Ways of thinking about the Future

Feb 16, 2025

Peripheral Vision, 11 September 2024

The last post was about Geoff Mulgan’s thoughts about the future in which he made a reference to what someone had called the tenth chapter problem – namely these books which spend the first 9 chapters describing the mess we’re in but cannot produce anything for the final chapter except anodyne platitudes and truisms. Mulgans’ lecture shows how it should be done by offering some imaginative ways to think about the future

But there are many methods that can be drawn on to expand a possibility space. Applying a few simple rules can help anyone or any group to generate options, for example to transform an existing activity like childcare, pensions, libraries, tax so as to multiply options.
First you think about extension - taking an aspect of existing practice and going further, like Bach’s extension of fugues to six voices or extending the idea of rights to new fields, extending school hours, extending suffrage by giving the vote to sixteen-yearolds, or six-year-olds.
Then you try grafting (or combining) taking an idea from another field and applying it to another. Again, this is very common in the arts—for example, grafting ideas from photography back into painting—and other examples include the way that the idea of auctions was grafted onto the management of the electromagnetic spectrum (the radio waves used for mobile phones, satellites or television), or how the idea of the jury was grafted onto democracy in the form of citizens’ juries.
A more radical approach is to use inversion, as practised in the Middle Ages during Carnival, when for a day the poor pretended to be rich and vice versa.
What if farmers became bankers (as happened with the microcredit provided by Grameen Bank); patients became doctors; or social care were provided by people who had themselves been recipients of care? What if consumers became makers of things?
Addition and subtraction are also useful. Baroque and traditional Hindu architecture are good examples of extreme addition, and any social service can easily add on new elements—like a family doctor who also offers advice on welfare. Much modernist art and music favoured subtraction, leading to Malevich’s painting ‘White on White’ in 1918 or the silence of John Cage’s 1952 composition 4′33″. This way of thinking can also be generative in social contexts: what if you took away half of the roles in a hierarchy or introduced a maximum income? Or what if you had to cut a budget by half?
Noone likes cuts but I’ve worked with public parks that faced a 50 per cent budget cut and were prompted to come up with dozens of creative ways of raising money, through events, music, festivals and food, leaving the parks more vibrant than they had been before. The cheap prices of today’s supermarkets are only possible because Clarence Saunders in Memphis in the early twentieth century had the inspired idea of subtracting service staff and letting customers pack their own bags. Sometimes, not doing things is better than doing them. A surprising example of this was found in the military’s experience that taking immediate action to treat soldiers suffering from PTSD tended to make it worse. It proved better to let people mobilise their own resources and then to focus on the 4 or 5 per cent for whom that approach hadn’t worked. Less can be more. And of course veganism is an approach which subtracts—excluding meats and dairy products from diets— while much law and regulation is now focused on reducing energy use, carbon emissions and travel, rather than increasing them. If these are some basic methods creative thought can also be helped by mobilising metaphor and analogy—seeing one thing and thinking of another (a variant of the grafting process described above).
Much of social change comes from shifts in metaphors. Do we see society as a war, a body or an organism; a building, a machine or a family? Is the economy analogous to a household, which means being very careful not to spend more than you earn, or is it more like an entrepot or trading post, in which case debt may be essential?
We are at a time of extraordinarily fertile analysis of the past – the ‘long durées’ of inequality, governance, values, families – and just as fertile analysis of the present. But we’ve made it harder for social scientists to engage with understanding or shaping the future. If we really are in a time of multiplying crises then we badly need options, and social scientists need to be part of this work.
We need the best brains to be working out how to design and run a zero carbon economy; a society with more disability; how to make ubiquitous smart technologies serve us rather than the other way round; how to counter polarisation; misinformation. We need to populate our fuzzy pictures of the future with complex, rich, plausible deas, pictures of the possible – a possibility space that is capacious and helpful for action in the present. There may not be an immediate demand for these, not least as governments attend to the immediate.
But it is precisely at these times that we need to look ahead, just as in dark days of 1930s and WW2 some worked hard to think about what could come after, from designing welfare states to macroeconomics, decolonisation to human rights and the creation of the UN, which a decade before it was founded seemed utterly utopian.

Peripheral Vision

Ways of thinking about the Future

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