At the risk of straining a wonk bone or something, the previous post about optimising journeys in London has had me thinking about social policy and the role of the state. Yes, I know, bear with me. I’m about to ramble. But I do have a point.

So, the Adaptive Journey service I describe isn’t possible at the moment, because you can’t get at the user data without breaking TfL’s terms and conditions. Nevertheless, the “We see you’re doing this, perhaps you’d find it better to do that” design pattern is a powerful one, if used properly.

The question, then, is who should do it? Is it a for-profit operation? No. Something for TfL? Well, maybe, but it would have to show non-TfL services, and they’d find that tiresome. Is it something the London authorities should do? Again, maybe. National government? Well, that makes me start to feel queasy. Why? After all, it seems just their sort of thing: a tiny little initiative, and probably sold with a preface written entirely from bits cribbed from WIRED about neuroscience, and the dopamine released as we learn new things about our city. They’d love it.

It’s just that seems like it should be something too small for the government to do. Beneath them, somehow. Heart-breaking to my Jed Bartlet sense of how things should be. Though there are currently a good deal of government projects that feel like that. John Harris’ frustration in the Guardian about us needing more Marx and less Gladwell speaks to this. Although it starts to touch on the old saw of “ignoring the real problems” – a slightly weaselly thing used by both sides to cancel the other’s pet projects, regardless of merit – it is very familiar to anyone who has done anything with the UK government over the past few years. The mean-time from New Yorker article to Policy Unit working group is down to days. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but we can do better.

As on the other hand, the Adaptive Journey idea is one of things that perhaps only the state can do. It’d make no money for anyone, but it would make the world better, if only a bit. Only the state can pay their rent doing that sort of thing.

And here is the debate to be had over the next few years. What is the role of the state? With the demographic changes alone, we’re going to have to rethink this quite substantially. It’s certainly a debate that the Left needs to have Right Effing Now, if it ever wants to come back into power. A lot of blood will be spilt. “What about the demographics?” is really the question for the decade, and for my generation, and its being hidden away behind older stories of class war and banker-hatred.

Personally, at the moment I think we’re getting the role of the state slightly wrong. Even if you want to cut costs drastically you still have to look and say, ok, what is it that we a) want as a society, but b) won’t be provided by the market. And then do have to do that anyway, because as small as a government you might want, or as market-based as you think the country should be, there are still some things that only the state can do, and it’s that category that holds all the difficult bits.

Now, in my fields, that means fewer Prime Ministerial attempts to bring conferences to London, and more long-term infrastructure projects. The fun job of sprinkling nice coffee places around won’t transform a neighbourhood overnight, no matter what a misreading of Richard Florida says, but the coffee, along with the urge to innovate, and all of that stuff so feted right now will happen naturally if the infrastructure is there. That’s the job for the state. Even at a trivial level: after all, the post-developed world’s beloved bike lanes and pavement cafes depend on civil authorities – the state – for their existence.

It’s the infrastructure, then, that only the state can push ahead of the market. Lay fibre, reform copyright, change banking, send a man to the moon, eradicate a disease. These are big projects, with deep benefits. Meanwhile, we seem to be wasting a generation of young politicians in attempts to woo one arm of a Twitter dutch sandwich to Shoreditch by the means of unveiling another logo. These are not big plans. They do not stir the soul, and they should have no place in Westminster. They simply confirm the suspicion that it’s all a bit Fisher-Price down there. What Would Jed Bartlet Do? None of this stuff.

But my over-romanticisation aside, there’s a deeper issue at hand. Perhaps, as
Will Davies’ post “where are the psychologists of the night?” puts it so eloquently, we’ve simply forgotten about human nature.

…could we be finally discovering the true consequences of ‘post-modernity’, whereby policy elites base decisions on subjective impressions, anecdote and a Schumpeterian cult of the entrepreneur?…
…Paradoxically, a psychologist who communicated the dark appeal of winning, beating others, hoarding wealth, abandoning others and ego valorisation might also be able to start a conversation about the sorts of institutions and civic frameworks necessary to cope with those instincts, only some of which will be markets.

We face, as I keep saying in my lectures, a coming couple of decades of complete upheaval, if only because of baby-boomers all getting old. There’s no judgement there, it’s simply true. And while it’s fun to complain that It’s 2011 and Where’s My Jetpack, my worry is that it’s 2011, and we have no Apollo Program.