“De Tocqueville observed that it was alright to have rich people in a democracy, so long as they were replaced by a different batch of rich people in the next generation. A certain amount of flux and mobility are necessary for creativity. The price of a practical solution is the acceptance of winners and losers alongside the promise there’ll be a next round. The ossification of public policy into a trajectory where new solutions are simply more grandiose versions of old failures is the result of a parallel ossification in political classes. If change were genuine then you could imagine a situation where a department might be there in one generation and gone the next.”