And we moved to Paraguay

Will is keen to dispel some myths about think tanks:

Imagine you're throwing a party, and invitations have to be equally split into three factions. Firstly you must invite your grandparents, great uncles and great aunts. Secondly, you must invite your colleagues. And thirdly you must invite the kids who hang around the local park. When they arrive, they inevitably split into their respective groups, and congregate in separate areas of the room. As the host, it's up to you to come up with topics of conversation on which all three groups will engage enthusiastically and frame that conversation in language that all three groups can understand. If any group opts out or feels alienated by the conversation that you introduce, you have failed in your hostly duties. Within those limits, you have complete freedom to take the conversation where you like. Now substitute 'government, business and media' for 'grandparents, colleagues and kids' ... and you have a sense of how much independence a think tank has in what it says.

There's a bunch of assumptions here which could do with unpacking - who is 'media'? who is 'business'? come to that, who's 'government'? Do the answers change over time, and do think tankers make any contribution to the way they change?

But what struck me was something about the metaphor itself. Firstly you must invite your grandparents, great uncles and great aunts. What this tells me is that British thinktanks are populated by young people. The last time I could have invited a grandparent anywhere, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.

I used to work in IT - programming was my first job after college (Thatcher was in power then, too). Over a period of years I learned that young coders tend to be very bright, very keen, very confident and very prone to screw up (myself, in retrospect, very much included). They could really crank out the lines of code, but you needed to watch them. You wouldn't let them do their own program design without severe misgivings, and you certainly wouldn't let them go out and talk to the business.

This has nothing to do with intelligence or ability to learn - I had plenty of the former when I was a junior programmer, and probably more of the latter than I have now. (I seem to remember I had something called 'energy', too. Wonder what that's like?) What I didn't have was experience - including the experience of screwing up horribly. Consequently I didn't have a lot of the other qualities that go under the heading of 'maturity' - caution, circumspection, the sense that things are probably more complicated than you realise and that other people probably know more than you understand.

Greater than all of these is the sense that it's all been done. Back on comp.software.year-2000 (those were the days eh?) one of the regulars summed up the "old coder" mindset as

10 We tried it

20 It didn't work

30 GOTO 10

Which makes the encounter with old coders frustrating as hell for new-broom managers and business consultants.

Admittedly, this isn't a good guide to (in)action all the time - you'd end up with the character in La Peste who's described as a saint because he sits in bed all day, and hence doesn't do anyone any harm. But I can't help thinking that the old coders are likely to be right more often than not.

So, think tanks are meeting-places for government, business and the media, and places where they go to hear new and interesting ideas. And think tanks are staffed by young coders. I guess that explains a lot.

Better in the long run

Pessimistic Clive, 28th December:

When I find myself largely agreeing with UKIP leader Nigel Farage over the two new EU member states, despite disagreeing with the very basis of his party and being largely pro-EU, how much longer can the Union continue to keep its loose supporters on board with all this prevarication, shoddy decision-making and incompetence? There’s only so long you can hold on to hope in the face of so much mounting evidence of ever-worsening illness, after all - and no matter how much you may love your dear dog, at some point the realisation has to dawn that it’s so poorly, so incapable of looking after itself, and so unlikely to recover that the kindest thing is simply to have the poor mite put down and go get yourself a new one.

Optimistic Clive, New Year's Day:

In the short term, the lack of progress on the constitution, the lack of progress on deregulation, the ever-increasing piles of pointless directives, mountains of wasted produce, and continued disasters caused by the Common Agricultural and Common Fisheries Policies - all of these are problems, some more major than others.But all of these problems are transient in the grand scheme of things. Even if they continue throughout my lifetime, if these initial birth-pangs of an organisation that will only reach its half-century this year are the worst that the EU can produce - after all the centuries of warfare that Europe has suffered to date - then I think we can surive them, if this is what it takes for our children and grandchildren to inherit a better world.

It's not the volte-face that bothers me so much the particular face Clive seems to have volted into. When I was about fourteen I converted to Communism; it came a bit after my flirtations with Buddhism and Christianity, but lasted a lot longer. I'd read a bit about Cuba, and the news from China was all very inspiring at the time, but what really did it was an anecdote our History teacher told in class (yes, it's a story within a story - David Mitchell look out). Our teacher said that he'd once met the Russian Ambassador, and asked him whether he really believed that the socialist states were progressing towards communism. Apparently the Ambassador said that he realised that he wouldn't live to see communism, and he doubted that his young children would - but maybe, just maybe, if everyone kept the faith and worked hard, maybe his grandchildren would live in a communist society. And that thought alone was enough to make him a believer.

To his great credit, our teacher told us that he personally couldn't believe anything like that, but that he did believe that people could make things a bit better in their own lifetimes, and that was why he considered himself a socialist. Me, I was a sucker for the grand plans and the glorious hopes and the torch of faith handed down through the generations, and I fell for it. It sounds rather as if Clive has too. I've arrived at roughly the point my History teacher was at in the seventies - I don't believe social projects have some sort of Hegelian essence which enables them to develop coherently over more than one human lifetime. I certainly don't believe in birth-pangs that last half a century. I wonder where the Ambassador's children are now.

To illustrate the kind of mentality I'm thinking about, particularly for anyone who's puzzled about some of the terminology I used up there (whether the socialist states were progressing towards communism and so forth) here's a poem, Roque Dalton's "On headaches". (Dalton was a Salvadorean guerrillero, tragically shot by his own side in 1975; he was 39.)

It's a great thing to be a Communist,
although it causes many headaches.

And a Communist headache
is a historical phenomenon, which is to say
that it can't be treated by painkillers
but only by the realisation of the earthly paradise.
That's just how it is.

Under capitalism our heads hurt us
and they take our heads off.
In the struggle for the Revolution our heads are bombs with delay fuses.
During the period of socialist construction we plan out our headaches,
which doesn't make them go away - quite the reverse.

Communism will be, among other things,
an aspirin as big as the sun.

It's a beautiful dream - but I don't trust politicians with dreams.

Update 3/1/06: Clive strikes back, and explains how he can be both cynical and idealistic about the European project. Long, but good stuff.