Goodbye social democracy. Hello [X?]
A meander through the biggest question facing humanity
In my book, End State, I explore nine big social problems and nine radical ideas to put things right. What I’m really interested in, though, isn’t the ideas themselves but the project they’re a part of — how do we upgrade the state so that it’s capable of governing a twenty-first century economy?
That’s a complicated question, so I thought it might be interesting to unpack it a little more here.
I’ll start by summarising the argument I make in End State, and then I’ll try to pin down more precisely what this argument really means. Then I’ll wrap up by addressing the question in the title of this post: if social democracy was the way we governed in the twentieth century, how will we govern in the twenty-first? [1]
The basic argument of End State goes something like this.
Across the world’s mature capitalist economies, a gap is opening up between the way our economy functions and the way we govern the economy, using the levers of the state.
If we look at the way markets work, it seems clear that our economy has moved on decisively from its twentieth century form, as a new, digital variant of capitalism takes hold.
As a result, the logic of digital capitalism now determines a whole bunch of socially and politically significant things, from the way value is distributed in the labour market, to the way we communicate and form opinions, to the way competition and innovation function.
Yet if we look at the state — the laws and institutions by which we govern capitalism, ameliorating its harmful effects, or sharing out the proceeds of growth — we see that change is lagging behind.
Our public policy settlement still works to a pre-digital or industrial logic, functioning on the basis of premises that predate the internet and that therefore no longer hold true.
In End State I argue that this gap — between an economy that’s moved on, and a state that still really hasn’t — explains a lot. So much so that I think you could call it the root cause of our current social and political woes. And so closing this gap — identifying and then implementing a form of government that is genuinely ‘of’ the new economic era, and that works to the same logic — is a kind of root solution. It’s the way out of the mess we’re in.
Those are some pretty big claims. So let’s pause, make a cup of tea, and do some unpacking. What does that all really mean?
Definitions
I remember once sitting in a philosophy class taught by Tim Scanlon when a student asked: what’s the point of philosophy? Scanlon’s answer has always stuck with me:
There are distinctions to be made, and it’s important to make them well.
So let’s make some definitions and distinctions, and in particular let’s define the idea of a policy paradigm. It’s a useful idea and I think it can help us understand what happens to politics at a time of economic transition.
In its broadest sense, a paradigm is the way we tend to look at something. People sometimes use the metaphor of glasses because a paradigm colours how we see the world without itself being seen. Another common approach is to see a paradigm as a set of ‘model problems and answers’ — some reusable patterns that we can apply to solve problems. In this sense, a paradigm is a kind of user guide, showing us how to apply a particular discipline to solve problems out there in the world.
One thing all these definitions have in common is that a paradigm is formed of deep assumptions — ideas that go largely unsaid. So when we argue with each other, the paradigm itself isn’t generally being contested — it’s the space within which the debate takes place.
Paradigms are useful, until they’re not. When a paradigm holds true, or true enough, it acts like a scaffold, giving structure to a conversation.[2] Without it, our arguments would spiral into ever higher realms of abstraction, continually reopening foundational beliefs.
Problems arise, however, when the paradigm — or rather the set of unspoken beliefs that make up the paradigm — is itself no longer true.[3] At this point, it goes from being a scaffold to a straight-jacket. Rather than keeping us focused, our unspoken assumptions start to inhibit us, hindering intellectual progress or blinding us to viable solutions. We find ourselves arguing entirely on the basis of false premises and, because we all share those premises, no-one’s even questioning them.
The most well known examples of paradigm shifts — the moment one paradigm dies, and a new one is adopted — come from the history of science. There’s the Copernican revolution, when we realised the sun, not the earth, sits at the center of the solar system. And there’s the Lavoisier revolution in chemistry, when we realised that combustion isn’t a process in which phlogiston is given off, but one in which a substance combines rapidly with oxygen.
These moments are fascinating because they’re so disruptive, even intellectually traumatic, as assumptions we’ve leaned on for decades or centuries fall suddenly away. They’re moments in history that feel genuinely decisive, in the sense that it’s useful to talk in terms of ‘before’ and ‘after’. One era ends, another begins.
What is a policy paradigm?
The idea of a paradigm is versatile because a similar dynamic can play out in any discipline, including public policy.[4]
In debates about public policy, we tend to focus mostly on ideological disagreements; whether to cut or increase welfare spending, for example, or whether the state should regulate markets assertively or should instead step back.
Behind these important debates, however, deeper tides are at work. These relate to the assumptions that are shared by both sides of the ideological divide at a given point in time — the assumptions that make up the policy paradigm.
Let’s return to welfare as an example. Behind all the ideological arguments we have about benefit levels, lots of shared beliefs go unsaid. These could be ideas about what constitutes a good justification for a particular welfare policy, or ideas about the kind of evidence that should count as valid or necessary. Or they could be presumptions about the types of outcome that matter when it comes to welfare, and the outcomes that deserve less attention.
A good way of unearthing the specifics is to listen to a political argument play out, and to write down the types of things that are being said and the types of things that could be said but aren’t.
In the last 50 years, for example, most debates about welfare have given lots of airtime to distributional consequences. How many ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ would there be if the government changed benefit rates, for example, and what would happen to a distributional measure like poverty? These concepts — winners, losers, and poverty — have highly specific definitions, which again go largely unsaid; they’re simply the language in which the debate takes place. The concern for distributional consequences, for example, relates specifically to financial losses/gains/relative positions quantified in terms of household income.
What else do we talk about when we talk about welfare? Another dominant concept is work incentives, and again it has a tight definition. The idea of work incentives refers to how the welfare system affects a person’s behaviour as a benefit ‘claimant’ or ‘recipient’, with the person modelled as a rational economic agent computing the financial gains/losses of working more/less.
It can be hard to see beyond these ideas — that’s precisely the point. But if we push ourselves to consider the entire landscape of things that could be said about a welfare system, we realise there’s lots of unexplored territory. We could debate, for example, how the welfare system affects the texture of social or family relationships, or the effect it has on a person’s felt place in society. Or we could discuss the system’s implications for anxiety and depression, and the uncertainty or stability it brings to people’s lives. Or we could analyse the system’s effects over time, and ask how it shapes a person’s life narrative. Or we could talk more about aspects of delivery, such as the pace or agility or flexibility or accuracy of the decisions the welfare system makes.
If these issues sound niche or irrelevant — like the kind of points a hippy outsider would make — that’s the paradigm at work, guiding us on what’s credible and what’s not. My point here isn’t a normative one — I’m not saying we should focus on these things. It’s just an observation: when it comes to public policy, we spend our time talking in a tiny walled-off garden, within a vast field of possible debate.
Going back to the source
Why does any of this matter? And why do I think it matters a lot at a moment in history like this? To answer these questions we need to ask another one: where does the policy paradigm come from?
The policy paradigm grows from deep intellectual soil. It emerges from, and draws its character from, more general ideas about the way we should solve problems, or assess evidence, or evaluate options.
If you’re into this sort of thing, it’s fascinating and a real afternoon killer to trace back the intellectual history of the twentieth century social democratic policy paradigm. If you zoom out to look over time, the ideas resemble a river system filmed from above. First you see the trickle of a concept or argument emerging in, say, the late nineteenth century, and then you see that idea broaden, or fork, or merge with other ideas before, many decades later, it flows into the river of the policy paradigm.
At the risk of over-extending the metaphor, you also see ideas go underground, disappearing from view like subterranean rivers, where they continue to flow, contouring the ground under our feet — determining the conversations we have, and therefore the decisions we make — despite being unseen.
To give a specific example, of all the ideas that shape public policy today, some of the most influential stem from the work of Frederick Taylor. Taylor was an economist who, in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, promoted with a religious zeal a new way of driving efficiency in manufacturing through precisely measured experiments.
To appreciate Taylor’s impact, a good place to start is Robert Kanigel’s excellent biography, The One Best Way. Even better is to read Taylor’s original books and articles and the commentary around them. It’s humbling to see ideas that we now take deeply for granted, such as a particular way of thinking about economic efficiency, being treated as daring new kids on the block. Taylor’s ideas were revolutionary and their impact is hard to overstate. If you’re interested in the question ‘when did the twentieth century truly begin?’, a good answer is the moment Taylor demonstrated his methods at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, cutting steel so fast it turned blue and curled at his feet like butter, leaving his audience stunned.
The ideas that were developed and popularised by Taylor are an example of a subterranean river. From his emphasis on efficiency and his particular approach to that concept, to his more practical work on the best way to run an industrial process, his ideas inspired a heated debate and were then so broadly accepted that they disappeared from all-but academic debate, while continuing to shape the world, including through public policy.
Taylorism isn’t, of course, the only tributary that flowed into the twentieth century policy paradigm. Another nearby stream of thought concerned how we should organise economic activity.
In the early to mid-twentieth century, as American capitalism morphed into a new form, the corporation emerged as a new way of organising companies. As with Taylor, a good way to appreciate these ideas about organisational structures is to read the original debates. People were obsessed with the corporation as an innovative institutional form, and libraries of books were written about the implications of the corporation for everything from design to architecture to the human soul. In time, these ideas solidified into concepts and practices that we came to take for granted, from seniority and hierarchy, to departmental silos, to sign-off and governance, and they also influenced other later ideas, such as how we should plan work over time through waterfall project management.[5]
We can watch these ideas flow into — or ‘become’ might be a more direct way of putting it — the twentieth century policy paradigm.
If you jump into pretty much any policy debate in the late twentieth century, right back to the peak mid-century technocrat, William Beveridge, you see this intellectual material everywhere you look. The policy debates we had, and the laws and institutions we therefore created, were built on the assumption of economic rationality. Policies were designed on the premise that efficiency is a first order goal. And of course the whole policy settlement was implemented through corporation-like institutional forms, from the NHS to modern welfare bureaucracies. More generally, throughout the late twentieth century, public policy exhibited a growing deference to economics as a discipline (as opposed to other disciplines like psychology or design).
Sometimes, reading the work of leading twentieth century technocrats, these inherited ideas are so prominent that you feel the whole discipline of public policy is derivative, in the sense that it’s really just about taking these more general ways of thinking and applying them to the specific problem-set of public policy. If you dip back and forth between twentieth century government and think tank reports and the writings of earlier industrial theorists, even the spirit of the work — the vibe of the thing — feels similar.
Bringing it down to earth
This might all sound pretty abstract and far away from the policy and political challenges we face today. But I think it’s of real practical importance for a couple of reasons.
First, the intellectual scaffold within which we make policy choices has real-life consequences every day for millions of people’s lives, and for the character of our society.
In the case of welfare, for example, our policy paradigm helps to explain why, regardless of which party is in power, modern welfare systems across the world’s mature capitalist economies can be described using words like: optimising, complex, formula-based, conditional, rigid, hierarchical, and technocratic. It also helps to explain why we probably wouldn’t describe those systems using words like agile, simple, autonomous, loving, respectful, humane, or intuitive.
The policy paradigm explains these qualities because it determines the tests we set when designing and scrutinising a welfare system. The paradigm keeps us contained in that narrow walled-off space, where we focus on those narrow (if important) ideas of allocative efficiency or work incentives. If you sit in a benefit office, or a roundtable discussion about welfare, you can almost feel the ghosts of Taylor and other early twentieth century economists standing over your shoulder.
The second reason this all matters — and the reason it matters even more at this particular historical moment — is technology.
The deep assumptions that make-up our policy paradigm — those historic ideas about efficiency and the ‘one best way’ to do things — are so tightly intertwined with the history of technology that they’re really inseparable. In a sense they are the history of technology, or at least one of the main chapters in that history.
What I mean is that these ideas didn’t emerge a priori from someone sitting like Descartes at a desk, or Newton under a tree. They were written like manuals — as user guides for how to do things in the technological conditions of the time.
When Taylor developed his theories, he was literally standing in an industrial factory with a stopwatch and a clipboard, and the task he had set himself was to work out the best way to make industrial manufacturing more productive. Likewise, those debates about the corporation and organisational forms were responses to a practical question: what’s the best way to organise a company in the technological conditions of the early to mid twentieth century?
So these ideas — the base material of the policy paradigm — aren’t evergreen; they’re tied to particular technological conditions. Rather than being timeless principles, and a firm basis on which to govern forever, they’re ideas with a shelf-life, appropriate for governing an economy of the twentieth century.
That’s what I mean when I say the state is being left behind. Because of course those technological conditions are now changing, and so that ‘one best way’ of doing things — and its associated way of governing — needs to be upgraded.
A castle built on sand
The digital revolution is one of those cliches that’s hard to avoid because it’s true. It’s also a bit like climate change, in that you can’t really capture its significance without sounding breathless, and even then you’re probably still understating the thing.
As many other people have pointed out before, technology is the least interesting aspect of the digital revolution. The real disruption doesn’t come from the gadgets and algorithms themselves, it comes from the fact that those gadgets and algorithms enable a new best way to do things. This triggers a process in which our dominant paradigm of production is replaced — and it’s the implications of this process that are hard to overstate.
What happens at a time of transition like this isn’t just lots of change, or faster change, but a particular type of change. A new and qualitatively different type of economy emerges and then replaces, piece by piece, the economy that came before. There are strongly-held views about the specifics of this — what to call these different phases of capitalism, and how many of them there have been. For the sake of simplicity let’s just say we’re now living through the latest stage of the transition from an industrial to a digital economy, and let’s not worry too much about whether this is the second or third or fourth such revolution.
One thing we can be confident of is that the effects of this transition will ultimately be total, just like the original emergence of industrialism was total, in the sense that there will be no escape. This is true because capitalism is a totalising mechanism, since a more profitable model of production will replace a less profitable model everywhere it can. Sure, this process of replacement will take decades, as change is held up by many different types of inertia, but it’s just a question of time.
The new best way
If you walk into any big bookshop, you’ll find endless titles that try to describe the new best way that is now taking hold. They tend to be called things like The Age of Agile or The Start-up Way. They’re today’s equivalent to those early twentieth century books on efficiency or the corporation (back then, they were called things like The Industrial Man or The American Model). They’re attempts to describe a new model of capitalism live, as it emerges before our eyes.
So what is the new best way? Its main elements are themselves now cliches, but again they’re cliches that are basically right. Waterfall methods are replaced by agile methods. Hierarchical institutional forms give way to flatness and autonomy. Economics loses its trump status as a discipline, challenged by the discipline of design. Silos are replaced by multidisciplinary teams.
What’s interesting for our purposes isn’t so much the content of all of this, but the process by which this transition — from one best way to another — plays out. And what’s especially interesting are the differences between how this process unfolds in the market versus how it unfolds in the state.
In the market economy, the adoption of a new paradigm of production plays out in the familiar cycle of creative destruction. Startups adopt the new best way in full from day one, and so, like an animal that’s perfectly suited to its environment, they thrive, displacing other species around them until they themselves become dominant — think of Facebook, Netflix, or Google.
Meanwhile, big companies that were founded before the technological environment changed try desperately to reimagine themselves in the image of these start-ups. Most of these efforts fail, and they fail not so much because the answer is unclear (after all, the new way of doing things is spelled out pretty well in all those books), but because companies are made up of people, and people find change really hard.
For the state, meanwhile, the process of upgrading plays out to different logic. The government isn’t subject to the same ‘change or die’ mentality as a private company. But that doesn’t mean we can default to a lazy story about the market being all lithe and adaptable while the state lumbers behind.[6]
The real story is more nuanced than this. Sure, governments aren’t subject to competitive pressure but they do still face powerful incentives to modernise. These pressures are, however, political, not economic, and this tends to mean government reform feels, if not always messier or slower, then at least angrier and more hotly contested than modernisation within the market economy.
Political change plays out not through the coldly formalised logic of profit and loss, but through mechanisms like rising public frustration, deteriorating social conditions, financial instability, the turn to populism, and, without getting too excitable about it, the biggest incentive of all: the threat of revolution.
The result of all this is that the state doesn’t adapt to a new form of capitalism more slowly than the private sector as a whole, but it does adapt more slowly than the fastest parts of the private sector. The consequence is that large swathes of the market economy assume the logic of a new stage of capitalism while the state still functions on the basis of the old one.
The most direct demonstration of this dynamic today is the way governments seemingly have no clue how to govern practices at the frontier of technological change — how to tame the monopolies of digital platforms, for example, or how to provide security to gig economy workers, or how to regulate dark nudges and algorithmic decision-making. (Actually, leading policymakers do have an increasingly good sense of what’s needed. But these ideas feel scary and radical, so they’re hard to implement because — just like those lumbering companies — the institutions of the state are made up of people, and people find change really hard.)
It’s the gap between these two dynamics of reform, with their different paces and logics, that I’ve referred to as the root cause of our political and policy woes. What I mean is really just that this gap has huge explanatory power, in that it can help us make sense of a bewilderingly messy world.
It explains, for example, a lot of the policy challenges we face today. New social ills are emerging only for the state to stand there looking flummoxed, like an electrician who’s turned up to find a plumbing job.
It also explains the distinctive public mood at times in history like this. The mounting sense of disorder, even fury, as social problems pile up unsolved. And the widespread feeling that mainstream elites live on a different planet, apparently unable even to recognise that things aren’t going well.[7]
The specifics of how this all manifests vary a lot, of course, depending on the historical period. The first industrial revolution was a tangible revolution of steam, iron, and coal, and so the social fallout was itself tangible, in that it was there to see, smell, and touch. Urban rivers literally filled with human excrement until the smell made people gag. Railway tracks didn’t line up, so passengers and goods had to swap from one train to another. Children fell asleep at unguarded looms and were either killed or had their fingers, arms, or hands torn off.
In today’s information-based revolution, by contrast, it’s no surprise that our social ills are more abstract, from mental illness and burnout, to the dissipation of trust and the distortion of truth. During both these technological transitions, however, there’s that similar mood of exasperation and disorder — a sense that things are spinning out of control.
And behind it all is that dangerous gap between the economy and the state. A gap that can only be closed by upgrading the way we govern.
How to update a paradigm
I’m conscious this might all feel a bit bleak, so let’s finish with a word on what we can do. The surprising point I want to make here is that this is an optimistic and reassuring story.
For one thing, it tells us that the issues we’re facing today aren’t signs of the end of the world — they’re just signs of the end of an era, or signals that the latest great transition is well underway.
For another thing, this diagnosis suggests that today’s big social problems aren’t inherent to the new form of capitalism, in the sense that digital capitalism isn’t inherently inhumane any more than industrialism was inherently inhumane.
What this new form of capitalism is is ungoverned — or at least mis-governed — and so its incredible power is bursting out haphazardly in a mess of opportunity and risk.
So if our twentieth century policy settlement — the way we governed that prior stage of capitalism — is nearing the end of its useful life, what would an internet-era policy paradigm look like? What is [X]?
It feels increasingly clear this is a top tier question, in that it’s up there on humanity’s to-do list alongside other epochal challenges — stopping climate change, for example, or addressing racial inequities.
I say this simply because the stakes are so damned high. In the past, when we’ve succeeded in matching a new form of capitalism with a corresponding governing logic, our lives got better in ways that were previously unimaginable. The last time we pulled this off, developing ways to steer and regulate an industrial economy, life expectancy more than doubled, real income rose sixfold, and working hours halved, all over 100–150 years.[8]
We also know what failure looks like, since history is full of examples of what happens when a country fails safely to govern an economic transition; it turns out that those fears of revolution and social collapse are real.[9]
So what is the new policy paradigm? This is a bit like asking someone to describe social democracy in around 1920. They might have got some things right, but they would probably also have missed whole swathes of what later became our twentieth century policy settlement. In general, I suspect they would have massively underestimated just how different the future form of the state would be, and how much better our lives would get as a result.
Still, in the interests of not coming all this way and then dodging the question, I do think we can say something about [X]. If you look at the radical ideas I explore in End State — the possible components of a twenty-first century settlement — you see some common themes.
So here are some speculative thoughts on how the twenty-first century state will differ from the twentieth century state.
1. Economics → Design
The discipline of economics seems to be losing its trump status within public policy, challenged by the discipline of design. This is a big deal because for at least the last 50 to 75 years economics has been essentially the language in which we talk about public policy. The rise of design thinking, which still has a long way to run, has the potential to change everything from the way we investigate social problems, to the methods we use to evaluate public policies, to the skills and cultures we expect from public servants. In time, this could prompt us to have very different conversations and to make very different policy decisions.
2. Rational → Behavioural [10]
As well as a shift beyond economics, there’s also a shift underway within economics, as policymakers become more comfortable straying beyond old orthodoxies. One example is the rise of behavioural economics as applied to economic regulation. Another example is the rise of a field like complexity economics, or of network economics, or of less orthodox ways of thinking about uncertainty. None of these ideas are new, of course. What’s new is their growing acceptance in centrist policy-making. They’re starting to find their way into that walled-off garden of mainstream policy debate.
3. Certainty → Humility
When you read the work of twentieth century technocrats, one thing that makes you wince is the overwhelming self-confidence, even arrogance, in the assumption that Whitehall-knows-best. Today’s reformers take a humbler approach. Their ideas start from the premise that the world is uncertain, that things will change, and that they’ll get things wrong. When public policies are designed on this basis they look very different to the policies of the past. They tend to be simpler, for example, and less prone to false precision. In time, a humbler approach to public policy should also change the relationship between the individual and the state. The state will stop trying to be that omniscient puppet-master, tweaking formulas to optimise people’s behaviour, and will start being more of an enabler, building clear and simple platforms on which people can build big lives.
4. Waterfall → Agile
I use these words reluctantly as nothing more than a short-hand for something broader: the way the state of the future will need to adopt internet-era ways of working. Despite the tireless work of digital reformers, in every mature democracy across the world this process of adoption has only just started. The default way of governing is still essentially based on the midcentury corporation. Replacing this model will take generations, and the government that emerges will be unrecognisable from the one we’re used to. In simple terms, it will look a lot more like the agile organisations that are described in all those books about the new best way.
5. Distributional → Relational
I find this last shift the hardest one to pin down. There seems to be a growing recognition in public policy of the power and importance of networks and relationships. This crops up when you talk about delivery mechanisms — the way today’s policy reformers talk about peer-group-based interventions, for example, much more than their predecessors. You also see it in the way today’s policy reformers think about equality. There’s a growing interest in the concept of relational inequality, which emphasises ideas like shame, stigma, and relative social standing, as opposed to focusing just on the material distribution of income and wealth. This makes the whole project of public policy feel less individualistic — or atomistic and anomic might be better words — and altogether more social than it did in the twentieth century. Like the other four shifts I’ve described above, this could have quite profound consequences for the way we govern.
These are no more than impressions — an early attempt to sketch out how the new policy paradigm could differ from the old one. It would be going too far, I think, to see this new paradigm as a single coherent philosophy. But I also think it’s clear that these themes aren’t random or contradictory — they complement each other. Design thinking, for example, chimes with behavioural economics, which fits neatly with being more epistemologically humble, which complements agile/iterative methods. It’s early days, but we can start to glimpse the state of the future. And we can certainly sense how different it will be from the state we’re all used to. Not different as in bigger/smaller, or different as in more left or rightwing, but different in its logic and tone.
If the twentieth century policy paradigm could be described as technocratic, efficient, cold, optimising, and hierarchical, then my guess is that the twenty-first century policy paradigm will be described by words like simple, flat, humble, and warm. And if you really pushed me for a single word, I think I’d go with human.[11]
At some point, we’ll give this new paradigm a name. A clutch of books will fill in the details and new political and social movements will emerge and will become associated with its constituent ideas, just like liberal or progressive political reform movements did in the past. And when future historians look back from 2100 to describe how the state evolved over the century, they’ll write things like: ‘In the second quarter of the 21st century, the social democratic settlement gave way to [X]’.
For now, we can only really see [X] in its earliest, haziest form. The one thing we know for sure is that, when it arrives in full, it will be so different from the way we governed in the twentieth century that we wouldn’t believe it if we saw it now. We can also be pretty confident, although it won’t feel this way during the messy transition, that the new policy settlement — or, rather, the power of the new form of capitalism steered and harnessed by the new policy settlement — will make our lives better in ways we would find implausible today. That’s the destination anyway. The journey there is going to be, well, let’s just say interesting.
End State: 9 ways society is broken — and how we can fix it is out now and available here.
Footnotes
1. I’m using the phrase ‘social democracy’ here as a shorthand to describe the policy settlement of the twentieth century — the basic model of government that took hold in Europe and in a different form in America, with its constituent parts being western democratic institutions, regulated markets, redistributive welfare systems and social insurance, and free education and healthcare, as well as the ways in which these policies tended to function.
2. The word ‘true’ here is obviously a tricky little beast. I mean true as in useful, but let’s not get into that.
3. Again, ‘true’ here is complicated. Sometimes a paradigm fails because it worked as a model up to a point, but only by luck. At other times, the real world conditions change and the model becomes less accurate/helpful as a result.
4. When I say ‘public policy’ here I mean the methods we use to govern our lives together, such as by designing and implementing laws and institutions that pool risks, or that regulate human behaviour, or that distribute resources between people.
5. Here’s where the rabbit hole gets dangerous because we could keep going, and explore the history of ever more abstract ideas. For example, we could look at how economics emerged as a discipline, and the way economic reasoning — an attempt to model the behaviour of people as rational units, or an effort to convert the value of things into money — came to be seen in public policy as a kind of trump suit that outbids other forms of reasoning. Or we could even talk about the way we value reason and rationality itself.
6. You can see how misguided this narrative is when you consider that government digital reformers — GDS in the UK, for example, or pioneering reformers in countries like Estonia or Taiwan — have been consistently ahead of most big corporates in the way they’ve applied internet-era mindsets. Even now, I’d much rather get advice on good digital work from someone working in a forward-thinking government digital team than from any of the big commercial consultancies. At the risk of being horribly reductive, I tend to think the ranking is: 1. Tech sector/start-ups, 2. Government digital reformers, 3. Big corporates, 4. Old school public sector.
7. The caveat here is ‘non-populist’ elites, because of course populists thrive at times like this. They feed on people’s anger, pinning the blame for social problems on immigrants, or on another country, or on other more mainstream elites.
On a more contentious note, I also think this diagnosis helps us see why Michale Gove was onto something when he said people have ‘had enough of experts’. At times like this, experts are in a sense less ‘right’ than normal people about what’s going on, in the sense that normal people can at least intuit that something is badly awry, because the everyday problems they see are so stark. Experts meanwhile are so steeped in an outdated intellectual orthodoxy that they’re blinded from those problems. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not making a point here about Brexit or endorsing anti-intellectual populism. I’m just saying that, at a time like this, policymakers can easily feel they’re doing everything right — because they’re following that dependable twentieth century user manual — and they can also feel, therefore, that if anyone’s wrong it can only be the public. Hence the widespread use of terms like ‘disengaged’ and ‘disillusioned’, which situate the blame with the pissed off consumer, or the angry voter, not with the moribund system itself.
8. On this point about life getting better, there’s a nice idea in this Tim Urban piece — the ‘die unit of progress’. Tim uses this to mean: how far would you have to time travel into the future before you died from shock at just how much better life had become? His point is that the die unit of progress has been going down over time as technological progress, and our ability to harness the power of technological progress, has accelerated.
9. There’s a great interview with David Runciman here, in which he argues that complacency is the biggest risk we face in mature capitalist democracies. It’s been so long since most of us have experienced a full-scale collapse that we’ve started to forget it can happen. And, more specifically, because we’ve never seen a collapse happen under the conditions of mature digital capitalism, we might not recognise it when it starts.
10. These are problematic words, I know, but I’m just using them as shorthand in the hope of avoiding a horrible word like heterodox.
11. This point about being more human is a recurring theme in debates about technological change — i.e. that paradoxically, to respond to technology well, we need to get more human, not less. I’d recommend the brilliant work of people like Rachel Coldicutt and Cassie Robinson on this idea. For example, see Rachel’s piece here on love and technology, and Cassie’s thoughts here on the importance of social imagination.
