Taking Back Control: Why ‘Agency’ Could Be The Next Big Idea In Politics (James Kanagasooriam)

17:19James Kanagasooriam:He's the godfather of this.

17:21Amol Rajan:He is the godfather. And Bowling Alone, which I mentioned in that episode with Jonathan Haidt, actually. And Haidt, being a great sociologist, knew the work intimately. In 1995, Robert Putnam wrote an essay. Five years later, he turned it into a bestselling book. We talked about the decline of voluntary associations, rotary clubs, women's societies, sports groups, church groups, whatever it might be. The big society, I don't really care what you call it. It's not a left or right thing. Social life, social capital. And what Jonathan pointed out to me, which obviously is in the Putnam book, is that Putnam talked about how the rise of television had sort of created an appealing interior life where people used to play about on the street.

17:59Amol Rajan:And then because of television in 20th century America, people, kids went from the street to watching as a family at home. You know, 30 million people watching whatever, some big show in America. And it's almost like the transition from and bowling alone came out in 2000. The iPhone came out in 2004. And I sort of feel we've gone from bowling alone to scrolling alone, where in the transition from television to iPhones, even that family moment is reduced to an individualized atomized existence. At the same time is for lots of reasons social life has collapsed. Trade unions have collapsed. Working men's clubs have disappeared.

18:37Amol Rajan:Ladies societies, friendly institutes. The church. The church has massively declined. Pubs. Pubs are in crisis in this country.

18:44James Kanagasooriam:Well, these are all connected, right? What's going on? So interestingly, Robert Putnam is the godfather of all of this. Some of his work has since been updated. Meta and the Royal Society basically did a massive study of millions of people's friendship groups to cover a couple of things. A, one of your interests around social mobility, which I know that you're interested in. And second, around friendship and connectivity. And they've basically found that the updated model is basically there are two types of social capital. The first is what they call bonding capital. Again, a very wonky term, but it's the idea of the closeness of relationships to people within an area.

19:23James Kanagasooriam:So how intense and how overlapping are the relationships that you have with the people that you basically live next to or adjacent to? And then there's bridging capital, which is the degree of capital that exists between a communities or people or groups that are not right next to you, but might be adjacent to you or across from you. Postcode to postcode, David to, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And one of the things that a lot of these clubs and social life, and again, we don't talk about it, I guess, because the idea that the answer to a lot of our civic issues is a hobby doesn't sound very clever, right?

19:59James Kanagasooriam:There's not much social incentive to start talking about ultimate Frisbee as some kind of panacea for political problems. You want to have big, grand solutions that involve stuff. But actually, what you're talking about is the stuff of life.

20:12Amol Rajan:This is the hidden wealth of nations, to quote the title of David Halpern's book. But the trouble is, it's a hard political sell, because people, probably me, back in the day would say, you know, the big society is a narrative which is a cover for austerity, taking away the money from youth clubs. And you're saying we've got the big society, what you need is money for youth clubs. But some of this stuff doesn't need to cost that much money, does it? You still need people who want to go. You still need people who want to go. And is it the case that the decline of social capital, I don't understand why you think social capital or association or civic life is in decline, but is it the case that the decline in social capital has most affected people from poorer communities and that, in a sense, people from poorer communities who lack economic capital, obviously they want more economic capital, but they benefit most from access to social capital.

21:02James Kanagasooriam:I think it's affected people everywhere, but the main thing that the matter, proposal really struck out for me was the idea that in social capital rich settings, i.e. hobbies or groups, you actually had a huge degree of mixing. And I've also seen a lot of research that churches, for example, in the UK, and I'm sure other religious kind of institutions match that, are one of the biggest kind of arenas for social mixing. And effective people who have different views, different values, different ways of thinking about the world come together. And I guess if you retreat out of the physical world where you have all this mixing, you have a degree of conversation, people are able to listen to each other and understand each other.

21:45James Kanagasooriam:And you basically retreat into a abstract thing that is governed by social media bubbles, but also kind of quite separate identities. Then these things become a lot harder. You know, for me, the most depressing poll, polling, and it's regularly done every year by different companies, is the percentage of people that wouldn't be friends with or wouldn't necessarily be a partner with someone of a different political persuasion. There's a couple of things, right, that are strange about that. First of all, how you vote is what you do in five minutes once every five years. Just think about it. That's quite a strange thing on which to demarcate and to view society based on what they do once every five years.

22:25James Kanagasooriam:In the UK, it's even stranger because now we've got 50 % of people changing their vote every election. So it's strange for a number of reasons. And it seems to me that a lot of these things have coalesced to remove people out of the messy reality of convening and talking and being with people in their real physical lives.

22:44Amol Rajan:Some of whom will have different opinions. Right. On their favorite type of pizza, but also, you know, reformed council tax.

22:52James Kanagasooriam:lost that ability just to to live and and not necessarily agree but just live alongside and so the degree of geographic self-sorting and then digital self-sorting has created a really difficult politics and putnam was the person that called it the other person i think he's very influential on understanding the role of technology and how it might change our politics and i guess

23:15Amol Rajan:the attention economy is neil uh postman amusing ourselves amusing ourselves to death where it's

23:22James Kanagasooriam:For me, it's the companion piece to Robert Putnam and about how this retreat out of the physical life into online, because ultimately, not everything, by the way, has degraded. If you go to see Park Run, you see the number of people. That's what I was going to say.

23:40Amol Rajan:I want to do the antidote to decline, honestly, because I feel there's such a cultural script around, and I'm so conscious of it because I work in the news industry, for goodness sake. There's such an obvious cultural script. I kind of want it's a bit like recently people have pointed out actually crime in London across most measures. And these are just facts. Crime in London is lower now than it has been for a very long time. Homicide, murder and so on, things like that. But but just on and Parkland's a great example. But just these different things that are in decline. So in 2000, Putnam talked about voluntary associations or groups like sports clubs, Rotary Society, mothers meetings trade unions church attendance take all of those put them in the UK add on the decline of the friendly societies or working men's clubs or trade unions which you know 70 years ago millions of people belong to trade unions in a way they don't anymore add on the decline of pubs which in Roger Scruton's immortal phrase added to the moral savings of their communities are these things linked or are they just like

24:40James Kanagasooriam:no they are all linked it's about it's about our use of time and we have swapped out all of these different things to spend effectively what 15 years with our phones if you think about that as a transformation of our political social cultural life that's a huge thing to have happened like we are now all live with a friend that is the size of your hand that you now spend 15 years with the entire population basically

25:06Amol Rajan:15 years over the course of your life

25:07James Kanagasooriam:over the course of your life and we've swapped that out for the messiness and the diversity I think cognitive and emotional and physical diversity of all of these different things. I don't think it's down everywhere. We measured degrees of social capital by areas of the country and it does correlate to income. And this is the this is the problem. If the country, you know, as a pollster, we measure what's the number one problem is the cost of living crisis. The cost of living crisis is a very wonkish anodyne term to describe a crisis of the future and a crisis of optimism. Isn't it a crisis of meaning?

25:42James Kanagasooriam:I think it is about money as well.

25:45Amol Rajan:It's people. Cost of living is absolutely. Cost of living. I think cost of living used to be called poverty, right? But the point about calling it cost of living. The problem with cost of living is not having enough money. And cost of living becomes an acute problem. It's got that sense of adjusted for real terms, right? It's about inflation and whether or not pay keeps up with inflation and the increasing gap between the two of them. But cost of living to me has a kind of almost Dickensian, mid-Victorian additional sense, which is about the cost of living crisis is an expression of dejection about your country and society's prospects.

26:19James Kanagasooriam:I thought the winning candidate in Gorton and Denton, is it Hannah Spencer? Yeah. For the Green Party. Summer. Put it really well. What's the point of working? Well, you're working harder and harder for less and less. Factually correct. Which is an amazing, astute and very efficient way of describing. We're using all these different terms, right, which a lot of the time people are not actually the language that they speak in. But fundamentally, people are finding it harder and harder just to get on in life. So I think the issue about social capital and the issue about giving of your time, because we're talking about time here, that's the most important variable.

26:54James Kanagasooriam:You can't really approach this conversation about volunteering and enriching the social life of an area and recalibrating our time until people know how they're going to afford their bills and their energy bills and how they're going to get a pay rise and how they're going to move. So the two aspects, this is where economics and culture are not, yes, they can operate separately, but actually they're intimately connected.

27:16Amol Rajan:With the idea of agency as this very useful, I should just say, by the way, people should go and have a look at the political whiteboard, so named because there's a political whiteboard in your office, and read this very long, brilliantly clear and cogent and wonkish blog post for themselves. And I don't want to overstate it. I don't think James Kanagasurium is going around saying, agency is the one big idea that explains all our politics. But it explains a lot of our politics. And that's at the kind of, you've talked about agency at the sort of individual level, that if you kind of look at the polling, a bit like David Goodhart would say, that if you look to the British Social Attitude Survey, it wasn't in there.

27:54Amol Rajan:Yeah, it wasn't that people said, I feel like an anywhere, I feel like a somewhere. You kind of infer that from the sentiment that's kind of expressed there. Similarly, you're inferring that a lack of control or agency over our lives is a big thing for many, many individuals. Isn't it also, isn't agency a useful idea for understanding some of the problems of the modern British state? Which is that if you look over the last 15 or 20 years, it is just the case that it's quite hard to get stuff done. People talk about this a lot in the context of planning, but also just in terms of the politicians and these kind of weird advisors who come and go, like Dominic Cummings and Steve Hilton, they say in Whitehall you just can't get anything done.

28:35Amol Rajan:And so lack of agency, as well as being a feeling for individuals, is to some extent a reality of the modern British state, isn't it?

28:44James Kanagasooriam:And I think if you read that, again, outside my polling domain, but if you just read the feedback from departed government advisors they always say the same thing. Paul Oven and Ben Judah

28:56Amol Rajan:have literally all said exactly the same thing. Paul Oven just to explain worked I think for Starmer. Ben Judah is an interesting sort of Labour intellectual who worked for David Lammy. He's written pieces in the Times recently.

29:06James Kanagasooriam:Basically all wrote the same block. All wrote the same article. Saying that we can't seem to get things done.

29:13Amol Rajan:The state doesn't work. You need a fundamental rewiring of the civil service. In Whitehall you pull leaves and stuff doesn't get done. So you've got a lack of agency at the individual level, which is why the idea of taking back control and maybe politicians like Trump who appear to have agency kind of appeal. You've got a lack of agency when it comes to the state where maybe because of the civil service it's hard to get things done. And the consequence of those two, together with kind of sustained low economic growth, has been a profound cultural pessimism. Do you see that now in the data?

29:50James Kanagasooriam:You do. Well, there's a couple of things on cultural pessimism. If you ask people, what do you think about the political system? You get very negative feedback. You know, between two thirds to three quarters of people. Anti-politics. That we need some kind of renewal, reform, change, whatever your word is that begins with re. A restore for some cases, right? It's very different, but they all have the same kind of root. Ridical. Ridical. Exactly. and for me though there's a quirk though to the polling data so YouGov do a weekly tracker of life satisfaction and I was looking at the data since 2019 it stayed flat so you're asked basically how satisfied are you with your life?

30:37James Kanagasooriam:0 to 10 and the average score has been 5.7 literally for 7 years and so it's a bit more complicated than everyone is unhappy. It is a bit more complicated. And actually, I think there's a degree to which how people view the system, how people view what's going on around them is not necessarily completely coupled to their own life satisfaction.

31:01Amol Rajan:But do you think that the, all mindful though it must be that it is more complicated, do you think that to the extent that there is evidence in the polling for kind of cultural pessimism, a kind of declinism, do you think that that's beginning to have really kind of negative consequences? I mean, immigration figures would suggest a lot of young people, including every single one I know in their 20s, are thinking about leaving. But do you think that sort of we're... Yeah, it's real.

31:29James Kanagasooriam:The cultural pessimism is real.

31:31Amol Rajan:But it's making it harder to do politics. You know, it's making it harder to kind of cohere society. It's making it harder to... And, you know, by the way, it might be justified. You know, as I say, it might well be justified, especially for young people who can't buy a house or have never experienced growth in their life. But do you fear that as you look at this kind of cauldron of problems and challenges that Britain faces, that this cultural pessimism is going to inhibit our ability to fix them?

31:58James Kanagasooriam:I think when any society or community has a degree of unity and optimism, there's basically a greater degree of elasticity where it's able to deal with shocks and things going wrong and sacrifice, right, which is what people have been through. But when you don't have those pillars, people ask what am I sacrificing for in terms of the amount of tax they might be paying or what they're doing or what they're contributing to or certain diminishments of their freedoms as we saw during COVID. And it is really important for societies to cohere and for people to be satisfied and for people to be optimistic.

32:33James Kanagasooriam:And it's the silver bullet that everyone's been looking for. And I think, did I mean the agency to be kind of a uni explanation for everything? No, because I think it's going to be really unhard. You talked about the rise of all these different things that have occurred, lack of income growth, the lack of unity, the decline of social capital, the rise of migration to levels which people didn't necessarily consent to, the rise of expansion of higher education, beyond which the number of jobs exist to take into account. These are all like a maelstrom of different explanations and things that are damaging our cultural optimism.

33:11James Kanagasooriam:But again, I think what people are looking for is leadership out of it. I don't think people enjoy being pessimistic. It's leadership, isn't it?

33:17Amol Rajan:Leadership and optimistic leadership, a sense that someone can get things done and unite a country.

33:27Amol Rajan:I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with James Kanagasurium. Kanagasuriam, he is a hugely influential figure in modern British politics. So just bear in mind what you're hearing him say to you via me is the stuff that he's saying to people right at the top of British politics on both sides of the Commons. So I hope you're getting some value out of it. If you are, please subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. That way you won't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. And that way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode.

33:59Amol Rajan:and you'll never miss out. Not bad, is it? What a deal. Right, thank you. And back to James Kanagasurum.

34:09Amol Rajan:It's 2009 and we're in the German mountains. A man straps himself into a car on the world's most dangerous racetrack. He whispers to himself, It's time to put my balls on the dashboard. As he starts the engine. In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance, unconscious. In 15 years, he's a billionaire. This is Toto Wolff, Formula One's most powerful team boss and the breakout star of Drive to Survive. This week on Good Bad Billionaire, how Toto Wolff made his billions. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

34:48Amol Rajan:You're doing a bit of work, I think, on the attention economy and kind of the implications of it. how has the attention economy, by which we mean the kind of extraordinary monetization of our attention by mostly a few companies and our willing conscription in this by being on Instagram all day long looking at images of kettlebells, which I intend to contribute to quite assiduously quite soon. How is the attention economy fracturing modern societies, do you think?

35:18James Kanagasooriam:So I'll reference the guys at More in Common again. one of the key segments they found in the population, when analysing it, they called them sceptical scrollers. So it's the first time the British public have been analysed and one of the key seven segments is literally defined by their attention and use of a phone.

35:37Amol Rajan:Who are these people?

35:39James Kanagasooriam:Effectively, people who are very online, quite sceptical about institutions and different people.

35:45Amol Rajan:They're not sceptical about scrolling. They're not people going off social media. No, they're literally scrolling.

35:48James Kanagasooriam:And I find that extraordinary because that's literally changing how we consume. It makes it harder to cut through, I guess, particularly if you are used to the more kind of traditional outlets and ways of communicating. But crucially, it means you have to do quite strange things or more esoteric things or more meta things to grab people's attention. So, Alan, we were analyzing the idea how many people multitask while watching something. I think two-thirds of under 45s are literally doing something else as they watch something. So you might think you have eyeballs, someone's eyeballs, but you don't.

36:27James Kanagasooriam:That's only versus only 27 % of over 75s. We asked at Focal Data, we asked whether they agreed with the statement, I can't stop checking my phone when I should be focusing on other things, which is a completely terrifying phrase. 71 % of 18 to 24-year-olds agree with the statement, I can't stop checking my phone when I should be focusing on other things. You know, you had Jonathan Hight on. You know, he can explain this in some depth. 66 % of 18 to 24-year-olds say they struggle to concentrate on tasks that require long attention. James Marriott is the other thinker who's massive on the seats.

37:03James Kanagasooriam:Great Times columnist, yeah. Writing a whole book about this crisis of attention. It changes everything because suddenly we're having to compete with short-form arguments. And actually, a lot of politics is about the long-form argument. It might not be necessary to win an election. You can win elections on slogans. But actually, a lot of the fixes that are required are very long-form arguments that have to display trade-offs.

37:25Amol Rajan:But there's a complexity here, though, isn't there? Because on the one hand, owing to my interest in digital media, I've spent a huge amount of time watching online tutorials by Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast is the world's biggest YouTuber. I don't know if he's a billionaire, but he's extraordinarily rich. you know some of his videos literally hundreds of millions of people are watching like 2 %

37:46James Kanagasooriam:I've seen the Beast games

37:47Amol Rajan:absolutely incredible he's a huge he's a kind of massive conglomerate in himself and he's basically this guy called Jimmy who from a very young age obsessively created videos and he gives these tutorials where he talks about what you can do to get people's attention how you can make the first three seconds ever more this idea of the hook and you know now on your Instagram feed or your social media feed it's just full of people saying here's how you use AI to write three killer hooks because it's all about grabbing people in that first three seconds. Do you think that's a good thing? No. And I think I kind of want to resist it and I experiment with it a little bit.

38:19Amol Rajan:So people do all these weird things like crash zooms and out of focus and all this quite crazy stuff. And I just, I find it sort of unnatural and strange. I'm experimenting all the time, so I try and have a go at it. But I find it kind of difficult to reconcile that with the flip side of it, which is that one of the huge reasons for the success of podcasts and YouTube, if not the main reason, is long form. That's amazing. People want that sustained focus on the subject.

38:42James Kanagasooriam:But what people are doing versus where they want to be are two different things. And I think there probably is a desire to not get rid of long form culture. It's happening everywhere. How many of the songs from the 90s, 80s and 70s would have ever passed through the concept of a hook? Sure, there are loads and loads of tracks with amazing hooks. I don't know, how many Kate Bush songs would have made it through? if you think about the decline of the album I think about the decline of classical music as the other thing, as an art form that's under serious pressure

39:13Amol Rajan:That's because you're a classical singer though, isn't it?

39:15James Kanagasooriam:How much of that though would exist in a world of an attention economy? Who's going to listen to, I don't know, two hours a mile or who's going to listen to 30 minutes of something? Who's going to listen to 10 minutes of something? I think that, by the way, you talked about the sense of loss. I think people know that. They think that long form culture whether it's a book, whether whether it's a piece of music, whether it's a film, basically under attack and not necessarily from other people, but from our own behaviours. And that makes politics more difficult because at the heart of why things haven't gone well, which we haven't discussed, is the lack of trade-offs.

39:50James Kanagasooriam:There are real trade-offs that exist. Like you can't just have X without Y changing. But that's already a conditional argument. Whereas if you just say it's all possible, which is a much neater, much more efficient way of communicating. Isn't that what populists do? I think it's what everyone does. And I think it's very easy to warehouse a lot of the more negative things about politics into populism. I think people have done it everywhere. If you think about the last election, you know, no tax rises or X, Y, Z, right? That's from, and that happens across the centre-right and the centre-left across all of the...

40:24James Kanagasooriam:But maybe that's because there aren't votes in it.

40:26Amol Rajan:It's so interesting you say that. I think about that all the time. I don't know if you've had the pleasure of hearing me say this on the Today program. I have a sort of a rule. I don't do it 100 % of the time. But I try in most politicians' interviews on the Today program to say the following words. All policies are trade-offs. Who are the losers? I've done that maybe 50 times. I don't know. A few dozen times. Whatever. I've done it. And I try and do it. Make sure I do it. What's the answer you get? Well, you never get a frank answer. No one wants to talk about the trade-offs. And if you think about some of the intractable problems in this country, for instance, social care.

41:01Amol Rajan:And I mentioned social care because I think it's, you know, you can talk about it impartially, right? Because in 2010, the coalition government asked Andrew Dillnott to come up with a report. You know what? You can find the Dillnott report. It was published March 2011. He had some pretty interesting proposals about what to do about social care. When Nick Timothy was advising Theresa May, they came up with a plan in the 2017 election. It was called a dementia tax. It's been put on the back burner. What's happened right now? Louise Casey. Good on Louise Casey. I know her well. She's a tremendously bright public servant.

41:32Amol Rajan:She's doing a review into that and about 12 other things. I think her review about social care is going to report towards the end of this parliament. And then who knows who will be in government when its recommendations are implemented, if ever. You're talking about a country that takes 20 years to come up with a social care policy. That's cross-party, right? Maybe that's because the voters. I know you've got to think about the voters are never wrong or not quite that. but you can't want different voters. But maybe voters don't want to hear the trade-offs.

41:58James Kanagasooriam:Okay, so the person I think who I've learned the most from in terms of this particular question, which is how should research be used, is a guy called John McTernan, who I think was... Blair advisor, yeah. Blair and Brown advisor, and also advised the Labour Party in Australia as well. Julia Gillard, I think from memory. And John is a very expert guy. He's been around for a long time. And he talked about research being either a mirror or a lamp, which sounds like a kind of Wolf Hall offshoot. But it isn't. And he said, look, leaders, commercial leaders, corporate leaders, political leaders can either use polling as a mirror, in which case you ask, you know, what do you think about X, Y, Z?

42:42James Kanagasooriam:And then back comes the answer. And then you say, here is the answer. And, you know, he was a political strategist. So, you know, he could have had an option saying, do this, do A, B and C, because that's what the country wants. And there are people who use research as a lamp, which is all the kind of stuff that's in between, which is, yes, the poll says A, B and C, but that's contextual. And they've said all these other things. And actually, if you want to get this done, this is how you do it. And this is how you move people. It's basically a difference between following people and persuading and leading them and showing them tradeoffs.

43:13James Kanagasooriam:And he said the great people basically use research as a lamp to basically lead the way. He's got to write the book, The Mirror and the Lamp. The Mirror and the Lamp, yeah. The Mirror and the Lamp. I think Hillary Mantle's a state, Mike.

43:25Amol Rajan:I think you should have a word or two of that. They might appreciate it.

43:29James Kanagasooriam:But I think it's really important because when you bid for someone's time and they're answering a survey, it's not on them that every single one of their answers is somehow some kind of future-proofed answer on which you can take decisions. They're just saying, this is how I feel at the moment in time. I call it the chocolate sushi problem, which is if you poll people, do you like chocolate? They say yes. If you poll them, do you like sushi? They say yes. And then politicians or leaders might say, right, we're going to launch chocolate sushi. And then it turns out that's not very popular. Chocolate sushi sounds repulsive.

44:02James Kanagasooriam:Exactly. But it's a way of framing how you shouldn't necessarily follow steers. You have to make things contextual. You have to make them real. that's by the way why people uh like luke trill and other people like deborah mattison for example do focus groups because you put people in context you talk with them you understand what they say you look at non-verbal cues so from my perspective when you when i say uh people aren't wrong and you're saying oh but people won't buy x um people are incredibly uh open to having the trade-offs put in front of them. The things that they want is that honesty and integrity and the ability actually of saying actually it can't all be fixed.

44:45James Kanagasooriam:These are the trade-offs. These are the choices.

44:47Amol Rajan:And maybe politics is the art of persuasion and just, you know, the people that have been trying to persuade them aren't sufficiently persuasive. You know, that might be the core of it. Let's talk finally about COVID. Do we, do you feel, and we've talked, you know, you're an optimistic kind of guy and so am I.

45:03James Kanagasooriam:Which is a bias you should always be aware of.

45:05Amol Rajan:Being optimistic? Yeah. Well, I'm getting increasingly pessimistic. If that helps. It's gone well. If that helps.

45:16Amol Rajan:An hour in the old, was it? The projected national share. An hour of wonkery with James Cunningham enough to turn the most optimistic patriot into a declinist. Anyway, COVID is a, you know, it's an extraordinary kind of rupture in the normal way of things. Do you feel, based on some of the research you're doing at the moment, that we fully reckon with the impact it's had on us?

45:40James Kanagasooriam:So the British Social Attitudes Survey, which is conducted every year, collects information on what people think the size of the state should be. So should it be reduced, should it grow, or should it stay the same? This is where I take the view that people are amazing, because they are incredibly intuitive about incredibly complicated things, basically. and basically from 1980 till around 2021 the numbers of people who thought the state should either be expanded or reduced moved in lockstep with the actual amount of state spending as a percentage of gdp it's extraordinary it's like a it's like a graph of um do you remember i guess if you did you know biology class at primary school you have like homeostasis like predators and praise yeah they literally interact with each other dynamically so every time basically the state gets too big people's public opinion changes and they say we want cuts and every time the state is too small and people feel the public realm has been under invested in they say we would be okay with tax rises and we want the state to be invested in and it's this perfect ecosystem where people understand what's happening and their responses change and it's one of those things that i always look at and i think people are amazing and incredible in terms of understanding what's going on until covid and obviously where the the debt amount has spiraled out of control for the first time basically since the vsa have recorded things that dynamic loop has been broken and basically even with the rise of state spending and the expansion of the state state paid people's wages people saying there's no magic money tree and then it turns out that there is um people have not got more skeptical over the size of the state even though it has massively ballooned in size and i think that's one thing that we're grappling with which is that we now have like a fiscal reality that people haven't quite caught up to and interestingly in the last year we have seen from the bsa some of the sharpest rises in public opinion of people who think actually we should probably be spending a bit less but that's been like a four-year delay in terms of that and that's the first time we tracked this and we looked into the data since 1980 and for me that's really really striking um and that's a well you know that's a form of political long covid basically gosh which is that it's kind of broken that link the other thing i think is about what people think government can and can't do it's just structurally changed because suddenly they literally paid people directly yeah um and i still think we're grappling with many consequences of that people's disrupted lives disrupted freedoms how they can go about their lives.

48:18James Kanagasooriam:Disrupted education in case of kids. Yeah. A huge cost. And again, yeah, not my field, but you can see that scarring still hasn't reduced. And I think it's only just now that we're registering changes in the British Social Attitude Survey that's responding to the much bigger piles of debt

48:35Amol Rajan:that we have on the sides of the state. How should we, as a final thought, because you're going to stick around and answer a few of our listener questions, how should we use the idea of agency to fight decline to restore a sense of cultural optimism and to fix some of these problems the most useful

48:54James Kanagasooriam:thing is is understanding at a micro level so where would you be lacking agency in a very micro personal environment and how could that be increased and then work your way up from that because ultimately people taking control of their lives they're too very careful with a message like that yeah can we paternalistic kind of it sounds paternalistic sounds like it sounds potentially luxury it's and that's why i don't suggest that people should do xyz i just say here is the polling and here is the data on agency and oh it looks to be if you have lots of agency that seems to be correlated with a huge amount of good outcomes i think it's on i'd go back to to kate hall to kind of round it off which is obviously she built this mental model of agency uh basically out from her experience with aa alcoholics and alcoholics anonymous and it's maybe getting a bit meta but she said towards the end of the interview that i had with her that obviously the thing that really transformed her is just knowing that there were uh people and she thought because she was religious a higher power she believed in the concept of grace that actually she was able to take control because she realized there were things she couldn't take control of which i guess if we're being very meta there's a i think when margaret thatcher gone to power downing street in 1979 there's a line that she quoted about understanding the things that you have the power to change and those that you don't uh which is i think a prayer tost francis of assisi exactly Which almost matched perfectly what Kate was telling me about her concept of agency.

50:33James Kanagasooriam:And so that's not a policy answer. No, no, no. Believe in something and a higher power. But it's very interesting that's part of the playbook. But I think that's why people are looking for meaning and they're looking for a sense of togetherness. They're looking for something else. I don't know how to create agency at a community level versus government level. those are two drastically different policy prescriptions. At the government level, that's to do with the law. That's to do with how it's enacted.

51:01Amol Rajan:That's to do with parliamentary sovereignty. Community level is kind of social program. But, you know, at the individual level, it's funny. There's an echo in what you say. As you may know, I spend quite a lot of time following health influencers swinging kettlebells at the moment. And one of the things that I find is I'm actually, if I might as well admit, very inspired by people who turn their life around health-wise. And, you know, after my dad died of type 2 diabetes, I thought, you know, you're overweight, been overweight for 30 years in a scientific sense. You're South Asian. You like to get type 2 diabetes.

51:36Amol Rajan:Have some agency, you know, take control of your life and start swinging some kettlebells. Turn your life around. And I know it's a strange thing to say, but now I think about it, I should look at those videos on social media and my own kettlebell routines in a whole different way. Maybe what I'm really doing is striving for agency. to take back control over my own weight. You're doing a good job. Oh, thank you very much indeed. Slowly disappearing Amal Raj. Oh, not so fast. James, it's always such an enormous pleasure. Thank you so much for your magnificent analysis of British politics and everything else.

52:11Amol Rajan:I think agency is an idea we're going to come back to.

52:14James Kanagasooriam:Thanks a lot.

52:21Amol Rajan:so for at least 20 years i've heard people uh i've read people write columns goodness me i've commissioned some of these columns myself i've heard podcasts i've heard discussions of people saying what's the big idea and once upon a time the big idea was the big society another time new labor was a bit of a big idea i think there is a sense and james is very um he's so smart about these things that he sort of caveats it very intelligently. But there is a sense in which it is actually very, very useful to look at a number of the biggest issues, problems, crises, challenges facing Western democracies through this prism of agency.

52:56Amol Rajan:As he says, there is now a kind of graph, a kind of chart you could do, which shows that the higher your sense of agency, the more likely you might be, in most senses, to be happy with the status quo, Whereas the lower your sense of agency, the more you feel like you don't have control over your life, the more you feel like you've experienced cultural loss, the more likely you might be to vote for radical change. Whether that's, I don't know, the Reform Party under Nigel Farage or the Green Party under Zach Polanski. So I think there is a profound way in which agency is actually useful for understanding where we are.

53:31Amol Rajan:Now, what do you do about it? Well, we kind of got into that a little bit. I mean, people feel a greater sense of agency if they've got more money, economic capital, that's money in their pocket. That makes the cost of living less painful. But there's also a sense of which the lack of agency is distributed in a way that's really bad for poor people. It's perhaps not that surprising that the poorer you are, the less agency you feel. And there is an interesting question, actually one raised by the whole idea around the big society 15 years ago, and indeed JFK in a very different context several decades before.

54:02Amol Rajan:this idea that the big society and social capital, civic institutions, which have been in some decline, might actually begin to, if restored, give people a sense of agency, even if they don't have a huge amount of money. It's not a substitute, but it might be something of a supplement. And that whole area that we talked about, the decline of civic institutions, of associational life, of social capital, I just think it's so, so interesting. When James said we've swapped out all that stuff, the stuff I grew up with, maybe he grew up with, maybe you grew up with. We swapped all that stuff out for 15 years on a phone.

54:36Amol Rajan:Makes you think, doesn't it? Which I guess is the idea behind this podcast.

54:44Amol Rajan:This week on Political Thinking, Nick speaks to the shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith, a man who spent years at the top table of Rupert Murdoch's Sky before jumping on the Boris Johnson train and entering politics as a Conservative MP in 2019. They're discussing a huge number of things, including Andrew Griffith's fascinating life story. But particularly in this episode, you're going to hear about what war in the Middle East could mean for global business. That is it for now. But please do make sure you check back here on Monday because James K, as we sometimes call him, James Kanagasurium, is going to be answering your radical questions in our bonus Q &A.

55:20Amol Rajan:And they're terrific questions with really superb answers. Well worth your time. To make sure you don't miss future episodes, please just hit subscribe on BBC Sounds. and that way you will get an alert every time we release a new episode. We'll speak to you soon. Thank you and goodbye.

55:58Amol Rajan:unconscious in 15 years, he's a billionaire. This is Toto Wolff, Formula One's most powerful team boss and the breakout star of Drive to Survive. This week on Good, Bad, Billionaire, how Toto Wolff made his billions. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.