Social justice in a digital age

Announcing a new project and a chance to relearn policymaking

A few weeks ago I wrote about the task of building a new institutional settlement for a digital society. I teed up some new work that I’m now pleased to say I’ll be doing in collaboration with Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

We’re calling the project Social Justice in a Digital Age and JRF’s Graeme Cooke has posted more about our plans here.

Joseph Rowntree was one of a band of reformers who tried to make sense of the changing character of industrial capitalism in the late 19th/early 20th century, informing the policy settlement we call social democracy.

We want to do something similar for digital capitalism. Our goal is to better understand what digital capitalism is like, and why it’s like that, to help inform the institutional arrangements we need for a digital age.

TL;DR — what would Rowntree do now?

There’s more in Graeme’s post on the substance of all this, so in this post I’ll focus on methodology. If the task we face is one of institutional redesign, how should we go about it?

The need for new methods

When I read work done by Rowntree’s generation, from leading politicians to other public intellectuals, I’m always struck by how different their methodology was to policy work today.

That generation had a real breadth of ambition, they drew on a range of intellectual disciplines, they worked in a mix of mediums, and they often rooted their arguments in big ethical ideas.

If you contrast this with the main methods we use for policy work today, it’s hard not to feel a bit short-changed.

Our generation of policymakers came of age at what I increasingly think was the high watermark of the twentieth century policy paradigm. Since at least the 1990s, the main vibe of public policy work has been one of technocracy.

We’ve been narrowly reliant on economics over other disciplines. We’ve tended to work on the positivist premise that we can strip out ethics to allow for an ‘objective’ treatment of social issues. And to the extent that philosophy/ethics has shaped our public policy choices, it’s tended to be within a narrow analytical framework, defined most of all by Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism.

It seems to me that these approaches are quite ill-suited to the task we face now — i.e. reforming our institutional settlement in quite radical ways to cope with a new economic and social age.

It all feels a bit like trying to carve out a sculpture with some really fine-grained sandpaper. Our tools don’t go deep enough.

So Social Justice in a Digital Age will be an experiment in method as much as anything else. We want to see if we can learn how to do policy work at a time like this.

Here are four aspects of the approach we’re going to try.

1. Frontiers, not averages

Revolutionary technological change spreads in quite a particular way. A new type of economy, defined by a new practice of production, emerges at the technological frontier and this new practice then takes over, sector by sector, region by region, spreading via a process of diffusion or disruption.

One implication of this mode of contagion is that, at a time like this, averages can only tell us so much.

Notice how, for example, even at the height of the Industrial Revolution, a lot of Britain’s core economic indicators were pretty uneventful. To see the drama of what was happening, you had to go to the frontier and appreciate how different things were.

This feels like a real challenge to how we do policymaking today. So much of our debate is about studying averages. And even when we look at distributions we tend to study things like the distribution of income in the economy as a whole. i.e. even if we’re not looking at average incomes, we’re still looking at how the economy on average functions across the income spectrum.

What we don’t tend to do is spend much time at the technological frontier. Instead, we define what’s happening at the frontier as ‘digital policy’ or ‘technology policy’ and we leave this to small teams of specialists.

This makes me think of the metaphor of running a bath. When you’ve just started running the water, you don’t test the temperature by checking the water at the bottom of the bath; if you did that, you’d get a really misleading idea of where things are headed. Instead, you run your hand under the tap.

To put this another way, in the early stage of a change, what you care about is the flow, more than the stock.

When you think about it this way, you realise it’s not a coincidence that a lot of history’s most impactful sociological and economic insights — from Smith to Engels to Taylor — took exactly the methodological approach I’m talking about.

These people spent time at the frontier — in many cases, they literally walked into the frontier of production — which for them was a factory — and tried to make sense of what they were seeing.

So one principle we’ll apply in this project is to focus on the frontier, not the average. Well look at things like the new jobs being created, not the median job. And we’ll try to understand what it feels to live and work at the frontier of a digital society.

2. Beyond incrementalism, and beyond economics

To cope with a technological transition, we need to go beyond technocratic and incrementalist reasoning.

This is partly because lots of the underlying premises of public policy don’t work very well in a digital economy — i.e. the premises themselves are undermined by the transition.

It’s also because technological revolutions throw up questions of ethics or political economy. For example, think of the question: is data a public good? We can’t answer a question like this with a cost benefit analysis. We have no choice but to get into philosophy.

So in the course of the work we’ll also try to ask some big questions and draw on disciplines beyond economics, like history, sociology, and psychology.

We’re hoping, for example, to host a discussion about the philosophical foundations of a digital-era state. Do we need finally to escape the shadow of Rawls and return to broader conceptions of equality, like relational equality, as the foundation for a twenty-first century state?

3. Working in intuition

Another thing that’s tricky about technological revolutions is that, just as you need to be bolder, things get less clear.

It’s almost as if the smoke from the burning platform clouds our vision, so that the jump off the platform starts to get scarier for precisely the same reason it starts to get more urgent.

In essence, I think this means we need to be a little more relaxed and impressionistic in the way we do policy work — a little more confident to take some mental leaps.

This situation makes me think of some lovely passages in Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes in which he writes about Keynes’ comfort reasoning on the basis of intuition.

Skidelsy calls Keynes “the last of the magicians of number” because of the way he made these stunning leaps of insight that left people wondering how he did it.

Keynes was capable of this partly because he was so unconstrained. He had what Skidelsky calls a supreme disinterestedness, which he means in a positive sense of being undogmatic.

Keynes was also comfortable working in broad brushstrokes. He loved to argue not so much, or at least not always, because he had a position to defend but because he had an idea to try out.

Keynes worked impressionistically, even to the extent that he felt being too pernickety or too precise could hinder good thinking, killing off a promising but imperfect idea before it had the chance to develop. So while he challenged his students fiercely on the cogency of their arguments, he was more reluctant to shoot down an argument on the basis of its finer details.

As someone schooled in that 1990s/2000s policy paradigm, I find this a really helpful corrective.

Let’s be honest; modern technocratic policymakers (myself included) are better at the pernickety game of spotting flaws in arguments than we are at making leaps of intuition.

But if we’re going to leap off the burning platform of an outdated policy settlement through the smoke, we’re going to have to put more faith in our intuition. And in policy work, I suspect that means we need to relax and shake out our shoulders.

4. Work openly and iterate

Working in intuition doesn’t mean we should be hubristic or over-confident. It’s not about blindly stating our views and then sticking to them; it’s about trying arguments out.

In fact, I think humility might be the single most important quality we need from policymakers and politicians when we’re living through a period of such profound change.

At this point in a technological revolution, no-one knows the answer — and the more I read, the more I think almost no-one really has a handle on the problem. Acknowledging this up front, and then having a conversation on this basis, feels important.

In recognition of this, I think it’s important that we resuscitate an unfashionable idea: political pluralism.

So in the project we’ll try to encourage disagreement and argument in the Keynesian spirit. We’ll float some ideas and have people critique them. And we’ll try to make sure the discussions we host are genuine debates, not warm baths of agreement.

It’s not a coincidence that this all means we’ll be applying some of the early principles of public digital work. For example: ‘Iterate. Then iterate again’ and ‘Work in the open; it makes things better’.

It seems to me that these principles work just as well for the task of institutional redesign as they do for building software.

Policymaking as practice

The more I think about all of this, the more I think of the word ‘practice’. Increasingly I think this is a nice one-word summary of the way we need to approach policy making today.

I like the word practice because of its dual meaning. There’s practice as a verb, in the sense that policymaking is a task you need to repeat so that you can get better at it.

And there’s practice as a noun, in the sense that policymaking — like digital transformation — needs to be a highly intentional behaviour, like meditation.

What I mean is that doing the thing — rather than theorising about the thing — is the work. As an experienced meditator once told me, there’s not much use theorising about meditation. It’s called a practice for a reason.

Unlearning how we do policy work, and learning new methods for new times, will be hard. My hunch is that we can only learn — and unlearn — by trying to do policymaking in a new way. We just need to try some things out.

That’s the idea, anyway. We’ll see how it goes. You can follow me on Medium or Substack for updates as the work progresses. There’s also my year-long blog series exploring how we govern the future, which I hope this new project will complement.

And of course there’s my book, End State, which is out now in paperback with a nice yellow cover.