Cultivating agency
How we build futures together
This is the second post in a little series in which I’m trying to answer an admittedly silly question:
What would it take for life in the year 2100 to be unimaginably better than life in the year 2000?
It’s a reductive and over-ambitious question, I know, so I’m not trying to give a fully rounded answer covering every aspect of social change.
I’m just seeing if I can give a simple, functional description of the conditions that would need to click into place. A kind of combination lock for progress.
In the first post I covered two conditions:
- We would need to unearth a new family of technologies with revolutionary productive potential, which it seems to me we’ve done with digital technologies.
- We would need to develop a system for working with these technologies so that we can put them to use, which it seems to me we’ve done with agile/internet-era methods.
This takes me to the third condition, which is that we’d need to spread our new technologies and social technologies widely across our economy and society.
This is at root a conversation about how we cultivate the conditions for agency.
Condition 3: Cultivate agency
If we’re aiming for a better future for everyone, we can’t just have a small elite using our most powerful technologies profitably and hoarding all the proceeds.
We need a broad swathe of people — across a range of organisations and places — to work with our most powerful technologies so that we can build a better future together.
This requires more than just making sure everyone has iPhones, internet connections, and basic digital skills.
It means we need to spread knowhow with respect to digital technologies, so that people can work with our most advanced technical/social capabilities to make things of value.
That phrase ‘knowhow’ is important. It means people need to be able to work with today’s technologies the way a carpenter works with wood. Or at least people need to be active participants in organisations that can do so.
Knowhow is about more than tools and knowledge. It’s more active than that — tactile, embodied, and expressive of agency, even identity.
And when knowhow is collective — as it is with an orchestra, or with an inclusive economy — we might say that agency ripens into a sense of belonging. Knowhow helps people feel part of something.
So knowhow matters a lot. But if we’re trying to building a better future together, there are also some more material preconditions.
If people are barely managing to scrape through the week, and are finding daily life relentless, then it’s a big ask to look to the future.
Economic agency requires that there be some give in the system. People need at least a modicum of time, security, and headspace to engage.
What makes that possible? There is of course a rich history of thought on the preconditions for agency. And this is now backed up by a quantitative evidence base and learnings from practice.
This points partly to the basics of a Maslowian hierarchy. People find it hard to act for the long-term, for example, if they’re hungry, or if they’re suffering physically or mentally, or if they’re cold/have nowhere secure to live.
But there are also intangible, or psychosocial, enablers of agency.
To take good risks, for example — like starting a business, or relocating to pursue a dream job — people need a base level of financial security.
Because although people will take risks in the pursuit of a better life, when people are exposed to extreme risks — like the risk that your family ends up homeless and destitute — it’s not motivating, it’s paralysing.
There’s also good evidence on the way poverty exhausts mental bandwidth, which is terrible for long-term agency — if you don’t know how you’ll you pay for the next food shop/energy bill, it’s hard to think beyond it.
And we know feelings like self-worth matter a lot too, as does being able to engage in society with self-respect. Which is one reason thinkers like Adam Smith cared a lot about dignity.
Evaluating our progress
So, how’s it going? Have we established the conditions for agency?
It seems to me this is the point in Britain’s twenty-first century performance when the audience starts booing and we get our first big red X’s from the X Factor judges. “ERRRRRRRRR!”
Because as we sit here in the mid-2020s, it feels pretty clear that the average person in Britain doesn’t enjoy true economic agency. And of course people are sharp enough to see this — many people don’t feel part of the future.
Why are we failing to cultivate agency?
For one thing we’re failing to spread contemporary management practices — ways of working adeptly with twenty-first century technologies. Or at least we haven’t yet come close to spreading these practices nearly as broadly as we did during previous periods of inclusive growth.
If we look back to the twentieth century, for example, we eventually managed to diffuse that era’s ‘one best way’ — Taylorism/Fordism — across our society/economy, and this lifted living standards for millions of people.
At first those new practices had emerged at the vanguard of the private economy, just as they have now with internet-era/agile practices.
As Peter Drucker wrote in the 1960s, leading business enterprises were the ‘prototype’ for new social technologies, from the novel production practices of Ford’s assembly line to the institutional form of the modern corporation exemplified by General Motors.
These practices were then abstracted and spread. And of course we didn’t do this work manually, like moving mud with a spade — we did it by building an institutional settlement that was conducive to practices spreading.
I’ve written before about the idea of an institutional settlement that is more liquid than solid, or hot rather than cold. Which is to say we need an institutional settlement that prompts new practices to spread easily, like warm butter. Whereas today our institutional settlement seems cold, so that novel practices spread stubbornly, like butter hard from the fridge.
What does that mean concretely? It means we’re failing to do things like tackle monopolies and anti-competitive business practices, like the moat-building of companies like Google, Meta, and Apple. As well as slipping backwards on old school regulatory capture in regulated industries.
And it means we’re failing to update the rules of the game to keep competition alive/tackle winner-takes-all dynamics in digital markets — for example, by legislating to stop data hoarding, or by insisting on interoperabillity, or by agreeing shared technical standards, or by protecting rights to repair and repurpose.
It also means we’re failing to support/incentivise the long tail of existing small and medium-sized businesses to adopt new technologies/practices at anywhere near the boldness that’s needed. And I’m talking here about spreading basic internet-era methods from, say, 2010, let alone practices from 2020 and beyond. So our most powerful capabilities are still concentrated among a small elite of people, firms, and places.
Plus we’re failing to enable people to learn new skills once they’ve left school, which of course most people have done. Which means people’s only route to retrain is via one of those paralysing risks — quit your low paid job and borrow money for a course, crossing your fingers you’ll make the rent, while your kids look on hopefully. And since the world of work now changes multiple times within a career, this leaves millions of people stranded in the old economy.
This failure to spread knowhow feels quite abstract, but it becomes tangible if you pick a company at random in Britain and walk in to see how it operates. Most likely the organisation’s structures, practices, and mentalities, will be two decades or more behind contemporary practice. As a result, the organisation will be operating far below the productive potential of its constituent capital/people — if only they worked differently.
If you zoom out from that company, operating far below its potential, you’ll see thousands of similar companies. That is the UK economy.
No give in the system
On top of this failure—but inseperable from it — Britain has seen a severe deterioration in the material preconditions for agency.
People don’t have a minute to breathe, so there’s no give in the system; no resilience, no financial security, no headspace.
As a result, Britain’s whole stance economically feels clenched or arthritic, our joints locked in a spasm, unable to step into the future.
This holds for individuals—millions of people unable to start businesses, or relocate families, or learn new skills — as it does for the country; a nation unable to muster a rounded, confident conception of its twenty-first century image, and so unable to invest or take long-term decisions.
Another way to put it is that Britain is locked—some would say has locked itself — into an epic catch-22, or what economists might call a sticky equilibrium.
We’re a country home to millions of people full of ingenuity and driven by wanting the best for themselves and their families, stuck in jobs that waste their talents, and that teach them nothing useful, and that pay so little per hour that they have no time/money/security to upskill to get a better job.
And at the same time — elsewhere in the same economy — companies are starved of talent and are paying massive wage premiums.
Similarly, Britain has failed to build anywhere near enough housing, which means there are millions of people who can’t move to a job that would, if only they could move to it, pay them enough to relocate, so it’s another catch-22. Hence why those wage premiums are so spatially concentrated.
Plus there are milions of people who simply have no bandwidth to look beyond the next weekly shop or energy bill. Hence the feeling of being stuck in a hand-to-mouth cycle, which is another catch-22.
This all adds up to a situation that strikes me as, in certain ways, similar to the 1920s, although with some important differences.
It feels similar in the sense that we’re in the early decades of a new technological era, and we haven’t yet developed institutions for inclusive growth/widespread agency in that new era, and we’re therefore operating with unsustainable waste/far below our potential.
A hopeful story
That all got a bit gloomy, sorry.
The point I was trying to land with this third condition is really just that agency is incredibly important.
Partly because I think our failure to cultivate agency — by failing to diffuse knowhow and failing to establish certain material preconditions — helps us make sense of Britain’s predicament.
For example, I think this story dovetails with an analysis of contemporary inequality that is true and that chimes with our experience (which I’ve unpacked separately here). And I also think it connects into an explanation of our queasy love/hate relationship with digital technology.
But more than making sense of our predicament, I think a focus on agency shows that our predicament is tractable, even hopeful.
Because the real star of this story is human potential.
If there’s one point to take away from this post it’s that we’re operating far below the capacity of our best knowhow and our people, if only these were combined — and that is a solveable problem.
So what I’m suggesting, really, is that this insight should be one of the main contributions made by progressives at this historical moment, as we move into the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
I think this insight can be powerful, literally, in that it can act as a kind of uranium core to power the next chapter of the progressive project.
The reason being that this story about frustrated agency combines three potent qualities: (1) it’s true, (2) it’s hopeful, and (3) it’s generative — it populates the work to be done
I’ll write more about this soon, when I finally get round to wrapping up this series, and the accompanying series about the ‘how’ of government.
But where this takes me, basically, is to thinking that progressives should (a) snap out of the funk and be more positive, (b) spend less time defending/repairing the old settement and more time building the future, and (3) get beyond a slightly wonky and not-all-that-uplifting emphasis on security to talk about agency.
To close by being a tiny bit more specific, I think this account of agency can manifest in the substance of contemporary progressivism. In that a diagnosis centred on agency — and an accompanying set of prescriptions — can make up a big portion of 2020s progressivisism, both in terms of narrative and in terms of policy.
The policy agenda being partly one of fighting economic sclerosis. Tackling anti-competitive practices; setting new terms of engagement to combat winner-takes-all effects (open data and interoperability); creating new institutions to help small and medium-sized businesses adopt contemporary practices; being unashamedly radical on lifelong learning.
But the policy agenda also being a fight for material security. For example by facing down vested interests to build housing in areas of high demand, or by restoring a social security system worthy of its name.
These two parts of the policy agenda are, critically, complementary.
Progressives shouldn’t be fighting for security for its own sake but because security is liberating. Which means this part of the project shouldn’t be apologetic — it’s not an attempt to compensate people for a crappy economy, sitting in tension with efforts to make the economy more dynamic. It’s a crucial part of what it takes to build a free, dynamic economy. Which is why it should be at home not just in a project of progressivism, but also of liberalism.
Finally, I think this whole emphasis on agency can usefully shape the character of contemporary progressivism.
Which is to say that twenty-first century progressivism should be hopeful. It’s not a gloomy project to make the best of a bad situation, or to patch up an old system; it’s an ambitious, imaginative project to build a new one.
That hope, though, should have a certain quality. It’s not a blustering kind of hope, and it’s not the kind of hope that plays out in soaring oratory. It’s a more humble kind of hope, modest and hard-working, motivating a patient project of institutional renewal. It’s hope as a call to diligence.
I had a new year’s resolution to stop writing posts that are unreadably long, which I’m breaking, so let’s pause there for now.
Remember the idea of this series is to ask:
What would it take for life in the year 2100 to be unimaginably better than life in the year 2000?
We’re now halfway through the six conditions I’m suggesting, and in the next post I’ll turn to the fourth condition, which is about how we regulate contemporary capitalism for sustainability and wellbeing.
This will mean picking up a question I put aside earlier: Are we doing dumb/harmful things with digital technologies/social technologies? And, if so, how do we stop the harm without also stopping the good stuff?
After that I promise we’ll get to the fun part, which is where we talk about imagining new futures and developing new capabilities to build them.
To stay in touch with my writing, you can follow me on Medium, Blue Sky, or Substack. Here are links to my parallel series on the ‘how’ of government, which I’ll wrap up soon: one, two, three, four. And, as always, if you want a big, optimistic take on how we build a better future, there’s my book, End State.
