Moneyball, applied to politics
I recently finished reading Michael Lewis’s book ‘Moneyball’ for the third time: a true story about how a bunch of people, mostly outsiders, challenged collective group-think in American baseball using rational, scientific methods, bringing the first team to adopt these methods (the Oakland Athletics, or ‘A’s’) remarkable success despite having less money than its rivals.
It’s impossible not to draw lessons from Moneyball and
apply them to other institutions and to politics. I couldn’t resist exploring
them a little here, though the most tantalising lesson we might take, of attempting
a completely rational, scientific approach to politics, is one I think we should resist.
The book is largely an exploration of prejudice in
institutions and how the Oakland A’s through its General Manager Billy Beane
took advantage of this prejudice to play the market in players, picking up
valuable underrated ones for little and selling on those who had become overrated
for a lot.
Billy Beane, still GM of the Oakland 'A's |
This prejudice in baseball was largely about looks, with
Billy Beane in his own playing career exemplifying it. As Lewis writes it,
“He encouraged strong feelings in the older men who were
paid to imagine what kind of pro ballplayer a young man might become. The boy
had a body you could dream on. Ramrod-straight and lean but not so lean you
couldn’t imagine him filling out. And that face! Beneath an unruly mop of dark
brown hair the boy had the sharp features the scouts loved. Some of the scouts
still believed they could tell by the structure of a young man’s face not only
his character but his future in pro ball. They had a phrase they used: “the
Good Face.” Billy had the Good Face.”
Beane failed as a player and gave it up to work as a
scout then as a manager. There he was lucky enough to work under someone who
knew the works of Bill James.
James had started writing about baseball for a tiny
audience while working as a night-watchman at a pork and beans factory in
Kansas. Starting with a self-published monograph in 1977, he focused on baseball
statistics, with increasingly detailed – and acerbic – explanations of how the Major
League baseball community was getting badly wrong many of the things it took as
self-evident.
Lewis says: “There was but one question [James] left
unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a
person’s value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of
thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say
about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional
baseball players could be over- and under-valued, who couldn’t? Bad as they may
have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far
more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn’t play
baseball for a living.”
Indeed. As for politics, applying the Moneyball approach is
tricky because it’s based on rationality, calculation and statistical evidence,
but politics isn’t just about these things.
Sure, in the short term at least you can maximise your electoral
returns by detailed polling, tailoring of messages and policies, and targeting those
voters who are most likely to swing the result in your favour. But doing this
means relegating or sacrificing what is perhaps the essential element of
politics: that visceral element of standing up for a version of the good, and of
actually seeking to make a difference (rather than just being successful in the
immediate task at hand).
The story of Moneyball looked at the market for baseball
players in the United States and showed how inefficient its major actors had
been within it. But in politics there is nothing inherently wrong with
inefficiency. Everything is in play, unlike in baseball or financial markets
where the end is simple: to maximise your resources and win.
Some will no doubt respond that in politics the end of
winning is the same, especially in a democracy where the interests of voted-for
and voters are in theory aligned. But this view means instrumentalising
politics, accepting a deterministic reality (‘the world of change’ that Tony Blair talks about for example), and negating the power of politics to
change things. It is also to accept a particular political ideology that reduces
the sphere of politics to one in which many of those things which could be
contested – efficiency as an end in itself, for example – are not; where
consensus reigns behind a cloak of antagonistic competition.
This technocratic version of politics, applying a
Moneyball-type approach of maximising one’s resources to win as an end in
itself, sometimes appears ubiquitous in politics nowadays. Following this path offers
great temptations: of immediate success, being useful, acceptance and approval
from one’s peers, and therefore promotion within institutional hierarchies.
However, it was these aspects of institutional life, the
group-think and collective wisdom, that the main protagonists of Moneyball were
challenging in order to win.
Voros McCracken, a blogger who was later employed by the
Boston Red Sox under John Henry (who in turn now owns Liverpool Football Club),
is quoted as saying:
“The problem with major league baseball is that it’s a
self-populating institution. Knowledge is institutionalized. The people
involved with baseball who aren’t players are ex-players. In their defence,
their structure is not set up along corporate lines. They aren’t equipped to
evaluate their own systems. They don’t have the mechanism to let in the good
and get rid of the bad. They either keep everything or get rid of everything,
and they rarely do the latter.”
This sort of set-up should be familiar to most people for
the institutions they know and work for, including those ‘set up along
corporate lines’. Group-think and collective wisdom are surely an inevitable
part of life, essential for us to be able to get through life without constant
misunderstandings and petty disagreements.
But they do need to be challenged for institutions to
renew themselves, adapt to changing times and maintain or enhance their
relevance.
McCracken points to what I think is the most important
lesson for institutions like political parties to take from Moneyball besides
the basic one of evaluating people based on what they can offer rather than
more superficial characteristics like looks. This is that however partial they be,
they should try to institutionalise the capacity and ability to evaluate internally - truthfully and honestly - what they are doing.
They can do this through internal mechanisms of criticism but also through research conducted in an impartial manner, not to make political points but to examine how truthful and also how faithful to their values (if they have any) they are being. This way they strengthen their position by anticipating and addressing good criticism before it arises from outside, while bolstering their confidence that they are being consistent with their institution’s aims. As far as I am aware, the closest approximation to this sort of thing is the commissioning of independent polling and focus groups, which is fine as far as it goes but examines surface perception rather than underlying reality within the institution.
They can do this through internal mechanisms of criticism but also through research conducted in an impartial manner, not to make political points but to examine how truthful and also how faithful to their values (if they have any) they are being. This way they strengthen their position by anticipating and addressing good criticism before it arises from outside, while bolstering their confidence that they are being consistent with their institution’s aims. As far as I am aware, the closest approximation to this sort of thing is the commissioning of independent polling and focus groups, which is fine as far as it goes but examines surface perception rather than underlying reality within the institution.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I’m thinking that for some of our main political parties this
sort of thing could be the difference between a long life of continuing
relevance and a relatively quick death.
For more on not dissimilar themes, see Labour and other party politics page.
For more on not dissimilar themes, see Labour and other party politics page.
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