Dominic Cummings: prediction

Transcript context

…It’s like a Japanese company where you get in after college and just stay until you die. I live in San Francisco, and if somebody works in a company for three years or five years, they’re, “Oh, my gosh, you’ve been here for a while. You’re like a long term employee.” So the idea that you would be in the same place for 40 years is really odd. Sorry to interrupt, but imagine as well what the promotion system is like and who ends up getting to the top of these systems. A lot of people say, “Oh, you’re so negative about the civil service. You’re all saying that everyone there is rubbish, and it’s not fair.” That’s not my view. In fact, if you look at the civil service, you actually see a lot of very able people, but most of them are young. What happens is the young, excellent people get weeded out by self-selection, largely because they go in idealistic, they’re there for a few years, but then they look at what the process is to be promoted, and they look at their bosses, and the best of them look at it and go, “I don’t want to be like that. ” I don’t want to have to make those decisions. I don’t want to have to make those compromises. I don’t want the job like that, where it’s almost all bullshit. We can’t actually build anything. The most entrepreneurial, the kind of people who actually want to get on and do stuff now, leave and the most HR compliant, disastrous people to be in charge of supposedly fast moving agencies are the ones who are promoted to take over. And then that culture itself becomes highly self reinforcing. Once you get a whole cadre of leadership at the top that’s like that, it’s extremely difficult to break out of. It’s not like “Well, okay. IBM has gone wrong. But you still have a whole ecosystem of competition for IBM.” Like sure, IBM dies, but the American economy evolves and continues. In government systems that obviously can’t happen. So you have — IBM is dead, but it’s still actually in charge of everything. This reminds me of this wonderful biography of LBJ that Robert Caro wrote. In volume three, which is about him taking over the Senate, when he gets in the Senate the seniority system is known as a senility system because you have these people who are in charge of these important committees and they’re 80 years old or something and they’re in charge of ways and means. So when he becomes a majority leader, he realizes that he can’t have this if he wants to get things done. He realizes he needs the young senators in charge and so he engineers ways to get 40 year olds or 50 year olds in charge of these committees. Could a Prime Minister just retire a whole bunch of people and say we’re going to put 20 year olds on the path to management or path to advancement. Who would that be up to?…

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