24.11.2010

Students take aim at the ‘Never Had it So Good’ Generations

Today’s protests will be mainly read as anger at the hike in student fees resulting from the government’s massive withdrawal of funding from higher education. Very important issues, to be sure. But the issue at stake is broader, even, than the debate over whether higher education is a public good. Refusal to pay for higher education is just one part of an ongoing, broad-ranging assualt on future generations by those currently in positions of power.

Lord Young’s panned comments that people had ‘never had it so good’ is revealing, not just of an out-of-touch toff at the centre of power, but because the ‘never had it so good’ generations are continuing to live at the expense of today’s youth. The phrase comes, of course, from PM Harold MacMillan’s speech in 1957 – a time of widely rising prosperty that set the scene for the baby boomers‘ hedonistic consumption in the 1960s and 70s. A few everyday observations show the extent of changes benefits enjoyed by the boomers at the exepense of the current crop of university students:

Proportion of Spending on Housing

Spending on housing - set to rise faster?

1. Cheap mortgages and housing booms: in the UK home ownership is now seen as the norm, at least aspirationally, but there are undoubtedly limits to how far the price of property can be inflated. The days of cheap credit for 100% mortgages are surely numbered. Rather than a breif blip in the housing market the increasing difficulties faced by first time buyers signal only two possibilities: either a genuine crash in house prices or a vast increase in the proportion of income that those currently outside of home ownership will need to pay on rents or mortgages. The government will do everthing in their power to avoid the first option.

2. Externalising environmental costs: enironmentalists rightly demand that the environmental costs of the full lifecycle of products become internalised into the prices of those products. Small gains have been made in this direction but much more needs to be done, and recycling practices will have to move away from ‘dump it on developing countries’ as those countries become more powerful. Moreover, the economic costs of decades of uncontrolled consumption of artifically cheap goods in the rich world will fall on today’s younger generations in the form of environmental clean up costs and dealing with resource depletion and climate change.

3. Generous pensions: the problems that come with an aging population are widely recognised as national health bills increase and pension funds, both public and private, are struggling with a future in which many more people will be pulling fund out than those putting funds in. Avoiding a crash in the current value of pension funds is probably one of the better justifications for ‘quantitative easing’ policies (a.k.a. slash welfare and direct the proceeds to financiers and shareholders). But significant rises in the retirement age and, more importantly, much less generous pensions for todays youth seem inevitable in all baby boom countries. The shift from linking penions to Conumer Price Index (rather than the RPI) to take account of inflation means essentially that no account will be taken of rises in housing costs and council tax in determining penioners income.

Painting this picture of intergenerational injustice is not to belittle the importance of intragenerational inequalities. The ‘never had it so good’ generations undoubtedly experienced the benefits of housing booms, cheap consumption and generous pensions very unevenly and period of crisis saw – particularly in the early 1980s – millions thrown out of this system of economic ease. Those who are wealthy can be expected to pass on their good fortune, but for many, who are struggling or merely getting by there won’t be enough to offer comfort to their offspring. A bleak image of rising inequality emerges where many of today’s youth find themselves saddled with years of debt for education, the repayments for which will have to compete with incresaed housing costs, paying for their parents’ retirment and trying to put aside something for their own pensions. Today’s protesters will rightly be angry at the impending cuts, they should demand a wholescale shift in the attitude of politicians to correct yesterday’s mistakes in a way that at last puts the interests of future generations centre stage.

UPDATE: Just been reminded there’s a book on exactly this topic, where Ed Howker and Shiv Malik argue that a Jilted Generation – those born after 1979 – has generally been very hard done by. Looks like another one for the reading pile.

21.11.2010

Reading Notes: Johnson’s Interface Culture

Johnson, Steven. 1997. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way we Create and Communicate. Basic Books.

[NB These are notes to self, they become pretty ungrammatical towards the end!]

This interesting and erudite book starts from the position that the collision of technology and culture is nothing new, but that with the increased pace of technological change the collision has become more obvious. That is, new media have always intersected with cultural change but major innovations have lasted for millenia (cave painting), centuries (printing) or decades (television). As media technology change begins to happen within the span of one lifetime the relationship with culture becomes more obvious. An important point here is that the invention of the technology is itself a creative cultural act; engineers have always been artists and vice versa. Thus, the modern science/art of interface design and its relationship to culture is the topic of the book. Obviously, this is a very technologically led (even determined?) point of view, but well put nonetheless. (more…)

21.11.2010

The ‘Big Society’ Needs Sociology

Jesse Norman MP was on last week’s Politics Weekly podcast at the Guardian talking about his new book on The Big Society (Indy review). He said that the Conservatives weren’t trying simply to shrink the state in order to replace it with the market, but instead wanted to harness and ‘unimaginable reserves of social energy’ to do good. This energy apparently exists in institutions outside of the state and the market: ‘the local church, the local school or even Manchester Football Club; the things that give people purpose and meaning’.  For the record, Polly Toynbee rightly took the Tories to task on this because the effects of the cuts are sending voluntary institutions to the wall. But I’d like to think about something else…

Taken together with the announced intention that the ONS will now start regularly measuring the happiness of the citizenry there is something new in these conservative ideas – something small and fuzzy and liable to be squashed by the weight of tradition and vested interests – but something new nevertheless. There’s signs here of a real move away from the market as The Solution for all ills and perhaps an attempt to finally shrug off Thatcher’s ludicrous view that ‘there’s no such thing as society’. The economic depression of the 30s helped swing the political-economic pendulum from laissez-faire to Keynsianism, while the crises of the 70′s sent it in the direction of neoliberalism. It seemed likely that the latest crash (coming on top of the massive corporate scandals in the early 2000s and general weakening legitimacy of corporate power) might swing the pendulum back towards the state. But the confluence of this historical moment with an exhausted Labour Party confounds things in the UK. Perhaps then, the scene is set for the pendulum to stop swinging between state power and market power and take in a new dimension?

Exciting stuff, but, have the Conservatives really got the intellectual resources to work out what that would mean in practice? And how can they, being located in government and all, can use the state to empower that as yet mystical third realm? As self-proclaimed ‘intellectual architect of new conservativism’ and now author of The Big Society, Jesse Norman might be the one to tell us. But, his academically philosophical approach is to identify a puzzle and a critique of traditional social contract theory and to describe a ‘new’ category of associations between people.[1]  When it comes to discussing alternatives he claims,

we have well developed theories of individual rationality and morality, and well developed theories of state action and politics, but we don’t have any theory of what these institutions are in the middle and how they work. There’s a massive plurality of them … and it may be that over the next hundred years academics catch up with this pluralist view.

Here speaks a man who is thoroughly educated in politics, philosophy and economics, but who could never have, even momentarily, wandered into a sociology seminar. A flick through the references finds plenty of reference to philosophers, and especially the key conservative thinker Michael Oakeshott as well as brief reference to Giddens’ The Third Way (neither his best nor most sociological stuff) and inevitably to the communitarians Etzioni and Putnam who have already been such an influence on New Labour policies.

Of course, Norman’s ‘institutions in the middle’ matches exactly the subject of sociology: family, religion, social movements, the third sector, civil society and all have been core to sociology since the discipline first became self-aware. I can’t decide whether Norman needs berating for his tunnel vision (and really, if you’re writing a book with ‘society’ in the title you might at least consider reading some sociology) or whether really this should be taken as a signal that British sociology needs to step out of the academy much much more, maybe even dust off a soapbox. Indeed, one of the main problems facing British sociology at the moment is justifying its role and claiming that it has a positive impact on society. [2] So, if the ‘big society’ is not empty rhetoric – and in truth we need far more than Jesse Norman’s efforts to show that it isn’t – then the Conservatives need sociologists. Ironically enough, just when there’s a genuine risk of departmental closures and a general decline in citizens armed with sociological education, its ‘relevance’ may be coming to the fore. Perhaps the rhetoric should be seen as an opportunity both to defend  sociology and to feed some genuinely well thought out ideas into the political machine.

[1] Side note: the new category is apparently philic (meaning connected) rather than Oakeshott’s nomic (legal/civil) or telic (goal based/instrumental). My immediate thought here is that a philic association must be a tautology – aren’t all associations ‘connected’ by definition? But I have to admit to only having glanced at the book, instead on book reviews, notes and Norman’s interview.

[2] Hardly confined to sociology of course, it applies to all the humanities, arts and social sciences. Moreover, that’s glossing over the complete withdrawal of state funding for HE teaching in the humanities. Hmmm, there’s lumps behind that gloss.