Two years on from the general election, we still don’t know how the Tories intend to build back better.
Dominic Cummings had a pretty good idea of what needs to be done, but he’s long gone. And now Gove’s white paper on the levelling-up agenda has been delayed. Two big speeches from the Prime Minister this year were supposed to flesh out the agenda, but the first was a let-down and the second a major embarrassment.
The only hint of a guiding principle came in a third — Boris Johnson’s crowdpleaser at the Conservative Party conference. Here’s the key passage: “If you insist on the economic theory behind levelling-up it is contained in the insight of Wilfredo Pareto… that there are all kinds of improvements you can make to people’s lives he said without diminishing anyone else… we call these Pareto improvements.”
Why was the PM referring to a 19th century Italian economist? He claimed at the time that Pareto had merely “floated from the cobwebbed attic of my memories”. But I’m not so sure. I suspect he is foundational to Johnson’s entire political outlook.
Vilfredo Pareto was born in 1848 to an Italian father and a French mother. He trained as a civil engineer, but in mid-life switched to an academic career — in which he shaped the modern disciplines of economics and sociology. His theories are complex and contradictory. But paradoxically they’re also accessible through bite-size concepts such as Pareto improvements (see above), Pareto efficiency and, most famously, the Pareto principle.
This last one is also known as the 80-20 rule. It’s the idea that, in many situations, 80% of the consequences come from only 20% of the causes. This has been expressed in all sort of ways ever since — including the half-joke than in any organisation 20% of the people do 80% of the useful work. Pareto claimed that this basic pattern could be seen everywhere, which is why he thought that human society is naturally hierarchical.
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