It is not a simple question of regulation and laissez-faire. Regulation can result in an excellent service, better than what an unregulated service might have provided. London’s licensed taxi drivers are, in my experience, the best in the world, for example, and this is due to proper regulation. To obtain a license to operate, they have to master the Knowledge: learn the street plan of London — as higgledy-piggledy as that of any city in the world — not only in theory, as an abstract mental image, but in actual practice. This usually takes them three years, spent driving around the city, day in, day out. When finally they think that they have mastered it, they are examined — often by a retired policeman — and have to be able to say how they would get from A to B, or from C to D, not only by the shortest but also by the quickest route. Only then (and provided they have no police record) are they granted a license.
Obtaining the Knowledge is a formidable intellectual feat: indeed, neuroscientists have used it to demonstrate by brain scans differences between London taxi drivers and others in the possession of spatial knowledge and powers of orientation. And the result of the regulation requiring the Knowledge is that London taxi drivers, besides being small businessmen working largely on their own account and therefore committed to their profession, are generally intelligent, capable men. No doubt the advent of GPS will reduce the need for much of this effort, at least among unlicensed drivers, who were never required to have it anyway. The license was, and is, a guarantee of quality; and the point remains that regulation is not sometimes without benefit to the public.
What do the regulation of London taxi drivers and the success of the vaccination program have in common? I think that it is in the clarity, but also in the modesty, of their goals. The object of the regulation of taxi drivers, for example, is to produce a large cadre of drivers who provide an excellent public service — and the means to achieve this object are unmistakably and obviously connected to that goal. Any group comprising tens of thousands of human beings will contain some who fall below, even much below, the standard desired, but I know of no profession whose members more approximate its ideal. The drivers are justly proud of what they are. There have been no efforts to make saints, or even good people, of them; all that is required is that no ill be known of them and that they have the requisite knowledge. In 50 years of taking London taxis, I’ve never had a bad experience and have had innumerable good ones.
Theodore Dalrymple, “A Cure for Government Incompetence”, City Journal, 2021-08-30.
December 9, 2021
QotD: “The Knowledge” of London’s licensed cab drivers
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