Specialisation and the division of labour is as old as humanity, and of course it goes way back further when we are talking biology. Adam Smith may have formalised why and how it was important economically but he did not invent it. Most specialisation relies on expertise, at least it used to until Crapita and the like started mining the seams of government ignorance.
The quote below is from an article in the Economist in May this year. It is about Public Health England (PHE) and how since they only possessed 290 contact tracers, they needed to call on those wonderful experts in everything, Serco, to help them out. Of course, expertise in such tasks always used to reside with Local Government, not PHE, but Boris and his bunch of Maoists, when they are not having their eyes tested in the fast lane, have decreed that Local Government — along with the opposition, the judges, the education sector and more — are enemies of the people. Given this mindset, we are left with those whose main area of expertise is commercialising ignorance.
Firms such as Serco, a big contractor, are in talks with the government to provide the workforce. It should be possible to train new recruits fairly quickly—the requirements of the job are similar to those of 111 operators, for whom the training time is just four hours. They will work from a script that guides them through the various stages of an interview [emphasis added].
Awhile back, I ended up corresponding with somebody in the Scottish government about how misleading their self-help pages on skin disease were: they contained factual errors, and would mislead people seeking medical help. The content had clearly not been written by a medical practitioner — defined as somebody with domain clinical expertise and who might have actually dealt with patients by shaking hands with them. Asking for validation studies or some sort of empirical evidence to support the content, was unhelpful as the content was supplied by another agency and was commercially ‘confidential’. I didn’t follow up because the person I corresponded with clearly knew that his own position was both untenable, and uncomfortable. Its just business: you know, ‘new ways of working’, ‘direction of travel’, and all those other vacuous suitcase terms that just mark a space where reason or domain expertise used to reside.
Rather than making clever machines, or allowing humans to do what only humans can do1, it seems we are content to make humans behave as stupidly as Excel spreadsheets. 111 is not for BoJo et al.; 111 is for poor people waiting to be levelled up, even if the best way to do that, is to go to straight to A&E. 2
- See Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings ↩
- Image at top of page via Wikimedia here ↩