A note from me

Hi Folks,

Sorry to say, I’m still struggling at the moment with this healing process. The chemical cream treatment is over after 4 weeks but it has left me with skin all over my face and elsewhere that is red, raw, uncomfortable and stingy. It’s all very tiring but I know there are many worse things in the world and everything should heal over the next couple of months. So, I hope you remember the advice from Baz Luhrmann and the last Newsletter to wear sunscreen and avoid this type of situation yourself in the future!

This has put a bit of a downer on a week when I’d normally be celebrating many milestones. In just a week we have, in chronological order, the birthday of our eldest grandson, Aaron, our sapphire wedding anniversary (Valentine’s Day), and then the birthdays of our younger daughter Grace, Jen (cousin who lives with us), son James and finally Carola (silversmith friend with her studio in our basement). With so many birthdays in mid-February, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the joys of spring in mid-May bring a certain degree of friskiness in our family.  

I guess I’ll just get through the week as best I can, and plan for enhanced celebrations at a later time.

I did get out to the cinema once in the past week (I could hide in the darkness!) where I watched the Oscar-contender, ‘The Brutalist’. This is a film full of ideas that retained my interest even though it was long. However, I found that the themes were not particularly strongly developed so I was never very deeply or emotionally engaged. The core themes were probably the challenges/impossibility of authentic artistic or cultural diversity in the face of dominant post-war American capitalism which, nevertheless, appropriates it when it suits powerful individuals. At some point, I should probably try to watch the film again to consider afresh the different ideas being explored and also look for how well they are illuminated in the film’s high-quality cinematography. 

I guess, in a way, the collective enterprise of producing a film, distributing it widely, and viewing it in a public space reflects the interplay of private enterprise with a range of different common goods in society. In recent Newsletters, we have been exploring ‘The Common Good’ and this edition continues that theme. I hope you continue to find these materials enjoyable and that they help you enrich your own personal or organisational perspectives on building ‘The Common Good’!

I hope you’ll understand why I’m not including the normal video clip with this edition of the Newsletter - but I do have some other very exciting news in the official launch of the Dodo Club Podcast! This is a progression from the previous webinars which we held online, and we hope that with this new platform, it will encourage more and more people to participate in viewing these important discussions. The first episode is a wonderful discussion on the Power of Stories, Politics, and Scenario-thinking with the inimitable Betty Sue Flowers! You can find the link to watch it on YouTube or listen on Spotify below:

My Bi-Weekly Guide

The Importance of Strategic Character and How to Build It

In the last Newsletter, we considered 5 principles for managing common pool resources and addressing the challenges of free riders and the so-called, ‘tragedy of the commons’. These principles are reflected in the lessons from the US Constitution explored in Newsletter Edition 34. This Constitution provides a successful (though currently seriously threatened) template for organising a society that combines individual rights with the generation of collective and individual prosperity.  

Different societies have evolved different ways of trying to address these challenges at different times and with different degrees of success. The story of modern France begins with a series of turbulent social and political upheavals from the time of the Revolution in 1789-92. Within a hundred years of the Revolution there was the First Republic, First Empire, Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire and the Third Republic (which followed defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and the uprising of the Paris Commune). All of these were different models for organising society and the affairs of State. The period also saw significant linguistic and educational reforms aimed at unifying the country through language and education, contributing to a stronger national identity. Nevertheless, wealth concentration saw the richest 10 percent owning most of the nation's wealth.

These turbulent times also fuelled strong artistic expression, with Paris becoming the widely acknowledged powerhouse for Western fine arts. Despite widespread French despondency following military defeat by the Prussians, Impressionism in art emerged in the 1870s with a group of artists based in Paris. This was initially derided by the established artistic authorities but became recognised as a fresh, original and exciting development in art over the next couple of decades.

The pioneers of Impressionism were four young painters—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille—who met while studying together in the 1860s. They began to paint outdoors and to try to capture the sense of light and the essential feeling of moments in everyday life rather than emphasise verisimilitude or address the formal historical, religious, or mythological subjects that occupied many established artists.  

Certainly one of my favourite paintings from this period is Renoir’s, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, which was painted in 1876 and can now be seen at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. For me, this painting also captures something of the essence of ‘Common Good’.   Many people are gathered together in an attractive location to enjoy music, dance, food and drinks in a way that unites them without diminishing their individuality. There are many individual little stories within the painting – just consider who is looking at, or being ignored by, who – but the overall impression is of people being able to flourish in a framework that provides them with a social setting for self-expression, relationship-building and entertainment. Le Moulin de la Galette was a form of common good for these people.

To develop new forms of common good today like, for example, the effective management of emissions into the atmosphere, we need to understand more than just the principles and lessons outlined in previous Newsletters. We also need to understand better the types and ranges of attitudes different people actually have towards supporting common goods. As noted in a previous Newsletter, credible writers on the topic assert that, for the framers of the US Constitution, “the only meaningful definition of the common good would be the agreements that emerged from an inclusive political and legislative process to resolve competing interests”. We need to actually deliberate the nature of common good with people if we want to build an understanding of what can be achieved.

We thought a lot about how to create these types of dialogue in our scenarios team. We also wanted to understand the range of perspectives on common goods in different places around the world to see how they differed. However, our initial discussions with others often just led to philosophical, somewhat abstract, deliberation about topics like capitalism, Marxism or communitarianism. So we came up with an idea of how to make the discussions semi-practical – turn them into a board game. By observing how people play the game, you can learn a lot about their underlying attitudes. The wonderful Ariella Helfgott championed this development.

The basis of the ‘Common Good’ game makes use of the ‘veil of ignorance’ concept articulated by John Rawls in his classic, A Theory of Justice. The way this is applied in this game is not very complicated:

- Before knowing what situation you will start with as an individual in the game, you set up the rules and goals for a society right at the beginning and make choices as a group about the way systems will work. You also set individual goals.

- You are then given a role to play, as an individual who may, for example, be born privileged, middle-class, disabled, or in a minority group etc. 

- And then you have to try and win the game by achieving your goals as an individual within this society you have built.  

- A key element being that, if the societal goals you set out right at the beginning aren’t also reached, everybody loses. 

It was a truly interesting game to play, with different permutations for different cultures and countries, and it was a wonderful, relaxed ice-breaker for meaningful practical conversations. We learnt much about the attitudes of different people to common goods like health services, education, environmental protection, taxation, social welfare and justice systems, which institutions people trust to deliver common goods, and how individuals come to make group decisions. 

Many rich insights emerged from these deliberations although I would like to initially highlight just the following 5 points.

1. The Common Good game and the ‘veil of ignorance’ approaches are powerful: 

   Using the game to kick-off gatherings provides a relaxed low-stakes environment that brings people comfortably together to explore potentially sensitive issues. It also provides a learning platform and practical food-for-thought for subsequent dialogue. The ‘veil of ignorance’ abstraction feels fair to most people as an approach to the topic and encourages them to consider possibilities more broadly than may be motivated by their current situation in society and self-interests.

2. The level of trust in government has a huge impact:
   Many people expect governments to be the main institutions that guarantee common goods, but the experience or perception in some parts of the world is that power is used mainly to benefit either politicians or civil servants themselves or the specific constituencies that support them, with scant attention to the broader population. Corruption then becomes a prominent issue, and there is a significant impact on attitudes to immigration, national security, military spending, and willingness to pay taxes to fund public services. 
   
   In a Nordic workshop, we found a generally high level of trust in government to provide common goods, but in a Kenyan context there was more trust in non-governmental civic organisations and external agencies, and in a Japanese deliberation there was greater trust in large, well-established business conglomerates.
   

3. There are significantly different priorities in different social contexts:
   In a multi-stakeholder Nordic engagement, the higher-ranked priorities proved to be addressing climate change, maintaining the solvency of the welfare state, and addressing immigration and social inclusion. In contrast, in a similar East-African setting, the higher priorities were breaking the cycle of government corruption, addressing inequalities in wealth and access to services, and gender issues including abortion. Working with intermediaries in Japan, it was initially difficult to initiate any meaningful deliberation as there was an assertion that attention to the common good over individual interests was already an intrinsic aspect of Japanese culture. Unwillingness to risk losing face in front of foreigners also reduced the willingness to address criticisms of Japanese society or include representatives of the underprivileged in the dialogue. Eventually, however, the higher priority issues that surfaced in deliberations were the aging population, wealth inequality and precarious labour, and gender discrimination.
   

4. Access to healthcare and education is critical across contexts:
   Along with the significant differences in different societies which are important to recognise, some common priorities arose across most contexts. Access to both education and healthcare was uniformly considered absolutely essential. In addition, for attention to be paid to broader common goods, there was a recognised need for people to have sufficient means to focus beyond their individual survival. This suggests that the three topics of financial security, health and education can form a bedrock on which additional common goods may be built. 
   

5. Wealth inequality has an enormous impact: 
   This issue has a significant impact on social fragmentation and willingness to participate in delivering and maintaining common goods. While average disparities between nations have been reducing as emerging economies grow, there are rapidly increasing inequalities within most well-developed economies.  For example, the ‘great compression’ in wage inequality post-WWII in the US gave way to the ‘great divergence’ beginning in the 1980s and continuing today, with levels of inequality not seen since the so-called ‘Gilded Age’ of the late 19^th century. 

   There are also important differences between actual inequality, perceived inequality and desired inequality.  There have been various studies on this, but I recall delving into an article that highlighted that actual inequality in the US was much greater than the people surveyed thought it was, and that even this perceived inequality was much higher than people thought would be ideal. ‘Fairness’ is an important consideration in this. People observe that there are naturally differences in effort and capability between different people and most consider that this this should be reflected in some income differentiation.  So a certain degree of income inequality seems ‘fair’, but if this becomes large it appears ‘unfair’ as it probably relates to structural factors or good/bad fortune independent of individual contribution.
   
   The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality that varies from 0 (all the population has identical income) to 100 (all income goes to a single recipient with no further distribution). From the figures in the survey, I estimated the Gini coefficient of the income distribution this group felt on average was ‘ideal’. Interestingly, the ‘ideal’ outcome was around 26-28 which is similar to the Netherlands (where I live) and the Nordic countries. This contrasts with around 35 in the UK (where I was born) and 40 in the US (where my wife was born). It is interesting to reflect on the extent to which this structural inequality may relate to different levels of social fragmentation and attitudes to building common goods in these different locations. It is also interesting to consider the significant gap between actual and perceived inequality and the potential consequences of more widespread awareness of realities.

Question of The Fortnight

Every fortnight I’ll be asking a thought-provoking question in hopes of sparking interesting and enlightening discussion.

I’d love to hear your response! You can do so by simply responding to this email.

Today’s question is:

Did any of the 5 insights highlighted above particularly resonate with you? Why?

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