The civil service is based on the “cult of the generalist”, mandarins who move far too frequently from job to job and are never in post long enough to be held accountable for the success or failure of the projects they manage. And they’re out of touch with the public. At the same time, the public sector undervalues scientists and other specialists.

That’s the argument of Rachel Wolf, part-author of the Conservative manifesto, who wrote in the Telegraph this week about Dominic Cummings’ plans for a Whitehall “revolution”. But it’s also the argument of the Fulton report, perhaps the most famous attempt to reform the civil service, published over half a century ago (and two decades before I joined the Treasury).

So when Wolf says that civil servants “seem woefully unprepared for what’s coming” – a “seismic” overhaul of the way Whitehall operates – the more prosaic truth is that we’ve seen it all before. Which is not to say that the problems she identifies don’t exist – it’s just that solving them will neither be quick nor easy.

Those who know their history will recognise the echoes of Tony Blair’s Performance and Innovation Unit

Yesterday, Cummings himself got involved, posting a highly irregular “job advertisement” on his blog for “data scientists, project managers, policy experts and assorted weirdos” to work in Downing Street. Again, those who know their history will recognise the echoes of Edward Heath’s Central Policy Review Staff, or Tony Blair’s Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU), where I worked at the turn of the millennium.

My first degree was in mathematics, and I share Cummings’ views that quantitative skills – and especially a basic understanding of statistics and probability – are undervalued in the civil service. But these deficiencies, and their negative consequences for policy, are far more common among ministers and journalists than among senior civil servants. It may not matter that, as a Telegraph writer, Boris Johnson was in the habit of inventing statistics, but now that he’s prime minister, perhaps Cummings should devote a fraction of his well-intentioned efforts to educating his boss.

There are risks in an excessive concentration on “hard” sciences and advanced mathematical techniques. Cummings’ blog has all the current buzzwords: machine learning, agent-based modelling and so on. He clearly thinks introducing these techniques to the centre of government has the potential to be transformative. But I was reminded of my attempt back at the PIU in 1999 to forecast the policy challenges of 2020. We noted that, rather surprisingly, many earlier forecasts of the development of computing technology had been broadly correct; however, predictions of its economic and social consequences had been hilariously wrong.

Our conclusion – that it’s the context in which scientific and technological change takes place that matters for policy as much as the science itself – still holds. The reason the government is way behind the curve on regulating tech monopolies, not to mention dealing with misinformation spread via social networks, has very little to do with a lack of people who understand the technology or the software code, and much more to do with the interaction between that technology and age-old problems, institutional, political, economic and social. That doesn’t mean we should downplay expertise – but government needs social scientists just as much as nuclear physicists.

Similarly, Wolf’s view that excessive turnover and a lack of accountability explain the tendency of major government projects to go off-track are only part of the story. Take the most obvious recent example: universal credit. The key failures resulted from Iain Duncan Smith’s decision, against expert advice from both inside and outside government, to press ahead with a timetable that was universally regarded as undeliverable, and to double down when things went badly wrong. Insofar as civil servants are to blame, their mistake was not making their case much more forcefully.

Dominic Cummings calls for 'weirdos and misfits' for No 10 jobs Read more

Hiring “great project managers”, who are also among Cummings’ desired recruits, seems an implausible solution. Does he really intend to project-manage HS2 and the delivery of new local bus services from Downing Street? What would really help would be for him to make clear that he and his new colleagues at No 10 will listen to – and empower - civil servants willing to push back against ministers who, for narrow ideological reasons or simple vanity, insist on pressing ahead with doomed projects or policies. Again, Johnson’s track record – remember the garden bridge – doesn’t inspire huge confidence.

For Cummings, reform and new blood are the key to delivering government promises – on GP appointments, for instance. The competence and capability of the civil service certainly matter a lot, especially for delivering new, complex policies and projects. However, a cynic – or a realist – would say that the main reason it’s a lot harder to get an appointment than it used to be is simpler: there just aren’t enough GPs. More broadly, the recent deterioration in the quality and responsiveness of public services and the welfare state – from the NHS to policing to the shocking and shameful rise in street homelessness – has a much simpler explanation, and cure.

None of this means Cummings and Wolf don’t have a point. Whitehall needs greater continuity and institutional memory, with more professional and technical expertise, embodied in officials who are better trained and more scientifically literate – in the broadest sense. But most of all it needs politicians who combine a determination to deliver on their promises with honesty, competence and a willingness to listen.

• Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and was a member of Tony Blair’s Performance and Innovation Unit