The nef blog

In his Guardian column this week, Aditya Chakrabortty wrote how workers are becoming slaves to routine, with only a lucky few still possessing any real autonomy. It's time that we changed the way we work.

Writing on the scourge of "insane work" in 1974, the economist E.F. Schumacher cited an article in the Times: "Dante, when composing his vision of hell, might well have included the mindless, repetitive boredom of working on a factory assembly line. It destroys initiative and rots brains, yet millions of British workers are committed to it for most of their lives."

Thirty-five years on, fewer of us are in factories, but the reductive logic of the assembly line has seeped into almost every aspect of working life. The result: we spend more and more time at work (since 1981 two-adult households have added six hours to their combined weekly workload) with progressively less scope to influence what we do when we are there. Modern work is hollowing out our lives and making the planet sick. To break free, we need to reconnect work with the art of living.

As the thinktanker turned motor mechanic Michael Crawford explains, before the factory line accustomed workers to abstraction – people would choose a satisfying job over a higher wage. Workers didn't exactly skip merrily towards life on Ford's production line: "So great was labor's distaste" that "toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963."

Like caged animals devoid of stimulation, there are physical and psychological impacts of the mechanisation of our working lives. Recent research for the American Cancer Society found that women who sit for more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely. A study into Alzheimer's found that people who lived physically and mentally active and engaged lives seemed to build a natural defence system of "neural reserves" that dramatically reduced memory loss even where the physical signs of the degenerative disease were present.

As for FW Taylor, the godfather of "scientific management", it is enough to know that his thinking influenced both Stalin and the Harvard Business School. The sociologist Robert Jackall, who spent years inhabiting the world of corporate managers, describes Taylor's legacy – the worker: "constantly vulnerable and anxious, acutely aware of the likelihood at any time of an organisational upheaval which could overturn their plans and possibly damage their careers fatally". Guided by Taylor's legacy, mechanisms like the 360º appraisal mean that our workplaces don't just prescribe what we do with the majority of our waking lives – for good or ill, our colleagues define our personalities too.

The lack of autonomy in the modern workplace has paved the way for a host of crises, from the credit crunch to the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe. In an environment where asking questions is tantamount to committing public hara-kiri, it would have taken a brave soul to point out that ever-increasing profits weren't a natural phenomenon, or that alarms were designed to wake people if something went wrong.

The "efficient" workplace discards one of the most valuable resources we have: our skills, creativity and potential as human beings. Slack isn't always waste. A manufacturer with plentiful stock may lose some money on warehouses, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action. If work only enables us only to know what is necessary to perform a very limited function, it doesn't equip us with resources we need if we encounter something new. From the state of the economy to the survival of the biosphere, we need to make the transition to a new economy if we are to survive and thrive in the years ahead. nef's Great Transition initiative sets out a pathway for a low-carbon economy in which all can survive and thrive.

At the heart of Schumacher's economics was the belief that good work was essential to a good life. The Buddhist view takes the function of work to "give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence."

nef's 21 hours argues that the shorter working week should be the new social norm. It sets out how reducing the amount of time we spend in the office and distributing the work we have more effectively would free us to actively engage in our lives, learn new skills while also reducing inequality. Reduce the working week, and it might also give us the time to think about what we do. It's a vital first step on the path reconnecting work with the art of living.

If we only ask whether we can set ourselves free from work, it makes inhuman work tolerable. If we can set work free, then work itself becomes part of an active and engaged life.

The Camp for Climate Action outside the headquarters of Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh does not so far seem to have shifted the subsidised bank in a more greener direction.

They are still subsidising the polluting business of extracting oil from tar sands, just as they are financing the oil and gas extraction that is accelerating global warming – and just as they were before the bank nosedived. 

But the New York Times reports that the campaigns against this kind of banking in the USA are beginning to bear some fruit.  

Wells Fargo is the latest bank to shift its policy against financing mining companies that want to remove whole mountaintops to reach coal.

Wells Fargo are not a big player in the field, but banks like Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America is also reviewing their support for mining companies removing mountaintops.  HSBC is beginning to end some relationships with palm oil producers.

None of this is a new dawn.  The Carbon Principles, formulated by Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, are not the solution to global warming, any more than HSBC’s Climate Principles are.  There is no suggestion that even the worst and most destructive mining companies will be denied finance anywhere.

But it is the beginning of a realisation by banks – some of the slowest learners about global issues – that financing climate change is likely to be an increasing problem in the future, even if it is only a threat to their reputations.

It isn’t a change of heart, but it is maybe a symptom of change to come.

Twenty five months ago, working with my colleague, a climate scientist, Dr Victoria Johnson, and others, I decided to find out how long it would take before, on the best data available, we would begin to cross red lines where climatic instability and extremes were concerned. A quarter of that time has now passed.

To minimise the danger of alarmism, but without hiding from the facts, we set our parameters to assume that humanity would be on the lucky end of the spectrum of environmental risk. We were optimistic, perhaps too much so, about the speed and likelihood with which ecological dominoes might fall in a warming world. Nevertheless, what we found was startling. One hundred months on from August 2008 we were set to cross an atmospheric threshold.

The accumulation and concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would make it more likely that global average temperatures would rise 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. That point was significant because 2 degrees is generally thought to be the temperature around which a number of complex environmental changes start to feed off each other, making their dynamics harder to predict and harder to control.

Vitally these changes, such as glacier melt, forest die-back, and the weakening of ecosystems' ability to absorb carbon – are both the result of warming, and also likely to add more fuel to the fire. In other words, it represents the beginning of a process which could become uncontrollable and irreversible.

Since then, an international recession, rooted in a market failure of the financial system underlying Anglo-Saxon economies, has partially and temporarily slowed the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, as economic activity slowed.

Unfortunately it has not, at the same time, led to a low-carbon re-engineering of the energy, transport, and agricultural systems of those same economies. The potential for a win-win response to recession was passed-by. A "green new deal"-type package of economic stimulus could have created jobs, lowered energy costs, increased security and set an example for tackling climate change to the wider world.

Instead, for a short time at least, the old systems were propped up. Car companies were bailed-out and people were encouraged to keep over-consuming – shopping till they dropped – to resuscitate the economy.

Then came the new coalition government's bonfire of the environment. Many of the institutions and much of the resources key to a low-carbon transition have been either run-down or axed.

So, here we are. One finger of a four-finger KitKat eaten. The first bend of a 400 metre race run. Act one of a four-act play complete. Yet, we are perhaps further from holding back the warming tide than when we began to count down the months in which meaningful action could take place.

What will happen when the months have run their course? Even without action, nothing in particular will occur on the stroke of midnight on the last day of the last month. But something will have shifted.

There will be the dull creeping awareness of an opportunity missed to prevent inexorable, destabilising change. A rise, perhaps, in bashful apologies and excuses about why it was impossible to do the right thing while there was still time. We may feel like kicking ourselves, often.

And what will the future look like? The severe droughts during August in Russia, and the huge floods in Pakistan may not be directly, causally related to current patterns in warming (although their scale and severity might well have been influenced by it).

But these are the kind of extreme events set to become more common in a warming world. High and volatile food prices are another intimation of the weakening security we all face.

But, there is still time. Changes in direction as fast and as large as those needed now have been achieved before, and during the lives of many people living today. We cannot escape the fact that will take enormous collective action – a form of rugged collectivism as brave as any acts of individual heroism. There are signs, finally, that walls of reluctance are beginning to crack. Yesterday the Guardian reported that Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "Sceptical Environmentalist" had overcome his dismissive attitude to climate change and now thought it worth spending $100 billion a year to stop it.

Three fingers left to eat, two straights and a bend to run, three acts still to play.

These words are carved in stone and hanging on my wall at home.  You might ask where they come from and why have I got them hanging up there.  Well they were sent to me by the organisers of TED Global a few weeks before I gave my TED talk on nef’s Happy Planet Index. They were one of TED’s ten commandments, which include other pearls of wisdom such as “Thou shalt not murder powerpoint” , “Thou shalt not steal time” and “Thou Shalt Prepare for Impact”! 

I have never before felt such intense pressure before a talk. I guess one option would have been to panic but I choose instead to follow the advice that golfers use “The more I practice, the luckier I get”.  So I practiced and asked for as much feedback as people would give me.  I even for the first time had some coaching from nef’s regular editor of our reports, Mary Murphy, who also moonlights as a speech coach. She helped me structure the talk and encouraged me to dare to strip the contents back to the bare essentials.For sure the practice paid off as when I stepped on stage a quiet calm came over me and I just delivered the talk I wanted to.

So now we are all hoping that the TED commandment about preparing for impact will come true. We all know at nef that there is a long way to go to achieve a Great Transition to a world that we all want, a world which is sustainable, socially just and with high levels of personal and social well-being.  In short hand a world where good lives don’t cost the earth.

Whilst there is a long way to go I think we can be happy that slowly the world is coming round to the ideas that we at nef have championed for many years.  At the moment, I am in Bangkok, precisely as my TED talk is launched online.  I'm attending a UN brainstorm on creating a roadmap for achieving green growth in Asia.  This is just one of many encouraging signs that institutions are starting to think constructively about our core agenda. 

And this is the story that I think we need to be telling the world.  We need to saying that yes there are challenges ahead but there is much that we can do. We need to be encouraging people to engage with our agenda in a positive useful way.  Most of all we need to inspire people, organisations and governmental institutions to work together at creating a Great Transition.  This is the story that I hope we will be able to tell in the future – a story where it all went right.

There is no such thing as a free lunch or a free market – or so it is said.  Or a free school, come to that.

Nothing is free.  There we are, now all of us radical new economists can nod our heads sagely and congratulate ourselves on our Jesuitical understanding of the world as it is.

But, having congratulated ourselves, it may be time to think again on free trade, because all is not quite what it seems.

It is true that the survival of free markets as a philosophical concept, as we currently understand them, despite the huge abuses – from Goldman Sachs to the destruction of the Amazon rainforests – is really quite extraordinary. 

It helps of course that they have the backing of the most powerful and wealthiest corporations in the world, who can keep an idea afloat for centuries after it would otherwise have sunk in ignominy.

It was an idea that emerged from the Scottish enlightenment, with Adam Smith’s ‘hidden hand’ explaining how the decisions of millions of people can allocate resources according to need, and then supercharged by the utilitarians and ‘statists’ in the 1820s and 1830s.

It actually stretches right back to Medieval merchants, who used to use the figure zero – viewed with suspicion by the church in the thirteenth century because if its magical ability to multiply numbers in accounts by ten – as a secret underground code for free trade.

But the case against free trade from a new economics point of view is not quite as clear cut as it seems – and it may be, if we can organise the right kind of debate, that we can reinvent the idea as a core element of the new economics.

So here is my three-point defence of free trade from the point of view of new economics.

1. Free market may be an impossible phantasm born of wishful thinking among the powerful, but the opposite – closed markets – are certainly not what we should aspire to.  They are the favoured instrument of regimes like those of North Korea or East Germany that are desperately trying to reshape the world – and their own populations – along ideological lines.  They are a basic tool of tyranny.
2. The worst abuses of free markets – from Goldman Sachs to Halliburton or the other corporate monsters – are actually not examples of free trade at all.  They are examples of rigged favouritism, corporate subsidy and monopoly.  The last thing these organisations want is genuinely free markets.
3. The political concept of free trade emerged in the 1830s, not to prop up the status quo, but as the next stage in the campaign against slavery.  Campaigners saw that the rigged markets of the big food producers was another version of slavery.  What was the point of freeing people from slavery, if the prices they were forced to pay for essentials was always too much – as the American slaves found out after 1865.

None of this is to suggest that a slavish insistence on the letter of free trade, to the detriment of poor nations or communities, isn’t just as tyrannical.  What we have today, under the guise of free trade, isn’t so much free trade as compulsory trade – forced trade, as they used to called the behaviour of the Portuguese in the Far East or the British in India.

Nor do I suggest that free trade requires an end to regulation – quite the reverse.

But there is a powerful core at the heart of the original idea of free trade which has been pushed aside by the powerful.  It meant the right of equal communities to trade with each other, not the right of the rich and powerful to ride roughshod over the world.

These are contradictions in an idea that lies at the centre of the political philosophies that are broadly Conservative and broadly Liberal. 

The coalition between these two political parties in the UK might provide an opportunity to re-forge the idea of free trade into its radical roots, except that both sides of the coalition are actually rather hazy about what they meet by markets.

But there is an opportunity for the rest of us.  We need to reclaim the idea of free trade – or open markets – and use it to put a spotlight on those abuses that are undermining the ability of ordinary people to have any kind of economy of their own.

When Cardiff gives permission for yet another Tesco, and lets it corrode the small shops in another corner of Canton, that is an abuse of free markets.

When American agents raid small family farms which are involved in clubs selling raw food and unpasteurised milk to members, that is another abuse.

When we allow the banks to use public money to pay themselves vastly inflated bonuses, or when they cream off £7bn a year from our pensions in the UK, that is an abuse too.

Those are not examples of free trade or free markets.  They are perversions of the idea.  But perhaps we new economists are partly to blame, because we surrendered the idea of free markets without a fight.

It may now be time to reclaim the idea of free trade and set it to work, starting with the subsidised monopolies that increasingly rule our lives.

I spent the weekend at Facilitation Camp. An ‘unconference’ built on the principles of Open Space. This means the agenda is designed by participants on the day and a structure emerges built on the energy and interests of the people who are there.

This was the first time I have really encountered Open Space and it has taken me a while to understand what it is all about. It sounds woolly and uncoordinated, but in fact the structure that emerged on the day was more relevant than any other conference I have been to. It’s not just about people co-designing or being consulted about what goes on the agenda. But about people coming together and creating shared ownership over content and process. And collaborating to make it happen.

If your still not convinced, think about how many meetings you have been to that didn’t offer an ‘open space’. Indeed, many of our most important public decisions are set up with entrenched power dynamics and a closed agenda. In these situations people are not encouraged to think about the most important questions, let alone get a chance to actually ask them.

Thanks to DecisionLab, London Creative Labs and others who dreamt up and organised and hosted Facilitiation Camp 2010.