Neither of my parents were exactly space buffs but if, back in the heady days of Armstrong and co., you had asked them when their offspring would first see man in the general vicinity of the Moon, they probably wouldn’t have picked the early years of his sixth decade. Back then, there was a general assumption that, having gone to our satellite, we would keep going to it and, at some point, we would decide to stay.
That didn’t happen. Yesterday, a mere 57 years after Apollo 11, NASA released a glossy video showing a moon-base (more an encampment of moon caravans to my cynical and untutored eye). Will it be built? Who knows?
Despite copious evidence to the contrary, humans tend to think in straight lines. If a happens, then b will, and c etc., in an inevitable chain, like the Voyager spacecraft serenely sailing out of the solar system on the trajectory set in my infancy. The world, however, often has different ideas.
While America was looking to the stars, Britain’s focus was rather more Earth-bound. The rise in youth unemployment, now at record levels, had attracted official attention. Something had to be done and, as so often when the government is involved, that something was the writing of a report, the task falling to the former Cabinet Minister Alan Milburn.
As is the way in these days of media management, he toured news studios in the morning to lay the ground for the later release. The situation was grave, he told Sky. “The social contract is built on a very simple basis…each generation should do better than the previous generation. That’s a contract that’s been broken.”
On the face of it, that seems fair enough. But is it? When was this contract signed?
It must have been quite recently. Sustained economic development only enters the human story with the Industrial Revolution. Before it, GDP was essentially flat over the long term. There might be periodic booms or busts, but the average human in 1700 was not appreciably richer than his forebear in the year 1000.
Once the Industrial Revolution kicked off, we took the ball and ran with it, but the lives of unparalleled affluence we live today are not the result of “Society”, rather a series of contingent events coming together to transform our existence. Steam engines enabled the development of industry, oil fuelled it. Metal ships enabled global trade. Exploration and political developments opened new markets and new sources of raw materials. The jet engine made the world smaller and communication technology made it smaller still. All of these came together to make the world we now live in.
There was no central intelligence behind these developments, they just happened. And if you want living standards to keep rising, they have to keep happening. But we cannot guarantee this and we cannot force it – no government can say to its scientists “Go off and solve cold fusion in the next five years”. Well, it can, but it is unlikely to be successful. One reason that Britain’s government went all-in on renewables was that it thought that battery technology would develop sufficiently to render it a plausible replacement for fossil fuels. Unfortunately, it hasn’t.
If the social contract really is that each generation will be richer than the last, then, it is a contract that one party cannot be certain to fulfil. That a previous generation had a Brunel is no guarantee that ours will. It mistakes a historically unusual confluence of factors for the normal state of affairs, and derives a moral principle from them. You don’t have to be a hair-shirt degrowther to think that may be slightly unwise.
Perhaps recognising this, Mr Milburn indulged in a bit of rhetorical slaloming in his tour of the TV studios. He told Sophie Ridge that “The social contract used to be, if you work hard at school, university or in an apprenticeship or Saturday job, you will be able to get on. That social contract is broken.”
This is much closer to traditional definitions of social contracts. They do not guarantee outcomes, but rather set the rules of the game. People surrender a degree of power to the Sovereign and it, in turn, undertakes to keep the playing field reasonably level.
Looked at this way, Milburn does seem to have a point. Youth unemployment is very high by comparison to recent history. The housing ladder, famously, has several rungs missing. Many careers seem to require unpaid internships which are, by necessity, only open to those with parental resources behind them. In a society with abundant new opportunities, these barriers matter less. In a slower-moving one, they become gatekeeping mechanisms.
Here too, though, there is a sense of recency bias. Social mobility has always existed – the philosopher Epictetus rose from lame slave to public intellectual and friend of the Emperor Hadrian – but it has generally been an exception, not a rule. For most of history, people have done what their parents did. That people should follow their dreams is, in the main, a modern invention. Children learn about Dick Whittington because Dick Whittington’s life was odd.
And being recent, it is hard to disentangle it from the other changes we have seen. The explosion of growth created a world in which people could “get on”. There were more opportunities, industrialisation released surplus labour and everyone benefitted from systemic gains – the Boomer who bought a house for £2,000 and is now a property millionaire is not an investing genius, they were just in the right place at the right time.
Particularly since the financial crisis, economic growth has stalled. There is no longer a rising tide to raise all boats. The economic world appears to be returning to that described by Thomas Hobbes, one of the founders of social contract theory, a “war of all against all”. If the pie is no longer growing appreciably, it makes sense to grab your neighbour’s slice. Fund your offspring’s first few months in the advertising company, campaign to stop that new housing development to keep your scarcity value.
In the absence of a return to growth, there are things governments can do to restore the balance. They could, for example, outlaw unpaid internships. They could remove the right to object to new buildings. They could put their finger on the scale. But they would have to be active, and each government action has an equal and opposite reaction, not always predictable, and not always congenial.
We are not the first society to face this challenge. Japan flatlined after its Bubble in the 1980’s. And it adapted. It was, it felt, a sufficiently nice place to be that it did not see the need to take the actions that might have made it a nicer place. It was willing to settle. And it remains a very nice place. Not without its problems, certainly, but civilised, stable and functional. Much of our current dissatisfaction stems from a refusal to settle. Because we do not think we have to. The line can keep going up.
Perhaps what would be required is something genuinely radical: a willingness to accept the sort of creative destruction Japan avoided and we have spent decades trying to avoid. That really would be a moon-shot.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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