Matthew's RSA blog

Free as ...

This week I’ve been recalling the iconic line from Withnail and I, “Free to those that can afford it, but very expensive to those that can’t”.

This sprang to mind while reading in the Guardian about Freeconomics – Chris Anderson’s idea that companies are giving away many of their goods for free, and opening up new revenue streams elsewhere. For example, a colleague recently upgraded her phone with a particular network, and in return received not only a free new phone, but also an i-pod nano.

The business model here is based on the assumption that since i-pod will only play i-tunes formatted songs, Apple is broadening its consumer base. Given how cheap manufacturing has become, thanks to globalisation, it is actually a cost effective way of distributing goods and then making people pay for the services later.

In large part major corporates are responding to the rise of what Matt Mason (who spoke here yesterday) calls The Pirates Dilemma – which is about how corporations can compete / collaborate with the people who distribute their intellectual property without paying royalties or receiving consent.

The new economics of the internet is part of a more general reappraisal both of the ‘big’ economics of markets, risk and regulation but also the day to day economics of our own consumption patterns. Things can change quickly.

Twenty years ago the value of a family house in the London suburbs was equivalent to the cost of about 400 good quality video players. Now, even with the housing market slowdown, you could buy 16,000 multi functional DVD players for the price of the same house. In the 1980s we would have expected to pay a lot more for an item of clothing than a basic foodstuff but now you can get a perfectly serviceable t- shirt for less than a good loaf of bread. It’s easy to get disorientated about the real costs and value of stuff.

With food and raw material shortages, and climate change, a key issue in the politics of consumption is waste. Whether its white goods with built in obsolescence or the tons of good food we chuck into dustbins every day I wonder whether we are approaching the end of the disposable society.

We have no idea how much producing a kilo of meat costs in environmental or economic terms, we have no idea what the real costs of making our i-pod are in labour or any other sense. We suspect corporations of overcharging for cheap goods – and they may well be in some cases. But what we must do is regain some perspective on consumption, for the good of our planet, or even just for our own peace of mind.

The changing climate of climate change

There would appear to be a change in the air – and I’m not just talking about the weather. At the Commentariat event last night (fun, if slightly self indulgent) I heard someone from Spiked magazine confidently criticising the commentators’ consensus around climate change. This wouldn’t normally have been so worrying, but it was the third time in a day that I’d heard this kind of dissent.

This time last year it appeared that all the UK, and even some American, politicians were on message with what could broadly be called the Stern Hypothesis: the climate is changing, humans have contributed hugely to this change, we should and must act now to mitigate our impact and adapt to those changes we can’t mitigate. But today people seem to be emboldened to question this scientific orthodoxy.

Richard Littlejohn, one of the most widely read columnists in Britain, recently wrote about how politicians are using ‘dodgy climate change hysteria to keep increasing taxes’. His overall point is that climate change isn’t happening, that the earth’s temperature is cooling (though I’m not sure what his source is), and that the Government’s agenda to implement green taxes is hurting the man on the Clapham omnibus (or rather in the 2001 Renault Espace).

Indeed, even looking to the American elections, climate change doesn’t seem to be an issue in the interminable Clinton v. Obama contest, and their increasing tone of protectionism doesn’t bode well for their commitment to global issues.

In some ways both Littlejohn and the American politicians are right. As people’s finances are increasingly stretched, and a downturn in the housing market means that people feel less well off, they may feel that all this talk of paying more taxes to facilitate climate change mitigation, or changing their lifestyles to reduce emissions and waste, is too much to ask when they are concerned about more pressing problems like paying their mortgage.

It was always going to be difficult to empower the individual to feel responsible for their own contributions to climate change, particularly when changes in global politics means that many less developed countries are justifiably piqued when asked to reduce their emissions (and economic growth) by developed nations who got us into this trouble in the first place.

Sceptics like Littlejohn are helped by the misnomer of ‘global warming’ – in fact climatologists would say that there is no inconsistency with the argument that humans are responsible for changes in our global temperatures and a drop in temperatures – the point is that our actions are impacting on the world, and this may take the form of some cooling and some warming, the point is that the climate is changing.

I don’t believe that ethical living, as some put it, is incompatible with a retrenchment in the family finances, quite the opposite. There are ways to live a full life that don’t involve driving a petrol guzzling car, or buying clothes made by children in distant countries, and there are ways to make such a lifestyle affordable as well. Paying more taxes to enable the government to deal with those elements that are outside our control, like what happens to the waste we inevitably create, is just a further cost that must be factored in.

There is a third, more hopeless view, falling somewhere between Stern and Littlejohn, which argues that it is pointless to tinker with car emissions and plastic bag bans because people will only make drastic changes in their lifestyle when they are forced to, the tragedy is, that assuming the science is right, by this time it will be far too late.

Memoirs of life, love, death and art

We shot into April at the speed of light with a busy week in the lectures team. First up on Monday evening we continued our education series with Edge on developing the potential of every pupil. Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation opened the discussion about diversity of provision in the education system, an area of special interest to the RSA as we look ahead to the opening of the RSA Tipton Academy in September. We were delighted to welcome Anders Hultin to the event to speak to us about the Kunskapsskolan in Sweden, an innovative system of preparatory schools which he co-founded.

On Tuesday evening, the novelist Julian Barnes spoke to a packed and attentive Great Room about his memoir of life, love, death and art - Nothing to be Frightened of. This was the first in a new series of collaborations with bookseller Blackwell and we are very much looking forward to welcoming poet, Simon Armitage as our next speaker.

MT has already blogged on our great event on Wednesday with Michael Landy, Neil Boorman and Daniel Miller so I won't elaborate any further than to say that the audio podcast will be available soon for any that missed out on that fascinating discussion.

And to wrap up the week, we welcomed veteran foreign correspondent Robert Fisk to our RSA Thursday stage. After shoe-horning as many people as possible into the Tavern Room, Robert shared memorable moments from his incredible reporting career and caused a great queue of people after the lecture who were eager to question the great man himself.

We slow from a fast gallop to a steady canter next week, and we kick off our week with Tim Harford revealing the hidden logic of life... prepare to be enlightened!

The power of things

We had a fantastic event here at JAS last night as part of our Arts and Ecology dialogues. The audience was lively, up for some impromptu and planned participation, and as inspiring as the speakers themselves – I’d really recommend that you have a listen to the podcast, available on the RSA site soon.

First up was Neil Boorman, critic, author, music promoter and all around cool guy, who famously burned all his branded possessions in an effort to rid himself of the tyranny of ‘the brand’. His argument is that we have been conditioned, much like Pavlovian dogs, to desire specific brands because their marketing is specifically designed to appeal to your emotional responses causing us to consume ever more, even if we claim to be brand neutral. Arguably this is mass consumption is unsustainable both economically (re: the credit crunch) and environmentally (climate change).

Daniel Miller, an anthropologist researching material culture at UCL, followed hot on his heels. His forthcoming book The Comfort of Things explores the complex relationship that we have with our stuff, branded or not. He cautions against hope that consumer choices can be a major lever in tackling climate change. This is because our relationship to things is complex. People have to play off the public ethics of buying fair trade and environmentally and the private ethic of saving money for their family or eating healthily. And people are confused: bottled water which largely began from an environmentalist critique of the ‘polluted’ water in our taps has now emerged as a environmental culprit.

Miller believes that we need to allow scientists to work out what the most harmful activities are to the environmental, and for the government to make the tough decisions and legislate against them. This prompted another bit of audience participation – I asked the audience to raise their hands for either a Government Centric or Citizen Centric model for combating climate change, and the results were split about 50/50.

Finally, Michael Landy, the artist who gained notoriety when he catalogued and deconstructed all of his possessions for the piece Breakdown showed his film about the work, and discussed his feelings of elation, and loss. This sparked a debate about whether we should value our ‘things’ more or less – again, the audience voted, and the overwhelming majority believed that we should value our things more.

This reminded me of the famous William Morris quote: ‘have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”. By following this maxim I think that we both value things more and less – our possessions are linked to our memory and to our understanding of ourselves and the world. Maybe we keep them precious to us because we have a desire to feel connected to the material world, because our lives feel so ephemeral in comparison to the world around us.

International relations

An amazingly busy week for us here in the events team. We started on Tuesday with a joint event with the Equality and Human Rights Commission where David Cameron and Trevor Phillips drew a buzzing crowd to talk about Sharia Law amid the controversial comments that have recently hit the headlines. MT then bumped into DC on his bike outside the Houses of Parliament when DC had only positive things to say about the RSA.

From religion and law to arts as Turner Prize winner, Jeremy Deller spoke about social and environmental challenges with John Wilson of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row in the second of our Arts & Ecology Exchanges. With Wednesday came an international slant on education, as Ray Simon, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education travelled to the UK for the first time to speak on the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. And from America to Russia as our popular RSA Thursday took on the Russian Presidential elections with an expert panel. Speakers included Edward Lucas who has recently published The New Cold War: How the Kremlin menaces both Russia and the West.

Finally we finished off the week with acclaimed director and self-proclaimed master of hype Tony Kaye with an exclusive screening of his epic documentary Lake of Fire. After a massive 15 years in the making this black and white film tackles the ever-dividing issue of abortion head on.

We step into March with an exciting and varied range of events, including a mini-series on Iraq five years on from invasion. We start with a bang as British filmmaker, Nick Broomfield joins us for an exclusive screening of his new film, Battle for Haditha.

Consumer Choices in the Frame

In my speech about pro-social behaviour (all reasonable speaker's fees accepted) I suggest we can group under three headings the ways we need to develop as people if we are to create the better future we say we want.

We need to be more positively engaged in collective decision making, we need to live in ways that are more self-sufficient and sustainable and we need to be find new ways of being 'other regarding'.

Under the second of these headings I mention the growing importance of our behaviour as consumers. The rise of Fairtrade shows that many of us (surveys suggest about two thirds) want to be ethical consumers and that this can make a real difference.

But if we want the overall impact of our consumption to be benign, we need to ask more questions. For example, what about our role as the consumers of financial products?

The RSA is intending to undertake a consultation and deliberative conference to explore whether small and medium sized investors know how their money is invested, if they care about it and are they interested in having more say over it.

I wonder whether we will find we are simultaneously investing in companies with a strong commitment to social and environmental responsibility and, indirectly, in aggressive investment funds which see overly generous corporations as good targets for takeover and asset stripping?

Some of us may be buying more ethically but nearly all of us are buying more. Yet, do we ever stop to ask whether we actually want or need the next gadget or luxury product?

The other day I was in PC World buying an accessory for my son's computer. I was fifth in line at the checkout and was intrigued that three out of four customers in front of me were buying variants of the same product.

The item in question was a digital picture frame. Based on this small sample I confidently predict this will be a chart topper in next Christmas' most bought present list.

Before getting to the meat of my argument I have to admit to an aesthetic (some might say 'snobbish') bias.

I can't imagine anything less appealing than an unattractive constantly flickering picture frame in my front room featuring an ever changing catalogue of family snaps taken from the picture files on my computer.

Imagine being at the house of someone with one of these. When they are speaking to you is the polite thing to look at them or to gaze admiringly at the slide show of family snaps scrolling by on their mantelpiece?
If an amusing photo of the kids in fancy dress pops up does one show appreciation by grinning inanely even though the conversation is about the situation in Darfur or the new outbreak of foot and mouth?

But behind this bias is something more serious.

As I understand the technology, a digital photo frame is designed to be always on (after all we don't turn ordinary picture frames on their face when we leave the room). The frames work by receiving a signal from a wireless router which we also tend to leave on full time. I'm not sure if the system also requires the computer to be on but it might encourage us to leave our PC always in stand-by mode.

If I am right about the spread of these new gadgets - that they will soon be seen as must-have objects - why not have one in every room? 

So a new gadget, another thing moving around and flickering in our homes, another thing to make ordinary conversation more difficult, and most of all another way to use electricity and increase our already bloated consumption of carbon.

I am not saying we should ban digital picture frames, nor that we can, or should stop the endless pursuit of new consumer gizmos. But if ethical consumerism is to move beyond the top layer of our crowded supermarket trolleys, part of the process might be encouraging a more critical debate about whether every new consumer good is, well, good.

What should we make of all this?

The debate over tackling climate change is interesting but a little confusing. I first heard of the Conservatives’ ideas about aviation arriving on Sunday morning at Sky News to do their paper review. I welcomed the idea of a personal aviation emissions allocation as this is broadly in line with the RSA’s own proposal for personal carbon trading.

The next day the FT suggested that my support for the Conservative idea – which is both green and redistributive - was some kind of rebuff for Gordon Brown ahead of his own speech. As it turned out the Chancellor, referring to the important deal negotiated by Angela Merkel, emphasised the need to take continental and global action on climate change.

Last week in Brussels David Cameron urged the EU to take a strong role in tackling climate change but at the same time revealed that his only partners in his putative new centre right European Parliament group is the Czech ruling party, whose leaders are apparently unconvinced that global warming is real! In a further twist, Brown favoured voluntary measures on domestic fuel efficiency over Tory proposals for regulations and taxes; a neat reversal of conventional political point scoring.

What should we make of all this? Obviously it is good that the politicians are putting climate change centre stage. After last month’s grim IPCC report (itself probably erring on the cautious side), there was nowhere left to hide on the issue. Environmental groups must feel like the only girl at the ball so assiduously are they being courted. Put both Brown’s and Cameron’s ideas together and you have a pretty serious action plan. Brown is right that action must be taken internationally; Cameron that the domestic requirements of such agreements will not be met by voluntarism alone.

But there is a danger in the environment being seen as a political fad. As the sociologist Stan Cohen brilliantly analysed in his book 'States of Denial', most of us rely on a capacity to turn our faces away from difficult truths. Thus were most Germans under Nazi rule able to deny responsibility for the Holocaust and even otherwise progressive white South Africans willing to live with Apartheid. And maybe it is how we can live affluent Western lifestyles while a few thousand miles away African children starve?

In persisting with denial we rely on certain mental tropes such as 'it's not really happening', 'it's nothing to do with me' or 'there's nothing I can do about it'. By making climate change feel like an issue of political point scoring rather than unarguable science and clear moral responsibility we run the danger of providing an easy route for denial.

Ultimately I believe we can tackle carbon emissions and have better lives, but in the short term we face some tough choices. Once this row is over, our politicians should try to find a basis for an agreed way forward.

I heard last week that the average readership for a blog is one so I am gratified to see that at least six people read mine:

Andrew and Praguetory - I agree there are some good blogs and I should stop talking only about the negative ones.

Ewan - yes, we need to think of new ways to use technology to engage young people in politics (something we will be discussing in our internet conference later this year).

Leen Petre is right to remind us of the digital divide, although it isn't so big when you look at satellite TV or mobile phones.

Trevor - we are currently thinking about doing some work on prisons.

John - I liked the idea but I can't say I hold out much hope that citizens would pay a voluntary tax to politicians however good their cause.