"It is true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” - Søren Kierkegaard, Journalen JJ:167
“I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something.” J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
-
Welcome to Power Lore, my newsletter/blog! It’ll mainly be mid-form pieces about policy, tech and governance, but this first post is to give a sense of why I’m writing about those areas.
-
Like most New Year’s resolutions we make, publishing this first post is a rollover. I’ve been meaning to write this since I left the civil service in 2022, but since then it’s been a hectic sequence of house-moving, wedding-organising and job-changing. However, starting a new job this week is a good time to reflect, and what better way to do it than putting pen to paper!
Since beginning my career it’s been a great adventure. The hardest was deciding to leave the civil service in 2022 to try working at an AI company. And then last month, I left Faculty to return to Westminster and work on policy at a think tank. Had I stayed in either, my feelings about 2024 would probably be quite different - and this post wouldn’t exist at all. But looking back has helped me understand what I want to write about, and is probably the best way to introduce this.
It’s hard to understand your career decisions at the time, and perhaps it’s also too easy to read into them in hindsight. I thought about leaving Whitehall for years, but it was still the hardest decision I’ve ever made. I didn’t join Faculty expecting to leave before at least two years had passed, but the opportunity to work at Reform made it a quicker decision than most.
Looking back, I’ve been following both an idea and a feeling since the early days of my time in Westminster, and I think it’s time to write about both.
In 2017 I started working on future applications for technology, particularly AI, in government. It wasn’t the project I wanted to be given at the time - tech was, and largely still is, seen as quite a low-prestige area in government. But as the months passed I became obsessed, and I think the events of 2023 have shown that we were right in that obsession.
But that was quite an easy thing to be right about, and it was the hard truths I wanted to work on. Government was wildly under-prepared to use new technologies, which didn’t get any easier when I moved to the private sector to try and help. I thought the problem could be fixed by better software, but now I believe it’s a failure of social technologies - bureaucracies, the political economy and systems of incentives. They won’t be solved by more GPUs or better architecture, only by politics - by constructing some kind of new set of incentives that prize significantly better management and innovation within the state, on a scale never seen before. It’s not just a theory about how government needs better technology, but a theory of how power actually works.
Interesting ideas are the product of both care and frustration, and mine aren’t any different. I loved working in Whitehall. There will never be anything quite like the feeling of briefing Cabinet Ministers, going to No10, meetings in COBR, and watching your policies on the news. I was 21 years old when I joined, 28 when I left, and whilst seven years isn’t much of a stretch by most standards, in those years decades happened. Brexit, pandemic, war in Ukraine, two elections, three Prime Ministers. But living through it day to day, it went in a flash.
For the most part that’s because the people I worked with were amazing, and we were trying to do the right thing. Whitehall at its best has the feeling of being in the trenches together, fighting the good fight.
But the same things that made government brilliant - the responsibility, the shared project, the sense of community - also wore me down. Instead of office politics, we Whitehall has actual politics, and institutions which count their birthday candles in centuries come with a lot of baggage. Whenever I felt this most, I thought about leaving, but work had a good habit of giving me excuses to put it off - one more cool opportunity, one more problem to solve, one more chance to be a team player.
Ultimately I realised I couldn’t keep colouring inside the lines, and I had to draw my own. I’d watched the tech industry keenly from a distance, and was excited by the new technologies they were developing, but I knew that a career in government would never give me that experience in the same way that I’d get by trying it myself.
I knew if I left, a part of me would stay behind. But equally, if I stayed, a part of me would leave forever - and I’d miss my last chance at another adventure before more responsibilities piled up. I decided that was the part more precious.
Leaving felt like a release for all these pent-up interests. Faculty let me work with genuinely innovative tech, and with entirely different kinds of people - data scientists and engineers whose professional backgrounds and ways of thinking were foreign to how I’d been trained. And it was a great excuse to meet new people and groups who were thinking about the same things I was - to be reassured that I wasn’t alone. And it’s not just my professional life - since I left the long-hours of Whitehall, I’ve made time for a few other things - Lily and I bought a house last year, and got married in September.
Years ago someone suggested I shouldn’t pick jobs based on high-minded ideals, but what they involved day-to-day. I’ve always loved writing (if you hadn’t guessed yet), and the practice of sitting down to write a paper has always been my favourite part of every job. But in policy advice and tech consultancy, you are always writing whilst glancing over your shoulder - thinking about your bosses, your clients, the context.
Rather than just writing, I’ve been looking for the freedom writing brings - to talk about things which matter, on their own terms rather than with caveats.
I want to bring that idea and that feeling together in this blog. To write about how people use power to change things for the better - to take the right ideas (comfortable or uncomfortable) and put them into practice. The analysis of power- how organisations work, why they change (or don’t), and how they affect the rest of the world is hugely under-rated. And how to think about the jobs in your career in terms of power, of how you can change the things you want to, is even rarer. I’ve become a keen follower of a few people who have touched on this problem, and hope to contribute my own part:
Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution, particularly writing about state capacity.
Samo Burja and his writing about how organisations (particularly bureaucracies and startups) succeed and fail.
Palladium Magazine’s thinking about governance futurism, particularly this excellent article from earlier this year.
Works in Progress, who are popularising new and different ideas about how to make progress a reality, with excellent longform pieces like this one.
I’ll be writing this alongside my new day job as Policy Director at Reform, where I’m going to lead the ‘Reimagining Whitehall’ programme and other areas of policy analysis of state capacity.
Beyond the first couple of post, I haven’t got more of a plan than a disorganised Notion page of half-organised bullet points. So if you have any ideas or feedback then I’d love to talk!
Happy New Year,
Joe