15 Comments on Tradition, fairness and the big society – a new politics for new times?

Julian Saunders on Tue, 12th Oct 2010 6:16 pm


agree-I think there is an emerging consensus that globalisation has tended just to make the rich into the super rich whilst suppressing wages of most other people-mainly because multi-national corporations can pick and choose where labour is cheapest.
Unions can do little about it.
The big question is what are the factors that will reduce inequality?
Nobody seems to have much appetite for much more top down redistribution through taxation.
One force may be the internet because it puts producers and buyers in direct contact without the intermediation of big business or big media. In other words empowerment rather than top down directed change.It looks like the internet has already dealt a big blow to NI and Associated- the former would love to roll back the for free revolution of the web. NI will try hard. But we need to be vigilant that about net neutrality-so that big business does not just end up taking it over
The warning signs are there-network effects have already produced some very dominant players like Google and Facebook. They are the real danger not NI.

Ian CHRISTIE on Tue, 12th Oct 2010 7:50 pm


A good post and the film sounds like a welcome intervention.

I would like to hear much more from business leaders about how sustainable they think the prevailing model of capitalism is, given that big finance has had to be rescued at ruinous cost and that demand is about to be sucked out of the economy at the same time as anyone with the opportunity to do so is paying down debt and avoiding credit. Post-70s neoliberalism in the USA and UK has been a long experiment in seeing how far capitalism can push its luck in redistributing from the poor and middle classes to the rich. Very few business leaders have contributed to the debate about how far this can and should go, and about the impacts so far on social cohesion, employee morale, corporate values and prospects for political unrest. Maybe the RSA can draw them in.

Antonio Santos on Tue, 12th Oct 2010 8:01 pm


are we back to Rawls?

MatthewKalman on Tue, 12th Oct 2010 8:33 pm


While we’re on the subject of the RSA’s values, and the values of the new political space that may be opening up, I’ve had two colourful ‘Values Maps’ produced by analysing Matthew Taylor’s recent pamphlet ‘Twenty-first century enlightenment’ and the RSA’s ‘Purpose, Vision and Strategy’ webpage.

You can see them here: http://bit.ly/9WiMDQ

The webpage also includes a graph of the popularity of the value of ‘Empathy’ compared to ‘Rights/Respect’, between 1988 and 2010, and values scans of the speeches of Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia, and Tony Abbott, Opposition Leader.

As you can see, these ‘Values Maps’ are bar-charts which depict all the values found within the text, grouped across a somewhat Maslow-like spread of 8 clusters of ‘satiable’ or ‘insatiable’ values. (NB this model actually rejects the hierarchical/evolutionary approach of Maslow, though).

The Australian values analysis expert who did these scans suggests that the values present in ‘Twenty-first century enlightenment’ are not what one would immediately think of as the archetypal Enlightenment values – though I think I might contest his interpretation.

An interesting point that emerges is that the particular value that might knit together the values that the values analysis of the RSA texts found with the more individual-focused values of the Enlightenment itself is the value dubbed ‘Collaborative/Individualist’ (ie ‘Commitment to a group and its purpose in order to simultaneously maximise both individual independent action and interdependent co-operation’).

Another issue that the scan of the RSA’s ‘Vision’ throws up is the very noticeable lack of focus on the ‘Self-Actualisation’ column of values, compared to the adjacent ‘Emerging Order’ column, which is the most strongly represented. You’d expect these 8 columns of values to form something more akin to a bell curve –  but instead there’s a huge gap in the ‘Self-Actualisation’ column. This column is said to relate in particular to the individual capacities and behaviours that underlie the ‘Emerging Order’ column values that the RSA so clearly supports. (The columns alternate between more of an organisational focus and more of an individual focus, apparently).

The very modest ‘Self Actualisation’ column in the RSA’s ‘Vision’ points towards a classic trap that the RSA may be in: developing the vision for collaborative teamwork, the leadership, (the rhetoric!) etc –  but without all the people themselves fully making the journey, gaining the tools they need as individuals to make the collaborative organisation a reality. Producing the right external behaviour alone can be very ‘brittle’, unless the underlying journey of inner development has taken place, towards becoming more open to learning, strong enough to be both open and vulnerable. (Tools like Prof Robert Kegan’s ‘Immunity to Change’ exercise might help build these individual capacities, that could be lacking).

This whole model is based on something called the ‘Hall-Tonna Inventory of Values’, which worked out that there are 125 key values, some of them ‘goal values’ and others ‘means values’. It seems to be fairly academically respectable and valid, not some off-the-wall clap-trap.

The software that scanned the pamphlet and the webpage looks for these 125 or so values, and also has a big thesaurus of 1000s of equivalent terms.

I hope this all provides some food for thought

Matthew K

PS I wonder what a ‘Values Map’ of ‘enlightened social conservatism’ would look like…?!

Alastair Thomson on Tue, 12th Oct 2010 10:50 pm


I think there is a re-alignment going on.

In the same way that Tony Blair re-framed (however imperfectly and transiently) a Labour Party perspective, so too is David Cameron. Even if this were not happening within the context of a coalition government, I’d argue that he is not from a ‘same old Tory’ mould but is exploring (however imperfectly and transiently) a re-framed Conservative approach.

It’s easy to default to tribal positions either way, but the RSA provides a valuable (semi-public) space where a reasoned exploration of ideas might happen.

Keep posting Matthew!

Karl Hungus on Wed, 13th Oct 2010 9:26 am


In the world beyond the pages of the Daily Mail, is the consensus for ‘virtue, moderation and thrift’ as clear cut as suggested? It seems a somewhat paternalist, puritanical stance that might be difficult to reconcile with opposition to an interventionist state. Amongst the young people out and about around East London on a Friday night it’s difficult to envisage any form of social conservatism emerging, however enlightened.

Some of the most compelling sub-cultural alternatives to the failings of industrial-capitalism highlighted in this article (through fringe environmental groups etc) have directly challenged subjective conceptions of the kind of values you discuss. Their narratives seem more powerful post-crash but admittedly haven’t gained any widespread traction.

Perhaps where this social conservatism links in with the previous two points, particularly the big society, is in acknowledging that being part of a society bestows responsibility and a duty to contribute just as much as rights and safeguards. That society cannot function unless its members recognise and respond to this…

Richard Honeysett on Wed, 13th Oct 2010 9:29 am


You may be right about the consensus that is building around the limits of the state, values and extremes of inequality. It certainly appeals to me.

However, when I try to imagine the society that might be built on these foundations, I can’t help but feel the distance between where we are now and the rather austere and dutiful place that might emerge.

I think that if these ideas are to be properly explored, real weight will need to be given to forces that currently shape our world. The drive for economic growth, for example, that demands both an unsustainable use of resources and a particular role for citizens as consumers. Another example might be the crude distinction we maintain and return to between public – defined as services – and private. We need a larger debate about what is proper to the public sphere and where the limits of private sector should be set. Finally we have to start to recognise and find ways of valuing the role that people play in society when they are not directly economically active. Most of the potential for ‘big society’ type activity lies in making space for people not to be at work – and feel both recognised and valued when they are not.

Anyone of these changes would amount to a sort of revolution in the way we describe our world. My fear is that the crudest of economic forces will stifle them at birth.

Bernard Mason on Wed, 13th Oct 2010 10:13 am


In what way does the core thesis of this film differ from a description of class warfare successfully waged by one class?

David Clancy on Thu, 14th Oct 2010 9:52 am


I agree.

I posted the following analysis/solution in a Facebook group 18 months ago. Still fresh I think.

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=39068585641&topic=6828

Full text here if link doesn’t work:

“Living Off Our Wits”

The purpose of this short essay is to make a contribution to the debate about the appropriate economic policies the government of an advanced economy, such as the UK, might pursue to pull its economy out of the global depression which started in 2008 and which, it is now becoming apparent, is a new type of economic depression i.e. one that persists despite Keynesian and monetarist stimuli, but with an extensive welfare state and safety net in place.

In doing so, I will try to dispel the popular belief that the phrase Fantasy Economics is some sort of oxymoron i.e. a figure of speech combining two contradictory terms such as act naturally, pretty ugly, definite maybe.

Of course no-one can be blamed for trying to characterise the current economic crisis as the culmination of ten years of fantasy economics. I will not rehearse those views here, except to comment that, apart from the underlying and still unresolved, long-term, structural economic challenges – pensions, energy, unreformed public services – the economic turbulence of 2008 would probably have remained a normal and proportional correction to a prolonged period of uninterrupted expansion, had it not been for the confidence sapping activities of Messrs Paulson & Co. at the US Treasury; which pulled not so much the rug, but the plug, kitchen sink et al from the beneath the financial sector, and thereby the global economy.

So we are where we are: confidence has collapsed. We are at a moment of cathartic change in the drivers of economic growth in the advanced economies around the world. What might have taken a generation to work its way gradually through our economies, is now being concertinaed into a few or several more years, depending – I believe – upon the ability of our politicians and the public in general, to start fantasising about the sort of economy they desire in the future, and start implementing the policies to make those fantasies real.

Before considering the possible nature and impact of my Fantasy Economics, let’s recap why bog-standard monetarist or Keynesian policies are not going to work this time. There are in fact two reasons why this is so, as has already been observed in Japan through the 1990s; as that country tried everything in the standard model cupboard to reflate, and failed. And, as reported this week, is failing again now with the sharpest decline in domestic car sales in over 40 years.

First, advanced economies today are largely consumer driven economies; consumers who will not respond to low or even zero interest rates if they believe that their long-term prosperity and jobs are under a long-term threat. A consumer’s assessment of his or her permanent or average income over the long-term is down-shifted by the evaporation of confidence in the underlying performance of their economy. This downshift requires a profound psychological adjustment which is unlikely to cohabit for very long with their old mindset which indulged in the sort of prolonged, superficial and casual consumerism which characterised and drove the historic economic boom which ended in 2008.

In an advanced economy, nearly all consumer expenditure is discretionary and can be easily disposed of with a simple change of fashion. Austerity, albeit a mild austerity, is now fashionable and it is a fashion that might last a decade or more. Zero interest rates of themselves, will not change this fashion.

Second, traditional public works, work, provided the economy in question is an old, industrial economy. In the 1930s and for most of the 20th century, blue-collar workers’ wages dominated the economy of the then advanced economies. Temporary government programmes to build roads, bridges, council houses, railways, cars etc. provided jobs that filled the employment gap until new jobs with similar skill sets re-emerged within the private sector, post-depression.

In 2008, this will not work, because advanced economies no longer create – or can survive on – these low-skill jobs. Over the past 40 years, our low-skilled jobs have either been taken over by robots and computers, or transferred to the emerging economies, or both. We cannot go back to the future. At a macro-economic level, the trend must continue. Those low-paid jobs must never come back or, to the extent that they do, we must accept that previous levels of prosperity will never return, let alone grow further.

Advanced economies therefore, by definition, need skilled workers and specifically, skilled workers’ wage levels to sustain their GDPs. It follows that traditional public works can only ever be a drop in the GDP ocean of an advanced economy.

How long will it take our politicians to appreciate that something other than property-based consumer expenditure or ‘public works’ is required to reverse the long-term, economic stagnation that many commentators now believe is the bleak prospect for the advanced economies of the world. I think for as long as they take to start thinking about and implementing Fantasy Economics.

In medical terms, a new prescription is needed now to cure the advanced economies of the collective depression into which they have begun to sink in 2008. However, if the diagnosis for every advanced economy is the same, the recuperative prescription that each will follow is likely to be different – at least initially – and will determine when, or even if, their respective recoveries commence.

Contrary to the general consensus, I believe that whilst global co-ordination will continue to be an important ingredient in the general prescription, each country must take responsibility for its own recovery. Trumpeting economic independence might sound counter-intuitive in an irrevocably globalised world but domestic led growth is now the only way back to long-term, economic health for all advanced economies. Domestic led, Fantasy Economics.

As we have seen, this new domestic growth will be neither traditional consumer expenditure financed by monetary and fiscal stimuli nor incremental public sector expenditure on old style public sector works. At best these will only mitigate the symptoms of stagnation but they will not cure the patient. So what is the cure and can we provide any proof that it will work?

Economic depression is an appropriate term to describe the current malaise in the advanced economies, not because GDP has as yet declined by 10% – which is many economist’s technical definition of a depression – but because, for the reasons described above, growth is going to be stagnant for the foreseeable future: the property bubble that sustained the advanced economies for the past decade and compensated for the shift in the balance of trade to the emerging economies, has burst. More important, no one can see clearly what is going to replace it, and so the downshift in consumer expenditure is becoming entrenched e.g. retailers report a dead-cat sales bounce to the stimulus of 20% price discounts that they introduced in late November. Goldman Sachs now expects GDP in the USA to fall at an annual rate of 5% this quarter.

Normally, and in all previous recessions, this would be considered very depressing, but with welfare and safety nets well established throughout advanced economies, there is a demonstrable, turn of the century, Oh, Oh, Oh what a lovely War! feeling to the general commentary we read in the press. Consumer austerity is fashionable. General concern over global warming and unsustainable economic growth means that the downturn is even being welcomed by some commentators as part of a widespread philosophical reassessment of what an advanced economy should look like.

We shall see whether these attitudes prove to be complacent; the calm before the storm; whether taking stock in this way will lead, in the end, to some very negative conclusions, to very negative economic growth and ultimately to lasting depression; both economically and clinically in the mind set of the general population. The jury is out.

Other things being equal, I believe that the verdict is going to be brutal and a real depression awaits around the corner. As with all depressions, the reasons will be in the self-fulfilling minds and gloomy expectations of the population. Expectations that have been vanquished by the failure of their weak but self-satisfied, Weimar-like governments and the failure of those government’s successive attempts to reflate their economies through endless fiscal and monetary stimuli.

Expectations that will be overshadowed by feelings that all the advantages in the global economy are switching to the emerging economies and the old economic drivers are no longer – and for a plethora of reasons – sustainable. Expectations that could lead to iterative and prolonged downshifts in economic expectations and relative economic performance.

Thus will words like depressed; gloomy; overshadowed; feelings; enter into the daily lexicon of the media. Note how all these these words have emotional connotations. For all the technical, biological and intellectual sophistication of the advanced economies, it is sobering to observe their acute vulnerability due to collective, negative emotions.

Therein, however, lies the key to a much brighter future; for such vulnerability begs the question: how does a country lift its collective emotional spirit? Clearly a new and compelling vision is needed in which everyone is able to believe. Is this not more easily said than done? Empty political rhetoric – drivel – is one of the causes of collective economic depression in the first place. Our antennae are attuned to it. We do not hear a convincing vision today from anyone in the advanced world, nor will we, I believe, without our politicians indulging in Fantasy Economics; and implementing the fantasy when they have worked out how to make the proposition viable and won a mandate from us for that purpose.

Is Fantasy Economics a truly valid strategy to cure collective economic depression?

The answer is yes because as any economist will tell you, the reason their academic discipline is classified as art subject and not as a science is that at its heart lies the huge variable of the human mind; with our myriad desires, preferences and emotions. Economics is about commenting and making financial forecasts based on assumptions about these emotions, at a given time, under a given set of circumstances. Monetarism itself is based on managing a small, narrowly defined subset of our expectations.

Adam Smith described how unthinking, self-interested actions at the human, micro-level translate into beneficial outcomes at the macro-level; Milton Friedman described some of the transmission mechanisms by which those activities impact the general level of economic activity; Keynes described some of the things that governments can do to mitigate the human costs expropriated by the time-lags in the natural balancing of these systems. All of them at some point had to discuss the management of human expectations to support their theories but no-one has yet understood how to calibrate and predict all the variables of those expectations, influenced as they are by our minds, and specifically our emotions; that would be too profound a gap in any science, and it is why economics remains an art.

The cure for the depression of 2008 and onwards will require artful economists, artful politicians and, I believe, an artful population in general.

Velocity of circulation of money, the total money supply and aggregate economic demand, might sometimes seem to be controlled by interest rates, fiscal policy, factors of production terms of trade etc., but this is only because at these times, our collective emotions and thereby our economic expectations, seem to be stable. Such times might persist for many years; but when our emotions change, all bets are off. Or as Keynes put it, lowering interest rates will be like pushing on a piece of string.

As ever therefore, the cure for the Depression of 2008 will lie in addressing our collectively, negative emotions. But as would be expected in an advanced economy, our emotions are highly tuned and complex. As discussed above, we are not going to be bought-off emotionally with empty rhetoric, old-fashioned clap-trap, and the traditional monetary or fiscal stimuli. The Japanese didn’t buy it and nor will we. We all know that the game of the past 10 years is up; we suspect that the whole game could be up for good. That’s why we’re depressed: we are an advanced economy, with advanced minds and emotions and we require sophisticated reasoning to get us believing again in ourselves and in our economy.

In short, we now require a sophisticated economic fantasy that we can make viable and turn into our new economic reality. Where can we look for such sophistication?

There are places to find this sophistication and there is ample scientific research – at Yale University for example – to show that their approach works.

The conundrum – how to manage negative emotions in a sophisticated mind that lives in a sophisticated world – is also the problem with which schools are constantly trying to grapple. We no longer live in a traditional, hierarchically controlled society, just as we no longer live in a traditional industrial economy, and so schools are having to find new ways of managing and balancing the emotions of their students; so that they are motivated to learn. There are lessons to be learnt here for economists.

Schools are using emotional development frameworks such as those researched and pioneered at Yale, to develop the emotional potential of their students, teachers and the institution as a whole.

At some stage, part of this framework will be to ask individuals – and the institution itself – to fantasise about what they would want to be and how they would live their lives, if there were no obstacles. Prior to asking this question, an understanding of the basic generic instincts driving our emotions, and the potentially counterbalancing dispositions that we can develop in ourselves, will have been explored and discussed, so that any perceived mental obstacles can be overcome and so that the imagined fantasy world is a mature, realistic, viable and personally obtainable and sustainable vision.

This approach is fabulously successful in the schools that embrace the training fully. It works and is working in socially deprived schools all around the world where, heretofore, the depressed aspirations of school, teachers and students alike were a self-fulfilling reality.

Emotional intelligence – and its fantasy modelling – is the key to removing this emotional depression and I believe, can now be the cure for modern economic depressions too. As we have seen over the eons, economic depression is primarily the result of a collective emotional state. But is it precisely because our populations are advanced that they are now ready for an advanced approach: Cognitive Economic Therapy is a next generation approach to economic and political consultation. Our populations have grown out of the old, patrician ways. That way no longer works in our schools, it doesn’t work in our politics and the 2008 depression is evidence that it will no longer work in our economics. Our politicians, economists and media will need to start treating its populations as adults not widgets, as if we can all understand and come to terms with the key issues that we must now all face collectively, in an emotionally mature way.

That maturity starts with an acknowledgement that Fantasy Economics is not a term of derision but the process by which our society can investigate, and find a path towards, a new and sustainable economic era.

To start believing that this is true, the nation and the government needs to fantasise, in a realistic manner, about their ideal world and their ideal economy. Just like the students in a school, they need to imagine where they would like to be, test to see if their dream is viable, and then start removing the obstacles – mental, financial, physical – to achieving the dream.

To get the ball rolling, I have developed just such an economic fantasy and will demonstrate below how it could cure our economic depression both emotionally and financially. Others can, and no doubt will, invent their own fantasy. The key is that the fantasy or fantasies chosen are viable and can be turned into a believable vision that motivates the population of an advanced economy.

My fantasy is that the key to future, sustainable economic growth in advanced economies is to create emotionally intelligent economies, where the population actively and regularly consumes – and pays for – events and media which either advance their individual understanding of the world or entertain them or both.

To kick start my fantasy economy – and pull the economy out of recession – the population would be given vouchers by the government to go to at least one live, qualifying, performance a week, with tickets costing about £10 for each performance.. It doesn’t matter what the live performance is so long as it is something that they like, enjoy, find amusing, entertaining, educational or all of these. All that matters, is that everyone is tempted to go to at least one performance every other week and has the disposition to go because they are or want to be emotionally intelligent, want to improve or nourish their minds in some way, and understand that by going every week they are doing their individual bit for their country’s economy; which in itself is a demonstration of their emotional and economic intelligence.

What would be the financial impact of such economic activity? GDP would increase by at least 1% or roughly half of the trend rate of growth of the UK economy over the past 50 years. It is easy to demonstrate that this is the case as follows: multiply 50m people by the £10 ticket for each performance by 30, which is the number of weeks in which each person attends one performance in the first year. The answer is that total ticket sales in my fantasy economy would be £15 billion in year 1, which is 1% of UK GDP, which is currently £1.5 trillion.

This is the case provided of course that the government or banks funded this new expenditure with new money, so is this realistic? Well the government has just spent almost the same amount – £12.5 billion – on what most commentators believe is a pointless cut in VAT by 2.5%, whereas giving 50 million people 30 x £10 vouchers to a live performance of their choice will cost £15 billion; so my fantasy economic policy is affordable.

The cut in VAT has no necessarily direct impact on GDP whereas my performance vouchers would increase GDP by 1%, the impact of which would be much greater because of the multiplier effect as theatres and performers invest in their new markets and spend their new income. The recession would be over.

Furthermore economic activity which centres around the development, production and consumption of our intellectual pursuits whether that be educational, cultural, political etc. is self-evidently more eco-friendly and sustainable than economic activity that requires consumption and production of something physical.

My government policy of distributing live performance vouchers would send a signal to the population that there is a new way forward for advanced economies: that they have it within their own power to cure their economic depression and reverse the shift in economic power to the east, or at least make such a shift irrelevant. The message would be that we can, literally, live off our wits; that our advanced economy can truly thrive as a knowledge driven economy.

How practical is my fantasy economy? Do we have the capacity for 50m people to attend 30 live, qualifying performances in a year. The answer is that we would require between one and two thousand 1000 seat venues around the country. The annual voucher income for each venue will be more than sufficient to finance the private construction of as many new venues as are required.

Where should such venues be located? There are 3000 state schools in the UK, in my fantasy economy the government would also give every parent a school voucher so that at the heart of every school in the country, a new type of globe theatre would act as a beacon leading the whole local community into a bright, sustainable and emotionally intelligent new era.

Is my vision not merely Fantasy Economics but also a Utopian Fantasy? To believe it all you have to imagine is that the more educated an individual becomes, the more they will spend on consuming knowledge based activities. Of course the old consumer consumption will always be with all of us – having fun is emotionally important – but, in advanced economies, it will not be all that we do. Growth will be knowledge led.

In the end, never forget that advanced economies are nothing to do with subsistence or about what we actually need to live; they are driven by pure fantasy based on fashion and whim. Yes, we have science, technology and manufacturing but these are not the principal drivers of the main economy. The overwhelming economic driver today is consumer expenditure. We do not need multiple types of cloths, shoes, cars, TVs, restaurants, supermarkets, films, holidays etc., except in the sense that producing them and buying them has been the main driver that the advanced economies have needed to work properly. In 2008 that party has come to a grinding halt.

So if some of our old consumer fantasies are now out of fashion, and if the belief that old-style Keynesian public works will pull us out of this depression is also a fantasy – and will have little impact in our real, advanced economies – let’s use vouchers to create some new, viable consumer fantasies, but this time those that require advanced, value-added, high wage skills sets, based on a bit more emotional intelligence.

We will remain depressed until we do.
over a year ago · Delete Post
David Clancy Further thoughts…

This essay explains why this Depression isn’t going to go away soon. In my view, not until we all learn a positive moral lesson. To facilitate that, the population needs a bit of Cognitive Economic Therapy – CET – namely that there is no economic rule which says that, in order to have a successful economy, we have to consume or manufacture anything in particular. If there is no rule in this respect, then it follows that we can decide ourselves what we want to make and consume, provided we do so collectively. Of course supply and demand will remain as important as ever, the central question is does the internet allow us to act effectively in a coordinated and collaborative fashion, as never before, to create supply and demand in new markets that we have consciously created as a society, as opposed to ad hoc as Adam Smith observed? If the answer is yes, then we can create our economy collectively, democratically, in whatever image we choose…precisely because the internet will ensure that the desired objective is executed because the new market will have been pre-approved by the population, who in the process will have pre-ordered the new products to the requisite critical mass to kick-start the new market.
over a year ago · Delete Post

rhian on Thu, 14th Oct 2010 10:48 am


Interesting proposition if a bit limited in its outlook.. .Fairness matters yes, but not to the detriment of individual creativity and freedom – even if the state can be ‘fair’ and happy! no one’s is prepared to stand in the rice fields all day for the state! That’s been done and no-one wants it. The problem with the Big Society is that if DC wants people to roll up their sleeves for nothing, including the dispossessed, he has to value them as well. He can’t have it both ways: take everything from them and make them feel like a useless criminal underclass on the one hand then expect them to give everything back to society at the same time. This government has the whiff of Thatcher about it – it may get worse. The Big Society might be designed for Middle Class people who have some spare time on their hands whilst ignoring people who can’t afford a new washing machine.. Social conservatism… thrift, ageing, climate change etc does all sound a bit gloomy – like someone said above, young people want to live to the full, not grow up with the weight of our past econmic (greedy banker-induced ) sins on their shoulders – sounds like another form of catholic guilt.. Think propserity and creativity, not gloom or that is what you will get.! Enlightenend conservatism may be a paradox..
People need to be of value for what they can truly contribute, whatever it is and that cannot be determined by the state no matter how bad the economy or climate gets. No one wants to have social repsonsibility rammed down their throat…it will make some people resentful and want to do the opposite! You can’t control or repress human nature as history demonstrates – no one wants to wear grey every day!

Matt Cavanagh on Thu, 14th Oct 2010 12:35 pm


As you say, even if it’s right, this framework won’t dissolve ideological differences – those differences will endure, for example, not only in how much inequality people might tolerate, but also in the degree to which their “scepticism about the central state as a direct agent of social change” leads them to want to make the state smarter, or simply shrink it.
But I’m more immediately interested in the left’s attitude to the inequality part of the framework. I have always supported something like the first of your three bullet points, but have a few questions about the way it is formulated.
Shifting to opposing the worst kinds of inequality – rather than promoting equality – usefully enables the left to avoid a number of traps: in particular, it is harder to dismiss as the politics of envy, or of deadening uniformity. It is also, in my view, simply more compelling. But there remain other difficult questions from the equality debate that it can’t avoid, and which have to be confronted before we go much further – especially if your aim is to be clear exactly what people agree and disagree about.
First, should our opposition to the worst kinds of inequality be on intrinsic grounds, or instrumental grounds, or both? Your ‘destructive’ suggests instrumental; but despite the success of ‘The Spirit Level’, there are good reasons for thinking the left should continue to argue that it is both.
Second, shifting from promoting equality to opposing (extreme) inequality doesn’t enable us to escape the “equality (or inequality) of what” question. The “equality of what” debate is often tiresome, but important. What kind of extreme inequality are we talking about – extreme inequality in outcomes, life chances, or capabilities? There are good reasons for thinking the left should continue to oppose serious or extreme inequality in all these spheres – indeed now might be a good moment to try to loosen the recent strangehold of the ‘life chances’ approach and remember that extreme inequality of outcome would be objectionable and destructive even if people had (more) equal life chances and/or capabilities.
Third, surely it is too narrow to oppose only inequality which is both extreme and unmerited? And more fundamentally, much as we might enjoy discussing cases of extreme wealth or extreme poverty which are either clearly merited or clearly unmerited, things are more difficult when we consider the cases in between. What do we say about someone who had a privileged start in life but nevertheless worked hard and played by the rules (in spirit as well as letter)? Or someone who had an underprivileged life but is also lazy? How do we assess how much of their success or failure is merited and how much is down to luck? No one has come up with a satisfactory answer to such questions, and that is unlikely to change. It is also the wrong question. It leads too many on the left to follow Rawls in arguing that since it is impossible to tell how much of someone’s success or failure is merited, we might as well regard it all as unmerited; and too many on the right to follow Nozick in arguing in the opposite direction, that if it is impossible to tell, we might just as well regard it all as merited. Surely a more reasonable approach than either is to argue that since it is impossible to tell how much of someone’s success or failure is merited, a fair system is one which concedes that by and large successful people should be allowed to keep what they earn (since we know some of it is merited, even if we don’t know how much), but also insists that they contribute some percentage to help those who have done badly (since we know some of that will be down to luck, even if we don’t know how much). This is probably nothing more than a return to the 1945-79 political consensus – but it does involve seeing the question of how much redistribution there should be, not as the business of tidy-minded theory-building by political philosophers, but as the stuff of messy democratic debate.

adf on Thu, 14th Oct 2010 12:56 pm


An interesting thesis – and in many ways vindicates the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition which in previous years would have been close to unthinkable. I think there may be an emerging consensus that extremes of inequality matter – or at least, they matter when they are not matched by high levels of social mobility. Translating this into policy however is a lot more difficult, as we can see from the debate over tuition fees, and the effect on the ‘squeezed’ middle classes who think their children will be locked out of the most expensive institutions and with it, the best jobs.

Ian C – I agree it would be very interesting to hear from business leaders. But I get the impression that many in the business community are far ‘nicer’ than their businesses – there is an incongruence between values that apply to humans and values that apply to business in a capitalist society. I’m not sure any of the values Matthew blogs about are visible in the most successful companies.

Karl H – As a young person in (South) East London, I agree with you completely. But its across all parts of society – the carriage of commuters in the morning reading free papers taking delight in the misfortunes of others, and the shopping centres filled with goods that we don’t need. I don’t see much evidence of enlightened social conservatism in my daily life.

Matthew Taylor on Thu, 14th Oct 2010 4:32 pm


Thanks for these comments. They are fascinating and encourage me to write more on this topic (which I plan to do tomorrow or over the weekend). As many of you say, the principles need a lot more fleshing out before we can even think about whether they are compatible

Margaret Bowker on Thu, 14th Oct 2010 6:00 pm


Your blog and description of The Flaw reminded me of how many of us felt on that early October morning two years ago; the day after the Banks had gone to the Chancellor. Sky was on, the markets falling like lead, ‘let the markets deal with it’ someone was saying and I rushed away to blog about a window of opportunity. Now people are looking for a new way. The Big Society has great possibilities, so does enlightened social conservatism. I agree that concepts coming from differing experiences can have an advantage. The comments were very interesting. People’s enthusiasm is amazing. I looked up commentator Matthew Kalman’s society and was taken into another world. What are we saying? That people deserve a satisfactory, fair life? We should mean something to our politicians, more than just part of their careers? Which I feel is happening. Commerce in partnership with its populations; global finance successful and harnessed for the general good. It doesn’t have to be just rhetoric.

Nye on Fri, 15th Oct 2010 12:27 pm


Sadly, the likelihood of any agreement on values, and hence policy positions, is unlikely now society’s bill for the 2008 financial crisis is arriving with the CSR. Just look at the debate on the cause of the deficit (was it Labour profligacy or state intervention to avoid the banking crisis becoming a depression?).

The key contradiction in the “proposed new political space” remains the state’s role in moderating the inequality that Matthew’s post elegantly describes. Either the state has some kind of responsibility to provide a safety net, countering the negative effects of the markets including high unemployment, or it does not. Citizen involvement and community action are barely relevant here, though they have an important place in civil society.

The biggest challenge remains sustainability: weaving this in as a central idea into a debate about inequality, social solidarity and where wealth creation and growth fits in.
Tim Jackson sums it up well at
http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_jackson_s_economic_reality_check.html

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