In this short RSA Animate, renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek investigates the surprising ethical implications of charitable giving. View the original lecture on RSA Vision. Download a transcript of this video (pdf)
Archive for July, 2010
Will Big Cuts bolster the Big Society?
With pretty much every part of the public sector facing cuts, the search is on for ways to deliver efficiencies. Ben Rogers asked whether the Prime Minister’s Big Society provides some answers.
To be fair to Cameron and colleagues, they have been careful not to hoist their eye-watering programme of debt-reduction too closely to their social programme of promoting voluntary and civic action. That would risk bolstering the arguments of those who say that Conservative talk of freeing up society from the shackles of the state is just another way of justifying rolling back the state.
And to be fair to the last Labour government, they were all over this territory long before Cameron. New Labour was pre-occupied from its beginning with promoting ‘social capital’, ‘co-production’, community empowerment, and the role of voluntary and community groups.
The RSA too has, for some time, been promoting more citizen-centred approaches to solving our collective problems. Indeed, Matthew Taylor has argued for some time that this is critical to closing what he calls ‘the social aspiration gap’: that between what we say we want and the way in which we behave. (more…)
Time to value worklessness
Julian Dobson FRSA argues for policies that begin to un-tap an important source of civic and economic renewal : time.
Britons, it’s often said, work the longest hours in Europe. The image of a nation of ulcerated, stressed-out wage slaves, juggling work, family and a commitment to voluntary activities, may resonate with many reading this. We might love to adopt the empathetic values espoused by Matthew Taylor in his quest for 21st century enlightenment, but they just get squeezed out.
Yet the burden of economic activity falls on less then half the population. Latest labour market figures (PDF, 347 kb) from the Office for National Statistics show an employment rate of 72.1 per cent. But that’s 28.86m people out of a total of more than 62m.
Most of the rest, of course, aren’t of working age. But there are many others who are: at the last count, 2.47 million people were unemployed and seeking work, and many more – 8.19m of working age – classed as economically inactive.
The government recognises the problem. It wants to reduce the welfare bill by chivvying claimants into work, and shifting the balance from public sector to private sector employment. The rationale may appear solid, but it won’t work. Neither of these policy thrusts will significantly change the size of the labour market.
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Trust me! I am a – coalition – politician
The success of the contemporary coalition government will depend on psychological skills developed in the Stone Age argues Paul Seabright.
The UK is currently undergoing an interesting experiment in coalition government. It will require cooperation between partners who have no previous experience of working together in this way. This contrasts with much of continental Europe, where coalitions have been a fact of political life for a long time (since even before the Thirty Years War, according to a discussion of the Holy Roman Empire in Peter Wilson ‘s recent book of that title).
There has been much press mockery of the coalition’s attempts to play up the personal chemistry between the participants, as though such considerations were irrelevant to the serious business of government. But recent research on the foundations of social trust suggest that personal chemistry is at the heart of serious business even in our sophisticated and globalized world.
The reason is simple. Economic transactions between strangers require mutual trust – in the quality of what is being exchanged, in the willingness of the parties to abide by their promises about the future. But trustworthiness is difficult to measure in a systematic way, and our judgments of the trustworthiness of others rely even more than we realise on pre-conscious reasoning, often embedded in the responses of our endocrine system. Something as simple and as complex as whether a person’s smile seems genuine to us can have a large influence on our willing to trust them with our savings, our health, our lives.
Nurturing children should be everybody’s business
The nurturing of children should be everybody’s business, argues former Children’s Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley-Green FRSA.
Children are our most precious resource; they are citizens of today, but our nation’s future depends on them. What we do for them determines their outcomes and potential in life, and they will be the people who generate the wealth to support our pensions and services as we grow old.
Nurturing is the bringing up of children. They need love and care; physical contact and comfort; protection, security and safety; nutrition; play, exploration, encouragement, managed risk; friendships; education, and expectation, values, spirituality and purpose in life.
Parents and families are fundamentally important, and there is a limit to what central government can do. It creates policy and allocates resources but the well-being of children also depends on building child-friendly communities by local government and other institutions. If we accept this, then nurturing children really should be everybody’s business. (more…)
What price the Big Society?
RSA Fellow Richard Chambers argues that the voluntary sector’s role in defining and delivering the Big Society is vital but cannot be done on the cheap.
It would appear from recent events that there is such a thing as ‘society’ after all. The return of this much-loved friend is all the more remarkable because it is central to the thinking of a political party that condemned the very concept, so memorably, three decades ago.
Political analysts tend to agree that the idea of the ‘Big Society’ was not a vote-winner for the Conservative Party in the 2010 general election, because no-one could give a clear definition of what the term meant. However, recent pronouncements show that the government considers this idea to be absolutely crucial to the future of the nation.
Last year, David Cameron’s take on the Big Society was a call for social cohesion: ‘We will do this by making government more transparent and accountable and by breaking open public services to new providers, unleashing the forces of innovation. This followed his repeated assertion that: ‘We must use the state to remake society.’ (more…)
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