Society means many things to many people but it essentially describes deliberate exclusion. It always has. Society, as understood by Jane Austenʼs characters, was essentially exclusive, them and us. To take a random and worthy contemporary UK example The Royal Society has its membership defined by those who are excluded. The idea of ʻsocietyʼ as a verbal shorthand for mutual self-help just does not work. Let us be thankful no public money was spent on the logo, yet. The choice of ʻBigʼ to describe this society is part of the same problem. This is not a superficial problem either. The bigger the group the less the feeling of group affiliation. It is true that there are exceptions. National symbols engender a loyalty that trumps county or State affiliation: “Cry ʻGod for Harry, London and St George...” just wouldnʼt have the same effect; and I am sure that in extremis, if faced with the choice, we would all save the human and let the chimp die, showing loyalty at the most granular level. But in the main the rule I think holds. My family over my street. My street over the town. Loyalty to the platoon is greater than loyalty to the regiment.
However the organisation of small, community level activity, into bigger units with real impact is hard. President Obama, advised by Marshall Ganz at Harvard, cracked the code and mobilised local support groups to great effect for the US election. And in UK we have many examples of self-assembled communities whose focus is relentlessly local. My local sub-urban London Church is a wonderfully cohesive small group of supportive churchgoers; and so is the other Church in our Parish. But there is not a lot of cooperation between them that can be discerned below the level of the General Synod. So, say this out loud please to the next BS evangelist you meet: it
is
an assumption that community level activity can be scaled to achieve cost economies with no dissipation of delivered benefit. It is an assumption
The choice of ʻBigʼ to describe this society is part of the same problem.
that if you replace State activity with self-ordered community delivered services that they can be any less impersonal when scaled up to country level than is the State provision they seek to displace. And before we go too far with BS these are assumptions that could do with testing. Yet I have struggled to find any empirical analysis of the natural boundary of the State based on efficiency of service delivery. I conclude that for this first of the three fixable problems a name-change is inescapable. For an alternative I quite like ʻsmall communityʼ but I accept that it is not much of a runner at the hustings.
# The second problem for ʻBig Societyʼ is pretty fundamental too. Who
should provide the basic
services in a democratic society? What services are validly supplied by the State? Public goods, where exclusion from consumption is not possible, and therefore there is no profit incentive for private provision, would be one clear answer. Even without considering technological
change, and where we really ʻliveʼ our lives in 2011, demographic changes alone pose two new challenges. Demographic changes resulting from changes in nutrition, changes to public health, and changes in healthcare mean that the likelihood is that the expansion in the costs of being a caring society over the next 50 years will be in care for the elderly. As our life expectancy extends on average perhaps to beyond the age for which we or our pension insurers had ever hoped for or feared, it will be how to care for the enfeebled and the feeble-brained that will tax society most. Retirement at 60 after 40 years productive work and savings with life- expectancy at 75 is quite a different personal and State funding problem from retirement from full time work at 55 after 35 years of contributions with life-expectancy approaching 100.
On the other hand the concentration of earnings capacity in fewer, better educated, and probably on average younger people will mean the second big issue will likely be disaffected youth constantly stimulated to try to achieve consumer brand satiation and frustrated in being able to do so. Less academically high-performing youths have less craft or labour alternatives. Physical activity as a wage earning activity has already fallen to a small percentage of GDP. The successful focus in Boston on schools that teach craft skills is impressive but the sign outside the Church on Mass. Avenue, Cambridge, “Youth on Fire : a safe place for youth ages 14-24” speaks to a significant problem even in well- to-do neighborhoods. As my friend and mentor Prof. Rosabeth Moss Kanter at HBS says, ʻPowerlessness corruptsʼ.
Sadly the provision of support for disaffected youth and the provision of care for the elderly are both areas where the State
traditionally has
performed poorly. The recent report of the UK Health Service Ombudsman should convince anyone who does not yet have personal experience of the difficulty State-funded groups
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