Building a new country based on data
After WW2, as the country rebuilt itself from war damage and built the new social security and health systems promised to citizens, the British civil servants did something that seems odd.
They decided to replicate databases rather than built a single centralised database. Thus there was a database of who paid tax and a database of who received benefits. Decades later, this split was endlessly criticised as inefficient and stupid.
The horror of IBM’s efficiency
However, it was quite deliberate. The civil servants had seen what databases and computation could do. They knew of the IBM work on the Holocaust. They feared what could happen if a government became too efficient. Perhaps it could be efficient for the good of the citizens. Perhaps it could be used to terrorise them.
Friction against fascism
The inefficiency was a form of protection. The government could still be effective. Taxes collected and benefits paid out. However, its databases were just askew enough not to enable the efficient tabulation of data about citizens to categorise them and track them down.
Effective not always efficient
This is the civic administration version of ‘Outcomes not Outputs’. A government should be effective but not necessarily efficient.
Efficiency has a fluid rapidity that, as the 1940’s civil servants understood, can be abused by government who have malicious intent.