Why is the idea of a four-day working week seen as radical? What did the pandemic teach us about the role of science in politics and the reality of human interdependence?
English thinkers Geoff Mulgan and James Plunkett are currently in Aotearoa as Australia & New Zealand School of Government visiting fellows.
They join Susie Ferguson to discuss some of the big challenges and opportunities for governments in the next decades.
Photo: supplied
Sir Geoff Mulgan led British PM Tony Blair's strategy unit and is currently a Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London. James Plunkett works for the non-profit innovation group Nesta and his 2021 book End State was The Guardian's political book of the year.
Geoff Mulgan on why he's still "quite optimistic" about the state of the world
"I think in the next 10 or 20 years, we will work out routes through the multiple challenges of inequality of carbon and political distrust, that we must need to come down but we're gonna get a grip on the problem.
"At the beginning of the pandemic ... it really struck me that alongside the other crises, there was a crisis of imagination.
"I asked lots of people about this to try and picture the world in 30 or 40 years' time. [We] find it quite easy to picture ecological disaster, climate catastrophe, forest fires. We've all got that very clearly in our heads, partly thanks to Hollywood movies and things and often we can picture a technological future of robots and AI and drones running the world but often with not much place for human beings.
"If you ask people to think about the welfare system, our health, our democracy, our families, what our neighbours look like a generation or two from now, people really struggle. Many people in democracies expect their kids to be worse off than them for the first time probably in 200 years. We are very pessimistic about the prospects of fixing problems of all kinds.
"I think we need to work on the muscle of imagination, our shared ability, to picture where might, for example, care for the elderly be a generation or two from now? How might we live in a zero-carbon economy?
"The various institutions which played this [ideological] role in the past - whether it's political parties, universities, or, for that matter, science fiction writers - they rather vacated this space. So we live in a world full of dystopias with very, very few utopias to guide us."
Geoff Mulgan on the science of political solutions:
"So many of the issues facing societies and politics now have a lot of science involved. That's obviously true if you're hit by a pandemic but it's also true of climate change. We've got to understand the science both of the problem and the solutions.
"At the beginning of that pandemic, Boris Johnson said he would follow the science. And obviously, it was sensible, faced by a pandemic, to listen to the scientists, to look at the modelling of how infections would spread and hospitals would be overrun. But it soon became clear you couldn't really follow the science on its own. The science didn't tell you what to do. It didn't tell you when to lock down the schools. [The solutions to] all of these dilemmas you couldn't get from the science. You had to integrate the politics and the science. And one of the things I become increasingly interested in is how do you do that better?
"We need new combinations, new hybrids, of the political and scientific. We need our politicians to be much better trained. One of the things which was very clear all over the world through the pandemic is our politicians - often trained in law and economics - simply didn't understand much about science, or how to ask the right questions how to interpret the data and the models.
"[During the pandemic] scientists were often a bit detached. They thought their job was to share some advice and somehow the politicians would make brilliant decisions. But actually, increasingly, they have to be part of the decision-making."
Geoff Mulgan on our self-focused idea of happiness:
"The best predictor of how happy a country is [according to the World Happiness Survey] is not GDP level or life expectancy or education, it's mutual support. It's how many people you can count on in a crisis to help you out.
"Once you take that seriously, that takes you to very different ideas about what government should be doing or a welfare system. And in a way, it also takes you to a different notion of happiness.
"Part of our problem in the social media era, is we think happiness is all about me, the self. 'I work on myself and I go to therapy and so on.' Well, actually the lesson of all the evidence is you're mainly happy if you do things for others, if you give, if you share, if you're part of networks of mutual support.
"When you're locked down [as people were during the pandemic], you start realising who you depend on. Can your neighbours take you to the hospital, buy food for you for months? [Valuing] that would really help us shift to this very different model of taking mutual support seriously, but by the end of the pandemic, it almost disappeared.
"The historians, I think, will be a bit baffled about why we so squandered that chance."
James Plunkett on what history teaches us about systemic change:
"Reading letters to the newspapers in the 1850s to the 1870s [for the book End State], the vibe, the kind of atmosphere, felt so similar to now in some senses, this sense of frustration and hair-tearing fury from members of the public at that time. People were writing to the papers saying 'Why can't you deal with the sewage that's running in the streets?' [These social challenges] were the consequence of new technologies.
"I do think that's very familiar for now. There's a sense that things have spun out of our control, that our politicians aren't on top of things. There's this image of new problems piling up in the in-tray and that leads through into sometimes extremism polarisation, where people say 'Oh, this isn't working, let's try something different. Let's roll the dice'.
"Change often doesn't come about until we reach a real crisis point. And certainly, historically, it was the threat of revolution really forced many of these changes and fear from elites that there was such anger rising amongst the working classes at that time that they had to do something to avert revolution.
"One of the interesting questions I think I explore in my writing is how do you make the system less contingent on crisis? It would be nice not to have to rely on a crisis to make these changes. Can we experiment? Can we try new things out and get ahead of these changes rather than waiting for that pressure to build up?
"If you look across public services in New Zealand, Australia or America, you see pockets of people working in profoundly different ways, sometimes using new technologies in really innovative ways, sometimes running very different services to deal with challenges like mental health or chronic illness. So the experimentation, in a way, does happen. The new system is there, it's available if you go looking for it.
"In a way, the challenge isn't to invent something new, it's more to spot these new ways of working that are emerging, this experimentation, and find ways to scale it. These people are working against the system, under the radar, and we're not very good at scaling these new ways of working. So that's the challenge, I would say."
James Plunkett on the evolution of the working week:
"The two-day weekend was considered to be a very radical innovation … we almost forget that we've invented it now.
"Are we sometimes more productive because we work with more intent, with less stress and burnout for four days a week? If we make better use of technology, for example, if we stopped sending endless emails to each other non-stop that we then have to reply to, does that make us sufficiently more productive that we can move towards a four-day working week?
"On the face of it, that seems very radical and certainly people react to it as if it were radical. But if you draw the line forwards on the chart of working hours, it's been very long-term declines in average working hours.
"We have some choices that we can make about how we, if you like, use, these new technologies, use the new productivity they give us. Do we take leisure or do we take it as money or do we invest the money in care, for example?
"In a way, we've sort of forgotten we're capable of making these kinds of choices, even though we did so in living memory.
"The innovations that we now take for granted - public health systems, sewage systems - when these ideas were first mooted, they were seen as terribly radical. Public sewers someone called "a dangerous act of government overreach" when the idea was first proposed.
"There will be ideas out there today that we currently considered radical, maybe unaffordable, maybe even dangerous in some respects, but that will be 2050s commonsense."
