Posts Tagged ‘Will Hutton’

Weekend reading, 1 October 2010

Friday, October 1st, 2010

A version of this list of recommendations also comes out as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

Anthony Giddens and Martin Rees – Wake the world
Since my column this week focussed on Anthony Giddens, it seems appropriate to highlight this post on the excellent NZ-based Sciblogs site, which he has co-authored. As well as his earlier work on Third Way, Giddens has gone on to write The Politics of Climate Change (2009), while Rees is president of the Royal Society. From the post:

It cannot be emphasised too strongly that the core scientific findings about human-induced climate change and the dangers it poses for our collective future remain intact. The most important relevant fact is based on uncontroversial measurements: the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is higher than it has been for at least the last half-million years. It has risen by 30 per cent since the start of the industrial era, mainly because of the burning of fossil fuels. If the world continues to depend on fossil fuels to the extent it does today, carbon dioxide will reach double pre-industrial levels within the next half-century. This build-up is triggering long-term warming, the physical reasons for which are well-known and demonstrable in the laboratory.

Will Hutton – Extract: Them and Us: Politics, Greed and Inequality – Why We Need a Fair Society
Andrew Marr – Start the Week with Andrew Marr (27/09/10) featuring Will Hutton, Lars Kroijer, Billy Ivory and Ronit Avni
Claire Armitstead – Guardian Books podcast (24/09/10): Polly Toynbee and Will Hutton
Meanwhile, Giddens’ interlocutor in my column, Will Hutton, has a new book out in the UK, and it looks like it could be an important one. I’ve previously linked to a trial run of the its arguments in a lecture Hutton gave at the London School of Economics late last year. The book is called Them and Us and in it Hutton aims to place ‘fairness’ at the heart of political discourse. The Observer has published an extract, and here are a few snippets from that:

We need a shared understanding of what constitutes fairness in order to restore our society. At present, there is none. The rich argue that it is fair for them to be so wealthy, in much the same way as Athenian noblemen believed that their riches were signifiers of their worth. They believe they owe little or nothing to society, government or public institutions. They accept no limit or proportionality to their wealth, benchmarking themselves only against their fellow rich. Philanthropic giving is declining; tax avoidance is rising; and executive pay is rising exponentially. All three are justified by the doctrine that the rich simply deserve to be rich.

And:

The principle of “just deserts” is a key part of our culture. We are not flat-earth egalitarians. But nor do we share the view held by the private-equity or hedge-fund partner in Mayfair that wealth is a signifier of personal worth in its own right. We believe it has to be earned, and we believe the rewards should be commensurate with the discretionary effort. Proportionality is a key value. Its trashing by those at the top of the financial and business community risks an angry populist backlash fuelled not by envy, as they airily claim, but by a visceral human instinct.

This last point is an important one, I think. Over recent years the Right, here and elsewhere, has been very effective at reframing any concerns about the disproportionate growth in income at the top as being about envy. When, as Hutton points out, it is actually about fairness.

Hutton elaborates on these points in an interview on Andrew Marr’s Start the Week radio show, which you can listen to on an audio file. (You can also subscribe to the Start the Week podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/stw.) He is also featured on last week’s Guardian Books audio alongside the highly-regarded Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, whose new book The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? also looks very interesting. And he is giving a new Royal Society for the Arts lecture next week, which will also be available by podcast.

Matthew Yglesias – Zero Tolerance Done Right

The commonplace scenario in the United States when people decide to “get tough” and implement a policy of “zero tolerance” for infractions of the rules is to in practice tolerate the majority of infractions by not catching perpetrators and then hit a minority of violators with extremely harsh sanctions. For years now, Mark Kleiman has been pushing the reverse approach — make sanctions relatively mild, but make them swift and nearly certain. He teams up with Kirk Humphreys to describe a version of this that’s led to a sharp reduction in South Dakota’s drunk driving fatalities . . . [read more]

Dani Rodrik – In (some) economists’ topsy turvy world, cutting firing costs will decrease unemployment – except it won’t

I hope someone from the IMF or OECD – the two institutions responsible for convincing the Spaniards that such a reform is an urgent priority – will explain to me how reducing the cost of firing workers can lower unemployment in the midst of a decline in labour demand. [read more]

And I also have a couple of recommendations from others to pass on:

Charles Taylor – Solidarity in a Pluralist Age
The Canadian philosopher and social theorist on the challenge to progressivism from increasing population diversity.

Mark Harris (New York Magazine) – Inventing Facebook
I hadn’t realised that The Social Network, the upcoming movie about Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, was written by Aaron Sorkin. I love The West Wing and am a keen Facebook user, so I’m now really looking forward to this film!

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Looking back on the Third Way

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

This post is about Tony Giddens, not Tony Blair.

In other words, it’s about the intellectual foundations of the ‘Third Way’, rather than an assessment of how political parties that described themselves as ‘Third Way’ did in government.

And Anthony Giddens is probably the writer most strongly associated with the ‘Third Way’ as an theoretical project. His 1998 book The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy provided an intellectual justification for, and both reflected and influenced the practice of, New Labour in the UK and its overseas counterparts. (I’ll discuss the impact of ‘Third Way’ thinking on the Clark government in New Zealand in an upcoming column.)

Giddens is an academic sociologist who, by the time he came to write The Third Way, had already been working and publishing for over 25 years, starting with Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. An Analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber in 1971. Much of his work was heavily theoretical rather than closely related to contemporary political debates. An Australian collection, Social Theory: A Guide to Central Thinkers, published in 1991, described his career up to that point:

Over the past two decades he has published more than twenty books and established himself as a central thinker. Giddens’ writings combined a detailed exegesis of the classics with a sensitivity to the issues at the forefront of contemporary social theory. He brings these concerns together under the rubric of an overarching project. This project involves identifying and criticising the shortcomings of traditional thought and developing a way of theorising issues that are obscured or ignored within that framework.

. . . This involves a reconceptualisation of the concepts of action, structure and system in order to integrate them into a new theoretical approach. Giddens calls this new approach the ‘theory of structuration’.

Giddens has been heavily involved with the UK-based Policy Network over the last decade, and this year he has published two essays for them reflecting on New Labour and his book The Third Way. These essays provide a useful insight into which features of his mid-90s project he feels are likely to endure.

‘The Third Way’ as a phrase is not one of them. In his essay “The Third Way revisited” Giddens expresses some regret that he didn’t stick with his orginal (if less flashy) choice, The Renewal of Social Democracy, rather than relegating it to a subtitle: “If I had published the book under the original title, it would have been clear that it was rooted firmly in social democratic traditions.”

Giddens insists that for him ‘the Third Way’ was never about “a ‘middle way’ between left and right, socialism and capitalism, or anything else, but a left-of-centre political philosophy, concerned with exactly what was stated in my original title, the renewal of social democracy. It was NOT a succumbing to neo-liberalism or market fundamentalism.”

I’d just about be ready to buy this, and accept that that fateful title was just an unfortunate phrase that was doing the rounds at the time (thanks to the Swedish Social democrats and Bill Clinton). Except that Giddens’ previous book, where he began his exploration of some of the themes of The Third Way was entitled Beyond Left and Right — the Future of Radical Politics (1994).

Moreover, we then come to this:

On the contrary, I argued that social democrats had to move beyond two failed, or compromised, philosophies of the past, one being neo-liberalism, the other being “old-style social democracy,” characterised by a top-down state ownership of the “commanding heights of the economy” and Keynesian national demand management.

And we are back to ‘equidistance’. Despite his earlier denials, Giddens instinctively depicts his ‘Third Way’ as being as far away from traditional social democracy as it was from neo-liberalism.

Similarly, in “The rise and fall of New Labour”, Giddens again tries to have it both ways. Early on, he states: “A different relationship of government to business had to be established, recognising the key role of enterprise in wealth creation and the limits of state power. No country, however large and powerful, could control that marketplace: hence the ‘prawn cocktail offensive’ that Labour launched to woo the support of the City.” But towards the end, he admonishes: “It was a fundamental error, however, to allow the prawn cocktail offensive to evolve into a fawning dependence and turn the UK into something like a gigantic tax haven.”

Giddens’ positions about both the Third Way’s relationship to traditional social democracy and its relationship to wealth are not inherently contradictory, but in both cases they require a delicate balancing act. And I’m not sure that he provides sufficient guidance about how to achieve that balance.

Giddens and his ‘Third Way’ project have attracted many critics over the years, including some extended and detailed rebuttals. But, from my perspective, the most effective challenge came when he debated Will Hutton, another reformist social democrat who had an early influence on Blair, in their co-edited volume On the Edge (2000). At one point Hutton says to Giddens:

Well, which is to be — regulation because capitalism can be destructive now that communism has left a gap or starry-eyed faith in capitalism’s boundless creativity? Don’t traduce Schumpeter. Your argument and his are essentially the same: capitalism may be ruthlessly destructive but it is also creative. At one moment you want to celebrate capitalism, at another you’re wary of it, but without — unlike Schumpeter — offering an integrated view of how both propositions could be true.

Giddens was right that social democracy needed renewal. The ascendancy of neo-liberalism, and the faltering of progressive thinking in the face of it, suggested that new ideas were required, which took into account new social and economic contexts.

And the changes that he identified in 1998 (and restates in “The Third Way revisited”) still seem convincing as new elements a modern progressivism needs to take on board, perhaps even moreso today. These were: the intensifying of globalisation; expanding individualism; the growth of reflexivity; and the increasing intrusion of ecological risk into the political field.

But in the end the failure of the Third Way was its inability to repeat the task that Weber and Keynes, between them, had achieved a generation before. This was to set out a compelling account of, not only the need for but also the effectiveness of, state action.

That theoretical failing was to be reflected in the limitations of early-21st century progressive governments in practice. And it is this that a new wave of progressive leaders and progressive thinkers need to remedy.

Links

Further Reading

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Weekend reading (and listening), 6 August 2010

Friday, August 6th, 2010

A version of this list of recommendations also comes out earlier in the day as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

Matthew Taylor – Please read this – it might just be important and Not too slow, not too fast
Matthew Taylor is an interesting guy. He used to be an advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair, and now he’s the chief executive of the 250-year-old Royal Society for the Arts. His blog isn’t as high-profile or widely-read as some others in Britain, but I frequently find it worthwhile and thought-provoking. Taylor is currently getting somewhat involved with David Cameron’s Big Society idea, and trying to treat it seriously, rather than as an intellectual smokescreen for cutting public services — both these posts reflect this effort in different ways.

Grant Robertson – Reciprocity and the Left
Anthony Painter – A greater emphasis on reciprocity will be a crucial part of Labour’s response to a Cameronian residual state (chapter in Rutherford and Lockey, eds, Labour’s Future)
Will Hutton – Them and Us: how capitalism without fairness is capitalism without a future
Like Chris Hipkins (who I mentioned last week), Grant Robertson is part of Labour’s large and impressive “Class of ‘08″. His post is an interesting one about the role of the concept of ‘reciprocity’ in progressive thinking. It draws upon work by Anthony Painter, whose work for Open Left on demographic and attitudinal changes and their impact on the UK politics I recommended in the newsletter back in March. Open Left is hosted by the thinktank Demos and was set up by James Purnell, whose ideas I’ve previously discussed in some detail (Purnell has recently become chair of another thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research — I’m not sure how that will affect his involvement with Open Left.)

Interestingly, one of the heavy-hitters of modern progressivism has recently been stressing a similar theme to Robertson and Painter. Will Hutton’s The State We’re In was one of the founding texts for New Labour in the UK and even though Blair & co pulled back from ‘the stakeholder society’ idea, his Observer columns and work with the Work Foundation thinktank continue to be influential. His next book will be Them and Us: Politics, Greed and Inequality – Why We Need a Fair Society, released later this year and described as “a timely examination of fairness and due dessert”. Late last year he did a trial run of its arguments in a lecture at the London School of Economics, which is is well worth listening to or watching (see the link above).

Matthew Yglesias – Military Spurring Research Into Self-Driving Cars

“One intriguing technological possibility in the transportation domain is the idea of “self-driving” cars—robot cars, basically—that could drive a route without the need for a human being to pilot the car. This kind of technology could potentially revolutionize the urban landscape.”

Intriguing indeed!

Also:
Ben Rogers – Rethinking the role of thinktanks
R0b (The Standard) – For the economic record
Stuart Nash MP – Child support debt – the national shame

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Vote with your feet – or work for change?

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Bundesarchiv: Wolfgang Krueger // CC BY-SA 3.0

http://www.flickr.com/ photos/peasandcornbread/ // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Progressives should embrace increased consumer choice as the best way of raising standards in areas like health and education.

That’s the view of economist John Kay, who we heard a bit about at Policy Progress last month, and who was interviewed by Kim Hill on Radio NZ this weekend talking about his new book Obliquity.

Explaining this view, Kay stated that ‘exit’ is much more effective than ‘voice’ in raising standards.

But is that really so, and what do we mean by ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ anyway?

As it happens, I’ve written a description of these concepts and an argument in favour of the importance of voice. In fact, I wrote this thirteen years ago as aspects of students’ association submissions to the 1997 tertiary education review.

After mentioning exit and voice in that earlier post, I thought it would be interesting to dig out those submissions and see how my views back then have held up. Having done that, I decided that rather than write something new, which might be influenced by having read Kay, it would be worth presenting what I argued in 1997.

The following paragraphs therefore are from the June 1997 APSU/NZUSA submission Building a World-Class Tertiary Education System:

For students, institutional responsiveness is good in itself. But for the government, it is also a very useful measure for ensuring quality provision.

This can be conceptualised in terms of economic theory, using the exit/voice analytic framework developed by Hirschman. Exit is the withdrawal from a relationship with a person or organisation when one becomes dissatisfied with that relationship. Voice means directly expressing one’s dissatisfaction to the relevant person or organisation.

. . . [as well as using 'exit'] there is also a great deal of scope to influence quality by improving student ‘voice’. This is a underdeveloped area and a crucial one. There is increasing recognition that effective use of voice can be, if anything, more important in fostering good practice than exit.

For instance, in the macroeconomic arena, there is a growing literature on the success of economies which use bank-based financial systems (emphasising ‘voice’) compared to those using capital market-based systems (emphasising ‘exit’). (See e.g. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Banks Versus Markets as Mechanisms for Allocating and Coordinating Investment, 1992); Michael Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, 1990, and Capital Choices: Changing The Way America Invests In Industry, 1992; and Will Hutton, The State We’re In, 1995.)

And from the December 1997 NZUSA submission Looking to the Future:

Exit can be a powerful strategy but it does not have much subtlety to it: it is all or nothing. Yet some matters, while important, are not central enough to the learning experience to contemplate exit over. For such matters, effective voice is more useful. Similarly, exit is good at highlighting matters of concern, but not so good at generating solutions. Where students have something to offer in terms of developing improvements or suggesting alternative directions, then voice is more valuable.

Even where exit is a viable strategy not all students may be able to, or wish to, exercise their right to transfer to another institution if this was possible. Exit may be a response to deteriorating quality, but it can also cause quality to deteriorate further. A programme with dwindling numbers may suffer from reduced resources, poor morale and fewer fellow students to enrich the learning envionment. In a world with perfect information and zero transaction costs, all students could exit simultaneously and none would suffer, but these circumstances seem unlikely to occur.

While the context of these arguments is clearly tertiary student involvement in institutional processes, most of the arguments are applicable more widely across various areas of public policy.

However, as this last passage (responding to claims about the importance of exit that were based on studies in the school context) implicitly acknowleges, the relative importance of ‘voice’ and ‘exit’ may differ from one policy area to another:

The situation of university students is very different from the parents of school children. Students tend to be more concentrated at one site (the campus), are more likely to know one another, and the experience that they have in common (being a student at a given institution) occupies a greater part of their lives.

So perhaps the lesson from this is that, rather than assert either voice or exit as being the superior mechanism, we should look at the particular characteristics of the area that we are seeking to improve. In some cases it may be empowering service-users’ choice (via ‘exit’) that is more likely to make a difference, whereas in others finding ways to give them an effective say (‘voice’) may be more important.

What’s your view about ‘exit’ and ‘voice’? Are they useful concepts for looking at the different ways that people can make organisations respond to their needs? Do you agree with John Kay that ‘exit’ is generally the more powerful mechanism? Or do you feel that, as my 1997 argument implies, it depends on issues such as how realistic it is for people to organise and express themselves collectively?

Postscript: this article has Joseph Stiglitz looking back on his 1992 paper, cited above, in light of the global financial crisis.

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