It’s NOT about ‘jobs’, stupid.
Filed under: Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, inequality
The RSA event advertised in our last post, Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty? was a rallying cry for Whitehall to get over their fixation with creating ‘jobs’ and start focussing on using technology to develop existing economic activity.
As Jerry Fishenden(Centre for Technology Policy Research) put it: “The state’s idea of what a ‘job’ is is constraining productivity” and Wingham Rowan(Silvers of Time Working) added that “local authorities are beaten up by Whitehall on job creation” (thereby constraining attempts to create more flexible labour markets).
The problem is not jobs as such, but untraded resources, especially time. The focus should be on how we better harness and develop existing economic activity and help people earn money, rather than how to create ‘jobs’.
So how can we help people earn money? Who are ‘they’, and what is stopping them? It seems they tend to work at the lower end of the economic spectrum, functioning in what Wingham Rowan called unfocussed markets, where the conditions for the demand and supply of labour are fuzzy and changeable, and buyers and sellers can’t find each other(the exact opposite of the more efficient targetted markets- the kind that traders operate in).
Think baby sitters, people wanting to borrow a bike, others wanting to borrow a tenner to pay back the next day etc. There is lots of such ad hoc economic activity.., things hired, time offered, money lent, and many can do work of this nature who can’t fit in to a job structure.
The solution lies in new technology that we know to work well calledNEMs: National E Markets. Think Ebay writ large and better regulated. Slivers of Time working is an exmplar in this field, but merely one example of a much wider and still under-utilised phenomenon.
I liked the example given by Wingham Rowan:
If you suddenly need a baby sitter, you might be horrified of looking for one online, but you don’t need to merely post an add on a random website. Instead you have access to a focussed market where you can see existing baber sitters, be certain that they have the relevant CRB and ISA checks completed, have a certain amount of experience and references etc. You can aslo narrow your search to find baby sitters who have worked in your area, or with people you know. The technology can do all this hard work for you, and tell you exactly how much it will cost. You get meaningful data immediately- the kind you need to take a quick decision, just like traders do all the time… so, strange though it may seem, NEMs become a very safe way to get a baby sitter. And of course, from the baby sitter’s perspective, they are not locked in, not forever doomed and blessed to have the ‘job’ of being a babysitter, but being one as and when it suits.
How can such a system we brought into being? The most likely scenario would be that, as with the National Lottery, the private sector would fund these markets if Government could put the conditions in place.
The technology is not the problem, the problem is political will and bureaucratic inertia. The British welfare system has a binary view of being in work or out of it. If you can only earn £25 a week before your benefits are cut, you are implicitly encouraging people to work in the informal economy, or to put it more sharply, the black market. (And in this respect, Mathew Taylor commented that while working in goverment he noticed the strange reluctance of politicians and civil servants to even talk about the informal economy; “nobody wanted to go there”.)
The Government needs to work much more with the natural behaviour of people. Selling time and possessions, rather than products as such, is very difficult to regulate, tax etc, but it can and should be done.
Share the Love?
Filed under: Book Reviews, Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, Social Capital, inequality
Yesterday evening we were fortunate to have Jaron Lanier, described by the New York Times as “one of the digital pioneers” in the internet age, come to give a talk at the RSA about his new book, ‘You Are Not a Gadget.’ In this book Jaron develops a more cautious tone to his previously optimistic take on the power of the internet to decentralise cultural production and empower a more diverse and diffuse cultural sphere.
Instead, he argues that a more pernicious by-product of the mantras of ‘open culture’ and ‘information wants to be free’ is coming to dominate. This by-product is a destructive new social contract whereby, as he writes, “authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
This raises an interesting point for us in Connected Communities, for it suggests that this ’social contract’ might be re-spun in a more positive light, whereby culture becomes precisely nothing but altruism. This possibility is deflated, however, when we consider what John Tierney, in the New York Times, describes as a “crucial distinction between online piracy and house burglary: There are a lot more homeowners than burglars, but there are a lot more consumers of digital content than producers of it.” The problem, then, isn’t so much the giving, but rather the disequilibrium that has emerged between those who provide and those who retrieve online content.
It is in part in response to this disequilibrium that Jaron proposes an overhaul of the ideological underpinnings of the Web, comprising a revision of its software structure and, notably, the introduction of a universal system of micropayments (among other innovations). The suggestion is that even in the online world where the scope for a global economy of regard is huge – in so far as transaction costs can be minimised and information shared with incredible ease – penalties, controls and prices need to be introduced to ensure that this vast potential is not abused.
This seems, in sum, to be a call for a more healthy form of reciprocity, whereby payment is not so much seen as antithetical to reciprocal relations – as Tim Harford put it recently “many policy wonks believe …that cash incentives are counterproductive and even morally corrosive” – but rather, where needed, as a formalisation of the very process of reciprocation.
Back on the ground, in traditional, place-based communities, the implications of this are as yet unclear. However, as we start at Connected Communities to try to lubricate the exchange of individuals’ and groups’ social capital, assets and resources, it does raise the question not only of how we should expect communities to cope with unequal flows of time, knowledge and resources (time banks may be one possibility), but also of how any regulatory framework that we develop around this accounts for the differentiated stocks of social capital (and so individuals’ capacity to share) that already exist.
Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, inequality
Bill Gates has scattered quite a few nuggets of remunerative star dust over the years, but one quotation should be more widely known:
“The first rule of any technology used… is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Wonferful!
But is it true?
Discerning readers may have guessed that the dot dot dot above replaced ‘in business’, but Gates’s point might apply to the labour market. How efficient are the mechanisms that connect labour supply to labour demand? If there are generally inefficient, will using technology merely compound matters, or are we missing important tricks that might radically increase Britain’s porductivity?
These thoughts amount to a quick cyber shout to anybody watching about tomorrow’s RSA Thursday Lunchtime event:
How can we use online markets more effectively to ensure we create value and opportunity for the low-paid and unemployed?
The Speakers are Wingham Rowan, project director at Slivers of Time Working; Jerry Fishenden, founder of the Centre for Technology Policy Research and there will be a “contribution” (presumably verbal) by Rt Hon James Purnell MP. The event will be chaired by Mathew Taylor.
The blurb from the RSA events team is below:
E-marketplaces have developed exponentially in the last 15 years, and financial institutions now turbo-trade billions worth of assets every day. But the benefits of these new marketplaces are primarily concentrated at the top levels of the economy, and have neglected the resources that people at the bottom of the economic pyramid could sell. A new generation of marketplace could utilise the time, potential and skills of the less well-off or unemployed – simultaneously creating value for the individuals concerned, and flooding the market with hitherto untapped products and services.
Creating ‘modern markets for all’ should now be a priority, but the private sector can’t work alone to create the marketplaces needed. Is it time for policymakers to make modern, inclusive marketplaces a priority across multiple sectors at the bottom of the economy?
Bringing the digital to life: how can new media reinvigorate the material public sphere?
I read with interest Rob Bagchi’s prediction – and let’s face it, as a sports journalist he’s pretty familiar with predictions – that the closing down of the British Library’s newspaper depository in Colindale in 2012 may signal the demise of the UK’s statistics-enamoured sports fan community. As he put it at the end of his revealing mini-ethnography of this particular grouping of, it seems predominantly if not entirely entirely, men:
When Colindale closes in 2012 I fear that another refuge for the trivia-enchanted sports fan will not take its place, somewhere that you could always wear your metaphorical anorak with pride. The internet provides things we could never have envisaged but the library’s sense of community may be lost forever.
What struck me about this closing comment was that while the internet has been touted as an overwhelmingly empowering medium, through which we can build anew a lively and inclusive public sphere, in this instance the digitisation of information may result in the disbanding of an, albeit fragile, active and engaged community. What also struck me was the significant role played by Rob’s sensually-experienced descriptions of the library’s visitors – e.g. ‘the man who reeked of Dettol’ or ‘the hare-eyed chap with the roll-up permanently wedged behind his ear’ – in illuminating the milieu to which he referred.
If we take such physical co-presence and the immediate (as opposed to mediated) experience of difference as an important part of a healthy, democratic society (esp. see the work of Iris Marion Young on ‘the politics of difference’), then the implications of such displacement of face-to-face communities by wired ones may be serious.
In particular, I would argue that a particular question is raised by these implications, namely how might we actively re-shape the potential posed by ever-increasing digital connectivity to take mutual social activity out of place into a reinvigoration of embodied public life that draws on the internet’s potential to draw people together around interests, concerns, ideas etc?
Thankfully, there are already some unmissable indications that the digital revolution doesn’t have to sign the end of communities of co-presence, but rather can generate communities of this kind that were unimaginable previously. I am thinking of flash mobs specifically here and the numerous transformative appropriations of space and time that this situationist ‘movement’ has achieved. Notably, flash mob happenings have been able to bring together previously unknown others to act collectively to an unprecedented degree. Rather than lament the envisaged dissipation of the Colindale sports fan community, then, can we be more hopeful that the digitisation of sports statistics may provide a shared resource around which a wider community may develop? Does the transfer of information into bits and bytes necessarily mean that we’ll no longer come together to share in its exploration and analysis, or does it just mean that we might have to be more actively engaged in ensuring that this information is shared, pored over and put to use in ways that still physically bring people together?
Inequality of Power
How much power do you have?
If you are struggling to answer that question, defining power and creating a suitable metric would be a good place to start. Neither task is easy, but Demos recently attempted both, resulting in: The Power Gap: An Index of Everyday Inequality in Britain, written by Daniel Leighton.
According to Demos, what makes a person powerful is a combination of three factors: the ability to shape one’s own life, to be resilient in the face of shocks and the arbitrary power of others, and the power to shape the social world. These three factors are measured in terms of eight power indicators: Education, occupational status, income, employment, freedom from crime, health, voter turnout, marginality of parliamentary seat.
The theoretical framing of power seems quite sophisticated, but the research, as far as I understand it, amounted to a large scale quantitative data survey, with several proxies used for the relevant measures. For instance, an individual’s measure of ‘personal power’ is a mixture of their level of academic qualifcations as a proxy for their critical thinking and choice of occupation, their income is a proxy for control over personal decisions, and their seniority as a proxy for control in the workplace.
Demos are of course aware that such measures are approximations, and if your ambition is to map levels of something as intangible as ‘personal control’ over the whole country, it is hard to see how you could do much better. For several thousand individuals the data and the proxies will not adequately capture their power level, subjectively or objectively(whatever that means in this context) but in aggregate the data does seem meaningful and powerful. The map may not be the territory, but it’s a pretty impressive map nonetheless.
I found it a fascinating report to read, not least becasue The Connected Communities Project is based on a less formalised understanding of the inequality of ‘power’, and driven by attempts to foster empowerment through building social capital in deprived communities. When he was recently speaking at the RSA, John Kamphner said he didn’t like the word ‘empowerment’ because it sounded too ‘NGOish’, but it is not easy to find a suitable replacement. The question of giving individuals and communities more control over their lives and their environments is very much the heart of the connected communities project, and the Demos report, and I think ‘empowerment’ captures that idea quite well, NGOish or not. (Demos also use ‘resilience’ as a key component of power i.e. the ability to withstand shocks and arbitrary changes. Their proxies for resilience are health, crime and unemployment, while our main claim is that resilience is a function of the range and density of social networks).
Inequality comes in many guises, but the Demos report contends that the inequality that impacts on life quality most tangibly is the inequality of power. At first blush, inequality of power sounds like a tautology, because we are used to thinking of power in hierarchical or ‘power over’ terms, whereby power is a zero sum game, traded between boss and worker, state and citizen etc. But the power at stake in this report is principally the power to shape one’s own life i.e “The power of the effective agent to make things happen.”, as they put it in the report, or as Bertrand Russell put it even more succinctly, “The production of intended effects”.
The report is heavily informed by Amartya Sen’s work on Capabilities, who refers to the central importance of people having “The opportunity to lead lives they have reason to value”.
I refer you to the report for more detailed considerations about the relative power of different areas in the uk, but what I didn’t find there, and what I would like to have known, is how a map of the inequality of power differs from a map on the inequality of income; such a comparison would have been illuminating.
In terms of closing gap between the powerful and powerless, I think we need a deeper understanding of surplus powerlessness, an idea of Michael Lerner’s that was highlighted in the report: “Surplus powerlessness refers to the fact that human beings contribute to their existing powerlessness to the extent that their emotional, intellectual and spiritual makeup prevents them from actualising possibilities that do exist.” Lehrer is clear that such surplus powerlessness is a direct cause of real powerlessness i.e. that the inequality of power in socio-economic terms creates a vicious circle and becomes compounded by our psycho-social makeup. On this analysis, the inequality of power literally goes from bad to worse.
On a more optimistic note, at the RSA we believe that becoming empowered is about recognising that our autonomy increases as we recognise our interdependence. While we encourage policy makers to address the inequality of power at whatever levels policy can have impact (education, employment, health, law and order etc) we can begin to address surplus powerlessness by a deeper appreciation of our connectivity, and by accessing sources of power through available networks. Hannah Arendt puts the point more powerfully:
“Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is ‘in power’, we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain group of people to act in their name.”
Do me a favour – the reciprocal development of the RSA’s Connected Communities and Social Brain projects
My name is Rohan Talbot, the new intern with the Connected Communities and Social Brain projects. One of my first duties is to write something on the relationship between these two projects, so here goes.
If a person wishes to fix a broken car, they must understand its internal components, how they function, and how these functions relate to other components. If the problem lies in a small part of the engine, then attempting to fix the car as a whole entity would be fruitless. Similarly, if we wish to solve societal problems, it is important to understand the behaviour of individuals since it plays such an important part in shaping the effectiveness of the community as a whole.
Of course, underpinning any model of social interaction are assumptions regarding human motivations and behaviour, but these models have typically assumed that humans act in a way that is referred to as ‘rational’; i.e. that individuals are self-interested and seeking to maximise personal gains. Such models of human behaviour therefore give relatively few opportunities for pro-social action (either from individuals or whole groups) compared to other approaches, since they expect that people are unlikely to expend resources and engage in behaviours that do not directly benefit themselves. We therefore need a fuller appreciation for our social nature, to help us understand how we can be motivated to act in ways that benefit our communities without the provision of direct (and perhaps economic) incentives.
With surprising regularity, we come across instances of individuals who risk their well-being or reduce their own resources in order to help others. Examples range from grand personal gestures (such as Warren Buffett’s pledge to donate billions of dollars to the Gates Foundation) to the many people who engage in voluntary work. These seemingly ‘altruistic’ acts pose a significant problem for traditional rational-choice models of human behaviour, since such actions would not occur if human beings were self interested resource-maximisers. Notably some evidence is starting to suggest, as we have long suspected, that individuals are greatly influenced by their social cognition. Factors like social identity, empathy and social perception can therefore be important influences on people’s behaviour.
So the reasons for seemingly altruistic behaviour are becoming clearer. We may engage in such behaviour for intangible social rewards of ‘positive regard’ or increased status. Others suggest that altruism may be based on the person’s desire to view themselves as a ‘good person’, rather than empathic concern for the well-being of others. The view that the RSA seems to espouse, based on evidence from evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics, is that we are reciprocal altruists. The ‘reciprocal altruism’ argument suggests that people may engage in behaviour that incurs a personal cost because they expect that, if they were to also find themselves in a position of need, they would receive similar help or cooperation from others in their group. The strength of reciprocal altruism is, however, limited by the number of people who consistently prioritise their own needs above collaboration. If just 5% of a population act as ‘egoists’, it can reduce overall cooperation among the population by about 40%.
Such is the strength of the norm of reciprocity that, when a favour is enacted (whether asked for or not), we will be more willing to comply with requests from the giver; even when it opposes our own, ‘rational’ interests. A common example can be seen when charities include a small ‘gift’ (such as a pen or personalised address labels) with their direct mailing. By giving us this token, they are engaging with the reciprocity norm, in an attempt to induce ‘altruistic’ behaviour in the form of donations. It is a tactic that works surprisingly well.
All of these approaches share an appreciation for the fact that we are essentially social creatures. There are already examples where such an understanding has been put into practice. In 2005 Camden Council initiated their ‘Exceptional People in Camden’ awards (repeated in 2006 and 2008) for people who have made a notable contribution to local life through their voluntary and community-focussed work. By recognising and publicising community-focused action, such programmes can help to reinforce community norms which value ‘altruistic’ behaviour and the people who engage in it. Furthermore, initiatives such as time banks, which allow individuals to reciprocally exchange services rather than money, have been introduced in some areas. Such schemes can be relatively cheap to set up, and may help to promote and formalise community norms of trust and reciprocity, thereby building social capital by helping to extend and strengthen social networks.
Our decision-making processes clearly go beyond simple economic cost-benefit analyses. Instead, they include a strong concern for our place in society and our relations with other individuals. Understanding the ‘Social Brain’ is therefore important to the Connected Communities project, as knowing how to motivate the ‘engine parts’ of communities (i.e. individual members) to act in a pro-social way can help us to keep our communities running smoothly.
Reed’s Law
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
The main reason social research is so difficult is that human interaction does not lend itself to law-like regularities. However, after stumbling across ‘Reed’s Law’ (more on that in a sec) in an article about social capital, I was moved to examine wikipedia’s list of eponymous laws i.e laws named after people. These laws range from the serious, like Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”, to the troubling, like Wirth’s law: “Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster”, to the wry, like Hofstatder’s law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law”.
In the context of social capital, a core concept of the connected communities project, Reed’s law is particularly pertinent. Like many of the eponymous laws, Reed’s law initially sounds like it came from ”The Department of the Bleeding Obvious’, becuase it simply states that networks grow exponentially i.e. the more people there are in a network, the more scope there is for sub groups that connect with other networks. Reed’s analysis amounts to saying more than that network growth is geometric(2,4,8,16,32 etc) rather than arithmetic(1,2,3,4,5 etc), because the key elements of a network are groups rather than individuals, and connecting with one group invariably means connecting with more than one group, if only because each individual member of a group typically belongs to other groups too.
The idea is a bit more subtle, but basically contends that connectivity feeds off itself, a point that becomes clearer by considering the morphology of networks. Broadcast networks are the most basic, amounting to a ‘one to many’ network. In this sense my network is everybody I know, and spreading the word across my network merely means broadcasting information rather than an exchange of information. Transaction networks, or one-to-one networks, are more complex, featuring an exchange of information between two people. However, the most powerful form of network is the many-to many network, also known as group forming networks or GFNs. These networks are at the heart of Reed’s law, because it is the connection to another group that significantly increases your resources. This kind of bridging or linking capital is the kind of connectivity we most need.
Reed expresses his own law in the following technical language: “Let’s say you have a GFN with n members. If you add up all the potential two-person groups, three-person groups, and so on that those members could form, the number of possible groups equals 2n. So the value of a GFN increases exponentially, in proportion to 2n. I call that Reed’s Law. And its implications are profound.”
Profond indeed, because it means that every time you aad a person to your network, you are really adding several people from several different ‘packs’. A fuller exposition can be read in a Harvard Business Review article aptly called ‘The Law of the Pack’.
I am not totally sure what Reed’s law means for community regeneration, but I think it suggests that, at least in network terms, the more people you know, the more access you have to potentially valuable sub-groups, and that the really valuable people to know are those who have the most connections to several networks. Such assumptions are already built in to our empirical work, which is designed to guage levels of connectivity in areas like New Cross Gate, without making any judgment on how valuable particular networks are. Our contention is that GNFs, group forming networks, are one of the most important antidotes to the pending public sector squeeze because we all need to become more adept at mobilising existing resources, rather than buying new ones, or waiting for the government to bail us out. Following from Reed, our claim is that the value of such resources has until recently been underestimated.
As I think I have said before, and as Reed’s law seems to confirm, it is not what you know nor who you know, but who they know that matters.
Global Consciousness?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Think Global Act Local
With the world’s attention beginning to focus on the Climate Change talks in Copenhagen, I felt this might be a good moment to ask what sense, if any, it makes to think of the ‘world community’ as a community, and asking this question with the aid of the ‘Global Consciousness Project’ seemed to be the least boring approach.
If you toss a coin a hundred times and find that you are getting heads every time, you would probably suspect that the coin was weighted in some way, or perhaps had heads on both sides. No wonder, because when something that is supposed to be random suddenly begins to show signs of order, we are inclined to look for an explanation.
So imagine if you had a machine that could randomly generate numbers every second of the day, and then you noticed that periodically these numbers became significantly less random, and that such moments corresponded with major world events. This curious correlation is precisely what a team of statisticians seem to have been discovering for several years, and they believe, with due scientific caution, that the ‘ordering’ of the random numbers may be related, in a statistically significant way, to those moments where a certain number of people pay attention to the same thing at the same time, for instance September 11 2001, and, wait for it, Lady Diana’s funeral.
The Project is led by researchers at Princeton University in New Jersey, USA, but involves the collaboration of scientists around the globe, all of whom are engaged in forms of ‘data mining’. While by no means core to our work at the RSA, I feel this project is a useful one to know about whenever you hear somebody talk about ‘the global community’.
Many of the world’s spiritual traditions seem to converge on the idea that we are fundamentally one rather than many, that our differences mask some sort of deeper unity. Gens Una Sumus is the Latin expression. We are one people. But are we? Does it make it any sense?
If there is such unity at what philosophers call an ontological level, and not merely in a figurative way, then that level will almost certainly be consciousness, if only because there appears to be no concensus emerging on what is known as ‘the hard problem’ of consciousness, i.e. we don’t really know what it is, and so the claim that consciousness is something we all share or inhere in might be more literally true than the idea that we all ‘breathe the same air’ as JFK once put it.
While the Global Consciousness Project, conducted by a group of scientists around the globe, continues to collect and analyse data, many sceptics have disputed the statistical methods and conclusions, but more fundamentally people have critiqued the study for lacking a clear theoretical basis. For instance Robert Matthews suggested “The only conclusion to emerge from the Global Consciousness Project so far is that data without a theory is as meaningless as words without a narrative.” Others have said that the stock market is a better guage of the state of global consciousness.
But personally I find the idea that we share our consciousness quite compelling, and I hope the Global Consciousness Project can find a way to continue to develop their idea and methods, so that, at whatever level of community we care about, when people say ‘we are in this together’, they mean it in a fundamental way.
What would you give a busker if you didn’t have any money?
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital
Prompted by Mathew Taylor’s recent blog on the cultural life of the London Underground, I remembered an aspiring musician who told me that she always gave money to good buskers, because as a matter of principle we should support what we value, and because she feared she might be in the same position some day (she is now a vet).
But what do you do when you really like a busker’s music, want to support their endeavour, but find that you are genuinely out of change? A quick ask around the office led to ‘a kiss’ and ‘a smile’ as the main suggestions, while many spiritual traditions would suggest offering a prayer, or simply a heartfelt positive thought for the person’s wellbeing, which is surely worthwhile. But man cannot live on smiles, kisses and good vibes alone. There ought to be a more tangible non-monetary expression of regard.
What if you were to offer some nourishing thoughts or advice? You could write them your favourite quotation on a piece of paper and drop it in alongside the twenty pence pieces, or perhaps advise them on where to have lunch (Mooli’s would be my suggestion).
Sounds wildly unrealistic and impractical? Perhaps. But now imagine you walk past the same musician every day for several weeks so that you effectively enjoy hours of the fruits of their skill and time. How could you pay that back in kind? Perhaps you could help them improve their second language, fix a leaky tap, or cook some lemon rice.
Maybe. But at the end of the day, surely people want money – universal vouchers that give you the freedom to get whatever you want, rather than relying on the relatively limited set of whatever skills or products people around you can give?
Certainly money is the preferred form of exchanging value, but many argue that something vital about human meaning-making and social connectivity has been lost in the process. By mediating human contact, money lubricates the free exchange of skills and products, but also contaminates it.
A few years ago a friend hired a van and helped me to move flat in london, and in return I gave him some chess tuition. We didn’t haggle too much about the relative time, skill or value of what we exchanged, and seemed to sense it implicitly. On a large scale, you cannot build an economy on this sort of model, but at a local level, especially when money is tight, we need to consider ways of reviving this form of exchange.
Some communities are already doing so with the idea of time banking, and the classic expression of related forms of exchange is Avner Offer’s paper Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard, which is far too rich a tapeastry of ideas to summarise here, but one signature quotation of Offer’s might whet your appetite:
“Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines wellbeing.”
So the next time you pass a busker doing their job well but don’t feel like reaching for your wallet, be patient, and consider what you might be able to offer each other.
LBRO Summit: Regulation for Regeneration
The expression ‘red tape’ creates a visceral negative reaction, as if it was some sort of malign boaconstrictor. And yet, not only is the colour red generally pleasant, and tape pretty useful, but less figuratively we need some red tape to hold things together.
On Monday morning, RSA hosted The Regulation for Regeneration Summit in conjunction with LBRO- the Local Better Regulation Office- to be pronounced ‘El,bee,ar,oh!’ rather than a lazy conflation of elbow and eyebrow.
For Connected Communities, one of the most important arguments to come out of this Summit was that regulation needs to be less about policing. Rather, regulation should be reconfigured as first and foremeost being a driver of behaviour change. To achieve this there appeared to be resounding sense that new locally-oriented and co-produced approaches to regulation need to be developed, as the following interviews recorded at the Summit show:
Regulation for regeneration: towards a new localism? from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
By the time the Home Secretary began disclosing Government thoughts on immigration policy in the Great Room next door, the LBRO Summit in the Benjamin Franklin Room was well underway. The event was initially chaired by RSA Director of Research, Steve Broome, and latterly by Chief Executive Mathew Taylor. Key speakers included:
- Chris Leslie, Director of The New Local Government Network;
- David Frost, Director General of British Chambers of Commerce;
- Clive Grace, Director of LBRO;
- John Penrose MP, Shadow Minister for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform;
- Cllr Merrick Cockell, Leader of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and chairman of London Councils;
- Cllr Stephen Houghton, Labour Leader of Barnsley Metroploitan Borough Council.
The distinguished panel included councillors, business leaders, environment agency executives and representatives from government departments.
What was at stake?
Regulation does not typically set your heart racing, but during an economic downturn, it can serve as the heart of the recovery. One participant referred to an interview with Lord Alan Sugar, who was asked what he felt about the role of business regulation. He replied that in his experience, most businesses were in favour of regulation for other businesses, but not for their own, which they felt didn’t need it.
Businesses want to be relatively unencumbered to do whatever they need to in order to make the economy grow again, and employment law, business taxes, health and safety laws can get in the way of that. However, such regulation is also essential to protect people in the workplace. There is a need for consistency in regulation, so that people feel fairly treated, but also some flexibility so that regulation fits the needs of local businesses across diverse contexts.
To allow for a full and frank discussion, much of the discussion took place under chatham house rules, so what follows are a selection of (largely unattributed) themes ideas and quotes:
Chris Leslie on the role of the New Local Government Network: “We are the annoying mosquito biting the back side of the elephant”
There is typically a 2 year lag between recesssion and public service cuts- a public service ‘tsunami’ is about to hit us.
If a hung parliament arises, there is likely to be less emphasis on regulation, which is harder to pass, and more on behaviour change.
We are about to contend with an immoveable object of regulation (e.g. no compromise on health and safety) meeting an irresistible force(certainty of budget reductions obliging businesses to cut corners). How can regulation meet this pending challenge?
New model needed: light touch regulation, self-assessing, shift focus onto consumer/producer, slimline enforcement.
“There is a need to let enterprise run riot”
PR problem of business being associated with city fat cats, bonuses etc, but business is part of the solution, not part of the problem. Business should be seen as an integral part of the community, and behave in a way befitting this role.
Unsustainable to have growth in the public sector and loss in private sector.
But is the idea of mutual engagement of local government and business credible? One participant felt it was hard to believe because neither side sounded like they really believed it.
Too much emphasis on business and government. Need to remember the place of citizens- those who might be a business person, a consumer or an architect of community.
Quality of life linked to maximal engagement- people are clamoring for sense of what they can do together.
When improving regulation, need to focus on the real burden areas of employment law, taxes, and health and safety, and not the more peripheral issues that would be easier to amend.
John Penrose presented his “fairly green-tinged” policy paper: Regulation in a post-bureaucratic age
LBRO: Regulation can have collateral benefits to small businesses that need to recognised.
Regulation should be outcome-based- it should focus on principles, and recognise that the detail can vary.
Need for three-way co-regulation between regulators, businesses and consumers.
Mathew Taylor: the conundrum underlying the discussion is the tension between flexibility and consistency. On this point, one participant later responded: “One person’s local autonomy is another’s uneven playing field.”
Another remarked that regulation should be both horizontally and vertically consistent, and that the government placed too much emphasis on the latter.
Wedge reward card being trialled in Kensington and Chelsea.
Towards the end, Mathew Taylor reiterated that the RSA was focused on actions, and wanted to know whether or not a fora existed for getting businesses, regulators, government and consumers together to discuss how to coordinate their actions. The RSA might have a role to play in this regard.
Some suggested that in old manufacturing and mining tows, the spirit of entrepreneurship was relatively underdeveloped. One participant remarking:
“The last thing you needed down a mine was an entrepreneur.”
RSA Vision
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