Quote: Says I: I don’t think we can have a chapter about international relations. The debates are too developed for us to make any real contribution in a few thousand words.
Says Optimistic Chap: I don’t care about academic debates. I just care about what governments should do.
Well, my internship at the Social Market Foundation has come to an end. It all finished on a bit of an ignominious note, which is frustrating, but overall I had a lot of fun, and I think working at some like institution is a pretty cool thing to aim at for the next few years.
I had applied for a bunch of things back in November after I stopped working at the cafe and, given how few jobs there were out there for young people and graduates, I was pretty stoked to land the few interviews that I finally did.
I arrived in my newly bought suit (the cheapest I could find) and was met by the head researcher, John, a tall, youngish-looking man, with a refined sense of moderation in dress, manner and ideas. I made some off-hand comment about the student riots that had, for the past few days, taken control of Whitehall and the surrounding streets, where the SMF is located, and from there we launched into a conversation about whether or not the policy in question - a significant raise to higher education tuition fees - was well considered. Though we were both on the same side of the debate, it progressed quickly and after half an hour I left with more questions, and more interesting questions, about tuition fees than I had come in with. I was disappointed, though, that I had wasted my precious interview chatting, instead of getting to the real business of where I wanted to be in five, ten and fifteen years and what my top five greatest weaknesses were in rank order. I was pleasantly surprised a few days later to receive an offer to complete an internship.
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| London is starting to look nice again |
I arrived for my first day in early January and set up a desk in the small office that housed the three men and one intern that made up the research wing of the SMF. I was in the middle of desperately trying to think of a project to spend my next two months on, when I was interrupted by Jeff, recounting his Christmas cracker:
“Why do anarchists only drink camomile?” He opened, smiling roundly at the office from behind his laptop.
We didn’t know.
“Because proper tea is theft,” he answered with an enormous grin, and, much like my initial interview, the five of us launched into a half-hour of discussing the statement’s merits.
‘Good God!’ I thought, ‘how far out of my depth have I found myself?’
I came up with a project soon enough, creating a simple, mathsy little model of one aspect of the new macroprudential policies that the central bank is in the process of touting. Macroprudential regulation is a very new field. Coming out of the crisis, it changes the way we regulate banks and other lending bodies not on the basis of their individual situation, but on the state of the economy as a whole. For example, ‘dynamic provisioning’ would require lenders to hold liquidity buffers that would be adjusted through the economic cycle. I wanted to write about the effects of forcing lenders to hold different liquidity buffers against the assets they held, depending on the riskiness of the asset. Through my little model, I was going to show that this would impact smaller institutions -with higher costs of capital- more, due to their need for riskier assets in order to maintain profitability rates in line with larger lenders. Point being, by raising the cost of riskier assets in order to internalise the externalities placed on the system as a whole, an unintended effect would be to increase the costs of entry and decrease the competitiveness of the lending market. Hot stuff, huh? Yeah, my ‘nomics brings all the girls to the bar.
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| Here are some thoughts I photographed (some are brighter than others) |
But don’t get too steamed up, as I didn’t end up writing it.
Instead, a project came up a couple of weeks later, by an outside chap, a renowned political historian, who wanted to write a book called
The Politics of Optimism and have it published at the SMF. It was to have ten chapters (his books apparently always have either ten, twenty or thirty chapters) and to apply his philosophy of Optimism across every area of governance. Essentially, he was arguing that service providers, like schools or hospitals, should have more freedom from the government to decide how to run their services. As well as that, he wanted services to be more ‘positive’, meaning the government should prevent problems from arising, instead of fixing them when they did; for example, make healthy people, instead of fixing sick ones.
These are nice slogans, but obviously pretty complicated to put into practice. For a start, the first one calls for decentralisation and less government control over service provision and the second one calls for more. I was supposed to provide briefings to him alongside getting on with my project, but as the size of the task of writing this book in the seven weeks until our soft deadline became clear, my project fell by the wayside and I began getting through material at nights, on the weekends, and even somewhat during my week in India.
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| Told some guys my troubles: they looked troubled |
An added dilemma was that the chap himself was impossible to pin down. Meetings were rushed and he lacked time away from his professional duties to either provide guidance to the project, or respond meaningfully to the work I was sending him.
I began to resent the outlook of the whole thing. The quote at the top of the page is indicative. What did he mean he wasn’t interested in the debates, but only in what the government should do? What did he think all the academics and policy wonks did with their lives that wasn’t related to what the government actually did? Were we all just sitting in ivory towers screwing around?
Eventually, the whole project imploded. There was no way to continue writing blind, knowing that the final product might be miles away from his initial vision and end up not being printed anyway, or that it might end up being miles away from anything I - or more correctly, the SMF, might want printed in their name. John tried to step in and intervene, but the thing was doomed.
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| Told Brigit my troubles: she didn't care |
Seeing as the original term of my internship had already ended a week or two before and I was only staying to write the book, I more or less finished up that Monday. Quite abruptly, and not with any dignity or ceremony, I left, feeling a bit defeated. On the whole, it was a great pick-up CV-wise, but it’s still irks me that I didn’t get my name on an actual product, that I can’t slam a document on the table and say ‘that’s what I did.’ But it was an instructive experience. And think-tanking is a lot of fun. I think it’s something to aim at - getting into a like institution where you can play with ideas independently -which is the fun bit after all- but impacting the policy arena with what you write. Quite clearly, I’m not up to scratch skill-wise to do it yet, but it’s nice to have something that I’m keen on heading towards all the same.
My thanks go to all the guys at the SMF for an enjoyable couple of months, even if it did end in failure.
Best to all,
Michael
