On History and Policy
Some year end reflections
Happy Friday! This will be the last Deep Dives newsletter of the year, and I thought I would end it with a slightly different type of post. As you may or may not know, my academic background is not at all in policy, and especially not innovation policy. Instead, I did my PhD in diplomatic and political history. Specifically, my dissertation was “The Duke of Wellington and British Foreign Policy 1814-1830”. I’ve had a few conversations recently where people have asked how that has influenced how I think about policy and my work now, and I thought that would be an interesting topic to expand on. I hope you enjoy it, and I’ll see you in the New Year!
Systems, Agency, and Politics
For the first few years after I left academia and went into the policy world, I don’t think I saw too many connections between my past studies and my current work. However, over the past couple of years, I’ve reflected much more on it, and there are a few aspects that have helped shape how I approach policy now.
Some are relatively unremarkable - doing a PhD and teaching undergrads are both great at helping teach you to read a ton of written pieces and be able to understand and distill the key elements fast. That is definitely a skill that has proven useful.1 Other skills, such as communicating to non-expert audiences, were also strengthened, though that was more by the teaching than the PhD research.
Other aspects of my PhD have shaped how I think about and approach policy a bit more deeply. Foremost among these is the interactions between systemic factors and human agency. Studying international relations and foreign policy explores how systemic factors, such as geography, demography, and industrial capacity, interact with human decision-making.
I liked showing this map to students when introducing foreign policy courses. It helps illustrate Britain’s maritime vulnerabilities (it is really easy to invade the UK from Belgium and the Netherlands) and strengths (Britain is well placed to blockade almost all Northern European shipping if it has sufficient naval strength—and after acquiring Gibraltar and Malta, it was well placed to do the same in the Mediterranean) and how they shaped its rise to be the leading European naval power.
Yet nothing about the UK’s rise to naval dominance during the 18th and 19th centuries was certain. Outcomes depend on the decisions people actually make and how others respond - i.e. on human agency. We can see this with foreign policy now. On paper, Russia far outclassed Ukraine militarily and economically, and there were widespread projections that Ukraine would fall in days if Russia attacked. That, of course, did not come to pass, in no small part due to decisions from political leaders (such as Zelenskyy choosing to stay in Kyiv) and from military commanders on the field. Likewise, while the US might have the most powerful military and the largest economy, its ability to bend outcomes to its will often depends on its leaders and how much domestic political capital they are willing to spend to achieve something.
That brings me to another key point—everything is political. I often used to think that International Relations as a field paid insufficient attention to this. As a state, your capacity to shape affairs or successfully respond to challenges depends significantly on domestic politics. As Jenny Odell has written, “Politics necessarily exist between even two individuals with free will,” and “regardless of how high-tech your society might be, ‘peace’ is an endless negotiation among free-acting agents whose wills cannot be engineered”. Everything comes back to the coalitions you can make and how you manage the politics.
My single favourite quote from my dissertation is on this exact point. Shortly after becoming Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington was frustrated with the politics of the position. An acquaintance recorded the following interaction:
There, Wellington said to him pointing to a pile of green bags and red boxes, ‘there is the business of the country, which I have not time to look at – all my time being employed in assuaging what gentlemen call their feelings. In short, the folly and unreasonableness of people are inconceivable’.
Those feelings that Wellington so decried were those of his Parliamentary colleagues, whose goodwill the success of administration ultimately depended on. A technocratic approach to government undermined him. As I wrote in the conclusion of my dissertation, “His disdain for principles left his policy unsupported by the ideological props that were becoming increasingly crucial in a dynamic age”. In short, he couldn’t build and sustain coalitions behind his policies. Needless to say, Wellington did not last long as Prime Minister and his foreign policy was not a success, even if his diplomatic stature in Europe was unequalled.
Takeaways about systems, human agency, and politics from my PhD influence my thinking and work today. When we consider Canadian policymaking, all three are crucial. Systemic factors, such as our geographical and economic proximity to the US and our country’s size and low population density, clearly matter a lot to how we approach policymaking. Likewise, the constraints imposed by a highly decentralized constitution (that is basically politically impossible to change substantially) shape what any individual level of government can do. But these systemic factors aren’t determinative, and how we respond to them or get around them matters.
Other factors can appear systemic but are deeply shaped by human decisions. As I’ve written about before, our economic system and some of the assumptions embedded in it can appear systemic when, in reality, a lot of it is up for grabs in the realm of human decisions and politics. Likewise, technological developments can appear inevitable when they are not. As Neil Lee wrote in his book Innovation for the Masses:
Innovation is not neutral: the direction of technological change is not predetermined but shaped by human action. Decisions about where innovation happens, what new technologies are developed, and how much is devoted to them are highly consequential policy choices.
A lot depends on human decisions and on the politics we build. Like the Duke of Wellington in the 1820s, we live in a dynamic age in the 2020s. Technological change is rapidly changing the world.2 What ideological props we construct and what coalitions we build will play key roles in the kind of world we will live in over the coming years. What choices we make about innovation and technology will shape the kind of economy and society we have. That is both an empowering thought and a terrifying one, as there are high stakes if we get these decisions wrong. Let’s hope we put the work in to get it right.
It is also a skill that is interesting to think about in the context of AI, which is, of course, even faster at summarizing documents. However, I think that if you want to deeply understand written work in a way that will enable you to make connections between them and other information both in the short and long term, then you need to be able to grapple with writing in a longer form. You need to sit with it over the time it takes to read. Having AI summarize it for you in a couple of bullet points without doing that intellectual heavy lifting might help in the short term, but I would be surprised if it helps with creative and critical thinking in the longer term.
Rapid technological change was a reality for the Duke of Wellington, too, who lived in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, Wellington saw the opportunities and dangers of new tech more viscerally than most. While Prime Minister, Wellington attended the opening of the world’s first locomotive-hauled goods and passenger railway line between two cities - a day that ushered in the age of the railway. It was also a day that saw Wellington’s former cabinet colleague, William Husskisson, struck and killed by Robert Stephenson’s pioneering locomotive, the Rocket.
Great point regarding AI. Doing the work is absolutely more beneficial in the long run. In a similar way, rote memorization of facts, or tables, might not seem like something useful, but that crystalized form of intelligence allows for a much better use of fluid intelligence. Hard to to connect the dots to generate new insights, or allow the subconscious to produce those "aha" moments, when some of those dots don't exist in an internal mental model.
Another important topic you touched on: free agency. I often wonder how much of it any of us really have, and to what degrees it varies between individuals, both from a philosophical and practical perspective. An important question to consider when so much of our information landscape is being algorithmically controlled by a select few, and important institutions are so slow to react to new realities.