has anyone ever done cost/benefit analysis on whether changing government policy is worthwhile?

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 Sorry, just a hurried post (and, re-reading it, a dull one) as I'm dog tired. I just had this thought whilst halfway through Toynbee's latest effort. She writes:

The Salmon centre has just lost 80% of its funding from its 48 streams as state funds for the young dry up. Half its staff have gone, losing irreplaceable experience built up over years.

 That irreplaceable experience. Does it ever get accounted for in planning the effects of cuts? Furthermore, does anyone ever account for the time lost to adapting and acclimating to a new legislative system when they plan these hatched jobs or clean sweeps or new guidelines? I don't think they do. Punkmum was a primary school teacher, retired a few years back. She used to dread general elections because the new lot would inevitably "reform" the education system- both were awful at it. As a result, half her career was spent familiarising herself with some new legislative environment, instead of refining her performance under a single one. 

The same goes for hiring and firing people. In the science career path you are always seeing PhDs and postdocs come and go. The technical staff are broadly stable, unless your university enacts one of those sporadic orgies of destruction and contraction that have characterised the last decade. As a result I am very appreciative of the enormous value of the knowledge and expertise a single, experienced human being can carry around with them. When a good researcher moves on your lab suddenly has a hole in it where things don't get done and problems that used to be easily resolved suddenly become monstrous challenges. Furthermore, collaborations which once might have added novelty and power to an experiment- and yet were frequently easily achievable due to the experience of the collaborator- are no longer available or, again, become inordinately challenging to achieve. In contrast, when new staff appear they take time to acclimate to the bureaucratic environment and to establish themselves to the point when their expertise becomes available. This is more than a casual reference to Adam Smith and the division of labour. As an aside I also want to comment that, due to the overly competitive and highly results-driven research environment that has been cultivated in the UK in the last ten or fifteen years there are consdierable obstacles to young researchers engaging in any significant collaborations outside of their core experiments.

So I am very understanding when Toynbee writes about the loss of experienced staff and how an institution  ca be crippled by the loss of a few, key staff (or pretty much all of them, in her case). This is not an anti-reformist post, as with most of my posts I'm calling for decisions to be made rationally and transparently upon the best evidence possible. And that includes costing the relative benefits of any legislative changes against intangible losses such as expertise as well as more tangible ones such as the time taken to train and familiarise new staff or for established staff to adopt new procedures.

Yawn. 

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

on democratic participation and work hours

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How many times have you heard people say, when confronted with a political position, something along the lines of "oh I don't have time to follow politics"? We must all have heard some similar excuse and I, like many of you, have often put this down to willful ignorance, laziness or some other dysfunction. On reflection, however, I appreciate that politics is fiendishly complicated, not least because of the inordinate amount of proganda and misinformation propagated by the media. The situation is made worse in countries such as the UK, that have unreformed and near-mediaeval constitutional arrangements.

I will happily spend several hours a day reading links from twitter and other sources to keep up to date on developments that personally interest me. Although I consider myself well-educated I still can't offer any truly informed opinion on issues such as health and safety policy, social care, the health service and other issues that I'm just not that excited about. And so I'd like to contrast my position with what must be a significant minority of the electorate of the UK who don't possess the means to access virtually any reasonably objective sources of information about our democracy. These people still spend a considerable fraction of their waking hours at work or occupied in some other useful activity such as caregiving.

Citizens not having time in their lives to acquire sufficient knowledge to engage in constructive politics is a glaring symptom that our economic culture is depriving people of the opportunity to participate in our democracy. For our democracy to function these people need the personal time to allocate to such activity, the information technology to access them and the langauge and comprehension skills to understand them. 

To emphasise this point, let me present a contrasting example of the electorate to my first one. Instead of Mrs Caregiver, lets look at Mr Accountant. Mr Accountant works 70 hour weeks for a big firm in the city. In this capacity he might well be an expert in accountancy law and policies affecting it but he lacks any broader understanding of politics. He has no incentive to gain one, either, because his six figure income allows him to afford a lifestyle remote from the majority and unaffected by such piddling social issues as unemployment, healthcare, environmental or foreign policy. This man has no greater incentive to engage in enlightened politics than Mrs Caregiver.