Benign Neglect

Through my work, I've read, listened to or skimmed through at speed a large number of business books and self-improvement guides. Whether they are citing Eastern spirituality, referencing fashionable management sages or quoting Yogi Berra to prove they have a sense of humour, there is a unifying thread: a belief in activism. Reform yourself, reform your management style, reform your company. Apparently the key to success in human affairs is relentless action. What they never propose is a forgotten approach to life’s challenges: benign neglect.

Yet if flares, shoulder pads and leggings can rise from the dead, we could give enlightened neglect a whirl. Our struggling Coalition government might benefit from this old-fashioned, indifferent approach to statecraft; it would most likely save money too. So why in certain cases, is the right course to do less and care less?

The law of unintended consequences

Our governments pass a lot of laws, what they rarely do is ask themselves the counterfactual: could this legislation make things worse? Like most of us, ministers and civil servants fall into the fallacy of thinking that a positive intention guarantees a positive outcome. When you believe that wanting to do good automatically results in you doing good, you run the risk of massive overconfidence and confusing beliefs with real world outcomes. As husbands buying gifts for their wives on Valentine's Day will attest, thinking and hoping she might like the lingerie you selected is just that...wishful thinking. 

I will offer a simple case study to illustrate this issue: bats. Bats are protected by a host of laws. It is a criminal offence to “intentionally disturb a group of bats in its nest” or to damage or destroy a bat roosting place (even if bats are not roosting there at the time). Stern stuff. You might imagine that these draconian protections are helping the little flappers to flourish; sadly most bat species remain on the endangered list.

Thanks to these comprehensive legal protections, bats become a problem if you are, for example, a property developer looking to renovate or demolish an old building. Should you find bats or even just an empty bat nest, all activity should cease. An ecological consultant must provide an assessment before you can proceed with your venture.

You may have borrowed £100,000s to develop the site, with construction workers on the payroll and everything has to grind to a halt because of a bat nest. It could be weeks or months before work could resume, by which time you might have gone bankrupt when your cash runs out and the bank recalls the loan. 

This assumes you comply with the law and notify the authorities. Or… maybe… just maybe…you could destroy the nest and the bats, when no one is looking. There are likely to be a few more Fliedermaus im Himmel.

So the legislation to protect bats almost certainly makes them more likely to be harmed than before; a little bit of neglect might have done better by the bats than concerned and dedicated action.

Concentrated Benefits, Dispersed Costs

The main function of government is to take money from certain groups of people and organisations and give these funds to others. Often these sets overlap, so the government will take tax off the low paid only to give them funds back via housing benefit. Unfortunately, like an eccentric relative, who gives one grandson £1,000 in cash each Christmas and the other a £1 Boots Token that expired in1992, government often does not distribute its largesse with any discernible logic. Governments and ministers do not set out to be wasteful or perverse, but they are hamstrung by a defining feature of politics: concentrated benefits, dispersed costs.

I am going to use a fictional example to demonstrate the point, as you may already consider me a bat murder advocate and I don’t want to lose you entirely. Imagine pressure group existed, called G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. whose catchy acronym stands for “Ginger People Called Alice Who are Left-Handed Deserve Free Taxis”. They know the name needs work, but they are very effective at lobbying government. The Minister for Transport is persuaded by their clever PR campaign to pass legislation, mandating that all left handed women called Alice with ginger hair were entitled to a free taxi service to wherever they want in perpetuity. By pure coincidence the minister’s daughter was a leftie red-head, whose first name rhymes malice.

Whatever the minister’s motives, he gets the bill passed. There are heated debates about whether phonetic spellings of Alys as opposed to Alice are valid for the travel subsidy or strawberry blond counts as red hair. But following a government inquiry, legislation tightened up all loopholes and all Alices (phonetic or otherwise) with red hair (not strawberry blond) who were left-handed (or ambidextrous) are delighted to receive free taxis.

The cost to the British state is a mere £500 million a year, even though some Alices insist on driving back and forth from Scotland just because they can. Regular, non-Alice taxpayers like you and I might grumble about the unfairness of this taxi subsidy, yet it only costs us each an additional £16 a year in tax. In other words, one cab-ride less for ourselves, which is hard to get enraged about.

Then a new Transport of Minister comes into post and she is appalled by this daft and partisan subsidy, especially when her predecessor’s child was a beneficiary. She moves to cut the free taxis and all hell breaks loose.

G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. (remember that catchy name) mobilise their lobbying resources once more. There are tearful, emotional protests outside the Department for Transport by red-heads distraught at these cuts to much need services. Newspapers run articles by a left-handed writer, first name Alice,  who can no longer afford to visit her ailing grandmother now her taxi service is under threat. The colour picture by her column shows lustrous red locks. Our poor minister doesn’t know what hit her;  turns out it was eggs hurled by furious Alices.

So after she’s been hit with the fifth egg in one day by a screaming Alice and facing investigation by the Commission for Racial Enquiry about possible ginger bigotry, the minister backs down and leaves the subsidised travel service as it is.

G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. claims victory; the rest of us moan about politicians being spineless and then continue trawling through the Mail Online crack bar.

Now if the Minister of Transport had practiced a little bit of benign neglect when lobbied by G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T, we would not be saddled with another spending commitment that is impossible to remove.

Imperfect Knowledge

The third reason why benign neglect should be a legitimate policy response is in that in many instances, ministers and civil servants base their policy responses on studies or data sets that are for too inconclusive or contradictory to justify such faith. Let's go back to the real world now; relax no bats are harmed in the following paragraphs. 

In the early 1980s, government dietary advice changed, telling us that saturated fat was dangerous. The secret to healthy living was apparently cutting out fat, counting calories and eating five portions a day of fruit and vegetables (of which up to 3 could be fruit juice). Now given that adults today eat 600 calories less on average than they did in the 1980s, children do roughly the same amount of exercise and many of us followed this advice, often guzzling several smoothies a day, you might wonder why the obesity rate is 40% and climbing.

It turns out that much of the diet advice of the last thirty years has been worse than useless, it has been actively harmful. Fat was never the villain, if it were you would have to explain how the Innuit make to old age on a diet of 80% seal blubber or for indeed how any of us made it through the ice age.

This blog is too limited to go into great detail, but suffice to say sugar is the cause of the obesity epidemic and its most toxic form is fructose. When fructose is delivered in a liquid, fibre-free form such as a fruit smoothie, it is worse for you than a can of Coke and has much the same effect on your liver as a shot of whiskey (unless you’ve just done intensive exercise and are glycogen depleted). 

Without getting too melodramatic, if benign neglect had been applied to the dietary advice in the early 1980s, we would all be a lot thinner, happier and healthier than we currently are. When you consider too that benign neglect of the processed food lobby might have prevented high fructose corn syrup being introduced into everything in packets, doing nothing at all would have saved lives.

There you go, there powerful and compelling arguments why doing nothing is sometimes a noble and virtuous course of action.Vive la indifference!

Now if only we could persuade our politicians to take longer holidays, who knows how quickly things might improve.