Is Rigorous Advocacy an Oxymoron?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
I gave a talk on the social and educational value of chess in Dallas, Texas recently. The person driving me to the event, John Jacobs, read on the blurb that I worked at the RSA, “a think tank in London”, and asked, in a melodious southern drawl: “I see that you work in a think tank. So what do you think about?”
I gave the quick elevator pitch for our project(social networks are a tool than can be visualised and used to assist in community regeneration), but the real answer is that we don’t just think, but also research and advocate. In fact the core tension in any think tank is between the rigour of your research and the relevance of your findings. You are obliged to pay allegiance to Truth, Validity, Reliability etc, but while you want the blessings of such celestial Gods, the success of your projects are typically judged by their impact on the terrestial Gods of Media, Funders and Whitehall. (And at the RSA we also want the participants in the research, the people ‘on the ground’ to endorse what we do).
This context explains the recent musings of our great leader, who accurately reflected the ambience of a meeting yesterday in which the Connected Communities Team showed Mathew a few emerging findings, subject to some important qualifications, and he told us which of the ‘findings’ had traction, and which ones needed more work.
When you spend weeks collecting data and trying to make sense of it(especially social network analysis data), you realise that your ‘findings’ are actually constructed on a host of more or less problematic assumptions that are part of the choice architecture of any research project . But when you want to make a splash, and tell the world that you have a new model of social change, there is an understandable tendency to gloss over such details and focus on the strength of the core message, even if the strong core message is based on tentative foundations.
You only realise how messy social research is when you start trying to do some, and although you may want ‘evidence’, what you tend to get is concepts that are contested, samples that are more indicative than representative, methods that may or may not be replicable, correlations that may or may not be causal, and ‘findings’ that were created by looking in a particular way for a particular purpose. As any honest researcher will tell you, respecting such tensions is crucial if the research is going to be informative, or provide the basis for action.
Such rigour is not easy becuase most research is timebound and opportunistic. It is a huge challenge to feel confident that you have tapped into some truth about human nature or the structure of society. For instance, at a recent RSA event, Christakis mentioned that it took 25 years to collect the Farmingham public health data that provided the basis for our interest in social networks, and 5 years and 5 millions dollars to analyse it.
So here is the nub of working at a place like this. If you are passionate about an idea, you can be a vigorous advocate for it, but as part of a project research team, you are asked to be a rigorous advocate. You are asked to push an idea, and, often simultaneously, asked to support it with evidence, even when it is in the nature of evidence to be equivocal and open to interpretation.
The challenge is that robust advocacy is unequivocal and passionate, while reliable research is equivocal and cautious. So is rigorous advocacy an oxymoron? Or are there ways to feel at ease with the conflicting demands of rigour and relevance?
How many friends does one cyborg need?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, Social Networks
Yesterday’s RSA Thursday featured Robin Dunbar, Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, but best known for having his own number (a sure sign of success), 150, which he argues is the upper limit on the number of people you can maintain stable relationships with.
The idea is powerful, but it’s not new. I first came across it more than a decade ago when it was already called Dunbar’s number (Dunbar’s first major paper on the idea was in 1992), but it was then a much simpler anthropological notion about optimal group sizes, i.e. the upper size that communities and organisations should maintain in order to retain the informal efficiency of mutual recognition, trust and stability, rather than creating cumbersome rules and regulations that we seem to need in society at large.
In this respect, Dunbar’s new book, How many friends does one person need? can be thought of as Dunbar 2.0, in which the idea has been revitalised as a corrective to the rampant polyphilia on facebook and other social networking sites. Dunbar 2.0 says loud and clear that you can have thousands of facebook ‘friends’ if you want, but there are constraints on how many of them can meaningfully be called friends.
There can be no uncontested notion of what ‘friend’ means, but Dunbar argues that humans consistently show a pattern of layering their social contacts, with a core of close friends around 5, 15 considered ‘good friends’, 50 as ‘friends’ and up to 150 as acquaintances. Jacob Morgan’s blog gives a powerful graphic for this idea and the discussion on socialmediatoday.com is well worth reading.
Dunbar’s work is highly complex and interdisciplinary, and his core claim is that there are two constraints on stable relationships. The first is cognitive, the neural density and processing power needed to retain detailed information on people, or ‘keep track’ of them as Dunbar put it yesterday. The second is temporal, the time we need to invest so that people to create mutual interest and regard, and so that such relationships don’t decay, i.e so that friends don’t become strangers all over again.
There are many things to say about this fascinating idea, but I want to raise one in particular. It might be true that human beings are limited by Dunbar’s number, but much of Dunbar’s work seems to be based on extrapolations on primate behaviour. He thinks in evolutionary terms that are framed principally by biology and anthropology. But I wonder whether he should pay more attention to technological change as part of cultural evolution, for 21st century human beings in the developed world are now suspended somewhere between primates and robots. Indeed, many, most notably Andy Clark, have argued that human beings should be thought of as cyborgs.
“We cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature’s very own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forbears. The hard task, of course, is now to transform all this from (mere) impressionistic sketch into a balanced scientific account of the extended mind.”
So that would be my challenge for developing a Dunbar 3.0. Our minds and our technologies are increasingly part of continuim, with much of our memory and functionality stored in digital form. A person may only need a certain number of friends, or be capable of maintaining 150, but what of person-plus? What of the fact that we now live and learn and think with machines? What of the Cyborgs that we are becoming? We are so now thoroughly dependent on digital tools, and our sense of self interwoven with them, that it is far from unimaginable that future technologies will overcome the temporal and cognitive constraints intimated by Dunbar’s existing work.
Perhaps we are already doing so, because it is easier to keep track of people, and it is easier to invest time in relationships than it has ever been.
However, one of the many big suggestive points made yesterday was that we may need to physically touch people to remain close to them. The importance of touch for bonding is not fully researched yet, but it might be crucial- those handshakes, hugs and cheek-kisses may matter more than you know… and as Dunbar noted, it is hard to imagine ‘virtual touch’…but you never know…
Think Tank Clash
Last night’s Think Tank Clash at the South Bank Centre, organised by New Deal of The Mind was hopefully the first of many such events. Around 300 people were hosted by comedian Rory Bremner and the atmosphere was as playful as it was political, with a pint or two enjoyed by many of the audience, and most of the participants. Reviews of the Think Tank Clash format so far have been good, though I am sure if the event is repeated it has scope to be even better.
There were 8 think tanks involved: Progress, ResPublica, Fabian Society, Reform, Policy Exchange, IPPR, Demos, and of course, The RSA. You might not have thought of the RSA as a ‘think tank’ before, and indeed the organisation as a whole, with our fellowship, House, and Events programme, does not match that description very tightly. One way to square this circle is to think of the RSA Projects team as a think tank within the RSA, albeit one that places less emphasis on producing pamphlets and informing policy, and more on practical impact in the real world.
Each think tank had two representatives, the head honcho and their ‘witness’. I was Mathew Tayor’s witness, and I think the role of the witnesses more generally was to signal that the organisations involved are more than just their most public face and voice, an association perpetuated by the media reflex to seek comment from prominent and familiar faces.
We were pitched against Demos, represented by their Director Richard Reeves, and Stephen Scott, who looked a little bit like Kramer from Seinfeld. There was no Oxford Union style ‘motion’ to debate, but we were charged with convincing the audience that in the realm of big ideas, our work on social networks, particularly their role in community regeneration, was more important/pertinent/illuminating than Demos’s work on Character .
Needless to say, the debate involves a bit of a false binary, and is more about means than ends, because it makes little sense to be against character or networks. Demos argue that good societies need good people, which is a powerful point, and their claim that character is largely shaped by good parenting is carefully argued and empirically grounded. More specutively, they suggest that government should take a more proactive role in encouraging good parenting.
Our response is that networks are character forming, and that who your parents are and how they are is largely based on the nature of their social network. Moreover, character may be an important personal quality, but social networks can be thought of as a public good- a shared resource that nobody owns but that everybody can potentially benefit from. In short, our idea is more progressive.
The vote was close, but we won for two main reasons: 1) I emphasised that our research was grounded in fieldwork on the ground, and that we were literally ‘knocking on doors’ to make sense of the power of social networks in deprived communities, and 2) Mathew Taylor looked like “the sexy bad guy in a James Bond movie”
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.
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?
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.”
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.”
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