Boing!
This short post has three elements: self promotion, self indulgence and humour amusing only to its author (‘no change there’ I hear you chorus). If you have anything better to do with your time (eg watching paint dry, re-reading the Thompsons business directory, removing the Madonna or Queen songs which have unaccountably got on to your ipod playlist) I strongly advise you to do so.
On Tuesday I went to Leyton Orient to see the West Brom second string win 2-0 in the Inter-city Poundstretcher Vase (aka the Carling Cup). Apart from a great last minute goal from New Zealand wonder boy, Chris Wood, it was a pretty grim game, of which it could fairly be said ‘neither team deserved to win’. Still, at least there were two chances to go through the West Brom fans’ goal celebration ritual.
This comprises the supporters jumping from one foot to the other and punching the air out of time shouting ‘boing, boing’, followed by a discordant but strangely uplifting rendition of Psalm 23 (The Lord’s My Shepherd) and ending with the ungrammatical but elegant simplicity of ‘The West Brom’ clap, clap, clap ‘The West Brom’ clap clap clap. The whole thing lasts about a minute and has over the years occasionally been rudely interrupted by the opposing team equalising.
The next day, as is my habit, I visited Boing – the excellent unofficial West Brom supporters’ site – to see whether my player ratings matched those of other fans. As you will see if you visit it, Boing is to website graphics and technology what West Bromwich town centre is to urban aesthetics.
So…imagine my surprise and delight when a colleague at the RSA (presumably looking for a rise, clever girl) referred me to a link to my 21st century enlightenment talk (‘46,000 views and counting’ now you ask). The link is on what it turns out is one of the world’s most hip blogs (formerly a ‘zine and web site). Its slogan is ‘brain candy for happy mutants’ and its name is?
No really, this is worth waiting for…
Oh, how I laughed. Oh, how I patted myself on the head. Oh, how I marvelled at the inability of my long suffering PA Barbara to see this as the most exciting thing to have happened all week.
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A comment on the ‘regressive’ budget
Channel Four on-line news contacted me about today’s IFS report showing that the Coalition’s budget measures are likely to be regressive. Of course, I wouldn’t say anything to Channel Four that I wouldn’t say to my loyal, clever and beautiful blog readers…..
Last November the RSA/2020 Public Service Trust published a pamphlet called ‘The Fiscal Landscape: Understanding contributions and benefits’. The top lines of this report were that:
* Taking tax, benefits and public services together public spending is very redistributive. One estimate is that on average across the lifecycle low income families with children are net gainers by nearly £13k pa while high income families are not losers by nearly £5k pa.
* The pivot point (the point at which people pay more that they receive) is higher up the income scale than might have been thought. Only between 30 and 40% of people pay more to the state than they receive.
* The pivot point for pensioners is even higher with fewer than 20% of pensioners paying more than they receive.
This is why it is very hard to reduce public expenditure without impacting more on the poor than the well-off. This is even harder when – as the Coalition has – you have made a blanket guarantee to protect the income levels of all pensioners.
And there is another factor too. If the Government were, say, to reduce the value of free health care to a rich family through cuts to the NHS this would represent a very small proportion of its family income. But the same cut would represent a much bigger proportionate reduction in the social income of a low income family.
Putting to one side the debate about the June budget, George Osborne will face a difficult choice in the October spending review. Either he genuinely makes the package progressive in its impact (which will mean hammering middle class entitlements) or he accepts that a cuts package is bound to be regressive (which threatens the Coalition’s centrist credentials).
The classic case in point is the proposed pupil premium which is intended to direct more funds to the poorest pupils. There are already several mechanisms in place which ensure poorer pupils have more money spent on them so the premium will have to do more redistributive work than the existing framework. But if overall pupil funding is flat this either means a generous premium – which will have to involve taking money away from better off pupils – or a small premium – which will be insufficient to compensate for the overall regressive impact of a cuts package.
This is very hard stuff. The Coalition needs to be clear in its aims, its policies and its message (a hesitant spokesman for the Treasury had at least three competing defences on the Today programme this morning).
But whilst sympathising with the Chancellor’s dilemma, there are two things I would advise the Coalition against strongly: don’t over-claim at budget or spending review time (something which dealt a heavy blow to Gordon Brown’s credibility), and don’t slag off the IFS (which is highly respected for its rigor and objectivity).
My YouTube obsession
My Youtube obsession
I’m finding it hard not to become obsessive about checking the viewing figures for my RSA Animate. It reminds me of a few years ago when I wrote a book with my old man. It got part serialised (in The Times I think) and for a day climbed the Amazon charts reaching the heady heights of the top fifty. Thereafter it fell inexorably and now every year I get a royalties statement from the publisher which is always a negative figure.
There was a point a few days in, when we were still in the top thousand, when I flirted (as so many other authors must have done) with buying ten copies myself to see if I could start a reverse trend. Given the pretty ghastly reviews the book received, the fact that I didn’t try to rig the market is one of the few scraps of dignity I can take from the whole episode.
But the YouTube number is continuing to rise, which makes it all the more addictive. I find myself day dreaming complex theories about on-line contagion effects. The viewing figure is rising steadily at about 5-6,000 a day, but how long until the momentum runs out? Is there a certain window of time in which an acceleration of take-up has to take place, and if so, how long is it?
The main value of the video is that it is helping get the RSA brand out world wide. But it is also great to see the ideas being debated. For example, blogs by Duncan Green and Julian Evans have been talking about them. Julian and I have had an email conversation following his post (I’m delighted that he is thinking of becoming a Fellow). Like a number of critiques of this and others of my lectures he worries about the strength and linearity with which I link evidence about human nature to actual human behaviour.
My defence goes back to my elephant rider metaphor in which our conscious self is the rider, our automatic systems the elephant and the social context the jungle. I like this metaphor but am having to accept that it doesn’t seem to resonate with other people. The point I am trying to make is not simply that what we can do is conditioned by who we are as a species and the situation in which we find ourselves, but also that we use our freedom as riders most effectively when we understand how we operate and how we are constrained. It is when we see how our conscious self is only a part of what we are that we understand what an amazing part it is and how best to use this amazing mysterious capacity to be fulfilled and effective people.
So, far from being a neurological determinist I believe that the key to being powerful self-directed individuals is to understand our physiological and social nature. But somehow I’m not managing to get this across. Is it because the point is simplistic, wrong, or the metaphor inept or something else?
Do tell me….
Baby boomers and enlightenment
The combined occasion of the first tranche of post war baby boomers reaching retirement and fifty years since the beginning of the sixties is leading to much debate. Today’s Observer features a long essay by Will Hutton with additional comment from a range of distinguished 60somethings.
Writing an essay on the sixties for Radio 4 and reading David Willetts’ excellent book ‘The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future – and how they can give it back’, I spent some of my holiday sitting round the pool with fellow middle aged guests debating the thesis that the generation born after the second world war has exploited its demographic power to the detriment of future generations.
The general consensus seems to be this: in the sixties the baby boomers won important freedoms – from oppression and prejudice based on gender, race and sexuality - but in making the case for individual rights, the era also laid the basis for an aggressive individualism which tore up social norms and tore down social institutions without thinking responsibly about how and with what they might be replaced.
This is a huge generalisation and pretty damning of a whole generation and historical period. It misses out, for example, that as well as sex, drugs and rock and roll, the sixties was a period of huge creativity in the third sector with many of today’s major charities being established, along with whole new movements such as housing associations (today’s bureaucracies seem far removed from the grassroots self help idealism which often drove their formation).
I don’t want to annoy the Radio 4 people by revealing my thesis ahead of broadcast, but anyone who attended or has watched my 2010 annual lecture won’t be surprised to hear that I focus on the kind of freedom the baby boomers seemed to want and the problems with it as a concept. Indeed there is an interesting resonance between the questioning of ideas of freedom, justice and progress which we have put at the heart of the RSA’s 21st century enlightenment idea and the themes of much of the baby boomer debate.
All of which is largely an excuse to plug the RSA Animate of my lecture which is now online. The Cognitive Media people have done another great job and although – like any author – I find it hard to see my great words edited down by nearly two thirds I am assured by several people that 11 minutes is ‘even more powerful’ (‘well, if you put it that way’) than the original thirty.
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