Geoff Mulgan’s basic message can be reduced to bullet points – that we
have become too pessimistic about the future
have lost our sense of “agency” ie are not prepared to take up arms but have sunk into despair
need to use our imagination to envisage different futures
should act together to bring some of these about
His approach is perhaps best caught in a paper he delivered to the Progressive Governance Summit of 2021
I live in Luton, a fairly typical post-industrial town in southern England. It thrived in the past making hats, and then cars. Now the largest employer is the airport, and many work in the big Amazon logistics centres nearby. The town is relatively poor, very diverse (roughly a third Muslim), sneered at by wealthy Londoners, but quite content. It usually votes Labour but is also home to an extreme right party and to young jihadis who went to fight in Syria.
My neighbours have little interest in theoretical debates. Only a small minority now have a strong attachment to an ideological tradition in the way that trade unionists at the car plants here did back in the 1970s. Instead, they look at political parties with a sceptical eye and see if they might deliver some improvements to lives that are often hard.
They want to know whether there is a plausible route to good jobs – ideally higher paid and more secure. They want some care for old age. They want to be safe from crime. They are quite green though in a more amorphous way than in the big cities. They are patriotic. Although the town has many migrants – from Pakistan, Poland and the Middle East – they’re generally sceptical about the virtues of more migration. They voted for Brexit (unlike my metropolitan friends I was surprised the Brexit vote wasn’t higher). Most are fairly socially conservative but have also been swept up in the shifts of values of recent decades. They watch politics, if at all, partly as entertainment.
They are natural voters for progressive parties. But their allegiance is thin. Many like Boris Johnson even when they disagree with him. He seems authentic even in his dishonesties. And they appreciate his willingness to adopt a host of leftwing policies – regional equality, infrastructure spending, carbon neutrality. He has no real vision of the future. But neither do the other main parties.
The paper mentions the pride we take in the achievements of the Progressive Tradition and tries to identify the key elements of that tradition
Belief in unrealised potential
security as a precondition for the good life
peace – whether bullies at work or avoidance of conflict with other countries
being “part of nature” – which is one I would question and replace with a belief in progress which he elaborates thus -
…….a conviction that things can be better, that we have the power to shape our world and should not just accept the status quo as somehow natural. That means a belief that
ahead of us lies the possibility of longer and happier lives, of an end to oppression, exploitation and inequality.
we can, together, solve our most pressing problems. That we can unite divided and fractured societies and not take new divisions as inevitable.
That is the heart of the progressive promise, and often gets lost in compromise, everyday administration, the tyranny of the incremental. It’s vital to return to it and it provides the fuel for radicalism.
So, welfare policies have to address the new risks, not just the familiar ones of unemployment or physical ill-health: addressing needs for care in old age, mental as well as physical health, the needs of a precarious workforce for portable benefits. They need to offer practical answers to housing shortage and household debt, mobility and the governance of data. Many of these concern how we think about the economy. The traditional issues of economic policy – product markets, competition, macro policy, industrial policy – all matter, and it’s right to address the core DNA of capitalism, developing alternative ownership models (commons, mutuals, social enterprises and co-ops) and new accountability for firms.
But to be adequate to our times our economics has to be much broader, attentive to how the economy interacts with home life and family, ecosystems and communities. This was all squeezed out by the pragmatism of the 2000s and 2010s and left a gaping hole in our programmes, leaving parties as managers not mobilisers; curators of the status quo not transformers. Recent surveys show that half the population in many countries, including Germany, the US and UK, and 70% in France, believe the economic system needs “major changes” or “needs to be completely reformed”.
While on the subject of AI, I also liked the introduction to Algorithmic Reason – the new government of self and other; by C Aradau and T Blanke (2022)
This book has been a journey of several years, which has spanned multiple disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and computing. It took us several years to make sense of how disciplines and approaches diverge in their diagnoses of what is at stake with big data, algorithms, machine learning, or artificial intelligence. Tracing the sinuous contours of different debates across disciplines has been an arduous, at times disorienting, but also rewarding task. It has required getting to grips with varied concepts and methods and attending to how words carry not just different meanings but work differently across disciplinary and intradisciplinary practices. This journey was partly made possible by the fact that both of us had previously traversed disciplines and worked with the ambiguities and tensions between these: Claudia from English and French to political science and then international relations; Tobias from political philosophy to computer science and then digital humanities. Our rather eclectic trajectories can perhaps explain the theoretical and methodological eclecticism of the book. Yet, this is not an eclecticism of ‘anything goes’, but one that has been fostered by controversies and contestations we have followed and by the commitment to take seriously actors who enter these dissensual scenes, whether engineers or activists, scientists or workers.
Other Useful Papers
The Case for exploratory social sciences; Mulgan 2021
Imagination Unleashed – democratising the knowledge economy; Unger, Mulgan 2019
Compendium of Innovation Methods (Nesta 2019)
Social Innivation – what it is, why it matters and how it can be accelerated
Mulgan et al 2007
How to run a city like Amazon and other fables ed M Graham et al (2019)
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