Geoff Mulgan

Aggregation without Integration is not enough

We are, as ever, at a cross roads. We have the choice to combine forces for the greater good, or leave all the potential just sitting there, and proceed as usual, learning the hard way. We can pool our data, expertise and ideas to resolve climate change issues, or argue about whether they should even be considered. It’s back to Carl Sagan’s point – who speaks for Earth or even just earthlings? If we could get our acts aligned, we could make show more much deeper progress much faster. But our competitive society prevents such thoughts, let alone actions.

I think the reason I like Geoff Mulgan’s books is that ideas come at you like buckshot. Packets of multiple ideas fire again and again with every chapter, page and paragraph. If you’ve learned nothing from a Geoff Mulgan exercise, you must have slept through it. In Big Mind:

-Computers can generate answers much more easily than they can generate questions, the mark of real intelligence.
-Greater knowledge does not bring greater comfort. It brings awareness, anxiety, caution and worry. It gives us vast new things to worry about.
-All our gadgets do not make our lives simpler; they add complexity.
-The vast majority of meetings in business, academia and politics ignore almost everything that is known about what make meetings work.
-There’s a temptation to make too much use of data that happens to exist, and manage what’s measured rather than what matters.
-We spend our lives looking for confirmation rather than responding to intelligence.
-We risk not having internalized the lesson if we haven’t experienced the errors.
-There are levels of abstraction as organizations move to more diverse ways of looking at their situations. Those that can’t, stay stuck in the primordial reactions to events. (eg. airline security, which continually punishes passengers further every time there is a threat, instead of thinking how to make flying safer.)
-Universities do research and development on everything except themselves. (Universities should be actively collecting knowledge as much as disseminating it.)

-Cultures that think of themselves as individualistic, dissident and rebellious tend to be highly conformist.
-The biggest danger in any field is the delusion you understand why you succeeded.
-intelligence is highly improbable, and collective intelligence is even more so.

All of this pivots about the point Mulgan calls the third loop of learning. The first loop is what we all do – observe, and apply rules we know. The second loop makes use of knowledge to come to new and innovative conclusions. The third loop is when whole sectors and industries change in light of anticipated developments and ways of thinking and doing. Doing this at world scale is Mulgan’s idea of collective intelligence. It means combining with data and artificial intelligence, because people alone and computers alone can accomplish far less.

What emerges is that although he has been thinking along the lines of a collective intelligence for many years, Mulgan is not prepared to predict or envision it. There are too many variables, too many unknowns, and too many rogue components for anyone to pretend they can nail it down. We are held back because our institutions aren’t open in their thinking, and we are stymied by competition rather than co-operation. He would like collective intelligence to coalesce into a discipline.

David Wineberg show less

This wonderful tome is an attempt to distance us from capitalism, and see it from the outside, for what it really is, and then project what might come after. Because something will come after; it’s just the nature of the beast that is society. It’s a Herculean task, and some might say a fool’s errand, but Mulgan provides incredible mounds of food for thought. It is like looking all around you at flat earth and trying to picture yourself living on the surface of a ball. It is a wide show more ranging work, spilling over with quotes and perspectives that make it continually fascinating. There’s hardly a page I didn’t want to make notes on. So I didn’t make any. I’d never be able to find what I wanted – that’s how many there would be.

The basis of the whole book is the duality of capitalism. Its Janus facet, its hypocrisy, twosideness, two facedness, its yin and yang. The predator and the creator – the locust and the bee. Mulgan manages to distance himself from living in a capitalist world, and looks at it dispassionately, not just warts and all, but also at the overwhelming advantages and accomplishments. It is enormously fair. Mulgan is Lafayette visiting the new world.

The enervating and maddening thing about The Locust and the Bee is the amount of provocative information in it. It often seems that every sentence is thought provoking; if you let it, it would take all year to finish reading it once. In the first half, every paragraph merits a page, and every page merits its own book. The whole thing is important and informative.

Those first pages are packed with great wisdom, just mentioned in passing, and often without further analysis. Hundreds of facts, quotes, and theories. It’s not possible to give you an overview, but let me share a few that I want to remember:

-The banks’ biggest risk used to be the sovereign; now the sovereign’s biggest risk is the banks.
-Labor used to decide what was made, now labor is just another commodity and products decide what labor is required.
-President Thomas Jefferson said the banks were more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
-Communism collapsed because it didn’t let prices tell the economic truth, and capitalism will collapse because it didn’t let prices tell the ecological truth.
-In the UK, universal healthcare came about because during WWI, one third of draftees were rejected as unfit. So healthcare was actually all about providing a higher quality of cannon fodder for the army.
-As for nonprofits, one of England’s first charities raised money for wood to burn witches.

Imagining what might come next is as tricky as thinking the unimaginable, because we’re so immersed in our system. Mulgan posits a time-based system (for example), where time is the currency instead of money. In capitalism, time is money, so what if we switched everything around and made it official? That requires some thought.

In the end, the book converts to a wishlist, based on examples and experiments in different countries and societies all over the world. Following what Mulgan says in the first half, we should expect some of these things to succeed long term, become trends, change our thinking, and eventually transform our societies. But which ones? He focuses a lot on relationships and services such as healthcare, which is fairly obvious. But I was surprised that after the line about the ecological truth (above and on page 122) he never comes back to how ecology will change society. So it’s not the bee all. But The Locust and the Bee is a big, sprawling, focused accomplishment. show less

Rarely have I encountered a book with generally sound ideas that I found less engrossing. I have great respect for Mulgan as a public thinker, and his ideas aren't wrong, but they're so slick, soulless and uninspiringly expressed that my eye kept slipping off the page. It ended up taking me months to finish this book, as I just never had the desire to read more.

In some ways reading this book is the classic New Labour experience (Mulgan was an adviser to Tony Blair): the chapter headings show more ("Outgrowing Capitalism") promise so much, but in the end it's full of bland and inoffensive policy solutions, without any grist, historical complexity or adherence to the canon of left wing writing. Unlike Blair himself though, who could dress up crap ideas in winderful cadence, Mulgan has written about (other people's) brilliant ideas in platitudes and soulless syntax. Shame. show less

Cos'è il capitalismo? Quali sono le anime che lo abitano? Quali sono i problemi del capitalismo oggi? Come può percorrere strade nuove?L'autore tratta questi argomenti con competenza e passione,dando prospettive interessanti per superare la crisi attuale.