We already know everything we need to know - Part 2

Part 2: Society

‘Life moves faster than science, whether natural or social.  Factories close. People find themselves out of work and smitten by depression. People die. People go to prison over the many years it takes the social scientist to hypothesize, collect data, test, confirm or disconfirm, and replicate. And on it goes. When we confront the hardest social problems… we need to accelerate the pace of our acquisition of understanding. We have to use every available tool of thought to think what we are doing… make a judgment even before the economic study gets completely rendered, and so can you, and then we can debate our differing judgments, wrangling our way to a decision about what should be done…. Of course, where we can, we also want to draw on and validate our judgments through rigorous science or social-science research. But it is crucial to keep in mind that science will always remain limited by the fact that it can’t catch up with reality, and it can never tell us what we should do. We must supplement science with other instruments for understanding current, lived reality.’

-Danielle Allen 2018. New foreword to Aerendt’s The Human Condition.

In part one I discussed the modern plight of having too much information. Too much noise in the signal, too many options, too many ways of doing things sub-optimally. Unlike previous eras, the bottleneck is never lack of information, even though we often hope that more information is somehow the solution. I made the argument that we already know the shape of what’s true, and we’re generally at the stage of filling in the gaps. A lot of the ‘one weird trick’ or ‘hacks’ or counter intuitive takes we’re exposed to are usually attached to some kind of profit-seeking campaign. At an individual level, we probably don’t need more research, we just need opportunities, structures and environments that allow us to make healthier choices and engage in nutritious behaviours.

I believe this is true at the societal level as well. We already know what’s good for populations and communities, we just need to decide as a society what we want to prioritise. Much in the way that one more click bait article on the best way to exercise isn’t going to change most peoples’ lives, one more study or paper on the importance of green space, or cycle paths, or play, or the value of libraries isn’t going to fix our current conditions. The issue is not lack of research, it’s an unwillingness of our leaders to prioritise health and quality of life over disproven ideas about free market fundamentalism or the superiority of shareholder value over social value. Just as we’ve had the modern fitness industry for over 40 years and things have not gotten better, we’ve ceded the social good to profit-driven insurance corporations, private equity groups, privatised water conglomerates and their results have have laid bare the lies behind the ideas that an unregulated free market will improve the quality of our lives. The market as it exists today isn’t capable of meaningfully  reacting to climate change, poor working conditions, social isolation or the rise of hate groups. All it can do is re-arrange itself so that these trends are a further source of profit. We can’t cede our sense of what is good or important to supposedly neutral market forces.

The playing field is not neutral. Corporations in the tobacco, fast food, tech and entertainment industries spend billions (trillions?) in order to ensure we act against our own self and community interests. The economic term ‘revealed preferences’ is often a sneaky way of saying when you take away options, how do people spend their money and time? It’s easy to pretend most people would prefer to stay at home, watch Netflix and order delivery when their other opportunities have been limited by lack of time, money, transportation, knowledge, social structures and other factors. People’s preferences are constrained by what is afforded to them. If someone is living in a small apartment in the winter and they have nowhere to go, there’s no public space and there are no libraries, what are they going to reveal as their preferences? There’s an important distinction between what we value & what is good versus what we do or consume compulsively because of our circumstances.

This is a round about way of saying that the onus should not be on us as individuals to present evidence that parks are good, or libraries are important or that walkable urban design is healthy. We know all these things are obviously true and it takes a specific kind of profit motivated reasoning to pretend otherwise.

It’s a system level version of the old Upton Sinclair quote, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ The same people who argue that public assets should be privatised are the exact same people who will write articles about how we don’t need public libraries because we have Amazon and Starbucks.

I think of all the volunteer organisations or local providers who are caught in a hamster wheel of collecting data and creating evidence that movement opportunities are good or that the ROI on garden allotments outweighs the cost of not developing public land. People who are good at community building are suddenly forced to fill out endless reports to prove the value of their work.We can look at countries where they have prioritised accessible movement and green spaces and we know that this works. 

I often think about the 1970s Dutch ‘Stop de Kindermoord’ movement. Parents were galvanised by the rising rates of children being killed by cars. As a society they stepped up and said enough. The modern Dutch transportation infrastructure is a result of their activism. The market would have priced dead children into the cost of doing business. 

Eventually, we have to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘This is what we want. This is what we stand for as a society.’ “It is important to us that our kids can walk to school without getting hit by cars, it’s important to us that we have access to sports clubs and leisure centres, movement is important, access to nature is important and social connection is important. We don’t need any more data to prove this. Instead we need to work together to make positive change possible.