A richer debate?
A few years ago, when running ippr, I had an idea. It was to create a new top rate of tax for the wealthy but to give these taxpayers the option of choosing where their tax revenues were directed. The reaction I received from my left of centre policy wonk friends is relevant to the heated debate about the imposition of a cap on tax relief; but, first, some context.
Back in 2003 the personal tax base was narrowing. The Government was able to rely on business taxes – particularly those generated by financial services – to fill the coffers. This strategy blew up disastrously with the credit crunch. Indeed, as the current ippr director Nick Pearce has argued, it was the over-reliance on taxes related to financial services and property transactions – much more than over spending – which was the biggest cause of the deterioration in public finances in the wake of the crunch. However, given political nervousness and hostility from the well-off it was difficult to see a way of making an increase in wealth taxes a realistic policy, thus my idea.
The strong opposition to the proposal from ippr colleagues (as a consequence of which it never surfaced) explains why the Guardian is defending the tax cap and why Ed Miliband is performing verbal contortions to condemn the Government without actually opposing the policy.
The first objection was that rich people’s choices would tilt spending in unfair and irrational ways. This is exactly the same charge levelled at tax relief in a recent Guardian leader:
the chancellor is right to limit the tax relief that wealthy people receive for supporting good causes. This is effectively money that pensioners and the low-paid, along with other taxpayers, are handing to the rich to indulge their philanthropic activities
The second objection is more subtle and profound. Although in proportionate terms low and medium earners actually donate more of their income than the well off, most people can’t afford to make large donations to good causes. They have to accept their contribution to society is made through the taxes they pay, and they have no individual control over how those taxes are spent. From a left of centre perspective, the problem with my idea was accepting the principle that by paying more aggregate tax rich people should have greater rights as taxpayers and citizens. This could even be seen as the first step in a slippery slope back to property qualifications on the franchise. The critique applies more directly to my idea than to the case against the tax cap, but it is still applicable.
Behind the critique of Government cock–up and the understandable but instrumental complaints of the charity sector lie deeper issues. Do we think high tax payers should, in essence, have more control than the rest of us over where their tax is spent? If the rich do have more control, isn’t that a good thing in that it means bold, controversial or decorative causes which the state might not support get independent funding? Conversely, given that the majority of big domestic donations go to either, or both, elite institutions or London-based good causes, doesn’t tax relief just add an extra dimension to the imbalance of culture and social capacity between London and the rest of England?
Given the best defence of the Coalition policy is from the left, and charities will probably fight shy from explicitly defending the principle that rich people should be uniquely free to hypothecate their taxes, I suspect the public debate about the tax relief cap may not get to the heart of the matter.
Apples, elephants and roosters
The other day I had coffee with Andy Gibson, founder of Mindapples, an organisation which – among other things – aims to give people the information and advice they need to maintain good mental health. As well as being a very active Fellow of the RSA, Andy is a great guy; energetic, ambitious, thoughtful and totally driven by the desire to help people have better lives. I was impressed by the way he combines a big vision with very practical ideas and interventions.
Having just the previous day chaired Jonathan Haidt we got on to elephants and riders. If it is the elephant of instinct which governs our emotions, how can talking to the rider of conscious thought make an impact? While recognising that every person has their own mind apples (the mental equivalent of five a day) there are some proven methods which are fairly easy to enact and which are shown to have an impact on our underlying sense of well-being. For example, regularly writing a list of the things which are good in our lives really does seem to have an effect on our overall positivity.
But what about the jungle; the paths of social norms, pressures and incentives which drive the elephant to take a particular course? How possible is it, I asked, to improve the mental health of employees if an organisation’s working practices tend to make people more anxious and alienated.
There is an echo here of the central argument of the Richard Sennett’ book The Corrosion of Character. The modern white collar workplace with its emphasis on employee flexibility, team working and mission may seem to provide an environment which is more conducive to well-being than the factory floor, but the loyalty expected of employees is not reciprocated by footloose firms driven by the interests of anonymous investors. Like much of Sennett’s work, aspect of the argument can be opaque and the evidence far from convincing, but many people recognise the description of workplaces where employees are supposed to show the responsibilities of committed corporate citizens but are in fact mere items of dispensable human capital. If I recall correctly, Sennett cites a study of poorly paid air stewards showing higher levels of depression and anxiety after they were told to project more warmth to passengers.
For organisations to adopt an holistic approach to mental health they may have to be willing to examine their business model. If the demands of competition or customer care (either because it is disrespectful or too respectful) are inimical to employee resilience or self-respect it may be better not even to try to improve well-being. And if an organisation’s business model has to change it might have implications for customers. I worry that the signs you see in public buildings and on public transport asking people not to abuse or assault staff reinforce a rather negative set of behavioural expectations, but I guess this is the idea I am getting at.
Fortunately, just yesterday, I saw a brilliant example of one small business which has taken the brave step of changing the way it does business in order to assert the right of workers to be treated with respect. If the lead of Little Red Rooster in Norwich was to be followed so that it became socially unacceptable to place a face to face order while on a mobile phone, it would not only be good for the mental health of the staff, I suspect it would be a mind apple for the customers too.
Black swan on the Thames ?
Twenty-twenty hindsight, the human need to find meaning and the huge industries tied up in claiming to predict the future tend us towards rational explanations for social events. Even when something extra-ordinary and world changing occurs – 9/11 or the credit crunch, for example – we will find reasons for saying that it was inevitable. It is not easy to walk a consistent course between on the one hand, the truism that every event has causes and is therefore as some level explicable in terms of its causes and, on the other, the existence of black swans (huge, unpredictable events), emergent phenomena (things which are qualitatively more than simply the sum of their parts) and tipping points (tiny causes which lead to huge effects).
But once in a while, in something which feels like a child’s excitement as the milometer on the family car clicks over ten thousand, there is a moment when it feels like something radically discontinuous has become a credible possibility.
I came perilously close to nailing my colours to the mast of a particular London Mayoral candidate the other day, so let me underline that my voting intentions are between me and the ballot box, and anyway the RSA website is not the place for me to parade my political preferences.
However, one doesn’t need to support Siobhan Benita to be fascinated by her unheralded rise. Given that just about the only people who predicted George Galloway’s success in Bradford West were the bookies, it is surely interesting that Ms Benita’s odds have fallen from 500-1 to 50-1 in the last 48 hours. No one should get carried away – the bookmakers stopped taking bets when Galloway was odds-on and if a horse wins the National at 50-1 it will be accurately described as a rank outsider – but still, as the cliché has it, in politics momentum is everything. Ms Benita also has the advantage of the most popular slogan in the current election. Not the rather prosaic ‘Siobhan for Mayor’ which features on her website but the phrase you can hear wherever Londoners meet; ‘they’re both as bad as each other’.
Reflecting the RSA’s interest in promoting citizen engagement in decision making and more informed public discourse, I have written in the past about the way political parties are squeezing the life out of our politics. Ultimately, I am a friendly critic. I want politics to be about issues and programmes not personalities so my intention is to save parties from themselves. But the concerns of people like me have had little purchase as long as the voters had nowhere else to go. A classic analysis of failing corporations argues that a symptom of decline is when they are more interested in their competitors than the customer. Sadly, as the current shenanigans around Labour’s process for selecting Mayoral candidates underlines, many people in political parties seem more concerned about competition within their party than the customers.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer and one Galloway doesn’t mean the end of the party system. But if Galloway was followed by Benita and then perhaps by a swathe of Mayors and police commissioners, then who knows?
I have not met Ms Benita but I suspect she may be about to face the biggest challenge of her life. If the odds continue to shorten then the major parties and media will try to do to her what Labour failed to do until too late in Bradford, put the outsider under the kind of scrutiny that mainstream politicians live with every day. It will be tough. If she performs well under pressure she might lose some of her outsider appeal, if she cracks….well, she cracks.
Mind you, given that just a few days ago virtually no one had heard of her – indeed she is still literally invisible in some opinion polls – I bet it’s a challenge she’d be delighted to face.
Do the right thing
The RSA was delighted today to host a talk by the social psychologist and public intellectual Jonathan Haidt. I loved Jonathan first big book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ and I wasn’t disappointed by his new creation ’The Righteous Mind – Why good people are divided by politics and religion’. I strongly encourage my readers to buy the book or failing that download the video or podcast of the event from the RSA website in a few days’ time.
But in the meantime here are Jonathan’s three core arguments, and for each a specific highlight of the case which stood out for me plus a question I think the argument raises:
Argument: Because the elephant of intuition is more powerful than the rider of deliberation, moral judgements are firstly and mostly intuitive and only subsequently and occasionally reasoned
Highlight: Experiments which test subjects’ reactions to stories involving abnormal but not strictly harmful behaviour find that, instead of reasoning leading to response, the subjects react first and then develop – often rather contrived – rationales for their reactions
Question: As people in general become more reflexive (more inclined to think about their life and their values) and indeed more neurologically reflexive (aware of their own cognitive frailties) will the power of judgement start to shift from elephant to rider?
Argument: We have six moral ‘taste receptors’: these are care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation. The liberal left has a message which stimulates the first three but is much less relevant to the last three. While the conservative right may not be as credible on care/harm, still, it has a message which stimulates all six receptors.
Highlight: (actually two) in most people the fairness/cheating receptor is more about proportionality (rewards for hard work and punishments for misdemeanours) than ideas of social equality. Put another way, we care more about procedural than distributional justice. And, conservatives tend to be more accurate in describing the views of people on the left than people on the liberal left are in describing what conservatives believe.
Question: While the conservative right may appeal to a greater array of moral instincts, doesn’t this also mean conservatives have to contend with more internal contradictions; most obviously between social conservatism and libertarianism?
Argument: Human beings are 90% chimp (self-interested individuals) and 10% bee (group oriented social animals). Sacred beliefs (by which we usually mean religion) have an evolutionary purpose at the level of group selection in relation to promoting solidarity and sacrifice and discouraging free riding
Highlight: Richard Sosis’ study of two hundred communes in 19th century America found that the more sacrifices that were demanded of members (as part of a religious creed) the more likely by far they were to survive.
Question: How can and should the ‘hive’ instinct evolve in the twenty first century? How do we reconcile the benefits in well-being and pro-sociality of powerful group bonds based on common beliefs and characteristics with the benefits to organisations and societies of diversity and the sheer facts of a shrinking world of moving, connected people?
I do hope that whets your appetite for the book and the podcast. And, by the way, if these are the kinds of questions which interest and motivate you maybe you might want to find out more about applying to be a Fellow of the RSA. Given the antics of a certain Trenton Oldfield on Saturday we may soon have a space to fill
PS Much to my discomfort, and by sheer co-incidence, to illustrate teamwork Jonathan’s first slide today featured two rowing boats!
Time for change?
As the visionary American writer William Gibson famously said, ‘the future is already here it’s just not evenly distributed’. When trying to convince people of the need for change it is more powerful to identify things which are already happening, albeit patchily or at the margins, than simply to hypothesise a better way.
Although I often forget it, I find this tip helps address my tendency to adopt a tone of indignation and piousness. This is particularly the case when it comes to politics. I have recently drafted a piece for the journal Political Quarterly in which I explore how politics might need to change if it is to be better at engaging and mobilising people (so that, to use a stock RSA phrase, we might start to close ‘the social aspiration gap’ separating people’s hopes for the future from the trajectory on which current attitudes and behaviours have set us).
One aspect of such a politics is that politicians would find a way to be both more respectful and more challenging towards the public. We tend to think successful political persuasion is when a politician convinces us they can solve our problems. Instead we need politicians who can help us ‘own’ social problems and accept we have the responsibility and the capability to contribute to solving them ourselves. When making this point I sometimes refer to how Presidential candidate Barack Obama dealt with being attacked for attending services given by Jeremiah Wright a preacher who often used anti-white rhetoric.
Instead of trying to bury the issue or simply condemn Wright, Obama recognised his embarrassment but chose to turn the issue back to the people with a brilliant speech exploring the wider unresolved issues of race in modern America.
Having used this example on many occasions it was good to read another tribute to Obama’s speech making, in Matthew Paris’s column in today’s Times. Here is what Paris writes:
‘Mr Obama’s text was pitched quite cooly to a notional person. That person was a humane intelligent and fair-minded individual; not part of the President’s claque but disposed to give him a hearing. The speech was an appeal to this individual’s reason and sense of justice. It did not assume his hearer agreed, but believed that he or she could be persuaded. The President liked his hearer, but was not trying to ingratiate himself or get too familiar. Mr Obama respected this person and wanted their support – but their considered support’
Paris goes on to urge David Cameron to offer the same kind of leadership by also speaking to the best in us;
‘…if he could lay aside PR, news management, the hurly-burly of Westminster, his pollster’s lists of groups whose tummies need tickling and his aides lists of achievements that need name- checking; if he too could fix his attention unwaveringly on this civilised incarnation of the country he leads’.
We can expect and even demand a better form of politics and a better type of leadership. And it isn’t just up to the politicians, we have to reward those who show the right stuff and be willing to step outside our own comfort zone to encourage change. And that’s why in the London Mayoral election, for the first time in my life, I don’t think I’ll be voting for the Party I’ve always previously supported.
I tend to be suspicious of independent candidates in elections. But The Times also featured an interview with Siobhan Benita, independent candidate for London. Not only did I agree with just about everything she said but I also liked the calm, thoughtful, open way she seems to be saying it. She probably hasn’t got a hope but I like the idea that challenges to our current mediocre political mainstream can come from the thoughtful centre not just the wilder extremes.
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