Gillian Tett of the Financial Times engages in conversation with Jenna Bednar, Hilary Cottam, and James Manyika on rethinking the fundamental logic of how we define human flourishing and successful societies. All are members of CASBS's Creating a New Moral Political Economy network.
Suggested Readings
“Governance for Human Flourishing”
“The Social Contract in the 21st Century”
“Welfare 5.0: Why We Need a Social Revolution and How to Make it Happen”
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. We all want a flourishing society, but what does a flourishing society even look like? Clearly, the traditional measures of economic growth and rising GDP have proven to be insufficient at best and destructive at worst. So what is flourishing? How should we define it? Today on Human Centered, another episode in our Social Science for a World in Crisis series. This episode was produced in association with the CASBS program on creating a new moral political economy. Originally webcast May 25th, 2021. This episode is titled What Human Flourishing Looks Like. The panelists, who are all members of the new Moral Political Economy program at CASBS, were Jenna Bednar, professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan and an incoming 2021-22 CASBS fellow; Hilary Cottam, an author, social entrepreneur, and honorary professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London; James Manyika, Chairman and Director of the McKinsey Global Institute. And moderating the conversation is Gillian Tett, the Editorial Board Chair and Editor-at-Large in the US for the Financial Times. The panel set some interesting questions before themselves. What are the design principles and guiding visions for a framework to sustainably integrate communities, economies, and complex ecologies? How should such visions influence how we situate ourselves relative to corporations, technology, and institutions of democracy? If we're to rediscover a deeper sense of shared social purpose and an honoring of human dignity, how will we need to rethink the fundamental logic of what constitutes human flourishing and successful societies? Now join Human Centered as we listen to the CASBS conversation what human flourishing looks like.
Gillian Tett: Hello and welcome to everyone who's watching, whether you are in the US, Europe, anywhere else. It's great to have you with us to talk about a very important question which confronts all societies as we hopefully emerge from the pandemic, which is how to promote human flourishing, or to give this a correct title, how to bring in the social sciences into this debate at a time when we're facing a world in crisis. This is actually the 15th episode of the CASBS's webcast series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. A number of partners have sponsored this, so thank you, the Williams and Flora Hewitt Foundation, Ford School of Public Policy, McKinsey Global Institute, New America, and Stanford SPARK. And we have three truly fantastic people to talk about this today. On the one hand, we've got Jenna Bedgar, who is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of Michigan. Hillary Cottam, who is an author, social entrepreneur, and honorary professor at the University College London. And James Manyika, who's chair and director of the McKinsey Global Institute. And I'm Gillian Tett, I'm with the Financial Times, but probably the reason I've been asked along today is because before I became a journalist, I was an anthropologist, and I've always been passionate about bringing social sciences into these kinds of debates, so much so in fact that I have a book coming out in a couple of weeks' time called "Anthrovision: A New Way to See in Business and Life," which argues we need anthropology to be informing these very important public policy debates. But widen the lens beyond anthropology in asking, how do we put the social sciences into these discussions, is incredibly important right now, because one thing we've learned during the COVID-19 pandemic is that not everything that matters can be measured or expressed with a number. I'll use a number to indicate what the problem is. I was looking at a Pew survey last night, and saw that even though we're now seeing a mood of optimism in the financial markets about where the economies are heading, even though we're seeing potentially so much economic rebound that there's worries about inflation. Two-thirds of French respondents in a Pew survey recently said they thought the economic system needed either a significant or a radical overhaul. And in America, Germany, and France, the proportion who are wanting a radical change was around 50%. So people can see that we are maybe entering the end of the pandemic, let's hope so, and yet there's a real sense of discontent about the way the economies have been structured. And as people start talking about Build Back Better, I suspect we're gonna see more and more signs of a shift in the zeitgeist impacting not just governments, but companies and investors. And other institutions too. So all three of these panelists have been looking at what this means in terms of how we discuss these issues and reframe policy. And I'd like to start with you, James, because McKinsey Global Institute recently came out with a majestero report on the question of the social contract. That wasn't the kind of thing that McKinsey used to look at 20 years ago when it was all about profits and margins and, things like that. But certainly a lot of the reports you've been putting out recently have been trying to reframe what companies are doing and what advice you're giving to companies in terms of that wider social context. Tell us how you see the question of human flourishing post-pandemic and what the implications are for anyone who's watching who either works in business or wants to work there.
James Manyika: Well, thank you, Gillian. I'm glad to be part of this conversation. I'm very much looking forward to it and also looking forward to reading your book, by the way. I think it's a— the first 20 years of the 21st century have seen some very profound changes with respect to human flourishing. On the one hand, I think we've seen and we often quote the fact that a billion people have come out of poverty around the world and that by many measures, things have gotten better for many such as life expectancy and so forth. And all of those are good things and we should celebrate them. But I think at the same time, many of these same trends that have enabled people to flourish in that way, at least whether it's trade or globalization, the market economy, technology, and so forth, have also created challenges. And I think it's what you referred to in your remarks about what people are feeling, which is the need for this overhaul, I think is what you described it as. And here, let me point to 4 specific challenges to humans and people flourishing, which is some of what we've tried to highlight in some of our social contract research and other work you've pointed out. Number one, I think there's this clear and overwhelming sense of inequality of people. I think if you look at the last 20, uh, 20 years or so, clearly if you were an innovator, an entrepreneur, or an investor, or a high skill or high wage worker, things actually worked out pretty well. And if you look in the OECD countries, that's roughly about 150 million people, whereas the majority, another 500 million people, didn't do so well. Uh, and in fact, we know that real market income stagnated and have fallen for two-thirds of, uh, households in the advanced economies. And this in particular affects, uh, low-skilled workers, low-wage workers, young people, uh, who've had difficulty finding well-paid jobs and quality jobs. Uh, gender parity— I mean, women have not done particularly well with respect to participating in the economy, and gender parity remains elusive. And we also know that ethnic minorities have continued to face challenges. I mean, it's quite striking that college-educated Black and Hispanic households do worse than college-educated white people. So I think we've got these issues of inequality of places, one thing that people are feeling. Then you've got the second issue, which I'll point out, which is the inequality of place. And this is when you look inside our economies. Take the US, for example. Over the last— since the last Great Recession, something like two-thirds of all the job growth that happened in just 25 cities and high-growth hubs. Whereas if you look at the rest of the country, roughly 2,000 counties, you know, where more than a quarter of the population lives, they saw either flat or negative job growth. And we already know that something like 1% of counties in America make up over a third of US GDP. So these differences of place within countries, and you see similar trends in Europe, by the way, although not as acute. I mean, you only have to look in the UK and the effect that London has versus the rest of the country. So that's an important challenge. Let me point out a third and a fourth. You mentioned the social contract as a third point. I think it's quite striking that if you look at how households and people flourish in the economy, whether it's as workers or as households or savers, this has not been has not gone out well for everybody. So for example, we know that while work opportunities have increased, uh, to record levels in some countries, we know that work security and income security have declined, uh, for many. I find it quite astounding that, for example, 100 million Americans are economically insecure, if you define that as living at roughly twice the poverty rate. And by the way, 40% of these Americans actually work. So these are people who actually have jobs. We also know the cost of housing, the cost of healthcare, the cost of education have risen astronomically, particularly for working class and also low-income workers. So these are important reasons why we need an overhaul. Let me make a last point, which is the impact of technology. I think technology is also changing the idea of flourishing. On the one hand, you know, it's made so many things accessible. Easier, whether it's entertainment, education, even health. But on the other hand, we know that technology is transforming work in very profound ways, whether it's automation or the impact of, you know, whether, you know, jobs being substituted, etc., and raising the need for reskilling and re-education. So all of these reasons, I think, come back to the reason why people feel the system needs an overhaul.
Gillian Tett: Right, well, thank you, James, that's fascinating. And that's a good moment to bring in Jenna, who recently published a very interesting paper, "Governance for Human Flourishing," in which she starts off by quoting Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who's the former Prime Minister of Denmark, a wonderful quote who says, "Our most acute concern should be that the coronavirus pandemic will change very little or nothing at all. Everything changes, but everything stays the same." Now the Pew survey, which by the way, if anyone's not read the Pew survey, I would urge you to do so, because it's quite shockingly stark findings and quite counterintuitive in some ways if you're working in the financial markets, but I'm curious, you know, how do you see governance for human flourishing and what do you think are the key issues right now?
Jenna Bednar: Yeah, thanks, Gillian. And I'm glad that you brought up that quote, which has really motivated a lot of my thinking. So I thought what I would do is maybe take a few minutes to describe what I think about human flourishing, the way I have focused my attention on that question, why I've focused it in that way, how we're failing to flourish collectively and in its relationship, sort of getting back to some of the things that James was saying to the social contract. And then with that, give at least a general approach to how policy might encourage flourishing. In my house, I'm married to an economist who says, oh, you're working on flourishing? And almost daily, he's like, oh, I saw somebody else is also working on flourishing. And it's become kind of a family joke because he thought it was maybe an obscure topic, and now you see it everywhere. You know, I'm thinking about amazing work just off of, you know, Noreena Hurts, Jean Sperling, Rebecca Henderson, Edmund Phelps, Minouche Shafik, Mark Carney. You know, like every time you look at the paper, soon to be Gillian Tett, people are talking about this issue in one way or another, all diagnosing the same sets of ills that James brought up, right? This inability to solve our collective problems like the pandemic, pandemic and climate change, persistent racism and other forms of openly expressed hatred. And for me as a political scientist, the decline of democracy, incredibly troubling. And so often in those works, they think about flourishing and define it in terms of well-being. In fact, those two phrases are often used synonymously. And this— so there's a sense of a need for growth of individual capacity. They're not wrong. In addition, and this really comes out of my perspective as a political scientist, I am concerned about our belonging, our sense of being needed, of being respected, of having meaning, of having status within our community, whether that community be defined very locally, your family, a community, a township, identity group, nation, or even global humanity. So have a sense of our relationships as being about connection and care. And so what's keeping us from this? What's— you know, a lot of people describe this as somewhat nebulously as our social fabric. And a lot of these fantastic writers diagnose the problem as being one of excessive individualism, an emphasis on individualism in our society, or our atomization from one another, somewhat ironically, despite all the technology technology that James was just talking about that's supposed to be bringing us closer together. And we have become rivals for finite resources. And so our relationships are transactional. We value one another according to how we profit from that interaction. And so as a social scientist, I would say, well, okay, let's ask, if we're becoming increasingly individualistic, what are we moving away from? What, how, what are, what would bring us back in balance? And bringing us back in balance is paying attention to this other side of ourselves. Yes, of course, we're naturally innately self-interested, but we're also innately other-regarding, that we care about others, that we see ourselves as being something, part of something bigger than ourselves, and that our welfare is linked to the welfare of others. So what we're losing is a sense of solidarity. And so why does this matter? And thinking about the social contract that James was talking about, well, the social contract, this sense of what we owe one another, our duties to one another as we are governed, requires some consent on our part to participate in this, in the language of the social contract theorists, right? And in order for us to do that, we need some confidence that everybody else is also buying into this, right? And that comes through social norms, pro-social norms. These pro-social norms that are not a product of laws, but instead emerge from our interactions with one another where we can develop confidence and faith in one another. These norms are— give our Constitution legitimacy. And they make our democracy robust. So that, as a political scientist, is why I'm incredibly concerned about the decline of our social norms, of this social fabric. And so then, and I'll just lay this out briefly, how might policy repair this? So the question, the big question is what role might government play in repairing or reinforcing or nourishing these prosocial norms of solidarity? The most common remedy that I see in some of these books coming out is, well, if we want to bring in— if we want to, for example, encourage dignity, what we need to do is maybe fix the system of allocation. We need to redistribute. We need to raise, or some say lower, corporate tax rates, or we need to raise, or some say lower, the minimum wage. That still puts us in this transactional realm. And I am interested in solutions that focus on us participating, us coming together. And this is part of why I am thrilled to be on this panel with Hillary Cottam, frankly. This is something that she writes about so eloquently, right? As she puts it, solutions can't be pushed from above. They have to be pulled from below. People need to participate. They need to be included. So I'll talk a little bit more about that as, as we roll forward, but I just, um, I, I think that we all have a lot to benefit from, uh, Hillary's deep experience in this realm in thinking about how to radically revolutionize the way we approach policy interventions.
Gillian Tett: Well, thank you, Jenna. That's fascinating. Um, it's actually— it is an issue I touched on a lot in my book, and in a nutshell, I think what both you and James are saying is we need to go from a world of tunnel vision, which has marked so many of our 20th century intellectual tools, whether that's economic models or big data sets or public policy pronouncements, into a world of more lateral vision where we actually try and think beyond the model and have a wider lens. But Hillary, tell us what you make of this, because you wrote a very interesting piece called Welfare 5.0. I'd love to know what Welfare 1.0 and 2, 3, 4 were as well, but anyway, let's keep it onto 5, saying why we need a social revolution revolution and how to make it happen. By the way, I should say, if anyone's watching and has got questions, do please start asking them now through the Q&A function, and I'm going to weave them into the conversation as we go along, because it's a good way of me getting a sense of where your head is, what you're interested in, and also having a more rounded dialogue. But Hilary, tell us what Welfare 5.0 is and what exactly is the type of social revolution that you want to have happen.
Hilary Cotam: Okay, well, thank you very much, Gillian. I mean, I'm first and foremost a practitioner, so my work is rooted in place And it's the work of living alongside people. I mean, Gillian, I'm a big fan of all of your writing because I suppose in a way I'm a kind of barefoot anthropologist. And so I'm trying to understand the world from this very granular perspective and from there ask what flourishing looks like in this century. And Jenna writes in the paper, the great paper that you mentioned, that the continuation of current institutions is insufficient. And I really agree. I mean, in the 5.0 paper, I'd go further and say that the flourishing we seek is actually— it just can't be brought about through our post-war systems and institutions. So they would be 4.0, because I think, you know, to touch on what James was saying, that when we have technology revolutions, we have to have really deep revolutions in our social systems if the economy is to kind of flourish, but also if we as human beings are to flourish. And we have to get to this point where we think again. So what I'm exploring really is what do 21st century social systems look like that enable us to flourish? And in my book Radical Help, I describe some of these new systems that I've built through this rooted collaborative practice with communities. So these are new forms of support that allow our families often living in desperate situations to flourish by asking them to lead rather than kind of doing something to them or promoting something or telling them something. New forms of support for adolescents. I mean, if we think about developments in neuroscience, for example, we really understand now that adolescence is a time when you can reset, when you can begin to flourish in a different way. And, you know, when we designed the social systems we have, we didn't have that kind of understanding. So just an example is how other disciplines have developed and how we can bring them into thinking about flourishing. How do we find and progress in good work? We know that good work is absolutely is absolutely fundamental to a sense of flourishing, but we also know that most people today who are poor are in work, they're in demeaning work, they're basically in so-called crap jobs, which kind of undoes flourishing rather than promotes it. New systems for health and for a rich third age. And all of this work, these are kind of systems that tens of thousands of people are using, is rooted in what I would see as an Aristotelian concept of flourishing. So I'm very kind of, you know, I use in my practice the idea of eudaimonia, I've worked across the globe, but my work today is rooted in the Global North, and in particular in post-industrial communities in the UK. So I think about these concepts, and in this context, in these communities where I'm living and working, money is important. So I am in places where, you know, people are choosing between heating or eating, and often unable to eat. They're not able to pay rent. I'm working alongside families that basically are not connected to the internet. They have very expensive data packages which they can't use most of the time, which means that their children have not been able to learn in this pandemic. So it's really clear that as part of flourishing, material existence matters, but so too does meaning and creativity. It's really fundamental. And also what's important here is that this kind of definition is collective and it's political. So it's about the right to participate fully in our institutions at all levels, from the family through to formal democratic representation. So touching very much on the issues that Jenna was talking about. And I think that our current systems don't only fail to deliver flourishing, they actually exclude by design certain groups: women, race. I hope we'll come back to talk more about this because it's not an accident. It's actually in the design and we need to unpick those designs if we really want everybody to flourish. So, I think what we need and what grows out of this practice is a new, what I would call, a design code for social flourishing, which is kind of at the heart of the 5.0 concept. And there are 5 kind of points in the social design code that I write about, but I mean, we haven't got time to talk about them. I just want to touch I'd like to touch on two. So, the first is I think that we have to start from thinking about whole connected human beings. That if we don't have a kind of pattern in our minds that is different, when we come to design institutions or when we come to design systems and services, we're not going to get there. So, what I'd really like is to give Homo economicus, that rational self-maximizing man, a good death and replace him completely with what I call Sapiens Integra, which is this concept I've been developing with Anne-Marie Slaughter. So we know that, as Jenna's saying, we work, we care, we love, we play, yes, we compete, we suffer, which is also really important because, you know, in the Aristotelian concept, being unhappy is part of being human, so kind of ideas of happiness and simplistic well-being aren't going to get us there. And we need all of these more complex things to flourish. And I think perhaps the most important aspect is that we become who we are, integra, through our connections with one another. So as Martin Buber, the 1970s philosopher, put it so beautifully, "I am an I through a you." So we can't kind of disentangle these things, and we have to put our human connections to one another right back at the center. And Gillian, you were talking about how this works institutionally, which means, you know, unpicking this very vertical set of systems that we've inherited and kind of becoming kind of new horizontalists and connecting in a different way. And the second principle is that we have to grow capability. So all the systems that we have that we're trying to kind of grow things through at the moment are needs-based. They're about assessing a need and trying to do something to you, package something. It's very passive. I'll give this to you and things will change. The systems that I'm creating and that Jenna is working on are around capability. They're around thinking about what are the things and what are the systems that enable all of us to grow across all these dimensions in order to flourish in this century. And because my work's practical, I mean, you know, I'm rooted in the kind of ideas of Nussbaum and Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen and their capability work, but it's very complex. I mean, I can't kind of work across all of this if I'm working in communities. I've basically, through my practice, concentrated on 4 capabilities which map very nicely, I think, on the pillars, Jenna, that you have in your work that I hope that you'll talk a bit more about later. And so what I'm saying, I can hold up this little diagram, is that I think that the capabilities for flourishing in this century are essentially 4. They're about working and learning, by which I mean, as I say, good work and learning, not as just sort of passing exams and getting certificates, I mean learning in a deep way. They're about health, physical health and inner health vitality. They're about understanding and feeling that we definitely have a genuine place in community. And then above all, I think they're about relationships. So more and more we're seeing that relationships are what Martha Nussbaum would call architectonic, that they're absolutely fundamental, and that if we design the way that we work, the institutions we have around this kind of relational concept, we really do begin to kind of develop something very different that enables us all to flourish across these dimensions. So those are the sort of principles. I mean, I could talk about how we need a different sort of economy to grow that, the importance, I think, in particular of making in practice, that we have to kind of not receive things passively, we have to make. And this is about kind of doing things in place that James referred to, and also Jenna writes about, about things close to us, about care and repair, rather than things that are invented elsewhere, even if they're invented in a participatory way and then somehow passed to us down a pipeline, that isn't going to get us to where we are. So for me, these are the pillars of flourishing. I think that they're in our grasp because because they're very much kind of in my practice, but also in the practice of many, many other people across the globe. And so I think what we need is there in the everyday, but at the moment it's very much at the margins. And I guess our work is to think about how we move that different flourishing practice from something that is marginal to the center of the way that we design and operate our social systems, and very much a new social contract today.
Gillian Tett: Right, well, that's fascinating, Hilary. It does sound like the work that you're doing and the work that Jenna's doing are incredibly complementary. So I want to come back to that in a moment. I want to first of all, though, quickly ask James, because James, you don't spend your day talking to social scientists. You spend your day talking to masters of the universe, policymakers, you know, important CEOs. I write in my own book about anthrovision, you know, one of the ironies about companies today. I don't know, do any of you know where the roots of the word company comes from?
Hilary Cotam: It's very relevant to all of you.
Gillian Tett: Do you know, James? Tesla? Not quite, not quite. It's even better than that. It comes from the old Italian "con panio," meaning "with bread," because companies were originally places where people gathered together to eat and basically act as a social group. They weren't balance sheets. They were actual social functions. You know, I often tell CEOs that, because the canteen is more important than they realize. But, you know, I'm curious, so we, you know, one level we know that companies are actually usually about people meeting each other, or they are when there's not a pandemic. But another level, most of the people who you speak to, James, have taken people completely out of the equation in recent years in their balance sheets. Do you think that the people you speak to are willing to tolerate or actually entertain these ideas at all?
James Manyika: I think they are, Gillian, and I think you make a very, very important point about people being taken out of the equation. I think one of— this is one of the structural things that have changed about how our economies work. Let me just explain that in a sec. So if you look at the last 100 years, the labor share of income of the economy and of companies has actually been declining steadily. And that's just because when it comes to making a unit of any output, product or service, whatever, we actually need a little bit less labor than we used to need. And need a little bit more capital than we now. So that mix has changed. And as that mix has changed, it's affected people flourishing in a particular way because I think if you look at most, the vast majority of people, maybe with the exception of people like us on the Zoom, derive their livelihood and flourishing through their work. And so if we squeeze work out of how the economy and our systems work, it does impair people's livelihood and ability to prosper to have a sense of dignity, provide for their families. And quite frankly, it also changes this idea of learning and growing that Hillary was talking about. So I think that is a structural shift that's happening. So we're gonna have to be not just recreate what we have, but create the new way of doing that and achieving those things, because the structure of the economy itself is changing ways that won't go back. So I think many of the policymakers, I think, are starting to understand that question, Gillian. I think some CEOs are starting to understand that. And the ones that seem to understand it more are the kinds of companies that employ a lot of people and are present in many, many communities. So if you take a company, often these are retailers who are present in every community, in every geography, and they actually employ a lot of people. They've, in recent years, have tended to be much more attuned to this issue than perhaps others where the interaction of ordinary people in their systems is much, much, much less. And often these are technology companies or financial institutions where people at the community level are less a factor of their, of their systems. So I think that's, that's shifting in the right, in the right, in the right way.
Gillian Tett: Yeah. Well, I remember going to an investment banking conference in 2005, and again, I tell the story in my book, and basically realizing that investment banking conferences play the same function in the financial world Tajik wedding rituals in the Hindu Kush, in that they basically assemble a crowd, reformulate social ties, and actually most importantly reformulate a worldview. And I sat through all these PowerPoints, deconstructing them like a Tajik wedding, and realized that there wasn't a single face in any of the PowerPoints. It was like the end user had been completely written out of the equation, which of course didn't just cost the people who were borrowing money, it also cost the bankers because they couldn't see the risk and it wasn't until someone actually went and met an end user in a film like The Big Short that people actually realized that there were human beings at the other end of the chain that mattered. And I do think that's been so much the problem in businesses in recent years. But I'm curious, we've got a great question here from Margaret Levi who says, "I love the concepts and vision that you're all presenting," and I'm going to lead into this with a question for Jen and Hillary, "but how do we know flourishing when we see it?" How can we tell if we're flourishing? What are some of the indicators a government actor or policymaker could use? Hilary, maybe you should start with that because you're actually involved on the ground trying to deal with real-life communities. And, you know, so how do you measure flourishing or the lack of it?
Hilary Cotam: Sorry, I'm muted. One of the reasons that I really think this concept of flourishing is important is because actually people get it themselves. That they, you know, when I'm working alongside families or my current research is around working and good work, so in workplaces. This is not a kind of abstract policy label that people don't get, that everybody understands what it means to flourish. And actually, when you ask people what they want in their lives, people, you know, have fairly common things. They do want, you know, a decent income, they do want time to be with family and to care. So I mean, actually re-knitting together care and work in a different way will be a fundamental kind of work challenge of this century. And then, I mean, to ask— I mean, I wanted to talk about the role of business, actually, because I think the role of business actors in this is absolutely critical. And maybe I can come back to that later, what you were asking, James, but to go to the question about indicators, I mean, obviously what's really important is that we have to kind of change the indicators if we're going to move to kind of a world of flourishing, because if we carry on measuring kind of just money and traditional outcomes, it's as if we're kind of facing backwards whilst we try to move forward. And one, I mean, I could talk a lot about this, but in my work I do have to measure money because of course I'm a pragmatist Nobody is going to kind of fund me if my work costs more. I have to kind of show that the work I do actually delivers better outcomes, even though they're ghastly, than the kind of traditional work. But then what's really important is measures that have meaning to people so that people themselves can kind of understand and be part of that. And I think that what I have used in the kind of social work I've done is a set of capability indicators. And I write in Radical Help how, you know, I turned up with these quite simple measures and then families themselves began to unpick my measures, actually much to my horror, and started to basically work with kind of a macho sense system and say, well, this isn't quite right because you don't really understand that when I begin to kind of think this way differently about myself, I have made this huge movement in my life and you need to start kind of looking at that. And you're kind of thinking about health in this way, but if I can just get to the bus, I can kind of think about it in this way. So actually, the kind of sets of measures that I was working with kind of worked at the system level for kind of government, but they also were very much at the household level. And I've got kind of huge problems with measurement, which, you know, maybe we can come back into later. But one of the core things, if we're going to shift, is that we have something that kind of locates the flourishing in the everyday, that kind of is meaning intellectually and of the heart, and then connects all the way through those systems. And we can do it. I mean, I've shown how we can do that.
Gillian Tett: Right, well, I'm sure everyone's hungry for answers right now, but I'm curious. I have a question for you, Jenna, which is from Paul Backeleitner, and it touches on the point that Henry raised earlier about sort of how do you actually get excluded people involved in this. And the question is this: How do you propose centering the input and feedback of those most affected in communities in the creation of new social systems so that new systems feel organic and owned by them? If you're going to create a governance of flourishing, how do you actually get people at the bottom who are often most harmed by the existing systems to feel empowered, to feel engaged?
Jenna Bednar: This is such a great question, Paul. I don't— I didn't catch your last name, and I have to confess, so here I am, I have a sabbatical next year at CASBS so I can work on this very question because it isn't something that we know very well, but I can give you a sense. So, well, let's get back to that approach that I cite, where I cited Hillary, that it can't be pushed from the top down. It has to involve a bottom up. There was a, there was a troubling article in the New York Times in the last couple of days about, maybe you caught it, about a Wausau, Wisconsin. And, uh, I, uh, there was the— Wausau, Wisconsin, um, has been for a very long time extremely white, is changing now, is changing in many ways. Its economy is changing, and the racial and ethnic composition of its population is changing. And so there was a proposal, uh, let's, let's have a new motto. Let's call ours— let's say that we are a community for all. And so this was going to be through city council, you know, a proposal made through city council passed and then it would become an official model. So this is all done legally, right? And there was immediate overwhelming pushback within the community of the majority population. Some, you know, as the reporter reported it out, you know, some things about linking it to some conspiracy theories. This is the end of the world as we know it, that sort of thing. But it's— and in the end, by a, I think, 6-2 vote, it failed. And all parties, even those who were supportive of it, regretted having started it. Okay, so here's— how does this respond to Paul? Well, what happened here? It started from the top. Top-down, right? It was a legal process through city council rather than something that is far more organic where you could work on developing a social fabric that is more inclusive. Now, how do we do that, right? That is such an important question, but there are great people thinking about this. I love the work of Eric Klinenberg talking about libraries. Libraries as social spaces where people come together and see one another. I've seen fantastic work on the effect of farmers markets, experimental, natural experiments, some communities with farmers markets, others without it, and to what extent do they have norms of toleration to diversity and the growth of social norms in those communities just from having these interactions with strangers. So how can we think of public policy as creating interventions that will help this organic growth from the bottom up before we ever get to the stage of trying something that is a legal process? There's also the risk, frankly, and of crowding out. So this is one of my concerns with a lot of equal rights movements that precedes bottom-up social kind of demand for this. Because, you know, say, if rights are acknowledged legally, then that in some sense, that doesn't change someone's dignity, someone's status within the community other than in the court of law. But it doesn't change your status as you're seeing one another on the street. And so for dignity, dignity is something that is bestowed, bestowed socially and enforced socially, and it's a status of mutual respect. And then to go one step farther, and this gets back to Paul's proposal, is then the growth of acceptance, not just of of mutual tolerance of one's existence and right to be a member of the community, but also including them, people who are different from you, in decisions that affect your own welfare. That is the kind of dignity that we would like to see. And so the question is, what can policy interventions do to help us move in that direction rather than crowd out those movements. So.
Hilary Cotam: Right.
Gillian Tett: Well, those are big questions. They both impact companies— sorry, both impact communities and also companies. I'm going to come back and ask James in a few moments about the issue of company democratization. But before we do, I wanted to read a very strong message from Susan Fitzpatrick, who's watching, who says this: I live in a rural area of the Midwest and help steward land that's been in my husband's family for many generations. It is only in the past few decades that this land can no longer support a family. But on the other hand, there are interesting small-scale industries starting up that manufacture for niche markets, and the workplace is retooling because many people have deep roots in the community.
Hilary Cotam: But—
Gillian Tett: which sounds fantastic— but then she goes on to say, I would not say the area is not flourishing, and partly— so I would not say the area is flourishing partly as a result of disconnect these folks feel from influence who continually denigrate their communities. How do we deal with this problem of disconnect between rural communities where there may be some very good things happening and yet still get denigrated, and the fact that they are often operating within a wider society which writes them off as worthless? And we saw how that contributed to the political poison of the last election. Hillary, do you have any thoughts about that, how the communities you're working with feel more valued by the wider national debate?
Hilary Cotam: Well, I would say that all the communities that I work in do not feel valued and do not feel heard. I mean, one example of that would be that I think I pretty much am only working in Brexit communities, so everybody where I work, in all the communities that I'm currently working in, voted for Brexit, just as kind of one measure of that. And I think that, I mean, there's a couple of things, well, there's a lot we could say about this, but just kind of touching on points that have already been made. So the first The first thing is I think that you need completely different tools, and this is to what Jenna was talking about, is that if we want to create different policy, I mean, to kind of, you know, sort of use Audre Lorde, you know, we're not going to dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. We might, you know, we've got to kind of work in a different way. And one of the things that we're missing at the moment are kind of tools that can work in a different way. So, for instance, you know, one of the things we see a lot is a lot of interest in participation. We see traditional policymakers go to communities and run focus groups groups and then take all that stuff, or, you know, maybe they're Deloitte or McKinsey, they take all that stuff back to the office and then they create things in exactly the same way and try and push it down through the industrial sausage machine and get very surprised when it doesn't work. So one of the, you know, one of the kind of critical early tools is about storytelling, it's about narrative. One of the most important things and parts of the work that I do, I'm doing at the moment, is thinking about how in those communities do we create How do we create a forward-looking narrative as a starting point for this work that brings everybody together, that talks about the pain and the loss? Like, we can't leave that behind, but we can talk about what has been that experience. What do we need to leave on the shore, but what do we need to kind of acknowledge? How can we bring together through these conversations really, really deep divisions in communities, and then focus on the kind of north, you know, the sort of star that we might want to head towards? So, you know, how do we create those stories. And that has been really, really important. It's a process that takes time and it needs investment, but it's an example of a very different tool that we need to start with. But then the other thing that I think that I just wanted to also touch on is that, I mean, originally I studied history, and when we look at technology revolutions and we look at the kind of social systems and how they evolve, we can see that four sets of actors always have to play a role: civil society, organized civil society— that means unions, movements, and so on— what I call organic intellectuals, so people with big ideas, not necessarily just people in universities, but obviously academia plays a critical role. Government, which we might come back to because they're the architects and they are stuck at the moment because they are working with the wrong tools. And then business, you know, that it's really important to think about. You know, there's a group that I call the new industrialists, who in every technology revolution are at the forefront, and they are thinking really, really differently about why we need 'we need a different social settlement.' And this group also needs to come in, both kind of in the rural context that you talked about, but also in the urban context. And usually this group comes in through enlightened self-interest. They understand that unless these changes are made, that capitalism will run amok. I mean, the classic example is Henry Ford. He understood that he needed to pay his workers differently and more, partly because he realized that that was important to kind of to keep skilled workers. But he wasn't a very nice man, he also shot his workers famously, but he realized that he couldn't kind of have the new car unless workers could afford the car. And so we see this kind of complicated cocktail in a way come together, and I think that's what we're struggling for at the moment, we're struggling to find narratives and we're struggling to find spaces where those actors can come together and talk about these concepts and think about how this kind of new contract can be made which really what actually brings these four groups together. And I think until we find that, we are going to kind of keep going round and round. We're not going to move forward.
Gillian Tett: We have a lot of questions about education and about how you actually educate people to embrace these ideas, given that so much of education is taking them down a different direction. And also questions about children. What does this mean for children? Do either of you want to comment? Because I'm then going to turn to James and ask about the corporate side of things. Well, I'd like to.
Hilary Cotam: I mean, Jenna, can I start? I mean, this is kind of such a huge conversation. So one of the things that I think about, I mean, if we think about formal education, obviously we've got systems that are set up to make us industrial cogs in the wheel. I mean, in the UK, you know, we've got a complete factory education system, which is first of all creating young people who are completely unsuited for the kind of creative dynamics and changes and threats and everything that are coming, also creating kind of enormous mental health crises. So we've got all our mental health, you know, institutions kind of trying to cope with the fallout of absurd schooling systems. So just in the formal system, I think that that's really important, that we have to kind of, you know, rethinking the social contract is rethinking what's inside the education system, not just how to kind of organize and fund schools. So that'd be something important. But I think there was something in the question that sort of slightly suggested that somehow we people sitting here have got these highfalutin ideals about flourishing and how are we going to get other people to think about them. I really I really can only emphasise that everything I think, I talk about, and I write about has come through my kind of barefoot practice, if you like, living in communities. I don't have— I'm not an academic. I don't have ideas from, you know, I mean, I read books, I love books, and that's a kind of important part of it. But these are ideas that people have, like, let us trust people and think completely, which is not happening on the left or the right in formal institutions at the moment. I mean, we just need to learn to listen. Differently and to kind of take the time. These are not ideas from the top. These are ideas that are everywhere, kind of as part of the firmament at the moment.
Jenna Bednar: And I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump in and follow up on that to say that education doesn't just happen in the classroom, and it doesn't just happen in our schools. If what we're talking about is encouraging this fellow feeling, this solidarity, this mutual respect, that education happens everywhere and possibly especially on the streets when we're seeing one another. And so, you know, the new urbanists are fantastic about talking about placemaking. How can we think about designing cities to encourage the interaction of people who are diverse to come to understand and respect one another? But I, you know, it's one of the things that I've been working on in this project on flourishing is beauty. Beauty, this is so often left out of social science analysis. But as Hillary has already described it, beauty is something that captures joy, playfulness, sorrow, struggle toward a goal. And beauty also, it's a way of educating. It's a form of enlightenment, a way of representing in its best form, representing what we might become or who we are in a way of taking in diverse perspectives, saying, "I did not expect," you know, "I've never looked at it this way," when an artist offers out a work of art but leaves it to the audience to interpret it. That is very participatory. Beauty can also be very destructive, very divisive, very exclusive. You know, Stone Mountain in Georgia is back in the news again, as it ought to be, for being very exclusive. Moving a couple of Confederate flags is not going to improve that place and make it more inclusive.
Gillian Tett: Right. Well, that's fascinating. Well, listen, we have a number of questions about companies, which I'm going to start with James on. I'm going to read out about them because they're very interrelated. We've got a great question from Olfa Ingel saying, would the panelists like to comment on the notion of workplace democracy and whether there's a trade-off between financial performance and human flourishing in the workplace? And we've got a question from Peter Gurevich who says, to what degree is this a corporate governance problem, the power within the firm towards elite shareholder and top managers which neglects workers? Can changes be made without looking at the power system within firms and the relationship to shareholders. And then we also have a question about the question, again linked to this, saying, is from Muriel Russell, saying, is the concept of putting communities at the center of a new model meaning flatter structures in our institutions? Is the issue about eliminating layers of management? Is that part of flourishing? James, what would you make of those ideas?
James Manyika: Well, a few thoughts. I wanted just to comment very briefly back to Margaret Levi's original question about how would we even measure or get a sense of flourishing. One idea that we, I don't think we've talked enough about is how we recreate flourishing in a world in which the locus of interdependence has changed. I think one of the things that was always very powerful about flourishing societies was there was this interdependence between communities, between people, between cities and rural areas, rural areas. That interdependence has shifted. Uh, if you look at, you know, the economic systems, it's found interdependence elsewhere. So companies find interdependence with their suppliers, sometimes locally, sometimes overseas. That's where the interdependence is. If you take large cities like London, which are financial centers, they're much more interdependent, not with the rest of the country, but the rest of the global financial system. So the So shifting the locus of interdependence is part of what we're going to need to find new ways to reestablish. I don't think it's recreating what it used to be because the economy works differently, but we have to reestablish that sense of interdependence differently. I think to come back to the question of companies and democratization, it's actually fascinating because if I've learned anything in spending time with companies is that they're actually all very different. So if you take companies where at some level the core of what the company does or what it values the most, what it competes for the most is the talent that it recruits. In those companies, you will find that those companies are much, much more democratic. They'll probably be swayed in what they do by what their workers think because those workers could leave. Uh, we've seen this happen in technology companies. We've seen this happen in banks sometimes because they feel that this is the scarce resource they're all competing for. So they tend to be much more democratized in that sense and pay attention and try to empower their workers. If you go to other kinds of companies where perhaps the most scarce resource might be capital, if you— and the workers play a slightly different role, it's a different system. So I think as we think about democratization and empowerment, and even the sense of dignity and the sense of inclusion, we have to look at how it works in very different kinds of companies. The one thing I will say though, Gillian, is that I think, you know, and it's a very recent development, I think it's quite astounding, quite frankly, if you compare what companies would have told you 30 years ago and what they'll all say today, whether it's, you know, the BRT statements and any of these statements that companies are making now, The fact that now companies, well, they may not have fully delivered on it yet, but are now at least recognizing the need to pay attention to all their stakeholders, not just their shareholders. Now we'll see how it all plays out and happens, but at least there's a, it's a conversation that wouldn't have, wasn't happening 10, 15 years ago. So we'll see how that plays out in terms of will they truly follow through and empower and, you know, take seriously all the stakeholders that are now being talked about.
Gillian Tett: That's absolutely fascinating, and I must say I'm very struck this morning. I was watching on television, I saw adverts, endless adverts from Amazon trying to show how it's paying its workers and treating them better, and you can argue about whether it is or is not, but what's striking is that Amazon feels the need to even talk about it because 5 years ago it didn't, and The fact it is talking now is partly because it's recognizing that it may face a labor shortage in some areas. It's also potentially facing, you know, investor pressure and most importantly employee pressure, which I find absolutely fascinating. We've barely got any time left, but I wanted to quickly ask you each a question on the positive side. Can any of you think of positive examples where policymakers or corporate leaders or community leaders are creating flourishing communities in an active way that other people can learn from?
James Manyika: I can think of a few examples, Gillian. I've been struck by how— so one of the key things, particularly, I'll take the case of the US as an example. We know that, for example, there's this huge disconnect in terms of where the investment that companies or the governments make in particular communities. And I've been quite struck, for example, by how some few companies, I'll pick the example of Microsoft, in the case of Atlanta where they actually opened an office quite deliberately in a county that is a very poor community. Because we know, for example, when it comes to African Americans, take that as an example, one of the biggest disconnect is that the employment opportunities are not where the people are. We know that if you go down to the county level, there are some communities, it could be even just across the railway tracks or on the other side side of town where a particular county gets no economic activity, no one invests there, no one opens an office there to tap into the talent that's there. So I think those kinds of moves I think are quite important. I also think policymakers could do the same thing. We know that the amount of investments into public goods that enable people to participate, whether it's education systems, healthcare systems, are very uneven, even inside countries. I mean, it's easy to think that governments invest equally across the whole country. Well, that's actually not true. We know that there's variations at the state and local county level. So I think this idea of really focusing in the places that need the help the most, whether it's by companies or public policy, I think is really, really critical. We're seeing a few examples of that.
Gillian Tett: Margaret, we are almost out of time. So you've got about— sorry, not Margaret, sorry, Hillary, you are almost out of time. We've got about 2 minutes. But point made by Margaret Levi that you do work directly with communities and you're embodying being a new form of community organiser, Hillary. Can you see any positive, exciting examples of progress and change in the work that you're doing?
Hilary Cotam: Oh, totally. I mean, when you asked that question, I was like, can't we all go on a tour? I mean, so, I mean, I've only got a minute and now I've got so much that I could share that I'm sort of almost speechless. But I mean, I think that there has been a revolution actually in local government in Britain, and it's kind of in places that are not looked at by Western Westminster. So I can think of places like Wigan that have got a deal where they've completely reorganised the kind of relationship between the communities and the public sector by giving resource on kind of big timescales and horizons to the community. Somewhere like Barrow where they've begun to tell a very different story to get out of a kind of monoculture where there's one job which is with BAE, it's a very good job but it's one job. I could take you to East Ayrshire where they've kind of really rethought the kind of relationship between work and kind of social economy in a very different way. So I think I could show you incredible work. The important thing, I think, is this kind of margin to center point, which is that it's very, very hard to keep this work going within a kind of, you know, in the case of the UK, a very dominant Westminster culture that doesn't understand this, that is continually trying to invest in a different way and kind of constrain through regulation in different ways. So we can see work that's taken root over a decade. I mean, I bring my colleagues in Scandinavia to visit these places because although we look at Scandinavian welfare models, they come to look at these very different experiments in the UK which frankly blow their socks off. So we know it's there, it's just very difficult for it to live, breathe, and kind of expand within the sort of structures of the economy and society that are imposed from the centre.
Gillian Tett: Well, that's very encouraging. Jenna, you've got 1 minute to give us another inspiring example.
Jenna Bednar: I think I think what's great and gives me a sense that we are really poised to do things differently as we exit the pandemic is that we're seeing an end to a one-size-fits-all policy model. The World Bank abandoned that a long time ago. If we are going to move to a human-scale approach to policy intervention, one that is very context-sensitive and dependent and responsive to the needs on the ground and inclusive, it's going to look different from place to place. And so for something like the World Bank to acknowledge that is terrific. I also am a huge fan of Anne Hidalgo— sorry, Anne Hidalgo, the president of Paris— and others who are working to create these smaller-scale cities within a city, the 20-minute city idea. Because I think it's going to create overlapping networks of people that will help this social fabric to be nourished and reborn.
Gillian Tett: Well, thank you all very much indeed. I take away various lessons, one of which is we all need to go on the road when the pandemic ends to Paris, obviously, and other parts of England and elsewhere to look at some of these inspiring— Atlanta— to look at these inspiring positive stories. Second point I take away is that we are seeing we're seeing, partly but not entirely because of the pandemic, a shift in the nature of the conversation around policy and corporate leadership, and that's likely to only accelerate as we go forward, I suspect. But thirdly, there is a lot that needs to be done in terms of how this new conversation makes its way into the centrality of policymaking, how it's measured, and how it's actually turned into actual tangible change. For those of you who can't go on a road trip but want to read up about it, The papers that both Hillary and Jenna and also James have written were sent out in the original notice, but there's also Jenna's working paper in the chat function, which you can see along with some of the other links that are important to recent debates. I put in the link for the Pew Research survey as well, which some people asked for. And I should also say that details about the next episode in the series Social Science for a World in Crisis will be coming onto your screen in just a few seconds. So do please keep watching for those new announcements. So it just remains for me to say a very big thank you to all of you for taking part, all of you for watching, all of you for doing such interesting research, and frankly, for all of you caring and having the imagination and tenacity to try and see a different way of doing things for the future. Let's hope that in the post-pandemic world, we can actually embrace some of these new ideas. So thank you all very much indeed.
Narrator: That was Jenna Bednar, Hilary Cottam, James Manyika, and Gillian Tett discussing what human flourishing looks like. You can learn more about this and other CASBS events by visiting our website at casbs.stanford.edu. Stanford.edu, or you can find us on Twitter. We're @CASBSStanford. As always, we'll have more CASBS Live events coming to the Human Centered feed and more original interviews exploring the work of fellows here at the center. So be sure you're subscribed in your podcast app of choice. You won't want to miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.