Everythingism revisited

The main thing is the main thing (most of the time)

Is policy a means or an ends?

In March 2023 Ezra Klein introduced the concept of the 'everything bagel', where policies aim to fix just about everything adjacent to their core problem, as well as the problem itself.

Seen by an uninformed audience as 'consideration' or even worse 'consultation', this approach is actually highly counterproductive to getting things done.

The idea expands to explain the solutions of one era can become the problems of the next. A common example is that the same rules that were designed to help the environment in the 1960s now harm progress in the 2020s.

‘Focus’ policymaking at least sounds nice

Joe Hill’s piece Everythingism: An Essay, published in March 2025 builds on Klein’s idea, outlining the merits for a far simplified version of policy making - especially in the UK.

The piece doesn’t pull it’s punches, running with a subtitle that describes everythingism as the pathology holding back the state. There’s even a snazzy diagram to explain what ‘focus’ policymaking could look like.

Hill’s essay draws out some of the absurdity currently observed in the UK:

Everythingism is why the Government can't have a policy that delivers safe and cheap nuclear power quickly. Britain has some of the highest energy prices in the world, and why increasing geopolitical instability energy security is a key government priority. But because of Everythingism moving to shoehorn geopolitical security, 'green' goals, and cheap nuclear power is impossible unless it also promotes the Welsh language, enhances biodiversity, and upskills the local workforce.

Everythingism is the belief that every proposal, project or policy is a means for promoting every national objective, all at the same time. Trade policy is not for producing cheaper goods, but for reshaping the global economy. Planning policy is not for getting high-quality housing near the best jobs, but creating local jobs, hiring Trade Union members, and enhancing biodiversity. And Government procurement isn't for the best products and services at the cheapest price. It's about promoting "social and economic value", reshaping the British economy to promote Net Zero, regional economic development, and diversity and equality training.

Because of Everythingism, we never do any one thing well, we do everything badly. Housing policy becomes the main route for fixing the nitrogen imbalances in local rivers, and creating more social housing the main way of subsidising the welfare state. Trains must look after bats. Climate policy is to support the services sector.

Hill follows up:

If every policy is about every other policy, it's even easier for policymakers to get distracted and forget to 'keep the main thing the main thing'. Too often, policy levers aren't pulled with equal enthusiasm, despite the evidence suggesting that in most areas, a small number of the causes generate the biggest effects. James Q Wilson identified this "goal ambiguity" as a central problem of bureaucratic organisations.

This rolls off the tongue well and seems to be correct, but as with anything, it’s useful to consider the edge cases.

Enter Ravi Gurumuthy

Ravi Gurumuthy hits back eloquently in his piece In defence of everythingism saying that this approach is flawed in some particularly critical areas - law and justice, energy, and immigration are top of this.

History is important here too. Ezra Klein isn’t the first left leaning intellectual to discover progress really does matter, as well as process. We’ve been in this cycle before.

Gurumuthy writes of the UK:

Despite the inevitable need to balance competing goals and constraints, governments have attempted in the past to push back on everythingism. In 1982, when Michael Heseltine was setting up Urban Development Corporations, he said he wanted them to be 'single-minded' and 'focused like a laser beam' on the problem they were charged with. Next Steps agencies that separated policy from delivery and the growth of quangos and arms length bodies were also part of this effort.

But agencies with a singular focus often create externalities, dumping costs onto other departments. They are usually defined by a particular function, when the reality of people's lives is that they interact with multiple professions and needs. The fragmentation of services created by 'new public management' led to the push for 'joined up government' in the 1990s.

This makes intuitive sense - peoples lives are complex and ever changing, and programmes design to support health, education, housing, and incomes will all affect each other. It is genuinely difficult to find ‘shortcuts’ where ‘focus policymaking’ actually works.

International development may be one of the true cases where simpler is better. Gurumuthy explains:

Some forms of joining up do not add services but subtract them, creating much greater simplicity. In international development and humanitarian interventions, there has been a growing focus over the last twenty years on conditional and unconditional cash transfers. Randomised trials have shown that cash transfers are not only more cost-effective than providing aid recipients with food, clothing or shelter, they also increase enrollment at school, children’s nutritional status, and reduce intimate partner violence. There is a good case for donors and aid organisations with single mandates - such as the World Food Programme - to pool their efforts to create effective cash safety nets and meet multiple outcomes together much more cost-effectively than they can do alone.

Getting everythingism right is practice

I think Ezra's Klein’s core idea that there is no real ‘everything bagel’ is true - yet it needs a slight tweak.

Progress requires regulation of the regulation itself. We must hold a dual focus on introducing policy where it is the only solution, while stripping away old rules and regulations that are inhibiting progress today.

This is hard in practice. It's unpopular to take away a regulation if it increases the risk of a single person getting harmed, whereas new policies only need to stack up in a cost-benefit analysis to get a business case fully funded. Up and coming Ministers also don’t win hearts and minds (let alone votes) selling dry reform initiatives.

Some say that sunset clauses are the answer to this problem - policy with an expiration date. This makes legislative review an active rather than a passive nice to have. Personally, I don’t see this as likely in any Westminster system anytime soon.

So what is to be done?

Firstly, we need a culture that values and prioritises progress. The tools for progress change over time. Policies of old aren’t the bedrock of intellectual knowledge and social welfare - they were means to end for the issues of the day.

The tools we need today are different, just like the tools we’ll need tomorrow. Scrapping old policies is progress, and it’s equally as important as introducing new legislation.

Secondly, ‘focus policymaking’ where one policy targets one outcome is a worthy goal - but it’s not gospel. The Theory of the Second Best is a whole field of welfare economics dedicated to explaining this. Policies have very human consequences, and not all eggs can be unscrambled.

We should avoid everythingism as a general approach to policy making. Instead, we need a new culture that values progress as just as it value humility One that knows when to stop. Or better yet, when to let go.