The Population of the UK explains the geographical differences in key socio-economic variables – like education, health, and work – that illustrate the UK’s stark social inequalities and how these affect everyone’s lives. Ludi Simpson thinks this book is commendably rich in quantitative evidence, although it has a subjective approach which emphasises human responsibility for maintaining or changing patterns of inequality.

The Population of the UK. Daniel Dorling. Sage. November 2012.

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Here is a tussle with social policy that will engage general readers, despite the exercises, key points and other aids characteristic of an undergraduate textbook. The Population of the UK is not a book of theory or methods, but an examination of spatial social patterns, that rails against inequality as much as it portrays it. In each chapter the reader is asked to consider maps and charts that show how people are socially sorted, with text that builds up a picture of unequal decisions and outcomes from cradle to grave. Our moves around the UK, as well as into and out of it, are shaped by our place and our jostling in this sorting, creating the human geography of Britain. This prolific author is a relatively young veteran of Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield and now Oxford Universities.

As one might expect from Danny Dorling’s track record, the chapter on inequality draws many of the strands together. “Literacy, numeracy and mortality distributions all closely follow these same geographical patterns” of high incomes and of poverty. Through bank records that include unearned incomes as well as wages, he charts patterns of wealth, finding that only in Central London does extreme poverty and wealth coincide in the same area.

While many authors would see public education as a great leveller, this book claims that examinations function to sort people in ways that last for the rest of their lives. Already by age 11 the Key Stage 2 tests sort children into sets, and more than half do not reach the grade 4 labelled as ‘doing well’. The examination system is organised to fail many and to pass some with flying colours that allow them to proceed to higher things, including higher incomes. Affluence is passed on from parent to child through educational support and through moving to areas with schools whose children are more likely to pass examinations. Nonetheless, the book provides a nuanced commentary, inviting us not only to recognise the stable geography of inequality that can be predicted from an early age, but also the deviations from it. Why does Merseyside West (and other mainly northern ex-industrial areas) do worse at GCSE than predicted at age 11, and why did children in Cornwall and coastal East Anglia do better? In this and sufficient other cases, the book does not provide answers, but leaves questions to consider.

Dorling demonstrates maps of teenage pregnancies that are the inverse of University entrants, and gives the education system in Britain a large responsibility for maintaining social sorting. “Current educational expectations and norms that are influencing so much else can be claimed to hold for many of the women who only have children later in life (or never at all). This is a group who are portrayed as having the most choices in life, but they often look, in aggregate, to have the least” (p. 27). For Dorling, social sorting determines the outcomes of the well-off just as much as the less well-off. Being ‘successful’ carries a lot of baggage too, and isn’t necessarily advantageous: “Poor education for the worst-off may breed complacency amongst the best-off. It is not hard to appear clever in countries where so many do so badly in education” (p. 95).

The lack of attention to academically popular debates may put off some seasoned academics. Where does the author stand on neighbourhood effects: is the persistent poverty of some places partly a result of their environment and aggregate social poverty, or simply the location of individuals who have been failed by the system? Perhaps it does not really matter to this book’s story; neighbourhood and individual effects are both consequences of systems that socially sort, resulting in the stark local inequalities described here. Systemic solutions involve social policies and moral aims that transcend the detail of their implementation through a balance of individual or neighbourhood investments.

Dorling asks his reader to consider how education would be different if it focused on teaching rather than sorting, with fewer graded examinations as he would clearly prefer. How does this affect the book itself? Each chapter has a conclusion, further reading, a key point summary. All its maps and charts are held as slides and data sheets at the book’s website. The chapters’ exercises are mostly group activities. Some require a large space (not a room with fixed seats); others demand role play in small groups, interaction between students or the creation of social policies (such as non-examined education). There are certainly no prescriptions for individual markable scripts, though no doubt someone practised at these could invent them as extensions to the exercises.

This is a book demanding action in a number of ways. It is commendably rich in quantitative evidence, but the author claims that it is not purely objective: he sets out his interpretation of the data in the context of his own railing against inequalities. The evidence is a call to arms against inequality’s human origins. We can do better, he says: just look at the abstentions in voting patterns. We can do better: which social policies would you pursue as an MP (or next time you vote for one)? We can do better: how will you use geographical data to help change people’s minds?

The 2011 census results were being released as the book was being published. They provide plenty of scope for students to check out and update Dorling’s social patterns of the UK. This is a book that encourages by example a do-it-yourself approach to data analysis in human geography, emphasising the analyst’s own responsibility to display evidence clearly, to openly construct interpretations of data, and to focus on human responsibility for maintaining or changing those patterns.

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Ludi Simpson’s demographic research has influenced understanding of race and migration and the use of demographic data in planning. He has been the president of the British Society of Population Studies for 2011-2013. Read more reviews by Ludi.

Justifying New Labour Policy. Judi Atkins. Palgrave Macmillan. April 2011.

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Under Ed Miliband’s leadership the Labour Party has begun to question its raison d’etre. Whether it even knows it is another matter. Today’s Labour Party is highly divided yet it is striving hard to appear united in the post-New Labour world. The divisions are highlighted with various colours and shades being co-opted to represent various ideological splinters. Black, Blue, Red, and Purple are just a few. Moreover, Next Labour, Reassurance Labour, New Generation Labour, Blue Labour, and now One Nation Labour have been thrown about as possible new directions for a party which increasingly looks uncertain about its identify.

New Labour provided something of an enforced stable environment for electoral gain at the expense of debates and divisions. Under such conditions, Labour members built up frustrations which have now begun to spill over, with only Socialist Labour appearing absent from the debate. Such was the victory of the Third Way that the Left are the Croslandite social democrats of old, and the Right now comfortable confirming a Disraelite tradition as Labour’s future.

In this environment it is unclear how the Labour Party will be able to present itself with a clear vision in 2015. With such an uncertain future this important and timely book looks again at domestic New Labour policy to see if it can lend the current generation ideological wisdom. Judi Atkins’ thematic approach and theoretical framework provide a thorough interrogation of various policies; these being welfare, the human rights act, anti-social behaviour, and the defining impact of the Iraq War upon the New Labour project. Texturing these is a repositioning of Labour as a force for moral individualism vis-à-vis “New Labour’s core concept of equal worth was decontested as the moral equality of all individuals, regardless of such contingent factors as their gender, age, ethnicity, or sexuality” (p.84).

The author rightly goes on to argue that such intellectual weight draws more from liberal than socialist traditions because of a clear rejection of equality of outcome in favour of equality of opportunity. This is hardly surprising given the declining influence of traditional socialism in the Labour Party, both at constituency and Parliamentary levels since 1982.

By applying such a philosophical perspective upon the four areas under review, the author argues that New Labour essentially ‘made work pay’ by providing social welfare for the price of genuine participation on the part of the individual. The perception of endless universalism would be replaced by a commitment from both sides (individual and state) that a role had to be played for social welfare to actually prove beneficial.

In terms of the human rights act, the author argues this was an attempt by New Labour to ensure the British citizenry benefitted from rights under the ECHR. To do this, incorporation into the UK’s legal system was seen as a fundamental part of ensuring British individual rights were in line with the European social democratic model.

Again with anti-social behaviour, individual responsibility was key. This negated more structural factors which may contribute, for which New Labour can be critiqued. Yet across these three domestic spheres the author emphasises the importance of the individual over the state, which to some extent became relegated.

The Iraq War stands apart in the book for its more distinctive character. This is because it was justified using a different part of New Labour ideology connected to the Blair Doctrine and the changing circumstances in international relations compelled by 9/11. The author argues that the Iraq War was for Blair justifiable and compatible with the Doctrine because it “echoed the enlightened notion of self-interest that underpinned New Labour’s conception of community” (p.163). Put simply, the individualism that underscored New Labour’s approach to domestic policy can legitimately be extended to the international community in a way that implies intervention. As a result, Britain was compelled to remove Saddam because he was a retardant element in ensuring those interests on the international stage. This is, of course, a matter of substantial debate yet the author argues this is how the Third Way interpreted international relations.

The book concludes that success in these arenas should be measured asymmetrically. Although many of the liberal undercurrents informed these areas, their success rates were by no means universal. Of those, the author argues that “perhaps the most successful of New Labour’s argumentative strategies was its case for the New Deals”, which aimed to alleviate social concerns in the UK. This suggests the New Deal may still have relevance for One Nation Labour. In the other areas the author suggests New Labour may have been less successful; however, given the defining nature of the Iraq War, it is singled out for its controversial impact. Indeed, the drive to war may have been informed more by ideology and less about military intelligence, which for the author undermined Blair’s credibility and with it the entire New Labour project. This makes any wholesale return to New Labour highly problematic in the current Labour Party, even if some of the ideas remain of value.

The strength of this book is certainly that it provides the current Labour Party with a clear moral argument for and against New Labour policy. The book also provides an appropriately objective assessment, even when discussing topics which politicians and commentators may themselves be passionate about. Such a disconnect is necessary for any academic book, and this certainly is neither sympathetic nor condemning of the material. Indeed, the book is thoroughly intellectually located and uses a valid research approach. However, a caveat must be the inclusion of the Iraq War. Whilst the author clearly makes a strong case for inclusion, it cannot be denied that the main focus of the book is on domestic policy. This presents the reader with a slightly left field step, justified only by the author connecting them ideologically. Had the book included a chapter on Sierra Leone, then it may have been more balanced in terms of its studies. However this should not detract from what is a highly interesting and valuable book for any scholar of British politics.

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Andrew Crines is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Huddersfield, specialising in oratorical and rhetorical analysis across British Politics. Dr Crines has written a monograph entitled ‘Michael Foot and the Labour Leadership’, and is currently editing a volume with Dr Richard Hayton (Huddersfield) on Oratory in the Labour Party. Read more reviews by Andrew.

Leslie Madsen-Brooks

This article was originally published on LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog.

I’ve heard that higher ed needs to be “disrupted” because it’s not cost efficient, it treats students as learners rather than customers, it’s risk-averse and unproductive, it values research over teaching, it doesn’t offer enough flexibility to adult learners, it’s too focused on prestige and credit hours instead of broad-based student competencies, it’s done a lousy job of using technology to expand affordable access to degrees, faculty spend too much classroom time lecturing and faculty act as if we should be exempt from the sweeping technological change that has upended the newspaper and music industries.

I’m not opposed to disruption; rather, I’m skeptical about the kind of disruption start-ups and tech folks promise: “paradigm-shifting” technology that improves university teaching and learning. The truth is, many of these start-ups clearly have no idea what actually works in higher ed and know little about the direction university teaching and learning have moved in the last 10 years, because they’re trying to take us backward, not forward. Start-up and commercial tech are certainly proving disruptive—just in all the wrong ways.

But this is a not (merely) a post complaining about bad technology. Instead I want to highlight the ways university faculty and staff are driving thoughtful technological innovation. These are people who intimately understand students’ needs and the faculty’s interests, tech skills and psychology. And although there are some acclaimed universities launching projects with the aim of spawning start-ups or transferring commercial technology to industry, I want to showcase a few projects that take the opposite track: they’re innovative, but they tend to rely on open source technologies, and their focus is on individual and collective empowerment of students and communities, rather than commercialization.

Those who have been paying attention only to partnerships among Silicon Valley companies and the Ivies may be surprised that the beating heart of a tremendous amount of academic technology innovation is a small state university in Fredericksburg, Virginia. At the University of Mary Washington, the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology has launched at least four amazing initiatives that should be replicated widely because it’s clear to even casual observers that they advance teaching and learning in myriad ways. For one, evidence of student learning appears on the open web, and I encourage you to check out the current blogs developed for courses. Faculty, too—and I know this from first-hand experience—benefit from knowing what students are thinking (as expressed in blog posts and comments) before they convene for class.

Several years ago, UMW’s DTLT premiered UMW Blogs, termed “the Bluehost experiment” by the DTLT staff because in its first iteration, it was little more than a WordPress Multi-User installation on an inexpensive ($6.95 per month) shared server at Bluehost. Today, any UMW student, faculty, or staff can set up a blog for class or personal use on UMW Blogs—and 500 courses have been brought onto the platform since fall 2008.  Anyone can browse the courses using UMW Blogs or discover all kinds of non-course blogs by exploring the latest posts featured on the home page. The UMW archives, for example, recently put online a series of lectures by the late civil rights leader James Farmer, and Jess Rigelhaupt’s Oral History class has created Rosie the Riveter, an excellent resource that includes “firsthand accounts of what people experienced on the American home front during World War II.”

Next to emerge from this innovation engine was DS 106, an open course on digital storytelling, originally taught by Jim Groom, but since taught by several different instructors, including noted ed tech thought leaders and innovators Martha Burtis and Alan Levine, and recently by instructors at other universities as well. Because of the strong networks of the instructors and students, DS 106 took on a life of its own, with students—both those enrolled at UMW and those following the course from elsewhere—providing daily fun assignments (“the Daily Create”) that stimulate participants’ creativity and stretch their technological savvy. DS 106 spawned ds106 radio, a free-form, streaming broadcast for which anyone could volunteer to provide content.  How popular is DS 106 and its apparently endless stream of creative multimedia content? In spring 2012, Groom launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a better web server for DS 106, and the campaign raised 600% of its goal in just a few days, providing funding for all kinds of course improvements and expansions.  While Kickstarter provided private funds for this project, I’m excited about this kind of crowdsourced funding—although I’d be even more enthusiastic about greater public funding—because it allows project creators greater future freedom than would, say, funding from investors whose motive is more likely to be profit than pedagogical revolution.

Springing next from the mind of the DTLT geniuses was Domain of One’s Own, in which each first-year student at UMW receives a domain name and space on a web server. The project encourages each student  to “reclaim the web” by “taking control of your digital identity,” gathering its artifacts “in a central place that you own and control.” And it’s offered in collaboration with the university’s Office of Information Technology Services:

The pilot gave 400 students and faculty their own domain name and web space to install a portfolio of work or map onto existing systems. In Fall of 2013 every incoming student at UMW will have the opportunity to choose their own domain and receive a web hosting account with the freedom to create subdomains, install any LAMP-compatible software, setup databases, email addresses and carve out their own space on the web that they own and control.

Then, as if granting students this creative freedom and technical autonomy wasn’t enough, this spring UMW launched Thinklab, a makerspace. According to its About page:

ThinkLab is the exciting new makerspace located in the Simpson Library at the University of Mary Washington. As a collaboration between the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, the College of Education, and the Library, ThinkLab hosts a variety of emerging technologies and tools for students and faculty across all disciplines. 3D printing, robotics, and electronics work using Arduinos and simple breadboard kits are just some of the many exciting things happening at ThinkLab.

The innovations and—yes, I’ll say it—disruptions, emerging from UMW exemplify some of the best practices in developing communities of learners, fostering collaboration, encouraging writing and reflection and developing curiosity about the world. Channeling George Kuh, Randall Bass emphasizes that such “high-impact practices” lead to “meaningful learning gains” as well as “high retention and persistence rates” because they encourage these specific behaviors:

• Investing time and effort
• Interacting with faculty and peers about substantive matters
• Experiencing diversity
• Responding to more frequent feedback
• Reflecting and integrating learning
• Discovering relevance of learning through real-world application

In an age when universities are pushing faculty ever harder to develop monetizable intellectual property, it’s refreshing to see faculty doubling down on using relatively inexpensive technologies to improve student learning. UMW is a case in point: it’s a modestly funded, small state university that, thanks to all the active minds (and periodic strategic hires) at DTLT and on the faculty, has become a major hub of innovation in higher education. It joins other cutting-edge departments and programs launched by other Virginia institutions, including the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab and the Virginia Center for Digital History, as well as George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, whose staff and fellows have created not only a lot of terrific curricular resources, but also Zotero, Omeka, ScholarPress,PressForward, and the globally popular THATCamp. It’s amazing how much scholars, programmers and others have accomplished in such a short time—and all without spinning off start-ups as seems to be so fashionable in higher education today.

This is the kind of disruption I’d like to see at more universities, especially out here in the Intermountain West, Pacific Northwest and Great Basin. That’s going to be difficult because, in Idaho at least, we aren’t developing or attracting people with the programming training to do this kind of work. Still, we can go a long way using inexpensive but high-quality, open-source tools.  And in fact, in my teaching, I have relied on a number of open-source tools, including WordPress and LocalWiki, and (to a lesser extent) Sakai, an increasingly robust alternative to the unwieldy course management system Blackboard. I require my students to create digital products and imagine new digital services they might provide, and I teach them about Creative Commons and the public domain.

I admit I feel a good deal of pride that this movement toward open source, open access learning founded on creative uses of inexpensive technologies is driven by digital humanists, faculty, librarians and academic technologists—including some people who manage to occupy all of those fields simultaneously. If you follow any of these innovators on Twitter or read their blogs, you can see their conversations and collaborations unfold, illustrating, as Scott Leslie points out, that disruption emerges from networks that enable open learning. Their collaborations and projects are excellent case studies of why Jon Boeckenstedt’s term “punctuated equilibrium” makes more sense than “disruption” when discussing changes in the digital landscape of higher ed.

I’m no detractor of entrepreneurship; I encourage my public history graduate students to make their own way in the world, and if I wasn’t so busy with my faculty responsibilities, I’d dabble in it myself. But what if, instead of investing so much time, effort and money in start-ups, MOOCs, lecture capture, unwieldy learning management systems, overzealous intellectual property protections and the like, we redoubled our efforts in open access, open learning and open source? These are the efforts that would prove truly disruptive of business-as-usual at the university.

Of course, I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. Aaron Bady muses on what makes a good MOOC (hint: it’s open and free), and then points out that what most folks are talking about when they invoke “disruption” is a further corporatization of the university:

So I want to shift the debate a bit. [Clay] Shirky thinks in terms of “disruption” and what can come of it, in theory. I think in terms of what the “disruption” of the University of California system looks like in practice, as a complex of politicians, financiers, and career administrators move in lock-step to transform it into a self-sufficient corporate entity, and to enrich private industry in the bargain. I see a group of decision-makers who quite manifestly do not know what they are talking about and who barely try to disguise it, for whom “online” is code word for privatization. If I am against MOOC’s, I am against the way “MOOC” is being experienced in California, in practice: as an excuse to cheapen education and free the state budget from its responsibility to educate its citizenry.

There’s little need to hire Udacity or Coursera or any other ed tech company to disrupt higher education because faculty and staff representing key nodes in the network are already evolving the theory and practice of teaching, learning, research and outreach in ways that are incredibly productive, if not always recognized. Take a moment to explore some of the projects and networks I’ve discussed here and then ask yourself: who exactly is so invested in interrupting this productive disruption, and why? Why are universities considering spending $2 million to affiliate with a MOOC provider, when tremendous faculty creativity and the $6.95 Bluehost experiment are at hand?

This was first posted at The Blue Review, Boise State University’s journal of popular scholarship, and is republished with permission.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School of Economics.  

About the Author

Dr. Leslie Madsen-Brooks joined the Department of History at Boise State University in 2010 as an Assistant Professor. She came to Boise State with a broad backgroundincluding work in American, museum, and technocultural studies, culminating with a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis.

Has the Eurozone crisis undermined Europe’s place in the world? In an interview with EUROPP’s editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson,

This article was originally published on LSE’s EUROPP blog.

In your view, what is the root cause of the Eurozone crisis?

I have great respect and great admiration for the project that is European integration. That respect comes not from the notion that we should all get together and create some sort of ‘super-state’, but from the foundational elements that drove the project: the belief in law and the belief in non-military solutions. But there is one big qualifier to that respect, which is that when the push to accelerate the adoption of the euro was taking place it was driven by corporations. The big winners from the euro were the big corporations who could become bigger and who could enter the global economic space more effectively. The ones that suffered were the smaller firms connected to subnational and regional markets.

Credit: Ash Violette (CC BY 2.0)

Now, I’m not against having an integrated currency – certainly for me, as someone who travels all over Europe, it’s fantastic – but the problem was the rush. I remember the debates that there was supposedly no way we could do it. Well, we got it done. Why? Because enormously powerful corporate interests were behind it and when they want to get something done, by God they get it done. The fact that most of these national economies are constituted by small enterprises, regional markets, and localised production – that was simply overlooked. And now I think we’re paying the price for that.

There are, of course, other issues that come into the picture. One is that by integrating on the continental scale, and by having a single currency, it became much more worthwhile for finance – which is very different from banking – to do its thing. If we still had separate national currencies then central banks sitting on top of the situation tightly would have prevented the scale-up that makes it worthwhile for global finance. When you have that level of integration, finance moves in and finance ‘financialises’.

Finance is not about money: if you take outstanding derivatives, which are the basic measure of the value of finance, then it’s several times larger than global GDP. Finance is extraordinarily disruptive and part of the issue right now is not the lack of discipline in Eurozone economies. It’s not even the lack of responsibility displayed by national governments. It’s the financialisation of everything. The situation in Greece, where we suddenly had financial markets betting against the country is, to me, criminal conduct.

Given the economic problems in the Eurozone, is the European Union’s relevance for the rest of the world diminishing?

I’ve always thought that if the European Union had been wise it would have incorporated Turkey. Turkey no longer wants to join – it’s arguably a far more dynamic economy than the European Union at this point – but it would have been wise to bring them into the project. It would have brought in a Muslim population which is incredibly enlightened. Turkish academics, for instance, are in my opinion among the best. I think that was a missed opportunity to create a bridge into the part of the Muslim world that is closest to Europe.

However I still believe that European integration matters. It matters for the world as one powerful zone that stands for solving problems with negotiation and diplomacy. Europeans know about diplomacy; the only diplomacy the United States recognises is having the biggest guns. So losing the European Union would be a real pity for world geopolitics, much more so than from an economic perspective.

In the last decade European cities, such as Paris and London, have experienced rioting. How should we understand these acts of public disorder?

When I see this happen my first move is to step out of the current language about ‘riots’, or the descriptions of the Occupy movement, which is mostly seen as slightly useless or even destructive because it doesn’t have a party or a programme attached to it. I think we need to step back from these types of descriptions in order to understand whether something is happening that actually matters. The key question for me, as an academic and a theorist, is: do the powerless make history? And if the answer is yes, then do they make history without becoming empowered?

If you look at how we’ve usually handled the question of powerlessness, we’ve typically viewed it as if we are powerless by default, but if something positive happens then we become empowered. I argue that in between these two conditions there are a vast number of invisible histories involving people who were powerless, but nevertheless made a history which has remained invisible because they did not become empowered. Becoming empowered makes it visible. But I find that under certain conditions powerlessness can become complex and in that complexity lies the possibility of making history, or achieving political aims in a different way, even if one does not become empowered. These moments may be points in a trajectory that is multi-generational. Think of the civil rights movement in the US, which took a century or more, or women’s struggle for the vote. I do not want to lose these moments that are perhaps a stepping stone towards something that makes a difference.

Tottenham during the London riots (Credit: Nico Hogg, CC BY 2.0)

So when I look at these riots and uprisings, I ask whether this is the politics of those without power. They know that if they try and engage with parliaments directly to get a law changed they won’t get anywhere, so these movements are other ways in which the powerless can acquire a political voice. In Paris, in the Banlieues, it’s been recognised for a while that the only language in which you can become visible to the media and the rest of society is if you go burn a few cars. So that’s what happens. It’s a kind of urban violence which acts as a form of communication.

However I think the riots in London were a bit different from the Occupy movements. The riots in London were also connected to middle class disappointment with the failure of the liberal state, as are the Occupy movements. To elaborate on this, the liberal state’s social contract has always been with the middle class and what we’ve seen is that the social contract with this particular generation has been broken by the neo-liberal politics of privatisation, spending cuts and austerity.

So I see in the riots in London an inarticulate version that does not function as a form of communication as it does in the Occupy movements, but rather uses its body: it’s the somatising of politics. They want material objects, they want to become consumers, their bodies become the instrument and they enter shops to take what they want/need.

This is really more like looting than a political movement, but that is one extreme end of the scale and at the other end you have occupying with its far more substantive social agenda. That agenda is about the traditional middle class being confronted with a situation in which the state is failing them: they played by the rules of the game, they took education seriously, they perhaps gained a university degree, and yet there are no jobs. Now I don’t deny that the London riots in particular were an ambiguous situation – they did many things which were reprehensible – but there is that other dimension where they are actually part of this history in the making. And my main point here is that even though they are not empowered, they can still make history.

You’ve developed the concept of ‘global cities’: places that act as bridges between vast emerging global markets and national economies. How should we view global cities in Europe and their links with the rest of the world?

The global city is a kind of structural hole in the tissue of national economies, national societies, and national territories. Each global city is highly individual and highly specialised, but that’s largely gone under the radar of commentators because when you look at the consumer side of these economies, which is more easy to understand and see, there is an enormous amount of standardisation. Further, when you look at the visual order of the renovated city centers you find that state of the art financial centres, state of the art airports, and luxurious residential and commercial districts all have a high degree of standardisation… yes, on the luxury vector! No matter how imaginative the architects are, no matter the details they incorporate into the buildings to make them look different, you can smell that standardised, state of the art environment.

Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt (Credit: Gizmo23, CC BY 2.0)

That has then led to the assumption that the economies of these cities are also becoming more homogeneous. However in my research I find that what globalisation has pushed is an increased specialisation of different capacities across cities. Take Europe: London is a very different type of financial centre from Paris and Frankfurt, and further, from New York and Shanghai, and so on. And yet all of these cities are radically different. If you look at the United States, there are two major global financial centres, Chicago and New York, and they are radically different – even though the state of the art environments which have been built in both cities have the same technical elements. This holds for all top-level financial centres. China has four major financial centres that are all radically different. And this involves not only finance but also the specialised services – everything that involves the firm-to firm economy at the top corporate level. Specialised lawyering and creative accounting also tends to specialise around diverse sectors – it can handle heavy manufacturing and global logistics in Chicago and in Shanghai, in New York and Beijing. So when it comes to the global city function – separate from the larger social and cultural milieu of a city – you can’t really generalise at the continental level and draw a distinction between European global cities and those in the United States or Asia. Each of these cities has a specialised, unique function that they provide to global markets which no other city can provide.

Now the global function of these cities is only one part of the city. London is many cities, and within it exists that global function: a completely specialised function that operates in multiple global circuits, where most of the consumer markets – the art world, the insurance market and so on – don’t participate. So if we’re talking about cities overall, then of course there are similarities, but we can’t generalise about these cities in terms of what they mean for the global economy. What matters to the global economy is the intermediate sector: not the consumer end of the economy, but the ‘firm to firm’ economy where businesses do business with each other. It is in this world of ‘firm to firm’ where you pick up on the extraordinary importance that the specialised differences of these cities have for global markets, global firms, and governments – who also use those capabilities.

You’ve recently written on the issue of surveillance. Do you think that the rights of citizens, both inside and outside of Europe, are potentially threatened by security measures aimed at dealing with terrorism?

Surveillance is one of the issues I’ve been working on recently, but this is not small-scale surveillance such as CCTV cameras or traffic cameras – which, to me, is relatively fine if it helps prevent crime or killing cyclists. I am concerned about something very different: a transnational system of surveillance which spans several countries.

The United States is the most extreme of these countries and is setting the norm for this system. Over the last ten years, as part of the war on terror, the United States has developed a surveillance system that consists of over 10,000 massive buildings that store a vast technical apparatus for surveillance and gathering data about people and organisations. It employs almost a million people with top level secret clearance, including at least 260,000 private firms. These firms hire foreign talent, which is one part of this that I find particularly interesting because it completely transnationalises and denationalises this world of top secret clearance.

Now what is the logic behind this? The logic is that for our security – and by this we really mean to prevent terrorist attacks – every citizen has to be considered, by the logic of that system, a suspect. And all of this surveillance exists simply to get at the handful of individuals within a given year who could actually be terrorists. This raises two issues. First, in this kind of system, who are we the citizens? Are we the new colonials? Do we have to be monitored and taught how to be civilised? Second, we have this huge surveillance superstructure to get at a few individuals who are real threats, and then we still have what happened in Boston. They now have a massive amount of data that they’ve collected on everybody; yet at the same time they’re not doing intelligence in the old fashioned way. So the key issue is who really benefits from this? The answer is the corporations who are involved in making and upgrading this technological apparatus.

So the surveillance issue is not this obsession that exists in the UK about small-scale surveillance and the retention of personal details – we are already so mapped by online technology like Facebook, Twitter and Google that this hardly matters. Rather as one person put it, it’s that we are a ‘turn key’ state: we haven’t yet turned the key, but all the elements are in place.

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Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.

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About the author

Saskia Sassen – Columbia University
Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. She also was a Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and has just returned as a Research Fellow in Destin. Her publications include Cities in a World Economy (4th ed, Sage 2011), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), and The Global City (2001, 2nd ed).

This article was originally published on LSE’s EUROPP blog.

France is not only one of the founding members of the European Community, but also one of the main drivers of the integration process. However, this does not necessarily mean that France has systematically allowed the erosion of its political identity as a result of European integration. In fact, it has done the opposite. France’s attitude regarding the position of the French language in the EU is a good example of its savoir-faire. Since the early years of the Community, France’s strategy for safeguarding its language has focused solely on adopting measures aimed at promoting the language or strengthening the privileged position it previously enjoyed in the institutional arena.

Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Public Domain)

The main challenge to this privileged position came in 1973 with the accession of the United Kingdom, as well as Ireland and Denmark. In addition to concerns about the French language losing its importance on the European stage as a result of English becoming an official Community language, this first enlargement brought with it a proposal to reform the EU language regime. Interestingly enough, the proposal for reform did not come from the states in which French and English were spoken, but from one with a minority language in the Community: Denmark.

On its entry into the Community, Denmark proposed not to use its national language, Danish, in an effort to help reduce the number of official Community languages to just two – English and French – thus streamlining institutional functioning. To avoid favouring native speakers of these languages, the only condition put forward by Denmark was that French members spoke English and English members spoke French. However, both the United Kingdom and France rejected this proposal, which is altogether surprising, especially in the French case, since the measure would have involved legally recognising the predominant role of the French language that France had been advocating up until that point. Opposition from the Italians and Dutch also influenced the stance of the French. However, from a rational standpoint, France’s refusal can be understood because if it accepted the criterion of functionality as an excuse for reducing the number of languages ​​to two, this same criterion could be used in the future to suppress French permanently, leaving English as the single working language.

Rejection of the Danish proposal also implied validation of the safeguarding strategy for the French language that France had adopted up to then. In fact, after the addition of English as an official language of the European Community, France continued to implement institutional measures to protect and promote French, by creating organisations to defend the French language. An example of this approach was the establishment in 1979 of the Comité pour la langue de l’Europe. This committee had two, somewhat conflicting, objectives. On the one hand, it defended “the development of all European languages in all countries within the Community, without giving preference to English” and, on the other, it suggested that the European Community have a single official language: French.

Despite the progressive deterioration of the privileged position of French in the European Union, this was not a critical issue until 1992, which was the turning point after which French began to give way to English as the main lingua franca of the EU. This situation triggered the development of an urgent strategy to rescue French, based on the joint promotion of French and multilingualism. The aim of this policy was to curb the threat to French and the other languages, which had been clearly identified in various French institutional documents.

However, a mere change of mentality does not necessarily imply the adoption of policy measures to safeguard the language in the European context. It was also necessary to create a policy framework for action that would result in policy decision-making aimed at defending linguistic diversity and, by extension, the French language. Moreover, these decisions had to be supported by the other Member States; something extremely difficult to achieve if we consider that the strategy to defend diversity was driven almost exclusively by French interests. In Europe, this policy framework was defined by the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. The Treaty introduces two essential elements that facilitate the new French strategy: a reference to linguistic diversity and the principle of subsidiarity, which stipulates that “the Community shall take action… only if and in so far as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can therefore… be better achieved by the Community”.

Thus, as the introduction of subsidiarity meant an extension of the competencies of Member States, it also ensured that the rest of the Member States supported the safeguarding of linguistic diversity advocated by France. This strategy has been unsuccessful, however, judging by the relentless advance of English as the supranational language of communication since the introduction of the principle of subsidiarity up to the present day. In fact, the current stance of French political leaders and academics suggests certain dissatisfaction with the results of the strategy initiated in 1992. Perhaps it is this dissatisfaction that, in recent years, has led to France adopting measures aimed at consolidating the position of the French language in an area in which it still enjoys a clear privilege in comparison to other official languages: the legal sphere.

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Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.

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About the author

David Fernández Vítores - Universidad Complutense, Madrid
David Fernández Vítores is a researcher in the project The economic value of the Spanish Language: Challenges and Opportunities and a Lecturer at the Complutense University. He has published in the Journal of Language and Politics and other academic journals and is the author of several books (in Spanish) including: The Europe of Babel (2011), and The Multilingual Europe (2010). His work focuses on the role of language as a political instrument in international relations. His latest book, Spanish Language in International Relations (2012) can be downloaded here.

How am I supposed to lead these lot?
(photo credit: Guillaume Paumier, CC-BY)

Phil from A Very Public Sociologist blog discusses one overlooked aspect of UKIP’s rise: the core of their support consists of old men uncomfortable with the pace of social change and evolving gendered identities. Unsurprisingly then, “UKIP’s whole populist platform is sharp cornered and macho.”

Laurie Penny explains in The Guardian how “society’s unwillingness to let go of the tired old ‘breadwinner’ model of masculinity contributes” to the distress that is undoubtedly being felt by men. 

Danny Dorling, writing for the New Statesman, explains ‘How social mobility got stuck‘ in the UK.

Chris Dillow of the Stumbling and Mumbling blog digs out what Adam Smith actually thought about immigration from the legendary thinker’s writings.

Since its creation the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), or ‘Nudge Unit’, has received a lot of attention. Fêted both in the media and by the Prime Minister for its innovative, primarily experimental, approach to policy-making, BIT recently ran into its first scandal when The Guardian newspaper claimed its innovations to Jobcentre Plus procedures involved forcing job-seekers to undertake ‘bogus psychometric tests’ in order to boost their psychological resilience. The story raises some interesting questions about the ethical limits of libertarian paternalism. Is it acceptable for government to deceive us if it is for our own good? And, can we trust that a nudge is a helping hand and not a shove in the back?

Libertarian paternalism is a novel reformulation of the enlightenment project which simultaneously rejects and reaffirms the notion of human perfectability. Unlike Marxism for instance, where a rationally organised utopia is predicated on a rational transformation of human nature, libertarian paternalism rejects the perfectability of individual humans and instead proposes that the clever design of the right ‘choice architecture’ can harness the imperfections of individuals – their irrationality, their inertia and so on – to fulfil the promise of a more rational society. Such a philosophy inevitably raises the questions of who are the choice architects, what is their rational project and what is the basis of their legitimacy to implement it? In this case of psychometric testing, the answer to the first question is simple: BIT.

Question two is more difficult. The stated agenda is ‘helping people back into work‘, but there are some unstated objectives too, for instance, optimising Jobcentre Plus processes, and reducing government spending on out-of-work benefits. The third question is more difficult still and it is difficult to see a sound basis for legitimately deceiving people into taking psychometric tests to boost their psychological resilience.

One potential basis for legitimacy is the consequentialist argument: does it work? If the tests inculcated greater psychological resilience, which led to the job-seekers finding employment, then they are justified. The BIT trial achieved quite impressive results; the treatment group was 15-20% more likely to find work than the control group – quite an achievement when compared with the derisory, worse-than-doing-nothing performance of the expensive Work Programme. However, there are some notable difficulties with interpreting the effects of the randomised control trial (RCT) for this intervention. First, four interventions were tested simultaneously – the equivalent of simultaneously giving a patient four different drugs in a medical trial – so it is impossible to know whether the psychological resilience element works. Second, it is doubtful that this effect would be scalable given the effect size measured by the RCT occurs in a partial equilibrium and full implementation would create a general equilibrium effect. Scalability is a common problem with RCTs in social policy, and an important consideration in assessing whether an RCT is an appropriate test for an intervention, which is missing from BIT’s guide to RCTs.

‘What works’ has become something of a sacred mantra in policy circles since the Blair years, and recently reached its rhetorical apogee in the proposal for ‘what works’ centres for evidence in social policy. However, the resurgence of this naïve belief in ‘scientific government’ – outmoded in the social sciences since the failure of the US Great Society Programmes of 1960s – does little to resolve our ‘legitimacy of deception’ conundrum. A world view that posits the policy maker as scientist, society as her laboratory and citizens as her unwitting lab rats is anathema to a generation of researchers raised on the importance of ethical reflection and informed consent. Ever since Kant the notion of respect for the moral autonomy of persons has arguably been the bedrock of Western morality, and any policy that does not respect this autonomy – whether it works or not – is unlikely to command legitimacy.

That a nudge should respect, or even promote, individuals’ moral autonomy is a useful principle for judging its legitimacy. This would not prohibit all nudges; such a principle is compatible with forcing citizens to choose whether or not to become an organ donor, for instance. Thaler and Sunstein, in their bestselling book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, draw on this Kantian tradition in order to draw the boundaries of libertarian paternalism and reject invidious nudges like subliminal advertising. They call for transparency in the use of nudges and argue for a Rawlsian ‘publicity principle’: that government should not adopt any policy it would be unwilling to defend in public. I would go further: nudges, especially those that rely on deception or concealment, should be subject to a ‘participatory principle’.

Nudges may be publicly justified as in citizens’ best interests, however; Foucault has written extensively on how the modern state manifests its authority in concern for the population and the optimisation of its health, wealth and happiness, utilising this to justify the regulation of citizens’ conduct. Interpreted in the light of the Foucaultian notion of ‘subjectification’, the nudge becomes a disciplinary technology through which citizens’ actions are policed by their own unconscious selves, and it is by this process that government is accomplished through the agency of the governed. With our psychometric testing example, the intervention is couched in terms of helping people back into work (a laudable aim), but it also targets a key government policy of reducing expenditure on unemployment. This is representative of the subjectified nature of current debates on unemployment which are framed in terms of a problem of agency among the unemployed rather than as, say, a structural problem of lack of employment opportunities. As such, it is only government through the agency of the unemployed that can remedy budget deficits.

Separating the interests of citizens from the interests of the state is not a simple task. BIT may be trying to promote citizens’ health, wealth and happiness, but its existence rests on raising/saving money for the Treasury – it has to save at least ten times what is spent on funding the Team. Nudges may be justified as the altruistic acts of a beneficent government department, but whether they are in fact in citizens’ own interests should be properly scrutinised. There is only one authority that can legitimately rule on what is in citizens own interests: citizens themselves. Therefore, the publicity principle is not sufficient and, if we are to abide by our long-held moral intuitions regarding respect for the moral autonomy of persons, there should be greater exploration around how to involve the public in decisions about the applications of libertarian paternalism. Citizens themselves should judge whether they think a nudge is a helping hand or a shove in the back. There is of course something of a paradox in predicating the use of techniques that can shape the way the public thinks on what the public thinks of them and, it should go without saying, the public should not be nudged into consenting to nudges.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.

About the Author

Rikki Dean is a doctoral student in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. His research explores the role of public participation in the policy process. He tweets at @Rikki_Dean.

In a recent paper forthcoming in Environment and Planning A, I have demonstrated that it is possible to predict local property price effects of new transport infrastructures using established urban economics approaches. I have also argued that such predictions can help improve planning. Property price effects reflect the valuation of location by residents and as such provide an additional source of valuation that can complement traditional cost-benefit analyses. Perhaps more importantly, I believe that this approach allows forecasting potential sources of revenues that could contribute the infrastructure funding. Here is how my argument works:

It is uncontroversial that good transport infrastructure is essential for the functioning of cities. Improvements in the urban transport system are typically associated with large benefits. As an example, a new transit line can reduce travel times between various pairs of locations and free up commuting time for which there is better use – be it for work or leisure. Moreover, the additional capacities may reduce congestion and increase the comfort of journeys not only along new sections, but along the entire network.

Obviously, the areas close to new infrastructure benefit the most. There is plenty of evidence that the opening of new metrorail stations significantly increases property prices in the adjoining neighbourhood. This is because buyers value the infrastructure and, all else being equal, are willing to pay higher prices. Owners of properties that receive a better connection to a transport network, thus, not only benefit from improved access to transport services, but also from an increase in the value of their typically largest asset: their property.

But where there are winners, there are typically also losers. For one thing, regional and local transport projects are often financed, at least in part, using national funds. This implies that money from taxpayers is used even though they will have little or no benefit from the local infrastructure. Also, whilst renters on the private rental market benefit from new transport opportunities, at the same time they suffer from increases in market rent. If the increase in market rent is driven by renters with a higher willingness to pay for proximity to a rail station, the associated rent increase will more than compensate the renter tenant for the increase in accessibility. The true beneficiary, obviously, is the local landlord who cashes in on the higher market rent.

One could argue that these imbalances call for an adjustment mechanism that reduces the fraction of tax money coming from taxpayers who hardly benefit from a project and instead charges those who benefit the most: local landlords. To be fair to owner-occupiers who haven’t voted for a new rail station, such compensations could be levied when properties are sold, which is when the asset gain materializes. The methods to empirically separate property price effects of transport infrastructure improvements from other factors that affect property prices are, by now, established tool-sets in urban economics. Also, the idea to charge local landlords for wealth increases that result publicly financed programmes is not new. As an example, in German urban renewal areas landlords are taxed for the increase in land value caused by public money spent on local improvements in infrastructure and building maintenance.

My point is that we can take the whole argument about property price effects and compensations one step further. If it were possible to predict such property price effects during the planning stage of, say, a transport project, the revenues of such schemes could be taken into account in the financing scheme. In times of notoriously scarce public funds, such extra revenues could make a difference when socially desirable projects are at the margin of being financially viable.

Predicting such property price effects, however, is not exactly straightforward. Take, again, the example of an addition of a new line to an existing metrorail network. Clearly, prices don’t go up mechanically around new stations, but the effects depend on where a new station is located within the network, the availability of existing nearby stations and the attractiveness of alternative transport modes. On top of that, prices also tend to rise along the existing network if the new line leads to new interchange opportunities. The theoretically attractive feature of the model I have proposed is that it deals with all of these challenges. To test how well the model does in predicting price effects in practice, I’ve run a simulation for the 1999 extension of the London Underground and Dockland Light Railway network (see Figure 1) and compared the predictions to the actual price changes. The encouraging result was that prices, on average across all affected locations, adjusted almost one to one to the predictions.

Figure 1: Predicted property price effects of the 1999 London Underground and Dockland Light Railway extension.

Notes: New (old) network sections are in red (grey). 

Coming back to the idea of using compensations from benefiting landlords to fund ambitious transport projects: Would the amount that could have been levied from landlords have amounted to a substantial contribution to the London underground and DLR extension in question? Well, the total predicted impact in 1999 prices was £716 million. While this would not have been enough to fully fund the £3.5 billion project it is important to note that this figure is for residential property only. Moreover, it not only excludes increases in value of non-residential properties, but also increased revenues from property tax. Still the amount seems far from negligible.

My conclusion is that some projects that are needed but difficult to realise may not turn out to be as unaffordable as they initially seem once the wealth effects to local landlords are taken into account. I have proposed a tool that allows predicting property price effects during the planning stage. In light of the undisputed benefits transport infrastructures bring to neighbourhoods and cities I argue that it is at least worth considering the potential for contributions by landlords before dismissing a project due to lack of funds.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.

About the author

Dr. Gabriel Ahlfeldt joined the Department of Geography and Environment in October 2009 as a Lecturer in Urban Economics and Land Development. Dr. Ahlfeldt is an Affiliate of the Spatial Economics Research Centre (SERC) and an associate of the Centre for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin. His research concentrates on the effect of large transport projects and architectural developments on local house prices, local political preferences and urban structure. This article is drawn from: Ahlfeldt, G. M. (in press). If we build it, will they pay? Predicting property price effects of transport innovations. Environment and Planning A.

Opinion is divided on shale gas. Depending on who you speak to, shale gas is either an energy game changer, heralding a new age of cheap energy, cleaner air and prosperity; or an environmental catastrophe that threatens to accelerate global warming and pollute water supplies.  However, in a recent report by the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, we have urged a more level-headed approach.

In the report we argue that the UK should use natural gas, including shale gas, to help decarbonise its power sector by replacing coal over the next few years, but should not assume that its price will be low. Enthusiasm for natural gas to play a much bigger role in electricity generation, based on an assumption that shale gas discoveries will make natural gas cheap and plentiful, is likely to be misplaced and a renewed ‘dash for gas’ is a risky option for the UK.

A lower risk option is a ‘dash’ for smart gas, where natural gas is used judiciously in those areas where it offers the greatest contribution to decarbonising the power sector. This means that in the short term gas-fired power plants should be used to replace ‘dirtier’ coal ones, while in the medium to long term their role should be limited to balancing supply from increasing amounts of intermittent renewables, like wind and solar, or expanded only of they are fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology

A number of facts bring us to this conclusion. First, natural gas will continue to play an important role in the UK energy mix over the coming decades, for both heating and electricity generation. Should gas prices fall, for example as a consequence of increasing worldwide supply of gas from unconventional sources, there could be positive consequences for the UK economy.

Second, low gas prices are not guaranteed and there are large uncertainties around future price forecasts. Several estimates, including by the International Energy Agency, indicate that gas prices in the UK and European Union are more likely to increase than fall over the next two decades (see table 1 below).

Third, extensive deployment of gas-fired power stations would not be consistent with the UK’s carbon reduction targets, unless it is accompanied by the widespread introduction of CCS technology in the next decade or two. In the short run, the UK’s emissions can be reduced by replacing coal-fired power stations with those fuelled by natural gas, which emit less than half the carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour compared with coal-fired plants. But in the medium to long term, a heavy reliance on gas-fired power stations with unabated emissions would prevent the decarbonisation of the UK’s power sector.

Fourth, there is great uncertainty around the actual amount of shale gas that can be commercially extracted in the UK. The latest available estimates suggest that shale gas could, at best, make up for the decreasing domestic supplies of natural gas, but will not be sufficient to render the UK free from the need to import natural gas (see Figure 1). The UK gas market is likely to remain largely driven by wholesale prices charged by foreign gas suppliers. The effect of shale gas production on household and business electricity bills could therefore be limited. Furthermore, in the short term, establishing a shale gas industry will face infrastructure challenges similar to those experienced by other new technologies, such as renewables. This means that the shale gas industry could take a couple of decades to reach maturity in the UK, and its scale could be constrained not only by resource availability and costs, but also by issues such as planning and public acceptability.

Figure 1. Future UK supply and demand

Fifth, investment in complementary technologies, such as CCS and flexibility measures to accommodate intermittent renewables, will be essential to ensure that future UK electricity generation is consistent with emissions targets. In particular, it is important to find out as soon as possible whether gas-fired power stations fitted with CCS can become economically viable within the next decade or so.

In sum, natural gas will continue to be important during the transition to a low-carbon electricity system. But if the UK is to meet its carbon targets in a least-cost way, there is only a limited window for baseload generation from gas-fired power plants with unabated emissions, during which time it should replace coal. Gas can only play a more significant role beyond the 2020s if CCS technology is deployed on a commercial scale.

Current government thinking, most notably the UK Gas Generation Strategy, does not appear to have fully acknowledged these challenges. In particular, the Strategy’s central scenario builds on the assumption that by 2030 the carbon intensity of the power sector will be twice as high as the level recommended by the Committee on Climate Change in the fourth carbon budget (50g/kWh). More dangerously, the Strategy’s recommendation that ‘gas could play a more extensive role should the fourth carbon budget be revised upwards’ could jeopardise the UK achieving its mandatory emissions targets at least cost.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.

About the Author

Samuela Bassi is a Policy Analyst at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This article is based on policy brief: A UK dash for smart gas.     

Paul Whiteley

The chart below shows student enrolments in higher education in three subject areas in the OECD or advanced industrial countries in 2010, with Britain and the United States identified separately. The data refer to the percentage of students enrolled in higher education who study science, engineering and also social science, business and law. The latter category is rather broad but the UNESCO data does not allow a finer distinction to be made between these subjects. The data are very relevant to the debate about the importance of science and technology as opposed to the arts, humanities and social science in stimulating investment and growth in Britain.

Source: UNESCO.

The conventional wisdom, shared by politicians from all major parties, is that science and engineering have a unique role in promoting economic growth and therefore Britain should give these subjects special treatment. The Campaign for Science and Engineering, the chief lobbying organisation for the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) puts it like this:

Our mission is to raise the political profile of science and engineering. We passionately believe in the economic and cultural importance of scientific and technological education and development, and the vital need for the funding of this research by Government and industry.

Their lobbying has been highly effective, since it persuaded the coalition government to exempt the STEM subjects when it decided to withdraw all financial support for teaching in universities, effectively privatising this aspect of their activities.

Do the STEM subjects stimulate growth? The answer is no more than any of the other subjects taught in universities. I have argued elsewhere that higher education makes a considerable contribution to economic growth in countries like Britain, but there is no evidence to suggest that the STEM subjects provide an additional boost to growth on top of investments in universities in general. The chart reinforces this point, since it shows that Britain does not in fact under-invest in science and technology in comparison with our competitors, and if anything the STEM subjects are rather generously treated in this country.

Britain had a larger percentage of students enrolled in science than the average for twenty-six OECD countries in 2010 for which the data is available. It also has a higher enrolment in science and engineering than does the United States, which is commonly regarded as a power house of technological innovation. Despite this, average rates of growth have been lower in Britain than in the OECD countries over the years. If anything the evidence suggests that Britain under-invests in social science, business studies and law in comparison with other OECD countries.

There is one sense in which Britain does lag behind our competitors, and that is in relation to the size of higher education relative to the population. In 2010 the UK enrolled 4,049 students per 100,000 people in higher education.  This compares with an average enrolment of 4,599 in the OECD countries and 6,673 in the United States. This means that Britain under-invests in higher education in general and since it plays a key role in stimulating growth, this is a very unwise policy in the long run. Unfortunately, this state of affairs is getting worse, since enrolments increased by 9 per cent on average in the OECD countries between 2007 and 2010 and by only 4.9, in Britain. In the United States they increased by a staggering 15 per cent over this period.

Investment in higher education is an important indicator of the effectiveness of a government’s response to the economic tsunami which has hit the industrial world since 2007. Many OECD countries including the US are keen to invest heavily in universities so that the educated labour force is there to aid recovery once the worst of the crisis is over.  In contrast the British government has tripled undergraduate fees, done nothing about the crisis in post-graduate funding, and cracked down on overseas students which are an invaluable lifeline to universities at the present time.

This short sighted response by the UK government has happened in part because the STEM lobby has divided support for a campaign of investment in higher education in the past, believing that they can successfully go it alone. This is a foolish policy since big science projects such as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are becoming prohibitively expensive and therefore more vulnerable to cuts in the future. But there is also the point that the social sciences have not fought their corner effectively in the past. However, the work done by various professional associations including the PSA and the Academy of Social Sciences to draw attention to the importance of social science is now helping to remedy this situation. But social scientists themselves have to join in too. If they don’t challenge arguments that the best way to promote growth in Britain is to scrap employment rights and drive down wages, as opposed to investing in higher education, then they have only themselves to blame.

This article was originally published on the PSA website and is being re-printed here with the author’s permission. 

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.

About the Author

Paul Whiteley is Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Essex.