Buddhists believe that on the eve of Buddha’s birth, his mother dreamt that a white elephant gave her a lotus flower. Consequently, they hold white elephants to be sacred. In 1885, when the British were at the gates of Mandalay, the Burmese Emperor’s white elephant took ill, which was deemed inauspicious by the local population. Even worse, as the British marched into the city the animal died of natural causes, portending the end of the great Burmese Empire and the fall of the house of Thibaw.

For the invading army, the idea of maintaining a white elephant as a palace pet was wasteful and ridiculous. From this incident we gained the phrase ‘white elephant’ in the English language. However, the conquerors’ cultural misinterpretation was costly, and they unwittingly sparked widespread unrest in the city by dragging its corpse through the streets of Rangoon.

Nowadays, the phrase ‘white elephant’ strikes fear into the heart of those involved in urban development. Symbolising wasteful extravagance, it suggests vanity projects, unaccountability and poor decision-making. It was hard not to be struck by this on a recent visit to Myanmar. There, the regime has, in the past decades, invested millions in the construction of an entirely new capital city, Naypyidaw, halfway between Yangon (modern Rangoon) and Mandalay. This huge urban project remains pristine and unreal while no major foreign embassy has agreed to relocate from Yangon. Meanwhile, the country’s two long-established cities experience population booms and traffic gridlock due to an explosive rise in vehicle use.

Walking the smog-choked streets of Yangon, it occurred to me that as cities grow they are too often condemned to repeat the mistakes of others. Is there any way we can avoid this, and better assist cities to learn from one another?

Closer to home, I have been addressing these questions, working with cities across Europe as part of the EU URBACT (cities exchange and learning) Programme. My particular focus has been on social innovation: new ways to tackle the most chronic social challenges. Underpinning this is the more fundamental question of how cities learn and particularly how they learn from one another. In beginning to address this question, a number of themes emerge.

Not surprisingly, one of these is leadership. Many city leaders, particularly in Europe, are being tested due to the economic crisis. Cities need fresh thinking, new ideas and permission to innovate. However, they operate in a climate that can discourage risk-taking, particularly where public finances are involved.

Globally, we have seen a new generation of civic leaders emerge in the past decade, who embody innovative approaches and inspire their citizens. Antanas Mockus, former Mayor of Bogota, and Park Won Soon, current incumbent in Seoul, are prime examples; social innovators who deliver the unexpected.

Apart from providing inspiration, cities have identified other leadership qualities that stimulate city learning, including actively promoting new ideas generation. Engagement with ‘unusual suspects’ – who can provide alternative perspectives and fresh thinking is important here – as part of what Danish think tank Mindlab call ideation. Effective leaders broker key relationships between different players in the city and they give permission to stakeholders – including front line staff and customers – to generate new ideas. Collaborative leadership skills, encouraging the crossing of professional boundaries is of growing importance. This promotes learning both within and between cities.

The importance of dialogue has also emerged as an important condition for effective city learning. There are two dimensions to this. Firstly, the importance of an ongoing exchange, based on trust, between the different voices in the city. Allowing platforms where different perspectives can be shared – whether virtual or physical – is important, as the growth of ‘shared spaces’ amongst cities testifies.

In Finland, local communities have come together in a national framework to engage in dialogue about their priorities and main issues. This process involves bringing together a microcosm of stakeholders from each area to engage with others. The URBACT process used this model to broker dialogue between cities including Berlin, Rotterdam, Copenhagen and Nantes. Through this, cities become aware of what they don’t know, often triggering a debate amongst their own stakeholders. So the dialogue works on two levels: between the cities and within the cities. It can also provide a mechanism for scenario planning, through a future dialogue process of what the city’s future will look like.

The process of engaging with other cities can be transformative for relationships within cities in other ways. A good example comes from the city of Wroclaw in Poland, which is now part of URBACT legend. A core group of city decision makers was due to travel to Hungary for an event with other cities, but due to bad weather the flight was cancelled. Instead, they travelled by mini-bus and during the long journey, in cramped conditions, relationships between the key city players were strengthened. The transformative effect of that shared experience was key to their subsequent collaboration.

And of course what you experience once off the bus is important. Exposure to the other provides an opportunity to benchmark, reflect and debate. Here, our experience suggests that cities are likely to take more from others that are closer to them. For example, in a recent discussion with a city manager from Tallinn, Estonia, he explained that having the opportunity to see developments in Stockholm had been interesting. But also depressing; he came back convinced that it will be another 20 years before city relationships in Tallinn are strong enough to work as the Swedes do. So the notion of proximal learning zones is also a consideration.

By visiting a leading edge global city, the main conclusion may be that you are not one… but at least the road to Nirvana may be clearer.

Writing in the Journal in Spring 2011, John Knell argued that arts organisations need to change the way they justify their need for public funding, and suggests exploring the applicability of a “social return on investment” model. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Maria Miller, reinforced the message that arts funding needs an economic case in her recent speech. But the practicalities of creating and presenting the case consistently and persuasively are vitally important.

Having been involved both in the appraisal of transport projects and in making and assessing applications for arts funding, I wondered at the time if – unlikely though it might sound – there might not be something like a ready-made solution in the way in which transport projects are appraised in the UK. The creation of the joint Arts Council/RSA seminar project, which aims to develop a new political economy for the arts and culture, makes it timely to have a first stab at crystallising these thoughts.

Transport projects are often (although not always) Big Projects demanding Big Investment, and rightly require robust justification. The central plank of this has for a long time been Cost Benefit Analysis which sets benefits against costs to understand return on investment (often expressed as a benefit cost ratio, or BCR). However, the need to quantify benefits in monetary terms, which is not always possible, prompted the development of the New Approach to Transport Appraisal (NATA), set out in the 1998 Transport White Paper. The paper included two important innovations: first that NATA looks at a wider range of benefits, including some which may not be quantifiable, and second it developed a consistent format for presenting the results, the Appraisal Summary Table.

The methodology has undergone constant revision and refinement over the years, evolving into a substantial set of guidelines known WebTAG available to all on the Department for Transport website. There is too much detail even to summarise here, but the important thing to note is that the Appraisal Summary Table included effects that may not be quantifiable in monetary terms or even at all but which nonetheless count in the overall analysis (note also that a negative ‘score’ is always possible).

So for example, alongside economic effects such as those that impact business or tax revenues, it includes environmental effects such as heritage and biodiversity, and social impacts such as journey quality, access and affordability.

But why should this be of interest to the arts? The simple fact is that robust transport appraisal gets projects built. Even in these recessionary times, substantial amounts of money have been and continue to be committed to transport projects, especially rail projects. Appraisals may not always give the ‘right’ answer (what forecasts do?), but there are at least two reasons why they are trusted enough to form the basis of investment decisions.

First, consistent methodology and presentation makes it much for fundholders to evaluate, compare and prioritise different proposals. Secondly, the focus on a single appraisal framework has in turn focused research in the areas in the framework, making it more robust. For example, time savings for travellers are one of the most important benefits, leading to a substantial body of research into how these can be given a monetary value. Similarly focused research on, for example, audience benefits could be similarly beneficial.

Developing a consistent presentation of benefits from arts investment akin to the transport model is, in principle, a straightforward task of listing and categorising the benefits. In practise, it will take time and discussion to achieve a consensus, and the result will continue to evolve.

The bigger and more time-consuming task is to build the methodology. But as a starter for ten, consider that the transport appraisal framework includes a ‘hierarchy’ of benefits, which have analogues in the arts. These include financial benefits, which in the arts context are relatively straightforward: for example, the arts world has become adept at quantifying the VAT raised by arts activities. Non-financial but monetisable benefits may be the area needing most work, and would require marshalling existing research and carrying out more work to understand how, and by whom, arts projects are valued beyond the revenues they generate. Meanwhile, non-monetisable but quantifiable benefits can be measured through actual and potential audience sizes (for example, catchment area), whereas non-quantifiable but still tangible benefits might include environmental or reputational effects.

The development of a coherent ‘Arts Appraisal Framework’ is work in progress and these ideas need further development. However, the transport model provides a potential answer to convincing fundholders to fund the arts and an opportunity to learn from and adapt an existing successful mechanism, rather than reinventing the wheel.

Historically, economic growth has delivered continuous improvements in living standards around world, although their distribution varies. In democracies politicians woo the voters with promises to increase economic growth. Indeed, the survival of governments is often seen as depending on whether or not satisfactory growth occurs during their time in office.

Apart from boosting living standards, economic growth is attractive to politicians because it boosts tax revenues and provides resources to boost government spending without raising tax rates. This allows politicians to sell expenditure increasing policies to the voters on the basis that they will not require increases in tax rates and coverage, and/or to maintain existing spending levels while promising tax cuts. Economic growth is therefore a panacea for politicians. However, if the narrative changes and growth is no longer the norm, policy options are more constrained, choices more acute, and living standards stagnant. Only, if public expectations match will the results be politically acceptable.

Official and private forecasts of UK economic growth since the 2008 crash share one thing in common. Consistently, they have been too optimistic. There are two reasons for this. The first is that it is taking time for forecasters to understand the consequences of the 2008 crash, and to incorporate them into the econometric models on which their forecasts depend. The second is the impact on UK economic growth of unforeseen events, shocks, like changes in oil prices, and the Euro crisis.

The salient consequences of the 2008 crash can be summarised as a material reduction in confidence amongst consumers and investors, a large and financially risky increase in the budget deficit and public debt, and a severely weakened financial sector, which was a major contributor to pre-crash growth and tax revenues. This has produced discontinuities in economic behaviour that econometric models are not equipped or designed to take account of. Only if, by a miracle, the economy was to return rapidly to pre-crash conditions, and there were no shocks, would the reliability of forecasts based on econometric models likely improve.

So, rather than basing fiscal policy and government rhetoric on unreliable forecasts of an imminent return to growth, experience since the 2008 crash points to the need for an intrinsically more cautious approach. Failure to do so risks growing cynicism and disillusionment with politicians and political processes, growing demands for populist solutions, and further economic damage.

Whilst labour market data shows some improvement, the economy is flat-lining with little or no economic growth. Driven by the policy objective of regaining control over the public finances, the Government is not prepared to rein back its growth sapping austerity policy by using a fiscal stimulus to kick-start growth. Indeed in the Comprehensive Spending Review currently underway it is seeking further cuts in public expenditure. Further, until consumer and investor confidence improves, monetary policy, whether conventional or novel, is likely to be pretty ineffectual. Despite a material devaluation of sterling since 2008, there has need no sign of export led growth, no doubt because of the depressed conditions in the Euro Zone, and intense competition elsewhere.

In summary, a prudent and realistic assessment points to very subdued growth of say, 0-1.5 per cent per annum for the medium term compared the UK historic trend rate of 2.75 per cent per annum. For the long term, technology and investment will continue to be the driver of progress, but before this is again shown up in UK economic growth and social improvement, further adjustment is necessary.

Realism, prudence and responsibility dictate that what is needed now is a zero growth fiscal policy. That is one based explicitly on no real growth in underlying tax revenues, and underlying public expenditure only being paid for by them. The only exception to this would be spending needed for an urgently needed fiscal stimulus aimed at supply-side measures to improve long term growth prospects. To reassure the global financial markets over a fiscal stimulus, new legislation would require that any extra tax revenues that arose subsequently through growth would be used to reduce the ratio of public debt to GDP to, say, 60 per cent.

A zero growth fiscal policy brings important opportunities to make further cuts in some elements public expenditure, to re-order spending to support sustainable growth, to change the structure and culture of government to radically improve its performance and cost effectiveness; and, as a precursor, to redefine the economic purpose of the state as the Canadian government did in 1994 in response to an ever growing budget deficit. In this age of affluence, the only part of public expenditure which should be ring-fenced, and indeed increased, is that part of social spending aimed at the prevention of destitution at home.

Simultaneously, two popes – one in Rome, the other in Avignon – were competing against each other. The result was a loss of belief in the authority of the Vatican. The church lost its iron grip on the common people who increasingly felt that independent thinking was both allowed and important.

Today, for different reasons similar trends are in play. We are losing trust in our governments and in big business and the evidence shows that this is not just because of the economic crisis. Rather there is a long-term trend, away from faith in distant forms of authority and towards putting our trust in ‘people like us’: our peers.

We are again seeing a collective loss of peace of mind. Globalisation and the severe economic crisis have cost millions of jobs in the Western societies. Life is not as secure as it used to be. Our jobs may be moved the China and many young people feel that there is no room for them in society. They worry about how long the economic crisis will last and how they will fare. Within this context, governments are seen as powerless.

In the 15^th century new means of communication enabled information to travel in unprecedented ways. In Gutenberg’s ingenious invention – the movable metal type – made knowledge available beyond the elite as books became cheaper and numerous. Today the internet is a revolutionary global tool that makes global dialogue possible: more than two billion people are using some social media. This is not a top-down dialogue; rather it is non-hierarchal and horizontal.

As well as new means of communication, we are seeing radical changes in the means of production. The way we manufacture products is based on economies of scale, with global companies able to drive what consumers want or need, providing standardised products in a top-down market place. The internet and other technologies are changing this. Within 10 years it is likely that we have millions of small entrepreneurs, producers, sometimes one-person ‘factories’ providing goods to a potentially global customer base. Their tool will be the 3D printer and scanner.

Their products will be marketed through the internet; and the horizontal production and dialogue will dramatically transform our societies.

This second renaissance will challenge traditional hierarchies and established authorities, which will need to develop radically different strategies if they are to adapt to the new market place. The winners will be ordinary people and the result will be a more diverse, richer society as more and more people discover and attain their dreams.

This is not a revolution in the traditional sense because these changes are not driven by ideology with two or more groups fighting for dominance. Instead what we will see is a gradual but radical change of societal structure. Hierarchies are already flattening but this process will be accelerated as the cost of new technologies comes down and their use increases. Government and political institutions will need to respond to these trends by re-organising and developing strategies that make room for people to participate beyond election campaigns.

The first renaissance inspired ordinary people to think for themselves and some of those who led this revolution of ideas – Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare – remain famous today. Just so, our second renaissance will create a more participatory society and unleash an explosion of new ideas and creativity in arts, science and exploration.

This comment is based on the book “The Renaissance Society” – How the Shift from Dream Society to the Age of Individual Control Will Change the Way You Do Business by Rolf Jensen and Mika Aaltonen, published by McGraw-Hill in May 2013.

The term urban ore was first used over 50 years ago by Jane Jacobs in her seminal work, The Death and Life of American Cities. More attention has been given to this potential resource as the opportunities provided by primary ores and energy-intensive mining have declined alongside rising transport costs, greater demand through manufacturing, consumption and increased quantities of waste.

There is a long history of recycling ferrous and non-ferrous metals from commercial and industrial wastes, end-of-life vehicles and consumer durables. The first bottle bank was launched in the UK 1977 followed by others to collect a range of consumer waste items.

This is now accompanied by recycling more precious metals and rare earths (especially for those where China controls over 90 per cent of primary production) including those highlighted by the EU list of ‘critical raw materials’. It is possible to extract 100 grams of gold from one tonne of waste electrical and electronic equipment and 280 grams from one tonne of mobile phones compared to 5 grams from primary ore. Other examples range from lead in cathode ray tubes to rhodium from catalytic converters and a wide range of other rare earths and common/rare metals.

Since 1967 in the UK, the establishment of civic amenity sites, more recently called household waste recycling centres, are now well established as urban mines for a range of post-consumer wastes. The term applies to historic scrap metal sites and second-hand shops, and even jumble sales. More recent examples include car boot sales and electronic versions such as ebay and freecycle.

The Clean Air Acts of the 1950s and increased use of central heating in the UK resulted in more paper and cardboard being disposed of in household waste. Demand increased as more was consumed as part of a growing information society and use of packaging materials and then discarded as wastes. Urban forests also have a long history; early recycling by local authorities often involved trailers for paper and cardboard behind refuse disposal vehicles or dustcarts, then accompanied by paperbanks and later separate kerbside collections. However, there are limits to the use of recycled paper and cardboard due to degradation of the fibres over time and the need to use primary pulp.

With significant quantities of food waste being thrown away by households (a WRAP report suggested over 7 million tonnes in 2007 at a cost per household of over £400 per annum)and the commercial and catering sectors, urban biomass has become a more recent resource. Historically food waste might have been home composted or fed to pigs, but it is now collected by many local authorities in the UK and either composted or used as feedstock for anaerobic digestion. In both cases the organic output may be considered a product and used instead of fertilisers, and with anaerobic digestion the carbon is converted to methane and available as an energy resource.

In England, mandatory targets for recycling/composting were introduced between 2003 and 2008, and many authorities started to (or extended) collect garden waste with tonnages increasing. By 2011/12 garden and food waste at 4 million tonnes accounted for over 40 per cent of all materials collected for recycling/composting, compared to 278,000 tonnes and 25 per cent in 1996/97.

Combustible materials may have been burnt as a fuel in household fires, with the resultant wastes being mined as in 19th century London dustyards, with fine coal dust being used for compost-like material or making bricks (53 per cent of waste inputs) and small/larger pieces (29 per cent of waste inputs) used as a fuel.

Such urban carbon has become increasingly important in the last 10 to 20 years. Sources included materials to generate methane through anaerobic digestion), or residual wastes combusted in incinerators (originally called ‘destructors’ to reduce volume and tonnage to landfill). . These technologies for residual wastes now have to meet high efficiency requirements, and commonly generate electricity.

The future might see further technologies involving bio-refineries and the development of hydrogen fuel cells based on urban carbon wastes. In terms of carbon, the use of recyclates saves on primary energy, raging form 95 per cent with aluminium, to 24 per cent with cardboard and 5 to 30 per cent for glass.

For all of these urban resources, the principles of extraction from the natural environment are replicated in terms of availability (a range of materials targeted for recycling/composting/energy recovery), quality (influenced by source-segregation and material recovery technologies and accessibility (costs of collection and processing versus prices of primary raw materials). Combinations of these various aspects of urban mining and industrial-scale activities are now found in ecoparks, resource recovery parks or sustainable growth parks, where different wastes are received and prepared for reuse through re-manufacturing, wastes are recycled into a range of new products and activities are self-contained in terms of on-site energy from waste generation.

At the same time, the debate about recognising and referring to wastes as resources is moving rapidly on. The RSA ‘s Great Recovery initiative, which focuses on better design, is underpinned by these concepts. Meanwhile, the Ellen Macarthur Foundation produced two important reports on the circular economy, providing a range of materials for teaching sustainability in schools; just two years on and these are being used in over 1,600 schools in the UK.

These trends are welcome: we need to recognise urban wastes as assets and resources to be reused, recycled and recovered and not as unloved things to be discarded, thrown away and considered the detritus of urban life; especially if we are to consider sustainability and the future wellbeing of humankind.

Legal language is routinely represented to non-specialists and there is a definite fusion of law and culture at the level of popular discourse where we find the real, and the represented, are mingled on television, radio and film; as well as in the print media and the internet.

This should not surprise anybody. It is the inevitable corollary of increased media production and the seemingly insatiable demand for stories about law, especially criminal law, emanating from the news consuming public; and which they act on.

People consume something that they understand as knowledge of the law, though it is gained in an ad hoc and unsystematic fashion. Of course, the supply of legal information in all forms of media, notably the internet, also feeds public demand for it. The discussion of legal cases in our daily lives as a result of it has had an impact upon the popular perception and understanding of legal principles and ethics. There is a plethora of legal and legal-related drama on our television and people tend to perceive that these have an educational function irrespective of whether they actually do.

These drama series tend to be well-scripted and realistically shot and aim to immerse the audience in the plot. All of this may be only of some minor sociological interest but for the fact that the media rely not on legal canon and procedure but on an overly-simplified explanation of cases that often claims to be educative, but which in reality only flags up issues and generalities; and in doing so does not necessarily illuminate legal principle or procedure. The notion of moral panic being fostered through media attention to issues such as mugging, mobile phone theft and illegal immigration is something that academics, policy makers and practitioners are all too aware of. Television depictions of criminal law usually promote unrealistically high standards for police detection rates. It is not surprising therefore that people often understand the world as far more violent than it actually is and believe that criminals get away with the bulk of their crimes. They hold to a misleadingly high standard for police clear-up rates. They often consume media that misrepresents the racial profile of criminals and victims.

Lately a victim’s rights discourse has come to pervade media production and contemporary journalistic practice and the public’s current understanding of the law in an unbalanced and very unhelpful way through the creation of narratives of legal processes, rather than elucidating any established legal principle: for example, in relation to such issues as the proper attribution of culpability and guilt and the systematic playing down of defendant’s rights in terms of judicial safeguards for accused persons in criminal cases. We see all too clearly here how a diet of victim-oriented news discourse can, over time, shape the world view of persons away from the rational and usher in an over-retributive focus in the general population in its wake.

There has been a great deal of academic discussion concerning the so-called CSI Effect which amounts to a concern about the exaggerated usefulness of forensic evidence and the way jurors, notably in the USA, have come to demand incredibly high standards of proof; and how this has led to a raising of the proof required to obtain a typical conviction. Studies have tended to support concerns that some form of CSI Effect is working itself out through the American criminal justice system. It has been shown that those jurors that viewed CSI are increasingly hesitant to believe forensic evidence presented at a criminal trial. There is a growing sense among some members of the legal profession that jurors are more taken with forensics, than with the practice and processes of the law itself. In short, the CSI Effect, and the attention it has received from American legal scholars, represents the clearest case of a link between the consumption of television and definite effects to the operation of the law, in real-world contexts.

All of this has very tangible social policy implications and affects the day-to-day workings of the criminal justice system. The issue is that regular members of the public ordinarily have no involvement in the legal process, though they all to a greater or lesser extent consume a version of it in the popular media. People tend to look, usually uncritically, to the media to furnish them with both information and entertainment, of a factual nature, about the law. On the one hand the public are increasingly aware of how to access legal services and of the content of laws through accessing the internet and television; and on the other hand they often have a reductive, and non-technical, view of what law actually is.

Sociologists have shown how this is mirrored in the types of material the public generally access online, which is often simplified, generic and of little practical use in specific cases. The point being that understanding law is a rather complicated enterprise, which can be undertaken at a number of levels. There may be nothing false or directly misleading in any one single broadcast or piece of information discovered on the internet but such a magpie treatment of how legal information is accumulated will always fall short of a thorough understanding; and in the end the last word probably rests with the legal experts anyway. The citizenry may be falsely proud of its legal and specialist knowledge, garnered through consumption of contemporary media.

Dr Anthony Amatrudo is Reader in Criminology at Middlesex University. An extended version of this article appears in volume 15 of Current Legal Issues (OUP), published in February 2013.

According to President Obama: “Inequality is the defining issue of our time”. Last month, the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, went further: “Excessive inequality is corrosive to growth; it is corrosive to society… the economics profession and the policy community have downplayed inequality for too long”. Yet while inequality is now an increasingly hot political issue, action has yet to follow. As a result, the global billionaire class has got richer through the economic crisis while most of the rest of the world has got poorer.

This failure is in part down to the dominating influence of one of the central rules of economic orthodoxy: that there is a trade-off between inequality and economic progress. You can, it is claimed, have a more equal society or more prosperity but not both. It is an idea that originated with the pro-market right, but came to be accepted across the political spectrum, including by the new Labour leadership and the Democrats under Clinton.

This theory – for theory it is – was central to the real-life experiment in pro-market capitalism applied in the US and the UK in the last three decades. As a result, inequality has soared with the share of income in the UK taken by the very top increasing threefold since 1979. This rise in the income gap has been driven by the way the fruits of growth have become increasingly unevenly divided: the wage share has shrunk, profits and personal fortunes have boomed while the proportion of the workforce that is low paid has doubled since the 1970s.

This trend is far from unique to the UK. Across the nations that make up the OECD, the wage share had fallen by 5 percentage points since 1990. Yet the promised economic pay-off from this profit-led strategy had failed to materialise. The global rich have used their growing muscle not to create more wealth and a bigger pie, but to grab a larger share of it for themselves. This power shift from labour to capital was meant to unleash a new era of enterprise and faster growth. Yet, in the UK, post-1980, profit-led market capitalism has a poorer record on investment, productivity, growth and unemployment than its more managed and much maligned predecessor.

The accumulated evidence is now overwhelming that the trade-off theory is wrong and needs to be dumped. Sharing the cake more evenly is associated with improved not lower rates of growth, and less not more turbulence. Rather, prosperity depends on divvying up the cake more proportionately. Last week the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, added his voice to the swelling ranks of those – from Obama to Lagarde – who are now arguing that greater equality and economic resilience go hand in hand. As Miliband put it: “Economic recovery will be made by the many not the few”.

Recognising this is one thing, steering economies according to this opposing rule is another. The global billionaire class shows no signs of acquiescing in an erosion of its muscle, privileges and wealth. Governments continue to dance largely to the tune of Wall Street and City financiers.

Nevertheless, the public, political and intellectual mood is hardening, apparently even in the most unexpected of quarters. “Capitalism may not have it quite so easy in the next phase”, writes one of Europe’s leading financial strategists, Albert Edwards of Société Générale. “Labour will fight back to take its proper (normal) share of the national cake, squeezing profits on a secular basis.”

For the first time for decades, the distribution question is back on the political agenda. There is now a newly emerging consensus, one that has started to capture a few significant and surprising voices outside the traditional left, that accepts that economic progress and stability depends on a more equal distribution of the cake. Achieving this would require moving beyond lofty speeches to a set of radical policies to rebalance bargaining power in favour of labour, steer profits to the productive side of the economy, impose a much tougher cap on unjust rewards at the top and initiate a sea-change in boardroom culture.

Against this there is an equally, if not more powerful lobby built around an entrenched and powerful global corporate and financial elite. This group – the winners from the last thirty years – remains wedded to the status quo, unwilling to concede anything more than token reform. The next phase of economic history – more of the same or one which yields labour a larger share – will be shaped largely by which of these opposing forces emerges on top.

When I was young the world seemed to be ruled by men over 80 whose names ended in ‘O’. At university in the seventies I had the opportunity to learn from Jack Goody and others from the great generation of social anthropologists about the lengths to which primitive societies will go to codify the relations between older and younger generations: generally, though not always, in the interests of the former.

New generations of social anthropologists have, for better or for worse, no appetite and no opportunity to conduct fieldwork on primitive societies; but our own society is just as full of these hidden codes.

We all know that the pincer movement of medical, demographic, technological and economic change is making generational friction more acute. This has become the elephant in every room. When was the last time you dared to say to anybody that he or she was too old to do something, or too young?

Take Strasbourg, my home for many years. Strasbourg has a university and a collection of European institutions. On the university side of the street, where I perform a modest pro bono role as treasurer of the popular education structure, Lucien Braun occupies a suite of offices in the main hall of the ‘Palais Universitaire’. Former President of the University, he is now President of the University Press and of the Popular University. He will be 90 this week. Lucien does a great job, is fighting fit, does it for free, and the institutions concerned do not have ageist provisions in their statutes; it would be foolish to propose that he retire.

On the other side of the hill so to speak, Bob Palmer FRSA was until recently a senior official in the Council of Europe (CoE): Director of Culture and Cultural and Natural Heritage to be precise. When Bob reached the CoE official retirement age they gave him a party and that was it. The rules. Bob is not noticeably less fit than Lucien, and not necessarily in a mood to retire, so he has moved off to continue his influential work in contexts where age does not act as a guillotine.

But that is not all. Bob was telling me recently about an ‘intern’ (sic) who was a very promising and energetic member of his staff; the kind of person who can get things done. He had excellent qualifications and so on. He was on his seventh internship in different organisations. He‘s 35 years old. But the CoE is shrinking. Our ‘young’ intern stands as little chance of being allowed to do something here as on the other side of the street.

The reader may be shocked to see me name names and give ages. But I don’t believe in ignoring elephants in the room. I’m 58, I’m me and I don’t care who knows it as long as we respect each other’s capacities. From my experience with Peace Child International (as if we didn’t all know it already) I know for a fact that many 20-year olds can write books, set up businesses and chair meetings. So why would your daughters or mine (MAs, mid-20s) be confined to book-stacking and photocopying whilst I (MA FRSA, pushing 60), my brother-in-law (MA FRSA, pushing 65) and my brother (MA FRSA, pushing 70) are all still giving instructions to others and offering people our opinions? Is there some ritual dance, some conch, some gift-giving ceremony that we have overlooked?

So there is the problem: how do we solve it? Well, first let’s focus on youth empowerment. That is not to ignore Old People Empowerment; but one thing at a time.

As a Fellowship we worry a lot about youth empowerment. Take a look at recent issues of the RSA Journal. The issue is often implicit in articles on other subjects, such as James Dyson’s remarks on engineering (Winter 2011); it is more prominent in the Trilling/Fadel article on skills (Summer 2012); in the same issue Tamara Erickson argues the case for how much young people can contribute. In Autumn 2012 Adam Lent and Madsen Pirie tackle the issue head-on using recent research data. Meanwhile anyone familiar with the RSA knows that it is a hive of young-person initiatives. But young people who come into direct contact with an organisation like the RSA are likely to be the privileged few. So what, if any, is the joined-up thinking in this area?

In the UK, we have the independent National Youth Agency and the government-led National Citizen Service initiative; in Europe, we have Council Resolution 2003/C 295/04 of 23 November 2003; the United Nations has its Youth Assembly, and even had its Youth Year. Youth empowerment is in fact an industry and a profession.

At Peace Child International we believe that the industrialisation of youth empowerment is not an entirely convincing institutional response to the elephant in the room. We need somehow to free up much more work of a non-automatable kind in which an expanding population can find a sense of purpose and contribution. And we need to encourage young people in considerable numbers to acquire the psychological reflexes of true empowerment: a belief that they are allowed to decide and do things, allied to a willingness to decide and do them in a sensible and non-conflictual way. When I meet (notably but not only through Peace Child) a young person who has broken through this particular glass ceiling, it is a very heartening experience.

PCI’s Be The Change Academies such as the one in Kisumu, Kenya, are pushing microfinance techniques to a new frontier. The perspective of tiny amounts of finance being used efficiently by youth workers, themselves in their twenties, to allow teenagers with training and support to set up their own businesses in attainable things like dressmaking and motorbike delivery (you have to be able to get your hands on a bike) is tremendously encouraging. There is a message that can spread here. Take a look at Rhoda’s story on the PCI website.

As current CEO David Woollcombe moves towards retirement, we are currently ramping up to recruit a CEO who can make as much impact with as much joined-up thinking as David has done in the last 30 years. If you know people of any age who could be right for this, point them our way. Well, perhaps not any age… let’s say under 80, and with a name not ending in ‘O’…

If you wanted to have a pop at the financial services sector, you would have to take your turn at the end of a very long queue. We all want a flourishing economy; and we know we need able-bodied insurers and banks to help make it happen. But at the same time, we just cannot help hurling rotten fruit: it’s a heart-rules-the-head thing.

It could be that the UK’s recovery is being hindered by another ‘heart-and-head thing’ happening inside those very organisations. Over the last couple of years, we have met an alarming number of senior people in the financial services sector struggling to manage their day jobs. They seem to have little enough time or focus to cope with today’s ‘business as usual’, let alone the future of their organisations; and they put it all down to the time they are forced to spend implementing the demands of their regulator.

Is it true? Regulation is supposed to be there to give us confidence. It is there to protect consumers and to reassure markets that key companies, critical to our economy, are not going to fall off a cliff. But it seems that there is every chance that managers are being frozen in the headlights of regulation; the very same managers whom our economy depends upon to rebuild their organisations – restructure their industries, even – as a prerequisite to the UK’s recovery.

If it is true, is the same thing happening elsewhere: in Europe, say? And if so, is this a problem created by poor management, such as the misallocation of resources? Or is it simply griping? You could reasonably expect negative reactions from people whose priorities are being set by a third party. Particularly as their organisations try to come to terms with their pariah status in the media. Morale is not going to be the bounciest when your sector, your bank, even, has played a significant part in bringing the world economy to its knees. So perhaps all we are witnessing is biters bit?

We have got to assume that the regulator knows their stuff. Surely the volume of activity that it has been demanding – systems and procedural changes, training and communications and their knock-on implications – could not alone be responsible for the extreme reactions we have observed in insurers and banks? They call it a ‘firestorm of regulation’; they say it is taking over their agendas, their lives. We start a conversation and try without success to talk about anything else. We talk to distribution directors who do not have space in their heads to talk about distribution!

So, could the drive for regulation itself bring about the effect it’s trying to head off? If regulation and management is sound, what is it that is taking over such a frightening slice of general management’s mental energy?

The work of Wilfrid Bion, an early pioneer in the field of group behaviour, might cast some light here. Among other things, his experiments led him to believe that many ‘dysfunctional’ groups work to an unspoken, covert agenda; one that every member signs on to subconsciously.

One of these classic ‘agendas’ is flight-fight, whereby everything the group does is subconsciously driven and shaped by keeping an enemy outside the gates, or running away from it. It is a defensive reaction to a perceived threat; and typically the threat could be posed by head office, or a tough personality… or a regulator.

One of the problems that this ‘hidden agenda reaction’ poses is that it can permeate an organisation and colour the way people behave (perhaps people completely untouched by the ‘threat’ as it were). It becomes a basic assumption behind thoughts and actions: a given, an accepted backdrop. ‘The task’ then takes a very secondary place in people’s minds, which become filled with worry, gossip and politics.

The crash alone, I suspect, could have created excellent conditions for stress and uncertainty to thrive in the financial services sector. It prepared the way for systemic paranoia, and remember, just because people are really out to get you, does not mean you cannot be paranoid. But if that were not enough, many, many organisations these days have already been through the mill: increasingly over the last 10 years or so, we have encountered organisations which have experienced so many knocks – via restructuring, mergers and acquisitions upheaval, applying for own-jobs and so on – that their capacity to accommodate further change is severely constrained. People have become more fragile at a time when we are asking more and more of them.

We imagine that it would not take very much these days for a regulator’s pronouncements to overwhelm an entire industry; not simply by the physical demands they make but by the impact that their demands may have on organisational behaviour. Here is the paradox: the harder the regulator drives to eliminate risk, the more risk it could be driving in.

So what is the way forward? Well, not to leave it to the organisations themselves to get on with, clearly. For regulators to work more supportively, learning some of the lessons that OFSTED are beginning to put into practice. To act in a quasi consultancy manner, pacing their input without pushing organisations too far beyond their capacity to cope. To watch for symptoms, and not take comfort from boxes ticked. But above all, to understand who you are dealing with and what makes them tick.

This is not an argument against regulating insurers and banks. Like everyone else in the queue, we want to see a healthy sector. But there are some sinister symptoms emerging and the last thing we want is treatment that leaves a dead patient!

When I was an undergraduate, ‘between a rock and a hard place’ followed by a colon was my favourite essay title. It so neatly summed up the ‘this’ and ‘that’ we were required to prove in papers about politics and gender issues. It assured my tutors that I had looked at all the angles and arrived at a reasoned and judicious view, which reflected the fact that there were rarely tidy answers to moral and ethical questions. Clever me.

This essay title came back to me recently when I was stuck in the car and tuned in to Julia Hartley-Brewer’s call-in programme on LBC. That day’s topic was the intention by a Muslim couple in south London to sue their daughter’s school for forbidding her to wear a headscarf with her uniform. I felt profoundly conflicted and disagreed with virtually everyone who called in (admittedly, a pretty common experience with LBC). ‘What do I think?’ I kept asking myself with the rising sense of urgency that plagues those of us who feel obligated to generate an opinion about everything under the sun. I wanted resolution, closure, to nail down My View. But I felt caught between a rock and a very hard place.

Like Julia, I am a lifelong feminist and I regard hijab as a symbol of oppression. I am also an Arab-Canadian who is keenly attuned to anti-Arab racism dressed up in liberal values. I’m a strong believer in liberal democracy and I think people should be able to wear (and say and believe) what they want. But I resent the tolerance at the heart of that view being exploited by people who wear what they want, and then try to deny others that right.

But I got really stuck on the question of free will. Countless LBC callers questioned whether this eight year-old girl was wearing a headscarf because she ‘really’ wanted to. If that is the issue I would ask them to stand at the gates of any church in the land on a Sunday morning, and interrogate all the bleary-eyed kids whose parents dragged them there to assess the sincerity of their faith. Callers tried to make this issue of choice in childhood as the central question; it struck me as a digression.

I was still pondering free will a few days ago when I read the MP Diane Abbott’s thoughts about ‘Pornified Britain’, an expression – which I embrace wholeheartedly – that Abbott uses to sum up the commodification of sexuality

In agreeing with Abbott, I am sure I will be deemed a prude. Nonetheless, when I see young women in their late teens and early 20s drunkenly weaving their way across Leicester Square on a Friday night wearing hooker heels and a glorified belt where a skirt should be, I wonder whether this is really what free will looks like.

And, if the eight year-old in south London is being influenced by her Muslim parents to embrace their values, whose values do these young women reflect?

Abbott’s focus is on younger girls, but surely the commodification of their sexuality is what grooms them for this debauched display when they are older? We need to ask whether this is the sexual liberation women fought long and hard for: the freedom to wallow in our own objectification, to tell ourselves we ‘own’ it? As my husband asked about the young women who dress and behave in an undignified way in city centres around the UK on a Friday night: ‘Who are they doing this for? The question is not rhetorical.

This is where I see a connection with hijab. While it might not be meaningful to parse the motives of eight year-old girls, I admit that I’ve often expressed scepticism when Muslim women say they are ‘choosing’ hijab, especially when we hear about the vicious punishment meted out in some countries when they choose not to wear it. Still, if wearing a head scarf is predicated on the belief that hair can be sexually alluring and should therefore be hidden, then surely hooker heels and a micro mini are predicated on the same belief except that the effect is deemed desirable?

I am certainly not implying that this intention to attract obviates a woman’s right to say no to sexual advances. Instead, I am suggesting that like young Muslims in hijab, these barely-clad women are organising their sexual identities in relation to (perceived) male desire rather than their own. I do not see what’s so liberated about that.

This question becomes all the more urgent in light of the commercial interests and unprecedented access to sexual imagery Diane Abbott identifies. If you throw in the disproportionate effect of austerity measures on women’s work, the sky-high costs of childcare that can (paradoxically) make work unaffordable, and the concurrent baby boom, it feels as though the repertoire of identities available to women and trickling down to their daughters is shrinking and becoming once again more gender-based.

Some time ago, I promised myself that I would not become a ‘parenting writer’ who connects everything back to her own children, thereby laying claim to the moral high ground and some special authority. It does seem relevant here, though. As a woman, feminist concerns have never been an abstraction to me, of course. But now that I have a daughter and a son, I find myself both speechless with wonder at their boundless and unmediated curiosity about the world, and painfully conscious of their increasing awareness of other people’s reactions to them, the behaviours that are approved and those that are discouraged.

In light of Diane Abbott’s compelling observations and my own sharpened outlook, then, it seems that my task as a parent is to help my children discover who they are and what they desire at a time when those questions are answered for them, insistently and seductively, everywhere they turn.