Tag: Elon Musk

The World Awaiting Andy Burnham

It’s a pretty unforgiving world out there awaiting our Prime Minister to be. If it was bad after the 2008 financial crisis it’s a damn sight worse now.

To start in apocalyptic mode.

A quote caught my eye recently – let’s take it as a sense of direction rather than an achieved reality – the objective of the very rich is to shift our gaze away from the imbalance of wealth and power toward everything else, not least issues relating to law and order, public services, immigration and gender. To turn disaffection into crises. And, I’d add as a rider, to minimise, to vilify, government action taken in response. We have in essence the aspiring libertarian state.  The state is denied, not just a role in helping direct funding to projects of benefit to wider society, but to any form of socially beneficial expenditure. Think Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, portraying Greta Thunberg as Antichrist, or JD Vance finding justification in St Augustine for a notion of compassion that begins at home and doesn’t go much further.

They are a vast and malign distraction. The old issues are the ones that matter. How to achieve a balance between an entrepreneurial state on the one hand and a caring state on the other. How might the one best finance the other. How might a caring state best help create the social capital which underpins the invention and rising productivity of a thriving society. That is a characterisation I think Andy Burnham might recognise. And the countervailing presence of Trump and Musk and Farage notwithstanding, it is a mighty task in itself.

How to … achieve radically improved childcare, social care, health care and education. Reduce the rapid rise in health-related benefits and the numbers of young people un-  or under-employed. Recognising all the while that we can’t afford anything other than reductions in expenditure if we’re going to boost our defence expenditure and have a Defence Investment Plan which actually delivers a fortress nation, and a fortress continent.

To achieve his ends Burnham has to deliver on prosperity and productivity, where everyone else has failed. How can he, how can we all, generate those animal spirits that Keynes talked about in the 1930s? Where we look for opportunities as the default, rather than spend our lives grumbling?  It might have seemed that Thatcher or Clinton or Blair succeeded, or were they sowing the seeds of the problems, not to say disasters, we’re faced with?

As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their book ‘Abundance’,  we’ve created societies where services have declined while prices have risen, and where those who can have prospered, while those who can’t find themselves without jobs, or chasing services they can barely afford, leading to societies which can easily tip into rage, and leave themselves open, at worst, to Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk-style (weird bedfellows) demagogues. There is a neat circular logic to the actions of Musk and Thiel and the anything but holy innocent JD Vance. Appeal to the so-called masses, undermine existing authority, and they are left unchallenged.

Back down to earth. Maybe the one place in the UK that has a positive vibe is Manchester. It’s lifted Andy Burnham almost to Prime Minister. Unlike the new Conservative Party convert Matthew Syed (and multiple other doubters) I rather like the Manchesterism that Burnham and his council leader predecessors, Graham Stringer and Richard Leese, have promoted, not least in working with local businesses to redevelop wide areas of the city, part of wider feel-good sense the city now enjoys. As a Mancunian born and bred I like what I see.

Manchester led the world on the 1840 because it was ruthless and only learnt how to be forgiving the hard way. Government could only stand by and watch and wonder. Now the role of government has to be about how it can ensure the structures are in place to allow business to be ruthless – to ensure we have the energy we need (will issuing further North Sea exploration licences materially influence availability beyond the short term), that the necessary talent is available (including from overseas), that homes are built (Burnham is a strong advocate of social housing), that tax is as fair as we can make it, and that long-term capital is available – arguably the most important of all.

We need talent and capital and that sense of optimism that gets and keeps you a step ahead. And making as much as possible home-grown, while rebuilding markets across Europe. All this, while enhancing our natural environment and limiting climate change.

All this… and the challenges of AI. We’re back to Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, to their tech-over-the-world over-exercised egos, and the Trump-pacifying social media moguls, Bezos and the like, and their billionaire fellow-travellers. I’m reading Karen Hao’s ‘The Empire of AI’, about Open AI, how altruism has no place when you sense you have at your fingertips a technology which will change the universe and leave you as one of the masters of it. How can we here in the UK, where we had in Deep Mind in the early 2010s a world leader, keep pace with – catch up with – the endlessly developing new generations and new frontiers of AI, turn it to the advantage of everyone and not the glorification of a few?

We’re also facing the reality that the USA is turning inward. The ‘abundance’ agenda has a very strong built-in-the-USA focus. Trump is denying Anthropic the right to sell its latest models outside the USA. What if the development of the internet had had similar restrictions imposed?

That said, talk of AI won’t inspire the nation. That for the moment is for the geeks. For Burnham the immediate reality is to convey a vision which we share and buy into and build on. Can he demonstrate that there is still life in social democracy? We have to hope so.

Making Things: Jony Ive and Elon Musk

Compare the worlds of Jony Ive, designer (with Steve Jobs) of the iPhone and iMac, and Elon Musk.

Both Ive and Musk are makers. Ive spends much of his time in his own mind, he tells us*, and he shows a remarkable contentment. It’s an inheritance from his father, a passionate and pioneering maker in his own right. He has always operated at a personal level. Musk’s aspiration from early on was to scale-up. Apple magic is small-scale, intimate, the hand and fingers. Musk it seems can only operate at mega-scale.

While Ive is always part of a team Musk has totalitarian instincts. Indeed, a totalitarian practice, as DOGE, his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, has demonstrated.

Human history is the history of making things. ‘Making maketh man.’ Back in the mid-sixteenth century even Michelangelo, dominant in his own sphere, relied on patronage, as artists before and since. Musk by contrast has no need of patronage. He has turned that old order on its head. He now patronises power. He is a would-be prince. If he’d been alive in sixteenth-century Rome and Florence he’d have pushed both Popes and Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici aside, as I imagine he’d quite like to do with Donald Trump.  

(The Doge of Venice back in the same era had limited authority but maximum glamour. Musk’s very different DOGE has maximum authority and nil glamour.)

He wants to get directly to the result. By the shortest possible route. Compare Boeing’s Starliner, so long in the making, and Musk’s Space X, already there. You focus only on what is important to efficient functioning. And you deal ruthlessly with any obstruction. (You also have to have luck on your side.)

If you apply that to people who work in government service, they can be dismissed as readily as Tesla employees. Processes can be engineered. Automated. Re-engineered. But can the efficient operation of a state with its very different objectives be compared to running a business?

We’ve not touched on methodology, in this case the callow youngsters that Musk is using at DOGE. A 25-year-old investigating Internal Revenue Service files. The clueless looking for clues. 340 million people. They are not spare parts, they have individual realities.

The result – the ‘baby’ of a caring and compassionate society gets thrown out with the bathwater. And compassion is somehow seen as criminal. Any gain is efficiency is unlikely. A wrecking ball produces – a wreck. To support this, a culture of dishonesty, and ‘accidental’ lies, is permitted, and more, encouraged, with Musk leading the way. And, to date, vilification is more than OK with the Republican base.  They’re used to it. It’s part of government. And if you lie to win power then you will lie to hold on to it.

Think back to Jony Ive. He speaks with a deep integrity, he evinces calm. How the world appeals in the hand and to the eye, to the user, is what drives him. His world and Musk’s didn’t have to be incompatible. But Musk wants to rule the world and if a Musk-style world implodes, then he will always have Mars to retreat to.  The rest of us will probably miss out.

*To hear Jony Ive talk about his life, check out a recent edition of the BBC programme, Desert Island Discs.

Next year in America

I posted a blog after the 2019 UK election which I intended as a marker to check, over the longer term, the outcome of the promises made by Boris Johnson. He failed on all counts. I’d like to do something similar for Donald Trump. I’m not, however, on such sure ground, expecting failure, as I was then. Trump has been through the hoops once and knows the route and can anticipate the snares, and he has his accomplices already in mind, if not yet in place.

I intend in a year’s time to check back with this post and see how it’s all working out. I’m not into predicting. Over the last ten, maybe fifteen years, we have seen the world turned on its head. I can’t see any kind of stability coming any time soon.

I’ll make the deep state my starting-point. Agencies such as the FBI and CIA and Federal departments have to function within government and cannot normally be held accountable in the public space. Under Trump they’ve been labelled the deep state and turned into a conspiracy against the American people which can only be rooted out by turning traditional merit-based appointments into political appointments. That includes appointments to the Supreme Court and Federal courts.

His appointment as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will ‘ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions’. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ in his mantra. ‘Government bureaucracy, excess regulations and wasteful expenditures’ are all in the firing line. Elon Musk will be a key figure.

He will continue to play games. Might he in a few cases row back on hard-line policies? His apparently amiable meeting with Joe Biden yesterday, and the orderly handover which now appears likely, took me by surprise. But, also yesterday, he’s put forward an ultra hardliner, Matt Gaetz, as the new Attorney General. He would end ‘the partisan weaponisation of our Justice System‘.

How will conspiracy theories, which thrive in this kind of environment, play out in the coming months and years? And will Trump continue to demonise opponents? He has made wild threats against journalists. Musk has helped enormously by turning Twitter into a right-wing promotional agency. Will the January 6th protesters be pardoned?

Fox News will have a free rein. The Washington Post and LA Times hedged their bets ahead of the election. Don’t alienate Trump has been the mantra. How much will free speech will be impaired? LGBTQ+ rights and critical race theory will be, more than ever, in the Trump media cross-wires.

What will be the effect on university campuses and by extension on anyone with a liberal arts education and a belief in an open, liberal democracy? The difference in voting preferences in last week’s election between locations which have high levels of college education and those that don’t were stark.

Are the old right/left dividing lines gone forever? A working class with socially conservative instincts is now firmly Republican. But might that change if Trump Republicans turn out to have feet of clay? Will Democrats realise how important it is to be a broad church on social issues?  Could the party re-discover its working-class roots? Might turncoat Latino voters turn back?

Disillusion with the Federal government in Washington has played into Trump’s hands. He has the blue Republican states very much onside and will use it to his advantage. One example may the abortion issue which he will probably leave to the legislatures of the individual states.

Trump will build his wall. His credibility depends on it. Deporting up to 12 million immigrants is a challenge at a whole other level, both logistically and in terms of the resistance and violent response it will engender. And heedless of the damage it will do to the American economy.

To what extent will tariffs, 60% on Chinese goods, 10% or more the rest of the world, impact the American economy and industry and patterns of consumption? Mercantilism, maximising exports, minimising imports, is a throwback to another age. The other side of American exceptionalism is and has always been America-behind-closed-doors. Leave it to the merchants, the industrialists and the money men to look abroad.

Taxes will fall (or, in the case the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, be renewed) and regulations cut back, with the aim of streamlining business. If high interest rates result might Trump intervene to keep then low? Might the Federal Reserve lose its independence? Can short-term stock market gains be sustained?

Related this is the rise of the plutocrats, the new libertarians, with Musk their primary example, and their likely role in a future administration, and their belief on a slimmed-down government. Michael Lewis points out that the gap between the billionaires who know how to manipulate finance and ordinary guy is getting ever wider. Financial markets will become ever more opaque.

With an avowed ‘America First ‘ and non-interventionist approach to foreign policy Trump could as easily be friends with autocratic regimes as democratic governments. We could lose any sense of American democracy as a role model for free societies worldwide

How will relations with Russia, Ukraine, China, Israel, Gaza, Iran work out? And North Korea. Might Trump have a better chance of influence because his government wouldn’t be trying to tell governments how to improve their human rights records? And what of the ‘friends’ of America and the West: the EU, the UK, India, Japan, South Korea, also Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Will they be kept onside?

The ultimate test will be 2026 mid-terms and 2028. Will Americans go into those contests with the same open debate (however fractious) and open and accountable elections as they’ve done in 2024? Trump, we know, has plans to suborn the courts. To what extent might he suborn the media, both social and imprint? Hungary’s Viktor Orban has pointed the way.

The world de-mystified

We, the people on this crazy planet, seek at one pole to identify, and work with, the world perceived as gaia, the mother of life, and at the other to command it: nature as enemy, to be tamed in what William James described more than a hundred years ago as ‘the moral equivalent of war’. The latter has indeed been the direction of travel for in the Western world for several hundred years, but we were, until even as late as the mid-20th century (if we exclude the USA and Europe), still getting no further than the edges.

Central Asia and Tibet were lands of mystics and Buddhists. There lay ancient paths to wisdom. Now those paths have been wiped by Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. Britain may have governed India but its impact on Hindu and Muslim culture was minimal. A piece is a recent Economist highlighted how Indian cinema, Bollywood, while as popular as ever is now accessed in rural communities not by showings at the traditional communal fairs known as mela but in the privacy of private homes, which may be no more than shacks, via mobile phone.

The Economist also recently ran pieces on the railways which had opened up the Middle East in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. East briefly met West in conditions of harmony, even if old attitudes to the Orient hardly budged. Tracks now run as far as borders, or have been torn up. Out of connection we brought division. And another piece describes and evokes the last kampong, or village, in Singapore, where the long-established Land Acquisition Act allows unrestricted development, the commercial maximisation of limited space.

The world has been thoroughly demystified.

Now we have Elon Musk seeking to re-make the world, and the solar system, in his own image. Tesla is green. He is scornful of climate change deniers. But he’s also loading the atmosphere with thousands of miniature satellites as part of his Starlink communication programme. From the distance in space where he or his satellites look back in the earth individual citizens are invisible.

Time Magazine made him their Man of the Year. ‘This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.’

This is close to worship. You lose one deity, you create another…

Another aspirant deity out in California is libertarian Peter Thiel. Thiel, David Runciman writes in the London Review of Books, ‘rails against the use of public money for the betterment of people’s lives, especially the poor. Who are politicians to decide how we should live? The state only exists to protect the lives we build for ourselves, including the wealth we acquire along the way.’ Monopoly is the logical aim of any good capitalist.

A favourite book of Thiel’s is The Sovereign Individual (published 1997), co-authored by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father, William. The authors predict ‘the demise of the nation-state and the emergence of low or no tax libertarian communities in which the rich can finally emancipate themselves from ‘the exploitation of the capitalists by workers’.

Thiel ‘helped to bankroll the Seasteading Institute, which aims to create independent, ocean-based communities free from all government control.’ He was ‘an early vocal champion of Donald Trump’s presidential bid’. (All quotes are from David Runciman’s article.)

So where does that leave the still small voice of Zen, so optimistic in 2009. Where does the ordinary guy fit in? Likewise, run-of-the-mill limited-term democracy? And the big issues of migration, the armaments race, land use, species survival?

Thiel we can shunt off into one of his Seasteading communities. The state could build it for him.

And let’s have Musk focused literally down to earth, where he’s doing some real good, and could do so much more. But his mindset… he is a commander. He doesn’t do humility. We have messed up the environment and using the same machismo approach that landed in this mess he thinks he can put it right. I don’t share his premise. But we could use his ideas and energy. He could use our humility, but, well, let’s face it – that won’t happen!