Usher: Farewell Cakeism, Welcome Trade-offs, Effectiveness and Efficiencies

While focused on the education sector, applies more broadly as Carney’s Davos speech makes clear (with the hard trade-offs to come):

… But look, cakeism is everywhere. I mean, just look at the last federal election, where every party competed to cut taxes/increase spending in the midst of threats from the US that were going to slow economic growth and require increases in national security spending. Nary a trade-off in sight. Politicians in Canada and many other countries have come to the conclusion – perhaps erroneously, perhaps not – that voters simply dislike trade-offs so it’s better not to make any. Once upon a time – in the mid-late 1990s when we finally got our fiscal house in order – Canada was pretty good at thinking about trade-offs. But it’s basically all been downhill since the turn of the century.

Now, if you wanted to put the shoe on the other foot, you could say that all politics is a bit cakeist. After all, loads of people ask for government money to fund their favourite cause or institution and never think too hard about where the money is coming from. So is it cakeist to ask for more money for universities and student aid? Well, sort of. But one expects stakeholder groups to be cakeist/selfish – they are pushing their set of priorities, and it’s not really their job to think through trade-offs. It’s the job of governments. And increasingly over the past decade or two, governments just forgot how to do that and started saying yes to more and more people. 

But times are changing. Neither our federal nor our provincial governments are in particularly sound financial footing. Thanks to the Cheeto Chaos Agent in the White House, we are in for an extended period of economic dislocation and lowered growth prospects, not to mention a massive re-orientation of fiscal spending priorities to advantage national security. For the next half-decade at least, public resources are going to be much scarcer than they have been at any point before. We as a country, therefore, need to re-learn how to talk about trade-offs, and perhaps more importantly, how to talk in terms of efficiencies.

To take our own sector as an example: when asking the public for money, institutions are going to need to be a lot more explicit both about what immediate obvious benefits will accrue to the public or the government if the money arrives, as well as about immediate specific costs which will occur if the money does not arrive. That means “asks” are going to have to get a lot more specific: not “we would like $50 million please”, but “we would like $50 million please, which we will spend on X, Y and Z, and if we don’t get it we will need to cut A, B and C in order to fund these priorities, which means the community will lose L, M and N”. This may sound simple, but institutions going in this direction would be the biggest tonal shift in university government relations in my lifetime, because universities choke on the idea of doing less or being seen to do less. But this is what the language of trade-offs requires….

Source: Farewell Cakeism, Welcome Trade-offs, Effectiveness and Efficiencies