Here are the eight key points of the speech David Cameron is giving at the Google Zeitgeist conference today:
The pre-bureacratic era: "A time when nearly all politics was local – because it had to be. When it took days or weeks to get from one city to the next, when news travelled around the world not in seconds but in months. In those days, over a century ago, the idea of a central government bureaucracy devising and implementing policy that would affect people’s daily lives simply couldn’t work. The only things that the state would do were the things that only the state could do – like war and peace, foreign treaties, the money supply, weights and measures."
The bureaucratic era: "Enabled by better communications, and the possibility of information being collected and held by public officials, the bureaucratic era is about faith in centralised administration. Often motivated by noble impulses – to iron out inequalities and differences, to promote fairness and progress, to achieve value for money - central planners asserted a strong role for the top-down central state. Of course this took its most extreme and virulent form in the former Soviet Union, with its crazed five year plans for everything under the sun."
Making people less responsible: "You can only behave responsibly if you have responsibility for something, and that means having the power to make a choice about how you behave. So as the bureaucratic era marched ever onwards, with all those well-meaning public officials making all those top-down decisions for people, with all that information and knowledge they kept to themselves, they ended up taking power away from people - making them less responsible."
Wisdom of the crowds: "That is a wonderful thing for someone who comes, as I do, from the conservative political tradition, because we’ve always been motivated by a strong and instinctive scepticism about the capacity of bureaucratic systems to deliver progress. Instead, we’ve always preferred to place our trust in the ingenuity of human beings, collaborating in messy and unplanned interaction, to deliver the best outcomes. You might call it the wisdom of crowds."
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