Ravi Gurumurthy: Hello, and welcome to Nesta talks to. My name is Ravi Gurumurthy, and I'm the CEO of Nesta, the UK's innovation agency for social good. Nesta focuses on designing, testing, and scaling new solutions and we have three main missions, a sustainable future, a fairest start, and a healthy life. And with us today is Geoff Mulgan to talk us about how we can reimagine a new future in all of those area.

Geoff was the previous CEO at Nesta from 2011 to 2019. He also headed up the number 10 policy unit and founded organizations like the young foundation and demos. Geoff is now the professor of collective intelligence and social policy at UCL and has written an amazing book called _Another world as possible_ and that's what we're gonna be discussing today. Geoff, welcome.

Geoff Mulgan: Hello there, good morning.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Geoff. Welcome. Your starting point for your new book is that [00:01:00] there is a crisis in social and political imagination. I just wonder, first of all, whether you can tell us what you mean by social imagination and is it really in crisis?

Geoff Mulgan: So the prompt for writing the book was conversations with a lot of climate activists just before the pandemic from all over the world. And I was really struck how incredibly clear they were about the dangers of climate change, the need to completely shift our economy , our society. But also how pessimistic they were about the possibility of living in a, with a significantly better welfare state or democracy or health system, a generation or two into the future.

That was what made me think. Maybe there was something going on. We were collectively lacking that sense of a roadmap of where we might be headed and what the options were to make things better. I could just as well, have been prompted to write the book vote by the last few weeks by a conservative party leadership [00:02:00] election, where there seems to be not much demand for any picture of 5, 10, 20 years time of the kind that previous conservative parties, not just under Margaret Thatcher who did have a roadmap, but before her Ted Heath, McMillan. They almost took it for granted that part of the job of politics was not just to act in the present to solve today's problems, but to have some picture of where they wanted to.

The country, the crucial choices, the issues, and I feel that has disappeared. And in a way, the current labor party sort of mirrors that that problem and that therefore we do have a kind of crisis of an ability to imagine a potentially better future, which may in turn, then energize us to act better in the present.

Ravi Gurumurthy: I, in your book, you do talk about technological futures and how actually there's lots of optimism around neuro prosthetics and AI and synthetic biology or, electric cars and self-driving cars. So is the picture on [00:03:00] imagination, quite split between the social and the technological, if you like.

Geoff Mulgan: I think it is. And I've spent a lot of my life working on digital technology. My PhD is in telecommunications and much of the time I'm a relative optimist about the potential for networks, the internet, AI, all of these things. And as you say, It's not hard to find very compelling, vivid, technological imaginaries of where we might be.

Again, 20, 40 years into the future with ubiquitous AI, synthetic biology, new treatments, for all kinds of diseases, new ways of organizing our cities. But I think it's increasingly clear, there is a massive imbalance between that. Mainly hardware focused, technological imagination and imagination about what kind of society might live around that.

And I think that's a problem, partly because if we look back at history. Yes, that all of our lives are shaped by hardware and technology; cars airplanes, computers. But just as [00:04:00] much change comes from shifts in values or consciousness or how, we organize societies and that's, what's been squeezed.

So there's massive investment in technological imagination. Silicon valley is piled high with think tanks. There's endless conferences on smart cities or smart homes or AI or robotics or cybersecurity, but almost no comparable serious investment in the social options. And I think we are paying a price for that.

We have paid a price in the last 10, 10 or 20 years around the internet. So as I was doing my PhD alongside some of the people inventing the internet, essentially in the us, in the late eighties. And what's really striking in retrospect is how for two, three decades as the internet became part of every aspect of our life. We're on it now we use it for, shopping banking, travel relationships, you name it. There was almost no serious work on the social dimension of the internet. How could we shape it? Not to corrode our democracy to [00:05:00] promote misinformation, to, undermine children's ability to grow up through compel compulsive a addictive social media.

And that was a, in some ways that imbalance between the purely technological and the social, I think has left us a whole host of pathologies, which now belatedly the world is trying to deal with. And we risk exactly the same happening with AI, with quantum computing, all the other things coming down road. And ideally yes, one has a dynamic, vivid compelling scientifically driven technological imagination of what is possible, but always that needs to be matched with a sense of, what's how would we live in this? What would our, what would make us happy? What would make us thrive? What would make our communities better? And that's what's missing today.

Ravi Gurumurthy: And historically, if you look at other big transformations in society, particularly technologically driven there are usually a positive set of scenarios and negative ones. And it's the job of people like you to often make sure we take the better path. Do you think we've been able to do that historically where [00:06:00] the act of looking ahead has allowed us to get ahead of the risks and choose the better path.

Because I think one sort of pushback on your point would be, look, we're just useless at this. We can't predict the future. There are a whole set of unintended consequences and let's just play a rather passive role.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah, I think it is very hard to predict the future. It is hard to shape the directions of technological change, but if you think of the period, which probably did more than anything to shape the modern world, the late 19th century, when the telephone, electricity, the car all became part of daily life, there were lots of forecasts.

There was lots of debate about the technologies, but that also coincided with an extraordinarily fertile time of reimagining society. How could you invent a welfare state? Could you build a universal health service? Could you create a global, United nations? Could you make democracy actually represent all the people in different ways?

And [00:07:00] lots of work was done in that period on social imagination, political imagination, which then went on to have huge impact in the 20th century. Some of it malign. It was also the imagination, which led to Marxism ,Leninism and fascism and Nazism. But in countries like the UK or most of Europe or north America, we are the beneficiaries of the serious work done at that point alongside dramatic technological change to think through how to reshape a society for the better and away from what was then in many ways, still a very unequal society, very huge problems of health and crime and pollution and so on. Many of which were dealt with reasonably well over the succeeding 50 years.

Ravi Gurumurthy: So why do you think we're in a worse state now in terms of our capabilities to imagine than we were a hundred years.

Geoff Mulgan: I think there are many reasons and I try to go through them in the book. There isn't a single one. One of them is perhaps a sense that some of the Utopus, the 20th century went badly wrong in particular the Marxist ones. A [00:08:00] lot of the late 19th century imagination was within the context of radical socialist, Marxist ideas. Which worked incredibly well in places like Sweden and Denmark and incredibly badly in places like Russia and North Korea. I think there's also a factor that many of the institutions which at that time, worked on imagination or were meant to, have vacated that space. And I look at this in some details. So one is political parties. There were times over the last hundred years when most of the main political parties saw it as part of their job to link policy in the present to the medium and long term. The Conservative party had a very strong research department at one point under Chris Patton.

Back in the seventies, Labour had an incredibly influential research department in 1945 and all through the sixties and seventies. Now all of those almost entirely disappeared from the main parties replaced by essentially communications, spin doctors, marketing the universities [00:09:00] in a very different way have vacated this.

Again, if you look a hundred years ago, places like the LSE in London were explicitly set up to be designers, shapers of a better future of a kind of, a new kind of welfare state or economy or workers' rights. But for various reasons, the social sciences have moved further and further away from that role. They do fantastic research on the present and on the past they're often very empirical or very data driven but there's very little work now in detail, doing the sort of work which was done a hundred years ago, mapping out, how might a health system work in 20, 40 or 2050 or 60. What would the roles be? What would the funding be? What would be the issues? And that's been squeezed out because in some ways it's quite hard to prove or disprove is much harder to in sense, validate.

Then empirical analysis of the past or present. And then another way sort strand of social science in [00:10:00] much of the world has just gone to critique and commentary rather than design. And this is a safe space for intellectuals to, tell you why the world's going to hell. Why why neoliberalism is to blame for everything and just leave it at that rather than actually say, okay what would you do?

Let's say you were running a city you were running a government. What would you actually do to fix these problems? That's the space that's been squeezed out. And I think it's left much of the world with this sort of stunted horizon, this difficulty of seeing plausible, desirable pictures of the road ahead, and the other places in the world we might expect to be doing this, perhaps the rising powers of the world, like China or India, for again, slightly different reasons have shrunk away from that. If you read, Xi Jim ping speeches, which I mentioned quite a bit in the book, in some ways they're a fascinating description of a, what I call a techno nationalist authoritarian, imaginary, which is quite influential [00:11:00] the world, much more than neoliberalism now, but is very vague about social organization in the future.

And if you talk to the very, young, ambitious Chinese people now they again will be quite at home talking about AI futures or robots, but not about welfare health education, let alone democracy in the future. And in India for different reasons under modes BJP. Again, that sense of a picture of the future, which the rest of the world could learn from and buy into.

They're not really filling that role either while the us, which for much of the last hundred years saw itself as the crucible of the future. Now, half the us wants to make America great again and return to the fifties rather than to the 2050s and that's left us, let's say with this void in relation to imagination.

Ravi Gurumurthy: I wonder whether the dominance of certain intellectual disciplines also played a part. So you talked about net zero and China and how they thought about it. One of the things that I was involved in about 10 years ago was a 2050 calculator that we did in [00:12:00] the UK, but we also did with the Chinese government and with the Indian government, it was very interesting to see how different countries could imagine the future.

When it came to net zero in the UK, all the economists in the department were very nervous about getting into predictions. They basically said, look, the market will decide, let's have the least cost technologies, pull things through. Let's not speculate cause we're not very good at that. We're not good at planning.

Whereas the Chinese were very happy to sketch out a 10 year map of different technologies. And I wonder whether are there certain intellectual disciplines that have become hegemonic, not naming any name names, like economics that's that, that, that make it harder to suspend belief and also get concrete and plan?

Geoff Mulgan: And I think, I China deserves credit for certainly for about 10 or 15 years, taking the long term aspects of climate change and environmental vulnerability. Incredibly seriously. I've taught for many years at the China executive leadership academy, which trains mayors, governors, ministers in a way we [00:13:00] don't do at all in Europe, what it's worth.

And it, they were willing to look at their vulnerability to shifts in climate and as you say, to think in terms of huge structural changes, huge shifts in policy to try and avert that it's become rather less in the last few years as sort Xi Jim Ping's rule has squeezed the space perhaps for imagination and debate, but it's still impressive.

Whereas as you say, some of our dominant disciplines shy away from that almost completely. In the case of economics, which is still the dominant social science. One reason for that is it's very poor track record of forecasting. So for many years, a huge amount of effort was put into forecasting, GDP next year, five years, 10 years and the best can be said for that is in retrospect, their forecast were no better than assuming next year would be the same as this year. And yet, in fact, long run economic trends are relatively predictable. The big flows through of new technologies as they're deployed across a society and [00:14:00] economy, even if there's specific elements are hard to forecast the broad direction of change isn't that difficult to many people's forecast from 20 or 30 years ago, far off the mark. I also criticize economics for another, I think myopia another blind spot, which is in relation to creativity. That is to say designing, know, what could an economy looked like in 2050, perhaps Euro carbon economy, an economy absolutely saturated. Smart machines. That's a creative task.

It requires playing with different options, exploring lateral options, and so on economics almost completely lacks those methods. And I interviewed a lot of economists about whether they'd borrowed any creativity or design methods from business, from science, from the arts, from architecture. All these fields, which have attempted to institutionalized creativity, 'cause that's part of what makes them tick.

And essentially there was always, the answer was [00:15:00] no.

And the intellectual curiosity that discipline, I think is extraordinary and has made it so much worse at shaping the future in bad. At this it's become less full as a space for collective imagination

Ravi Gurumurthy: And Geoff, just coming back to this question are of, are we losing our imaginative faculties? We do find it easier to imagine dystopias. And I just wonder why that is other than, I can't really imagine black mirror having a happy ending.

Is it easier for some reason to imagine dystopias?

Geoff Mulgan: That led certainly true. And if you look at literature, which I'd cover in the book, there is an extraordinary history of written utopias dating back to Plato, to feminist utopias in the [00:16:00] 15th or 17th century in the 19th century, there were huge best sellers like Edward Bellamy talking about now.

In fact, when there would be a world, you could press buttons and.

Sorry, I think you may have lost me just there for a bit. Yeah. I was saying Edward Bellamy wrote, a huge bestseller on a future America without private property with home deliveries, push button music, and so on. And these. Says, warmed up the society to imagine lots of things were possible.

The last really popular utopias were about 50 years ago, written by people like me, marsh Pearcy and Ursula Lewen mainly feminist utopias were world after patriarchy. But since then, there seems to have been a turning only to dystopia. And there's a stream of dystopias in fiction in film in TV, as you [00:17:00] say black mirror.

And there's a very interesting piece of research, which I cite in the book, which was done last year, looking at all literature over the last 150 years in English, German, and Spanish. What it showed was they were analyzing the sentiments in every book published and they showed around about the year 2000 there spikes upwards towards what they call sort of cognitive distortions, weird catastrophizing and essentially, a much more dystopian culture you can literally see in the data from about 20 years ago.

And there probably are many reasons why our whole collective culture has become so dark, so dystopian climate change probably is part of that. A shifting sense of technology becoming more often as much a threat as a liberator 20 years ago, people were much more probably optimistic about digital and the internet than they are now.

Perhaps a loss of confidence in politics [00:18:00] too. But I actually think we need utopias to help us see the plasticity of the world to help us must warm us up for realizing that the world is something we shape. It isn't a given it doesn't come from nature. It's not fixed. And it's often, much less rigid than we expect it to be.

And I think we've lost that tradition and I really hope in the next 10 or 20 years, we see some really gifted TV producers, filmmakers, writers. Trying to reinvigorate the utopian tradition, not banar utopias where everyone sort of sitting around singing kumbaya, but like the best ones, like Ursula Lewin's writings, which are quite nuance.

There's there, there are complexities, there are trade offs. There are difficulties in their picture of a better way of living. And that's what we need now.

Ravi Gurumurthy: So I wanna get onto actually how, what do we do about this and what kind of ways of of thinking what institutions can promote social imagination.

But before I do many of the themes, I think in your book are familiar to people who have read some of your other work, because you've [00:19:00] covered it in work, on social innovation or collective intelligence. I just wondered whether you'd say a word about how thinking in terms of social imagination has either supplemented or changed the way you've thought about some of the themes that you've covered historically in your previous work?

Geoff Mulgan: Collective intelligence is an example which can be thought of in a very narrow way, is can we have a Wikipedia or can we mobilize a few million people for a citizen science project, like galaxy zoo or Zoe during the COVID pandemic, which 4 million people shared their COVID symptoms.

But for me, actually, what's exciting is taking it further and really trying to use collective intelligence as a prompt for imagining a very different kind of society, which all the time is making the most of all the intelligence lying around, including in people's heads. So what would a democracy look like where 60 million people, 70 million people could take part in decisions could share experiences and ideas in a systematic way, [00:20:00] not just through online referendums but in ways which drew on deep expertise, deep experience, and not just relying on six or so hundred MPs in parliament. Now that to me is a very fertile route to rethink democracy. Similarly, a health system, which really made the most of all the intelligence again, not just of doctors and nurses and the research world and the scientific community testing, vaccines and treatments, but also again, of the lived experience of millions of patients.

That's a very different picture of a health system from one which just provides care in hospitals to to passive people. Another example is the, you mentioned earlier, net zero, the circular economy, the idea of an economy, which doesn't generate mountains of waste, but reuses, everything. That is a, as an idea, that's been around for 40 or 50 years it's still being in a sense work through what does that mean for clothing or paper or the, the computers, the [00:21:00] laptop you're probably looking at this moment, most of which isn't reused or recycled at all, but it's a generative idea. It's an idea which then prompts the thought. Actually, what would it take for us to reuse or recycle 90% of hardware or of clothes at the moment? It's about 2% of clothes which gets recycled and appallingly low number.

These are the kind of prompts which I find useful. And they're on the sort of boundaries, of social imagination, things like collective intelligence, but also engineering technology and science. And it's quite easy for any group with some knowledge of those fields, with a bit of help to picture plausible, desirable options, a generation or two in the future.

They just don't have many spaces to do that work.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Yeah. I think people tend to think about imagination often as solitary act. Whereas what you're talking about is a shared collective imagination in some areas. If you take the example of health that you cited, can you paint a picture of what that might look like?

[00:22:00] Where a health system really mobilized the collective intelligence of patients painted the picture sort of 10 years down the line on that.

Geoff Mulgan: I think many very, so either chronic conditions like diabetes or diseases like cancer are perhaps good examples. Let's take cancer in a huge amount is spent on detailed, sophisticated, complex research on cancer, it's links to genomics and so on. And I'd recommend there's an exhibition at the, in the Creek center at the moment, which is, a very good one trying to explain the sheer sophistication of modern medical science on cancer. But what I think the medical world has been not done nearly so well is tap into all the other kinds of knowledge, which may be relevant to cancer for millions of people. That may be experiences of other patients, how did they handle it? How did they change their lifestyles? What methods of maybe their diets or exercise did they find useful?

There's a whole host of unproven treatments or [00:23:00] approaches, which the formal medical world is usually very dismissive of. And some of them may be completely serious, but some of them may have validity.

So I think a mature to collective intelligence based health system would be tapping into all the kinds of knowledge, which could be relevant to it. Some very formal science based RCTs, and so on. Some much more informal, so much more rooted and lived experience. But organizing them and orchestrating them all in ways, which then could be useful to a patient or a nurse or a family member.

And you can see that perhaps more easily with something like diabetes or for that matter, anything involving pain management, which is often something where the patient's experience is much more vivid than the perspectives of the doctors and the hospitals. And often we found there's lots of was tacit knowledge about pain management, which simply wasn't understood by the system it's itself.

I hope that gets a little bit of a flavor of what I'm talking about.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Yeah, it gives a great flavor and it strikes me [00:24:00] requires a lot of humility on the part of professionals to accept that actually they may not be omniscient all the time and that it's worth investing in aggregating the information of the whole system, particularly patients. In the book, you talk a bit about how do ideas emerge and one of the sections talks about how great ideas involve things like thought experiments, extrapolation, inversion, using analogs.

And it did strike me the extent to which AI could potentially automate a lot of those, when you've got AI creating amazing art, to what extent can AI start remixing and juxtaposing existing ideas to create radical new futures?

What's your thought on that? And how quickly do we imagine AI being a big supporter of imagining theoretical features?

Geoff Mulgan: The dominant forms of AI at the moment, most of which are essentially machine learning or deep learning are very good for taking a mass of data and spotting patterns, or then [00:25:00] recreating something like a painting in the style of van Goff, or like GT three, writing a, I dunno, a report in the style of Ravi Gurumurthy.

That's what an AI can do quite well. What AI struggled with still is to create new concepts or new categories. So one crucial part of, as the idea generation process is not just improvement within a paradigm, within a model, within an existing logic, but the ability to actually see something from a completely different lens.

So you look at maybe yeah your drive into work, not through the lens of speed, but through the lens of effects on air pollution for children. And that kind of shift of perspective is hugely important for human societies. And as I point out in the book and was all social change begins with some shift of perception and observation.

Maybe observing domestic violence as an important reality, which was hidden or observing the [00:26:00] carbon emissions of an industry, which were not noticed at all. And so far, there is no AI which can do any of that. That said, I think in the, not too distant future, the sorts of gatherings or meetings, which will try to explore, let's say, yeah, the future of a city. What are its options? 10, 20 years down the line in terms of physical planning, provision of care services, education, transport. I think we, I hope we will find AI tools which can help a group think about those things. Can show patterns, can propose new options through recombining things, through grafting, an idea from another space through inversion extension, all these methods of creativity, which I set out in the book.

Some of these I think can be helped by digital technology, but I think we are very long way away from them being able to actually do it on their own. I think these, this is a classic space where it'll be hybrids of humans and machines, which work better than either [00:27:00] machines or humans on their own.

And I've literally never seen any is a way truly compelling social imagination from an AI, just as I think in the world of visual art. There's now, as you say, fantastic generation of artworks within existing genres, but I've always been very disappointed when I've seen the attempts to create a new genre, a new way of seeing we don't yet.

And it could be just part of the sort of touring logic built into our computers. And although there's other traditions of computing, such as, Japan's attempts at wisdom computing, they haven't yet had anything like the investment or attention as essentially the kind of the cheering model of how a computer should work which is embedded in all the machines around us.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Yeah, I guess the question for me would be to what extent are some of the things you cite quite formulaic, ways of being created. So extrapolation or inversion as two examples, it feels like those [00:28:00] are ways in which you could, those feel more easy than I radical new perspective that comes outta the ether.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah, and in a way, when I've done this quite often with groups, you use those first methods to warm people up. So you look at something like your local library or your park or a primary school, and you then as a group, think through what would it take to extrapolate some aspect of that? What would it take to invert it?

In the case of the library, maybe the, I dunno, they, the users become help, come start to run it, which some libraries have done. Or or you just do extensions, so you extend to providing other fields. These are almost warming up exercises. And when things get really interesting is when, as it were, you, then get a jump off.

A new kind of synthesis emerges often, not through logical linear thought, but through integrative conceptual thought, which is often visual in nature rather than prose based. And that's when you leap to a new it's, what's what [00:29:00] code Ridge called empl thought Dewey wrote about this as well, which the human brain in the right conditions is quite good at that kind of leaping. You never quite know why you've done it, but then it turns out to offer new insights. Now, again, that is very hard for any AI I've ever seen in operation. That's so aplastic, synthetic, integrative novel thinking, but groups can be quite good at it.

Given a bit of help, a bit of time and a bit of use of these methods to, as it were warm up the muscles, the mental muscles.

Ravi Gurumurthy: What I'll ask you about improvisation versus imagination and the reason I'm interested in it is when I was working in humanitarian context you'd sometimes work with an amazing person who was managing a health clinic for instance, and the design team would come in and we'd put post-it notes on the wall and you'd force this brilliant entrepreneurial manager of a health clinic to go through a imaginative a brainstorming process and often they weren't [00:30:00] that good at it. And yet they were brilliantly innovative coming up with new ideas, solving difficult things all the time.

And when you actually looked at what they'd done that last week, there were loads of new ideas embedded in the little workarounds that generated. So I just wonder about whether improvisation and harvesting the ideas from practice can be as valuable as the act of imagining.

Geoff Mulgan: Definitely. And I think this is a very important almost mental model shift.

If we'd been having this conversation a hundred, hundred 50 years ago, and I'm a university professor, my sort of model of how change happens would be that someone in a university the grand title comes up with a new theory. And then it goes into the world and is put into practice by other people.

It could be, Maynard Keynes in economics or Marx in, whatever or Hayek. I think often the world now works exactly the opposite way around, which is the practice is often ahead of theory, the improvisers having to solve [00:31:00] problems in reality, find new solutions out of necessity. And that means the job of the academic is not to sit in an ivory tower, dreaming up theories from which others will deduce answers is that their job is to make sense of the emergent answers in the world and to see what could be generalizable about them, how they could be adapted, how they could be shifted. One of the projects I'm working on at the moment is I hope a case of that we're doing a global study of how countries around the world organize their intelligence through the COVID pandemic.

And by that we mean intelligence in a very wide sense from data to evidence, to tacit knowledge from professionals to community improvisation and looking at everywhere from Taiwan to China, to bangladesh India, Estonia, Finland, Germany, UK, Canada. And you find that under the incredible pressure, particularly the first months of the pandemic, there was extraordinary [00:32:00] improvisation on so many fronts by civil servants, by businesses, by communities and.

We it's part of our job is to try and make sense of those, which ones actually do we want to take into the post pandemic world? Which ones actually point to a very different way of running a state perhaps with more intelligence than some states showed during the pandemic. And in some ways it is a humbler kind of exercise, as you say, because you are assuming that the answers were out there in an embryonic state. And your job is to rationalize, to interpret, to make sense of them, rather than assuming that your job is to tell the world what to do. And in that's not true of every field, but I think in many fields of certainly policy social innovation, that's a better way of thinking about the role of research and practice.

It's a practice, a dialectic between the two, rather than the theorists telling the world how to solve its problems.

Ravi Gurumurthy: I couldn't agree more with that. We're doing some work on education and how we give every child fair start so that we [00:33:00] narrow the gap between educational achievement at five, between kids on free school meals and the average.

And what's fascinating is that when you look at all 150 local authorities in the country, there is staggering variation and places that are similarly poor have very big differences. And we have no idea why and no one actually bothers to look why. And so one of the things we've tried to do is get all the data and now we're going local authority by local authority to understand what's driving difference.

And it's your point really of not starting necessarily with theory or just starting from scratch as though all that amazing practice doesn't exist and thinking, can we derive some answers from what's going already? I wouldn't suggest that's totally atheoretical and I think there's, as you said, it is both and rather than either, or but I think it's a very fertile and often ignored approach.

I wanna get back into politics 'cause you started with the Tory party contest and I thought I should leave that for a while, but one of the things I think is interesting about political conversation is the way in which it rests on certain mental models. Simplify the [00:34:00] world I'm often misrepresented.

So there's a good book by Jack MOS called the pound and the fury, which talks about which basically goes around in interviews London. And gets their view of the economy. How do they think about the economy? And it turns out that people think about the economy as a fixed pot of money that gets divvied up.

And almost everything that flows from that is quite challenging because when immigrants come in, it's seen as a very zero sum game as taking our pot of money. And I think the same is true of jobs as well. It's often seen as a finite number of jobs in the economy. How do we shift some of the mental models?

That politics and political ideas often jump off. That feels like a really important role, not just for politicians, but artists and other creative.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah. I think you, you could say that is all of political progress involves exactly that there's a, another wonderful book to recommend is Pascal Gale's book minds make societies which talks through what he calls folk, economics, folk politics.

These are [00:35:00] exactly those everyday models, which most of the public has about how societies work and how politics work. Let me give two examples of change. From, what is it now? 70, 80 years ago is Keynesianism basically said are common sense. Intuitions about the economy are essentially wrong in certain circumstances.

The idea that it's like a household and there's a recession, therefore you need to cut your spending and so on and save more. He showed that was exactly the wrong thing to do. And he persuaded enough people, enough decision makers that his ideas became mainstream for several decades. Two centuries ago, folk politics said it was inevitable that we live in a world of hierarchy where some people are Kings and emperors and others are servants and slaves.

That was just the way the world is. It's embedded in nature. And it's so crazy to think things could be different. And then over many years partly helped by things like utopias and social movements. And so on, we came to an almost opposite. Folk [00:36:00] wisdom about politics, which says actually the public is all wise and whatever the public votes for is the right thing.

Which has its own problems, perhaps. So I think probably all human progress is in some ways, a challenge to those kind of everyday mental models, trying to push them to something a bit more accurate and leaders who only pan to the dominant models of their tribe. As I feel we are seeing Liz truss and Rishi Sunak doing at the moment, they're not very good leaders, all the best leaders challenge their tribe and move them to a different place through that process of both engagement and challenge exactly on the simple narratives, the simple underlying mental models, which govern so much.

Ravi Gurumurthy: I think the other theme that I picked up in one of the debates was the debate between. Orthodoxy and expertise. I think Liz's trust at one point was saying, look, let's not listen to treasury orthodoxy on on economics. Let's challenge all [00:37:00] that. And I find that sometimes an interesting debate within innovation where people say, We need to be naive.

And and not listen to expertise. Whereas actually I cleave more towards the idea. We actually need to build on the evidence and expertise, but sometimes suspenders believe and challenge it. But how do you see that sort of tension between naivety and expertise? Playing out.

Geoff Mulgan: I think it's good to cultivate a bit of naivety and what's called in Zen beginner's mind in order to see things AF fresh, but you then have to return to asking how would I know if I was right with my new theory?

So when Kanes going back to Kanes in the twenties, challenged treasury orthodoxy about the gold standard. In part, he did that by developing a sharper analysis and better evidence, which proved their orthodoxy was wrong, but it took quite a few years before he won that battle. So it's always gonna be hard and you can challenge orthodoxy in disastrous ways.

Erdogan in Turkey concluded that his macroeconomics was better than the economists. And since [00:38:00] he followed his instincts perhaps a bit like Liz, the Turkish Leer has collapsed. His economy has gone into deep recession, so it can be quite a dangerous thing to do. And that's why I guess, and this, runs through the book and perhaps a difference in thinking about imagination now, compared to a hundred years ago, I think a hundred years ago, people thought we could imagine a blueprint for a new society and just implement.

I think now, and this goes back to your earlier comment. We realize the world around this is far more complex than our brains can ever grasp. However, clever you are. There's no way you'll already understand even a fraction of what's happening around you. So you have to be humble. And if you have a promising new idea, try it out, test it, see if it works on a smaller scale and quickly before you test it on your whole society at once. So in a way, I it's a bit difficult with macroeconomic policy, but I would perhaps say to Liz, if you've got some hunch of how things could be different, show us in an experimental context in one place or one region, don't take [00:39:00] too many risks for the whole country at once.

Ravi Gurumurthy: That's reminding me of, didn't Thatcher trial, the poll tax on the whole of Scotland first.

Geoff Mulgan: She did. Exactly. Yeah. And machine was actually sometimes quite good at this. And China has a very long tradition of experimental government. And I would nearly always argue, try something out in some way before you implemented at scale, because none of your brains will have been able to work at exactly how your fantastic policy on paper will work in reality.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Thank you, Geoff. Let, let's go to some of the questions now. There's one question. Ollie Wittington about the role of media in all of our imagination feels to him that political parties are either directly at the mercy of big private industry or indirectly to billionaire media owners, all of whom profit from retaining the status quo.

But I think perhaps just widen it to the, to, to what is the kind of current way in which the media shapes imagination and what it should look like.

Geoff Mulgan: I think the media could play a really big role and. Quite a few years ago in Australia as part of a [00:40:00] program called Australia 2020, when a new, relatively newly elected prime minister tried to mobilize the whole society thinking then about 12 years ahead.

And most of the media took part in it. They had big pullouts and investigations of what would happen to water or climate change or pensions and so on. Our media almost completely hopeless on this fear. In some cases it's obviously because of the big media owners have no interest in it. And one of the very weird things during this current leadership contest is how, as far where the BBC never mentions the place of media owners in British politics, even though it's one of the most central facts that if you want to be lead to the conservative party, your most important task is to win over about four owners.

It's never mentioned by Chris Mason, one of the others, I think, I've never heard them mention it. It's a sort of weird Ooma on this reality. But I'd love to see the BBC, which at the moment obviously is very scared of playing any role of this kind, because it's been under such, [00:41:00] attack from the government.

They could be playing much more constructive roles in, again, running programs, events, things like that, hybrids to help us. Perhaps post the pandemic, think our way into what would a, yeah. A zero carbon economy look like? How could we really transform care health pensions so that when we're all 90, we are thriving to the full, these are potentially very accessible questions.

They're relevant to all of us, but the media have completely opted out. And even the supposedly progressive media, like the guardian newspaper and news statesmen have, again, almost completely vacated that kind of space of ideas. They do commentary masses and masses of commentary on the present, but almost nothing looking even five years ahead, let alone 20 or 30 years ahead.

And I think that's a great, dereliction of duty, but I probably would say that wouldn't

Ravi Gurumurthy: I, a lot of agreement with the, as two of my, my, my brother and sister are both journalists and one of the irritations I have is that if you were just to watch the news for the last 10 years, you'd been a [00:42:00] very depress.

State of mind and you totally miss the social progress that's been made, not necessarily over the last 10 years, but over the last hundred huge changes happened even actually in the last 10 years. Carbon emissions have fallen significantly in the UK. You'd never know that probably. And I think that one of the problems with imagination is that people think it's rational to be pessimistic.

And I think you were saying this before, there's actually been a lot of social progress over the last 5,000 years. And if we don't actually have a more balanced view of how change has happened, we won't probably dare to dream. And I just wonder about what can the media do to both Provide the sort of positive story as well, without going down the Martin Lewis pointless good news stories that he, I think he advocated for years ago.

How do we convey the sense of positive change through our media?

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah, I think this is a challenge and I absolutely agree with your diagnosis. I think a lot of very well informed people have an unrealistic pessimist. Which is just doesn't, isn't supported by by the facts [00:43:00] by almost any measure now, even certainly before the pandemic now is a bit different, was, at a global level, the time of the greatest prosperity, the greatest health, the greatest spread of democracy, the best education ever in human history, but you wouldn't.

Know that from reading the media, I ask people some, those simple questions what is, how much of your electricity, which we're all using at this moment? How not now comes from renewables, even climate activists, massively misestimate under Underestimate the answer to that, which is about 40, 45%, depending on when it is a huge change from a generation ago.

As you say, carbon emissions fallen greatly recycling massively up for some things like glass and paper, even if not for clothes. And I think because people don't know this, they underestimate the scope for change. The simple device, I guess I'd recommend for journalists in any medium. Is always trying to tell a story about the present with a bit of a time series, a context.

They sometimes do this with things like economic growth, [00:44:00] but always just show the graph over 20 or 50 years, not just one or two weeks to show, where are we now compared to a previous point? I think. We need to train the public much more to think about the links between present past and future on every topic.

And instead, we've got this incredibly concatenated present with such intensive, speculation about what will happen tomorrow, maybe in the Tori leadership that it's completely squeezed out any sense of history and future. And yet that's what you need to make sense of the world around you.

You can't just understand through an eternal present. Journalists have to become more responsible about this. I really think they have to,

Ravi Gurumurthy: There's a sort of linked question, which I really like from Christina, man. I'm sorry. I may have pronounce your name wrong. But how can we teach kids imagination and social imagination?

What kind of education framework do we need for that?

Geoff Mulgan: In many ways, children find this quite easy because children spend a lot of their life in the [00:45:00] world of imagination and fairy tales and fictions, and they play games where you pretend to be this. And I'll pretend to be to be that. And in a way it's through looking at childhood.

We realize how much of our daily life essentially is a kind of imagination. I will pretend this little thing on my screen means money, which is a jump of imagination. I will pretend you know, that There is a thing called the government, which I will obey their laws. And in the book, I look at some examples of this from history of where children have been encouraged to think imaginatively, to create parallel parliaments, to do their own plans and all around us.

There are lots of great examples. One I like from last year was the mayor of Tiran and Albania who all involve lots of children redesigning the physical layout of the city. Reducing the main roads and putting parkways down the middle to make the whole city more child friendly, a small example of how involving children can have very [00:46:00] tangible, practical effects, but I'd love to see every school should be doing some exercises where children who could be as as young as six, but certainly from 12 or 13 on.

Are taking part in some exercise to think about their own place, their own neighborhood, their own town, their own country, and what its key choices and possibilities might be in their lifetimes, which may well last a hundred years, kids born today have an amazing life expectancy ahead for them to be trapped in this eternal present is a crime, an appalling crime because they will have to live with the consequences of myopic decision making.

And short-termism in all our institutions.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Pat CA has asked about what do you think are the leading forms of governance to enact of a vibrant imagination?

Geoff Mulgan: This is actually something I'm working on right at the moment. National government is not about to disappear despite many predictions it would, and one of the paradoxes of the global pandemic is most of the responses happened at a national level.

The global institutions proved [00:47:00] pretty weak. And one of the things I'm trying to look at now is how do we become better at imagining new institutional options which could be at a neighborhood level, a town city region, nation, Europe, global, and so on. And one of the prompts for this is.

Technology again. So technology has often spawned, extremely imaginative, creative thinking about institutions and the moment it's the blockchain world, which is probably doing most with its proposals, for Dows and other kind of tools. But we have a weirdly polarized position where there's evangelism about how a new generation of web three blockchain will transform all organizations.

A completely skeptical world of real institutional design and almost no middle ground and no thinking actually, what kind of structure an institution works for what task? And as I point out in this current work, what you need for enabled energy system is completely different for what you need for a bank or a school or a qu [00:48:00] system, or.

A university. And the idea that Dows or blockchain models will work for all of them identically is quite obviously foolish, but we lack a, a good theory of how to use these new options for organizational design. And then we lack systematic experimentation to find out which ones work for.

What task, if anyone's interested in this space do get in touch. It's a space. I. Very keen to work on over the next year or two. And it precisely answers this question. How do we combine creative imagination with the practicalities of institutional design from the global to the very local.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Thank you. And David, Rein's got a question specifically, I think, to do with Dows that you touched on between pull that one up. It's I'm curious if you see a bridge between social and technical futures in all the hype around Dows.

Geoff Mulgan: Potentially, but this is where I'm frustrated. If you read the literature and you read about the examples, they are trying to [00:49:00] straddle technology and social, economic and governance.

But it's very clear that people working on it are not drawing on any evidence, any lessons from what type of institution for what works for what kind of task they're sort doing classic one size fits all. Thinking exactly has happened at the birth of the internet. Where many people thought the internet would automatically remove corporate hierarchies states and so on, in a completely flat egalitarian and intelligent world.

Now that's not actually what happened as a result. And so I fear as just a pure repeat of history. And what I urge the people working on Dows to do is immerse yourself in thousands of years of human history. And we've learned how to design a myriad of different kind of institutions for very different tasks from yeah.

Farming to prisons to arm is to, to schools the idea, they would all have the same answer it. So implausible, once you think about it, and yet the virtue of that [00:50:00] field is at least it's thinking it's creative, it's imaginative. It just needs to Levin the imagination with a bit. Hard evidence and theory.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Great. And then I'm gonna turn to Adam Don. I think it's got a really good challenging point, which is that, we've talked about progress over the last 5,000 years, but with almost every natural system in decline, isn't pessimism in the environmental sphere, irrational approach, and actually could false optimism, undermine the impetus for urgent.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah, no, a really good question. And given what the Supreme courts did on climate change in the us, given what's happening in this leadership debate, which seems to have flunked it completely, it's very easy to be pessimistic. And the book I quote Roger halls. One of his letters on the potential apocalypse ahead, I got two or three answers to this, which I'll just give very briefly.

So one is that I think too much pessimism actually undermines action. One rational response to that degree of pessimism. Think there's nothing I can do might as well enjoy life in the present. And I think many [00:51:00] people do respond in that. A second, as Ravi said earlier is often it ignores where there has been progress.

What can be learnt from success in some places in reducing carbon emissions, reshaping industries. And a and third, if you only focus on the negative. The most you can promise people is averting existential disaster. James Lovelock died this week. The kind that he talked about. Whereas in fact, I think that's misleading because I think there are many ways we could actually shape our world for the better, at the same time as averting climate disaster.

So I've more and although they're very good, rational reasons to be pretty pessimistic right now, if that's all you have you risk becoming, I think part of the problem, not part of the.

Ravi Gurumurthy: I'm just gonna ask you one pharma question, which is, I think there will be people listening to this. Who'll feel inspired. Who'll want to pick up the idea and run with it. And I wondered what your, is there a general lesson either for an individual or an institution about how to [00:52:00] run with this idea and and take some.

Geoff Mulgan: There's quite a few sort of options for action, but in a way I sum it up very simply with a message from the arts, what we've learned about imagination in the arts, in visual art, film, you name, it is actually it's, it needs investment. It needs resources. It needs time. It needs places where people can actually exercise their imagination, become good at it.

And one of the things I hope my book will encourage. Is more places which actually fund this sort of imaginative work, take it seriously, try out the methods generate products. And it's only through that iteration between imaginative production and an audience who can critique them. But we get really good results that is obvious, as I say, in music or film or every art field.

And that's why they are generously supported. In most countries, we have almost nothing comparable for social or political imagination. So perhaps it's not surprising. We have a bit of a deficit.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Geoff Mulgan, it's been absolutely fantastic as ever talking to you a really rich conversation and I thoroughly recommend this [00:53:00] book, another world as possible, as well as the overall thesis.

I think every page is filled with lots of incredible stories and inspirational examples. Look forward to seeing how that book shapes public discourse in the next year. Geoff, thanks a lot. Thanks very much for everybody and their questions. Really interesting conversation and do join us again for another Nesta talks to.

Geoff Mulgan: Thanks very much.