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.

Cutting Up

The JAS team is divided up into the hospitality team and us upstairs doing things like research, fellowship recruitment, fund raising etc. Partly to overcome this divide and partly just so I can have a bit of fun from time to time, I have encouraged the desk-bound staff to volunteer in the House. Today was my turn and I had a great time in the kitchens. The team were very patient with me and I learned a couple of top tips.

The whole experience convinced me that everyone should spend half a working day a week on routine manual labour - something you can safely do while listening to music -helping out in the kitchen, the garden, cleaning etc. After all, these were the kind of tasks that occupied most of our time for the vast majority of our evolution as humans so it’s not surprising that doing them soothes our stressed-out brains.               

Speaking of brains I was fascinated by this piece in the Guardian. There are clearly mixed opinions as to the efficacy of brain training. Advocates say it has wide and long lasting effects while critics say the reverse.

The issues here are big, going well beyond a particular product or method to the much wider question of the plasticity of our brains in later life. This is clearly a debate we should host in our forthcoming cognition project.   

Food fight

We are facing a ‘silent tsunami’, according to the head of the World Food Programme, the Economist, and many of the broadsheets this morning. Indeed, our most recent RSA Journal featured an article on food security which argued that we need a new politics of food in Britain. One which ‘integrates individual behaviour within the planet’s needs and capacities.’

The debate on food security strikes me as emblematic of our agenda at the RSA in terms of promoting sustainable, pro-social behaviour, and local solutions for a globalised world. This is because food cuts to the very core of our society at every level.

The newspapers today have been preoccupied with the rising costs of staple foods, a situation caused by a confluence of global issues ranging from bio-fuel production to draughts in Australia to Westernising diets in Asia. But food occupies a much deeper psychological space in our life; we are defined by what we eat. To a certain extent this has always been true, but the issue is ever more acute as we see the impact of our food choices on the environment, and vice versa.

So for example, the environmental lobby, were (and are) particularly concerned about the introduction of GM crops. The media responded with a flurry of headlines about ‘franken-food’ and ‘jumping genes’ and as a result most people would now refuse to eat ‘GM’ products. However, with a basic understanding of science, and a rational response to risk analysis, most people would come to the conclusion that the benefits of increased supply, not to mention draught and pest resistance, outweigh the concerns. Obviously there are larger issues around patents for seeds etc but this can’t be properly discussed until we re-open the GM debate. 

A debate is currently emerging on the RSA Networks Platform on sustainable food supplies – should we be returning to increased self sufficiency (yesterday there were reports that people are buying more vegetable seeds in a time of economic crisis and Jamie Oliver induced gardening)?

In an increasingly urbanised world, how do we reconcile where our food comes from, and how can we as individuals make choices which are best for us (in terms of health) and sustainable for the world? What is clear is that we need an open and rational debate which puts reason and sustainable development at the centre of our food policies, and I’m sure many of the Fellows will have important contributions to make on this issue.