The state of well-being

December 16, 2009 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Public policy, Social brain 

When social historians they look back on the debates that emerged in the first years of the 21st century they are likely to notice a pronounced trend. This is the emergence of a field that might be labelled psycho-social policy. There are four distinct but overlapping sets of ideas:

First, that greater social justice lies not only in the legal, social or economic rights afforded to citizens but in ideas of capability and resilience, which are to some degree subjective.

Second, that progress as defined by economic growth and rising absolute levels of affluence across the income range has become uncoupled from aggregate levels of happiness or well-being across society

Third, that the success of policy interventions both in satisfying the public and achieving social outcomes involves not simply delivering service outputs but in affecting the values and behaviours of clients and citizens.

Fourth, that the crucial determinant of an individual’s life chances lie not only in their socio-economic circumstances but in psychological traits which emerge from some combination of genetic, parenting and cultural influences.        

Overall, I welcome these new ways of thinking about progress and fairness. They open up debates about the good life and the good society which are more interesting and engaging than the predominant recent form of electoral politics (a combination of tactical communication and technocratic policy making). Having said which, the objections to this turn in public discourse are not to be lightly dismissed.

They include questions about not just the objective measurability, but the conceptual clarity, of ideas like resilience, well-being and happiness. Wouldn’t constant happiness simply be a state of bovine complacency? What are we to make of a country such as the USA which seems to combine dynamism with poor levels of aggregate well-being? Isn’t the focus on individual characteristics simply a form of victim-blaming when we know that certain objective circumstances such as being unemployed or  chronically unwell are much more simply and directly associated with other poor outcomes? And, anyway, while issues such as economic redistribution or the provision of public services may be an appropriate domain for state action do we really want politicians imposing their account of happiness or well-bring on us?

These are difficult and complex issues. As Catherine Bennett’s piece in last week’s Observer shows, the arguments of those who emphasise psychological well-being are easy to caricature.  I have recently been involved in an ESRC project largely based on critiquing what the research director call ‘the therapeutic state’.

The goal must be to bring an awareness of the psychological and subjective components of reality more consistently into political and policy debate while avoiding the obvious traps.  It means that the advocates of this approach have to be rigorous in their own thinking and alert to the dangers of throwing ideas like well-being and character into debate half formed and poorly defined. Those who seek a more humanistic account of social progress need to be as willing to challenge their allies as their opponents.

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Will the middle class ever commit to social mobility?

July 21, 2009 by · 15 Comments
Filed under: Politics, Public policy 

Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility will lead to lots of hand wringing about how hard it is to break down privilege. But will anything change?

On Sunday I went to see Reginald D Hunter perform on the South Bank. His mixture of superficial social commentary and utter obscenity was pretty hit or miss. But there was one point he made that struck a chord. His father has defended himself from attack saying that he only carried some or other sexual misdemeanour ‘for the sake of the family’. As Hunter says this is the ‘universal father defence’; almost any action however crass, cruel or greedy can be justified on the grounds that it was taken in the interests of the family.

So it is with the middle classes, particularly in the pursuit of a place in a ‘good school’. Even though the evidence suggests that it is better aggregately for society to have mixed intake schools, and even though other evidence shows that 80 – 90% of a child’s performance is down to home influences, still the middle classes do everything they can to monopolise these ‘good’ schools. Presumably the most sought are among the ‘top 100 schools’ that the Conservative front bench say every school should be expected to copy.

But research published by the ESRC puts into question the whole idea of ‘good’ schools. Using value added data, Professor Harvey Goldstein and George Leckie show that there is little or no correlation between the past performance and the future prospects of a school. Indeed basing your school choice on past results is about as clever as basing your investments on the past performance of an investment fund (not that it stops people doing it.

The dynamic of a school becoming sought after is more to do with property than performance. A school may start off with an advantage such as being in a largely middle class area or having a good head. As soon as the school gets a good name, middle class people start moving into the area (the ESRC research shows there is a much stronger correlation between past school performance and property prices than with future school performance). As a consequence the intake to the school becomes more privileged, driving up further its raw league table results (which is what parents tend to look at) and so it goes on.

As I have said in the past, the barrier to social mobility in the UK is less about the lack of desire of the poor to move up and more about the utter tenacity of the upper middle classes in making sure their offspring never move down. And as the hostility people show to any tax on inheritance underlines, the vast majority of the well off are determined to make sure they pass on privilege down the generations.

Milburn’s report deserves serious debate. I am sure most of his 80 recommendations make sense. But unless the middle classes are willing to let their children stand or fall on their merit, or voters are willing to countenance a more profound redistribution of income and assets, it is difficult to see the UK becoming a more socially mobile country.

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Nudge, nudge, think, think

May 8, 2009 by · 13 Comments
Filed under: Social brain 

Having started the day in Kettering talking to the trustees of Youth Music, I have just come back from the advisory board of an ESRC funded project called ‘Researching Civic Behaviour’.

The main part of the meeting was taken up by a discussion of a brilliant paper written by Gerry Stoker, Peter John and Graham Smith entitled ‘Nudge, nudge, think, think: Two strategies for changing civic behaviour’.

In the paper the authors compare deliberation (which for the purposes of a clever title they call ‘think’) and nudging as ways of influencing behaviour and come up with the following dimensions:

View of preferences
Nudge
Fixed

Think
Malleable

View of subjects
Nudge
Cognitive misers, users of shortcuts, prone to flawed sometimes befuddled thinking

Think
Reasonable, knowledge hungry and capable of collective reflection

Costs to the individual
Nudge
Low but repeated

Think
High but only intermittently

Unit of analysis
Nudge
Individual-focused

Think
Group-focused

Change process
Nudge
Cost-benefit led shift in choice environment

Think
Value led outline of new shared policy platform

Civic conception
Nudge
Increasing the attractiveness of positive-sum action

Think
Addressing the general interest

Role of the state
Nudge
Customise messages, expert and teacher

Think
Create new institutional spaces to support citizen-led investigation, respond to citizens

It’s fascinating stuff and regular readers of this blog won’t be surprised that I wondered whether there was a cultural theory perspective here:

• Hierarchy – rules

• Individualism – nudging

• Egalitarianism – deliberation

There’s a lot more to discuss but I’ll see if anyone out there is interested first.

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