THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE

Another interesting reflection from Geoff Mulgan – this time a lecture he delivered in 2022 at the Academy of Social Sciences on its role in mapping and shaping the future

Search for well informed proposals for how welfare, democracy, tax could be a 

generation or two from now and you’ll find surprisingly little. Why has this happened? 

My suggestion is that this has partly happened as a unfortunate by-product of 

perfectly sound, well-intentioned shifts.  Healthy pressures to attend to hard data 

and evidence have had the unintended consequence of squeezing out attention to the 

future since by definition evidence and data refer to the past and present. 

A well-intentioned focus on impact has encouraged incremental work on policy – 

how to tweak a little, ideally aligned with the interests of the government of the day 

but discouraged the serious design of how our society or economy might be a 

generation out since of course a brilliant idea that will flourish in 30 years’ time won’t 

show up in the REF.  

An equally healthy commitment to rigour has made it hard or even career threatening 

to be creative, since any genuinely new idea risks sounding flaky, vague or half-baked 

(as any radical idea will be in its infancy). Similarly, as evidence now shows very clearly,

 the very valid reliance on peer review as a near-universal assessment method, by its 

nature discourages the boldest most speculative thinking, favouring safe proposals 

over more radical ones that tend to get a mix of very high and very low scores. 

So many of the brightest opt either for analytical work or for the safer space of 

commentary and critique - often brilliantly – but steer clear of the riskier space of 

saying what they think should be done. And although within every university there 

are pockets of bold thinking,  some very creative and dynamic, and although many 

want to play a part in the great transitions that may be needed in the next few years, 

they are almost without exception on the margins of their fields, happening despite, 

not because of, the incentives of the system. 

He goes on argue that 

Few in 1900 expected a brutal world war and revolutions in the next generation. 

Few in 1925 anticipated a boom, a depression and then another war. 

Few in the 1950s expected the scale of cultural change of the 1960s. Few in the 1980s 

expected the imminent collapse of the USSR, resurgent Islamic fundamentalism, or 

the rise of personal computing and the internet. Few in the 2000s anticipated the 

scale of the financial crisis, or the boom in populist authoritarianism, or that the 

world would grind to a halt thanks to a pandemic.  Few in 2021 predicted a brutal war 

in 2022 or a glorious time for oil companies. 
Thinking about which trends will continue, which will bend, invert, break sharpens our 

thinking and focuses us on the pace of change in different fields – on the one hand 

the slow but remorseless pace of demography or infrastructures that may take 50 

years to change; on the other the feverish pace of social media that gets a billion 

people onto Tiktok in a couple of years.  All of us usually overestimate how much 

changes fast and underestimate how much can change over longer periods, 

yet we still lack a plausible social science of time. 

This is, in fact, a theme picked up in a 2013 report I have just come across 

which was commissioned by the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations 

and entitled Now for the Long Term 

Within democracies, there are clear tensions between the capacity of governments to deliver long-term solutions in the collective interest and more short-term political demands. Politicians are increasingly punished in times of crisis, making it harder to take difficult long-term decisions that produce immediate pain. Since mid-2010, the leaders of more than 75 percent of the European Union’s 28 states have fallen or been voted out of office, including the leaders of France, Spain and Italy. Increasingly difficult decisions, particularly on controversial reforms such as on carbon taxes, nuclear power or abortion, are often delayed or are beset with uncertainty.

All societies face increasing demands for political accountability, higher living standards, economic opportunities and a more sustainable and healthy environment…..

Meanwhile in democracies, more frequent opinion polls, longer election campaigns, the pressures of increasingly vocal and well funded lobbies and the preference for sound bites over detailed analysis can mean the capacity to think and articulate a vision beyond the electoral term are increasingly limited.

Corporate myopia

Responsibility to think and act in the longerterm interest is not confined to the political sphere. The global business community also has a vital role to play. Yet with notable exceptions, businesses are failing to show leadership and grasp responsibility on the scale required. Some businesses, often through their corporate social responsibility activities or philanthropy, have sparked action, but these are only rarely mainstreamed within the firm. This is particularly acute in the financial sector where Andy Haldane, Executive Director of the Bank of England, argues that there is evidence that “myopia is mounting”.

Performance metrics of CEOs based on share prices arguably encourage a focus on short-term stock prices, rather than long-term value creation. Meanwhile shortterm investors who often hold shares for a few days (or potentially just a few seconds) have the same voting power as those who hold shares for a longer period, with this perversely rewarding those who want to make a quick return and are not necessarily committed to a company’s longterm well-being.

And the report doesn’t shy away from exploring the constraints on thinking 

ahead or from making recommendations – the second section asks “What Makes 

Change so Hard?” and looks in detail at 5 possible reasons viz

• Institutional Inertia; “20th century structures and institutions are poorly equipped 

for 21st century challenges, and suffer from legitimacy, authority and effectiveness deficits”.

• Time; “Electoral cycles, media pressures, company reporting timetables and just-in-time 

systems encourage short-sightedness”

• Political engagement and public Trust; “Limited opportunities for constructive 

engagement and declining trust in politics and institutions undermine citizens’ 
involvement in policy. Yet new online tools and methods of participation are potentially widening opportunities for discussion and debate.”

• Growing Complexity; “Issues are becoming more complex and the evidence 

base can be uncertain, whilst an emphasis on consensus undermines our ability to act”.

• Cultural Bias; “Entrenched barriers shut many women and young people out of 

critical conversations and activities, whilst cultural differences provide barriers to change.”

Mulgan’s lecture then points to the contrast between the hard sciences and 

social policy

In sciences – whether life science or computer science – it’s taken for granted 

that if you are ambitious you speculate and design options for the future.  

You are encouraged by research councils, university departments and venture 

capital to generate ideas, the more radical the better.  A future orientation is 

seen as necessary and admirable.  And it’s recognised that although most ideas will 

fail, the rare successes will be useful and some incredibly valuable. In science 

and technology there is no shortage of support for imagination – thinktanks, 

conferences, accelerators, funds - on smart cities, smart homes, AI, genomics: much of it 

speculative and much of it hype and hot air but some of it very real and feeding 

into well-developed systems.  Drug discovery and new surgical procedures on the 

one hand and much of technology have long-established systems for generating options,

 selecting the best and then scaling them up.   By contrast social action and policy 

lacks any comparable systems of support.  There is little support for radical thought 

and variation – little support for experiment and testing and only patchy systems 

for then selecting and scaling the successes.  

TO BE CONTINUED