YouSaid · the spoken record

James Plunkett

lines on the record: 42
first: 2021-11-02
most recent: 2021-11-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You kind of work in policy, whereas I think in a way these problems are too big to leave to the politicians or to even the civil servants. And it's a wider change than that kind of as we've sort of discussed it involves society at large and that includes artists, it includes all of us in our conversations every day. So I think, yeah, the big takeaway really, and I hope this is what the book leaves people with, is there are big problems, but we can solve them if we have hope, if we believe that that's the case.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the big thing, and this is back to hope, I think things can be different. I think actually that sense of optimism and that there are ideas out there. And we have been through this before. We've been through something similar, if not tougher before, i.e. times of great change and we navigated them and it wasn't easy and it was messy and painful, but we did get there and life got better. So I think that's in a way the big thing is, and I think in a way the big thing that's missing is that sense of optimism and practical hope. And so I hope that the book does leave people feeling that sense of possibility. And as you say, I think that the thing that people get wrong sometimes is they sort of think that the only way to sort of help or contribute to these debates is to go into politics or to go and work in the government.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or even just through conversations that we have with family and friends where we're all influencing, if you like, and sharing ideas every day in conversations with people. And I guess that's one of the role, anyone who cares about this kind of issues that we're discussing is to kind of keep talking about the fact that things could be different and sharing and learning about some of these ideas that could make that so. And again, we've all got a role to play in that.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think this is just incredibly difficult because, as you say, at times like these, and again, this is a recurring theme throughout history. The people who are on the receiving end, if you like, of our failure to govern and to give people security in difficult times like these, it can feel, I think, incredibly bleak. And that's why you get, I think not least, things like this kind of search for alternatives and the rise of populism and anger and that frustration building up. And I suppose it's in a way the responsibilities on anyone who kind of works in and around public policy or who cares about these kinds of issues to find ways to talk clearly about how things can be different and to be able to sort of sell some of those ideas and to communicate with them. And I think that's not just about politics. I think a lot of that happens sometimes through art or through music or”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should stick to in the next few years is kind of keeping an eye on ourselves, if you like, and kind of making sure we're retaining that hope. And we've all got a role to play in that.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's absolutely vital that it does. I mean, again, I sort of talk about hope as the kind of magic ingredient in a way because in a way you can take for granted that moments like this, there'll be a lot of anger and frustration. And that builds up. And I think the risk of anger on its own is obviously it becomes either a kind of sort of limp sort of fatalism where you think, as you say, nothing can be done, everything's the same, all the parties are the same, it's a sense of hopelessness, or it's a kind of rage. It's a kind of ill-targeted, just a kind of fury, which we see, I think, in our popular culture. And that feeds some of the sort of populism, this sort of direct.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particular to climate is the international aspect of it and that kind of uniquely difficult politics of countries each having to do their bit and all looking at each other. And originally actually in the kind of early work on the book, I was going to have a chapter on international politics. And it was so gloomy that it felt like such a downer that in the end we ended up taking it out because it's one of those areas where it is frankly a bit harder to see how you make progress on problems that are genuinely global in nature because that kind of collaboration is kind of necessary. So it's a mixed picture.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a mixed picture. So in a funny way, I am becoming slightly an optimist on climate because I think that dynamic I talked about where social problems mount and don't get solved for year after year and then there's a kind of tipping point when things start to change quickly. I do think if you, you know, and kind of on an optimistic day, I think you could see that you could argue that's happening with climate change, you know, the way that the public debate is shifting so that almost every time now there's an extreme weather event people say climate change. That wasn't happening five, ten years ago, the rapid shifts we're seeing on things like electric car uptake, renewables, for example. So I think on the one hand you could argue that if there is a tipping point, we're sort of starting to see signs that we're reaching it. I guess the more pessimistic view that I think is sort of in a way more”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Issue for the union movement. But then you did have government as well. So governments saying to employers, we're going to step in and legislate to require shorter working hours, sometimes not even having to do so because the threat of legislating, you know, that kind of act of leadership got employers to kind of start offering a two-day weekend as a norm and then it caught on and became a kind of cultural something that was just expected and that workers started to expect. So I think typically when these big changes happen, I think it's a combination of these different things working in kind of lockstep and each, if you like, feeding the other. And I think that today, I think, with issues like even climate change, which is arguably one of the biggest challenges, if not the biggest challenge we face, where there's this kind of interplay between how people's attitudes are changing, social attitudes, and then that's feeding.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's, I mean, well, it's the boring answer it's all of those things, I guess. But the interplay between them, I think, is really interesting. So one example I look at in the book is this idea of a four-day week that's now kind of starting to be talked about. And if you go back about 150 years to a sort of 1870s, that was when the idea of a two-day weekend first emerged. And it's an interesting case study, I think, because what happened with the idea of a five-day week when that came about was that it was a combination of interestingly progressive employers, some of the big employers like Henry Ford said we're going to go to a five-day week and have a two-day weekend because it was more productive. You had unions, I think, playing a big role at the time. So unions, interestingly at the time, unions were pushing shorter working hours even more than they were pushing higher wages. So working hours was a big campaign.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All people, not just politicians, find those mindset shifts incredibly difficult because, you know, if you've grown up with, and this kind of goes back to the Gordon Brown Tim Berners-Lee sort of conversation That's a real mindset shift. And I think that's not something just politicians are guilty of. It's something that everyone finds difficult. Of course, at moments like this, we do need those, if you like, politicians that are more visionary maybe or that can step above and sort of think in profoundly new ways.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's something to do with this idea of a paradigm shift, which is, I think, a really useful one. And it comes kind of mostly applied to scientific revolution, so things like the Copernican Revolution and these moments in the history of science where, if you like, our view of the world went from one thing to another. And you get these kind of, it's like a break, you know, there's a before and after where we thought, you know, in that case, we thought the solar system worked one way and then we realized it worked a fundamentally different way. And there's something fascinating about these moments. And I think in politics, you get similar moments where the economy changes in such a profound way that it's not, if you like, it's not just a kind of quantitative shift. It's not just that things are getting faster or bigger or less equal. It's that the economy is working just differently to the way it worked before. And I think people...”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it does take a kind of fresh thinking and a fresh generation almost to come through that better appreciates some of these new ideas.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in a way there's something that all parties are guilty of, which is just a staggering lack of appreciation for technology, I would say, given the times we're living through. It's amazing how little talk there is of what's going on in terms of the digital revolution, I guess, as it gets called, and just how significant that is. And I think that's something to be honest that cuts across most of politics. So I think there's something in that. And I also think, you know, often the system does take time to accept the need for change and that there's that phrase from Max Planck about science proceeding. One funeral at a time because old scientists don't like to give up their prior theories. And I think, you know, if you're feeling a bit kind of unkind, you might say politics precedes one retirement at a time in this sense of...”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invented entirely new policy instruments that had previously been inconceivable and never thought of before. And in my sense, when you look through the kinds of problems, so things like how do we deal with the monopolies of Facebook and Google, how do we deal with insecurity in the gig economy, how do we deal with mental health, the mental health crisis and burnout. I think just all these problems, they don't require tweaks, they require quite fundamental different thinking. And as this phrase, the paradigm shift, that it's, if you like, it's different thinking. It's kind of qualitatively different ideas and a different role for government. It's not just a bit more tax here or a bit less spending there. It's kind of fresher thinking than that. And those are the kinds of ideas I'm trying to explore.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My view is, and I say this partly, working in technology now because I lead technology teams and I think my sense is we're not going to tweak our way through this thing. I just think that the economic changes and the technological changes that are underway are just too profound for us to be able to, if you like, tweak the state of the 20th century so that we can cope with this thing. And I say that I consider myself, if you like, centrist on the political spectrum. So this is not about, if you like, radicalism of the left or the right. But it is about not just thinking about tweaking the policies we used to deal with the last set of problems. One thing I am saying in the book is, you know, we didn't deal with the industrial revolution by tweaking the medieval policy instruments. We didn't kind of increase funding for the knights of the garter. That wasn't the kind of thing policy changes that we made.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you say, other people said there's a way to steer it and to harness it, and that's what we did. And you have to say people's life's got better. You know, real incomes went up sixfold. Life expectancy doubled or trebled in some regions. Can we do that again?”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. And this was a sort of grand bargain, exactly. And this was precisely the debate, you know, in the late 19th century, was this debate about is the system, capitalism, is it inherently, if you like, evil? Is it the system itself that is leading to these dreadful outcomes? Or is it our failure to govern the system? And this was a debate. Can you harness another metaphor I use in the book? There are many metaphors and other metaphor I use is that governing is like trying to ride this incredibly powerful creature. And the creature doesn't have any interest in the creature is just pure power, if you like, the creature of capitalism. It just sort of gallops forwards. And our job, when we're thinking about government, is how do you steer it? How do you harness it? How do you steer it towards the kind of future that we want? And this was the question then, was, you know, capitalism at the time was galloping out of control. Some people said, you know, the system itself was flawed and had to be thrown out.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not quite there yet today, but there is, I think, there are very interesting parallels. And I think David Runsom and Professor of Politics and History kind of talks about the fact that maybe what we're seeing now is the kind of early signs of some of this kind of breakdown and kind of early signs of the system starting to break down. And so maybe over the next 10, 20 years, things will continue to get worse and elites will finally sort of face that moment of we have to do something. We have to be bolder and more radical in solving these problems or else, if you like.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“had the populist party that emerged which has the uncanny kind of similarities to Trumpism and this emergence of kind of people saying you know burn the system down and obviously on the left as well you of course at the time had the emergence of kind of if you like left-wing extremism as well and I guess that that was the kind of moment of maximum danger where the economy had changed things had changed and governments hadn't kept up and it was you know the question of what happens if you don't keep up I guess at the time the worry was revolution essentially you know a lot of the reforms we now take for granted like the welfare system you know emerged in that in that case emerged in Germany in the late 19th century when Bismarck was profoundly worried about the threat of revolution and so often this was elites saying if we don't do something to solve these profound problems then you know you'll have political collapse you'll have that kind of threat of a popular uprising and I do think”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the sort of scary, if you like, the other side of the coin, I think. And I think that, I mean, the best example of this, the best kind of lesson to draw on, is, I think, from history. Because for me, the most analogous moment to the moment we're now living through throughout history is that moment towards the late 19th century in the Industrial Revolution, which I spent a lot of time writing the book, reading letters and diaries and newspaper articles from that time. And it feels really unnervingly familiar in some ways. So at the time, you had profound technological change, which was changing the way people worked, the way people lived, new social problems emerging that governments just had no idea how to deal with and looked on these problems and they just didn't have the policy tools available. And also this mounting sense of populism, the emergence of populism. And in America, you've even...”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This sense of paralysis builds anger, and then something unlocks it. Sometimes a crisis, interestingly, but sometimes just that sense of collective hope that something is possible and suddenly quite a lot of change unfolds quickly. So I think sort of stay hopeful, I guess, is one of the messages of the book.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Raising the minimum wage, not quite to the living wage, but nonetheless, having previously opposed the idea of the minimum wage entirely, even 15, 20 years earlier. So I think some of these ideas, it's interesting, you feel like there's no progress day by day, week by week. But actually, when you zoom out, sometimes you can see progress. And the other thing is I think often progress has this funny sort of, it's not very even so you often what you see throughout history is there's this sort of mounting sense of frustration that builds up and the metaphor I use in the book is of a mudslide where the mud builds up year after year and nothing happens and it just sits there and then you'll get a rainstorm and it if you like kind of makes unleashes the mud and unleashes the force that's built up and suddenly everything changes and i do think often social changes like that that you'll get long periods of not much progress and frustration builds”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I'm quite an optimist on this, and I think it's because when you zoom out, so politics, I think, has this funny quality. It's like a sort of iridescence or something, and it might be the word that when you look up close, it feels pretty grim and gloomy. And the more you zoom out, the better it starts to feel in the sense of in the moment progress always feels impossible and you feel like you're getting nowhere and particularly last few weeks, you know, it's been sort of relatively kind of grim news in some ways in terms of policy decisions. But when you zoom out, you see this strange progress. For example, even 20 or even 10 years ago, ideas like the living wage were really quite niche ideas and they've emerged into popular debate. Increasingly you see some employers paying the living wage simply because it's the right thing to do. You saw even the conservative government in Britain significantly.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think this is a fascinating debate. And quote using the book from Keynes, where Keynes, I'll get this not quite right, but essentially he said he was writing a letter to Henry Knowles Browsford and he said, when you're thinking about the ideal state of the future, you have to start with ethics, not with economics. And I think the point he was making is, you know, you can't tweak your way to the future. You can't make these sort of small technocratic tweets tweaks. I say in the book, we didn't ban child labor on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis. That's not how we approach these problems. Often it was a big moral argument about the kind of economy we wanted and the kind of future we wanted. And often we were quite decisive actually in saying this is not okay. We will ban certain activities or we'll regulate certain activities or we'll be bold in founding.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should do it was an act of overreach, and the gauge wars dragged on for about 60 years while this kind of madness took place where people had to keep switching trains and eventually the government said, you know, there's a law, there's a standard gauge for railways, and they moved all the wide gauge tracks a bit closer to each other. And now we have a single gauge. So just another example of kind of a new problem emerges. It's an obvious problem that needs a solution. And it takes often a long time for these seemingly very obvious solutions to be accepted.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And suddenly it became something we just accepted. There's another fantastic example I love that which relates to the gauge wars. So this was on the railways when there was very rapid laying of railways in the 1840s. There was no rule about how far apart the train tracks should be laid. And George Stevenson and Isambard Kingdom, Brunel had different views. The two great engineers of the time, one of them thought they should be laid far apart and one of them thought they should be laid close together. And there was no rule. So they both just proceeded to lay railways at these different gauges. And of course, wherever the tracks met, you had to stop one train. Everyone had to get off and everyone had to get on another train because the tracks literally didn't link up. And all it took was government to say, here's a standard gauge for railways. And that's the required gauge at which to lay all railways. So almost like an early form of economic regulation really. But again, everyone said this was not something government.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This problem MPs, you know, it got so bad, obviously, Parliament on the banks of the Thames, MPs, there's a wonderful moment where Disraeli literally runs from Parliament with a handkerchief, clutched in his nose, because the smell is so bad. And amazingly, then obviously this idea emerged of why doesn't the state raise money to build public sewers? And it was Disraeli himself who sort of pushed through the bill that raised money for London's embankments, which, I mean, essentially cleaned up the problem, literally cleaned up the problem. And, you know, when Sewers first emerged as an idea, someone called it a dangerous act of government overreach. It was seen to be this radical departure from the kind of thing government had done in the past. And then obviously as the idea kind of took hold, people started to see, of course, this was common sense. And of course, this is a function for government. And then, of course, every government across the world began to play a role in public infrastructure and sewage and water treatment.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I became surprised myself. I didn't really set out to write a particularly optimistic book because I knew I was dealing with big complex problems. But this is one of the things that made me more optimistic as in the course of writing the book and it ended up being actually very optimistic as a story is this fact that these ideas in the past emerged. We had similar huge problems. Ideas emerged and we solved them. So one example is the problem of sewage. So in the Industrial Revolution obviously there was very rapid urbanization and people swelled cities London, Birmingham and Manchester and so on and there was no public sewage system and so in London on the banks of the Thames the sewage I mean literally piled up until it reached about two meters deep. The smell was so bad that people wrote letters to the Times newspaper and you can read these letters, people complaining at MPs to say what the hell are you doing? Why aren't you solving this?”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that at the moment is seen as completely impossible. Many people think it's quite a dangerous idea, even on the left, but it's emerging as I guess as an idea for how we might have a benefit system that is less stigmatizing. So the idea of a basic income is it's more universal, so more people get help, so it's not targeted, if you like, as much on some people and therefore arguably is more inclusive and less stigmatizing of people. The idea is it's much simpler, so it's a much kind of cleaner, simpler benefit system where you know what you're going to get. It's flatter. So, you know, people on the left in particular argue it's worse for...”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's interesting. One of the other idea that runs through the book so there's kind of nine big problems and nine big ideas, and this is one of them. And a lot of what I do in the book is look back at history about this question of at times when big social problems emerge and obviously the Industrial Revolution is the kind of case study here that I look at repeatedly in the book, this kind of pattern where these big new social problems emerge as a result of technology changing how we live and work. And then what often happens is the problems kind of accumulate and get worse and worse. And then slowly these new ideas start to emerge that at first everyone says impossible, idealistic, unaffordable. Dangerous in some cases. And then this is just this fascinating process where these ideas go from seeming completely impossible to seeming inevitable. And a basic income, I think, is a really interesting.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are almost impossible for people to understand interacting with those systems is unbelievably complex and quite stigmatizing and it doesn't make you feel good at the end of the day and leaves you feeling worried and confused. And so in some cases, I think what's needed now, and I think what actually might now happen is, to be honest, a slightly more human approach to some of these debates where we're not just saying, you know, what's the perfectly efficient economic answer to some of these problems, but what is a good way to treat people and bringing back in some of the humanity, I guess, to some of these debates about poverty?”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is a really interesting question because I think it's, you know, there's sort of, if you like, blame on the left and the right on this. I don't think my book is not a sort of, I think it's quite hard to place on the political spectrum in some ways. So it's actually quite a complicated story, I think, in terms of where we collectively gone wrong. And I think just, you know, to give one kind of part of the answer, I think there's something quite interesting in the way in which economics. And I guess a kind of technocratic mindset came to dominate public policy over the last, say, 50 to 70 years. And many of these systems that the welfare system in Britain and indeed in most countries is a perfect example of this, where, if you like, we tried to design the perfectly efficient technocratic solution to problems like poverty and mobility over time that solution got more and more complex. The formulas we use to calculate people's benefits.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was left with this real sense that even some of these systems that we've built with good intentions over the years and that are supposed to be there to help people and make their lives more secure often leave people feeling more anxious, if anything, even though ironically it's called social security and certainly feeling not valued.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love the fact that you know, maybe in the past you could have worked your way up through a company like that and work your way up the ladder of jobs, whereas the Uber drivers that I spoke to writing the book, obviously, what's their prospect of working their way up through Uber as a company to become a software engineer, if you like, some of those rungs of the ladder seem to be missing. And again, you get this sense of polarization where there's almost like there are two countries kind of forking off from each other, one very high paid and one very low paid. And the other people I kind of, the stories that stick in my mind are people who are interacting with the welfare system. And obviously this has been discussed a lot in recent weeks with the government cutting in the UK, cutting universal credit. The main family benefit. Again, people were interacting with the benefit system, just having an appalling time of it in terms of the complexity, the sort of stigma that they felt in having to even ask for help.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think for me personally, because I started my career more on the kind of economic side of things in think tanks and then in a way I became more hungry for that to understand that human side of these big trends and moved to citizens' advice. And I think it's really the human, it's kind of, what does it feel like to live in an economy like this? I remember, for example, talking to when I was writing the book, talking to people who are in low-paid work. And this sense of this kind of profound disconnect, I guess, between the jobs that they were doing and the kind of economy, the kind of opportunity that was out there in the economy. So an example I give in the book is, you know, the case of Uber as an employer, Uber employs both pretty low paid drivers, which it obviously claims are not even employees, and very high-paid software engineers that work on the platform. And that gives a kind of good example.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineers is the kind of case in point, but then this really rapid growth in low paid jobs at the bottom. And there's, interestingly, you mentioned jobs in the pandemic. There are three types of jobs that economists kind of forecast growing strongly in the future. One is caring jobs, which are often incredibly low paid, despite being incredibly important roles. Another is a set of jobs they call last mile jobs, which are these kind of slightly dystopian roles where you're kind of picking up after”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think this is a really profound question. I think one of the big changes I explore in the book is essentially the sort of, if you like, the shape of job creation. So one of the big shifts we've seen economically over the last 20 years even actually is relatively recent is this idea of people call it a polarization in the labour market. And what you see is this quite a significant change in the kinds of jobs the economy is creating, even in periods of economic growth that in the past, particularly in the 50s and 60s, we saw Western economies creating over time jobs that got better. So, you know, over time, automation and technology would, if you like, destroy lower skilled, lower paid jobs and create jobs at the top. And so you saw this kind of upward drift in the quality of jobs over time. In the last 20 years and even before the pandemic, we saw that those charts, if you like, they kind of started to sag in the middle. So you saw continued growth of jobs at the top. So software.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Down is one thing. So things like burnout, I think all of us in the last 18 months have found this experience particularly intense in this sense of kind of overwhelm with the use of technology. So I think that's been quite profound. And also I think what many of us did throughout the lockdown period was to some degree step back and ask some quite big questions about maybe in our personal lives are we on the right track? Are we spending our time in the right way? And I guess in a way what my book's doing is asking some of those questions for society, kind of are we on the right track? Do we need to change course? Are we governing this new economy in the right kind of way so that we're heading for a better future or not? And so in a way, the book felt, if you like, more timely after COVID than it had beforehand.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it has. I think the book or the idea, as I say, of the book started long before COVID and certainly over the last 10 years, I think it's become increasingly apparent just how profoundly the economy is being changed by technology. And, you know, we've seen over that 10-year period and even more that this emergence of new problems like the gig economy, the kind of lack of security people have in parts of the labour market. We've seen emerging problems like these monopolies of the big tech companies, Amazon, Google, Facebook, problems like burnout as well and the kind of sense of productivity is not performing well and yet we're all feeling completely burned out in this kind of intense pace of work. So I think a lot of that was around long before COVID hit, but certainly in COVID, and I was writing the book from lockdown, you know, kind of locked in the sort of studio flat. And many of those problems seem to get worse, I would say, during lockdown.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This new at the time sort of emerging economy, the digital economy was working. And on the other hand, you had Gordon Brown, who was talking very much in the language, if you like, of the 20th century state. And he was talking about things like what are the kind of the big levers that the state can pull, the big clunking fist, if you like, of government. And I remember being kind of incredibly struck leaving the meeting just how sort of different these two discourses and almost logics felt. And I didn't quite realize it, I think, at the time, but later I sort of dawned on me that in a way what that was representing was this sort of difference between, if you like, the 20th century state and the way we think about government and this 21st century economy, which in the 10 years since then has kind of changed all of our lives and changed how we work and live. That was the initial kernel of the idea.”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. I mean, I actually started when I was in number 10. So this was way back in 2008 and in the kind of opening months of the financial crisis was when I was working there. And it came about from a meeting, I guess, with Gordon Brown and Tim Berners-Lee was where the kind of idea first popped into my head. And it was less about the substance of the meeting itself and more this sort of the vibe I got when I left the meeting that we were sitting there. I remember in the number 10 garden, it was a kind of spring day and we were sitting there talking about government and how government sort of responds to changes in technology. And what struck me at the time was this really profound sense of a disconnect between the ways that the two of them were talking. So you had kind of Tim Berners-Lee on one side, who I think as anyone who's heard him speak talks in a very distinctive way and he was speaking in a language of sort of networks and platforms and talking about the way in which”
2021-11-02 · Intelligence Squared · How to fix a country, with James Plunkett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source