Ben Southwood

From 2028, Britain will have 18 mayoral authorities but mayors still lack key powers for building public infrastructure like trams & roads.

🚨 Today @BritishProgress and @ThinkLabour publish our paper with @AnyaM8_, @1jamesHowat and @johnrmyers on the FOUR powers mayors need 🧵

somehow the new issue of @WorksInProgMag is even better done than the past issues

holy shit didn’t think that was possible

In our country's time of need, John Bull is calling. Who will answer?

@WorksInProgMag !!! You all have out done yourselves. I love the new non-glossy look. It feels so good under the fingers.

Weekend reading secured by @WorksInProgMag

In the 1700s if you weren’t rich enough to have a portrait painted of your loved ones then you might not have a single likeness of them. If they died or went away you could soon forget what they looked like.

I have hundreds — thousands — of photos and videos of my children running around and doing their thing at all ages. What a gift that is. 🥰

The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.

worksinprogress.co/issue/the-seve…

The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:

- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.

- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.

- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.

- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.

- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.

This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.

Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.

care package delivery from @WorksInProgMag, issue 22-26. beautiful artifacts of culture

Nobody's imperfect! Thank you, Sadiq Khan.

Modern elites signal their virtue through "the grind": always productive, like workhorses, nowhere more visible than in the Bay Area's "996" startup schedule. But this wasn't always so: Victorian Britain's elite were more like showhorses.

They were comparatively leisurely, and invested in soft skills, sociability and humanistic pursuits. Some have argued that this was a bad thing, whose effect was compensated for by Britain’s extraordinary success in the Industrial Revolution. In a new piece for @WorksInProgMag that goes in depth into the habits of elite Victorians @SCP_Hughes argues that the lifestyle of Elite Victorians was more a feature than a bug and that it might have actually contributed to the success of the Empire.

As AI is disrupting many purely technical skillsets and calls into question the value of “grinding,” our elites might have something to learn from what made Victorian ones successful.

But first: what did life look like for a Victorian elite?

First, schooling was oddly “easy" and emphasized character formation over pure intellectual development as a goal. Elite boys boarded from about age eight, so they grew up with peers rather than family. Their lessons were mostly Latin and Greek, which they largely forgot, and there was very little science. Classroom hours were shorter than in continental elite schools. Furthermore, schools openly ranked character above intellect. Overall, schools served more of a social purpose than a purely “technocratic one”: it was considered that they should train students partly govern themselves as an apprenticeship in leadership. Boarding may also have been important in keeping the elite from forming regional loyalties, because it drew boys from across the country together.

This attitude continued to university which was again more about formation, than training. Nearly anyone elite could get into Oxbridge, and many students took easy "pass" degrees. None of the grind and cramming of today! Again, science was at the periphery: it made up a small share of degrees even by 1914. Much like with pre-university culture, the emphasis was on socialising and building a common culture. Living together in colleges, tutorials over sherry, rowing and dining built this common culture. Even Haileybury, the training college for the Indian civil service, was academically weak but strong on esprit de corps.

Adult life was relatively lazy by contemporary standards, filled with booze and social. Even prime ministers, which one would expect to always be working, breakfasted at 10 or later. Balfour worked only from bed until lunch. This was not uncommon: office work might take only four or five hours a day. During the London Season (February to July), the elite lived within walking distance of each other in Mayfair and Belgravia and went out almost nightly to dinners, balls and soirées until the hours. Compare this with Bryan Johnson, the longevity guru who shuns anything that might dent his sleep score. We might call this “lazy” today, but Samuel is wiser than this: he points out that for those elites, personal and professional life were fused, and socializing was itself work.

Not everything about Victorian elites was good. There is virtue in working hard and our elites are probably much more apt at driving scientific advancements. That being said, there were distinct advantages to the Victorian way of being. What were these?

1. Victorian elite culture created a tight community at the top of a big society. The elite functioned like a village held together by sentiment and shared memory (and status competition). This helped them coordinate to work to the benefit of the country, which was also their own benefit.

2. The extended socialising and emphasis on creating a common culture created unity. Aristocrats and new money, Anglicans, Nonconformists, Jews and Catholics (except the Irish) were absorbed into one elite. Britain avoided the counter-elites and internal conflicts seen in the US South, Spain, France and Germany. To draw a parallel to today, where culture wars have deracinated our public spaces, elite non-uniformity can be very bad.

3. The Victorians paid people in prestige rather than money, and this strengthened state capacity. Local government, magistracies and Parliament were unpaid, and often costly, since MPs funded their own elections. Yet the most talented and wealthy competed for these roles, because their peers would esteem them for it. Modern states, by contrast, struggle to attract talent to poorly paid public posts. Without a common culture that confers prestige on public service, the talented drift to the private sector and state institutions decay, creating a negative feedback cycle.

4. Restraint in politics. Drawing on Bagehot, Samuel suggests that politicians sharing one social world may have been less inclined to destructive opposition, demagoguery or brinkmanship.

Read more about Victorian Elites and their habits in Wise Samuel's full piece!

The Victorian elites who ran the British Empire did NOT sauna, or plunge, or work out, or use red lights. They didn't learn much at school. Instead, they partied all night, drank amounts that would make us wince, and worked a relaxed five- or six-hour day, sometimes from bed.

Queueing theory tells us that there are nonlinear benefits to having more desks. Application here.

you should buy a @WorksInProgMag article to read about the largest insider trading event in history (which occurred in biotech!)

In traditional Chinese cormorant fishing, the snares tied around the birds' necks are lose enough that they can swallow small fish, but not large ones, which they are trained to deposit at the feet of the fisherman. (Yes, this is a metaphor for our article on Chinese economic growth). Sketches below by Zachary Lank, our fantastic cover artist for the October issue of @WorksInProgMag . So happy with how this issue came out - our most beautiful yet imo. Hope you can get your hands on a copy.

Remarkable assemblage in the new @WorksInProgMag:

- @RobinRivaton and @bswud on how China's cities, and the competition between them, have driven its rise to techno-industrial preeminence,
- @danwwang on Chinese and American second-tier cities,
- @tylercowen on the food of Brazil,
- @vpostrel on the invention of supermarkets,
- @CharlesCMann on the discovery of porcelain,
- @salonium on the myth of accidental scientific discovery,
- Stephen Kotkin on Leninism's fatal flaw,
- @owl_posting on biomedical hedge funds,
- @PMArslanagic on the formula for lovable cities,
- @pietergaricano on Ukraine as the future of war,
- @PatRubenFitz on the Bronze Age Collapse, and
- @SCP_Hughes on the social lives of hard-partying Victorian elites.

Works in Progress nu era begins. Works in Progress 2.0

in the works. coming 2027 🤞

Our environmental system wastes an enormous amount of time and money on process, money that could be spent either on more infrastructure or better environmental protection. This needs fixing.

British companies are not undervalued. There are real barriers to British scale ups, not purely financial ones britishprogress.substack.com/p/access-to-ca…

As an artist who is sympathetic to the Atelier Missor boys, I don't think they quite succeeded. But not for the reasons many are saying...

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