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.
Private interests, public sphere: learning from the street
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
My name’s Alasdair Jones, and, alongside my colleague Jonathan Rowson, I’m one of the two new researchers on the RSA’s Connected Communities programme.
Having written my PhD on the co-production, through use and design, of public space on London’s South Bank, it was a great joy to find that on my first day at the RSA the evening talk Cities and Citizenship: Surviving the 21st Century concerned “the relationship between the way we design our city and our perception and experience of citizenship.” Moreover, among the panellists was Anna Minton, who’s recent book Ground Control has generated a resurgence of interest in the changing nature of Britain’s urban public realm.
While the themes that the discussion sought to address – cities and citizenship – were relatively abstract, a number of more grounded issues that arose struck me as pertinent to the Connected Communities action research that Jonathan and I are embarking on. Specifically, and perhaps not surprisingly given his extensive and lauded role in community regeneration, in the opening presentation by Lord Andrew Mawsom we were reminded of the importance of the physical, everyday, walked street to the vitality of local neighbourhoods. The design and quality of the buildings that line our routes through the city are, according to Lord Mawsom, central to shaping the way we view and conduct ourselves, and to the extent to which we are other-regarding.
Moreover, through references to Lord Mawsom’s own observations of the St Paul’s Way project in which he’s currently involved, we were told that it is not only the morphology of the street, but also, if not more so, its use that can help to foster social capital. In his example, it was through working part-time at the pharmacy on St Paul’s Way that two students from the nearby school pursued vocations in the medico-pharmaceutical sector. Their vocational interests developed outside of the educational setting, that is, and for Lord Mawsom this points to the need for an educational model that is oriented towards the community, rather than turning it’s back on and fencing itself off from it.
This point was picked up by Matthew Taylor, who fleshed the RSA’s idea of ‘schools without boundaries’ – that “in essence…we should make the work of schools, and the wider project of developing the next generation, the task of the whole community and not just parents and schools.” This offers an interesting challenge to the way that we think about the urban realm, and in particular to the way that we understand boundaries between public and private (as broadly conceived) institutions and spheres. Taking the terminology in a very literal sense, it means dismantling the boundaries that have been erected between loci of education and those of everyday community life.
This was of particular interest to me because Anna Minton’s most recent work argues, by contrast, that we need to be more assertive in the way that we distinguish between public and private realms in our city. From this view, the big mistake of planning in the last few decades has been to allow private developers to construct seemingly public spaces. In response, she argues, we should be looking to build spaces for doing nothing (or anything), to build spaces unburdened by some functional predisposition.
What I am interested in here is in the role that ‘private’ (or exclusive) institutions and activities – be they shops, schools, or even skateboarding on London’s South Bank – play in ‘connecting’ our public realm. It is the shop, in Lord Mawsom’s example, that provides the context and facilitates the contact through which the students from over the road find their vocations. It is through skateboarding that young people from different parts of London meet on South Bank meet and exchange views.
Paradoxically, is it not through the imposition of ‘private’ functions and activities on a space, rather than through their erasure, that a well-connected community, or a vital ‘public’ sphere, is produced? If we want more civic-minded citizens, might we want to look not at excising institutions and activities from our cityscapes, but instead at how best to harness the capacity of these institutions and activities to promote social interaction and connectivity? Shouldn’t we be looking to learn from our regular high streets, where private settings provide the context for regular public interactions, rather than promoting the development in isolation of these two spheres?
RSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.