Europe gets the ministers it pays for

Philanthropists should top up ministers’ pay. Here’s how to do it without buying a government.

We need good people to have good government… The single decisive factor that made for Singapore’s development was the ability of its ministers and the high quality of the civil servants who supported them. Whenever I had a lesser minister in charge, I invariably had to push and prod him, and later to review problems and clear roadblocks for him. The end result was never what could have been achieved. When I had the right man in charge, a burden was off my shoulders.

— Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore

European government ministers have vast powers and responsibilities. They are chief executives of bureaucracies with tens of thousands — sometimes hundreds of thousands — of employees. Yet they rarely have any management experience, let alone experience working at a top-performance organisation (think Google in the early 2000s or SpaceX). While I’m most familiar with politics in the UK and Czechia (I am a citizen of both), the pattern seems to hold across Europe.

So why don’t we have better executives in government?

One reason is absurdly low pay — a fraction of what private-sector executives with comparable budgets and workforces earn.

The most junior Singaporean ministers earn $820k per year, pegged to the median income of the top 1,000 Singaporean earners, minus the 40% “ethos of public service” haircut.

They [ministers] must be paid a wage commensurate with what men of their ability and integrity are earning for managing a big corporation or a successful legal or other professional practice… If we underpay men of quality as ministers, we cannot expect them to stay long in office earning a fraction of what they could outside.

— Lee Kuan Yew

European government ministers earn $120k per year on average.Average of EU countries’ ministerial salaries, excluding prime ministers. Polish ministers are lowest paid at $53k per year, the Belgian ones are highest paid at $270k per year. They don’t need to stand for any election; a prime minister can pick anyone.The UK is an exception; all ministers must sit in either Commons or Lords. There is a workaround: the prime minister can appoint anyone into the House of Lords and make them a minister. But prime ministers still routinely struggle with recruitment, especially in smaller countries.

My bet: adopting the Singapore model — paying ministers on par with what private-sector executives with similar responsibilities make — would get us much better ministers.

Pay isn’t the only reason capable people stay away. Others: the tabloidisation of the discourse, the end of mass participation in political parties, the death of noblesse oblige. But higher pay will widen the pool of available candidates.

I propose: donors should top up ministers’ pay.Because it’s not politically feasible for parliaments to do this. Pay each of 15–20 ministers an extra $500k per year (or more). For a mere $10 million a year — the price of a fixer-upper in Atherton or a pre-war villa in Prague — you can transform the quality of any European country’s leadership.

Now, the hard part: designing the scheme so it is beyond reproach; no one should be able to accuse the donors of buying influence.

First, you pre-commit to pay the ministers no matter which parties end up in government.

Second, you pre-commit to pay all the ministers, including the ones you don’t like.Unless the scheme had limited funding and you had previously signalled that you’d, for example, only top up pay of whoever becomes the Education minister, because education is what you care about the most.

Third, you pre-commit to fund the scheme for at least one full electoral cycle. You don’t get to pull out if you disagree with anything the government does.

Fourth, the donors must need nothing from the state — no contracts, no licences, no subsidies.

If the experiment works over the initial electoral cycle, the future funding should come from an endowment over which the donors exercise no control. Of course, truly excellent ministers will make the donors unnecessary — by convincing the public they are worth higher pay.

Is this the best solution to Europe’s political malaise? No. Does it solve all our problems? No.

But it is simple, cheap and testable in a single electoral cycle.

Europe gets the ministers it pays for. Someone should start paying for better ones.