghandi family possess the magic of royalty (at least in the eyes of several million supporters of the Congress Party). Being the senior member of this family is deemed sufficient qualification for both Party leadership and the post of Prime Minister, despite inconvenient facts like being a foreigner and having no experience of political office. In this respect, the Ghandi family also resemble monarchies, where a person can succeed to the most senior post in the land based on the sole qualification of being the eldest son or daughter of the deceased ruler.

There are other hereditary regimes which have the money and the power but not the magic. North Korea will soon be ruled by the third generation of Kims. Syria is ruled by the son of the preceding dictator, and other Arab states like Egypt and Tunisia would have followed in the same manner if their people had not overthrown their absolutist rulers. In these countries, hereditary succession exists because gangster leaders can only trust their closest relatives. But that of course is how virtually all our European monarchies began several centuries ago.

Dubai: the new Melbourne

I recently spent three nights with my wife in Dubai - two nights out and one night back on a trip to visit my daughter in Melbourne. We stayed on both occasions in the XVA Art Hotel - a wonderful small guesthouse built around an art gallery and a vegetarian café. This is in Al Bastakiya, the oldest part of Dubai, located between to the Creek, the Linen Souk, the al Fahidi Fort, and the Royal Palace. Al Bastakiya is a network of narrow alleys between courtyard houses, each of which has a wind tower - a sort of air conditioning system in reverse, designed to channel cooler winds from the sea down into the rooms of the house. The Creek is lined with dhows and crossed by small open ferries called ‘abras’, which take you across to Deira, which has the gold and spice souks.

This is of course very different from the other Dubai, of gleaming towers and shopping centres, all marble, gold, glass and flash. The most common reaction of visitors to this Dubai is that it is ‘artificial’. This is a strange comment because all cities are the result of human decisions, either by planners, property developers, or the inhabitants themselves. Dubai has been set out in the desert, but many of the world’s great cities were laid out in this way. Melbourne was laid out as a grid in the Australian bush by a surveyor one morning. This must have seemed an unpromising location for a great city, but, as in Dubai, its governors built imposing town halls, government buildings, museums and art galleries, and post offices that befitted the great city they intended Melbourne to become. Over the 150 years since it was planned, the central grid has been adapted. Narrow passages between buildings have become ‘laneways’ - pedestrian streets packed with restaurants and small shops. Trees line each of the broad main streets of the grid, which are wide enough to allow tramlines (and tram stations) down their centre.

Dubai too will change over the next century: people will become familiar with and fond of its iconic buildings; different areas of the City will develop distinct characters; its inhabitants will adapt and humanise its houses and streets; people will become proud of their city and pity those unfortunate enough to live elsewhere. Perhaps they will remember with gratitude the vision and drive of those who founded the city.

No sympathy for the devils

Future generations will look back on the 20th Century as the time of genocide and rock and roll. The extent of this genocide is almost beyond belief: not just the 20 or so million killed systematically by Nazi Germany and a similar number by the Japanese Empire, but also the 45 million killed in China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, the 10 million in the contrived famines associated with the ‘collectivisation’ of agriculture in the Soviet Union, and millions in Cambodia, Armenia, Nigeria, Rwanda, and many other places. Industrial scale warfare resulted in tens of millions more deaths, with new ‘weapons of mass destruction’, starting with poison gas devised by the German Empire in the First World War, and nuclear and biological weapons introduced to the world by the USA. Agent Orange, which was used by the USA in Vietnam, resulted in half a million deaths and millions of disabilities, increased risk of diseases such as cancer, and birth defects among the civilian population.

How can we explain this utter horror, this evil? The source of evil has been attributed through the ages to the devil or to devils. In Hollywood, the devil is portrayed as a deformed and deranged monster. This is a comforting depiction because it suggests that the source of evil lies outside ourselves, and that normal people are incapable of evil unless seduced into it by an alien being. This depiction of the devil as alien easily slides into xenophobia, leading people to believe that their society can be cured of evil if only they are able to eliminate foreigners, blacks, jews, communists, or some other defined minority.

But there is another quite different vision of the devil - the devil as a gentleman, suave, charismatic and persuasive, and very much one of us. This is  the version that appears in one of the 20th Century’s greatest rock and roll songs ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1968 and recorded by the Rolling Stones. In this song, Lucifer proclaims his wealth and taste. Like sophists everywhere, he argues for moral relativity: “Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints”, and for universal self-blame: “I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’, when after all it was you and me.” Yet at the root is a love of death and despair: “I watched with glee as your kings and queens fought for ten decades for the gods they made”.

This is a lot of work for one devil, and it is not surprising that many sources (such as Milton’s Paradise Lost) identify a pandemonium of devils, each of which characterises a particular kind of evil. These include Mammon, who exalts wealth, persuading us to feast while others starve. Beelzebub represents the arrogance of power, tempting those in high office to crush their rivals to maintain personal supremacy. Astaroth is the devil of accusers and inquisitors - those who enforce conformity with torture and death, while  Moloch is the demon of religious cruelty, persuading those with religious faith to stone miscreants to death, burn unbelievers at the stake and crash aeroplanes into skyscrapers. Finally, there is Belial, who works to stir up lies and hatred, and “loves vice for itself”.

Belial, like all the other devils, walk among us, or rather pass by us in their chauffer-driven cars and their private jets. They run giant chains of ‘news media’ which promote pornography and inculcate hatred of their political rivals, they manage wealthy corporations which employ workers in the Third World on starvation wages and pollute the landscape, they go to war in the name of security and ensure those they capture are tortured and murdered. They glory in personal power and crush and destroy others as an act of pleasure. They succeed because we are weak and easily impressed by ‘wealth and taste’.

Meet the new boss - same as the old boss

Politics is theatre, and those who strut and declaim on the stage do not usually write their own script. The more sober of politicians’ autobiographies acknowledge this. Looking back on their career, their authors describe their achievements in limited terms - getting a new law passed against the odds, changing public perceptions of a problem, or perhaps averting a crisis. Read the political memoirs of the former Labour MP Chris Mullin, and you find ambition for office tempered by a realisation that a minister has little or no influence on policy, and spends his time reading out (usually badly-written) speeches prepared for him by civil servants. The actual job of politicians is in reality a salesmen - to sell policy to Parliament and the public. What better person to do this than a natural actor (Tony Blair) or a public relations professional (David Cameron).

There are of course politicians who can claim, with some justification, to have changed the direction of the country. Margaret Thatcher blundered into the Falklands War, and pushed for the Poll Tax, while Tony Blair became unpopular in Britain but popular in Washington by promoting war as an alternative to diplomacy. However, many of the policies associated with a senior politician predate their time in office and bind their successors. All British governments for the past 20 years have promoted the interests of  the financial sector over those of manufacturing industry, have sought to undermine employment rights (calling this ‘flexibility of labour’), and have facilitated the plundering of the public purse by management consultants, IT firms and the PFI/privatisation complex.

Chris Mullin’s memoirs are also a guide here. They show that each government ministry (or part of a ministry) is at the hub of a set of stakeholders. These usually comprise key business and financial interests rather than the wider public. The ties between ministries and stakeholders are held together by exchanges of senior staff and the availability of well-remunerated positions for senior civil servants and politicians when they leave office. This works to create great continuity in public policy, which may only occasionally bend to public protest. Note that this is not a conspiracy theory - the policies of different ministries or parts of ministries may conflict, resulting in a policy stalemate. The Iraq War enquiry reveals major divisions between and within military, intelligence and diplomatic services. The one group not included in these debates was the British public, despite a million-strong march on the eve of war.

An example of this continuity is the reform of the NHS proposed by our coalition government. This is presented as a radical innovation, but bears all the marks of every other management reform (or ‘redisorganisation’) of the NHS since the 1980s. As usual, it is hyped as devolving power while actually centralising control. The recipients of the supposed devolved power in this case (as in 1997) are consortiums of general practitioners, but the central NHS commissioning board will have extensive and expanded powers to make sure the GP’s do what they are told. The consortiums will certainly not have much power over what they commission. Like all the NHS reforms since the early 1990s, this one confirms the steady drift to the marketisation of healthcare services. Consortiums will be required to choose the lowest price tendered, and providers will be able to compete on price. Needless, to say, even this limited power can not be contemplated without diverting funds to the giant management consultancy combines, who will move in to manage the commissioning consortiums, supposedly on behalf of the GPs. The previous two heads of commissioning in the NHS have gone to work for more than a pittance with KPMG. I would not of course suggest that the current one had this in mind when the NHS awarded a large contract to KPMG for commissioning in London.

Finally, this re-organisation, like all its predecessors in the last 20 years, has been rushed, with many details not worked out, no feasibility trials, and no effective project management. Why is this? I think there is a Darwinian explanation. After so many re-organisations, the NHS has become a bizarre ecological niche, to which NHS managers have evolved in response. Only those most able to respond rapidly and with enthusiasm to the latest shift of policy (in whatever direction it takes), espy the best time to jump ship, and rapidly create a new mini-empire for themselves can hope to survive. They naturally shape their environment to suit these survival skills, which means ever more redisorganisations. Each one of course is applauded by the well-rewarded management consultants, the usual squad of compliant social policy academics, and the politicians who read out the speeches written for them.

Read also: http://stuartcumella.blogspot.com/2009/12/pic-complex.html

Give them your money

You do not earn much - just enough to put aside some savings. Each penny of those savings is a product of hard work done and pleasures foregone. What do you do with these savings to protect them? One option is to place them in the trust of a very wealthy man. He tells you that he will gamble your money on unsafe schemes which he does not understand and which have failed spectacularly in the recent past. Irrespective of whether these make money or not, he will award himself and his friends a huge ‘bonus’ on top of his already magnificent salary, drawn from your savings and the savings of people like yourself. Do you trust your savings to him? Of course you do - because you have put your money in banks all your life.

There are other options of course. You could put your sayings in a mutual, like the Co-operative Bank. Or governments could break up the grossly-oversized ‘high street banks’, regulate how much bankers pay each other from our savings, and force them to invest in British enterprises rather than derivatives or other forms of speculation. Fat chance of that though.

Climbing up on Woodbury Hill

 Every hill in the English countryside has a name and a history - sometimes several histories. Look North from the crest of the Malvern Hills at the Worcestershire Beacon and you see a long ridge of hills, some with barrow mounds on their crest, and one (Woodbury Hill) with an iron age hill fort. This fort is now covered by a plantation of pine trees, but the steep ditches of the old embankments remain. Through the trees, and along the ridge to the South are some of the greatest views in the English Midlands. East are the great ruins of Witley Court, once the home of the dowager queen Adelaide. Beyond this is the wide valley of the River Severn, and the far hills of the Cotswold edge. West are the folded hills of Herefordshire, on to the Welsh border mountains. North is the long wooded ridge of Abberley Hill and the strange clock tower at Abberley Hall

There are over two thousand hill forts in Britain, but there is uncertainty about when they were built, whether they were occupied throughout the year, and when they fell into disuse. But most are about 2500 years old, and were deserted after the defeat of the native British by the Roman Army. Much later, Woodbury and Abberley Hills were the scene of a great non-battle. In 1405, Owain Glyn Dwr led his Welsh army with its French contingent against King Henry IV. Glyn Dwr’s men camped on Woodbury Hill, facing the English camp on Abberley Hill, across the narrow valley now the site of Great Witley village. No battle took place because both armies were unassailable on their hilltops, and after five days of challenges, Glyn Dwr headed back to Wales.

Over 200 years later, another civil war led to a further gathering on Woodbury Hill. On 5 March 1645, a gathering of a thousand ‘clubmen’ met on Woodbury Hill to pass a declaration which they presented to the Royalist High Sheriff of Worcestershire. The clubmen were local militias which were organised independently of the two sides in the Civil War, with the aim of defending their families and possessions against either army. Eventually, however, they sided with the better-disciplined Parliamentary army, and took to harassing the Royalists.

There have thankfully been no civil wars in England since the 17th century, and Woodbury Hill remains a quiet place to remember great events.
See also:
England's Great Divide Walk