Here is Francis Fukuyama giving gracious words about James Q Wilson, a towering US political scientist who recently died.

I was pleased to see him take up some of the many ideas which featured in one of Professor Wilson’s many masterworks, Bureaucracy, which I urge you to buy if you are at all interested in government as a phenomenon in itself:

I bought and indeed read this book when I had my Harvard sabbatical back in 1998/99. It has one sharp insight after another on why civil servants in modern bureaucracies work and think the way they do. He describes carefully why such factors as the way public sector budgets work necessarily circumscribes innovation and flexibility:

First, public sector agencies are not allowed to retain earnings, and therefore have no incentive towards economizing costs. A public agency that ends the fiscal year with a surplus because of efficient operations cannot distribute those savings to its managers and employees as incentives, but rather is likely to see its budget cut for the next year on the grounds that it was allocated too much in the first place. This explains the rush to push money out the door at the end of the fiscal year whether the spending is needed or not, and why bureaucracies are so often inefficient…

Good grief. Been there, seen that.

The chattering classes and Guardianistas in particular who burble on about the need for ‘more state’ never seem to have the faintest idea about the real limits what the state can ever do, which come from its very nature. These ideas were picked up in the evidence I gave to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee when it looked at reforming the FCO:

Some of today’s excessive process was invented in the previous Thatcher/Major Conservative era, with the ostensibly laudable idea of making government policy processes more "businesslike". But there was (and is) no consensus on what "business" foreign policy actually is. In fact it is a complex mix:

(a) part consultancy (top-level advice on what is happening and how to respond);

(b) part agriculture—planting seeds of goodwill and influence, knowing that some will grow into strong plants in years to come but others will not;

(c) part insurance—developing relations with senior foreign people patiently and deftly when there are no problems in sight, so that when problems occur there is a chance of having essential allies;

(d) part fire-fighting (making an impact in difficult/dangerous situations far from home); and

(e) part service provider (consular/visa work).

13. This is a unique "business" indeed. Because much solid background diplomatic work needed to get results is in the insurance sector and shows no "measurable" outcome, it tends to be devalued in Treasury calculations

In James Q Wilson we had a conservative-inclined analyst who looked at these things with a searching, open mind. Perhaps above all because he understood what was going on in government in a deeper sense he understood what might work (or not) in trying to make things better:

Wilson understood the critical importance of organizational culture as the source of good bureaucratic performance, as opposed to the shifting around of boxes on an org chart that often passes for reform (e.g., the two big reforms of the 2000s, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the reorganization of the intelligence community).

Now I see that in one of the periodic rounds of ‘centralisation’ which follow periodic rounds of ‘decentralisation’ almost all UK government training work is to be channelled through one provider.

Centralisation in this sense has (in theory and maybe in practice) real advantages – some sort of common standards, reduced overheads and process duplication, less scope for some firms ‘capturing’ a sector, greater transparency in what is required and by whom.

But it also has disadvantages, namely one-size-fits-all and much reduced nimbleness/flexibility – why in fact should the v small and specialised FCO (say) have to be put in a training process strait-jacket with huge Whitehall departments? Yes they have some generic training needs in common. But a lot arguably should be better done separately.

What is ‘efficient’ for taxpayers in this context? Not an issue of Right v Left (even if some might present it that way) – simply a question of fleeting fashion?

James Q Wilson will be watching all this from a very high place, and with a rueful smile.