July 2008
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31 July 2008
Feedback on the New Enlightenment
One great thing about my job is the feedback I get from Fellows. I particularly enjoy being challenged. One of my fiercest critics has been Australian Fellow John Montgomery who thinks I am a soft headed, jargon spouting, leftie.
John and I have been sparring on and off since I joined the RSA. He has just sent me an essay entitled ‘A New Enlightenment’. It’s a powerful and basically reactionary piece (I say this not to be disparaging but because the central thrust is a call to react against modern ‘isms’ in favour of older certainties).
Sorry, John, but I can’t give you the full response the piece deserves (it’s the pressure of last minute work before my holiday).
However, the starting point for my disagreement is that the old truths haven’t simply been displaced by modern fashion but by more profound changes in the world and our understanding of it.
Globalisation, climate change, complexity, technology and the web, new science from quantum physics to neuroscience; these all challenge aspects of the Enlightenment world view.
Moreover the Enlightenment itself helped to unleash forces which have created a hollowed out sense of the good society and the good life, which would horrify the authors of the Enlightenment.
I wonder why right of centre thinkers like John want to lay so much blame for modern problems at the feet of a few French philosophers whose theories are unknown to the vast majority of citizens, and so little at the door of consumer capitalism and the hubristic myth of the separate autonomous self, all of which are ubiquitous aspects of modern life?
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30 July 2008
The path to civic innovation
I have been spending time recently with some amazing social innovators. Last week it was Oli Barrett, creator of the Catalyst Awards among many other things. In just a half hour conversation Oli came up with some great ideas for Fellowship engagement.
On Monday it was Bobby Fishkin, another of the new breed of the hideously talented, young, ambitious American social technology pioneers.
What I got from Bobby, apart that is from an inferiority complex and a sneak preview of his exciting new web widget, was this:
- The
- The problem with social capacity is not an aggregate lack of
commitment, time or effort but that the available capacity is massively
under-utilised. We don’t use people’s skills effectively, we don’t
collaborate as well as we should and we don’t learn from what works (and
what doesn’t).
There are some amazing organisations trying to address some of this (for example Ashoka) but too much blood sweat and tears are still flowing down the drain.
- In countries, cities and neighbourhoods we aren’t combining social interventions effectively. Too much is marginal, short-term and disconnected. From sustainability to tackling social exclusion new ways of joining up interventions and innovations are vital if we are to get to a critical mass point.
- The RSA’s history is both a help and a hindrance. On the
downside we are trying to change a very established organisation. It’s a
bit like IBM going from selling computers to being a high level
consultancy (a process which nearly killed the corporation).
Where we used to offer Fellows status and membership of a club we are now offering membership of a network of thought leaders and civic entrepreneurs. Getting buy-in from Fellows to this new offer is the key challenge facing our new Director of Fellowship Belinda Lester.
On the upside the RSA’s brand, the willingness we meet when we ask people to work with us and our reasonably robust financial model mean we can stay the course.
In innovation failure is as essential to learning as success, but for new initiatives mistakes in planning or application can be fatal. The web is full of abandoned experiments in social innovation. Our new networks platform will have learnt important lessons from the too clunky nature of version one.
Talking to Oli and Bobby confirmed to me we are going in the right direction. It also underlined how far we have to go before we the RSA is genuinely a hotbed of innovation. But most of all I was encouraged by their willingness to offer us advice and support as we try to fulfil the new mission agreed by our Trustees and Council.
- The
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28 July 2008
The era of investor activism
We are entering an era of investor activism. There are at least three broad shifts that will compel investors to enter the market as more than merely consumers.
First, the failure of free markets to live up to claims made on their behalf. Milton Friedman and his mentor Freidrich Hayek told us that the market was free and fully rational. It turned out to be neither. The debacles of Russia and Argentina showed the folly of the first claim. Long tails and speculative bubbles put paid to the second.
Second, the growing realisation that central control cannot keep the City in check. Freidman and Hayek were right about this. Regulation, the product of a few bounded rationalities, can never out-perform the multiple mind of the market.
This second point is relevant to the current political situation. As the fall-out from the sub-prime affair continues, we are bound to get more and more calls for regulation. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Some regulation can be beneficial. But we would be kidding ourselves if we believed that regulation was the final answer.
The City is the very crucible of innovation. The men and women there, incentivised to create, will always be one step ahead of the regulators. As Michael Lewis describes in his book Liar’s Poker, mortgages were first packaged up and sold as bonds by a trader at Salomon Brothers, looking to steal a march on his rivals. It was a minor innovation that became a way of doing business. An army of independent watchdogs could not have stopped it.
The third reason for the rise in investor activism I pointed out yesterday. It is the catalogue of mismanagement attributable to that once-storied British institution, the joint stock company.What does the rise of investor activism mean for companies?
In his recent RSA lecture, marking the launch of our project Tomorrow’s Investor, David Pitt-Watson heralded the arrival of the new regime.
Companies, however, can be excused if they are not so sanguine. They need to distinguish between engaged activist investors, who may tell them uncomfortable truths they don't want to hear but have the long-term interests of the company at heart, and 'drive-by activists', who may whisper seductive tales of optimising shareholder value but whose real interest is in extracting cash from the company now, even if that leaves it debilitated and unable to cope with tough times in the future.
Investor activism can also be tricky ethically. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s attempt to improve the lives of Tesco chickens, for example, splits people down the middle. We discussed this at the Tomorrow’s Investor deliberative forum; about half the participants supported the “rights” of chickens, half the “right” to cheap food. There are no easy answers on ethical questions.
One way to get around - or at least ameliorate - this issue is to have broad participation from across the population. Then, hopefully, companies will behave in the interest of the many, rather than the few.
This more general citizen activism is what we are currently investigating in our Tomorrow’s Investor project. Check out the web page for more details.
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24 July 2008
The End of the Corporation
The idea that the multinational corporation would one day replace the state as the focus of global power was always a silly one.
The people who put it about believed that markets could survive and thrive outside the state. But they let their beliefs get in the way of looking at the facts.
When the "Washington Consensus" was put into practice - in Russia, in Argentina and, most recently, in Iraq - it was a disaster. The lesson was clear: markets need the support of institutions, above all the state.
The demise of the neo-liberal dream has been accelerated by the utter incompetence that resulted in the credit crunch.
However, as Jonathan Guthrie notes in today’s FT, recent defeats by no means spell the end for the joint stock company. He writes:"Companies will endure as a means of marshalling people and capital. No other organisations set prices as efficiently or pursue market experiments so single-mindedly."
In part, at least, this is true. Companies, the wealth-generating engine of any economy, will be around for a while yet.
But I wonder whether they are, in truth, efficient at marshalling people and capital.
Adam Smith, a Fellow of the RSA, disliked the idea of the joint stock company. Once managers take control of capital, he said, they will act in their own interests. The shareholders will forget to manage their investments.
Today, it could be argued, Smith’s dystopia has come to pass. The capital investments of millions of ordinary people are being controlled by what Paul Myners, speaking at the RSA, called "a self-appointed managerial elite". This group works for itself, not the investor. Excessive remuneration is only the most visible sign of this dislocation.
The RSA’s new project, Tomorrow’s Investor, is investigating these issues. We held a deliberative forum here on Saturday with 24 ordinary investors - people who have invested in the stock market mainly through their pensions.
Around 70 per cent of the UK equity is owned by pension companies and other funds. Yet, by and large, people have little consciousness of their role as owners.
Like the political system, the financial system relies on active involvement from ordinary people. Managerial capitalism is good for no-one: it reduces profits for business and diminishes value for the shareholder.
Tomorrow's Investor is investigating the role citizen investors should play in the economy. The Washington Consensus had a name for this: "democratic capitalism". It may turn out to be the best thing that failed ideology ever produced.
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23 July 2008
Do school children and students know how to research?
This was the question raised last night at the RSA, where Encyclopaedia Britannica were sponsoring a talk. Their Managing Director, Ian Grant, emphasised the difference between ‘search’ (a list of results) and ‘research’ (a broader and deeper process of inquiry).
The debate featured a spat between me and Professor Stephen Heppell, one of the world’s leading commentators on learning and technology. Stephen is profoundly critical of the way Government is running our schools. Indeed, he asserted that every example he had seen of innovation and experimentation in schools had been a success, if for no other reason than that it couldn’t possibly be worse than what it replaced.
I have a great deal of sympathy for Stephen’s analysis and even more for his progressive vision for schooling. We fell out when I asked how a more devolved, innovative, child centred approach could ensure success in ‘average’ schools.
My argument was that while visionaries like Stephen tell inspirational stories about what is possible when great schools and teachers aim higher, policy makers will always be obsessed with how systems ensure steady improvement at the average and action to tackle under performance.
I am all too willing to recognise that the current structure of school and student appraisal could be improved, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need a system. The goal is systems that are light touch, that encourage local adaptation (as with the RSA’s Opening Minds curriculum framework) and that provide useful information to practitioners and students as well as to regulators.
The themes of this discussion were picked up again this morning in the debate about the Government’s plan to give doctors an annual competence test.
I remember from my own time in Whitehall shocking statistics showing massive variations in costs, treatment rates, and performance of hospitals, departments and primary care practices. So I support the initiative but – returning to yesterday’s theme – it is important to avoid the obvious dangers in a policy like this.
The first is over-regulation leading to a loss of autonomy and blind conformism – this is what some critics mean when they warn of the danger of ‘defensive medicine’
This is certainly what seems to have happened to much teaching practice over the last decade.
The second is a system which is easy to manipulate, leading to doctors being rated not on their actual performance but on their ability to do well in the competence test. This is what some local authorities would say has happened over time with the star rating system for council services.
This second problem should be seen as an endemic weakness reflecting the powerful impact of Goodhart’s Law which states that the relationship between two performance variables will start to disappear as soon as one is used at a proxy for the other.
The oft-cited example here is that the relationship between academic excellence and having articles in refereed journals started became weaker as soon as the Research Assessment Exercise used the number of articles as the basis for scoring academic performance.
Not only did lots of Journals of questionable quality spring up but academics tended to focus on low value, specialist, incremental research, just about good enough for a journal, rather than bigger bolder more accessible work that took longer to pay off and with a higher chance of failure.
So, however good the new system for doctors it will need over time to be continually reformed as these various policy tendencies take effect.
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23 July 2008
Getting regulation right
A final point gives me a chance to link this discussion to Daniel Finkelstein who is writing some fantastic stuff at the moment. Like our greatest ever modern political essayist, George Orwell, Danny is at his best criticising his own side.
Today he is attacking the Conservatives for failing to champion the progress made using law and order which he says came originally from right of centre politicians like Michael Howard.
I wonder whether Daniel would also agree with me that another danger with the Conservatives is their apparent support for professional self regulation in the public services.
As I said earlier, we need better, more outcome based, less intrusive, regulation but that is different than simply handing power back to the professionals and producers.
Attacking regulation is an easy hit but if the Conservatives dismantle the centre’s capacity to tackle under-performance not only will they will be going back on many of the reforms of both Thatcher and Major, but they will only end up having to reverse the policy in the face of a public intolerance of failing services.
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22 July 2008
Nudge Fever
Following Richard Thaler's speech here last week about his book Nudge I have had several calls from journalists. As is often the case with policy fads there is now something of a backlash as commentators realise that ‘nudging’ is really no more than a set of clever techniques and not quite the new paradigm implied in some quarters.
The most widely touted example of a nudge proposal was George Osborne's advocacy of a recycling reward scheme modelled on Recycle Bank a highly successful
Recycle Bank is an impressive scheme overseen by an NGO which works in partnership with local councils to pick up recyclable rubbish and then hand out reward vouchers redeemable in local stores to those who recycle. From what I can ascertain the scheme starts from the assumption that there is no existing municipal scheme so that any recycling that takes place is a direct consequence of the scheme.
This is important because were there to be any existing scheme – as there is in the vast majority of UK local authorities – then this example of ‘nudge’ comes up against a classic problem with policy based on financial incentives; the dead weight. Osborne asserts that the policy is redistributive because:
‘While the poorest households were previously the least likely to recycle, as soon as they start receiving a financial incentive for recycling, they typically become amongst the most likely households to recycle’
This may be true once the policy is in place but at the point of implementation the scheme would involve rewarding those who are already recycling.
If, as Osborne tells us, the current recyclers tend to be better off the first effect of implementing the scheme is to give middle class families a reward for something they were already doing for free. The dead weight problem doesn’t necessarily kill a policy. The Government’s Educational Maintenance Allowance to disadvantaged 16-18 year old who stay on at school has been seen as a success despite a huge dead weight cost.
Recycle Bank has the feel of a neighbourhood NGO initiative (albeit one that is taking place in hundreds of places), so arguably it’s not the kind of scheme people might be inclined to fiddle. But given how many people are hostile to any type of government, a local authority scheme would have to address another classic policy conundrum.
How do you get the incentive right; just big enough to change behaviour but not so big to encourage cheating (people nicking each other’s recycling or putting bricks at the bottom of their bin). If this sounds cynical, remember the ill-fated Individual Learning Accounts (ILAs) which foundered when rogue training companies were set up to farm people’s ILAs splitting the proceeds between the bogus trainers and bogus trainees.
I remain a fan of nudging but policy making is complex and policies that look clever on paper and work with college students can founder when they are taken up by citizens and those on the lookout for a quick buck.
In an echo of the strange world of quantum mechanics the moment a policy is implemented it changes the context for which the policy was devised and is therefore bound to produce unexpected and sometimes perverse outcomes.
To end with another issue with incentives; if everyone takes up the scheme they quickly come to see the ‘reward’ as an entitlement. And if they then are refused the reward because they fail to recycle they see this as a punishment. In other words, if the policy of rewarding is too successful is comes to feel like the policy of fining it was supposed to replace!
It is this complexity plus the importance of underpinning schemes like these with a high level of public buy-in that leads me to conclude that such ideas work much better at the local level. That’s why the Conservatives are arguing for their policy to be a council initiative. However English Council areas are so big that to many residents the town hall is as distant and oppressive as
Changing behaviour is hard. Nudging is a useful technique but it doesn’t abolish the classic dilemmas of policy making.
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18 July 2008
Delivering the New Enlightenment
The RSA’s ‘new enlightenment’ mission seeks to combine thought leadership, social engagement and innovative forms of collaboration.
We have some way to go still until we are delivering on that mission. In particular the activities and support on offer to Fellows outside London too often falls short. We are investing significant resources in addressing this failing and our best regions and local organisations are working hard to transform the face of the RSA outside London.
But we do have days here at John Adams Street that offer a window into the future. Yesterday was one of those days
At lunchtime over 200 people attended a fascinating talk by Nudge exponent Richard Thaler, a speech that will soon be available on RSA Vision. Thaler's ideas are having a big impact in policy making circles, being quoted in a recent speech by David Cameron. And they are very relevant to the RSA's big idea of ‘closing the social aspiration gap’.
In the evening we had an excellent event to launch our new Tomorrow's Investor project. David Pitt Watson, who is leading on the project and is Chair of Hermes Equity Ownership spoke and there were powerful responses from Paul Myners, Chair of the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority, Penny Shepherd, Chief Exec of the UK Social Investment Forum and Jasmine Birtles the finance journalist and author.
There followed an excellent debate about how better to inform and empower the two thirds of us who hold shares directly or indirectly. On Saturday we will be holding a citizens jury to examine these questions with a group of ‘ordinary’ small investors.
Last night also saw a really lively network event jointly organised between RSA and Teach First. The event came up with some good ideas for initiatives, there were generous offers of support for these initiatives and some of Teach First Fellows alumni asked to join the Fellowship.
I hope that by this time next year networks events of this kind are happening regularly in every part of the country and that they are baring fruit in new initiatives and real social impact for the RSA. The RSA nationally is developing an ever higher and stronger brand the challenge now is to make this the case wherever we have a presence.
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17 July 2008
Britain's social recession
How do we get people to live differently in ways which are better for them and better for society?
This has become the political question of our time. It is something I address in my piece about David Cameron in this morning’s Guardian, where I argue that the Conservative idea of civic renewal overseen by a ‘post-bureaucratic state’ is interesting but not yet convincing. It was an issue that surfaced at a Progress seminar this morning addressed by James Purnell and Tony (Lord Anthony) Gidddens. It featured in today’s RSA Thursday with Richard Thaler.
Encouraging people to work together to build a better future requires a certain degree of public hope and aspiration. In my Guardian piece I drew on statistics I heard yesterday from Roger Liddle - a leading policy advisor to the European Union. Social pessimism is rife in the countries of the old Europe; France, Germany and the UK in particular. Here are their respective agree and disagree scores for the three predictions for the next twenty years:- ‘People’s lives will be better than today’: UK 36 – 56, F 27 – 64, G 20 – 68
- ‘People will earn less because of competition from rising economies’: UK 62 – 32, F 68 – 27, G 69 – 27
- ‘The gap between rich and poor will be wider’: UK 83 – 14, F 89 – 10, G 90 – 9
This extreme level of social pessimism is accompanied by a rejection of structural explanations of disadvantage. Whilst there is growing resentment at the very rich, people are more and more inclined to say that the poor have only themselves to blame. This is not fertile territory for developing a new agenda for social solidarity and action.
The figures on expectations of growing inequality are particularly stark. One of the other points made by Roger Liddle is that education - which many progressives hoped would be a driver of social mobility and inclusion - has actually become a major driver of social polarisation. The reason for this is simply that the wages available to those lacking higher education are falling, and will fall even faster now hard times and higher unemployment rates are here again.
Making education a force for inclusion and opportunity will require more than a further cranking up of an increasingly problematic standards agenda. We need to ask what education is for and we need a system which is not about finding our whether children are able but how they are able and how their abilities can be developed
(For more on this take a look at the RSA's Progressive Education campaign.)
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16 July 2008
Thanks Danny
Thanks to Danny Finkelstein for some kind words in his column today.
It’s especially pleasing to be praised by Danny – he is one of the leading thinkers in this area at the moment and has done a lot to push forward the revolution his column talks about. While I was preparing my speech I found this post of his – on the five sexiest ideas in politics – especially useful. One of the best starting points for anyone interested in this sort of thing.
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15 July 2008
Economic or social recession?
We live in a time of ideological convergence. Despite David Cameron’s recent return to a traditional Tory emphasis on individual morality, most voters would find it hard to distinguish the parties from their pronouncements or policies.
Maybe now the big divide is between optimists and pessimists. If so, the down in the mouth have a big lead in the polls. But there is something telling about the nature of our pessimism; instead of choosing between hope and despair there is a third way.
Opposition parties see their task as helping convince people the country is going to the dogs. Right now it couldn’t be an easier job. Gordon Brown may have the facts right when he says violent crime in down. Equally, it may be that there is no evidence of an increase in deaths from stabbing. Neither of these facts can stop the public perception of an epidemic of violence, seen as another symbol of our “broken society”.
And yet we are richer than ever before, better educated than ever before, we live longer lives, we are amongst the most racially tolerant and integrated country in the world, the streets of our inner cities are not only safer than a few years ago but a whole lot safer than Victorian times. For politicians to point this out runs the risk of being seen as complacent or out of touch, a political curse ever since Jim Callaghan was misquoted saying ‘crisis, what crisis?’
As I've said before, our social pessimism contrasts with personal optimism. Polls show that even when we overwhelmingly say the country is getting worse most of us predict that we will manage to do better. Personal over-confidence and social pessimism reflect the triumph of individualism and the decline of collective institutions. Our misleading perspective matters.
To take one well known example, an exaggerated fear of stranger danger means children don’t walk to school or play out, leading not only to less healthy and happy kids but also to less safe streets - and as one recent paper shows actually ends up putting the children themselves in more danger. One of the many problematic ways politics impacts on society is that social pessimism wins votes while contributing to exactly the woes it exaggerates.
Without dubious medical intervention we can’t turn pessimists into optimists. Nor is it easy to address the public despair personal hubris equation; it looks like an exaggerated sense of personal agency is a hard wired human condition.
But how about optimistic pessimism? Many of the biggest challenges we face are the consequence of past progress. We face a care crisis because we have become so much better at staying alive. We face a climate crisis because most parts of the world are getting quickly richer. The threats of globalisation are the flip side of its amazing opportunities.
Sure, we are in a stage of transition: unwilling to be governed but not yet willing to govern ourselves; no longer short of the bare essentials but unclear what we really need to live fulfilled lives; to say we are citizens of the world is as true as it is premature. But painful though transition is it can be the bridge to a better world.
Einstein was right you can’t use the same tools to solve problems that you used to create them. Social pessimism is an old tool. Can we remember a time when things weren’t what they used to be? To say our challenges are the result of progress is not to make them smaller. It helps us give us confidence that we can solve today’s problems and in so doing create a whole new set for our grandchildren.
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14 July 2008
Behavioural economics
Behavioural economics is all the rage. Like all fashions it is important to distinguish innovation and quality from fad and silliness. The principle of 'nudging' is not at issue; the devil is in the detail.
The always provocative Jamie Whyte has a pop this morning at Harriet Harman’s proposed Equality Bill. Whyte's argument is that the Bill seeks to correct a non-existent market failure. If women are paid less than men it is because women have different priorities. Similarly Whyte claims that to complain that disabled people have lower rates of employment is to reveal a 'Marxist' view of justice which 'requires simple sameness of outcomes and proportionality be damned'.
Whyte is clever but a tad disingenuous. He encourages readers to believe that Harman's Bill is going to force employers to pay women more or to employ disabled people. But the Bill is much less prescriptive. Its main tool for bringing about change is to make it easier to know how much employers pay all their staff, so that if there is clear evidence of discrimination existing legislation can be used to tackle it. The other headline proposal is that if candidates for a job are otherwise equal in all regards, employers can adopt a policy favouring an under-represented group. Given the evidence that in many workplaces diversity is an advantage (for example, helping firms understand and relate better to a diverse client base) this seems like a modest proposal that could encourage firms to do the right thing and at the same time assist social mobility by making it easier for groups lower down to climb the ladder. Over the last year Scott Page talking about employment and Brooke Harrington talking about investment have both shown RSA audiences how diversity can be beneficial
Also today George Osborne is in the Guardian singing the praises of behavioural economist Richard Thaler (who is here on Thursday). The media are fascinated by the Conservatives' interest in Thaler's argument; which is that small clever messages and incentives can have a significant effect on human behaviour. Osborne claims that the Conservatives interest in behavioural economics shows they are 'the Party of ideas in British politics'.
So it is an irony that Harman's Bill can easily be portrayed as being made up of just the kind of small nudges Thaler advocates. Rather than positive discrimination which is heavy handed and controversial Harman argues for positive action which is subtle and - properly explained - publicly acceptable. Rather than crude pay levelling Harman advocates using information transparency as away of encouraging employers to be more self-aware and accountable.
Some commentators suggest 'nudging' as an alternative to legislation but of the three nudges Osborne advocates this morning in the Guardian two require new national regulation and one new local rules. Nudging is not a brand new technique that avoids the problems of all the other techniques, such as perverse outcomes, bad implementation or cheating. It is simply - as Thaler and Sunstein make clear in their book - an alternative frame for policy making involving a more subtle evidence-based way of thinking about human behaviour, rather than relying on the mythical figure of the entirely rational, self interested, perfectly informed subject of economic theory (and of the world of Jamie Whyte).
The issue is not 'to nudge or not to nudge' it is how to nudge well. When the Government tries to nudge it is lambasted. When the Conservatives suggest something similar they are hailed as brilliant. This may be unfair but so is life. Successful nudging can rely on credibility and legitimacy. It may not be that the Conservatives have better ideas just that they are cleverly exploiting being in Opposition. While the public wouldn't share a park bench with Gordon Brown they seem relaxed at the idea of a nudge from David Cameron.
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11 July 2008
Post-consumerism
Let me make a prediction. Over the next few months and years we will get used to a new catch phrase; 'post consumerism'. Why? Simply because this concept forms at the intersection of a problem of human development and an external shock.
There is a growing willingness to assert that well-being, as distinct from material success, is the aim of life. This in turn has two strands; the limited correlation between wealth and contentment amongst the well-off and the sense that in poor communities, particularly among the young, the problem is as much one of psychological resilience as of material deprivation.
The external shock is the combination of climate change, rising prices and commodity shortages, and the likelihood of several years of economic stagnation.
So, just as we are starting to ask whether shopping really is the route to happiness we find we can’t afford to buy as much anyway; of such a concatenation are cultural turning points made. Of course, it could go the other way, when we find we can’t spend, spend, spend we might suddenly realise how our lives depend on it and demand that Government use up all the resources NOW (in which case the human race is doomed to triviality, conflict and well deserved species extinction).
If you think this is just the ravings of an old leftie who has found a new excuse to indulge his anti-capitalist tendencies, here are the words of Sir Martin Sorrell, arguably the most powerful marketing man in the world 'our view, counter to what you expect, is that conspicuous consumption is not productive, and should be discouraged' (thanks to Jules Peck for pointing out this quote in this week's Campaign magazine).
Here are eight ideas that will rise on the tide of post consumerism:- Sustainable design - this week the Design Council asserted in their new three year plan that good design must by definition be sustainable design
- Urban self sufficiency - time to stop ogling Felicity Kendall (if you are a man over 40) and start taking notes when watching The Good Life on UK Gold
- Make do and mend - disinvest in EasyJet and buy shares in darning wool manufacturers
- Upgradeability - technology and white goods being made so they can be upgraded without being thrown away (zero tolerance to built in obsolescence)
- City closet dwellers - people too embarrassed to admit they used to work in financial services
- Anti-consumerist chic - celebrities will positively want to be seen wearing the same outfit they wore five years ago
- Post consumerist gaming - forget Grand Theft Auto V, the must-have video games will be 'carbon killers' and 'investment banker shoot 'em up'
- The rise of the vegetarian super chef - forget macho, swearing, blood soaked cooks; we are all going to learn to do interesting things with lentils
Punk poet John Cooper Clark once said (I think) the world will end not with a bang but with a Wimpy. Cheap, disposable, unhealthy consumer capitalism is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Hoorah!
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08 July 2008
Moody blues...
It is difficult to imagine a more pessimistic national mood.
Not only is the news on the economy going from bad to worse but the knife crime epidemic has refuelled the debate over our ‘broken society’. With Gordon Brown’s popularity flat lining the Opposition need only to describe the problems to gain traction, even if its solutions are less than fully convincing.
Take one example of the tensions still to be resolved in Conservative messaging; it appears in Tim Montgomerie’s piece in today’s Guardian. As the leading Conservative blogger Tim is full of praise for David Cameron’s assertion yesterday that those in poverty and social exclusion must take some responsibility for their plight.
In the same piece Montgomerie castigates Labour for the fact that 600,000 more people are living in severe poverty than when Tony Blair came to power. However, these people are largely made up of those of working age without children.
Labour has put its energy into helping families with children and pensioners on the assumption that others are more able to help themselves. This policy looks broadly in line with Cameron’s tough message yesterday. So, it looks like the Conservatives want to attack Labour from two opposite directions: for not helping the poor and for failing to be sufficiently judgemental.
These issues are at the front of my mind in part because I am speaking tonight at the launch of a new collection of academic essays entitled Social Justice and Public Policy. The book reminds me of the kind of earnest discussion about the definition of social justice that I used to take part in when I ran IPPR.
I still find the debates fascinating but in my talk tonight I think I will steer away from a detailed assessment of the relative merits of the Rawls’, Sen’s or Dworkin’s definition of social justice.
Instead I will make two points. The first is to remind people of the contrast between the progress in achieving rights based on legal equality and the lack of progress towards greater levels of collective social equality.
At the same time as society has become more economically unequal, we have made major advances in the rights of, for example, gay people, disabled people and working parents. It is interesting to explore why this has happened and whether there is any trade off between legal equalities and social justice.
My second point will be recognisable to regular blog readers. It is simply that there is a growing disconnect between our worries about social injustice and our own willingness to do anything about it.
In recent weeks I have spoken to a number of city bankers. You might have thought they would feel guilt and remorse at the fact that the greed and stupidity of their sector is now damaging so many people. But instead the tone is more one of indignation and self pity.
Rather than recognising that those who did best out of the boom might be those who should sacrifice most in a downturn, they blame the Government for their woes and demand protection against the risks they were once so happy to take. I have written in the past about self styled progressives who send their children to private schools thus buying themselves privilege while lecturing the rest of us about fairness.
Society as a whole seems long ago to have abandoned the idea that to complain about something we should at least show some consistency between the complaint and our own actions.
The problem is not so much convincing people of the need for social justice, however it is defined, it is getting people to understand and accept the consequences for each of us of trying to be a more just society. In that sense Cameron is right to ask tough questions. But once again it is those at the bottom rather than those at the top who are in the firing line.
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07 July 2008
Some thoughts about politics and the future state...
David Cameron’s Party is developing what can be seen as their own third way. Thatcherite Conservatives eschewed social ambition and were sceptical about the state. Labour has tended to combine a big social project with confidence in the capacity of Government. Today’s Tories seek to combine a commitment to goals such as social justice and community cohesion with a critique of big government. This is what opposition ministers mean when they talk about pursuing ‘progressive ends through Conservative means’.
Responding to the Tory critique, and to public perceptions that services are not delivering value for money, Labour has sought to make the case for an ‘enabling state’. Ministers promise greater decentralisation to local authorities and neighbourhoods and more power to service users.
The Government is not only championing the idea of personal budgets for social care clients – something considered dangerously radical until a couple of years ago – it is even talking about extending the principle to those with long term health conditions.
This is a key battleground. Progressive commentators like Polly Toynbee warn loudly about the impact on public services and poor communities of the Conservative approach, while Opposition spokespeople lose no opportunity to attack what they see as the innate statism of the Brown Government.
In a recent interview with Oliver Letwin, I asked for some examples of the kind of civic initiatives the Tories rely upon to take up the space left by a receding state. He offered Dick Atkinson whose community campaign against curb crawling in the Birmingham district of Balsall Heath attracted praise from all quarters. But Atkinson’s campaign must be a decade old and its continued prominence in these debates suggests a paucity of other examples of successful sustained community initiatives in poorer areas. The Conservatives will need stronger evidence that civil society can square the circle of social ambition and a reduced state.
Labour can point to real gains in public service performance, for example, shorter average NHS waiting times and a declining number of ‘failing’ schools, but it is far from clear that those communities most dependent on the state have been ‘empowered’ by ten years of Labour rule. Some disadvantaged estates have seen real improvements but for most the dependency culture appears alive and well, something opposition parties are likely to highlight during the Glasgow East by-election campaign. Furthermore new pubic concerns such as that over the epidemic of knife crime in London leave state agencies seemingly powerless to address either the expressions or the causes of social dislocation.
So while the parties seem to agree about what they disagree about, arguably, they both face a credibility gap.
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07 July 2008
Palestine Inside Out
On Thursday, we have another interesting debate in our lunchtime series, with Saree Makdisi, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA.
Both Saree Makdisi (nephew of Edward Said) and the chair, Ghada Karmi, a UK academic based at the Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies have written in support of a one-state solution. The conversation will be focused on the human stories and everyday challenges for Palestinians.
Last week we had the “official” voice of Arab diplomacy – Marwan Muasher, at the heart of the peace process for over 20 years and enjoyed a very open and constructive debate with the audience, something I hope will be repeated this week.
I know a few of you have concerns that we are not putting up an ‘Israeli’ respondent, but we hope to explore the opposing viewpoint at an event in the autumn, and there will be no censoring of any questions from the audience. Please do come!
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02 July 2008
They all laughed...
I was going to do a really ‘fascinating’ blog linking a discussion we had last night about democracy (it was an event to discuss Paul Ginsborg’s book with Richard Reeves and Catherine Fieschi on the panel) and link it to the themes I covered in my speech on Monday.
However I have had meetings all day and it’s the Summer Reception now so you’ll have to wait another day for pearls of wisdom!
But I would like to share a small achievement – I was one of a number on a panel at a great conference – 2gether08 – organised by the RSA’s good friend, Steve Moore. It was held in a converted school in an achingly trendy area of Shoreditch. So intimidated was I by being in the midst of people right at the cutting edge that I was reminded of an Alexei Sayle sketch from the late 1970s. In it, Alexei imagines writing a modern folk song dedicated to the liberal middle classes in the trendiest area of the day: Hampstead. I can’t remember the whole song, just one verse:In Hampstead Town where I was born
The streets are paved with lentils
The cars are all Swedish and theatres experimentalIn a desperate attempt to ingratiate myself with the audience, I tried an update:
In Shoreditch Town where I was born
We eat organic humous and pitta
We are all innovation consultants and we live our lives on TwitterOh, how they laughed ….
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01 July 2008
Thank you and latest thoughts
Thanks to everyone who came to my lecture last night, despite the heat and the alternative attraction of Andy Murray (although I still had time to get home and watch the fifth set!)
It was great to have David Willetts as a respondent, both on Today and on the night. I have been thinking more about his three critiques of my speech.
David’s views are valuable, in part because they raise issues I need to address more fully but also because his interpretation helps me see which bits of my argument I am not communicating clearly. So briefly, my responses to his responses:
1)
David argues that just because our view of our selves and reality may not accord with the science it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work nor that we will change. For example we know the earth revolves around the sun but we still think about the sun ‘rising’ and ‘going down’. I agree. However, my argument is that as we become more aware, for example, of counter-intuitive facts about our brains (such as the neurological process associated with taking an action preceding us thinking about taking the action) this opens us up to more profound questioning of how we relate to the world.
That questioning won’t stop us going about our day to day business but it might widen the canvas of public discourse about how we persuade citizens to do the right thing, whether that’s volunteering, recycling or living more healthily.
2)
David disagrees with my suggestion that human behaviour is often ‘idiosyncratic’, ‘irrational’ or ‘myopic’. He is right that this suggests a too disparaging a view of people (I’ve probably been reading too much John Gray). David argues that most acts – whether it’s failing to save for old age or not living up to our commitment to sustainability can be explained as being rational as long as we have a sophisticated view of what constitutes rationality. I have two problems with this.
First it is a circular argument to say that human behaviour is always rational then prove this by extending the definition of rationality to include the fact that, for example, human beings have a non linear view of time leading them to make decisions today that don’t seem to accord with their own definition of their best interests.
If your definition of rational includes apparently contradictory or self deceiving behaviour then ‘rational’ has become a very loose term.
Second, and more importantly, I want to include the concept of moral consistency within my idea of rationality. So, in relation to climate change I think it is irrational to desire a social outcome which demonstrably cannot be achieved if everyone else behaves like me. This is a disputable point but one I think worthy of more debate.
3)
David argues we should be less concerned with people changing themselves and more with creating the circumstances in which the best parts of our selves are expressed. I entirely agree and it is a failing of my speech that this doesn’t come across. My only argument with David is that I believe that in winning legitimacy for the kinds of policies that strengthen, for example, social commitment we need to open up the broader debate that my speech seeks to provoke.
You will soon be able to see some of this debate on our web site. I suspect I am using my blog to respond to David because he got the best of the argument last night!
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25 June 2008
Cast your bread upon the waters
Every week or so I get a request for an interview from a research student, often they are about my time with Mr Tony. Although my diary is overcrowded I try to say ‘yes’ to most requests knowing how hard it is for many researchers to get access. And occasionally in conversation with the researcher I find am learning as well as teaching.
This morning was just such a time.
A bright personable student from Imperial (I’ll save him the embarrassment of being named) came to discuss his Masters on ‘Persuasive Technology’. Despite reading Nudge and other similar works in the broad field of behaviour change theory, this was a new term on me.
It turns out this is the field of research into devices like the ambient orb, a domestic device which flashes red when energy consumption passes a certain threshold and, apparently, incentivises people to turn stuff off.
There is a department of persuasive technology at Stanford which has already spawned a sub discipline dedicated to persuasive software called captology and a project at Brunel. (The scale and pace of research on cognition and behaviour is spawning many new inter-disciplines, most notable social neuroscience)
The obvious critique of this ‘new’ field of research is that it is just sustainable design by another name. But the focus here is not on sustainable materials or low energy usage but explicitly on shaping behaviour.
So whilst sustainable design for a car might be about engine efficiency and the scope for recycling the vehicle at the end of its life, persuasive technology might focus on how to encourage motorists to drive at the best speed to reduce fuel consumption, or even not use their car at all for short journeys.
What excited me about the conversation was the scope for new processes of innovation bringing together scientists, designers, behavioural experts and others to develop persuasive technologies, in relation not just to sustainability but to many other aspects of the ‘social aspiration gap’.
Sounds like a classic RSA project so watch this space.
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