Thats an interesting look at where to focus on innovation. I have two obvious thoughts:
1. Focusing on innovations on science is often linked to new businesses based on new technology. That in itself provides billions in £ due to industrial growth. So, as a government that is a very positive thing to do.
2. Social innovation is very different to hard sellable science. I see that the 'research' behind this work occurs in our communities and societies. I do much work in local authorities and community groups. And I am surrounded by great practices, innovation in many localities. I have access to so much of it, that I simply dont know where to turn as it is so overwhelming.
For that research to become useful, it has to be understood by local government (partial), the NHS (very little), and the civil service (in my experience non existent). Evidence of this is the drive to austerity that has killed off much of what happens in the social sphere, and removed much of those activities that used to occur in local government.
What I do find is that the civil service appears to be so disconnected to local government and localities, that their decision-making has no relevance to communities. Dont forget that New Public Management (NPM) is designed to keep decision-makers away from the real work, and also to see how organisations work through aggregated measures. NPM, service design and digital has pulled public sector workers away from localities, and into buildings.
Society is complex, and the public sector and especially the Treasury is not designed to react to complexity. So much of what is going on in communities today, and what has occurred over the past 2 decades lies hidden to them.
Taking your point, having a place where this learning can be gathered and learned from is a great idea. But is that not already occurring through the likes of Demos, Nesta, and other similar groups?
Surprised by what's said here about productivity. ESRC funds the Productivity Institute, which specifically has a remit to propose policy solutions and appears to convene most of the foremost experts on UK productivity. Its proposals may not be very long term in nature, but this is probably because there would not be much point proposing productivity policy solutions for many years into the future.
For productivity at least, I expect the problem is less that long term and solution-oriented thinking isn't funded by the government, and more with the quality and usefulness of the solutions it gets for its funding. Productivity experts' ideas about what to do about productivity are almost invariably banal (usually taking the form: "the data says the UK lags in x relative to (the US and/or France and/or Germany); the government should fund more x"). In fact there is more analysis and solutioneering on UK productivity today than ever, but the good stuff simply isn't coming from academia.
Just to pick up on the reference to Keynes too... In Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930), he was eerily right about what productivity would be 100 years hence, but wildly wrong about what this would mean for society and how we would adapt. For example he predicted 15 hour working weeks (and that not out of need but because we would all miss work), and that the interest in accumulating money would come to be regarded as a mental illness.
I think this essay - from one of the most brilliant social scientists ever - might tell us something about what kind of thing we might expect to get from long term speculative social science.
Agreed - as you say most of the work is quadrant 3. But its not impossible to work in quadrant 4 on productivity: there is a long history of bold ideas in production methods, skills, logistics etc which were developed far in advance of implementation.
But surely it's not the case that e.g. ESRC "does not have a license or authority to fund the design of potential solutions" to the UK's productivity problem. Because it does fund precisely such work. Is it that it feels it has the license and authority to fund quadrant 3 work, but not quadrant 4? If so, what's that about?
A possibility is that quadrant 4 work on productivity is political through and through, and funding political work is the license these institutions feel they don't have (probably correctly). Maybe, for example, the surest way to increase UK productivity would be to abolish the NHS and move to a US-style healthcare system; or to introduce punitive capital gains taxation on first properties; or to replace all capital taxes with a broad-based and higher VAT; or to dismantle the welfare state and remove all barriers to migration etc. It's understandable that publicly-funded institutions don't want to go there, so instead they publish repeated iterations of old ideas about how to tweak funding for adult skills etc.
I'm interested to see in your book how you address this problem - that long term, speculative work in social science is often going to be political through and through, so (how) should the state be involved in this kind of work. But I doubt that trying somehow to ensure "ideological spread" is enough (what "ideological spread" means is of course itself already a political question that will inevitably get a political solution).
Fear of being political is certainly one of the main barriers to work in quadrant 4, but not the only one. After all, publicly funded universities have worked on highly political ideas for most of the last 150 years, whether neoliberal, Marxist, social democratic or liberal, without the sky falling in. I think its an error to see 'political' work as somehow tainted, unscientific and unsuitable for the academy, though that appears now to be a common view, and one that leads to the rather bland technocratic centrism you describe. Any serious options for a society are bound to be political in some sense.
Meanwhile some teenager is spinning up the next social app that will define societal social context for the next generation.
I've been thinking of this as our responsibilty as app designers but you've spelled out an essential shift. Look forward to more examples and guidance on how to build such systems
Great post and observation - thanks for bringing attention to this.
It's something I was only beginning to notice following the ECPR Conference (European Consortium for Political Research), how so many papers and researchers were working on issues of the past, with limited comment on solutions for the future.
It's interesting to hear your thoughts on why this might be the case too, with the peer review system etc.
Finally in terms of thinking about the future of care, whilst not comparable to ARIA, I am aware that Zinc VC had this topic as one of their 'missions' in previous years (unsure where those projects are now) and the Churchill Fellowships just have opened with 'Building A Society that Cares' as one of their main programmes: https://www.churchillfellowship.org/become-a-fellow/our-current-programmes/building-a-society-that-cares/
Thank you for this Geoff. As someone without formal disciplinary knowledge (biochemistry/biotech and self-taught software), I’ve been thinking about and trying to address some of these issues for more than two decades now. The lack of funding opportunities has become so normalized for me that I often assume I must be missing something - like there’s some secret key to unlocking funding that others know about, but it's simultaneously illuminating and depressing to realise that almost no-one is funded to work on this.
The one real breath of fresh air for me was CCI (Center for Complex Interventions), who funded my research for two years. After they folded, I’m back to “self-funding” - meaning relying on the kindness and support of my partner while I’m not contributing my fair share of household expenses — so I can continue testing another intervention: wikisim.org. It explores how different mediums, such as back-of-the-envelope calculations and simulations, can help us better understand and act in a complex world; 5 minute talk introducing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjS3WPBBlRA
Science, entrepreneurs, the scaling up through investors and ultimately the pull of markets clearly works for interventions that are applicable at the individual level and of course can then scale up to the population level and have systemic effects. Where as the same model can't be applied to social issues at the systemic level where the market is often a single government, the evaluation of "product-market fit" takes decades and is political i.e. an intervention might work but is still rejected. It just struck me as another contributing explanation for that lack of quadrant 4, I don't have a solution sorry.
Thats an interesting look at where to focus on innovation. I have two obvious thoughts:
1. Focusing on innovations on science is often linked to new businesses based on new technology. That in itself provides billions in £ due to industrial growth. So, as a government that is a very positive thing to do.
2. Social innovation is very different to hard sellable science. I see that the 'research' behind this work occurs in our communities and societies. I do much work in local authorities and community groups. And I am surrounded by great practices, innovation in many localities. I have access to so much of it, that I simply dont know where to turn as it is so overwhelming.
For that research to become useful, it has to be understood by local government (partial), the NHS (very little), and the civil service (in my experience non existent). Evidence of this is the drive to austerity that has killed off much of what happens in the social sphere, and removed much of those activities that used to occur in local government.
What I do find is that the civil service appears to be so disconnected to local government and localities, that their decision-making has no relevance to communities. Dont forget that New Public Management (NPM) is designed to keep decision-makers away from the real work, and also to see how organisations work through aggregated measures. NPM, service design and digital has pulled public sector workers away from localities, and into buildings.
Society is complex, and the public sector and especially the Treasury is not designed to react to complexity. So much of what is going on in communities today, and what has occurred over the past 2 decades lies hidden to them.
Taking your point, having a place where this learning can be gathered and learned from is a great idea. But is that not already occurring through the likes of Demos, Nesta, and other similar groups?
Surprised by what's said here about productivity. ESRC funds the Productivity Institute, which specifically has a remit to propose policy solutions and appears to convene most of the foremost experts on UK productivity. Its proposals may not be very long term in nature, but this is probably because there would not be much point proposing productivity policy solutions for many years into the future.
For productivity at least, I expect the problem is less that long term and solution-oriented thinking isn't funded by the government, and more with the quality and usefulness of the solutions it gets for its funding. Productivity experts' ideas about what to do about productivity are almost invariably banal (usually taking the form: "the data says the UK lags in x relative to (the US and/or France and/or Germany); the government should fund more x"). In fact there is more analysis and solutioneering on UK productivity today than ever, but the good stuff simply isn't coming from academia.
Just to pick up on the reference to Keynes too... In Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930), he was eerily right about what productivity would be 100 years hence, but wildly wrong about what this would mean for society and how we would adapt. For example he predicted 15 hour working weeks (and that not out of need but because we would all miss work), and that the interest in accumulating money would come to be regarded as a mental illness.
I think this essay - from one of the most brilliant social scientists ever - might tell us something about what kind of thing we might expect to get from long term speculative social science.
Agreed - as you say most of the work is quadrant 3. But its not impossible to work in quadrant 4 on productivity: there is a long history of bold ideas in production methods, skills, logistics etc which were developed far in advance of implementation.
But surely it's not the case that e.g. ESRC "does not have a license or authority to fund the design of potential solutions" to the UK's productivity problem. Because it does fund precisely such work. Is it that it feels it has the license and authority to fund quadrant 3 work, but not quadrant 4? If so, what's that about?
A possibility is that quadrant 4 work on productivity is political through and through, and funding political work is the license these institutions feel they don't have (probably correctly). Maybe, for example, the surest way to increase UK productivity would be to abolish the NHS and move to a US-style healthcare system; or to introduce punitive capital gains taxation on first properties; or to replace all capital taxes with a broad-based and higher VAT; or to dismantle the welfare state and remove all barriers to migration etc. It's understandable that publicly-funded institutions don't want to go there, so instead they publish repeated iterations of old ideas about how to tweak funding for adult skills etc.
I'm interested to see in your book how you address this problem - that long term, speculative work in social science is often going to be political through and through, so (how) should the state be involved in this kind of work. But I doubt that trying somehow to ensure "ideological spread" is enough (what "ideological spread" means is of course itself already a political question that will inevitably get a political solution).
Fear of being political is certainly one of the main barriers to work in quadrant 4, but not the only one. After all, publicly funded universities have worked on highly political ideas for most of the last 150 years, whether neoliberal, Marxist, social democratic or liberal, without the sky falling in. I think its an error to see 'political' work as somehow tainted, unscientific and unsuitable for the academy, though that appears now to be a common view, and one that leads to the rather bland technocratic centrism you describe. Any serious options for a society are bound to be political in some sense.
Meanwhile some teenager is spinning up the next social app that will define societal social context for the next generation.
I've been thinking of this as our responsibilty as app designers but you've spelled out an essential shift. Look forward to more examples and guidance on how to build such systems
Love this! Thanks for shedding light on quadrant 4. We need much more work and attention on this.
Great post and observation - thanks for bringing attention to this.
It's something I was only beginning to notice following the ECPR Conference (European Consortium for Political Research), how so many papers and researchers were working on issues of the past, with limited comment on solutions for the future.
It's interesting to hear your thoughts on why this might be the case too, with the peer review system etc.
Finally in terms of thinking about the future of care, whilst not comparable to ARIA, I am aware that Zinc VC had this topic as one of their 'missions' in previous years (unsure where those projects are now) and the Churchill Fellowships just have opened with 'Building A Society that Cares' as one of their main programmes: https://www.churchillfellowship.org/become-a-fellow/our-current-programmes/building-a-society-that-cares/
Thank you for this Geoff. As someone without formal disciplinary knowledge (biochemistry/biotech and self-taught software), I’ve been thinking about and trying to address some of these issues for more than two decades now. The lack of funding opportunities has become so normalized for me that I often assume I must be missing something - like there’s some secret key to unlocking funding that others know about, but it's simultaneously illuminating and depressing to realise that almost no-one is funded to work on this.
The one real breath of fresh air for me was CCI (Center for Complex Interventions), who funded my research for two years. After they folded, I’m back to “self-funding” - meaning relying on the kindness and support of my partner while I’m not contributing my fair share of household expenses — so I can continue testing another intervention: wikisim.org. It explores how different mediums, such as back-of-the-envelope calculations and simulations, can help us better understand and act in a complex world; 5 minute talk introducing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjS3WPBBlRA
I'm hopeful that ARIA's latest opportunity space for Collective Flourishing might help myself or others get some much needed funding to work on this space: https://aria.org.uk/opportunity-spaces/collective-flourishing
Science, entrepreneurs, the scaling up through investors and ultimately the pull of markets clearly works for interventions that are applicable at the individual level and of course can then scale up to the population level and have systemic effects. Where as the same model can't be applied to social issues at the systemic level where the market is often a single government, the evaluation of "product-market fit" takes decades and is political i.e. an intervention might work but is still rejected. It just struck me as another contributing explanation for that lack of quadrant 4, I don't have a solution sorry.
Thanks for this. Perhaps a quadrant 5 for prescriptions actually followed? We know what to do in so many cases, but (mostly) we do not do it.