The Great Acceleration by Robert Colvile

Author:Robert Colvile
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

REINVENTING GOVERNMENT

So how can government deal with all these pressures – and the opportunities and dangers of disruption? One conventional prescription to resolve these problems is for politicians to look to the long term, to beef up their ‘horizon-scanning’ function. As the former Blair aide Geoff Mulgan has said, many governments ‘live with their eyes on the rear-view mirror, refighting ancient battles and reigniting ancient enmities’.103

How much better, instead, to develop a culture more akin to that of the Iroquois, whose Great Law, as cited by Philip Zimbardo, stated: ‘In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation . . . even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.’104

But it is all very well to talk about making decisions for the long term. The trouble is that when the world is moving so fast, even the best planners can be blindsided. In its World Economic Outlook for 2007, the IMF cheerfully proclaimed that ‘overall risks . . . seem less threatening than six months ago’.105 We know what happened next. Or take the HS2 high-speed rail line in Britain: it has taken decades to plan, and will take decades more to build, by which time regular high-speed rail may be laughably outdated in the face of maglev trains, mega-fast ‘hyperloop’ bullet trains or simple old-fashioned ultra-fast broadband.

Lord Browne of Madingley, the former head of BP, now serves as the government’s lead non-executive director, charged with bringing business savvy to the affairs of government. His mantra, he says, is not to look more than a decade ahead, but instead to focus on a few immediate priorities and devote all your resources and attention to driving them through.106 Others suggest making smaller, more flexible bets that can be adjusted in the light of changing events.

When it comes to technology in particular, there is a host of ways in which the disruptive, fast-moving, anti-hierarchical spirit of the great acceleration could be employed to make government – and politics – work better and faster. For example, one Downing Street official points out that changes in technology ‘give politicians an opportunity to engage with people in a way they never would have five or ten or fifteen years ago’: they are no longer reliant on the media to make their case.107

And while the internet has enabled candidates to bypass the media (most effectively with Barack Obama’s incredibly disciplined get-out-the-vote effort in 2012), it has also enabled them to draw their supporters into the process. Joe Trippi says of his work on Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004: ‘It became obvious pretty quickly that a couple of dozen sleep-deprived political junkies in our corner offices . . . couldn’t possibly match the brainpower and resourcefulness of six hundred thousand Americans.’108

On a more provincial level, British MPs have used the web to compile email lists of a significant fraction of their constituents, enabling them to respond more immediately and directly to their concerns. Sometimes, technology has even taken politicians

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.