Inequality, Big Society, professional unemployment and other ‘lite bites’
Yesterday’s full English breakfast of a post on public service reform hasn’t elicited too many responses. I had promised to elaborate on some of its themes but I feel now like an over keen dinner party host trilling from the kitchen that ‘there’s plenty more if anyone wants seconds’ – impervious to the sound of the dog munching away at the firsts it has been surreptitiously fed by desperate guests.
So here instead are a few tasty titbits:
What shall we do with the redundant consultants?
First, a call for ideas: the news that the Sustainable Development Commission is to join the growing list of doomed quangos means that there will be even more intelligent people with skills in the general area of research, evaluation, communication and co-ordination coming into what is already a massively overcrowded market. There are thousands more people wanting to be consultants at just the time when public sector demand for consultants is likely to dive. So what is to become of these people? Is there some kind of link to the problem of who is going to organise the Big Society in disadvantaged communities. What kind of incentives might be used to encourage some of these talented, public spirited, professionals to offer their skills freely or very cheaply?
Can the Big Society get out of the Moral Maze?
Those who are interested in the Big Society debate – and the splendid Tessy Britton has about thirty people involved in an on-line conversation – may want to tune into the Moral Maze tonight (Radio 4 eight o’clock), which is exploring the Prime Minister’s big idea. Given the politics of the other panellists I suspect that for the purposes of the programme I may be press ganged into being a Big Society sceptic. But, however I perform, there are some great witnesses, including the ubiquitous Phillip Blond and Nick Pearce, the deeply wise former head of the Number Ten policy unit.
Agreeing to differ
Tomorrow we are hosting a debate between, on the one hand, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett authors of ‘The Spirit Level’ with its argument that inequality screws up the whole of society and, on the other, researchers commissioned by the right of centre think tank, Policy Exchange, who say the whole thesis is deeply flawed.
In my role as chair I will be attempting to achieve what I described in last year’s annual lecture as a ‘transcendent’ moment in debate; when it is possible to identity what it is people actually disagree about. This in my experience is very rare as most political and policy debate comprises people making erroneous allegations about what the other side thinks. So I am hoping for more light than heat tomorrow. But given that supporters of both sides have apparently been rallying their troops it’s not going to be easy.
‘Policy based evidence making’
Between the recurring bouts of existential crisis brought on by a combination of the demands of RSA change management, the deteriorating form of West Bromwich Albion and night time flatulence (for which, apparently, the only cure is to give up every single type of food I enjoy eating), I have been thinking about the relationship between evidence and belief.
One prompt was an LRB review of Wilkinson and Pickett’s ‘The Spirit Level’ by David Runciman. David argues that Wilkinson and Pickett overstate the statistical evidence of the damaging effects of inequality on all levels of society. They do this, he argues, because they hope the statistics will relieve them of having to make what is ultimately an ideological claim; namely that inequality is a bad thing. If we are inclined to think this, says Runciman, there is enough evidence out there for us to make our case (and Wilkinson and Pickett assemble the best of it), but trying to prove it with facts alone is not only self defeating but misunderstands how political change works.
The question was also raised by a wonderful little paper recommended to me by my old IPPR colleague Joe Hallgarten. ‘On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research’, is by Dr Eleonora Belfiore from the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, at the University of Warwick. Dr Belfiore mines Government documents and ministerial speeches on the impact of arts investment on social objectives such as educational attainment and social inclusion. Not only does she find arts ministers making claims which have no basis in evidence but she also reveals how the same ministers occasionally drop their guard and admit the pretence is required of them in order to convince the Treasury or Number Ten to maintain cultural funding. She concludes:
“At the heart of the notion of ‘performance paradox’, thus, is the baffling observation that measures such as the imposition of targets, performancemanagement, evidence-based policy-making, pressures to evaluate the extent to which arts project have the socio-economic impact that policy makers presume they do – or in other words a whole range of measures introduced with the aim to improve transparency and accountability in the public sector – might have resulted, in reality, in more bullshit being produced and injected in public discourses around policies for the cultural sector, and in opaque political messages amounting to little more than doublespeak”.
The point I take from these two essays is that trying to prove arguments in social policy can not only be self defeating, but may involve us in hiding our beliefs behind ‘facts’. I am taking this to heart as I desperately try to finish my annual lecture before I am due to deliver it on Thursday evening.
The speech explores the relationship between new thinking about human nature (derived from behavioural research and neuroscience) and the attempt to close what I have called the ‘social aspiration gap’, enabling people to living more engaged, self reliant and altruistic lives.
The temptation in all this is to overstate the evidence. This is a criticism fairly directed at my piece on brains and ideology in Prospect magazine. Indeed this month’s edition contains a forthright letter from one of the magazine’s own editorial team making this point (is this a first I wonder: an essay so unfortunate that it made the commissioning magazine’s editors turn on each other!).
A theme running through my annual lecture is that we overstate how much control we exercise over our own behaviour and prospects as individuals, and understate not only the importance of, but the capacity we have to influence, our social environment. But I will be sure to make clear that, while there is research to reinforce this belief, there will never be enough to prove it.
Inequality and the realignment of the right
This blog repeats an argument I made a couple of weeks ago, but, for once, the more I hear, the more sure I am…
A few years ago, when I was Director of IPPR, I developed what I thought was a ‘big idea’. Sadly, I was almost alone in thinking this. But this week I have found myself returning to the same idea.
My argument five years ago was with the left. I suggested that its obsession with inequality was a mistake – my view was that what people want is to live in ‘the good society’ which will tend to mean a place that is fair, safe, pleasant etc. The left, I reasoned, needed to demonstrate that greater equality was necessary to have such a good society. In doing this, it also needed to recognise that the public’s commitment to fairness is not the same as the left’s definition of equality: people may well feel that ‘unequalness’ is fair if, for example, it’s based on merit or effort. By taking it for granted that equality was something everybody signed up to, the left was in danger of distancing itself from the public’s priorities.
So, it has been fascinating this week to hear a powerful argument that ‘the good society’ must be reasonably equal. This is the core thesis of Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level, which we discussed here at the RSA yesterday.
Furthermore in the work of Elizabeth Gould (speaking here in two weeks’ time) and in the answers given to me by Jonah Lehrer at our event last night, we can now see a strong causal argument linking inequality, status anxiety, and a variety of social problems.
So now my question is to people on the political right: given the strength of the argument that high levels of inequality are socially pernicious, will the right accept that reducing inequality is a valid and important policy objective? If so, there is a perfectly valid argument between left of centre strategies to achieve more equality, and right of centre.
The electoral triumph of New Labour came in part from a willingness of the centre left to see that markets are a powerful tool and are not inherently socially divisive. Just as Labour was able to grab the political centre ground by saying ‘markets work’, can the right do the same by saying ‘inequality matters’?
Here is a brief video of Jonah Lehrer speaking about his ideas
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