What links Donald Trump, Sajid Javid and Jeremy Corbyn? Answer: over the last couple of months, they’ve all sought to capture the political energy from the seemingly endless sequence of tech giant scandals. Trump has tweeted about a supposed (unfounded) anti-right-wing bias in Google searches. In the UK, Javid has warned of tech firms’ record on child safety, while Corbyn highlighted the oversized role of social media and other platforms in our consumption of news.

All have proposed responses to these threats. Javid favours fines, which, in the practice, often amount to less than a few minutes’ revenue. Corbyn has gone further, announcing his intention to create a new public sector body to drive digital innovation and inclusion. This is an improvement on the tepid centrist playbook (and on Trump’s vague promise that this “will be addressed!”), but an adequate response requires something even deeper.

The wealth, power and reach of the tech giants into so many areas of our social and economic lives shows that a more radical approach is required. Deep, structural reform of how data is generated, governed and used is needed so that all can gain from the benefits of digital technology. This benefit can and could be enormous – from connecting people around the world on social media, through making industrial processes more efficient, to helping us understand and act on environmental change and opening up affordable, clean transport for all.

But, so far, the development of the digital economy has been dominated by a small number of powerful firms whose activities tend towards monopoly. It’s estimated that, in the UK, Facebook has 74% of the social network market share, Amazon is responsible for 90% of all e-book sales and 80% of online physical book sales, and Google has an 88% share of the desktop search engine market and 95% of mobile searches.

Critically, this isn’t the fault of Cambridge Analytica or a liberal conspiracy, but a result of the platforms’ business model and the outcomes this generates. This revenue model is simple: the extraction and interpretation of user data to generate insights that are sold for profit. These insights include everything from what you’d like to buy to how to make you angry, and so endow platforms with powerful tools for manipulating consumer, political and other preferences. In turn, insights are used to improve how platforms extract data and develop further insights, with commensurate increases in profit.

This creates a voracious hunger for data, leading platforms to enter as many new markets as possible and to then ensure users stay within the platform’s ecosystem of products. Why use a high street bank when you can send money over Facebook messenger? How great is it that you can access travel information from Google maps through Google Home? Why bother with local shops when you can order everything through Amazon? As you enjoy these services, which are often free, platforms ensure you maximise the amount of personal data given over through various devices and products, while simultaneously decreasing the chance you will leave and become the user of another platform. In all, platform firms have a universal ambition reflected in their increasingly universal platforms.

In turn, political and social as well as economic power is concentrated in the hands of the small band of data barons who run the platform monopolies. Alphabet generated revenues of $32.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017, up from 24% the year before, with 85% of that revenue generated from its advertising business. Apple and Amazon are now trillion-dollar companies, with the combined annual revenue for the world’s five largest companies by market value – all of them platforms in some form – already exceeding the GDP of 90% of the world’s countries. With their huge piles of cash, data oligarchs seek the development of digital technology primarily as a means of making profit from the ‘data-fication’ of as much as society as possible. As we’ve seen with recent scandals, this threatens our privacy and democratic discourse. It is also likely slowing innovation and accelerating inequality as the rewards of the digital economy flow to the data hoarders.

So, in the face of their power and limitless ambition, fines are almost irrelevant. Structural reforms are needed that target the platform business model. These reforms include changing the ownership and governance of data and that of the underlying, evermore ubiquitous digital infrastructures that penetrate our economic and social lives. Overall, as we argue in a new IPPR paper, we need to move towards a ‘digital commonwealth’ where data is a collective resource driving equitable innovation, instead of a hoarded commodity, sweated for profit to further enrich the wealthiest people in history. In turn, digital infrastructure – from the cloud to analytical capabilities – should become a public good.

We stand at a crossroads. We can either embrace these reforms to realise a world of digital plenty, in which new technologies increasingly play their role in overcoming the great problems of the day, or settle for a world in which the power of data oligarchs grows and society and economies become more fragmented, private and unsustainable. So, the next time you hear a politician bash the tech giants, see if they’re advocating radical reform. If they are not, they are advocating for a lesser world.

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Facebook is being fined £500,000 by the Information Commissioner, the maximum amount possible, for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The fine is unlikely to change Facebook’s behaviour. The company is worth an estimated $540 billion, and in the first quarter of 2018 took £500,000 in revenue every five and a half minutes. Some claim the fine is symbolically important. In reality it is essentially meaningless, mattering little to a company run by a man who didn’t even bother to appear before Parliament when asked to explain his company’s actions.

If we want real change, we can’t rely on small, after-the-fact fines. Instead, we will need to undertake deep, structural reform of how data is created, governed and used to ensure all of us gain the benefits from digital technology and its revolutionary potential.

The fine is being levied for two breaches of the Data Protection Act over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Information Commissioner has concluded that Facebook failed to adequately safeguard the information of users and it was not transparent in how data was being harvested by others, including the apps used to extract data to build the influencing mechanisms used by Cambridge Analytica. The result was substantial and widespread breaches of privacy and, ultimately, the erosion of democratic principles and norms.

Clearly, it was a scandal. But was it also the beginning of a crisis, a moment that can generate support for deep and significant reform of both Facebook’s behaviour and how we regulate the platform economy more widely? This is less clear.

Critically, as the Information Commissioner’s analysis reveals, the deep scandal didn’t lie in the activities of Cambridge Analytica, but in Facebook’s business model and the outcomes this generates. The revenue model of Facebook and other major digital platforms is simple: the extraction and analysis of user data to generate insights that are sold for profit. These insights – from political preferences to how you react to certain emotions – are also used to fine-tune the platform and make it more effective at further extracting and analysing data for profit. Ultimately, the technologies that do this are a form of artificial intelligence. All our data is now providing the raw material for training this intelligence until it becomes mature enough to offer new products that provide extraordinary services to users, and gargantuan profits and market advantage to digital platforms.

This voracious appetite for data generates an expansive and circular dynamic of expansion and ‘enclosure’. Facebook expands into new sectors and offers new services to attract more users and acquire more data. These users are in turn incorporated into Facebook’s systems (enclosed) and analysed, generating huge profits and providing a growing data comparative advantage over data-light competitors. Why use NatWest when you can send money over Facebook messenger? Isn’t it convenient to be able to access commuting information from Google maps through your Google home speaker? The service works for you, by offering useful, free products, and for the platform, by providing a means in which you provide more and more personal data through a multitude of devices and services, all of which make it less desirable to leave and become the user of another platform. These companies have a universal ambition reflected in their increasingly universal platforms.

This business model concentrates economic power in the hands of the data oligarchs who control the platform monopolies. It puts at risk notions of privacy and democratic communication, when these companies seek to ‘data-ify’ all of society, from its physical infrastructure to our social relationships, making profit from the resultant insights. And it risks slowing innovation and accelerating inequality as the rewards of the digital economy flow to the data hoarders.

So fining Facebook the equivalent of five and a half minutes of revenue simply isn’t enough. What is required is structural reform to address the platform business model. This in turns requires rethinking the ownership and governance of data and the underlying, increasingly ubiquitous digital infrastructure of our economy and society. Whereas today the digital economy increasingly operates under conditions of data enclosure, where information is siloed and controlled by the digital monopolies, we need to move towards a ‘digital commonwealth’ where data is a collective resource that drives equitable innovation, and digital infrastructure – from the cloud to analytical capabilities – is a public good.

From regulating the tech giants as utilities, to new ways of curating and accessing public and private sector data, to strategies for building a digital commonwealth – drawing inspiration from innovative cities like Barcelona – our forthcoming IPPR paper will set out the concrete steps we can take.

We are now at a crossroads. We can either realise a world of digital plenty, with new technologies mobilised to solve the great problems of the day, or settle for one in which data oligarchs rule and society and economies become more fragmented, private and unsustainable. Small fines guarantee the latter. If we are serious about reining in the universal platforms, we need to rethink the deep institutional underpinnings of digital economy.

Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton are co-authors of forthcoming paper, ‘The Digital Commonwealth: from enclosure to a data commons’.

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Today the 70 year-old National Health Service finds itself in a world radically different to that in which it was born. Compulsory health insurance had only arrived in 1911, part of a reformist welfare agenda spurred by concerns over working class conditions and the revolutionary urges they engendered. As in all ages, the nature and causes of ill health were a function of the social and economic conditions of the day, as summarised by William Beveridge’s timeless evocation of the Five Giant Evils: “squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease”.

Emerging from the ashes of the Second World War, the founding principles of the NHS – free to all, at the point of use, beyond the insurance principle – allowed Britain to win the peace. Universal health coverage gave succour to a sick and dispirited nation, providing the conditions in which Fordist consumer-capitalism could mature by creating a “secret, silent column” of healthy and productive citizens who helped usher in the post-war Keynesian boom. For a nation bowed but unbroken, scuttling its empire in a new age of human rights, it may have seemed reasonable for Aneurin Bevan to proclaim that Britain, with its NHS, now had “the moral leadership of the world”.

This was an era of rapid and momentous change. Little less than a year before, at the stroke of midnight, the nations of India and Pakistan achieved freedom from a dying empire; in 1948, as 4^th July turned to 5^th, the British people could dream of freedom from fear.

The NHS was the archetypal child of its ideological time. The concept of public healthcare under the NHS model sat atop a new wave of political and economic ideas. Centralised state bureaucracies and Keynesian demand management washed away the failed political economy of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. As Bevan pushed through his plan for a publicly provided rather than ‘publicly organised’ NHS, a former Conservative health secretary asserted that this “would destroy so much in this country that we value”. Precisely the opposite occurred.

However, contrary to some contemporary opinion, this revolutionary turn in the role and functions of government came with broad support from across the British state. This is not to disavow the achievement, merely a reminder that the time for a profound shift in political and economic ideas had come. When it came again, in the late seventies and early eighties, the vanguard of the new order identified themselves almost in direct opposition to what the NHS stood for, the ideas that justified it, and the objective reality it delivered.

The NHS has always been the target of opprobrium from the intellectual evangelists of incongruous market liberalism. This is the case whether they are set to gain from outsourcing and privatisation, or are merely captured by the shadows on the collective cave of our economic discourse. In the case of the former, from its inception, health insurance giants watched the NHS and pumped money into proto-neoliberal think tanks that criticised all facets of Britain’s public healthcare model with gleeful abandon.

It was in reaction to an attack on the principles of non-fee-paying blood donation that the sociologist Richard Titmuss wrote The Gift Relationship, his seminal exploration of the impacts of pecuniary incentives in social policy. Titmuss warned that the unabashed introduction of markets into previously untouched areas of policy would result in a destructive, pervasive “ideology to end all ideologies”. Into what future would we now head if it was this book that British prime ministers pulled from their bags, slammed onto tables, and over which they declared “this is what we believe”?

As the post-war consensus fell, practical men, finding themselves quite exempt from intellectual influence, slaved away to deliver the assertions of defunct economists. The theoretical basis of neoliberal economic ideas considers markets the superior means of coordinating allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. However, when applied to healthcare, market dynamics are profoundly inappropriate. This is not the case with, say, food, where you, endowed with sufficient information on which apple is appropriate for your own needs, can enjoy the benefits of a plurality of apple vendors, each optimising their products and prices to meet market demand. For serious heart problems, even a world-renowned cardiothoracic surgeon would suffer from incomplete understanding of her condition and treatment, opening up information asymmetries with the consultant sitting opposite.

It took until the nineties for the neoliberal revolution to strike the NHS. Market structures were the order of the day as the state sailed heroically into the End of History. The NHS, as with all areas of public provision, was now going to compete – by hell, high-water or penalty imposed from central government. That it has taken until now for the contradictions, inefficiencies and failures of marketisation to be recognised by elements of the political mainstream stands testament to the dangerous paucity of our policy discourse. One cannot look upon the collapse of Carillion and the eye-watering cost of the Private Finance Initiative – £310 billion for assets worth around £55 billion – without concluding that something is profoundly wrong with those economic ideas that justify such cruel, inefficient policies. Where does duty of care come in a contract that allows a private company to charge an NHS hospital £333 for a lightbulb?

The NHS under neoliberalism has failed on its own terms. Firstly, inappropriate and unnecessary marketisation has delivered waste, moral hazard, and, ultimately, exposed the system to structural risks, imposing large costs on the taxpayer through the socialisation of failure. The Centre for Health and the Public Interest estimates that the annual cost of marketisation in the NHS is in excess of £4.5 billion per year, with additional start-up costs of over £3 billion per major market reform. Indeed, the benefits of market ‘reforms’ have always been hotly contested, with opposition across academics and health practitioners, who stress a high opportunity cost in forgone patient care and clinical innovation.

Secondly, privatisation – distinct to the wasteful outsourcing of healthcare provision to private companies – has seen the loss of assets built up over decades and paid for by generations of taxpayers, a particularly vindictive, socially and economically irrational policy. For example, the coalition government famously sold 80% of the UK’s blood plasma resource company to Bain Capital for £90 million, putting the security of blood supplies at risk. Bain soon enjoyed profits in excess of £700 million when the company was subsequently sold to Chinese investors. Into the future, the government is seeking to sell large quantities of NHS land, imposing the opportunity cost of missed public investment in productive assets, such as the construction of much needed hospitals and the installation of renewable energy that could power the NHS and reduce its carbon emissions.

Thirdly, it has simply been a deliberate political choice to underfund the NHS over a period that now approaches a decade. Over the 2015/16 financial year, NHS trusts and foundation trusts fell into a combined deficit of nearly £2.5 billion, only three years after reporting a surplus of over £500 million. While the changing nature of ill health and demand for services plays a part, this gap has opened up due to a deliberate policy of underfunding: real terms increases in NHS funding were 0.9% a year between 2010-2015, in contrast to an average of 3.7% over its lifetime. There is now a near universal consensus that the NHS is underfunded and that the lack of resource is the greatest contributor to successive crises – something that even the government has begun recognised. In all, health and social care spending cuts have been linked to 120,000 excess deaths.

At best, the justifications for George Osborne’s ‘Age of Austerity’ were the spurious frenzies of a politician appealing to the polluted ideas of a discredited yesteryear to benefit wealthy vested interests. At worst, they have cost lives and halted the inexorable, centuries-long tradition of improvement in public health driven by the noble efforts of British academics and clinicians. Do not forget that life expectancy had been rising continuously for over one hundred years, a trend that has likely faltered because of the political choice to cut public expenditure, with the rate of increase in life expectancy having dropped by almost 50% since austerity began. If medical science has been of the greatest benefit to mankind, uncritical adherence to outworn economic dogma has been of the greatest detriment.

For the neoliberal experiment, as in nearly all areas of policy, has imposed a wicked cost on our health. It has damaged systems that seemed to be working moderately well in the past and eroded the institutional basis upon which we can effectively respond to the challenges of the age. Take the future of the digital technology, which could alter social and economic relations at a pace and scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution. The manner in which digital technology is integrated into healthcare in the UK is and will always be a political choice. Smart phones, ubiquitous data collection and machine learning could be harnessed by the NHS to better realise its founding principles, creating possibilities beyond the wildest imaginings of Bevan, Beveridge et al. Instead, the digital frontier is dominated by multinational monopolists and speculators pumping money into consumerist start-ups that flood markets springing up in anticipation of continued underfunding and privatisation. We can do better.

Moreover, the very basis of our healthcare model is being shaken by demographic change and a shift in the nature of ill health. Underfunding is simply unsustainable in the face of these trends. Into the future, environmental change, already described as the greatest threat (and opportunity) to public health, will determine the parameters of our healthcare imaginations. There is no room for systemic waste, fragmented private providers, and the inefficient adoption of innovative technologies in a world that has warmed by 1.5C and in which the majority of soil fertility has been lost.

What is to be done? Much of a post-neoliberal approach to the NHS must seek to repair the damage done over the last few decades. Primarily, the NHS needs to be adequately funded as part of a wider move away from the discredited policy of austerity. Ill health over the period of fiscal retrenchment has resulted from damage to the systems of the state, encompassing everything from transport to social care, that provide the foundations upon which good health can spring. It will be a tragedy if the number of lives lost during the application of these failed, pre-Keynesian ideas should not banish them forever.

The government’s recent pledge to up NHS spending by an average of around 3% a year to 2023/24 does not do this. It is below the 4.3% annual growth needed to keep pace with demand and much lower than that needed to recover from the damage wrought by the past eight years of underfunding. What’s more, the funding is delayed until next year, opening up a cavern across which the NHS must jump and into which much of it could fall, particularly if another cold winter pushes the service into collapse. The increase also leaves out public health, staff training and building and other key capital investments. It has nothing to say about the cost of debt repayment.

Marketisation can no longer be the first port of call for policymakers, as should be the case across the public sector. This includes needing to handle the growing burden of PFI debts, with options including the centralisation and renegotiation of contracts. Into the future, the social, environmental and economic power of the NHS should be brought to bear, with hospitals acting as ‘anchor institutions’ that provide a local basis for everything from the rollout of clean energy through building energy assets on NHS land, to improving employment standards by targeting local recruitment and procurement. These developments are already occurring, with, for example, some hospitals in London recycling their heat into local housing. Maximising the local socioeconomic role of the NHS could also present a more meaningfully democratised approach to decision-making.

Until then, be wise to what neoliberalism has done and will continue to do to the NHS. Born of war and strife, Britain’s health service celebrates its 70^th birthday in a bad way – bowed, nearly broken, ill-prepared to suffer the burden of continued underfunding and held together by the goodwill of staff. All the while, foreign insurance giants watch with patient eyes for opportunities arising from Brexit trade deals. The NHS is about being civilised; as we dismantle it, we become less civilised.

Over the course of the 70^th anniversary, the official celebrations shall likely focus on NHS staff. Quite right. But do not forget that the NHS is and has always been about economics, politics and power. It is about multinational corporations getting richer while sick people die in corridors. It is about bright young management consultants repeating failed economic cantations to justify inefficiency. Alone in a society brutalised by years of austerity, the NHS is increasingly the first and last line of care for people up and down the country, and is kept going by the blood, sweat and tears of its staff.

The NHS is no longer national. Fragmented and sucked dry of resources, it cannot invest in responding to modern health problems. The NHS is increasingly becoming a logo under which private enterprise may suckle on the teat of the state, growing fat off our taxes. The predicament of the NHS at 70 is the result of a concerted application of failed economic ideology. Neoliberalism’s legacy is the private ambulance provider who bungles an emergency call because their staff are under-trained and poorly equipped; it is the baby who dies in the night, away from their parents, as the private provider of an out-of-hours service fails to adequately respond. Stand this no longer. If the Labour Party are to enter government in the near future, a test of their willingness to deliver a new society will be whether they create a post-neoliberal NHS.

The NHS can be all that its staff and its patients believe it to be. A harbour in which fear is kept at bay, in which everyone maintains the right to be relieved of the pressures of ill health. In the final analysis, the crisis of neoliberalism is inherently a political crisis founded on the inadequacy of a certain set of economic ideas. In the same way that the NHS has always proven there is an alternative, the orthodox approach to healthcare policy proves that we need, now more than ever, an alternative to neoliberalism.

This essay is a modified version of an article published in the Mint.

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That Cambridge Analytica used millions of Facebook profiles to create tools to target and manipulate US voters comes as no surprise to those who watch and work in large digital firms. This is for two main reasons. Firstly, many simply already knew. Secondly, activity of this kind – data accumulation and analysis to build tools of manipulation – is foundational to the business model of large digital platforms.

Over the last half century, improvements in information and computer technology have precipitated the development of platforms that act as intermediaries between the provider and user of a service. For Uber, a passenger uses the app to gain access to a seat in a driver’s car. In the case of Facebook, the holder of a Facebook profile is a supplier, voluntarily giving up intimate data that is analysed and sold to advertisers, who, in turn, target the profile holder with goods of a type and in a way that maximise their propensity to purchase.

Our economic and social worlds are being remodelled by these firms. The many varieties of platform have stretched their operations across a broad range of markets, from groceries to transport. Though their activities are broad, platforms are united by an insatiable impulse upon which their business models are founded: the extraction and analysis of data. In using Facebook, you create data actively, by liking pages or typing intimate status updates, or passively, through location services. All this data is captured. It is then analysed to, among other things, build inferred profiles of you and your network – what issues drive you to vote, which products you’re likely to consume, your sexual preferences, your dreams, fears, and the issues that most exercise you, your nearest and dearest, or anyone that is similar to you. If it can be captured it will be used.

Two things then happen. Firstly, these profiles are used to sell advertising in ways and at a scale beyond the wildest imaginings of the past. Digital advertising is now the largest advertising medium in the world, with Google and Facebook accounting for over 80% of digital advertising outside China and upwards of 20% of total global advertising. Secondly, data and analysis are used to improve the algorithms that power the platforms and produce the insights. Opening up the world’s knowledge is not the primary motivation of Google engineers as they frantically scan book after book, but the rapid development of its machine learning capabilities. The artificial intelligence beast is hungry, and platforms must compulsively feed it.

Ultimately, these companies seek to maximise profits. When the means of doing so become dependent on the extraction and analysis of data, firms are compelled to seek new frontiers of activity through which data can be gained and exploited more effectively. This drives them into new markets, with banking, healthcare, and travel at the top of the list. Rapid growth is made easy by the low marginal cost of expansion (an extra user costs little to nothing to Facebook), that larger networks create more value to users and so attract more, and the first mover advantage enjoyed by the big platforms – put simply, their enormous stores of data provide insights that yield a competitive advantage in almost any market in which data can be a source of value (essentially all). In this way, data both enables and compels digital firms to seek and achieve enormous scale and reach. Look out for Amazon Health, Google Mobility and Facebook Bank.

Scale and reach mean impact, which spans across three main areas: economic, social, and political. Economically, digital firms exhibit classic monopolistic behaviour, stifling innovation by buying up small firms and barring access to datasets that could be used to invent new products and services. They also erode labour standards – either directly, through on-demand casualisation, or indirectly, by undermining other industries. Moreover, by requiring so little staff, platforms further reduce the share of the economy going to the general population over the owners of financial assets. That they provide services at little to no cost has bamboozled the existing approach to anti-trust policy, which only recognises a firm as a monopolist if it raises, not reduces, prices.

Beyond economic factors, platforms are now foundational to the social and political experiences of people across the world, providing a shared space to learn, converse and organise. This has delivered great benefit, but has also impacted the mental health of users and increased the areas of society that are under the purview of algorithms and the assumptions and biases that underpin them. Platforms also have an environmental impact through maintaining large, energy-hungry servers and by lowering the barriers to consumption, through on-demand car journeys or fast food delivery.

Recognition of these negative impacts will accelerate in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations. As governments scramble to develop a response – the success of which is partly dependent on a rapid improvement in the digital literacy of politicians – they would do well to remember a key insight: it is Facebook’s business model that opens the platform up to abuses like those committed by Cambridge Analytica and others like them. As long as platforms raise the majority of their revenues from collecting and analysing data to better manipulate users through advertising or to purchase goods and services, third parties, from private firms to governments, will seek to exploit this power.

Thus, it is data that must become the focus of the response. A range of options exist: force the platforms to open up their data, allowing anyone to use it to produce innovative, more socially useful products; remove platforms’ ability to hold data, placing it into a public store that enables citizens to have ownership over it and limit that which is captured by firms for private use; or create marketplaces in which users become micro-entrepreneurs, raising personal revenues when platforms exploit their data. The last is the preference of many who wish to keep the hegemony of the platforms in place. But, crucially, this would limit the ability of wider society to benefit from large datasets and the insights they provide. Realising that benefit could be crucial to overcoming major problems – from environmental collapse to lifestyle diseases – and so something akin to options one or two is preferable.

This will necessarily mean that the platforms and their mercurial leaders are unseated from their positions of immense power, directly removing from them the very basis of the business model that has delivered their extraordinary riches. As public dissent grows and the space for political responses opens, Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple will do all they can to resist fundamental change. How to overcome this resistance is the key question we now need to ask.

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In times of disjuncture and hardship, an impulse exists to take flight from reality and retreat into the comfort of old-worn habits and familiar surroundings. To some, this offers the opportunity to reflect and reimagine. Many may simply desire to escape, or remain entirely ignorant to the problems at hand. For others, to be seen to act is all that matters. It is in this way that we can identify the different tribes that amassed in Davos for this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

Whether they realise or not, the attendees of Davos occupied a time and space in which two of the most significant stories in human history are colliding against the hubris and misguided optimism of the global elite. The first is the story of the prevailing set of economic and political ideas in major ‘developed’ nations, so-called neoliberalism. The neoliberal story began over forty years ago, and –  as inequality grows and economic crisis looms – has become one of failure. The second story concerns the impact of human activity on the natural world and, specifically, the implications of these impacts crossing safe thresholds. This story began much longer ago, back in the furnaces of the industrial revolution and on the creaking ships of colonial pirates, and has reached its terminal phase as global impact portends global collapse.

The neoliberal story

Davos 2018 came at a bad time for neoliberalism. In Britain, the preceding week was dominated by the collapse of the outsourcing giant Carillion and the exposure, to a wider audience, of the pervasive extent and expensive failure of the private finance initiative (or PFI). Many PFI schools and hospitals were built to unacceptably (even lethally) low standards, later than promised, and, when firms failed to fulfil their obligations – as they often did – the state socialised the cost while executives walked away with their pay-packets untouched. In all, we will likely pay over £310 billion for assets worth around £55 billion.

PFI has been one of the central pillars of recent British political economy. The continued failure of PFI makes it even harder to deny that the status quo is founded on a set of ideas used to justify unfettered profit maximisation and sweep aside any impediments to that end. In their infancy in the fifties and sixties, the development of these neoliberal ideas was encouraged by economic interests whose primacy was threatened by the New Deal and post-war consensus. Money flowed freely to entrepreneurial academics, who, in turn, told corporate leaders what to think and say. The ever lucid Milton Friedman, an economics professor in America and the supplest of intellectual gymnasts, gave them exactly what they needed when proclaiming that the sole social responsibility of business was to increase profits. In doing so, firms must, according to Friedman, stay “within the rules of the game, which is to [engage] in open and free competition without deception or fraud”. Inevitably, lavishly funded lobbying operations ensured the ‘rules of the game’ were changed, while, presumably, successive governments sought to minimise barriers to profit-making in order to maximise social welfare. It is easy to imagine the laughter of those benefiting from this arrangement pealing out over Westminster as they shopped between meetings with one uncritical adherent after another. Needless to say, there is nothing socially responsible about charging an NHS hospital £333 to replace a lightbulb.

The wider array of neoliberal ideas justifies policies that have relinquished economically productive state assets, create extraordinary levels of waste through unnecessary marketisation, and, ultimately, captured the state as a means to guarantee revenue streams with little to no risk. In theory, neoliberalism essentially ignores market failure; in practice, it benefits from it, actively promoting it at each turn. The financialisation of the economy is the deeper, inevitable consequence of a dictatorship of ideas that elevates short-term profit maximisation as the driving impulse of modern societies and economies.

The cost of this project can no longer be ignored. As is customary, Davos sees the release of the latest, greatest statistics on the failures of the prevailing economic model. Just over 40 people (nearly all men) now likely hold more wealth than half of humanity, with 82% of global wealth generated in 2017 going to the wealthiest 1%. In the UK, FTSE 100 bosses earn, on average, 120 times more than employees. These are the symptoms of a system that relentlessly minimises costs to maximise shareholder returns, eroding workers’ rights and exerting enormous influence on policymaking and political ideas. In 2000, Bill Clinton addressed Davos, the first sitting US president to do so, and expounded the virtues of globalisation as a unifying economic and social force. It is apt that Trump – a president whose position is partly a result of the hatred frothing from the dispossession and corruption bred by neoliberal policies – was the next president to do so.

As Trump brings the circus, bullish global markets belie the true global economic picture. Ten years after the Crash, its lessons remain largely unlearnt as optimistic investors commit the oldest sins in the newest ways and stock markets break records. Comfort breeds complacency and the word on the snowy boulevards of Davos was that another serious correction is coming. As younger generations gaze upon this spectacle – many of them from countries were youth unemployment still exceeds 30% – they could be forgiven for concluding that those in power are in charge only inasmuch as it serves them to be.

The environmental story

But the greatest tragedy of neoliberalism may be that it dominated our thinking over the period in which we had a final chance to halt catastrophic environmental change. Human activity has always impacted the natural world but the severity and reach of these impacts has accelerated exponentially over the last few hundred years, at least since Western powers began to establish colonial empires. With the advent of industrialisation and the first wave of globalisation in the 1800s, these impacts began to increasingly alter the functioning of the great biogeochemical cycles that facilitate life on earth. By the 1970s, as the global population reached 4 billion, the consequences of these impacts became evermore obvious, with our understanding enhanced by scientific advance. The decade of the seventies saw awareness of the growing crisis reach a mainstream audience, helped by landmark studies such as the Limits to Growth. Recurrent energy crises over the decade provided the economic pressure to seek more efficient, sustainable technologies, at least in providing alternatives to oil.

But these crises also sounded the death knell of the post-war social democratic era, providing the platform upon which an emboldened neoliberal movement could win arguments and, as the eighties began, power in the UK and USA. The neoliberal policies that have dominated rich nations and the global development paradigm ever since seek to maximise profit, usually through consumption, by extending markets across the world and minimising cost, particularly that arising from regulation. In segmenting environmental degradation as an external cost and insisting on the inadequacy of all incentives but the pecuniary, neoliberalism’s theoretical basis set the conditions for catastrophe. In practice, the relentless lobbying and legitimisation of regulatory arbitrage and tax avoidance has eroded state functions at precisely the moment they were needed to resolve the coordination problem at the heart of global environmental change.

In the 40 years since neoliberalism sought and won power, a third of arable land across the world has been lost. Around two thirds of vertebral life has died. Agricultural practices have disrupted the nitrogen cycle more than at any point in its 2.7 billion year history. Ours is the age of the Sixth Mass Extinction, the last being  that of the dinosaurs, the rates of which are exacerbated by climate change. According to the UN, the rate of toil soil degradation means there may only 60 global harvests left. In all, human activity has pushed environmental systems into ‘unsafe’ operating spaces, threatening the preconditions upon which civilisation can flourish, or even exist.

Societies are already feeling the effects, with a causal link being established between climate change driving a higher incidence of extreme weather, the resultant damage to crop yields, and the stress imposed by rising food prices in regions with already fragile socioeconomic positions, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. In Davos, the yearly World Economic Forum risk report now regularly warns of ‘profound social instability’ resulting from a complex web of factors, ranging from economic crisis to migration, all of which are magnified by environmental degradation. Risk is becoming increasingly systemic, compounding and threatens non-linear outcomes. In response, institutions must become more resilient or global cooperation could be threatened as nations turn inwards to protect their interests.

What next?

As we have seen, parts of these stories are recognised by Davos’s organisers and guests. This year’s theme was “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World Inequality” and there was no shortage of panel discussions on inequality, climate change, short termism, fake news, the gender gap. As is customary, these discussions are predominantly conducted behind closed doors and between old men. In turn, media commentators grasp for engaging metaphors and snappy headlines to enliven the whole affair. This year’s favourite concerns the heavy snowfall and the increased threat of an avalanche engulfing the hapless participants of the ‘New Consumption Frontiers’ panel. There is strength in this metaphor, particularly from the perspective of younger generations, who look around aghast at the unfolding catastrophe brought about by the twin stories of the neoliberal era and environmental decline.

On the former, the status quo’s crisis of legitimacy is increasingly infecting its intellectual basis, with parties of both traditional left and right seeking to capitalise on the growing backlash against neoliberal ideas. In the UK, the 2017 election result and the clear depletion of the Conservative party as a governing and intellectual force stokes coals of excitement across the resurgent left. This is welcome, at least in that the Labour party and its hinterland are engaged in a process of disruption and intellectual innovation. Most notably, the voice and energy of younger generations sits at the heart of this project, which is essential, as it is they who must deal with the wreck of neoliberalism.

But the most damaging legacy of older generations is far worse than the loss of institutions, employment rights and social cohesion. As we get excited about moving beyond neoliberalism, we have to understand how the degradation – and maybe even collapse – of natural systems will dominate what is and is not possible into the future, whether our politics catches up or not. Recently, a special UN report on the chance of global warming reaching 1.5C was leaked. A working conclusion is that this could happen by the 2040s. This is also the decade that, dependent on a number of factors, soil fertility may be lost across most of the world, robbing nations of the ability to grow nutritious, or indeed any, food. The millennial generation will be in their forties and fifties by this point and will therefore have to deal with this grave new world. Nothing short of a global socioeconomic transformation to ensure the sustainability of human activity over the lifetime of the millennial generation is required. Even without the damage to economies and societies wrought by neoliberalism, this is arguably the most difficult task ever faced by humanity.

Thankfully, and to the credit of older generations, this transition is already underway. But time is running out and we must transition more quickly from opposition to proposition. In response, more and more young people are entering debates and positions of responsibility, facing up to the full reality of the task in front of them. In doing so, they must work closely with older generations, to learn from what they did well and what they did wrong, co-creating a leadership suitable for an uncertain future bolstered by welcoming stories of hope and redemption. Greater diversity and equality of representation from across the world is needed to combat what is and will remain a web of global problems – and must break through the artificial barriers being erected in the last throws of a dying order. We must not forget that we are more connected, more knowledgeable and more capable than at any point in human history.

Each year, Davos provides a platform for the world’s leaders to debate important issues and spur action at this crucial moment. But by being ignorant to the two greatest stories of the day, it does nothing of the sort, squandering time and resources. The hour is late, and Davos’s time is up.

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How can we face up to the enormity of environmental collapse? How can we collectively build a politics for the Anthropocene? Laurie Laybourn-Langton interviews activist and former climate diplomat John Ashton.

Laurie Laybourn-Langton (LL-L): You’ve been at the forefront of combatting climate change through your role at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and by founding E3G, the climate change thinktank, among others. The concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ goes beyond climate, to bring in the wider picture of environmental degradation and its causes. Is the word a useful addition to the vernacular to provide focus in a way that climate change or the environment, arguably, did in the past?

John Ashton (JA): I would argue that the idea of the Anthropocene goes further. It’s about the relationship between human beings and nature, but it’s also about the relationship between human beings and each other. The ecological fabric and the social fabric are inseparable. You can’t address a problem unless you can talk about it, and you can’t talk about it unless you can name it. But my gut feeling is that the word ‘Anthropocene’ is never really going to be part of anybody’s vernacular, but at least it plants a flag in the ground.

I think it will be much easier to build a politics of the Anthropocene from the left because of its focus on collective responsibility and justice. For me there is nothing more fundamental to the Anthropocene than trying to address the enormous injustice which is inherent in the way we collectively conduct ourselves at the moment.

We have built a political and economic system which is based on plunder, and the most heinous example of that plunder is that which is being and has been carried out by my generation – I am 60 years old. We’re not wrecking our futures nearly as much as we’re wrecking the future of your generation. Your generation can no longer take it for granted that you have a prospect of a better life than mine, whatever that means. This is an extraordinary conclusion to be reaching because it would represent a collapse of everything we thought we had built, particularly with and since the Enlightenment. If I were your age, I would probably be fearful of the future rather than looking forward to it.

LL-L: There is a view that, in an era of potentially exponential environmental change, exponentially accelerating technical ability will enable us to address it. Therefore, we will be fine because we will invent our way out of the problem. Do you agree?

JA: I think that’s nonsense. It’s based on an impulse to respond to the problem through blind faith rather than through serious attempts to understand the problem. Also, it has within it an implicit assertion that this is a future problem, not a current problem. It represents a colossal failure of imagination, maybe in some cases a deliberate failure.

Just to take one example, we have had for the last few years an average of something like an average of 10 people a day drowning in the Mediterranean in the attempt to reach the shores of Europe from Africa or the Middle East. This is part of a crisis which is unfolding now. It may not be unfolding for the people who are at the top of the big decision-making institutions in Britain, but it’s unfolding for an awful lot of other people.

These events come from a complex interplay of social and environmental factors. Although those of us who live in cities in industrialised countries have built a certain amount of insulation from it, it’s not permanent insulation. We need to find ways of bringing the problem closer to the centre of our consciousness, not ways of holding it away from the centre. Our current language on the environment has become an obstacle. Natural systems are complex adaptive systems that have a tendency to self-regulate, but only when they remain within thresholds. Social systems are the same. Even neoliberalism asserts that the economy is self-correcting.

In the neoclassical economics that lies at the heart of neoliberal politics, the condition of the ecological foundation is not a fundamental concern. If you notice the occasional problem opening up, you just price it into the market and the price signal helps you correct. That doesn’t help you when you’re dealing with irreversible change. It doesn’t help you when you’re dealing with non-linear change. It doesn’t help you when you’re dealing with thresholds of resilience. If you cross the threshold, a system that was once resilient suddenly becomes non-resilient. For heaven’s sake, we ought to have learned that lesson from the [2008 financial] crash, because that applies to the financial system as well.

This is a theory which has no longer any useful application in terms of the practical challenges that politics faces and that societies face, but it remains far too embedded – and both explicitly and implicitly – in the way people in positions of leadership behave, all the time.

LL-L: Britain is ostensibly seeking to work out what its role in the world is. Do you think it could have a positive role on the world stage by helping people understand the scale of breakdown, and in mobilising action?

JA: It would have been much easier to say “yes” in response to that question a few years ago, even seven or eight years ago, than it is to say “yes” now. For a number of years, British climate diplomacy was my life. We didn’t do it from scratch; we stood on the shoulders of previous generations of politicians, officials, activists. But by 2010, or so, we had a sense that no country was being more influential around the world in building the foundation for a successful diplomacy of climate change than Britain was. This included the soft power that we’d inherited generation from generation, the fact that our climate scientists were contributing to the scientific debate disproportionately and were respected around the world. But our diplomacy was making a difference too, for example when we took climate security for the first time to the UN Security Council. For a while, we had a disproportionate impact.

Small and medium-size countries can have a big influence on the world if the right conditions prevail and they use their diplomacy wisely. You have to have a culture and disposition towards cooperation. In the last few years, it seems to me British discourse has moved away from the idea of cooperation. Brexit, and the way the conversation is being conducted, illustrates that. It’s moved away from the idea that we need to be rooted in reality rather than points of view that have their roots in blind faith. That means at the moment, I fear, it would be very difficult for Britain to play a significant, certainly a disproportionate, role in constructing a diplomacy of shared interest in sustainable development fit for the Anthropocene. It’s a tragedy because it’s a mindless squandering of diplomatic assets; you can lose in a few minutes what it takes years to rebuild. I’m afraid that’s where we are.

But diplomacy isn’t just about what diplomats do; it’s about the entirety of the conversations that we’re having in our society with each other, and with people outside our society and what they see of the conversations we’re having with each other. It may be that the most effective piece of Anthropocene diplomacy that we can do is to try and work out how to build a politics of the Anthropocene which can be scalable and which can start to influence others, which could be a reference point for others who are trying to do the same thing in their societies.

LL-L: At the moment, are there any narratives that could be particularly useful at drawing people into this debate? One example could be around health. Take air pollution – dealing with traffic and transport in cities has shot to the top of the agenda because people can comprehend the health effects. Are there any of these narratives that could draw people in, health potentially being at the top?

JA: The first question is: what do people care about? Not, how do you make them care about the Anthropocene? People care about their health and the health of their children. They care about what they eat. Look at the awful things that we keep learning about the way in which what we thought was a healthy and trustworthy food chain keeps being corrupted by people who are cheating and manipulating their freedom in the market in order to get away, potentially and almost literally, with murder.

I think in both of those areas there is scope for collective action, for bottom up building of projects that can help to take us in the right direction – in some cases very community based, where you go street to street. If you asked me, “How would I start if I were of your generation, if I wanted to play a role in building this?” I think I would say, “organise a group of you, wherever you happen to be. Start knocking on doors and finding ways in which you can help to solve problems for people who are in difficulty, people who are vulnerable, that aren’t being solved by the way the system is working.” With roughly a million people now resorting to food banks every winter, there are plenty of people who I think might be interested in a serious kind of street-by-street engagement. All successful political movements start like that. That’s the ground that our ‘mainstream’ politics has vacated. Is the emergence of Momentum a sign that this might be about to change, at least on the left? It depends in the end on whether it can make people up and down our country feel that politics can after all be something that is done with them, not something that is done to them.

A society which is coming to grips with the challenge of the Anthropocene is also going to be a society in which we care for each other when we need care. This is how we become part of a society in which humans are more than just a collection of atomistic, utility-maximising agents in an economic model. If we’re not caring for each other, we’re not going to be dealing with climate change; we’re not going to be dealing with ecosystem degradation; we’re not going to be addressing the drivers of mass migration at their roots. This is a comprehensive reshaping of politics.

LL-L: What kind of narratives would you like to bequeath to a younger generation to make sure we basically keep up our morale as we try to sort this out? What should get us up in the morning?

JA: The belief that together you have agency and the capacity to use your voices to repair the damage which is currently being done, and to start the healing and the building of the better future. This requires boldness and action. There’s room for lots of different projects, and activities, and types of mobilisation in different areas of society, but it’s just about coming together and doing that – having conversations that lead to action. The more you build in those conversations, the more inspiring they become and the more you believe that collectively you can build a critical mass.

One asset that young people have more so than my generation is moral authority; you can point out that the mistakes that my generation have made and make are going to shape much more of your future because you’ve got more of your future ahead of you. That’s the reason why we need to listen to you, and make it as easy as possible for you to draw on our accumulated experience.

Your generation would be justified in being angry, but actually that’s not going to get us very far. I think a more fertile conversation is to say to us, “we would like to enlist your help in building something very different from what you built, because that’s what we now need.” My generation don’t want to be thought of as not caring about our children’s futures – because we do – and so appealing to that would be quite a smart thing to do. You need our knowledge of how the system works and how the institutions can rapidly evolve into better institutions, because not everything is bad in our institutional framework.

LL-L: My generation might be, in many respects, terrified. It’s also got to be determined and it’s got to be hopeful. Do you think it should also be excited?

JA: Yes, hugely. But I don’t think terror is a helpful response, although I can understand why some people feel it. I don’t think we know enough to be sure that we will fail. I think there are grounds for at least entertaining the possibility that we can succeed.

That means that there is no alternative but to invest in that success; this is the most exciting project. It’s a cultural project, a social project, an economic project, a political project. It seems to me that this is the most exciting project that humanity will ever have embarked upon, no less significant for example than what we now call the Enlightenment. This is about building, for the first time in history, a capacity for collective self-awareness, a sense of shared identity, and a political expression of our common will in pursuit of our common interest – not only as nations, tribes and social groups but as the species whose ancestors first ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That’s what would get me up in the morning if I were your age. That’s what still gets me up in the morning now.

This is an abridged version of an interview published in IPPR Progressive Review.

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Ten years after the crash, the movement to replace neoliberalism is in the ascendency. Well organised campaigns cover everything from the promotion of pluralism in economic curricula to the application of new economic principles in local communities. Academics and campaigners, who prior to the crash were lone voices in the wind, have been joined by a growing chorus of economists and commentators acknowledging that neoliberalism is not working. Importantly, these now include those in mainstream institutions that have become synonymous with the status quo, such as the IMF and OECD. Meanwhile, bottom up movements, surfing a heady mix of social media and dissatisfaction with orthodox economic ideas, are beginning to score political victories across the world.

This is because neoliberalism – the broad set of political-economic ideas and policies which have dominated public life over the last 40 years – has failed, in both theory and in practice. It is in the wake of the global financial crisis that these failures have plumbed new depths. Financial instability looms over economies shackled by insufficient investment. Living standards stagnate and work becomes ever more insecure, shattering the implicit bargain of the entire endeavour. The human costs of this experiment have been enormous, with psychological and non-communicable ill-health becoming the hallmark of a system that cares for little but profit. Inequality, itself linked to ill-health, has grown to levels unseen since the nineteenth century, leading to large power imbalances throughout society. Socio-economic mobility has been further stalled by the erosion of the public realm, from universities to the legal system. Most pressingly, neoliberalism continues to rely on a growth model that is destroying the biophysical preconditions upon which it relies, increasing the chance of collapse in the climate and other natural systems.

Major changes in economic ideas have happened before

Despite this, neoliberalism remains the dominant perspective of most commentary and policy-making in the UK, countries around the world, and the global economic systems through which they linked. But its dominance may be illusory. Rapid changes in ideas have occurred at key junctures in the past. Over the last hundred years, Western political economy has broadly experienced two major periods of breakdown and transition from one political-economic paradigm to another: after the Great Depression and into the post-war consensus of welfare states and the Bretton Woods financial order; and after the crises of the 1970s and into the free market policies of neoliberalism that we live under to this day.

Across each period, the process of a shift to a new sets of ideas can be split into three components:

1. its intellectual and academic underpinning, particularly within economics;
2. the policies and narratives through which it was expressed in the wider public domain; and
3. the political processes – notably elections of governments – which enabled it to be implemented and entrenched.

When considering these components today, it appears the conditions are now apparent for another shift. Across the first, intellectual component, the failure to predict, understand and react to the financial crisis fractured confidence in key pillars of the orthodoxy. This included, for example, the ‘efficient market hypothesis’, which, by asserting that assets could not be consistently mispriced, led generations of economists to shamefully underestimate systemic risk in the financial system. Theoretical failures have been compounded by the inadequacy of policy prescriptions. Most notably, fiscal consolidation and monetary policies have not generated growth or reduced public deficits at the speed anticipated, and so have failed on their own terms. Indeed, elements of the economics profession have consistently found themselves unable to adequately explain a multitude of economic phenomena, ranging from stalling productivity to the impact of quantitative easing. Moreover, orthodox economics has little concern for the major crises of our time, from rising levels of inequality to global environmental change.

New economic ideas are proliferating, but a major shift is still not apparent

In response, a plethora of alternative economic insights have grown up, many of them building on schools that have always contested neoclassical or neoliberal orthodoxies, such as institutional and post-Keynesian economics. Some have emerged in response to particular failings of the orthodoxy, such as behavioural economics and its focus on more accurate modelling of human behaviour. Others pursue a deeper re-conceptualisation of the economy, including complexity economics, which applies complexity science in modelling the economy as a system in constant change, as opposed to equilibrium. However, economics is still dominated by orthodox neoclassical or neoliberal approaches.

While this is a function of the political dominance of these ideas, it also reflects institutional inertias within the discipline. Prestigious journals predominantly publish articles that adhere to the mainstream view, limiting the profile of alternative approaches. In turn, non-mainstream academics can become marginalised, further reducing their ability to publish work at the highest level. Meanwhile, economic curricula at secondary schools and universities remain grounded in the mainstream and so new generations of economists are largely moulded in the image of previous generations.

While these dynamics have attenuated the flow of new economic ideas into the second component of a shift – the development and adoption of counter-narratives and policy proposals – these have nonetheless emerged and built much credence in recent months. Few credible commentators and policymakers now defend the status quo, falling instead along of a continuum of voices calling for reform. Even think tanks who, only a couple of years ago, were staunch supporters of key tenets of neoliberalism now find themselves arguing for change. This became starkly apparent in the 2017 Conservative Party manifesto, which claimed that the party now “… rejected the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and the libertarian right and instead embrace[d] the mainstream view that recognises the good that government can do”.

It is unclear how serious this view is, or how long it will last, but it suggests that a critique of neoliberalism is starting to embed itself into thinking across the political spectrum. Indeed, throughout the West, most government and opposition parties now found their rhetoric on a critique of the status quo. The results differ widely, of course, from the accelerated dismantling of what remains of the New Deal under Donald Trump, to the nationalisation policies of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. And so we see that the third component of a shift – the embedding of a new political-economic paradigm through the election of a supportive government – is not yet apparent.

Change is driven by an ecosystem of influential organisations and individuals

How does a paradigmatic shift come about? Change of this scale is conditional on events that erode confidence in the status quo and heighten the legitimacy of alternative ideas. But it is also a function of the preparedness of those movements espousing an alternative. The conditions for change may come by chance, but the change is won by those most prepared to capitalise on crisis. Those seeking a shift away from the post-war consensus knew this and developed an ecosystem of influence to increase the chance that their ideas would win the day if and when crisis came.

This movement started by focussing on academic ideas, founding the Mont Pèlerin Society to provide a safe space for academics to play out their opposition to a catch-all ‘collectivism’. Members were united in their conclusion that an increased role for the state in economic and social management was incompatible with individual freedom. Around this assertion, they eventually built a coherent narrative and policy proposals that were prosecuted by a well-resourced ecosystem of institutions and networks mobilised to influence public debate and political processes. At its heart was a new breed of ‘knowledge professional’ located within the modern ‘think tank’, politically partisan and focussed on strategic influence as well as policy development. Journalists then provided the means by which neoliberal ideas could enter a wider circulation. This was an avowedly elite theory of change, lavishly funded by economic interests that were set to gain from the ideas being espoused.

By the early 1970s, the neoliberal counter-orthodoxy had organised into a transatlantic network of economists, think tanks and journalists. This network and its ideas increasingly populated political parties and government institutions, creating the intellectual conditions for change and ensuring that the neoliberal movement was prepared to capitalise on crisis. When this crisis came, neoliberal ideas entered government, first under the chaotic Labour and Democrat administrations of the late seventies, and later with the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. After triumphing in key battles against the commanding institutions of the post-war consensus and New Deal, these administrations scored the ultimate victory when centre-left parties adopted major elements of neoliberalism so that even changes of government could no longer halt the march of its ideas.

Now is the time for the new economics movement to shift to the next gear

If today the conditions for another shift are apparent, how well prepared is the ecosystem seeking that change? This was the question Michael Jacobs and I sought to answer in a recent report that assessed, from a strategic perspective, the movement seeking a shift in economic ideas in the UK. Our main findings were positive. This movement is growing and we think it now covers most of the major functions required to shift the paradigm – from academic groups and think tanks, through communications websites and supportive networks, to funders and political figures. Each year, this movement becomes more influential and is full with talent stretching across generations.

We think there is now broad intellectual convergence across groups around a shared critique of the failings of neoliberalism and the need for a new paradigm. There is slightly looser convergence on the overall goals or values of a new paradigm, largely centring on equity, sustainability and democratisation. However, outside of one or two notable efforts, we have not seen common narratives or policy solutions emerge. Our conclusion is that this results from material barriers to progress, rather than profound differences between groups. These barriers cover three areas:

• the lack of a fully developed intellectual foundation;
• the fact that most organisations are non-mainstream actors, or ‘outsiders’, with ‘insider’ or establishment activity still relatively thin; and
• the absence of coordination and strategic direction covering a critical mass of the ecosystem, including for communications and media outreach, and funding and resource allocation.

In response, we’ve recommended the creation of a platform, or informal coordinating body, to serve the movement by providing a forum for the development of strategic coordination. This could help formalise those networks already emerging within mainstream organisations and provide a safe space to link them to non-mainstream groups in a shared endeavour, collaborating with the brilliant work of other facilitating groups. Such spaces should also exist in countries outside the UK and between countries, as globalisation and environmental change mean this movement will have to be more international than the analogous movements of the past. The challenge should excite us, as the time to accelerate efforts is now.

Younger generations must be given the chance to lead

But too often it feels like change is not happening fast enough. Members of the millennial generation look around and see the chaos of a British government mired in scandal, presiding over a collapse in our international influence at a time when nations need to work closer together than ever before. They wonder what kind of world they will inherit. While the progress described above is heartening – and Britain does sit at the heart of an increasingly global movement – frustration still abounds. A notable, recent example was the INET conference in Edinburgh this October. Held at a time when the ten year anniversaries of the crash have begun, the conference did little to recognise the political moment in which we find ourselves. Moreover, it felt like a chance was missed to facilitate strategic discussions between groups from across the world, and it was remarkable that there was an absence of shared spaces for people to meet and talk. Many came away from the conference feeling disappointed, doubting whether much new economic thinking has been done, or whether it would make a difference at this crucial time.

There are many reasons for this, and they echo throughout the movement as a whole. Firstly, there is a lack of diversity. This ranges from a large gender disparity, through the representation of cultures and nations, to a lack of intellectual pluralism. It has been heartening to see INET and others make some efforts to increase the participation of women, but change must come quicker and be of sufficient force to overcome large structural barriers. We see the same with the representation of people across the income distribution. Younger generations must also be given more power and opportunities, both to act and to learn. It will be they who have to inherit the world neoliberalism made, or unmade. And across all of these areas, we can no longer afford to follow a ‘common room theory of change’ – that if you win the intellectual argument, you change the world. This has not and will never be the case, as the Koch brothers and the other heirs to Mont Pèlerin so ably prove.

In the case of INET, the Young Scholars Initiative’s Festival for New Economic Thinking, organised before the INET conference proper, provided an exciting shared space that brought together a community to celebrate and plan. In doing so, it allowed a younger generation to appreciate the progress that has been made and to build for the future. This future does not look bright and time is running out. But, as we found across the movement in the UK, the millennial generation, and those below it, are facing the challenge with ambition and excitement.

In an oft quoted remark, Milton Friedman, a key part of the neoliberal ecosystem of influence, once described its basic function as being to “develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable”. We do not yet have a critical mass of those alternatives and a common narrative around which to bind them. More shared spaces and coordination are needed to accelerate the process by which we reach this point. And while those spaces should be populated by all ages, the torch must be passed to a younger generation. It is they who will one day make the impossible inevitable.

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The arguments for mission-oriented industrial strategy in general, and the focus on a zero carbon mission in particular, have been well made. Historical examples – the moon landings provide the usual case – prove that it matters who is driving innovation and for what purpose. Public policy can steer the path of socioeconomic development toward solutions to the greatest problems we face, contrary to the prevailing narrative that the private sector is the only engine of innovation. Missions put outcomes first, giving socioeconomic development a more clearly defined purpose. The unprecedented threat of climate change requires global net zero decarbonisation, as recognised by the 2015 Paris Agreement, making it a prime candidate for the first national mission for the UK.

So how would a mission-oriented industrial strategy be delivered? This is a question that we at IPPR are currently grappling with, in a project linked to our Commission on Economic Justice, which is developing a new approach to economic policy.

Over the last thirty years, the orthodox approach to economic policy has precluded government intervention beyond two broad approaches:

1. ‘Horizontal’ policies that attempt to improve the general conditions for private sector investment in general through, for example, the promotion of workforce skills and the building of infrastructure
2. ‘Vertical’ policies that target interventions on particular sectors or technologies, such as support for the automotive industry or biotechnology.

As the BEIS select committee has shown, the government’s Green Paper on Industrial Strategy  proposes a primary focus on horizontal policies, with some vertical interventions in order to support energy innovation and “cultivate world-leading sectors”. This approach is inadequate.

Horizontal policies focussing on the supply side of the economy do not directly promote demand and therefore are better viewed as traditional economic policy. Industrial strategy requires an explicit focus on stimulating demand as well as improving the conditions in which firms invest. The decarbonisation of the economy cannot happen without this, particularly at a time when the British economy is suffering from a fundamental lack of demand. Thankfully, macroeconomic conditions are highly favourable for an increase in public investment, with interest rates at historic lows, increasing the value to growth. What’s more, arguments against debt-financed investment lack force when considering the need for spending now to protect generations in the future and the large returns that could result from a greener, more efficient economy.

On the other side of the government’s approach, current vertical policies do little to recognise that value chains cut across sectors. Important goods and service often don’t easily adhere to a sectoral category, as is the case with the government’s decision to define ultra-low emission vehicles – a key element in the decarbonisation of transport – as a ‘sector’ when it is simply a product. Choosing particular sectors also increases the chance of ‘policy capture’ by incumbent companies, and the promotion of policies that benefit certain firms or sectors to the detriment of others and the wider public interest.

This is where the mission-oriented approach comes in. Industrial strategy should direct investments and firms so that the economy and society develop the means by which to decarbonise. A mission to decarbonise focuses on outcomes, overcoming the narrow focus of vertical policies, incorporating the system-wide view needed to scale rapid change across the economy. A good example is the transport system. A more digital, shared transport system requires investment and policy co-ordination from local authorities, app developers, car club operators, charities and energy companies, as well as the Department for Transport and vehicle manufacturers.

In setting an objective to be delivered by the economy, government can signal the path of future demand, improving confidence for private sector investment. Much of this is already provided by the 2008 Climate Change Act, which requires governments to produce emissions reductions plans every five years, consistent with an 80 per cent reduction on 1990 levels by 2050. This gives firms a clear signal of the direction of economic development. Climate Action Tracker currently rates the EU’s nationally determined contribution (NDC) – the commitment made on behalf of all 28 members – as having “medium” ambition, meaning more work is still to be done. A net zero decarbonisation mission, particularly in the context of Brexit, would cement the UK’s role as a leader on acting on climate change. The Climate Change Act would need to be amended to enshrine the new target in law, something to which the previous government signalled its commitment in March 2016.

Public investment should then direct demand towards goods and services that accelerate the transition to a net zero carbon economy, going beyond the usual horizontal approach. This should include helping British businesses maximise their potential to provide these goods and services. Such an approach was taken to actively attract offshore turbine manufacturing and assembly firms to the UK in the years following the passage of the Climate Change Act. Industrial strategy should then seek to co-invest with the private sector to increase the total level of investment in the economy and ensure that the public sector benefits financially from its investments as well as shouldering the risk.

A mission-oriented approach of this kind would put the problems we face up front and centre in our political and economic narratives. Crucially, it would provide us with the means by which to better develop the solutions. Beyond decarbonisation, other missions could focus on some of the other major socioeconomic challenges facing Britain – from demographic change to adapting to automation and other major technological changes. A mission-oriented approach can be adopted in response to these and capitalise upon positive synergies between them, such as increasing resource efficiency in industry through digitalisation.

In all this, the narrative point is key. It is through stories that we enliven economic concepts and animate the engagement of industry and the population at large. Fifty-five years have passed since John F Kennedy promised his nation that humanity would go to the moon, that it would be done within the decade, that it would be achieved through the combined effort of the American people, and at a price less than that paid for cigarettes and cigars. This story and its eventual success remain imprinted on our collective imagination. Kennedy sought to land on the moon both because it was there and because it would establish American supremacy over the Soviet Union. We must decarbonise our economy to ensure the sustainability of our society. What other mission is more important and more captivating of the imagination? It is time to bring focus and ambition back to our economic story.

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All states, markets, welfare systems, major religions, their justifying ideas and the people that fought to create them came about in a uniquely stable epoch geologists call the Holocene. This era was typified by a climate suited to human flourishing, and is now over. In its place comes the Anthropocene, the name for a time in which humans are the decisive influence on the natural world.

This influence is so overwhelmingly negative that younger and future generations may inherit unassailably high levels of damage. Currently, we consume resources at around 1.5 times the Earth’s ability to regenerate them – a rate which, crucially, differs enormously between countries. Extinction rates are now some 1,000 times the background rate and around 58% of all vertebral life may have died between 1970 and 2012. This precipitous collapse in global biodiversity means we are likely to be living through the sixth major mass extinction of multicellular life on Earth.

Species loss is being made worse by changes to the very systems that facilitate life. The most famous of these is the carbon cycle and 2016 is likely to be the point at which atmospheric CO2 concentrations permanently exceeded 400 parts per million. It is estimated that a 66% chance of avoiding a 1.5C rise in the global mean temperature – a red line identified by the UN – will require all global carbon emissions to cease around Easter 2021. Another cycle is the global nitrogen cycle, which has, in the last 40 years, been impacted more than at any point in its 2.7 billion year history. These changes are the result of a global food system that has destroyed a third of all arable land over the same period. Global top soil degradation means we may only have sixty harvests left.

Together, the effects of resource depletion, collapsing biodiversity, rising temperatures and the instability of the earth’s regulating systems feed into each other creating dangerous feedback loops. In turn, these increase the chance of tipping points such as the rapid melting of Siberian tundra below which methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is trapped. Runaway climate change could then occur, bringing other systems with it. A vicious circle.

The destabilisation of natural systems is already feeding back into human systems. Take phosphorous, which we can’t synthesise, is essential to the global food system, and is being consumed at an unsustainable rate. These pressures came to a head in the wake of the financial crisis when phosphorous prices spiked by 800%. In turn, food prices shot up, affecting those countries with disproportionate reliance on food imports, including the Middle East and North Africa. The effects then fed into the causes of civil unrest that led to the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. This instability displaced around 12 million people from the Fertile Crescent, some of whom fled to Europe. The resultant ‘migrant crisis’ widened political and cultural fault lines that opened up in the wake of the financial crisis.

In fact, these fault lines have been opening up over the last thirty years as a result of wage stagnation, rising inequality, recurrent economic crisis, industrial decline and the retreat of the state at a time of increasing globalisation. A cursory glance at past episodes of globalisation teaches us that government needs to support those who are negatively affected, and that ‘too much market, too little state’ leads to a backlash. The prevailing approach to economics and politics – so called ‘neoliberalism’ – demands the precise opposite. Combine this with the perception of a corrupt and uncaring elite and the agenda of vested interests within and out of the media, and surprise at the election of Donald Trump and the result of the EU referendum seems inappropriate.

And so, after considering the scale of the failure of the current approach to capitalism, what happens when the collapse of natural systems begins to kick in? Even if Marine Le Pen doesn’t become French president, what happens to Europe if profound social collapse in the Middle East, a by-product of resource depletion and spiralling food costs, led 120 million people to be displaced? In this world, global co-operation could give way to domestic protection, leading to a breakdown of co-ordination as countries turn inward, or on each other. This is what global collapse looks like.

We are not there yet. But understanding of the scale of these threats is poorly understood, partly because they are so complex. It’s also because there is little to no awareness of these issues within and out of the political process. Many people would have noticed Black Friday was last week. Did they notice that temperatures in the Arctic are around 20C above what is expected for this time of the year and that the Winter sea ice is now at the lowest extent ever recorded? Our political systems at least ostensibly rely on aware voters applying pressure to politicians, who are in turn supported by an ecosystem of researchers and civil servants. If one, or both, of these groups is unaware of the scale of the challenge it may be impossible to rise to it.

There is a particularly acute generational element to this. Like a young doctor walking into the ER for a night shift and inheriting a total disaster from a clueless older colleague, the millennial generation must first comprehend the scale of the problem. Quickly realising that the odds are not in its favour, this generation must receive all the help it can get in creating institutions fit for the Anthropocene, and the ideas to underpin them. Surely these must include global programmes of technological development as well as the reigning in of vested interests that prevent action on, or understanding of, systemic instability. They will also likely have to include preparation for the worst, including triaging action to support nature and human societies, the implications of which pose profound questions of equity beyond the staggering inequalities already imposed by human systems and environmental degradation. By definition these institutions cannot be neoliberal and so we must understand how democratic institutions can exist in a radically unstable world and how they will ultimately differ from authoritarian technocracies, however liberal in their intention.

As such, having inherited damage of almost incomprehensible scale and complexity, the millennial generation may be the most important on earth. It could be that this challenge brings together a vast number of diverging constituencies across generations in a transformative political agenda – a re-politicisation of all that neoliberalism has ostensibly de-politicised. Indeed, anything other than this may be unacceptable. But it may be that we are in dire straits. When considering the scale of change already underway in many economies – including automation and digitalisation, demographic change and economic stagnation – the acceleration of environmental instability could place societies under intolerable stress. It is unclear how our institutions will be able to cope with this challenge. In endeavouring to overcome it, all generations must first understand that there is a chance we are entering a period of potentially terminal crisis. Only then can we rise to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

This article is an unbridged version of an essay in Juncture, IPPR’s journal of politics and ideas.

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Why didn’t Transport for London (TfL) invent Uber – and would Londoners be better off if it had done? The issues raised by this question are important and go beyond both transport and London and make us ask who and what the digital revolution is for.

In the jargon, Uber is a digital platform that facilitates peer-to-peer transactions between clients (in this case passengers) and providers of a service (Uber drivers). This allows Uber drivers to increase the use of an under-utilised asset (their vehicle) with little to no transaction cost beyond that imposed by Uber, provider of the platform that makes all this happen.

Platforms such as the one provided by Uber could prove useful in helping us make London a cleaner, more efficient and prosperous city. More shared transport could reduce car use and ownership as people recognise the ease and relatively low cost of jumping in another person’s car. Less ownership and a more efficient use of the remaining vehicles may also lead to reductions in air pollution, CO2 emissions and congestion, and, without so many roads, allow us to change the city’s layout to make living and working easier and healthier.

Platforms like Uber could also do the opposite, increasing the amount of traffic and adding to existing air pollution and CO2 emissions. This is a future in which London’s roads are swamped by private hire vehicles as a precarious job market pushes more people to become Uber drivers. The danger that this model leads to the erosion of labour rights is already with us, an issue that was at the heart of a recent court ruling to block Uber classing its drivers as self-employed. Uber is also famously set up to avoid tax, posting £22,000 tax on a £866,000 UK profit in 2015.

The societal, economic, and environmental effects of peer-to-peer transport platforms such as Uber are only just starting to emerge. Despite the potential for some short-term benefits there may be longer term problems that are difficult to reverse once these platforms become fully integrated into society and the economy.

A major concern is whether the commercial objectives of those who have developed and own these platforms align with the public interest of cheap, clean, efficient transport, and if they do not, whether there are appropriate levers for improving the situation. This brings us back to the twin questions of whether the public good would be maximised (or protected) if Uber were invented by TfL, and, if so, why TfL didn’t invent it.

TfL’s job is to deliver the Mayor’s strategy and commitments on transport, which presumably involve improving transport in the public interest. If peer-to-peer transport platforms could help realise these commitments, then one could argue it was well within the purview of TfL to invent one for London, linking the ability to list yourself or a company to certain conditions, including standards on environmental impact, passenger safety and labour rights.

A TfL app could have also raised significant revenue, an issue that is increasingly pertinent for TfL as it will lose its day-to-day running grant from 2018. London will then be the only city in Europe without a transport subsidy and TfL will likely have to increasingly commercialise or sell its assets.

There are many reasons why TfL may not have wanted, or been unable, to invent a peer-to-peer platform for London. Primarily, TfL raises its revenues from the public transport network it runs and so a platform that could encourage people to jump in cars instead of heading underground would raise questions around the effect on revenues, as well as the unproven environmental outcomes.

Presumably the black cab lobby would have had a lot to say, though it’s possible they could have benefited from being able to list their services on a platform that wouldn’t see them as competition to defeat, as Uber does. A lack of resources for innovation and future thinking may have also played a part. TfL has, and continues, to battle at the forefront of transport innovation, but we should ask whether its current and future resources enable it to continue this battle in a world increasingly disrupted by digital technology.

Beyond just TfL, the attitude toward the role of the public sector and of the state is important here. For the last few decades, political narratives and economic thought have been dominated by the assertion that the public sector is inherently inefficient and wasteful, leading to decisions that inevitably validate this assertion.

In reality, the time for TfL to invent a peer-to-peer transport platform along the lines of Uber has now passed. But the next opportunity is already with us. Around the world, a number of companies and public bodies are developing the idea of ‘mobility as a service’. These platforms build on the concept of Google Maps and Citymapper by offering a monthly subscription for all transport use – imagine a mobile phone contract but for mobility, where you pay, say £300, and get unlimited use of tube, bus, Santander bikes, taxis, and car share within zones 1, 2 and 3. Suddenly, getting from A to B involves seamless mapping and payment, and, if the car share market develops, means you will never need to own a car.

The knock-on effects could be enormous. If TfL were to develop this platform for London it could have some control over these effects. TfL could decide that companies like Uber would only be able to list services on the app if a proportion of their vehicles were electric, for example, or if their staff were entitled to certain employment rights. Presumably the app would become the go-to for getting around London and so it would be in Uber’s commercial interest to do so.

If TfL doesn’t develop this platform, a private company may do so. If this enabled the platform to be developed and that platform helped deliver good environmental and other outcomes, then so be it, some will say. But this would mean that TfL would lose the ability to drive outcomes directly and, assuming the UK government’s ideas don’t change for some time, the scope for regulating the private sector’s actions is limited. London’s mobility as a service platform could then end up like Spotify, for example, where advertising and other conditions are the norm unless users pay for a premium account. One could imagine a future where the owner of this platform could, say, cut a deal with McDonalds and so your taxi ride would go via the drive-thru unless you pay for a premium subscription.

To limit the chance of this world emerging, TfL should invent an app that turns London’s public and private transport network into a service. Considering why TfL didn’t do this in the case of peer-to-peer platforms like Uber helps us understand the barriers to realising the full potential of the digital disruption of transport. It also helps us pose a more fundamental question. Digital technology could enable unprecedented opportunity to remould transport for the public good; will that good be maximised, or even possible, if digital infrastructure is wholly private?

The answers to these questions will have an impact far beyond the transport sector. They are a cautionary tale for the future of our political economy. In short, the digital revolution is disrupting large swathes of society and economy and the pace of this disruption is accelerating. With it comes the potential for great negative as well as positive outcomes. The state – our means of steering these outcomes – is smaller, more under-resourced and more discredited than ever before. This is very dangerous. In developing our response, we must decide whether to be the architects of the future, or its victims.

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