The relationship between progress and social contentment
25 September 2008
We hosted a Joseph Rowntree Foundation debate here last night as part of their project on the new social evils. Perhaps surprisingly given the economic gloom the overall message of speeches from Julia Neuberger, AC Grayling and Anthony Browne was that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Grayling and Browne were particularly keen to argue that we have never had things so good (Anthony now works for Boris Johnson, so an echo here of the Mayor’s dismissal of Conservative talk of a ‘broken Britain’ as piffle). Julia Neuberger highlighted how fear of being accused of abuse can discourage people from showing kindness and concern to children and old people alike. She called for a renewal of trust and altruism, the opening up of institutions so the public feel confident about getting involved as volunteers or advocates and an end to a culture of blame.
Responding, Naomi Eistenstadt from the Cabinet Office made a spirited defence of the role of the central state in providing a social guarantee, a framework of values and protection for children.
As all this suggests, there was much to chew over but it still felt that we hadn’t got to the heart of the question. If things are getting better and there is no real evidence of a decline of social values, why are we so pessimistic and why do four out of five of us agree with the assertion that we are suffering from a decline in moral standards? Indeed if we think things are getting worse doesn’t that mean they are? After all, how we feel about society is surely an important measure of its health? Also, social pessimism can be a self fulfilling prophesy - if we think it’s cold and hostile out there we’ll go home and lock the door.
I have been commissioned to write an overview chapter for the final JRF report on this project. Given the slipperiness of the central concept and the quality and range of other contributors it’s a tough assignment. But after last night I think I have a clearer idea about what I am looking for. I want to try to overcome the dichotomy between how society is (getting better) and how it feels (getting worse). ‘How it feels’ is part of ‘what it is’ and how it feels feeds back into what it is. Instead of the starting point being ‘society is getting better but people don’t think it is’ – the theme for last night – it should be ‘society is generally getting better but one of the things that is not is how we feel about it’.
This opens up difficult questions about the relationship between progress and social contentment. Is it in the nature of some of the things that seem to be getting better – for example, growing affluence or tolerance - that they contribute to making (some of us) feel worse? Should we give greater weight in social policy to the subjective than the objective? Interestingly this has been the general shift in how the Government measures public service performance, moving from outcome based indicators to user satisfaction.
One interesting example of this is social mobility. Everyone says they are in favour of having more of it. This is fine when we are talking about absolute social mobility – increasing the numbers getting into the middle class, as happened in the fifties and sixties. But the only way to increase relative social mobility (or to increase absolute social mobility when the middle class has stopped expanding) is to make it easier for people to come down as well as go up. But it is far from clear that a society in which it is easier for middle class people to be downwardly socially mobile would be a more content society. Behavioural economics teaches us that the pleasure of upward social mobility (getting something we didn’t have before) is less than the pain of downward social mobility (losing something we have now). So the net social contentment impact of increasing relative social mobility (disregarding other knock-on effects) is negative. In other words the one thing all leading politicians say they want more of is something that will make us less happy as a society!
Grayling and Browne were particularly keen to argue that we have never had things so good (Anthony now works for Boris Johnson, so an echo here of the Mayor’s dismissal of Conservative talk of a ‘broken Britain’ as piffle). Julia Neuberger highlighted how fear of being accused of abuse can discourage people from showing kindness and concern to children and old people alike. She called for a renewal of trust and altruism, the opening up of institutions so the public feel confident about getting involved as volunteers or advocates and an end to a culture of blame.
Responding, Naomi Eistenstadt from the Cabinet Office made a spirited defence of the role of the central state in providing a social guarantee, a framework of values and protection for children.
As all this suggests, there was much to chew over but it still felt that we hadn’t got to the heart of the question. If things are getting better and there is no real evidence of a decline of social values, why are we so pessimistic and why do four out of five of us agree with the assertion that we are suffering from a decline in moral standards? Indeed if we think things are getting worse doesn’t that mean they are? After all, how we feel about society is surely an important measure of its health? Also, social pessimism can be a self fulfilling prophesy - if we think it’s cold and hostile out there we’ll go home and lock the door.
I have been commissioned to write an overview chapter for the final JRF report on this project. Given the slipperiness of the central concept and the quality and range of other contributors it’s a tough assignment. But after last night I think I have a clearer idea about what I am looking for. I want to try to overcome the dichotomy between how society is (getting better) and how it feels (getting worse). ‘How it feels’ is part of ‘what it is’ and how it feels feeds back into what it is. Instead of the starting point being ‘society is getting better but people don’t think it is’ – the theme for last night – it should be ‘society is generally getting better but one of the things that is not is how we feel about it’.
This opens up difficult questions about the relationship between progress and social contentment. Is it in the nature of some of the things that seem to be getting better – for example, growing affluence or tolerance - that they contribute to making (some of us) feel worse? Should we give greater weight in social policy to the subjective than the objective? Interestingly this has been the general shift in how the Government measures public service performance, moving from outcome based indicators to user satisfaction.
One interesting example of this is social mobility. Everyone says they are in favour of having more of it. This is fine when we are talking about absolute social mobility – increasing the numbers getting into the middle class, as happened in the fifties and sixties. But the only way to increase relative social mobility (or to increase absolute social mobility when the middle class has stopped expanding) is to make it easier for people to come down as well as go up. But it is far from clear that a society in which it is easier for middle class people to be downwardly socially mobile would be a more content society. Behavioural economics teaches us that the pleasure of upward social mobility (getting something we didn’t have before) is less than the pain of downward social mobility (losing something we have now). So the net social contentment impact of increasing relative social mobility (disregarding other knock-on effects) is negative. In other words the one thing all leading politicians say they want more of is something that will make us less happy as a society!
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Matthew Cain - 26 Sep 2008 9:50am
Layard's book on happiness might be worth revisiting. Many of the material improvements in society have not actually made us happier (despite also not making us significantly unhappier). The lack of personal contentment leads to a projection of that on society. Social mobility is important for itself but I'm not so sure it's the answer to your challenge. Layard demonstrated (if I remember accurately) how more money and promotions only felt good if we knew someone else that we were outperforming.
Richard - 25 Sep 2008 5:19pm
I think you're right to start from 'society is generally getting better but one of the things that is not is how we feel about it,’ but I wouldn't have come at it from the angle you did - setting up and knocking down a dichotomy between objective and subjective accounts. Instead, I'd say there is no such metric as society. 'Society is getting better' doesn't make much sense. By what measure? Some measures are getting better, some are getting worse.. and it is important to specify which is which. It's not important to dinstinguish objective and subjective measures; in the end all societal measures are important (or should be) because of their ('subjective') psychological implications.. i.e. the suffering/contentment implications. So, we need to be clear about what is getting worse. What exactly are people thinking about when they are asked these questions in surveys? People say morals are declining. Is this just a permanent rose-tinted phenomenon, or does it reflect something really changing? Is a sense of declining morals a proxy for something else - declining trust in strangers for example? //On the effects of social mobility, the problem is worse then you state... Because you don't mention the most significant negative impact.. on those in lower classes seeing their peers moving up in classes. As Michael Young pointed out when he coined the term, in the perfect meritocracy you have no-one to blame but yourself for your lack of success in life. //The paradoxes of progress are an interesting topic. I don't think the relationship of progress with social contentment is as necessary as that of progress with declining values/virtues. I'll be thinking about Brave New World for the rest of the day now. Orwell: "As for such qualities as loyalty, generosity, etc., in a world where nothing went wrong, they would not only be irrelevant but probably unimaginable. The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain, or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain, and difficulty. In books like The Dream and Men Like Gods it is assumed that such qualities as strength, courage, generosity, etc., will be kept alive because they are comely qualities and necessary attributes of a full human being. Presumably, for instance, the inhabitants of Utopia would create artificial dangers in order to exercise their courage, and do dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles that they would never be obliged to use. And here you observe the huge contradiction which is usually present in the idea of progress. The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard. You are at the same moment furiously pressing forward and desperately holding back... So in the last analysis the champion of progress is also the champion of anachronisms."