ON BIAS

There is a lot of talk in the UK of bias in reporting – whether it's the BBC or simple journalism. The reality is that it's very difficult to find examples of left-wing reporting – although the last post suggested we need to be cautious about this left-right classification, So I've attempted one of my famous TABLES which leads me to conclude that left-wing writing is very much a minority pursuit. But because the blogger site makes a mess of my tables I've attached the table as a pdf file - although I seem somehow to have succeeded in putting it below

People will note that I've drawn my net widely and included some bloggers – as well as someone no longer with us but whose ideas live on. The more names I added to the list, the more difficult it became to apply a suitable label about their “political leaning”

Some years ago I did an even more exhaustive list of good “journalistic” writers which readers may find interesting. It includes a fair number of writers who (in Hamlet's famous phrase) have shuffled off this mortal coil eg Arthur Koestler

Journalists have a reputation for digging up the dirt on people and institutions but John Harris (who figures in the latest table) is unusual in having started a series which celebrates the people doing good work in their UK communities

Writers I respect

	Normal source	Political leaning	Examples and COMMENT
Anthony Barnett	Open Democracy	liberal	A founder of “Open Democracy” and a writer famous for his long essays eg Out of the Belly of Hell (2020) but has also published several books on constitutional issues and on Brexit
Grace Blakely	Tribune	Harder left	Her many contributions can be read at the link at the title of the journal
Diana Coyle	Her blog and academia	liberal	British economist. Author of 9 books eg “Cogs and Monsters”
Matt Flinders	academia	liberal	British political scientist eg Flinders on democracy and a marvellous collection of his blogs in “What Kind of Democracy is this?” See also “Defending Politics”
David Graeber	Academia and activist	anarchist	Sadly David is no longer with us – here is my tribute
John Michael Greer	Current and previous blog	sceptic	One of the most stimulating US writers about the decline of industrial society eg “After Oil” and “The Ecotechnic future” with a strange interest in ancient druidry. This is his take on climate warming
Chris Grey	His brexit blog – and academia	open-minded	British organisational sociologist and author of several non-fiction books – on his subject and also on Brexit
John Harris	The Guardian	open-minded	Also famous for his “Anywhere but Westminster” videos
Chris hedges	Consortium news and his substack	left	Incisive, hard-hitting analyses of the reality of the American Empire
Anton Jaeger	New Left Review	left	His various pieces can be read here
David Jamieson	Conter	Soft left	The Conter site is “Against the Scottish Establishment”. David is its editor and host of its podcast
Owen Jones	The Guardian	Soft left	Author of several books eg “The Establishment”
Naomi Klein	various	open	Canadian writer and activist eg This Changes Everything
Andrew Marr	The New Statesman	liberal	Author of “The Making of Modern Britain”
James Meek	LRB	liberal	Author of several fiction books and of a couple of non-fiction
George Monbiot	The Guardian	Vaguely anarchist	Author of several books eg “Out of the Wreckage”
John Naughton	The guardian	Not clear	The paper's technology correspondent. Writer and academic. Author of several books including “From Gutenberg to Zuckenberg”
Dave Pollard	His blog	Diff to label	Dave is a Canadian – this a very useful post about what motivates him
David Runciman	London Review of Books (LRB)	liberal	David is a British political scientist with many books eg “How Democracy Ends” and “The Confidence Trap”
Jonathan Shafi	Conter site	Soft left	A Scottish free-lance writer
Wolfgang Streeck	New Left Review	Harder left	Wolfgang is a German sociologist and author of numerous important books eg “How will capitalism End?” and “Buying Time”
Gillian Tett	Various – inc Fin Times	Diff to label	Another anthropologist who has turned to financial journalism and author of several books eg “The Silo Effect”
Polly Toynbee	The Guardian	Centre leftist	Author of several non-fiction books eg “Dismembered”

CAN LABOUR WIN?

A recent post identified a widespread despondency indeed cynicism about contemporary British politics. Some forty years ago, there was a mood of hope - John Smith had commissioned the “Commission on Social Justice” Will Hutton was just about to publish his seminal text “The State We’re In”. John Major and the Tories may have won the election in 1992 but Black Wednesday a few months later destroyed the Conservatives' credibility – although they limped on before the overwhelming Labour victory of 1997.

Today there is little hope – the Labour party inspires little confidence, is seen as just too responsible not least for its expulsion of most of its left-wing critics. Just compare the party's 2017 Manifesto with its current “Covenant”.

Renewal is a soft-left journal (the link explains the term which publishes thoughtful articles and this one is a review of a recent book with the great title “Futures of Socialism - ‘Modernisation’, the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973-97”. This excerpt gives a great sense of an intensity of debate which has been lost in recent decades -

His book is a deeply researched history of ideological change on the British left in the late twentieth century. Murphy offers a fascinating guide to the debates about how to modernise socialism that raged across seminar rooms, conference floors, party documents, think tank pamphlets and periodical pages from the 1970s onwards. His findings make a powerful case against the commonplace portrayal of Labour in the late twentieth century as offering nothing more adventurous than a mildly humanised neoliberalism........

During the 1970s and 1980s a very large number of political actors on the left and centre of British politics became convinced that the model of centralised state-driven socialism associated with Labour’s heyday in power in the 1940s was out of step with modern Britain. Political formations as various as the New Left, leading trade unionists, disillusioned Labour revisionists, left-led Labour councils, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the Liberal Party and the emergent SDP all agreed that there needed to be greater economic and political empowerment below the level of the UK state. Initially this was often framed in socialist terms as the extension of economic democracy through worker participation in industrial decision-making and trade unionists taking seats on company boards. But these ideas quickly widened (or perhaps moderated) to include passing power on to consumer and community groups, local councils (with Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council as a model) and co-operatives. At a theoretical level, these decentralising tendencies were forged into what Murphy dubs the ‘neo-corporatism’ advocated by David Marquand and Paul Hirst. Marquand and Hirst envisaged a British economy that looked a lot more like the West German social-market model, by combining federal constitutionalism with a more collaborative and long-term industrial culture.

All of this was premised on the assumption that Labour’s traditional political vision was too top-down and statist and thus out of step with a less deferential, more individualist society. This was said to be the vulnerability in Labour’s earlier model of socialism that Thatcherism had exploited, by offering a right-wing vision of individual economic empowerment that widened private property ownership and increased disposable incomes through direct tax cuts (a point that had been presciently made by Stuart Hall even before the Thatcher government was elected in his famous 1979 Marxism Today essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’).

Four quadrants can be used to plot the old and new left and right -

Old Left; supporting a strong state sector for infrastructure and health (inc insurance although the religious and cooperative sectors could equally have responsibility for this last)

Old Right; recognizing the role of the state in sustaining property rights and traditional ways of doing things

New Left; which has supported the liberation struggles of repressed groups and the onward march of post-modernism….

New Right; which tends to divide strongly between the economic agenda of the Neo-liberals (whose eulogies for “the market” conceals support oligopolistic licence and the spread of “commodification”) and the more traditional social agenda of the American Neo-Cons.

But how long can we keep using the term “new”? The UK “New Left” some 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a decade earlier.. e are surely, therefore, overdue another term…..and the one I suggest is “emergent”  (which Mintzberg, I think it was, first used to distinguish one meaning of strategy). And, as few people relish being labelled as either left or right, we need a mid-way point for them….That then gives a 3x3 matrix and the question is what terms to use for the resultant combinations……??? This is what I’ve come up with

key words/symbols for the various points of the political spectrum

	LEFT	CENTRE	RIGHT
OLD	Working class	Family, property	Tradition, duty
SOFT	Social democracy	liberalism	duty
NEW	Liberation struggle	consumerism	The individual
EMERGENT	The commons	identity	libertarian

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’.

‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognise that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

Scruton’s is not the only book this year to explore “the culture wars”. A site I must consult more often is the Society for US Intellectual History which carried recently an interesting comparison of a couple of books which throw light on all this -

‘Ideas moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the dominant tropes in economics had been institutional, even among conservatives. Right-wing critics of the welfare state and state-managed economies did not speak of the market; they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’

The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints.

It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces’.

Everyone became a buyer or seller, everything – kidneys, pollution – got bought and sold. The only thing holding it all together was the magnetic energy of these individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to Galbraith’s 15-part BBC series on capitalism.

With his focus on the money supply as the source of economic well-being, Friedman helped popularise a ‘radically simplified model of aggregate economic behaviour’, in which ‘state, society and institutions all shrank into insignificance within a black box that translated money inputs directly into price outputs.’

But Friedman’s monetarism was also far more state-centric – the Federal Reserve played an almost heroic role in determining the direction of the economy – than most market theologians would have liked. What truly pushed the market into the culture – high and low – were the adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the market as a popular (and populist) vision of the good society.

Perhaps we need to be more cautious in assessing AI’s Impact

I’ve written a couple of posts this year about Artificial Intelligence – in April trying to put 

the sudden panic about it in the wider context of the discussion about the social impact of 

technology which has been ongoing since at least the 1980s; and in June about the 

possible impact on jobs. The latter post reminded us that such concerns had been around 

since Charles Handy’s 1984 book “The Future of Work” – although Living Together – the 

future of politics in a world transformed by technology by James Susskind in 2018 did 

paint a fairly grim picture. 

But both posts were perhaps too alarmist. Certainly a 2016 OECD report on The Risk of 

Automation for Jobs suggested that, if you looked at TASKS rather than OCCUPATIONS. 

the likely impact was minimal 

"Our paper serves two purposes. Firstly, we estimate the job automatibility of jobs for 21 

OECD countries based on a task-based approach. In contrast to other studies, we take into 

account the heterogeneity of workers’ tasks within occupations. Overall, we find that, on 

average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 % of jobs are automatable. The threat from 

technological advances thus seems much less pronounced compared to the occupation

-based approach. We further find heterogeneities across OECD countries. For instance, 

while the share of automatable jobs is 6 % in Korea, the corresponding share is 12 % in 

Austria. Differences between countries may reflect general differences in workplace 

organisation, differences in previous investments into automation technologies as well as 

differences in the education of workers across countries"   

and another report the following year supported this. For more discussion about the social impact of technological developments I recommend this podcast

That having been said, I must confess to one anxiety - relating to nuclear safety. Most of us have heard of the incident of a Russian radar official who identified an incoming ballistic missile on the screen but had the intelligence to assume that it was a glitch. So-called Artificial Intelligence does not have that same intelligence and would have obeyed what it was being told. We might assume that humans will always be there and act as a check – but most people in this field tell us that the day will shortly dawn when no such human checks will be there.    

For a marvellous discussion between Mustafa Suleyman and Yuval Harari, view

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JkPWHr7sTY&ab_channel=YuvalNoahHarari

Further Reading
The Gutenberg Parenthesis – the age of print and its lessons for the age of the 
internet Jeff Jarvis (2023)
Impromptu – ampflifying our humanity through AI" by AI and Reid Hoffman (2023) Interesting to have 
a book partly written by Artificial Intelligence!!  
http://mccaine.org/2022/04/26/book-review-aaron-benanav-automation-and-the-future-of-work/
this is a recent discussion with the authors of “The  Second Machine Age” (2014)
The Age of AI; and our human future Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and D Huttenlocher (2021)
Yes – that Kissinger and Schmidt! google excerpts only
Automation and the future of work; Aaron Benanov (2020) 2 articles from New Left Review
How to Run a City like Amazon and other Fables; ed M Graham…. J Shaw (2019)
Automation and the future of work HMSO (2019) a helpful overview
Rebooting AI - AI we can trust 2019Living Together – the future of politics in a world transformed by technology; James Susskind (2018) reviewed here
The People v Tech – how the internet is killing democracy (and how we save it) Jamie Bartlett (2018) looks a good read
Ten Arguments for Deleting your social media right now; Jaron Lanier (2018) A recognised expert
A World without Work? (Values and Capitalism network 2018)
Utopia is Creepy; Nicholas Carr (2016) another famous IT writer
The Internet is not the Answer; Andrew Keen (2015)
The Future of Work (ILO 2015) from the international Labour thinktank
A World without Work (The Atlantic 2015) an early article
The Second Machine Age; Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014) One of the classics
From Guttenberg to Zuckenberg – what you really need to know about the Internet; John Naughton (2013)
 If the link tempts you, the full book is here 
To Save everything click here – the folly of technological solutionism; Efgeni Morozov (2013) 
another classic 

The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brain Nicholas Carr (2010) an early IT warning

Collective Intelligence – part II

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)

Have we lost our Collective Intelligence?

Once again a video has inspired a post – this time a conversation with Geoff Mulgan about his latest book “Another World is Possible - How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination” (2022). Geoff Mulgan is a professor of collective intelligence and a Knight of the realm; a former CEO of Nesta and DEMOS think tank; Director of the government’s Strategy Unit and Head of Policy in the Prime Minister’s office. He is also the author of many books, including “Big Mind – how collective intelligence can change our world” (2018) which I’ve just started to read and which argues that -

... the world has made great strides in improving health and has accumulated an extraordinary amount of knowledge about it, yet still has a long way to go in orchestrating that knowledge to best effect.

Similar patterns can be found in many fields, from politics and business to personal life: unprecedented access to data, information, and opinions, but less obvious progress in using this information to guide better decisions. We benefit from a cornucopia of goods unimaginable to past generations, yet still too often spend money we haven’t earned to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. P13

For institutions, the rising importance of conscious collective intelligence is no less challenging, and demands a different view of boundaries and roles. Every organization needs to become more aware of how it observes, analyses, remembers, and creates, and then how it learns from action: correcting errors, sometimes creating new categories when the old ones don’t work, and sometimes developing entirely new ways of thinking.

Every organization has to find the right position between the silence and the noise: the silence of the old hierarchies in which no one dared to challenge or warn, and the noisy cacophony of a world of networks flooded by an infinity of voices. That space in between becomes meaningful only when organizations learn how to select and cluster with the right levels of granularity— simple enough but not simplistic; clear but not crude; focused but not to the extent of myopia. Few of our dominant institutions are adept at thinking in these ways. Businesses have the biggest incentives to act more intelligently, and invest heavily in hardware and software of all kinds. But whole sectors repeatedly make big mistakes, misread their environments, and harvest only a fraction of the know- how that’s available in their employees and customers.

Mulgan had rehearsed some of his arguments in a 2020 paper called The Imaginary Crisis and in this great interview a couple of years ago

One of the reasons I became interested in imagination recently was because perhaps 

there was a missing piece in the theories of change. In the past, one of the things which 

allowed change was people thinking ahead to a better possible society or utopia. And my 

worry is that that kind of imagination has almost disappeared.

Why is that?
People can picture a much worse world, with climate change, ecological catastrophe, robots 

taking over the world, populous demagogues. But very few people can give an articulate account 

of how the world might be better socially. What might our health care look like? Our primary 

schools, our libraries, our parliaments. And part of the reason is that the institutions which 

should be working on this imagination have largely vacated that space - political parties, 

universities, think tanks all for slightly different reasons. This has become part of a pathology 

of our time.

You have a very mixed background, working in government with Tony Blair, founding and 

running big think tanks like Demos and Nesta, teaching at university. What is your personal 

ambition in all of this?
I spent half of my career as an activist, from the grassroots upwards, starting at the age of 

14. I used to organize marches and pickets and I remained involved in community organizing 

and social entrepreneurship trying to find solutions from the bottom up. And I have spent 

the other half of my life working from the top down, with governments around the world, 

the European Commission or UN now. To some extent, nearly all change has to involve some 

alliance of the top down and the bottom up, the powerless and the powerful. I sometimes 

call them the bees and the trees – the people with the ideas and the big institutions with 

power. And, uh, money.

Where do you get your energy and optimism from?
I get some optimism from having seen how often you can transform things completely. 

The great lesson I have learned or relearned, again and again, is that we overestimate how much can change short term. But equally, most people underestimate how much can change over one, two or three decades. There is nothing worse than an unrealistic fatalism because it undermines the energy, the capacity to do the practical changes – which of course won't solve climate change in 2022, but actually over 20, 30 years. We will completely transform our economy and society.
How much of your job is to try to design options for the future?

One of the institutions that you want to challenge and change is the university – for 

THE NEW INSTITUTE you wrote a fascinating paper on what you call “exploratory 

social sciences.” Can you explain your argument?
I mainly focus on social sciences, it is a very different story for engineering and the other 

sciences. But in the social sciences, the fundamental question for an academic is: how much 

of your job is to understand the present and the past, and how much of your job is to try 

to design options for the future? Now in the 19th century, in the early days of social science,

 it was assumed you did both. The London School of Economics for example was very much 

formed as a place for academics to work on designing future health systems, welfare states 

et cetera – not just to write books and analyze what had gone wrong. Over the last 50 or 

60 years, academics have become quite fearful of designing the future. It is almost career 

threatening.

Why is that?
Some of this has to do with the rise of positivism and quantification, the in many ways quite 

welcome rise of attention to data, to empirical analysis, to looking at the facts. In many ways,

 this has been good. It has made for a much more rigorous understanding of the present 

and the past – but it squeezed out creativity and visions for an alternative future.

A scepticism vis-à-vis utopia or world-building?
There certainly was a disappointment with the grand ideological projects of the last century, 

which led a whole wave of intellectuals to move into critique rather than creative construction. 

It's a much safer place to be critiquing all that is wrong with capitalism rather than trying 

to propose alternatives to it. I believe there is a need to recover a bit of that older tradition 

of social science but align it to the best tools we have now, data and models and experiments 

– and learn methods from design and the arts and other fields, which do creativity as a matter 

of course.

Economics has been in many ways the leading social science of the last decades, and it 

has often pretended to be more than that, more like a hard science. What is your take on that?
Weirdly, economics has taken almost no methods from any other fields, including from business,

 in terms of its own creativity. There is a real intellectual narrow-mindedness, a lack of curiosity, 

lack of hunger at a time when creativity methods are so widely used in everything from 

film and design for products and services. My hope is that we will see university centers of 

exploratory social science, which try to be as good at rigor as they are at imagination. 

We have this paradoxical situation where the people with the deepest knowledge are not 

doing the creativity and vice versa – and hopefully THE NEW INSTITUTE can be part of 

changing that.
We need some really bold, radical thinking in this century

What is the politics in all of this? Traditionally, the left was aligned with the future, 

the right with preserving the status quo. This has shifted, in surprising ways, hasn’t it?
Traditionally, the conservative right was skeptical of any designs for the future because 

by definition what exists has been tried through history. For a time, that changed, left and 

right swapped places. A lot of conservatives became almost more utopian than the left. 

They pictured a future run by markets, supported by technologies, with a slightly crazed 

enthusiasm. In the last 20 years, they have returned back to a much more traditional conservative 

position, with nostalgic pictures of race and community and manufacturing-based economies.

And the left?
The left is still in a rather fearful state – a political fear of being exposed by having 

genuinely novel, genuinely challenging ideas. You are much more likely to make it as a public 

intellectual by reviving old ideas rather than coming up with new ones. Which is pretty disappointing.

 Because we need some really bold, radical thinking in this century if we are going to cope 

with climate change, with AI, with the threats to democracy. And our intellectuals are not 

serving us that well.

You explore a few tools and methods in your paper to get to that point where the 

new can happen: experimentation, complexity thinking, design. How can we unleash 

our societal imagination?
Extension is an example, you can use it for almost any phenomenon – like re-imagining your 

local library or childcare. Then you go through a series of transformations. What would 

happen if you extended one aspect of it radically, the way that we have extended ideas of 

rights to cover everything from animals to transgender. There is also inversion: What happens 

if the farmers become bankers or patients become doctors? Or grafting: You take an idea 

from a very different field and try and apply it to your library or your childcare.

What is the next step?
That is just the starting point. Then the deep knowledge comes in. You have to think about 

building your world, your designs, and see how plausible they are, what might be an evolutionary 

route for them. The challenge is to find a balance between the willingness to leap ahead 

and jump beyond what is realistic now to what might be possible in 20 years. And not to 

fall prey to what I call unrealistic realism.

What does that mean?
It is striking that many academic disciplines are very good at explaining why change won't 

happen. And when it does come, they have no way of explaining why it did happen because 

they hold on to their unrealistic realism. And at the same time avoiding fantasy, illusion, 

ideas which have absolutely no plausible prospect of ever happening. I would like to see in 

universities cross-disciplinary teams becoming good at creating these alternative worlds, 

interrogating them, seeing what their implications are, what their economic base might be, 

the legitimacy of them.

Imagination as practice.
Every society needs some sense of where it might be headed in the future in order to be 

healthy, just as we do as individuals. We need some shared pictures of where we could be 

headed 30, 50, 70 years into the future, pictures which aren't only ecological disasters 

or technological determinist triumphs. That's the missing space in our collective imaginaries 

which we really need to address. Because the downside is that all sorts of other dark forces 

may fill that space instead.