With the world still embroiled in the tragic SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, much of the discussion has focused on the immediate health, social, and economic threats posed by the virus. As the world emerges from the crisis phase, CGC believes that we are faced with a rare opportunity to re-assess how our world works and actually implement change on a wide scale.
Our societies, communities, health systems, international organisations, economies, politics, and relationship to the environment have all been affected. But what can we do differently? How should we be changing our thinking about what’s important, what we should measure, how we should organise on the various scales that we need. How can we better address “species-level” or “biosphere-level” threats? CGC’s ongoing #PossiblePaths series launched in 2021 to bring new thinking and ideas on these questions to a wider audience.
First up, we talked to Prof. Diane Coyle, from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane is an expert on economic measurement, the “beyond GDP” theory of the Wealth Economy, long-term planning, natural capital, the digital economy, and more. Diane addressed a whole range of interesting topics, including the slightly odd feeling some people get when economists like her talk about putting a monetary value on things we often rightly think of as having intrinsic value beyond money, like nature:
“...if you don’t do that, then that’s like putting ‘zero’ and not taking them into account. The measurements are really important because they are the lens through which we see what is going on...”
You can see Diane address this issue and more in the full video below:
To find out more about her work and the work of her colleagues at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, check out their website here.
Our next discussion is with economist John Kay. He co-published two timely books in 2020, the first, Radical Uncertainty - Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future, was penned with former Bank of England Chair Mervyn King. The book is a comprehensive consideration of decision-making and the often misunderstood probabilities, statistics, data, economics, modelling, theories of behavioural economics, and biases that underpin much of it. John’s second 2020 book, Greed is Dead - Politics After Individualism, was authored with Paul Collier and posits that the era in which notions of individualism driven by economic self(ish)-interest were an acceptable organising principle for society has well and truly ended. John and Paul consider what could and should come after this self-defeating and harmful era.
We discussed Radical Uncertainty (versus other types of uncertainty), John’s concerns about some conclusions from the field of behavioural economics, where the era of “selfish-individualism” came from, why it has ended, and what might come next.
See the full CGC PossiblePaths interview with John Kay below: