innovation
The Inequality of Wealth: Why it Matters and How to Fix it – review
In The Inequality of Wealth: Why it Matters and How to Fix it, Liam Byrne examines the UK’s deep-seated inequality which has channelled wealth away from ordinary people (disproportionately youth and minority groups) and into the hands of the super-rich. While the solutions Byrne presents – from boosting wages to implementing an annual wealth tax – are not new, the book synthesises them into a coherent strategy for tackling this critical problem, writes Vamika Goel.
Liam Byrne launched the book at an LSE event in February 2024: watch it back on YouTube.
The Inequality of Wealth: Why it Matters and How to Fix it. Liam Byrne. Bloomsbury. 2024.
Wealth inequality, a pressing issue of our times, reinforces all other forms of inequality, from social and political to ecological inequality. In The Inequality of Wealth, Liam Byrne recognises this fact and emphasises the need to move away from a narrow focus on addressing income inequality. He reaffirms the need to deal with wealth inequality and address the issue of inequality holistically.
The book adopts a multi-pronged approach to addressing wealth inequality in the UK. It is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the extent of wealth inequality and how it affects democracy and damages meritocracy. The second part discusses the emergence of neoliberalism which has promoted unequal distribution of resources, while the third part proposes corrective measures to reverse wealth inequality.
According to Forbes, the world’s billionaires have doubled from 1001 to 2640 during 2010 and 2022, adding around £7.1 trillion to their combined wealth.
The first chapter reflects on the exorbitant surge in wealth globally during the past decade, primarily enjoyed by the world’s super-rich. According to Forbes, the world’s billionaires have doubled from 1001 to 2640 during 2010 and 2022, adding around £7.1 trillion to their combined wealth. In the UK, wealth disparity has risen, with the top 10 per cent holding about half of the wealth while the bottom 50 per cent held only 5 per cent in Great Britain in 2018-20, as per the Wealth and Assets Survey. Byrne claims that this inequality has only been exacerbated in recent years. Despite adverse negative shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, austerity, and Brexit, about £87 billion has been added to UK billionaire’s wealth during 2021 and 2023.
The book highlights that youth have borne the brunt of this widening wealth disparity. According to data from Office of National Statistics (ONS), those aged between twenty and forty, hold only eight per cent of Britain’s total wealth. In contrast, people aged between fifty-five and seventy-five owned over half of Britain’s total wealth in 2018-20. Their prospects of wealth accumulation have further declined with a squeeze in wages and booming asset prices as a result of quantitative easing. Byrne contends that this has made Britain an “inheritocracy” wherein a person’s parental wealth, social connections and the ability to access good education are more important determinants of wealth than hard work and talent.
Those aged between twenty and forty, hold only eight per cent of Britain’s total wealth.
The second part of the book explores the spread of the idea of neoliberalism since the 1980s, that helped sustain and flourish wealth inequality. Neoliberalism promoted the idea of market supremacism and reduced the role of the state. The later chapters in this section engage in depth with rent-seeking behaviour by corporates and the increase in market concentration via mergers and acquisitions.
The third part of the book proposes corrective measures needed to reverse wealth inequality. The book contends that the starting point of arresting wealth disparity is to boost labour incomes by creating well-paying, knowledge-intensive jobs. Byrne does not elucidate as to what he means by these knowledge-intensive jobs. Usually, knowledge-intensive jobs are those in financial services, high-tech manufacturing, health, telecommunications, and education. Byrne argues that earnings in knowledge-intensive jobs are about 30 per cent higher than average pay. However, these jobs accounted for only about a fifth of all jobs and a quarter of economic output in 2021. Hence, promoting such jobs will significantly raise workers’ earnings.
The author maintains that knowledge-intensive jobs can be generated by giving impetus to state-backed research and development (R&D) spending and innovation. He draws attention to low growth in R&D spending in UK at per cent between 2000 and 2020, when global R&D spending has more than tripled to £1.9 trillion. However, there are some fundamental concerns regarding the effectiveness of such reforms in curbing inequality and ensuring social mobility.
People of Black African ethnicity are disproportionately employed in caring, leisure and other service-based occupations. They also hold about eight times less wealth than their white counterparts.
First, knowledge-intensive jobs are highly capital-intensive and high R&D spending may not generate enough jobs or may make some existing jobs redundant. The author has not substantiated his claim with any empirical evidence. Second, it’s possible that innovation spending and jobs perpetuate the existing social and regional inequalities. In the UK, about half of all knowledge-intensive jobs are generated in just two regions: London and the South East. To address regional disparities, Byrne suggests setting up regional banks, training skills and integration at the regional level, and promoting Research and Development (R&D) in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) via tax credits and innovation vouchers. However, no mechanism is laid out with which to tackle social inequality. People of Black African ethnicity are disproportionately employed in caring, leisure and other service-based occupations. They also hold about eight times less wealth than their white counterparts. It seems likely that new knowledge-intensive jobs would disproportionately benefit people of white ethnicity from wealthy backgrounds with connections and access to good education.
Another measure specified to boost labour incomes is to shift towards a system that adequately rewards workers for their services, that is, a system of “civic capitalism”, as coined by Colin Hay. Byrne alleges that one step to ensure this is to create an in-built mechanism that ensures workers’ savings are channelled into companies that adopt sustainable and labour-friendly practices. One of the ways to achieve this is to require the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) sets up guidelines and benchmarks for social and environmental goals for the companies in which it invests. In this way, Byrne has adopted an indirect approach to workers’ welfare, as opposed to a direct approach through promoting trade unionisation among workers, which in the UK has fallen from 32.4 per cent in 1995 to 22.3 per cent in 2022 . This would enhance workers’ bargaining power to increase their wages and secure better benefits and security.
Apart from boosting workers’ wages, Byrne underscores the need to create wealth for all, ie, a wealth-owning democracy. Inspired by Michael Sherraden’s idea of “asset-based welfare” and Individual Development Accounts, Byrne proposes to create a Universal Savings Account that enables every individual to accumulate both pension and human capital. He advocates that a Universal Savings Account can be created by merging Auto-enrolment pension accounts, Lifetime Individual Savings Accounts (LISAs) and the Help to Save scheme. Re-iterating the proposals from the pioneering studies by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation, Byrne proposes to expand the coverage of the auto-enrolment pension scheme to low-income earners, the self-employed and youth aged between 16 and 18, to increase savings rates and to reduce withdrawal limits from the pension fund.
In the last chapter, Byrne emphasises the enlargement of net household wealth relative to GDP from 435 per cent in 2000 to about 700 per cent by 2017, without any commensurate change in wealth-related taxes to GDP share. This has created a problem of unequal taxation across income groups, which, he states, must be rectified. To do this, he endorses Arun Advani, Alex Cobham and James Meade’s proposals of introducing an annual wealth tax.
Byrne attempts to encapsulate an existing range of ideas for reform pertaining to diverse domains like state-backed institutions, corporate law restructuring, social security and tax reforms.
Overall, the book presents a coherent strategy to reverse wealth disparity and build a wealth-owning democracy through a guiding principle of delivering social justice and promoting equality. The remedies for reversing wealth inequality offered in the book are not new; rather, Byrne attempts to encapsulate an existing range of ideas for reform pertaining to diverse domains like state-backed institutions, corporate law restructuring, social security and tax reforms. The pathway for the acceptance and adoption of all these reforms is no mean feat; it would entail a shift from a narrow focus on profit-maximisation towards holistic attempts to adequately reward workers for their services and improve their wellbeing.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Progress & New Ideas in Philosophy
“In what state do we find the research produced in academic analytic philosophy?… Things are better than they’ve been for eighty years or so.”
[“Tartan Ribbon”. Photo by Thomas Sutton, method by James Clerk Maxwell]
That’s Richard Pettigrew, professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol, pushing back against pessimism about philosophy (see here for example, or here) in a recent post at his blog.
Why think, as he does, that philosophical research today is of “very high average quality”? He says:
Partly, that’s because analytic philosophers are more often drawing on, incorporating, and showing proper respect towards the insights of traditions with which they’ve less often interacted in the past, taking their arguments and frameworks into account in the way they’ve long taken scientific findings and arguments and frameworks into account: traditions such as classic Chinese philosophy, critical theory, black feminist thought, and many more. Partly it’s because those who got their doctorates in the past decade or so have brought a slew of new questions to the table. And partly, I would say, it’s because the work done using the methodology the discipline has always used and on the questions it’s always tackled is currently extremely well done.
Pettigrew has some interesting defenses of some of the aspects of philosophical research we tend to hear a lot of complaints about, such as referee-proofed papers and epicyclical papers (“the sort of paper that takes a previous attempt to answer a question, notes that it doesn’t quite work, perhaps because it fails to cover a particular case that’s offered as a counterexample, and then proposes a new answer that is very closely related but incorporates some small amendment that allows it to account for that case”).
What was of particular value in his post, though, were his reflections on what, in the areas in which he’s an expert, strike him as philosophical progress and philosophical novelty.
Consider this an invitation to share your thoughts about progress or novelty in your areas of specialization.
Pettigrew writes:
Progress: is philosophy making any? We certainly aren’t establishing many unconditional facts with certainty, as we might think mathematics is, nor even with high credence, as you might think biology or ecology or linguistics is. But then it’s hard to see how we ever could. What premise that could ground a philosophical argument attracts widespread assent? There are no undisputed foundational premises in our discipline. And yet I think we are making profound and substantial progress in understanding issues.
Take the area I know best, which is epistemic utility theory or accuracy-first epistemology. The idea is that the sole fundamental source of epistemic value is accuracy or proximity to truth, and all norms that govern what we should believe can be derived from this. In the last twenty five years we’ve come to understand a huge amount about which norms might be established in this way and which might not, and that in turn has shed light on these norms, because one comes to look differently at a norm of belief when one sees that it can’t be shown to further the goal of accuracy.
Or take another area about which I’m beginning to learn: welfare ethics. Building on Harsanyi’s groundbreaking theorem, and proceeding by adding what we might call epicycles, we’ve gained remarkable insight into what principles about group decision-making under uncertainty one must reject if one wishes to reject utilitarianism. We now know in much greater detail the costs incurred by egalitarianism and prioritarianism, for instance.
In neither of these cases—accuracy-first epistemology or welfare ethics—have we established any unconditional facts with any degree of certainty. It is always open to people to reject veritism and it is open to them to reject the principles that give utilitarianism, and it’s hard to see how we could ever show they are irrational for doing so. In the former case, though, we’ve learned what we get if we accept it, and in the latter we’ve learned what we must be prepared to sacrifice if we reject utilitarianism. And this is progress. It’s substantial progress, I think. It’s the sort of progress we can make on these questions.
Finally, novelty: is there enough? Perhaps different areas have different amounts, but in epistemology, I’d say there’s a great deal, much of it generated by the very people who are typically taken to be under pressure from the publication system to keep ploughing the same furrows as their predecessors, namely, people who completed their doctorates in the past ten years and don’t yet have tenure, if they’re in the US system. It’s awkward to name names because it sounds like you think those you don’t list aren’t innovative, so let me be clear that this is entirely off the top of my head and reflects more what I’ve been working on myself recently than any judgment about people I don’t list. But let me mention Julia Staffel’s work on degrees of irrationality and transitional attitudes, Rima Basu’s work on the moral dimension of beliefs, Georgi Gardiner’s work on attention, Jane Friedman’s work on inquiry, Kevin Dorst’s work on rationalising apparent irrationalities, Amia Srinivasan’s work on identifying political implications of what seem like purely theoretical epistemological positions, and almost anything Rachel Fraser writes, but particularly her work on narrative testimony. Many of these are opening up whole new research programmes. I can’t think of another ten year period since the 1940s in which epistemology welcomed so many new avenues for research.
Pettigrew’s whole piece is here.
What are some examples of progress and new ideas in the areas of philosophy you work in?
The post Progress & New Ideas in Philosophy first appeared on Daily Nous.
The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies – review
In The Big Con, Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington claim that our overreliance on the consulting industry has negative consequences for society, inhibiting knowledge transfer and corporate and political accountability. The authors expose how consultancies’ goal of “creating value” may not align with addressing major issues such as climate change, arguing convincingly for greater transparency and a revitalised public sector, writes Ivan Radanović.
In their book The Big Con, Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington warn that relying on consultancies harms the public interest. Asking what happens to the brain of an organisation when it is not learning by doing because someone else is doing the doing, they conclude that societies must return public purpose in centre of attention.
The authors’ thesis is that overreliance on consultancies harms public interest, disables governments, and threatens democracy.
In 2021, the consulting industry was valued at over 900 billion dollars. Its ninefold rise since 1999 is the result of rising reliance of states on consulting agencies. The authors’ thesis is that overreliance on consultancies harms public interest, disables governments, and threatens democracy. They investigate this trend and how to reverse it.
The “Big Con” is the term Mazzucato and Collington use to mark the biggest auditing, accounting, and consulting agencies such as Ernst & Young (EY), KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Accenture and others. The consulting market emerged during early industrialisation, when engineers, periodically recruited by major industrial firms, formalised their work. In the 1920s many consultants, among them James McKinsey, cooperated with American businesses. The popularity of management consultancy rose in 1970 when BCG introduced the matrix for mapping the profitability of business portfolio. After two years, this tool was used (and paid for) by more than 100 enterprises. American firms, on the wings of the Marshall plan and later IT management projects, have spread throughout Europe.
Golden years
The election of the right-wing populists Margaret Thatcher in the UK (1979) and Ronald Reagan in the US (1981) occurred after a decade of economic turmoil, led by the end of the Bretton Woods system and two major oil crises. The opinion that the responsibility for the turmoil lay in how states were run mushroomed. The neoliberal credo was that the only value creators in society are markets, and with Thatcher and Reagan, favour was refocused from the worker to the citizen-taxpayer.
The neoliberal credo was that the only value creators in society are markets, and with Thatcher and Reagan, favour was refocused from the worker to the citizen-taxpayer.
Contrary to the belief that the essence of neoliberalism is to slash public spending, Mazzucato and Collington suggest “it is more precise to describe it as public spending redirection towards the stronger role of the market” (49). In Thatcher’s era (1979-1990) government expenditure rose in real terms by 7.7 percent (43). In Reagan’s (1981-1989) federal spending rose by almost nine percent annually (43). From the US to Australia, thousands of neoliberal reforms such as privatisation, deregulation or outsourcing states had to be implemented, and advised. The authors show us that the annual public spending for consulting in the UK from 1979 to 1990 rose fortyfold – from 7.1 million to 290 million dollars. The 1980s saw the advent of a new management doctrine. In place of earlier stable forms of organisational life emerged the model of flexible “learning organisations” which view instability as an opportunity. The main goal becomes maximising value for shareholders. In the 1990s, that led to the popularisation of storytelling in politics and business. It is no longer a product or brand that is sold, but the story about value, challenges and business success through positive change, peddled by elite consultants or management gurus.
Creating the impression of value
Today, consultants are seen as experts who transfer know-how and utilise advanced management techniques to improve clients’ businesses. The enormous rise of consulting in the last four decades is explained by the “value” they create for states and companies. However, according to the authors, consultants do not always meet expectations and they seldom transfer knowledge. Created “value” is often unclear and depends on the perception of the client. Consultants hustle to create the impression of value.
Created “value” is often unclear and depends on the perception of the client. Consultants hustle to create the impression of value.
There are many examples where engaging consultancies has backfired for states. In developing countries such as Nigeria, Mexico and Angola, hiring consultancies was a condition of their IMF loan agreements (50). The authors focus on wealthy countries, arguing that even if contracting consultants experienced in the implementation of complex macroeconomic programmes could be justified in developing countries, it is less justifiable in developed countries, which should ostensibly have high competency in these areas.
Unmet deadlines, spiralling costs
Consultancies often fail to deliver on their promises. In 2010, Sweden started the construction project for a new university hospital in Stockholm which would be the most advanced in Europe. Its operations were to be grounded in “value-based healthcare”, a concept designed by management guru Michael Porter. Costs were initially valued at 1.4 billion euro, with the project set to be completed in 2015. City authorities opted for a public-private partnership which contracted consultants from PwC and EY who claimed they would ”maximise the value and keep the costs under control” (145). Representatives from the construction company Skanska stated that this model would “transfer the risk from the state and taxpayers to the private sector” (145). However, the costs immediately surpassed the projections because vital equipment had not been included in the budget The project, beset by problems, was passed to BCG, who had nine consultants working on its implementation while earning a monthly salary of almost 70,000 euros over six years. Another consultancy, Nordic Interim AB was then contracted for an additional 12 million euro, and when the hospital was eventually finished in 2018, costs a billion euros higher than the original estimate.
Absence of accountability
It is not all about money. Consultancies contribute to many undemocratic practices, maintaining what Acemoglu and Robinson named as extractive institutions. Often, they act as a mechanism for public wealth extraction, whereby states recruit consultants when they want to “hedge” the political risk of unpopular economic measures. The states maintain legitimacy, and consultants get their share of political influence. Authors emphasise the example of Puerto Rico, which faced bankruptcy in 2016. Then-President Obama initiated the creation of an Oversight Board to supervise the bankruptcy process. Keeping reputational risk low, Washington ensured that the majority of members of the Board were of Puerto Rican heritage. The Board did not hire a large staff, to avoid looking like it was setting up a parallel government. Instead, it brought in consultants. Instead of the state, McKinsey engaged in the privatisation of public enterprises, healthcare reforms “based on value”, slashing public spending and restructuring debt. Moreover, McKinsey owned $20 million of Puerto Rico’s bonds: consultants were set to profit from the very same debt they were helping to restructure.
Regaining control
Even though consultancies did not cause the maladies of neoliberal capitalism, they have profited from them. Without transparency and democratic permission, they erode the capabilities of states and enterprises. Because knowledge is not cultivated within state workforces and institutions, a dependency on the “expertise” of consultancies spirals.
[Consultancies] erode the capabilities of states and enterprises. Because knowledge is not cultivated within state workforces and institutions, a dependency on the “expertise” of consultancies spirals.
The last section of the book is about “climate consulting”. Omnipresent and long-term, climate change is ideal ground for consultants. Competition is fierce; consultancies’ “websites are replete with beautifully designed free reports on sustainability issues for every sector, from oil and gas to healthcare” (190). They promise solutions, pitching themselves as an avant-garde of change.
The key takeaway, according to Mazzucato and Collington, is that we must challenge the predominance of consultancies. With their ultimate goal of “creating value”, they advise both the fossil polluters and the governments mandated to reduce emissions. Moreover, states are catalysts of technological change for public good, while the private sector only invests in fundamental research when it becomes enticingly profitable.
Putting aside the authors’ techno-optimistic view – which holds that climate change mitigation is mostly a technical issue regarding innovations for green transition, which is being debunked – their final suggestions are valid. A new narrative and vision for the role of the state, recovering public capacities, embedding knowledge transfer into consulting contracts’ evaluation and mandating transparency are, undoubtedly, desirable. The book’s importance lies in how it reveals the political implications of the consulting industry. Whether we choose “green growth” or abandon the growth imperative, one thing is certain: democratically elected governments are key actors. Only they can mobilise the resources required for achieving “moonshot” missions, the most urgent of which is climate change.
Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Alena Veasey on Shutterstock.
Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy – review
In Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy, Neil Lee proposes abandoning the Silicon Valley-style innovation hub, which concentrates its wealth, for alternative, more equitable models. Emphasising the role of the state and the need for adaptive approaches, Lee makes a nuanced and convincing case for reimagining how we “do” innovation to benefit the masses, writes Yulu Pi.
Professor Neil Lee will be speaking at an LSE panel event, How can we tackle inequalities through British public policy? on Tuesday 5 March at 6.30pm. Find details on how to attend here.
While everyone is talking about AI innovations, Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy arrives as a timely and critical examination of innovation itself. Challenging the conventional view of Silicon Valley as the paradigm for innovation, the book seeks answers on how the benefits of innovations can be broadly shared across society.
When we talk about innovation, we often picture genius scientists from prestigious universities or tech giants creating radical technologies in million-dollar labs. But in his book, Neil Lee, Professor of Economic Geography at The London School of Economics and Political Science, tells us there is more to it. He suggests that our obsession with cutting-edge innovations and idolisation of superstar hubs like Silicon Valley and Oxbridge hinders better ways to link innovation with shared prosperity.
Lee stresses that innovation doesn’t make a difference if it stays locked up in labs; it needs to be shared, learned, improved and used to make real impacts.
Innovation goes beyond the invention of disruptive new technologies. It also involves improving existing technologies or merging them to generate new innovations. In this book, Lee illustrates this idea using mobile payment technologies as an example, showcasing how the combination of existing technologies – mobile phone and payment terminals – can spawn new innovations. He argues that “technologies evolve through incremental innovations in regular and occasionally larger leaps” (23). Moreover, Lee stresses that innovation doesn’t make a difference if it stays locked up in labs; it needs to be shared, learned, improved and used to make real impacts. It is important to think beyond the notion of a single radical invention and recognise the contributions not only of major inventors but of “tweakers” who make incremental improvements and implementers who operate and maintain innovative products (25).
In challenging the conventional narratives of innovation, this book guides us to expand our understanding of innovation and paves the way for a discussion on combining innovation with equity. When we pose the question “How do we foster innovations?”, we miss out on asking a crucial follow-up: “How do we foster innovations that translate into increased living standards for everyone?”. Lee argues that the incomplete line of questioning inevitably steers us towards flawed solutions – countries all over the world building their own Silicon-something.
While the San Francisco Bay Area is home to many successful start-up founders who have made billions, it simultaneously struggles with issues like severe homelessness.
While the San Francisco Bay Area is home to many successful start-up founders who have made billions, it simultaneously struggles with issues like severe homelessness. The staggering wealth gap is evident, with the top 1 per cent of households holding 48 times more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent. Other centres of innovation like Oxbridge and Shanghai are also highly unequal, with the benefits of innovations going to a small few.
The book introduces four alternative models of innovation – Switzerland, Sweden, Austria and Taiwan – that suggest innovation doesn’t inevitably coincide with high-level inequality.
The book introduces four alternative models of innovation – Switzerland, Sweden, Austria and Taiwan – that suggest innovation doesn’t inevitably coincide with high-level inequality. Through these examples, Lee highlights the significance of often-neglected aspects of innovation: adoption, diffusion and incremental improvements. Take Austria, for instance, which might not immediately come to mind as a global hub of disruptive innovation. Its strategic commitment to continuous innovation – particularly in its traditional, industrial sectors like steel and paper – sheds light on the more nuanced, yet equally impactful, facets of innovation. (92) Taiwan, on the other hand, gained its growth from technological development facilitated by its advanced research institutions such as the Industrial Technology Research Institute and state-led industrial policy. Foxconn stands as the world’s fourth-largest technology company, while the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) accounts for half of the world’s chip production (116).
In all four examples, the state played a critical role in creating frameworks to ensure that benefits are broadly shared, showing that policies on innovation and mutual prosperity reinforce each other.
Building on these examples, the book highlights the vital role of the state in both spurring innovations and distributing the benefits of innovation. In all four examples, the state played a critical role in creating frameworks to ensure that benefits are broadly shared, showing that policies on innovation and mutual prosperity reinforce each other. Taking another look at Austria, ranked 17th in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)’s Global Innovation Index (99), its strength on innovation is accompanied by the state’s heavy investment on welfare to build a strong social safety net.
As the book draws to a close, it advocates for the development of a set of specific institutions. The first type, generative institutions, foster the development of radical innovations. These are heavily funded in the US, resulting, as British economist David Soskice claims, in the US dominance in cutting-edge technologies (169). The book shows a wide array of generative institutions through its four examples. For instance, in Taiwan, research laboratories play a crucial role in the success of its cutting-edge chip manufacturing, while the government directs financial resources towards facilitating job creation. On the other hand, Austria has concentrated its fast-growing R&D spending on the upgrading and specialisation of its low-tech industries of the past.
The second and third types, diffusive and redistributive institutions, aim to address issues of inequality, such as labour market polarisation and wealth concentration that might come with innovation. These two types of institutions offer people the opportunity to participate in the delivery, adoption and improvement of innovation. Switzerland’s mature vocational education system is a prime example of such institutions, “facilitating innovation and the diffusion of technology from elsewhere and ensuring that workers benefit.” (172)
Discussions about ‘good inequality’ where innovators are rewarded, and “bad inequality,” where wealth becomes too concentrated demonstrate the book’s strong willingness to call out inequality and tackle complex issues head-on.
Discussions about “good inequality” where innovators are rewarded, and “bad inequality,” where wealth becomes too concentrated demonstrate the book’s strong willingness to call out inequality and tackle complex issues head-on. (8) This integrity extends to Lee’s candid examination of the examples. Despite presenting them as models of how innovation can be paired with equity, he does not gloss over their imperfections. By recognising the persistent disparities in gender, race, and immigration status in all four of these examples, the book presents a balanced narrative that urges readers to think critically. Although these countries have made strides in sharing the benefits of innovation, they are far from perfect and still have a significant journey ahead to reduce these disparities. Take Switzerland, for example. Though it consistently tops the WIPO’s Global Innovation Index, maintaining its position for the 13th consecutive year in 2023, it grapples with one of the largest gender pay gaps in Europe. This gender inequality has deep roots, as it wasn’t until 1971 that women gained the right to vote in Swiss federal elections (71).
Lee warns against the naive replication of these success stories elsewhere without adapting them to the specific context. This frank and thorough approach enriches the conversation about innovation and inequality, making it a compelling and credible contribution to the discourse and a convincing argument for changing what we consider to be the purpose of innovation.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going – review
In A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, Michael Muthukrishna contends that the core issue affecting Western societies is increasing energy scarcity, leading to economic struggles, political disillusionment, and global instability. Though the public policy solutions Muthukrishna proposes – like better immigration systems and start-up cities – are outlined only vaguely, the book offers fresh ideas in an engaging writing style, according to James Sewry.
A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. Michael Muthukrishna. Basic Books. London. 2023.
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A Theory of Everyone by Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at LSE, is a bold and ambitious book. It argues that the underlying cause of the present malaise of western societies is increasing energy scarcity. There is no doubt that the malaise is real. Since the global financial crisis, the UK has struggled to achieve economic and productivity growth; living standards are stagnant; inflation recently reached almost double figures; and the cost of energy spiked. As faith in politics and institutions is eroded, voters are drawn towards populism. Social media polarises us. The global order seems precarious: wars rage in Ukraine and the Middle East. In the words of Muthukrishna, “we can feel in our bones that the world is breaking – that something is wrong”.
The global order seems precarious: wars rage in Ukraine and the Middle East. In the words of Muthukrishna, ‘we can feel in our bones that the world is breaking – that something is wrong’.
The ultimate cause of all these different problems, Muthukrishna argues, is the lack of excess energy. Tapping into the energy contained within fossil fuels has driven society’s development since the Industrial Revolution, precipitating prosperity and increasing standards of living. Until relatively recently, energy seemed abundant. But fossil fuels are running out. The energy return on investment (EROI) that they offer is diminishing. For every single barrel of oil discovered in 1999 one could find at least another 1,000, but by 2010, this number had reduced to five. As Muthukrishna contends, we came to take energy for granted and stopped thinking about it. But as it becomes more expensive and more effort is spent on its extraction, life becomes harder. This matters because, as the availability of excess energy reduces, the “space of the possible”, that is, what humans are collectively able to achieve, shrinks with it. Humanity’s pressing challenge, therefore, is how to arrive at the “next level of abundance that leads to a better life for everyone”. Otherwise, according to Muthukrishna, the future will be bleak, with humanity beset by conflict over dwindling energy and resources.
Tapping into the energy contained within fossil fuels has driven society’s development since the Industrial Revolution, precipitating prosperity and increasing standards of living. Until relatively recently, energy seemed abundant.
To provide an approach to this enormously challenging future, A Theory of Everyone is divided into two parts. The first explains “who we are” and “how we got here”, detailing what the author proposes as the four “laws of life” which underpin human development: energy, innovation, cooperation and evolution. This layout is justified on the grounds that “the forces that shape our thinking, our economies, and our societies have become invisible to us”, and that in order to solve problems, we must first understand them. Part two then considers practical policy solutions that might begin to address our current predicament: “how this comprehensive theory of everyone can lead to practical policy applications.”
What distinguishes us is our capacity for social learning and imitation which has enabled each generation of humans to add to the stock of knowledge which is then acquired and marginally improved upon by each subsequent generation.
Given the scale and ambition of the book, it is perhaps unsurprising that the reader is left feeling disappointed by its suggestions for public policy. Muthukrishna essentially offers the following ideas: better designed immigration, educational and tax systems; start-up cities; programmable politics; the curation of free speech and genuine meritocracy; and improving the internet and social media. Taken by themselves, many of these ideas are sound, and if there were sufficient political will, ought to be implemented as soon as practically possible. There are also many powerful insights within the book that might help shift some common understandings, such as the assumption, which Muthukrishna powerfully counters, that what differentiates us as a species is our innate intelligence and ability to reason. Instead, what distinguishes us is our capacity for social learning and imitation which has enabled each generation of humans to add to the stock of knowledge which is then acquired and marginally improved upon by each subsequent generation. Our intelligence is therefore more the result of this evolving cultural “download” than it is thanks to raw ability.
It is difficult to see how the book’s policy ideas sufficiently match the scale of the challenges the author outlines.
However, some of these practical applications are frustratingly light on detail. For example, his proposals for “start-up cities” and “programme politics” in his chapter on governance in the twenty-first century are both sketched out only vaguely, with little sense of how they might be realised. Where ideas are fleshed out, they are sometimes caveated with qualifiers such as “this approach is one of many and may not even be the best approach”. On occasion the author struggles to move beyond platitudes, as in his very brief discussion of artificial intelligence: “More progress is needed to know the true limits of what machines can achieve and our role in all of this. The tides of progress can only be held back for so long.” It is difficult to see how the book’s policy ideas sufficiently match the scale of the challenges the author outlines.
Muthukrishna does not seem to appreciate, or at least makes no room for, the fact that a number of his fundamental assumptions, such as a belief in the underlying virtue of capitalism and economic growth, might not be universally shared. Others would want to see climate change given more thorough treatment.
These flaws do not mean that the book is without merit. A recognition of the world’s complexity and the author’s commitment to truth and the scientific method means he is robustly unafraid to court controversy. He lauds unfettered free speech, expresses scepticism towards affirmative action, and explores sex-based differences in intelligence, while on immigration he contends that new migrants bring “with them cultural values both desirable and less desirable”. Muthukrishna is arguably right not to shy away from these controversial areas for, as he argues, “we can only arrive at the truth in a diverse environment of different backgrounds, considering all hypotheses and ideas – both those we like and those we don’t.”
Muthukrishna is arguably right not to shy away from […] controversial areas for, as he argues, ‘we can only arrive at the truth in a diverse environment of different backgrounds, considering all hypotheses and ideas’
The book is also written in an engaging and accessible manner, and whilst it might fail to attain the heights it purports to reach, in its fresh thinking it is a welcome addition to the basket of literature that helps contemporary politicians, policymakers, and anyone with an interest in the direction of humanity grapple with the complexity of today’s challenges.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
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What new data can tell us about the essential role of social science to innovation
The challenges facing social science research are numerous and wicked – being undervalued by funders, surmounting barriers between knowledge produced and its uptake, and ensuring they get the credit they deserve in public discourse. However, as Juergen Wastl and Kathryn Weber-Boer outline, solutions could lie in demonstrating their ability to catalyse STEM research, in effect … Continued
Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World – review
In Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World, Gordon Brown, Mohamed El-Erian and Michael Spence put forward a strategy on growth, economic management and governance to prevent crises and shape a better society. Danny Dorling contends that the book’s suggested policy solutions for economic and social problems, stemming from a hypercapitalist ethos, would entrench rather than reduce inequalities.
Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World. Gordon Brown, Mohamed El-Erian and Michael Spence, with Reid Lidow. Simon & Schuster. 2023.
Find this book:
Permacrisis is a remarkable book, but not for the reasons its authors might have hoped. It explains brilliantly why so much of our politics and economics is in such a terrible mess. The book argues that economic growth is progress, that we need this type of growth above all else to prosper, and that with just a minimal extra layer of regulation, such growth can spread the good life to the masses. Two quotations from Permacrisis, I believe, sum up both the core mantra of the three authors and what they think of as good growth and the good life. First, the mantra:
”You see, growth is progress. Growth is what has given the world the tablet you’re reading this book on, the medicines by your bedside, the economic breakthroughs that have lifted billions out of poverty. The problem is how growth has been achieved […] the old unsustainable “profits over people” methods of the past have outstayed their welcome and today are not just failing individuals and our environment but national economies” (14).
[The authors] assume that the development of a tablet computer is due to economics rather than developments in universities and other state-funded bodies which created the micro-components that that enable a computer to be transmuted into tablet form.
The authors make a series of assumptions that help to explain why people like them think like they do. For example, in the above quotation, they assume that the development of a tablet computer is due to economics rather than developments in universities and other state-funded bodies which created the micro-components that that enable a computer to be transmuted into tablet form. Computers, and electricity before that, were not products of “the market” but technological inventions that have been marketised.
Perhaps they choose to assume their reader uses a tablet rather than a print copy because it is impossible to argue that the invention of the book, or typesetting or the printing press, was due to economic growth. This is because it happened long before the concept of economic growth existed, when a group of monks in Korea invented movable type in 1377. Instead, it was economic growth that got us to a state, in the Netherlands in the 1990s, where we were publishing more books than people could read by those purchasing them, peaking at over a thousand new titles a year per million potential readers (see image below). At this point, middle-class Dutch people stopped buying books just to display in their homes, and the publication of new titles plummeted (see Figure 12 below from the book Slowdown).
As the above example illustrates, economic growth can produce waste more than uplift and “progress” for the vast majority of people. Similarly, industrialisation reduced life expectancy not just in the mill towns of England, but across India. As I write global life expectancy hovers just above 70. In the US between 2020 and 2021, it dropped from 77 to 76.1, its lowest level since 1996. Most people in the world have far too little, a few have far too much. Social, medical, educational, housing, and cultural progress have all been made when the greediest aspects of market behaviour have been held in check, as the UK’s history of service provision demonstrates. Technological progress has depended on collaboration over profits. Those working in the US and UK produce very few innovations per head, as compared to people in the Nordic countries or Japan. But, the authors of this book appear utterly unaware of such arguments.
As with the tablet, the authors suggest that we have medicines because of economic growth rather than research and innovation; tellingly, the index to the book includes entries for “McKinsey” and “Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO)”, but none for “medicine” or “pharmaceuticals”.
As with the tablet, the authors suggest that we have medicines because of economic growth rather than research and innovation; tellingly, the index to the book includes entries for “McKinsey” and “Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO)”, but none for “medicine” or “pharmaceuticals”. This choice reveals what the book is actually about: the world of consultancy, international travel, and enormous amounts of money. McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm founded in 1926 by a University of Chicago professor (of accounting) that advises people with a lot of money how to acquire more. PIMCO, is an American investment firm that manages about two and a half trillion dollars of capital – to make more for people already rich. There is a pattern here.
Brown, El-Erian, and Spence suggest that, with a little more management by people like them, a little more of their kind of consulting, a little more of what they view as careful investment and better directing the trillions held by the world’s super rich, that we can somehow end the unsustainable “profits over people” behaviour of global economics.
The authors of this book believe that it was economic growth that “lifted billions out of poverty”. This view, along with the other core beliefs in Permacrisis, goes entirely unquestioned. Rather, Brown, El-Erian, and Spence suggest that, with a little more management by people like them, a little more of their kind of consulting, a little more of what they view as careful investment and better directing the trillions held by the world’s super rich, that we can somehow end the unsustainable “profits over people” behaviour of global economics. For them, the crisis is that they are not being listened to enough.
This brings us to how the book figures growth, and a second key quotation. In a long section celebrating the $1.50 Costco hot dog that entices shoppers through its doors, the authors explain their idea of economic growth and why they rate it so highly. Costco is a huge US chain of warehouses that started in 1976 as Price Club. It now has 125 million members, a number rising by around 6 million a year, and accelerating.
“The hotdog with the tantalising $1.50 price gets people in the door. And when they’re in the door, that’s when they see the knife set, back-yard patio set or the vacuum they can’t live without. And this business model has been a winner helping Costco reach a value in excess of $200 billion. Costco’s hotdog is a powerful and tasty reminder that growth isn’t always achieved by innovations developed in a Silicon Valley garage. Sometimes it’s as simple as keeping the price of a hotdog and soda steady – a decision that advances social goals by feeding those seeking an affordable snack, all while helping to power the growth of one of America’s largest companies. Costco’s chief financial officer was asked in late 2022 how long the $1.50 price would last. His response? Forever.” (30).
It is almost shocking to see such blatant endorsement of a particularly destructive form of economic growth, unplanned (at least as far as the consumer is concerned) instant gratification consumption, and such a warped view of social goals (to provide cheap hot dogs to the gullible).
Of the book’s authors – who were brought together by Jonny Geller of the global literary and talent agency, Curtis Brown (298) – one is Chief Advisor to “Allianz, the corporate parent of PIMCO, where he was CEO and co-CIO” (2) and husband of an executive director of Eco Oro Minerals Corp. Another was once UK Prime Minister and worked closely with Ed Balls, whose brother Andrew Balls has been for many decades a Chief Investment Officer of PIMCO (the other co-CIO). The third, who now lives in Milan, joined Oak Hill Capital in 1999 and was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. They are what some economists view as masters of the universe: They believe their combined knowledge spans the breadth of global economic expertise: “While our personal and professional experience had natural touch points, like any good corporate merger the overlap and redundancy were minimal” (3). In fact, they are the crisis – and luckily, their beliefs are very far from permanent, sustainable or convincing, no matter how much they signal a sustainable ethos by adding the prefix ”‘eco-” before the ideas they put forward. In this book, they have encapsulated exactly what is wrong with the late twentieth-century hyper-capitalist worldview they champion that seeks to enrich the few and impoverish the rest of society.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Main Image Credit: hachiware on Shutterstock.
Figure from Slowdown: Reproduced with the author’s permission.
Democracy: doing it for ourselves
Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below.
00:00 – Introduction and Overview The talk begins with an introduction to the challenges facing contemporary society and the roles of NESTA in addressing them, including applied research, venture building, and policy shaping.
02:09 – The Politics of Policy Solutions The speaker reflects on the difficulties of implementing policy solutions due to the complexities of politics and the need for radical ideas to meet the scale of current challenges.
03:34 – Panel Introduction and Project Background Introduction of the panel members and their contributions to the field, along with a mention of NESTA’s work in collective intelligence design.
05:14 – Democracy and Governance Types The talk shifts to a discussion of different types of governance, with a focus on Aristotle’s typology and the concept of democratic lotteries.
10:43 – Media Influence on Politics Analysis of the impact of media, especially the reduction of presidential soundbites over time, highlighting the influence of media on political discourse.
16:22 – Brexit and Citizen Juries The speaker discusses the impact of citizen juries on public opinion, particularly in the context of Brexit, and how deliberation influenced people’s views.
22:04 – Activism and Nonpartisan Politics The focus shifts to the concept of nonpartisan activism and the importance of citizen juries in representing democratic legitimacy and influencing policy.
28:44 – Embedding a People’s Branch in Government The idea of a ‘people’s branch’ in government is proposed, suggesting a chamber chosen by sampling to represent a check on elected representatives.
37:05 – Panel Responses and Discussion The panel members respond to the talk, discussing their perspectives on deliberative democracy, the role of citizen assemblies, and the complexities of political change.
50:18 – Q&A Session The question and answer session begins, allowing for audience engagement and further exploration of the topics discussed.
You can access the audio here.
I am not sure why YouTube’s transcript creation hasn’t activated and but I’ve posted a rough transcript beneath the fold.
Introduction and Overview
Host: Ravi Gurumurthy
Like climate change, obesity, inequality. We have three roles. We do applied research with innovation partners and lots of testing of ideas. We’re also a venture builder, so we both build companies from scratch and invest in early stage companies. And we’re system shaper trying to shape the policies and institutions relevant to those three missions. In addition to that, we have the insights team as part of our family, and the challenge works that work on a broad range of areas right around the world.
Challenge works running prizes, table insights, team doing trials around the world. So that’s a bit of a portrait of NESTA. One of the projects that we’re working on at the moment is called UK 2040 and we’re trying to think through what are the big challenges facing the country over the next 15 years. Where where is there agreement? Disagreement?
What are the options We should be working up? And one of our reflections, I think, when you go through that process, is that while many problems feel intractable and difficult, there are actually policy solutions. But what is difficult are the politics. And even the second or third best policy idea is difficult politics. And I think that’s the context in a way for this conversation, because if we are to try and meet the scale of the challenges facing the country with ambitious policies, we have to find ways of forging agreements on quite radical ideas, not lowest common denominator politics.
And one of the ways in which politicians and governments have responded historically is to try and insulate policy and government from politics. Independent institutions, Bank of England, the Climate Change Committee, even the NHS, was attempted. It was pushed into independence under David Cameron. Short, rather short lived. So actually what we are talking today about is the opposite. Can we define democracy and deepen engagement?
Because that is a most stable, democratic way of doing things and is actually critical if we’re going to make change happen without the blowback that comes from trying to insulate people from politics, which is frankly often a fool’s errand. So we have a fantastic panel to discuss this really fascinating issue. We’ve got Nicholas Gruen, who is over here from Australia, who’s the CEO of Lateral Economics and a visiting professor at the King’s College.
Nicholas has written on many, many issues, including this particular one. We’ve got Martin Wolf who needs no introduction, chief economics commentator at the F.T.. And I think one chapter of his book is actually dedicated to this particular question that we’re discussing today. And we have Claire Melia, who’s the co-founder of the Global Assembly for COP 26, is an expert in participative processes and knowledge and practice lead at the IS my foundation.
So welcome to our panel. This is an area of work that’s Nesta, has quite a lot of history and we’ve done a lot of work in. At the moment, our Center for Collective Intelligence Design, CCD is doing quite a lot of work practically on the ground. So do check them out as well and we’ll potentially bring in some of those ideas during the panel.
The format for today is Nicholas is going to come up and do a talk for about 25 minutes. We’ll hear response from Claire and Martin, and then we’ll have a panel and panel discussion and throw open to both questions here and online. So do get your questions ready. So over to you, Nicholas.
Nicholas Gruen
Thank you. But are not forget this. But just in case, I’ll also not forget that. Okay. So I’m told that if I press this button, that happens. And it did. So that’s encouraging. That’s what I’m going to talk to you about. Democracy, doing it for ourselves. And that is a quick outline that you of what I’m going to talk about that you won’t have time to read, but it proves to you that I’ve got some system to all this.
Democracy and Governance Types
Nicholas Gruen
Now I want to talk to you. You may be familiar with this typology from Aristotle. These three types of government. And I want to point out a a simple thing to you, which is that two of these systems have a government and the government sorry, a government, a government and the governed. That’s true of monarchy. It’s true of aristocracy and Aristotle had a beautiful description of what democracy was.
It is everyone taking turns in being governed and in governing. And that means that if you asked Aristotle about different institutions and you asked Aristotle what type of institution was were elections, he would have said to you they were aristocratic institutions because they are designed to produce a government to govern the governed. And that’s that’s a simple explanation for why the founding fathers in America chose elections over other mechanisms, which they were well aware of because democracy was a dirty word at the time that they were thinking about designing the Constitution of America.
And the thing that gives people a turn in governing or being governed is a democratic or a democratic lottery. And it remains in our legal system, and it is and it is recognized in Magna Carta and so on. Thomas Jefferson had a hope. And the hope was because he was anxious about democracy like all the others. And his hope was that elections would produce a natural aristocracy.
How is that going then? Which brings me to the corruption of institutions. And in each of these cases of Aristotle’s institution, and then a corrupt form of that institution, what has happened is that the office holder or holders have lost the thread of what their purpose is, which is to be the vehicle for their society’s well-being. And they’ve started to pervert that to.
I think, you know, what the what what they perverted it to their own well-being. And so that’s a better picture of what we find of the situation that we find ourselves in. And, you know, thanks to Dolly, if I press this, I think it’ll point now. Anyway, the vine, if you like, is a delicate thing, and that’s the opinion of the people, what the people want and the spiky, nasty thing is a whole lot of other things like comms directors, people with a lot of money and power and so on and it’s not that the people aren’t involved in democracy, they are, but there’s constant there’s constant negotiation between those two things.
And one of the great one of the great things that gives people of power a lot of lot more leeway than you might think. In theory they had what is vox pop democracy, which is that we run our society on what people think right now, and this is what human beings look like. According to one artist a few tens of thousands of years ago.
And at this point they evolve the they evolved a desire for food that was sweet, fatty and salty. And that’s where we are now. And things that were the stuff of life, the things that were good for us when optimized to that degree become poison. And that’s what we’ve done with our politics. We fast food ified it now.
People blame the Internet for this. But let me show you something that happened before the Internet arrived. This is the length of a soundbite of a presidential soundbite on on American network news. And we’re starting with 1968, and we’re going to 1988 before the before Social media was even a glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s time. And that is what has happened.
Media Influence on Politics
The length of a soundbite has gone from 42 to 9 seconds. If you can’t communicate something in 9 seconds, it doesn’t get communicated. And that’s if you’re the president. We also have intensifying culture war. If you are out there prosecuting politics, you’re not interested in debating the issues, you’re trying to frame the issues, you’re trying to set up rival camps.
You’re trying to get people to identify with this camp or that camp. And that’s largely the story of Brexit. So this is the vote for and against. Yes, for and against Brexit. And as you know, in the middle of 2016, the vote was 52, four and 48% against and now it is about 6040. And still for various reasons we have this idea that we have, we have the will of the people that we are carrying out when it is no longer the will of the people.
In fact, it is a long, long way from the will of the people. So that’s the scenario that I want to address and I wouldn’t really be very interested in any of this if I didn’t think that the worse things that we can do that are simple and powerful to have a big impact on making this better and being an economist of course it’s I like to talk about Mr. Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, and I want to use just a very simple expression from him.
And he was writing about the Great Depression in 1930, and he used this expression, We have magneto trouble. And what he was saying was that if we take this problem to be a cosmic morality play, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble. But if we take it, if we ask ourselves carefully, calmly, what mechanisms might we be able to adjust?
How much can we how much can we fix this? And he had an answer for that in economics. And many economists think that his answer was a very fertile one, and it was a simple one. That’s important, too. And so he is his a way of thinking. What I think is a very important part of the answer, and that is to say that virtually every democracy that you can think of is a three legged stool.
It contains elements of the three. The the three legs are three different democratic institutions. The middle leg there. I’ve called direct democracy in Athens. It was the assembly. In our system it is simply voting. So we all get a say. Then we need more than that. And so we have people who are represented. Let’s see if that works.
No, that just turns everything off. That’s a bit of a pity. And if that. No, anyway, I can’t point. That’s all right. So and then we have two different ways to represent the people because what we need is we need a small group of people who will make themselves knowledgeable enough to make decisions on our behalf, to make decisions for our benefit.
And one way to do that is representation by election. And we’ve and I’ve given you a little hint of all of the things that that deviate from the textbook, our imagining of what that might be like and what it actually turns out to be like, because representation by election is mediated, is mediated democracy. And I think that mechanism is an important mechanism and if I didn’t think that, it wouldn’t matter because who the hell am I?
And then there’s this other way to represent the people. And we use it every day in courts. And that way to represent the people is to grab some people who we have reason to believe are similar to representative of people, of the will, of ordinary people. And of course, as you know, we use that in legal juries in Athens.
They use that to run the whole city. They had a thing called the Council of 500, the July and 1/10 of those 500 people at any one time were running the city. They were maintaining the monuments and the buildings and and and all the other things that had to go on. As well as preparing the agenda for the assembly.
This the supreme decision making body. And they used elections just for a few offices generals and also some financial officers. Now let’s go back to Brexit and let’s see what a citizen jury thinks. In 2017, there was a citizen jury in this city funded by four universities. And they so this is a year after the the the plebiscite.
Brexit and Citizen Juries
And they said to the press that they weren’t trying to relitigate Brexit. Remember how terrified people were of that They were looking at what sort of Brexit people wanted. But in fact, if you dug into the data, there was an entry question and an exit question about what you think about Brexit. And if you asked yourself that question, you found that over the four days of deliberation, nobody who voted leave sorry, nobody who voted remain changed their vote, and seven or eight people who voted leave changed their preference.
And so the citizen jury produced pretty much exactly the state of opinion that exists today with the experience that we’ve had so far. Here’s one example, and I mention it to you because I want you to think about the theater of this. So if you’re voting and let’s say you’re voting on the environment, your constantly being campaign to people, there are a bunch of people who you don’t like, who are on the telly all the time telling you a whole pack of lies or whatever you think they are.
And then there’s your side and maybe you think they’re right, or maybe you think they’re a bunch of blocks as well. And in a situation like that, you go to the voting booth and you’re pretty determined not to be the mug. You’re pretty determined not to be taken for granted. Compare that with being in a room of people who exemplify the situation that you are in, which is that you should be thinking about your own interests and you should be thinking about that in the context of all of our interests, because that’s what most other people there will be trying to do.
And in that context, in a citizen jury in Texas, which you may be intrigued to know, was commissioned by Governor George W Bush in 1999. I think the going into the citizen jury people were asked, would you pay a little bit more? And it was very small amount more for renewable energy as opposed for renewable energy rather than fossil fuel produced energy.
And 54% of people going in said they would and coming out 82% of people said they would. So that’s the difference of a of this different way to frame decision is to frame political decisions in people’s minds. Now the problem for me is that the citizen juries have been improving in have been becoming more popular. Lots of people think these are good things, but I think we’re only really at the end of the beginning because I’m almost all citizen juries have been one off temporary subject specific, and they and they advise the real law makers, which of course, which of course rehearses their inferiority, rehearses the fact that the real law makers, they’re the ones who make the decisions.
And again, a great deal a lot of citizen juries are run at the because governments have set them up, because governments have got into a problem and they think this might be a way out. I’m not really against any of that. That’s great. But I think if we’re going to try and make this this approach more, if we try, if we trying to make the next step, you can be here for decades going to governments and saying, what about this?
What about that? I have some experience of people who have spent a lot of time doing that, and it’s quite frustrating. So I want to suggest something. And as I’ve suggested this, it’s occurred to me that it’s actually quite a new and powerful thing. I want to be an activist. I want some activism around this. So there’s some activists.
There’s another activist, there are some activists. And if I ask myself, what are they doing? They’re not going somewhere and asking for permission. They’re not trying to please they’re not placing themselves in a position of supplicants. They will perhaps do that in other contexts. What they’re doing is they are asserting an alternative legitimacy. And that’s what I want to do with citizen juries.
But there’s a big difference because these people are partizan. These people are represent a particular group of people who believe that they are hardly done by and certainly the ones I’ve shown you, I’m good with that claim. There are some others I’m less good with. But what I’m talking about is something it has occurred to me is a different kind of activism.
It’s a nonpartizan activism. It’s an activism of the center, and it’s an activism not for a particular sub community, but for the system, for the health of our democracy. So the goal is, as the 18th and 19th century negotiated by Cameron ISM, two different chambers, initially the lower chamber represented the people, a.k.a the House of Commons. The Upper House represented property.
Activism and Nonpartisan Politics
I won’t go into why that wasn’t really the case until 1920, but you get the picture that was true in the United States as well. It was true in my country, Australia, upper houses. Typically you couldn’t vote for an upper house without a fair bit of property and so on. And so each is a check and a balance.
On the other, we need a people’s branch, a branch chosen by sampling to represent a check on elected representatives. So what could be the means of doing this rather than going to the government and asking, well, what I would what I would be doing, what I am trying to do is to privately fund a standing citizen assembly. Well, I want to commence with philanthropy, and that doesn’t mean we can’t take small donations.
Just mentioned that in case you’re interested, but if we can get this done from philanthropic money, I think when people see this and I’ve got a lot of evidence for this, when people see this, they’ll come up with their hundred pounds a year and say, I mean, I want to fund this thing. And the idea would be, say, over five years you phase out philanthropic funding, you get crowd funding, but all the time you are campaigning for government, governments to fund this.
So to fund it with ongoing funding and also a constitutional role for this body. Again, remember, we live in an open society. Some people might disagree with that, but there’s an assertion for you and this chamber, if it has a lot of legitimacy, can challenge the rest of the system if it wants to. And the challenge I would like to suggest that it issue the rest of the system is to say if it disagrees with a vote of the House, of the Lower House or the Upper House, it petitions that House to hold the vote again by secret ballot.
And if it could do that, we would have avoided the hard Brexit that has done so much damage to Britain, We would have avoided the abolition of carbon pricing in Australia in 2013 and we would have yes, we would have impeached Donald Trump, who six Republicans in the Senate voted to impeach Donald Trump the second time around. We didn’t need that many more to get a two thirds majority in a secret ballot.
I will assert you would have done it. So that’s the power that it can claim for itself whether the houses will cooperate or not. Well, I’m not all that optimistic. But then we campaign and we try and get that written into into the the laws of the land. So that’s the basic idea. A standing chamber. It models the way people solve problems because that’s what happens in citizen assemblies and juries as opposed to creating them, which is largely what has become what people do when they’re elected.
Because to be elected and stay elected, you create a problem and you you’re the solution to that problem. It illustrates deviations between the opinion of the people and their considered opinion. There’s no other there’s no institution that’s doing that. Surveys don’t surveys, opinion polls don’t do it. And they challenge elected representatives to do likewise, to represent the considered opinion of the people, and they see secret ballots where they disagree.
There’s another role that such bodies can have. And if and he is the thing that’s happening in democracy at the moment, which is that basic democratic norms are not being upheld by the system. Perhaps one of the most dramatic things to illustrate that is the way in which the United States Supreme Court has become politicized, even though the founding fathers built a mechanism in to try to stop that happening.
And that’s confirmation hearings that, of course, the confirmation hearings have become massively politicized. Well, it turns out that the people themselves will defend basic democratic norms, but they won’t do it if you ask them to vote at the same time as voting for a leader or voting for what they think different parties will do to the electricity prices that that doesn’t turn up high in the air on the dial.
But if you put people together in a group and you say, should we gerrymander this state, as you probably know now, it wasn’t always the case. But now Republicans have far gained far more from deliberate gerrymandering in numerous American states than Democrats. 92% of Democrat voters are against gerrymandering. Guess how many? Guess what the proportion of Republican voters?
These are the ones who vote for many of whom vote for Donald Trump. Guess what proportion of Republican voters think gerrymandering is a good idea? 80 is a bad idea, excuse me, 88%. And therefore a citizens will defend basic democratic norms far more than politicians in the right structures such as the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, which has a role in the Michigan Constitution to redistrict, to draw electoral boundaries and has cleaned up gerrymandering, know in the short time that it’s been around.
Embedding a People’s Branch in Government
So how do we embed a people’s branch? You see, what I’ve done is I’ve talked about the idea is this body would be renewed with new people sampled from the community on a rolling basis. So it it’s so there are two problems. One is existing institutions have built like the House of Commons in the House of Lords have built their sense of themselves, their procedures and so on, through various crises for centuries.
And there is a continuity of leadership there. So what I suggest is that that that the citizen with citizen assemblies being new and continually renewed, I would propose a council of elders from the alumni that is produced by each cohort. And I would try to select the best dozen of each cadre and they would become on a council of advisors.
They would have no and this is illustrative. There are different ways of putting this, but they would have no further power. I will. And so I’ll tell you a little as so this is a way of squaring the circle, but this is a way of trying to get to Jefferson’s and Stream, where we are actually promoting the best people.
And let me tell you of something that really excited me when I heard about the Adelaide Citizen, the Adelaide Citizen Jury on nuclear waste, there are 340 people in that citizen jury and they needed to choose spokespeople to speak to the Premier and there they are, the spokespeople and the Premier Jay Weatherill is on the left there and they didn’t want to hold an election.
So what they did was they randomly selected a group of people, about ten people on the last day of the citizen jury, and they said, please join us in a room for 2 hours. The first hour will be spent identifying the criteria according to which we want spokespeople and the second hour identifying who we’ve met in the citizen jury who best meet those criteria.
And then they went and asked people if they’d be happy to be spokespeople. And the and those who agreed were spokespeople. A nice little cherry on the cake. This was extremely popular. It was extremely successful. A nice bit of cherry on the cake for me is that the group of spokespeople was gender balanced, but gender balance was not one of the criteria.
In other words, they were ideally gender balanced, not artificially gender balanced. That to me, I wrote and I was blown away by that. I thought, that’s a very exciting mechanism. And I wrote an article about it. And then the people who improvised this method were a little mystified that I had got so excited. Some time later I discovered that this is how Venice governed itself for 500 years, you will have heard of coups and blood feuds up and down the Italian peninsula, breaking, you know, causing mayhem in most of the cities of the Italian Renaissance and medieval period.
Venice had no coat, no successful coups, was a stable government for 500 years, for 290, from two to from 1297 to 1797, when Napoleon turned up and said cold drinks. And the way they did this was So think of Venice as a little bit like Athens. Athens had about 20% of the population, had a vote and they were radically equal.
This is about 3000 nobles who had who were the sovereign body governing Venice. And what they did was they would randomly select people from that council. They would lock them up. Think of the papal conclave. They’re not allowed out until we get 15 new senators, two new councilors for the Doge and a financial controller. They are given a secret ballot.
So if people want to campaign or threaten or bribe them, you just walk out of the conclave and say, Yep, yep, did your bidding, and you can’t tell whether they do or not. A really, really interesting mechanism which solves Jefferson’s problem of trying to get off, trying to identify merit without flicking the switch towards Machiavellianism, narcissism and whatever else the third Triad is, I’m sure someone can tell me.
I want to I’ll conclude with what Joan Robinson You know, I’m an economist and I’ve quoted Maynard Keynes. This is the second this is the second edition of her Economics of Imperfect Competition, published the first way back in 1933. This was the second edition, 1969. And she said that the the book, the book had become canonical, and yet it frustrated her because she said all the good things or all the things that that she didn’t care about, which are all those graphs, all those things that she thought were a bit of a fudge.
They went into the canon. But what she was really concerned about was this, which is the consumer. As she wrote, Consumers sovereignty can never be established as long as the initiative lies with the producer for the great brand of consumer goods, the buyer is necessarily necessarily an amateur, while a seller is a professional. She’s just talking about consumer goods.
But think about all the other parts of our economy and then think about our political system. And that is the problem writ large. And this is something of a solution. It’s not a solution because we create a new institution which is part of the system. It is because we take we sample from the community, we give people the time.
We give them the capacity to start knowing enough to take turns in governing and being governed. I said, that was the last thing I’ll make it the last thing I might come back to that. And and if somebody does want to ask me why, if somebody does want to ask me why Susan Boyle is on this presentation, we’ll just have to handle that in questions.
Thank you.
Panel Responses and Discussion
Ravi Gurumurthy
Thank you. Nicholas. Claire, do you want to respond first?
Claire
Yeah. Okay. Great challenge. Thank you. So I suspect where I’m coming from is that we’re hearing you’re talk in a way about the need for change and it’s coming from you and it’s coming from an activist. It’s coming, but it’s actually from the day citizens and the general public. And that’s backed up by evidence. And there’s pure research that shows that people want radical system change, radical political system change.
So it’s not just us. Probably the usual suspects interested in politics that are asking for change. And it’s not just the social movement. So I want to start from that, acknowledging that there’s actually a demand for radical change right now. And it’s not just a theory and theoretical thoughts. It’s it’s actually happening, you know, citizens assemblies and the deliberative processes.
So you’re using the term justice, but actually there’s a wide range of methods which are at the heart of these processes. It’s about not just about sortation and selection of people at random, but it’s also deliberation. These are the key components in citizens assemblies, sortation and deliberation. So that’s that’s really it’s happening. And we are seeing, you know, the OECD, as you know, coined this, the deliberative wave.
And we think actually there’s a lot more that the U.S. is acknowledging. In the UK, for instance, the doing the brand brown governments that was, you know, more than 200 processes happening, deliberative processes. They might have been called citizens duty because actually there was there was a lot more happening. And my my organization is we as we’ve been supporting processes in Armenia, for instance, which I think speaks to your point about doing democracies democracy ourselves.
There’s there’s been an assumption for, I would say, the past ten or 20 years that to have legitimacy, these processes need a mandate from power holders. And if you get a mandate, you get, you know, a process will be designed that will lead to change. What we’re noticing and I’ve been involved in more than 20 assemblies in the last few years, is that actually that’s a bit simplistic and naive to assume that mandate and a good process need to change.
Politics is messy, and we’ve seen that with the French commercial situation, for instance, where there was a commitment from the from President McCall to not feel to what was coming out of the assembly that would be either translated into a referendum, regulation or legislation. By the end of it, we and that’s the thought. And so on your one on your picture.
We know how politics works. It’s it’s messy. They are vested interest and we need to acknowledge that. I suppose when we’re talking about deliberative democracy, it’s not just good enough to do a process that is robust. You actually need to think about how change happens. What are these recommendations landing and they land in a system that is not suited for actually radical change.
So when you think about the deliberative system, then you need to think about the different components in that system. And the citizens assembly is a mechanism, but you need to think about what are narrative and culture, How does that shape what happens, what well, what’s the role of the media? How is that going to influence what happens once you’ve got the recommendations?
Well, why are the vested interests good? And at which point are they going to influence the process between the recommendation and the legislation? So and this is what we try to do in an article we wrote last month called Let’s Get Real about Citizens Assemblies, it’s actually let’s let’s really talk about politics and how power works. So we need to become power literate.
So just to to, you know, in a way support completely your argument that we need to do democracy ourselves. We need to reclaim it and not put all our hopes into existing power holders open, you know, in a way that’s quite disempowering to say. And I’ve seen that time and time again when I was facilitating these assemblies, people were really activated.
That sense of individual and collective agency being created and then they’re realizing actually the change that we really believe is needed is not happening. So it is actually the risk and that’s the biggest risk I’m seeing at the moment, is that what’s that wave is actually crushing and that it creates disempowerment. This is your illusion then, because the change is not happening.
And so just to summarize, I think we need to see the seeds of the change. And and for me, this this idea of doing it ourselves is actually is really empowering. But that that requires thinking really carefully about then how do you make the change happen? So it’s not just about creating the process. And that’s what’s so interesting.
For instance, with this project in Armenia called the Convention of the Future Armenian, which is a highly complex political contact with war happening in Azerbaijan with as Abidjan, a genocide, literally another one happening on our doorsteps. And they have created a completely independent citizens convention, which has its own affiliation network, which will take some of the recommendations forward, which include, you know, people from civil society businesses.
So they’re not putting their hopes into the existing power holders. So this is where I completely relate to the arguments of let’s reclaim our power, let’s do democracy ourselves, but let’s be really careful about not just putting all hopes into methodology, which could be a method going to treat. Let’s think about system change and how we’re going to change that system collectively.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Thank you very much. I’m and finally, Martin, if you want to come up and give me a response.
Martin Wolf
Okay. That’s so many fascinating ideas.
I decided I’d sort of decide what to say when I heard what people said at the. So I’m a complete non expert on the assemblies and how they work. So my knowledge is such as it is doesn’t overlap with Claire in anything I think and Vicky and I got to this in a rather strange way and basically my starting point is because I got to it via Nicholas that everything he says must be true and right.
But what I won’t do, I is discuss three things, which is why I became interested in this. The this relates to the sort of what I think is the core problem in politics. And the third is what will be involved. David, this is just a reaction to Claire saying it can sort of manage in bringing about an insurrection, which is, I think what you’re talking about and which is, in other words, how do you actually make it politically effective, which is, I think, a pretty big question.
So why did I get to this? So I started writing in 2016, a book called which is published last this year in February called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. And basically it came out of my view, which is not something I would have thought ten years earlier or 13 or 20 years earlier, that our political economic system in as operating isn’t working very well.
And I’m putting this quite gently, and to me it seems clear that some form of capitalism is going to survive. But I’m not at all clear that any sort of democracy is going to. And that’s not something I had expected, and it was triggered by the obvious disaster. Brexit would be not just economic naturally, but politically. It’s created a for it has reinforced a form of politics which cannot possibly deal with any of our problems.
And I don’t think anybody who’s looked at the last seven years can really disagree with that. And of course, in America they’re about to elect a fascist. It’s as simple as that. And it’s a very open question, in my view, not very open whether Americans see America, even its current form of democracy, will survive. So this is a major crisis of our system and the core.
There are many core ways, but maybe one good way of thinking about a good way of thinking about it is get to Nicholas’s point, which could be put in the same way that democracy that is in my book, but not put it this way, democracy as we know it, representative democracy emerging within a constitutional order and out of a constitutional order that itself was highly non-democratic, to put it mildly.
And what made it more or less peaceful in a country like Britain? I won’t go into the whole history of all this. We’ve spent a lot of time on. This is precisely that. And that’s where we get to Claire’s question becomes one very crude way of putting it. Is that at each stage in the process, vested interest of which the most important were the landed aristocracy, and then what marks with the capital is recognize that giving the vote to a lot more people was better than having a civil war.
And there were successive stages. And based on and we ended up with universal suffrage democracy. And the point was not to change too much and it didn’t change too much, except within the system, of course, it developed a new form, not a new form, an evolved form, but the political process itself, which Nicholas has talked about, which is the corruption, the complete corruption of debate.
I think we can describe that this is very so that’s how we got sort of where we are. And in the process of making those adjustments 40 or 50 years ago, we designed a system to cope with this new arrangement, which very broadly could be defined as welfare capitalism. And that’s broken down, in essence, is the argument of the book very, very crudely?
What do you do now? Well, one approach, which is I talked to at length, is try and reform politics, reform the economy in such a way through the political process that it works better for everybody. The other way to think about it is you need to reform politics. You probably need to reform both. And they have to come together.
And it’s in that context that I came to Nicholas’s idea and have only two or three pages actually on why citizens assemblies, and particularly creating a separate house of Parliament selected by vote by lot might be a really interesting idea and might do some useful things to remedy the problems we have. And Nicholas discussed a lot of that, and I don’t have much to add the so that’s why I got to it and what I think are quite nice ideas to start with.
But the big point Clare raised is how do you make this or anything like it happen, which is of course also the good, the big good critique of my book of I wrote a critique of my book. It would basically say, Well, how is any of this going to happen? And the answer is what Claire is suggesting in a very nice and gentle ways or revolution.
And and because it’s trying to undo the 200 years or so, give or take over evolution of what was an aristocratic and monarchical system into a quasi democratic system and say we took the wrong course, we should have been Athenians. I won’t go into all the problems with the Athenian system. That’s another point altogether. I spent a lot of time as a classicist, but the the point is we have to be quite clear about this and this really last point.
If you want to do this, you have to recognize as you’re trying to overturn the logical by the the, the logical basis, I think, of our political system, which is, as he said, an elective aristocracy and the and the to do that you have to persuade the people at large that they are being fooled big time. Very big time.
And you’re going to have to do that against every interest, including all of the media, such as the Financial Times. So maybe what we should focus on if we want something that big is how you make revolutions happen, right?
Ravi Gurumurthy
I didn’t expect you send them all out.
Martin Wolf
I didn’t say I wanted to make this revolution. No, I said, if you wanted this to happen, my amelioration is that let’s get an agreement that we can build on the assemblies that Nicholas thought make them into and make one into an institution, Make it legitimate to such a degree that people have to give it part, which to some extent happened with the House of Commons in over a hundred years and sort of incremental incremental stuff.
But that change will probably be a century or so.
Q&A Session
Ravi Gurumurthy
Okay. Let’s let’s pick up on that actually, because I want to ask perhaps start with Claire. Nicholas, if you if you take on which I think he mentioned or Belgium or Armenia, how did they get there and what are we learning from those sorts of processes?
Claire
I can start with France. I’m quite close to what was interesting with the French Climate Citizens Assembly, which had more than 90% awareness in the French public by the end of the climate Assembly is that it started with the religion and the social movement. The gesture came together with deliberative democracy expert, activist, and they created this group, this Utoya, which then went to Moscow and negotiated to hold the citizens assembly.
The momentum came from the social movement in France, and that led to a process that was really interesting and change the narrative around what’s possible with deliberative democracy. And then it fitted within the existing power structure and that when that was commissioned by Merkel, what’s interesting for me with the Armenian process or what with we’ve done with the global assemblies, we claim the space was given to cause a claim space rather than a closed or invited space.
So most of the citizens assembly, when they’re commissioned by power holders, are invited spaces. The power holders determines the framing the agenda. The the you know what? How much budget is going to go into it. I think what’s interesting is to look at these claim spaces and how they have legitimacy within themselves. It doesn’t have the legitimacy doesn’t have to come from the power holders if they are done well and that transparent.
And that’s where the governance of these forces is, is absolutely critical. We haven’t really talked about it, but I think the governance of assemblies is where for me, where the nuts and bolts need to be really open and transparent.
Nicholas Gruen
I’m yeah. So one of the interesting things about Belgium and just to explain to people who don’t know the German speaking part of Belgium, it’s only 70,000 odd citizens has a standing citizen council and it’s pretty much, I think, best practice. I think it’s a perfect instrument. It has no formal power that it is funded. 50 people sit for a year and they have the power to commission additional citizen assemblies of a bunch of new people chosen at random.
And they write the terms of reference and just before COVID, they initiated a process in which people were looking at the conditions in nursing homes rather presciently, they then moved and one of the interesting things is that a lot of the things that a lot of the work that this body does doesn’t isn’t very newsworthy because of our politics in the paper is only newsworthy politics.
Quick factoid for you. A a small party in Austria that believes in Sortation did a survey of Austrian citizens before the last election and asked them what they thought was the most important issue for parliamentarians to focus on in their next term. And the answer was education. And the election was about immigration because you can’t. It’s not news.
Education doesn’t get on the nightly news. We don’t have fights about it. We don’t have demonstrations about it and so on. The other interesting thing about East Belgium is that East Belgium, like so many European polities, is run by proportional representation and there are six parties and all six voted for this thing. And in my discussions with Belgian people, they’re a little bit mystified because I’m and they realize that that this is a very different problem that I’m trying to solve, which is that I’m trying to solve a problem.
I’m trying to build a branch of government that can start to pacify civilized discipline. This crazy freak show that we’ve got in our politics. So all parties are not going to suddenly vote for a system of assembly in Britain or Australia or the United States. So it’s a it’s quite a different problem. I’ll also just make a quick comment about Ireland, which is that Ireland is a sort of pin up point for this and I think it’s extremely successful.
I’ve done about six or seven of these governments. They understand that they can be useful to them. And so lots of and so I would say that government, that the government in Ireland is right up at the edge of what I call the end of the beginning, which is that they have not yet got an established concept channel position for citizen assemblies, but Irish people like citizen assemblies.
And I think that’s a very valuable thing. And I just spent earlier this afternoon talking to somebody in, in government in, in the UK about the prospect I said I said to this person the most successful government in Australia, both in terms of policy and in terms of politics, was Bob Hawke and Bob Hawke styled himself not as a political hero but as a steward of a process.
That process in Australia was an accord between employers, employees, farmers, the bureaucracy and big business basically, and small business. And what that meant was that there were large social problems solved. And then they came to the party and they came to the parliament. And if they and of course, what’s the opposition basically take whatever trouble they can and at which point one of the social partners would say to look to the opposition, can you shut up?
We’ve done a lot of work on this. This is going to be good for us. It’s going to be good for everyone because we have to negotiate it through. I’m not suggesting you replicate that, but something like citizen assemblies can enable a politician, a senior politician, to present themselves to the nation as a steward rather than as the latest political hero, which will be a big hero for a while and eventually disappear, worn down by the tabloids.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Martin You want to come in? I just want to also ask you on this, can you see a version where it is actually an assembly that’s invited by a political by power holder as opposed to a bottom up revolution?
Martin Wolf
Yeah, I was I’ve been thinking about that actually related to discussion we just had. What are the circumstances in which politicians might be interested in institutional arrangements of this kind or anything that constrains their discretion in some way? And my sense of this within sort of, broadly speaking, functioning states, we can let’s not get into the difficulty of deciding what they are.
They exist, they operate, and all the rest of it is. And I can think of a few examples when a potato gets so hot that they really, really don’t want to handle it. My understanding and stress stress, my non expertise is one of the reasons the Irish, for example, went in to do this on abortion, is that it was a nightmarish issue, so deeply divisive and so poisonous to politics that it seemed very desirable to find a mechanism which looked plausible and decent and reasonable for people to reach a consensus which didn’t involve them having to make a decision which you’d end up as wildly outraging some very significant part of the population.
But that that was sort of deeply invested in it. And there are a few issues like that. And Nick just mentioned Brexit. Well then obviously many of those characteristics. I could imagine that if Cameron had thought about it, I imagine as I would stress, imagine that if he realized the mess he was going to get himself into, he might have said to George Osborne, You know, isn’t there some way that we can de-politicize this ghastly thing that is tearing our party to pieces and will end up destroying it as a functioning government party, which it has?
And and isn’t this a possible way of doing it? The idea, I’m sure, never crossed their mind, but in other, the supremely hot potato might be one reason that politicians are genuinely interested. And the other possibility, and this is more a question for Claire and this is gets more into the revolution stage. Now, I’m obviously I have no expertise on what’s going on in Armenia except the pretty obviously the country’s in simply staggering crisis as a place.
And if you are in overwhelming crisis or the regime is beginning to break down in one way or another, then revolutionary things happen mostly very, very terrible revolutionary things. But there are situations in which the break from a functioning order is so great that finding some way to work together becomes important. It is conceivable to me, therefore conceivable, I stress conceivable that politicians in the US would start saying if we continue down this where we’re going, we’re going to end up in a civil war.
And that’s really not a place we want to get to. Is there any mechanism we can think of to resolve outside this war? We having the the really bitter, contentious issues that divide us? And again, that might be a situation in which politicians will agree. This is the sort of thing we, we we we could consider as an alternative.
So those a couple of imagined paths which might lead some political forces say actually we need the help of this because the politics we’re now in is absolutely nightmarish.
Ravi Gurumurthy
There’s an assumption that there isn’t, that it’s the process will come up with the right answer and that when people deliberate, they suddenly become rather progressive and sensible and manageable.
Martin Wolf
I don’t equate sensible and progressive. I’m afraid I’m much more reactionary than that.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Well, you said point. There was an assumption that this is a way of when people really about the issues actually they come up with a a better judgment than when they haven’t deliberated. But if you take and I think it’s lots of good examples of that being the case. Yeah, I’ve been involved in enormously things on the energy side where we got people to participate in a 2015 net zero plan and actually people come up with very, very sensible ideas, almost identical to the economists cost optimizing models. So we put through an Energy Department, if it’s very.
Martin Wolf
Easy to get people to agree on what needs to be done in 2050, it.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Is, but even even even nearer term questions.
Martin Wolf
But I’m sure if.
Ravi Gurumurthy
You took questions that are very difficult, like the death penalty or immigration right now, would you take the risk of putting this through a citizen’s assembly or would you be fearful of the potential consequences of doing that?
Nicholas Gruen
So I would be a little fearful. But my view on Brexit, for instance, was that Brexit was a mad thing to do, but that if the British people really wanted to do it and understood what they were doing, I would be in awe. I would think, Good on you. You’re going to take a 4% lower income. We don’t live by bread alone and this is what you want to do.
So this all and so there’s almost no, it’s true. This is one. So citizen juries swing towards retributive ideas. And I think there are for instance, there are some precedents of juries in the South simply not convicting white murderers of black people. So I wouldn’t be that I would take to be a problem. But but but generally, all the evidence I’ve seen is that the considered opinion of the people is very safe, and it’s better than the opinion of the people.
And if it if it differed from me, except on a few incredibly visceral points, I’d go with that considered judgment, not mine. That’s I believe that that that’s that’s those are my values, if you like.
Ravi Gurumurthy
On sort of issues where particular the public are really much more to the right of say, the political elites would you.
Claire
So I was in Copenhagen at the Deliberative Democracy conference recently and we had a session on all some topics too hot to tackle. And there was very different views within the democracy experts. And some were saying, actually we can’t go on on these very polarized topics. And I and I, I don’t think personally that a topic is too hot to handle.
I think it’s about the expectation. So a not deliberative democracy experts put into these processes the expectation of consensus. I don’t think that’s what they are about. I think it’s much more about actually surface things, the deep fears and hopes and governing sentiments and not expecting that we’re all going to come to an agreement. But actually it’s randomizing that we we can live together and agree to disagree in a way that is respectful.
And so it’s quite a profound difference. And someone cool shimmery Windsor, an activist from Israel, has been, you know, basically imprisoned because he was he was supporting, you know, peace, the peace process in Israel. And he’s e believes that a citizen’s assembly posts on on you know, what’s happening in Israel at the moment could really be be done.
So I think I wouldn’t I mean, I’m not the one who needs to answer that. I don’t I don’t know. But I would talk to people who actually have thought about this. And Professor Nicole Camacho, for instance, has written this book called Democracy in Times of Crisis, And she really understands what’s possible in really deeply polarized states in the Philippines, for instance.
So I think it’s it’s it’s possible. We just need to be brave.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Okay. I respond and then we’ll go to the floor for questions.
Martin Wolf
I haven’t thought about this deeply, but I have thought quite a bit about what democracy means. And and it doesn’t mean unbridled majoritarianism. I mean, here I’m with Jefferson, if I may say so. And it’s a constrained system and, the most important constraints. And we can we don’t have the time to discuss how or where they would come but have are obviously individual rights.
So I wouldn’t support any democratic process, including this one, which allow people, for example, to decide by majority vote that a large proportion of the population should be killed. Okay, that’s a constraint, right? You’re not allowed to do that.
Ravi Gurumurthy
I think you’re reactionary. Reactionary.
Martin Wolf
That’s completely rational. Individuals are ultimately majority democracy is only important because individuals are important. That’s the core value. Human beings are important because as individuals in making state decisions which have to be collective, we have to have a process that allows in the best possible way the aspirations, hopes and ideas of everybody involved. And that’s, I think, what we’re discussing.
But if you accept that this is my view that the demand for democracy derives from the value of human beings per say, then there are things you can’t aren’t allowed to do to individual human beings just because of a majority of people would like to do them to them. In other words, there have to be fundamental rights in a system.
I’m not going to discuss how you get there, but that’s why every constitution has them. And by the way, the worst example of the Athenian democracy was in a debate of exactly this kind, which is the vain the million debate, as you know. Now, admittedly, this was written out by Thucydides, but the point is to me, all democratic processes have to be constrained by fundamental human rights.
Now how that fits into immigration is more difficult because the civic rights of non-citizens are an interesting question. But in the case of capital punishment, I’m pretty clear.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Okay. Thank you. Let’s go to the floor. Let’s take three questions in a row. Take the lady, that gentleman there and the gentleman just behind us. Okay. Could you bring the microphone over? Well, so everyone can hear online line. Ready to put your hand up? I.
Claire
Thanks very much. My name’s Sara, and I’m organizing with a group called Just Stop Oil. So I was really interested in Martin’s point of, you know, that basically what we need is political insurrection, because I would agree with him, and I think we do need it to change politics because our politic, our process right now is failing us hugely.
So currently this September was 1.78 degrees above the preindustrial average. And so, Martin, I don’t even think capitalism is going to survive.
Claire
Way that we’re going, nevermind democracy. So and also, we’re on a trajectory where we are going to kill millions of people. That’s what our democratic process is currently doing, if not billions of people. So I think my question is, I mean, I don’t know if just the world can achieve it, possibly not. But those, you know, today there’s an 18 year old who got sent to prison because, you know, they really believe that we need to change this political system that we have.
So what are you going to do to help achieve that, that change to take place? Because there already are people on the streets demanding and occupying that space, you know, saying something different has to happen. So how do we use them to make the the change in our political process happen?
Ravi Gurumurthy
Okay. Just pass it to the gentleman that I keep. Thanks.
Martin Wolf
James Robertson from Sortation Foundation. You mentioned 2040 at the start. Our vision is that by 2040.
Ravi Gurumurthy
The powers and responsibilities.
Nicholas Gruen
That are currently held by the.
Martin Wolf
House of Lords will be held by House.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Of Citizens.
Speaker 5
Permanent.
Nicholas Gruen
Rolling Citizens.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Assembly. And we realize that’s ambitious.
Martin Wolf
And that’s why we’ve already started the campaign. But we do think we have an opportunity.
Ravi Gurumurthy
So on the question of how that has come up.
Martin Wolf
As I’m sure people will be aware, Starmer’s pledge to abolish the House of Lords basically because everyone agrees.
Ravi Gurumurthy
It’s pretty indefensible in a 20.
Martin Wolf
First century democracy. But it’s under the he is pledged to do that in order to restore trust in politics. Well, our polling shows that people are about four times more likely to trust ordinary people in.
Ravi Gurumurthy
A citizen’s.
Martin Wolf
Assembly.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Than politicians to make a decision in their.
Martin Wolf
Interests. Right. So if it’s trust.
Ravi Gurumurthy
In politics that you want, then a house of citizens is the answer, not an elected second chamber. And then the other thing is.
Martin Wolf
Will people always say, well.
That’ll never happen? But then they’ve been debating.
Martin Wolf
They’ve been trying to get an elected.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Second chamber out of the Commons for the last hundred years, and it doesn’t ever get very far.
Martin Wolf
And so I wonder if there is a possibility that as.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Obviously a house as citizens wouldn’t.
Martin Wolf
Be elected, it would be selected whether they would be seen as less of a threat. So I suppose my question.
Nicholas Gruen
Is.
Martin Wolf
What do you think of that idea?
Ravi Gurumurthy
And so the idea being that even replace the House of Lords.
Martin Wolf
With a House of.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Citizens, basically. Thanks. And you. Good evening. My name is Andrea Sakurai. I’m a systems architect. The seed I would like to plant in your mind is the cost of democracy could be just a pound. The question I’d like to ask is no one’s kind of mentioned money in politics. And the reason I say that is because money is power.
Ravi Gurumurthy
And the political parties, even in quite an informed here, I’d be surprised how many people realize that political parties, whether it’s Conservative or Labor Party or the Lib-Dems, they’re really tiny and I mean tiny by budget. And if you look at the last ten years, the major parties have a budget that somewhere between 10 to 20 million a year, it’s largest in an election year.
Ravi Gurumurthy
None of these parties ever run can balance the books. They are not capable of running their own party like an efficient company, like and or business or an organization. And then what happens is we have donations. And those donations for the left come from unions, but at least they represent millions. Your question? Yeah, the question is why are we talking about the influence of money in politics?
Ravi Gurumurthy
Because politics shapes all the parties. And there are 47 million registered voters in the UK. And if we each paid £1 every year towards a pot, we would have enough money to fund all the parties so they couldn’t take any donations. All right. Thank you. Let’s keep going with some points and questions. Let’s keep them short and then we can have let’s have three football and then let’s go to the panel for some final reflections, if that’s okay.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Let’s go to this side of the room now, Rory. Yes, you can. I say.
Martin Wolf
Sorry, you consider using this mechanism, if you like, for decisions to be taken in advance.
Ravi Gurumurthy
It occurs to me you could also.
Martin Wolf
Have it as a check on and balance on decisions already made. So there’s a huge problem in politics. What is really reputational sunk costs. So projects like high speed to continue after the point of absurdity. If you’d asked me, for example, to advise the Remain campaign, what I would have said is that there was a perfectly rational reason to vote leave, which is you knew you’d never get a chance ever again to leave the European Union.
Martin Wolf
Okay? The odds of being given that choice ever again in your lifetime were practically zero.
Ravi Gurumurthy
You also knew that.
Martin Wolf
The political and governmental and economic class was slightly perversely obsessed with the European project to an extent which they would sign up to almost any future indignity. So if you’d asked me to advise that the Remain campaign, I would have said, Look, if we remain in the European Union, we will have a citizens assembly and permanent standing. And if that reaches a point where 50% of the people or more want to leave.
Martin Wolf
We will have a subsequent referendum. And then I think I don’t think many people wanted to leave in 2016. They wanted to leave for fear of what would happen in 2027 because they’d been told it was an economic project. It turned into a political one. They had been misinformed. Now, if you did that with things like high speed, two large projects where you simply said, we will do this thing, but at the point where it appears to be failure, the Citizens Assembly can override it and provides a low embarrassment way of stopping that could also be useful.
Does that make sense?
Ravi Gurumurthy
Yeah, makes sense. Thank you. Let’s take one from the online and then let’s take one of the back there.
Claire
Thank you. Yeah. So I’ve got a question here from Martin Online, and he said he very much like the idea of kick starting citizens assemblies with flapped philanthropy and what kind of budget would be required to get kick start this great thinking.
Ravi Gurumurthy
And I think the cloud hanging over this really fascinating conversation is urgency because, you know, we’re talking about five years or ten years time, and yet the progression towards potential fascism, as you said, in America, is on a much shorter timeline. And we’ve seen in the actions just in the last couple of weeks about infringement of the independence of the police, you know, the same stirrings of that movement here.
Ravi Gurumurthy
So I really want to pick up I mean, it’s it’s a sign of our times that a chief economic correspondent of the day is the one calling for revolution. And I just want to follow up on your question. If we were going to have a revolution, can we dream all of that? Like, what does that look like? Can we do something before this pivotal election to try and make an impact and start turn the ship around, Lady at the front.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Hold on a second. Hold on. Just let me get the film.
Claire
I just have a question regarding public legitimacy, because I see that is as the core of everything. I mean, if we know.
Ravi Gurumurthy
The British people no longer see their system as legitimate, you know, it will fall apart.
Claire
How do we if we think that democracy has to be deep, polarized and get off the the the parties fighting each other is how the system is set up. It means that we need more citizen engagement. So how do we nurture that with the idea that individual rights come also. With collective responsibility? How do we how do grow that society? Because we have to stop. We have to stop expecting that some leader is going to come and show us the way or give us all answers. We have a collective responsibility to our citizens.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Thank you, Robert. I’m afraid I’m going have to go now to a final round from the panel. I’m going to actually ask Martin to start off. There are a few questions that you might want to pick up. I think the question about checks and balances on decisions already made was interesting. And also the question on funding, is this a big idea or a small idea?
Ravi Gurumurthy
How expensive is this?
Martin Wolf
Okay. I think a fairly straightforward and I but I want to take up money. There are so many interesting questions, obviously. I think a very interesting idea and thought about it that way. One of the ideas in my book, I probably just got it from Nicholas, I saw all the others is that of referendums or proposals for referendums would go through the House of Citizens, and that will be one of their permanent functions to de-politicize the actual motion, and they would have the right to initiate them.
So that might be one way of getting your your thing. My own suggestion, by the way, because I don’t want to go to for various reasons, is that there will be an additional house of the citizens. I would be open to discussion of replacing the House of Lords. I just think it will create more, more difficulties. And there are functions of the House of Lords performance, which I don’t know exactly how they would work in this system.
I haven’t thought about them enough. But anyway, that’s that. That’s how I have a very clear view on money in politics, which is a big theme in my book. And I argue, which I think comes down to what you say that we need a mechanism for public funding of political parties and indeed private funding thereof becomes should become very difficult unless through with clear maximum gift.
So the problem is not just of money. In politics, though. This is changing in America, frighteningly in a way about that very large donations will be discourage. The interesting thing is that some of the parties the Trump machine works in this way have become very, very, very good at getting small donations. And that’s where the Internet has changed something.
So I think money and its role in policy is a very big the lobbying machines are very big issue, but they are quite complicated. Now, the final thing is I just want to get to is it because I was making a logical statement, not a political recommendation, that if you wanted to do this quickly on a big scale, it would have to involve an insurrection?
I’m in general, not in favor of insurrection, because my reading of the history of revolutions is they are generally a very, very long way round after the death of many millions of people to end up where you started. And the Russian Revolution is to me, the definitive example of this. They recreate. It’s a serious system under Putin. It’s more corrupt, more disgusting, and more culturally ruinous than where they started.
That’s pretty horrendous for God knows how many of death the so the political mechanics of this are unbelievably important and they have to be thought about much harder than I have. But I’ll make one point on climate, which is a point on which we’re going to disagree. And this is basically a practical issue. I mean, I tend to think, of it assume that climate is an existential issue.
Right. Assume that absolutely decisive action has to occur very, very soon and know that nothing, literally nothing we do in this country will make any difference. All. We produce a 1% of emissions. Two thirds of the emissions in the world are produced by emerging and developing countries and all the growth. So this is a global problem. Now, that doesn’t mean I have a solution of how you do this.
At the moment it seems very, very difficult. But actually I cannot imagine any conceivable process that will make a lot of difference in this very quickly that doesn’t involve actually going through the machinery of government that we have in the world. Right now and an immense amount of pressure on it from the people at large. And the and I think a an attempted transformation of the political process in a few relatively liberal and open democracies will unfortunately not change the outcome in any relevant way.
So I basically ended up with a conservative political position if you want to achieve any degree change. You can rightly point out that probably won’t work. I think that’s quite likely. So I’m very pessimistic on it, but I don’t see any alternative that will work better in the relatively relevant timetable, and that’s really a very, very depressing situation to be in.
Martin Wolf
But it’s not how I think about it.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Thank you very much.
Martin Wolf
Sorry about the length of that.
Ravi Gurumurthy
That’s alright. Claire, do you pick up any of the questions you want to. One particular one I’m interested in your view on whether the idea of a citizens assembly taking the place of the House of Lords could work, or whether if it were sort of co-opted, would it be co-opted by the establishment and the power holders and the be be effective from the start?
Claire
So that’s one one model replacing the House of Lords that’s very different from actually creating an independent chamber. I don’t think the workings of the House of Lords as a as a House of Citizens replacing House of Lords. I don’t think we we have the the details yet. I’m not sure how actually it’s going to change the system.
For me it’s just a plaster on actually an existing problem acting system. So I’m, I’m, I don’t know they are inside those outside the strategies. It’s you know to, to explore. But for me what’s what we haven’t talked about at the moment is how culture eats politics. And there are people in the audience that are working on actually how to engage how to bring this into popular culture.
I think we we need to hear more about that. How do we do that effectively and quickly? Because to address the point of urgency, I think that’s where we’re going. We could see the biggest shift. So it’s like almost like a social tipping point. If you bring this into popular culture and people realize the potential and the thing we haven’t talked about on the scale.
So at the moment, you know, you’re you’re saying it needs to be addressed at the global level? Well, we’ve done the Global Citizens Assembly. That was an experiment for COP26. We’re now working towards the the UN summit of the future, looking at how a global assembly fit within the multilateral system. But actually how does that connect to the very local processes?
So the multilayered and the the momentum is already happening. I mean, Brian Eno gets requests and offers all the time for hearing people doing deliberative processes on the ground and in communities. So it’s just a question of actually ensuring people know that it’s happening and that these collective agency, collective efficacy is, is built. It’s a movement building piece that we need to do actually.
And I think the there’s the it could happen faster than we think.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Okay. Finally, Nicholas, there’s also a revolution, which I didn’t expect in this this event. But in a way, your ambition for this goes way beyond the sort of single mechanism you actually want to try and create a deliberative culture more generally across how we make decisions. I just wondered whether you wanted to end with almost what’s an extension beyond what you’ve talked about.
Nicholas Gruen
Well, yeah, I think of this, and I think I’m reasonably unique in this among people who are who have discovered or claimed to have discovered that so attention is a kind of giant sanity mechanism that I think of it as more a kind of hemisphere having opened up in one’s mind about governance, that there are these two ways we.
Martin spoke about the monarchical power system every every polity in the modern world, every day, what we call democratic polity in the modern world, stuff that as a monarchy and remains a democratized monarchy, The president is a single figure, an elected monarch. And here it’s exactly the same thing. We have a pyramid. We have enough of sovereignty, and then we then we try to democratize that.
Now it is all sort of woke up at the start, maybe six months, maybe 12 months ago, to realize that Pericles, who most of you know of what’s the hold of any he was a general, one of ten. He wasn’t the holder of Supreme Office. There was no Supreme office that the demos was supreme. And and the the boat, the Council of 500 kept it all together and it functioning.
This is even true of the Roman Republic where that wasn’t they had a period of monarchy and they built the republic not to be a monarchy, to be a system in which the people, the consort was the what, two of them, and they could veto each other and so on. More generally.
Could this is what is in the mechanism in Venice. We can we can mix in these mechanisms and they can detox a lot of us. But that spiky plant keeps growing up. The the, the list in my picture. That’s what I did in Venice. And these mechanisms of view, this idea and up getting the actual people to be the experts to the extent that they can.
Nicholas Gruen
That’s what John Ruskin was to do.
Speaker 5
Is and that’s just because I can see I mean, that’s democracy. It’s pretty happy with McDonald’s.
Nicholas Gruen
With these things. We can.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Change through.
Speaker 5
These courts mechanisms of the sorts of things.
Ravi Gurumurthy
That can enable us to do that. Thank you very much, Nicholas. Thank you. Thank you, Martin. Thank you very much to the audience here and online for a really good discussion.
Nicholas Gruen
Nobody asked me about Susan Boyle.
Ravi Gurumurthy
I’m very disappointed because I Susan Boyle, if you want if you want to know Abbas’s void, we’re going to have some drinks afterwards to do. Please ask Nichols about the Susan Boyle question. Just one final thing from me. You know, I come back to what I said at the beginning, which is when you think about the massive difficult challenges faced in this country and everywhere else, yes, there are some technocratic policy answers, but I don’t think we will get them get to them without political change.
Ravi Gurumurthy
And institutions that drive better decision making, that drive moderation, that drive better reflection and that political space needs to be created. And it’s not being created by today’s institutions. We are both being honest, have done some work in this area, the collective Center for Collective Intelligence Design and Policy have done different experiments, both in the private sector and the public sector as an area.
Ravi Gurumurthy
I think of real interest. I know many of you here are involved in lots of practical experiments, so we’d love to keep the conversation going about what we’re learning together and what the way forward looks like. So thank you very much for joining and to join us for some drinks.
Martin Wolf
As you know, Nicholas, the Fenians lost the Peloponnesian War and the Roman Republic was divided in military dictatorship.
Nicholas Gruen
Exactly. Exactly.
Ravi Gurumurthy
So it’s hard, isn’t it?
Martin Wolf
Yes.
Nicholas Gruen
That’s right.
Unlocking Your Inner Genius with the Feynman Method
Richard Feynman was one of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th century. He helped develop the theory of quantum electrodynamics, won the Nobel Prize, and worked on the Manhattan Project. How did he achieve such groundbreaking insights? Feynman had a simple but effective strategy to spur creative thinking that anyone can try.
Feynman advocated always having a dozen favorite problems or questions on your mind. Most of the time, these problems sit dormant in the back of your mind. But whenever you encounter a new idea, result, or technique, pull out your list and test the new concept against each problem.
Looking for a spark
Once in a while, you’ll get a “hit. The new concept will provide insight into one of your lingering questions. This flash of inspiration, though rare, is the seed of genius. When you share your solution, others will be amazed and call you brilliant.
The beauty of these “hits” lies in the profound connection between our thoughts and the world around us. It is in those moments of clarity that we realize how intricate and interconnected everything truly is. It’s as if the universe itself conspires to give us the answers we seek.
When such a moment strikes, it feels as if time stands still. The jumbled pieces of the puzzle suddenly fell into place, revealing a picture that was once hidden. It’s like discovering a hidden treasure and unlocking a hidden door to a world of endless possibilities.
But it’s not just about personal satisfaction. Sharing the brilliance of our ideas is what truly ignites the fire of inspiration in others. When we present our solutions to the world, it sparks a chain reaction of creativity, setting off waves of innovation and progress.
Think about the great thinkers and innovators throughout history. Their breakthroughs didn’t just impact their own lives; they shaped the course of human civilization. From Einstein’s theory of relativity to Steve Jobs’ vision of the iPhone, these genius minds gifted us with inventions that changed the way we live and perceive the world.
So, embrace those rare moments of insight. Treasure them like precious gems. Because within them lies the power to transform not just our own lives but the lives of countless others. And who knows, maybe one day, someone will look at you and exclaim, “You are a true genius!”
But in truth, your brilliance simply came from persistently cross-checking new information against important problems. As Feynman put it, “Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’”
Focus on Process and Persistence
While genius may seem mystical, Feynman’s method shows it often arises from humble persistence. To harness this approach:
- Identify a dozen problems or questions that fascinate you in your field.
- Note these problems and keep them at the back of your mind.
- When you encounter a new concept or technique, ask yourself: Does this help solve any of my favorite problems?
- If there is a match, you may have brilliant insight! Explore further.
- Share your insights with others; you may seem like a genius!
- But remember, your brilliance comes from perseverance, not inborn talent.
Using this method won’t guarantee genius-level ideas. But regularly cross-checking new information against the problems you care about most is a simple way to unlock more creative thinking. With persistence, you may surprise yourself with insights that seem extraordinarily brilliant to others.
So next time you feel stuck, don’t despair. Refresh your list of favorite questions. And keep looking for hits as you test new concepts against old problems. That flash of inspiration you’ve been waiting for might be right around the corner!
Photo by Enric Moreu on Unsplash
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The post Unlocking Your Inner Genius with the Feynman Method first appeared on Dr. Ian O'Byrne.