21st Century Dialectics
Or How We Can Achieve Prosperity in New Times
A think piece for the ESPAS 2016 conference by Geoff Mulgan (@geoffmulgan), Chief Executive of NESTA.
It’s not hard to say what prosperity is: high levels of well-being and income, wealth and health, as well as confidence that you’ll thrive in the future. Nor is it hard to see what drives prosperity: the combination of stability and freedom, the rule of law and plenty of investment, human capital and healthcare, imaginative science and the absence of war.
By all of these measures, the last two generations have seen unprecedented advances in prosperity: dramatic rises in life expectancy (40 years in a century) and the presence of democracy; falls in poverty (to less than 10% of the world population) and deaths from warfare; and today, tides of new scientific knowledge and technology promise further dramatic improvements to health, mobility and daily life, the integration of humans and machines, and leaps to new forms of collective intelligence.
So what’s the problem? The problem is partly optical — a rise of politicians proclaiming a story of decline — and partly real, in that many of the foundations of progress in prosperity are in doubt.
For two generations it was plausible that more openness, and more flow (of capital, people, goods or information) contributed to the public good. It became an article of faith that globalisation and more open trade led to general benefits, stridently asserted by leaders and gurus of all kinds. Now, large minorities have seen their income stagnate, and fear that their children will be worse off than them, and probably jobless, thanks to the combination of migration and automation. Technological change continues to be ‘capital-biased’, meaning a declining share of income for labour, and new job and wealth creation continues to concentrate in areas with high levels of graduates. The promise of shared prosperity which underpinned so much economic policy over the last 70 years is now called into question.
For two generations it seemed obvious that democracy was the only plausible governing model for advanced societies, and that its competitors (fascism, communism, dictatorship…) had been defeated for good. Now that confidence has been shaken. In the old democracies, where the forms of democracy have changed little since the 19th century, large minorities have lost faith not just in politicians and political institutions, but even in democracy itself.
For two generations optimists could point to the inexorable spread of science, facts and evidence. Now social media act as echo chambers of lies as well as truth and popular politicians take pride in their contempt for consistency and accuracy.
For two generations it seemed obvious that the world was becoming ever healthier. Now we see a growing risk of epidemics and pandemics and the threat of rising antimicrobial resistance which could threaten tens of millions of lives by mid-century.
After a period when large parts of the world thought that war was a thing of the past, confrontation between heavily armed, technologically advanced countries is once again a serious prospect, with Russia a belligerent aggressor around Europe, and China flexing its muscles.
These changes are both cause and effect of a shift in political climate, a rising tide of nationalism in the US (Trump), Russia (Putin) and parts of Europe (from Marine Le Pen to Alternative für Deutschland), echoed in China under Xi, India under Modi and Japan under Abe.
How to respond? If optimistic openness was the thesis, we now see a dark anti-thesis. Simply to assert the old thesis ever more stridently doesn’t work. Instead we need to design new syntheses. They must avoid both nostalgia, and the tendency to fetishize globalisation and technological advance as ends in themselves, rather than as means. This is what I mean by dialectical thinking, and it’s what we badly need now.
The future requires Europe to think dialectically, achieving a balance between conflicting ideas.
The syntheses will need to: maintain the momentum of the vanguard firms, industries and places, but focus much more on access, spread and adoption elsewhere in society and the economy; reshape education better to fit the future, but also offer new routes to security in welfare and employment; strike a better balance between free flow and barriers and buffers (in everything from cybersecurity to migration); mobilise the full energy of entrepreneurship and innovation, but channel it more to social needs and opportunity for all; accelerate the next generation of technologies in ways that enhance humanity rather than replacing it; and reinvigorate democracy and politics in ways that respect peoples’ need for belonging, and for a share in power.
None of this is easy. But this is the serious work that must start if we are to prosper in the future. It requires Europe to think dialectically, achieving a balance between conflicting ideas, rather than taking them to their logical conclusions (the consistent mistake of the more extreme partisans of globalisation).
And, because the future is unknowable, it requires vigorous experiment in each of these fields to flesh out a synthesis that works in practice and not just in theory. Only then can we escape from fatalism and from the dictatorship of no alternatives.
