Start the Week

20/06/2011

Andrew Marr talks to Tim Harford about the key to success. The 'undercover economist' argues that the fear of failure paradoxically leads to greater and more dangerous failures - from oil disasters to world conflict. Success in parliament is often mercurial, but the new Director of the Institute for Government and former Labour Minister, Andrew Adonis believes the pool of talent for the top jobs is too small, and that Ministers should be better prepared for their role. Priyamvada Gopal argues that university education is becoming one of the country's biggest failures. She believes the humanities have been denigrated, as consecutive governments have emphasised the value of work, over knowledge. And Eli Pariser explores the world of internet personalisation in which your every move is tracked and individual choices assessed: he warns that it's the end of objective news and the free exchange of ideas.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 20 Jun 2011
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. At Sprouts, our wide open layout invites you in with healthy around every corner and tasty on every shelf. So when you walk in, you feel... This is that Sprouts feeling. Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/ Radio 4. Hello, we are rethinking today. Rethinking government, rethinking university education, rethinking how companies succeed and rethinking how we use the internet. Little later on, Andrew Adonis often cited as a successful minister. In the last Labour government, we'll explain how he thinks ministers in this coalition could be helped to do better at their jobs. And Priemvada Gopal, who lectures in English at Cambridge, warns that the coalition's plans will savage the teaching of English literature and the other humanities in our universities. Tim Harford, well known as the undercover economist, will be explaining why companies and individuals need to accept failure and adapt rather than sticking to grand plans on their road to success. But we're going to start today with Eli Parriser, whose book, The Filter Bubble, has already introduced a new phrase to arguments about the internet and its use. He believes personalized searching, which seems so handy, is actually shrinking our imaginations and dividing us dangerously. Let's start, if we could, Eli, by explaining exactly what happens when you search. We all, or most of us, search for things on the internet all the time, whether they're things we want to buy or whether there's some bits of information that we're looking for. What happens to that information? Well, it goes to the search engine that then uses it to customize your next searches. So it used to be the case that we all saw the same thing when we googled something. We saw sort of the results that Google thought were authoritative. And now, it's much more subjective. We each see different results based on what we've clicked on before, based on who Google thinks we are and what it thinks we'll be interested in and what it predicts that we're likely to click next. And so this is a radical narrowing of our possible range of reference. We were always told that the internet was going to open up to us this great, fantastic, worldwide treasure trove of information and viewpoints. And in fact, you would argue the opposite is happening. Well, that's right, and it's because these companies basically are looking at how do we provide sort of a very narrow version of relevance as the watchword. How do we make things more relevant? And what that means to them is how do we make people click things more, stay on our site longer, view more pages. And the best way to do that is to provide them with information they're likely to like. So they might say, listen, all we're doing is we're giving you what you like. That's what companies do. That's what the market does. Right, and I think the problem is that actually, you know, they say, we're giving you what you want and what you want as a complicated phrase. We all want lots of mutually contradictory things. We want to eat cake and we want to be thin. And the best media actually help us sort of balance those two inner selves, the more compulsive short term self that, you know, just wants the celebrity gossip and the more sort of citizenship or civic minded oriented self that wants to be informed about the world. What this filtering process will do is it will tend to feed, you know, it'll feed that short term more compulsive clicker and you more than it feeds the sort of longer term more aspirational self. So I can see that if I buy the Times newspaper, I might read it and I go from page to page and my eyes caught by things I didn't think I wanted to know about. But when I see that, I think, well, maybe actually I do want to know about that. And I can see that the internet search engines don't necessarily do that. But isn't it possible for intelligent provider of information on the internet or Google, whoever, to put in enough randomization and extra stuff and important stuff to deal with the problem? Well, I think, you know, the question is how do you do this personalization right? Right now, it's solely optimized to show you sort of the things that you're most likely to collect, the information junk food, if you will. You know, you could actually build in other variables into this. You could have next to the Facebook like button, an important button that actually allowed people to signal, you know, this matters, this is about something real. You know, you could gather that information. The question is whether these companies will, whether they want to. I think the thing is that, you know, if you look at a newspaper front page, there's a huge amount of kind of editorial thinking and values that go into sort of shaping that set of information. It's diverse. It's representative. You know, that hasn't made its way into the algorithms that are increasingly showing us what we see online. And the other difference would be that although newspapers tend to be biased politically, we all know our indeed television can be, but we make the choices. We know that we're picking up a liberal newspaper who pick up the Guardian or a writer who sent a newspaper who would pick up the telegraph, but what's going on in the internet is hidden from us. Those choices are being made, but we're not making them consciously. That's right. And that's very disturbing because the way you get into trouble is when you have a distorted view of the world and you don't even know it. And in this case, you know, you're getting this sort of feedback loop where Google is showing you more things that it thinks you want to see, but you're not aware of that. You don't know who Google thinks you are. You don't know on what basis is sorting information. And as a result, you don't really have a sense of what's being left out, the unknown unknowns. You've mentioned Google and you've mentioned Facebook, but tell us a little bit about the unknown companies that spend their entire time hoovering up all the rest of the information about us and then passing it on. Well, what I discovered was that there's actually sort of a behavior market being created. Every click on a website is becoming a commodity that can be sold to companies like Axiom and Blue Kai, these sort of, you know, these companies lurking in the shadows who gather immense amounts of data. So if I go out and buy a kagool or a pair of walking boots or something, they will know about it and they will pass that information about me onto search engines. In fact, it can be auctioned off in a matter of milliseconds. I mean, sometimes you literally can take one action on a website over here and have another website customize itself on the basis of that action without any apparent connection between the two. It's astonishing. And finally, before we open this up, you would argue that what this is doing is it's dividing people into smaller and smaller, mutually, in comprehending factions a little bit as if we were only listening to talk radio that of a kind that supported our prejudices. That's right. Yeah. I think, you know, we're drifting further and further from sort of a common view of what's happening in the world and without even knowing it, we're being reflected our own views, we're hearing our own views reflected back. Tim Harford. Eli, you don't mention blogs or Twitter in your book very much. You just touch on them briefly and it seems to me they are one way of bursting this filter bubble. Personally, I get a lot of my reading material via blogs and Twitter. They are filtered to some extent, but they're filtered by me, by my choices. There's no hidden algorithm. I mean, do you think that these are a possible solution or do you think that they're going to fade out? They'll be replaced by these more invisible processes? Well, I do think, you know, when you look at, say, Facebook versus Twitter, you know, Facebook is used so much more than Twitter and it's now driving a lot of the traffic to news websites or blogs. So you have this sort of, this company in the middle of that transaction that is using this kind of personalization and is deciding which content you see and you don't. I think Twitter, you know, can be very useful for, you know, I follow Karl Rove on Twitter even though I don't agree with him and I hear what he has to say. But even Twitter is moving more in this direction. So recently they announced that they're adding this sort of personalized search results to the way that you traverse Twitter. So it spreads prior. I just wanted to ask you, I mean, that the internet is clearly a sort of double edged tool. It's got lots of information. It can make democratic movements possible. It can make interaction and dialogue possible. But what I've read of what you've said is also very chilling. How do we then, as netizens or internet citizens, reclaim the internet in ways away from this filtering and actually enrich our experience of it? I mean, in some sense, get back the agency we seem to be losing. Yeah, well, I think, you know, it starts with actually just seeing how this all works because one of the dynamics at Play here is that these companies, you know, there's sort of this transaction we're handing over quite valuable personal information that can be translated directly into money for these companies, yet the companies try to make that transaction as opaque as possible. We don't actually, you know, see it at work. It's a phrase you use in the book, something along the lines of if you're not paying for it, you're being sold. Yeah, that's right. If you're not paying for the service, then you're the product being sold. And I think, you know, changing those dynamics would help us relate to these companies in a different way so that we might demand more of them. We might say, you know what, this isn't actually a free service. We're paying for this and we want it to feed, you know, sort of our, you know, our better selves, our society as a whole. Andrew, don't you? I hate to say this on the BBC, but it seems to me, Eli, your book makes a fantastic case of public service broadcasting, and it's continued relevance in the modern world, including, of course, public service websites. The BBC is a phenomenally successful website. It's probably most people's main source of news on the web, as well as as a broadcaster. That's why they're against us. And of course, those who are competing are against. What do you think about the future of public service broadcasting in the context of these filter bubbles? Well, I think, you know, this does highlight one of the dangers of having a huge amount of sort of what the public gets to know flow through these private entities that have other interests at heart, and I think we'll need institutions like public service broadcasting or education or libraries that can help, you know, fill in some of the information that may not get to us, you know, in our search results or on Facebook. I think, you know, the challenge here is that this is a hugely efficient, you know, service. What's happening is that you're sort of sifting out just the most delectable little information tidbits, and you're going to have to kind of bring people back to the stuff that's a little harder to get your head around, but actually more rewarding. And we have to learn how to turn off all the controls as well. That's true, yeah. Well, we've mentioned Google. Facebook, hugely successful companies, of course, but lots of other internet companies and other companies fall by the wayside all the time. And in ADAPT, why success always starts with failure, Tim Harford. You've been looking at this process. Always starts with failure. I'm going to blame the always on my on my publisher. Can we say very often? Yes. Frequently starts frequently. Yes. So you're looking at that ancient issue of how success happens. And just give us the headlines about about the dangers of the grand plan and the importance of being flexible enough to be to acknowledge your own failure. Well, this was originally supposed to be a book about how to save the world, how to solve really complex problems, climate change, how do we how do we how do we fix our innovation problem, all of this, better government, better aid. And what kept coming up as I looked at each of these problems was basically the realization that that incredibly difficult, the the economy that we've created somehow is hugely sophisticated, hugely complex, probably 10 billion products and services on sale around London alone, 10 billion distinct types of products and service on sale around London. And these, you know, these problems are so complex that grand plans are just impossible. You will fail if you try to make interventions in a complex system like this. And therefore success comes through error correction. It comes through working out what's gone wrong and fixing it really fast. One of the examples that you use in the book is about the Americans in Iraq after the initial invasion. Yeah, this was a case study in how an organization which is failing tragically learns from its mistakes and turns itself around and it doesn't happen from the top or it certainly didn't in this case. So Donald Rumsfeld was secretary of defense at the time and he had this bizarre press conference just after Thanksgiving 2005 in which he started avoiding the use of the word insurgent and instructing his senior general Peter Pace to also not use the word insurgent and what journalists have asked, well, why aren't you using the word insurgent? And he said, well, I had an epiphany. These guys don't deserve the term insurgency. So he couldn't even use the word to describe the problem the US Army faced. Meanwhile, at the same time change was going on, but it was going on basically the middle management of the US Army. So Colonel H.R. McMaster who is one of the heroes of the book with three and a half thousand men realizing that he was playing out a role in a tragedy and he had to change what he was doing. He had to change how his men were behaving, change the tactics. And that spread really quickly, not up to the top, but it spread very, very quickly horizontally. The other colonels, the other majors saw what McMaster was doing, copied it, adapted it to local circumstances, while he was continually being denied reinforcements and passed over for promotion. So that's a very good example of how it can work in a war situation. If we turn to the great banking crisis, which is a classic example, I guess, of over complexity or hideous complexity, we're sort of most of us half familiar with the idea of a corporate culture, which hides mistakes all the time under euphemisms and PR and fails upwardly and all the rest of it. How would using your model have made banks behave differently back when? So the lesson is fail early, fail small, and the banks failed late, failed big, and they all failed in exactly the same way. So the people I started talking to about the banking crisis were not the bankers or the banking regulators. They were safety engineers. I talked to people who try and stop nuclear power stations blowing up and try and stop oil rigs blowing up. And they said, oh yeah, we've been saying for 30 years that banking regulators and banking risk managers could learn something from the way we think about these complex systems. So those were the guys I spoke to, and they're fascinating, and one of the lessons was you have to discover these errors, these errors get buried in the system, and they lurk there for days, weeks, months, sometimes years, and you have to bring the errors to the surface and fix them, whether it's a closed valve, or whether it's a huge bet that's been made or a flaw in a risk monitoring system. And so one of the lessons is whistle blowers, how we treat whistle blowers is terribly important because it's the whistle blowers, they're on the front line, they're on the coal phase, they are the ones who see the errors, and very often they decide not to blow the whistle, they decide to keep their heads down, and even when they poke their heads up, they're often ignored or punished. When we come, we'll be talking about politics directly in a little while, but does this also mean that the notion of one single way of solving an education problem or a health problem to be imposed on all the country all at the same time is wrong, that we should be doing much more pilot projects, smaller experimental ideas, letting variations tell us what's working or what isn't. Absolutely, I mean there are good variations and there are bad variations, there are variations that come from very slack standards or poor oversight in some parts of the country, but there are also variations that come from trying to adapt to local conditions, and trying to learn and trying to innovate, I talk in the book about Andy Warhol's famous statement about Coca-Cola, all the Cokes are the same, and all the Cokes are good, and I say we seem to want our public services to be like Coca-Cola, all the same and all good, of course we want it to be all good, but the process of getting good in say central London versus north of Scotland is not going to be the same, so it can't be all the same, you have to experiment, you have to learn whether these experiments are informal or whether they're quite rigorously evaluated controlled trials. That process of trying out new things, figuring out what's working, getting rid of what isn't working and rolling out what is working, but it's anathema to politicians because they perceive this as sort of weakness. They want the great man theory still there, and so do we as voters. Well I was going to say, is there a personal individual part of this, that we as individuals if we want to live our lives as successfully happily possible, have to think about failure differently. Up to a point, there's a sort of coder of the book, a half chapter of self-help, almost of it, should we fail more in our personal lives. I don't think it applies with quite the same force in our personal lives because our personal problems are not so complex, and you only have one life, you don't want to have some huge failure, but still I look at the psychological research, and we are probably unduly anxious about small failures, and this speaks to Eli's point about the filter bubble, we're unwilling to expose ourselves to new things and new experiences, and I think if we did we'd be richer people. I'm quite amused by the fact that this book adapt is the big word, and it's been a whole series of books, nudge, blink, wobble, whatever they're called, which have kind of one great big new idea which is going to transform our view of whatever it might be. And actually this is a book about complexity and the sense about the lack of a big idea. So I look, for instance, decentralization often works, but when I look at the case studies in the book, you have situations where decentralization works here, works here, works here, and then you have another example and decentralization completely fails, and actually it's a centralized audit that works. When you look at the evidence around particular issues, you keep discovering new things, you keep having to change direction. Andrew. I completely agree with that two things that Tim says, firstly, that success almost always follows a lot of failure, and secondly that success almost always starts small. Where I'd like to put a question to him is about government. He says the problem with government is it can't afford to fail. The reality of government of course is that it fails all the time. The issue isn't whether or not government fails, it does constantly, but whether it recognises the failure and is prepared to adopt his principles of action. In my own experience in government, for example, dealing with colossal education failure, which is one of the biggest problems we face here in England, recognising honestly the fact that the status quo is failing, is the first requirement for being able to start experimenting. At that point, I agree with him, you need to start small in many of the education forums I was involved in in government, starting with 10, 15 schools, pilot programs for teachers that might just have a few dozen teachers, could and did, over years, scale up into hundreds of schools and thousands of teachers, so I think his principles are equally applicable to government. Do you think, though, that we've talked a bit about the culture of PR and hiding failure in corporate world, but that the media world of any minister, any political figure, any public figure who admits that something has failed, the instant reaction is resign, resign straight away, you know, you're a failure, get out, which of course creates a culture where civil servants and politicians never admit failure or try very hard not to. In my experience, the best time to admit failure is when you start, because you can't be blamed for it personally, so a government which takes office, that's right, and that's why a change of government or a change of minister is an incredibly important moment where you can recognise and be explicit about failure, often though, even in those cases, to do the reluctant to do so. I read, yes, there's a new Icelandic political party which has taken control of Reykjavik and it's the first part of its manifesto said we are going to break all of our manifesto promises, so that it could be blamed for doing so. I think it's worth thinking about the incentives we give our politicians, if you think about a trial and error system such as all our scientific institutions, they're all trying to falsify all ideas and fail ideas and spread good ideas and you can have 50 failed theories, one success, that's fine. In business, you can have 50 failed businesses, one successful business is business, if that's general electric, that's fine, we're happy with that proportion of success to failure because the successes get so big and the failures are so small, in politics, for the reasons you and Andrew have outlined, you can have 50 successes, 50 things going perfectly well and one failure and that's the failure that the media will talk about, that's the failure of political opponents will talk about and the incentives for a politician are first of all never do anything, but second if you do do something, for goodness sake, make sure no targets, no independent evaluation, nothing that anybody could ever come back and say well you've tried this and it didn't work, keep it nice and vague and then no one could have a challenge you on your results. Priya, what happens in academia, where somebody sets off what looks like a promising research area or route and the money's allocated and all the rest of it and then it turns out that the story isn't so interesting or the work isn't so interesting, in effect it's a failure, does academic life allow for failure? Academic life is about failing and trying again and failing better and trying, I mean any serious good project in academia, whether science or humanities, takes time, it involves engaging with difficulty failure with the unknowable, so in fact you can't have good academic output without failure, but again we have a system which penalizes failure, which penalizes exploration and penalizes encountering difficulty, where we're in that, too timid. Yes, we're in the culture of targets and output as well and that's a problem. Well, thinking about what you're saying Tim, it seems to me like one of the challenges here is that especially when you take this out of the political realm and you're talking about a business and you have these different divisions, actually admitting failure is complicated for a couple reasons, you know one people don't like to fail but two there's a whole constituency that feels bad about failing, you know if you have 50 divisions that fail and one that succeeds, you have most of your company feeling like failures, how do you do that, how do you build a culture where people actually are comfortable with having their whole project be a failure? It completely goes against the grain and I think generally we don't, generally what will happen is if there's some new technology, some new disruptive innovation, it won't be inside that successful company that it's commercialized, it will be some outside forces but for exactly the reasons you're outlining, there are some examples, so Google is a company that say that they expect 80% of their products to fail, they ask their engineers to noodle around for 20% of the time, the Virgin Group, which are Branson's Virgin Group, it's a series of different companies all standing alone, so it can be done, I think part of the thing is to create a way of feeding back criticism in a way that actually doesn't threaten people, so usually we feed back criticism in the form of what I call a praise sandwich, it's really really really good, you need to change this, it's really really really good, and people just hear, so you're telling me it's really good then, in a company like Pixar, John Lasseter's wonderful movie generating company, they have this thing called Plussing, where instead of saying let's forget about whether it's good, don't say it's really really good, just tell me what needs to change, don't tell me whether it's good or bad, tell me what needs to change to make it better, and you can create a culture where failure and feedback are possible. Well I don't know if Andrew Donis, Lord of Donis, did a lot of noodling around in his ministerial office in the old days, but he certainly had, you certainly had at least two big projects, the high speed rail link, and the educated schools reform program, which has been picked up by the coalition, they've pushed them forward, which is, I would have thought one, definition of success, if you're, if your political opponents pick up, pick up the thing and keep moving, but you started with a, you were one of the spads originally in white tool special advisors, and we keep reading that special advisors are a bad and indeed rather corrupt thing, there are far too many people wandering around being paid for by the taxpayers simply to make their ministers lives a little bit easier and better and smoother, and you take the entirely 180 degree opposite view from that, you think not only our special advisors are a good thing, but that we need far more of and the coalition government needs more of them. I've come on your program Andrew to make myself wildly unpopular, I think special advisors are a good thing, they're a good thing for two reasons, firstly you actually want ministers who are trained in the job, there is no better training to be a minister than being a special advisor, because essentially it's an apprenticeship for being a minister, you kindly said that I'd had some impact as an education minister, part of the reason for that is at the point at which I was appointed, I both knew how to do the job, and I had a plan, the average ministerial tenure in this country is 27 months, just over two years, unless you arrive as a minister with a good idea how to make the machine work and what you're going to do, you will almost certainly be ineffective, the second reason my spads are important is that it actually helps ministers do their job, you've got this huge civil service which does an excellent job and is thoroughly professional, independent and so on, but you're also a politician when you are a minister and you need political advice, and having somebody at your right hand who can give you that political advice, you need them to be a good and competent person, that's a big plus. Special advisors are good both because they train people to become ministers in due course and because they make the job of being a minister that much, so you, I mean, all those people say, "Well, probably this government, David Cameron, George Osborne, they've never done a real job, they've just been special advisors and so on," you'd say, "Well actually, that's why they may well be effective in government." I think that a great deal better as ministers, indeed, David Cameron, as prime minister, for the fact that he did know how Whitehall worked when he became prime minister, Tony Blair is honest in saying that it was a problem for him, that the only job he ever held in government was the office of prime minister, having no idea from the inside how the machine works, that's not a good way for preparing people to run the country. Literally, when you were appointed a minister, you are invested with some of the most important and wide-ranging powers that any person is given in this country, it is a pretty good idea that you have some idea how the machine works before you get there. And of course, it would be wrong for every minister to have to have been a special advisor first, we want a variety of backgrounds, a variety of ways into government. So what about the notion of actually training ministers or training potential ministers, giving them a sort of geographical oversight of Whitehall structures? I think it's a very good idea to provide training and advice to ministers before they take up the job. My own institute, the Institute for Government is a non-party charitable institution which does a lot of work with politicians behind the scenes, including with toy politicians before the last election, helping to prepare them to become ministers, introducing them to senior civil servants, former ministers, discussions about the nature of ministerial life, how you make an impact, how you get the Whitehall machine to work, things of that kind. I think it's good that we do start providing that support. It's very difficult, of course, for the government and the government machine to start training its opponents. So I think there's a big role for a charity like mine in taking forward this work. Because I can hear a lot of people saying, well, hold on a minute, what we have in this country, the crucial thing that we have in this country is a parliamentary democracy. Governments based on the House of Commons, people elected to the House of Commons. And therefore, all of this insidery Whitehall world of special advisors were being paid to kind of mooch around Whitehall and noodle. I love that word. And think and so on. Goes directly against the tradition of people standing for a constituency, coming into the Commons, and then, if their party's in power, going straight into government. I mean, you came in through the House of Lords. We may lose the House of Lords as that body which can provide that kind, that route into the, into the Ministeria. The House of Lords is quite good at looking after itself. I can assure you, I think the chances of it being reformed seriously are fairly remote. But most of our ministers and members of the House of Commons and parliamentary skills are incredibly important to being an effective minister. If you cannot persuade, justify and be properly accountable, you should not be a minister. So that side's important. But of course, you're also in charge of running a major Whitehall department and the bit of the job which ministers are least well prepared is the job of actually running a department being in charge of thousands of civil servants. And formulating and implementing a policy. But unless you can do that, you will never be a successful minister. Because the American system, very, very different from ours, allows the president to look around for people with huge experience of running big organisations, lots of experience from outside and so on. So, well, our best person for this job is that person and that person. Our system doesn't allow that to happen. But equally, I don't particularly like the American experience because you don't have a strong connection between the executive and the legislature. It's very difficult for the American governments to get anything done. I mean, President Obama makes wonderful speeches, but he has no majority in Congress. Even with his party formally controls Congress, he still has huge difficulty getting it to act on a progressive agenda. I actually quite like our system where a government is elected by the people once every four or five years on a programme and its job then is to seek to implement it, taking proper account of parliamentary debate. You mentioned, before I open this up, you mentioned the short tenure of ministers, two years plus. Do you think that, therefore, there are simply too many reshuffles in this issue? I do. I think one of the best things David Cameron has done this year is not to have a reshuffle. You and I, Andrew, are sort of political junkies. We also have aghast at the fact that we've now gone through a summer and there hasn't been a reshuffle. I think it's a jolly good thing. The instinct to reshuffle is at the heart of prime ministerial life and it needs to be resisted at all costs. Andrew, I love the idea of training ministers and trying to prepare them for their job. I want to speak up for a moment for the nation's geeks. I know we're all listening because they want to hear what Eli has to say. One of the things that really strikes me about politics in this country is numbers are thrown around without any respect for what they mean, any respect for what the actual reality behind them. Basic concepts such as debt or deficit are confused by politicians who should know better, i.e. those with treasury responsibilities or treasury spokespeople. Basically, there seems to be no culture of respecting the scientific method, statistics, numbers, evidence in general. When you set up some university to teach ministers how to do their job, will you please include a mass and statistics component? I think that's a great idea. It's precisely for the reason that Tim gives that we've set up a number of independent bodies who police the system. We now do have an independent statistics authority. We have an independent body which audits forecasts for economic growth and the public finances. I think it'd be great for them to be involved in training future ministers as well. There's an undercurrent of mild optimism about British government and what we've just been hearing, which is refreshing and different, and will make you hugely unpopular. I should say I am an optimist. I think things can get better and indeed, actually, if you look at the last 20 to 25 years in this country, it's been a great deal better than 25 years that went before. Well, let's move now because we can't have too much optimism or upbeat to the condition of the humanities, English and other subjects in our universities. Back in the new over years, tuition fees came in, they've now tripled and the focus for government support is going to be on what a lot of people would say absolutely rightly. The sciences, the hard subjects, the maths, the engineering on which this country's prosperity will eventually depend. But Priya, as we said at the beginning, you lecture in English at Cambridge and you're taking part in a debate simply asking, "What's the use of literature?" The underlying theme being that this is not something that in hard times a country should be spending a lot of money on. Yes. This seems to me precisely wrong. We are witnessing at this point a huge assault on the humanities and the arts and subjects like English literature, philosophy, history are imperiled. And one of the problems with this is that we're actually seeing a filtering of university education as well. The term that Eli has used so usefully in relation to the internet is also true of higher education. We're having the higher education system reshuffled, restructured in some sense, to address very, very narrow concerns. So just before we look at the effect of it, just talk through for us how the pressure on the humanities feeds through the system. What's actually happening? What's actually happening is several humanities departments are on the threat of closure. Some have already been closed at London Metropolitan University. We've had 80% of the departments. And this is because the fees for the courses which students now eventually have to pay have become very high. And it's not possible to get enough people prepared to pay very high fees to do something quotes. And I put quotes around it's soft, like English or philosophy or whatever it happens to be. Well, yes. Well, the problem is that all money, all 100% of the teaching budget has been removed. The block ground has in effect been abolished. So there is no public support. There is no governmental support for the arts and humanities. And indeed, for some of the sciences, those sciences which aren't going to be seen in the long run as useful to industry, what we've seen is an undermining of thinking that isn't instrumental. Now I should confess that I studied English at Cambridge. So that's where I'm coming from. But nonetheless, a lot of people would say, well, reading great literature, reading novels, reading poetry, that's a wonderful thing. Lots of people should do it. But we shouldn't have to pay for them to do it for three years at a university. If we're going to be paying as taxpayers in hard times, we should be paying for people to do things like maths and the hard sciences upon, as I say, which this country's prosperity depends on. Well, people can certainly read, and I hope everybody reads, and many people should read. But the skills that you pick up in English, and you will be aware of this, the skills of close reading, interpretation, debate, thinking historically, putting texts in relation to other texts, coming up with difficulty, understanding that interpretation is not simple. That often, interpretation involves failure, interpretation involves miscommunication, learning to argue, learning to write. These are not skills that you can just pick up, if you pick up a vanity fair and sit at home over the summer. I mean, it's a wonderful thing to read, but you have to be taught some of these skills as well. So it is a general mental education, you would say. It's a general mental education, it's as much about undoing mental reflexes, it's about encountering the oblique, learning to parse meaning. Meaning isn't simple. I mean, one of the problems is that we're in a society where we think that with a click off the button and you go on to Google and you get meaning, but meaning actually involves a difficult process of interpretation. So if we've got a problem with the internet, where people think they're getting information, what is actually also being undermined is reading and learning how to read and learning how to read in context and learning how to read in relation, put ideas in relation to each other. And these are skills that you cannot just pick up on your own. Do you think there are skills therefore that are going to be limited to a minority of people who can afford high fees to pay for? We had a huge amount of controversy the week before last with A.C. Grayling's sort of new college university, it's a privatized university opening in London. Yes, we are going to have a problem where if we have a culture where students are encouraged to take subjects where they will get decent paying jobs and they're encouraged to move away from the arts and humanities, you will have a culture where only people who can pay 18,000, which is what Grayling's university is, oh sorry, it's a college, it's not a university, it can't be a university, it's going to leave you, it will be an elite subject. Eli, what do you make of this from an American perspective? It seems like one of the themes actually running through the whole conversation today is about the value of generalism and the ability to sort of synthesize lots of different kinds of information. I think it was one of the things that I was thinking about when you were talking Andrew, also about sort of pushing towards more expertise. I'm generally of the view that we have a lot of narrow expertise, we have a lot of sort of specialization. What we don't have is sort of both mental and societal connective tissue that helps connect those ideas together. Tim refers to Phil Tettlock in his book who studied expertise and actually found that in a whole bunch of settings, you know, experts aren't actually better at predicting or much better at predicting what happens. They're terrible and the kind of expert who is least terrible is what Tettlock calls the Fox and the Fox is self-critical and embodies lots of different thinking styles, lots of different disciplines, rather than the so-called hedgehog who's very logical and very deep and tends to just run into trouble when it comes to dealing with the social sciences. But you do want generalists to know what they're talking about in my experience. So you need both things. I mean, that's go back to the ancient Scottish universities where you had effectively a first year in studying philosophy before you specialised any further because they thought you couldn't learn unless you learned how to think first. But there's nothing like that in our universities when you go in, maybe there should be foundation years. But Priya, do you think that the problem actually starts earlier with specialisation for A levels to the age of 16 already? I mean, I studied English literature and physics and maths and then went on to study economics and philosophy. So I've tried to maintain that generalism. But generally, I think students are channeled either towards the arts or the sciences quite early. I mean, it's not a problem. Yeah. Well, no, I think that the issue is this. We need both generalists and specialists. Subjects are distinctive. English literature does teach you skills that you don't get in mathematics or in economics. At the same time, we don't want to go back into two cultures or three cultures, the scenario where you're pitting sciences against the humanities. What we need as a culture is a connective culture of thinking. And in any serious university, any serious scholar will tell you that you can't do the humanities without the sciences and you can't do the sciences without the humanities. You need great ideas, clashing and interacting. And the days. Priya, your own university, Cambridge, was strongly in favour of higher fees. And indeed, has been a proponent for many years of a move towards the privatisation of universities which it please will lead to higher quality and more discriminating students. What do you think? Could I make a distinction here between the University administration and academics? Most academics, we have a huge campaign for public education. Most academics, I think, are very clear that a strong public component to higher education is absolutely crucial to keep access open and to democratise higher education, which is the direction in which we should be going. University administrations are, of course, looking at balance sheets and in the face of block grants being removed in the face of public funding being removed. Their eyes are on the money. But academics are very much in favour of public education and widening access. Isn't it inevitable, though, that in hard times, students are going to be more sort of mechanistic and narrow about what they want from their university education. They're going to be thinking more about the job that comes afterwards. Students inevitably have to think about jobs, but I don't buy this idea that students know what they want in any simple sense. I think students come in wanting an education, wanting to be challenged, wanting to learn. And we're doing them a disservice by setting up a culture where the only thing that matters is a job that pays at the end. So if we think we know what we want, we're almost certainly wrong. That takes us back to the filter bubble, which is where we started. Thank you to all my guests today. Eli Parris says the filter bubble and Tim Harford's adapt why success always starts with failure are both out. Now, Andrew Donis, Lord of Donis, has written the forward to the Institute for Government's Report on the Challenge of Being a Minister. And Priya Gopal will be taking part in the discussion what's the use of literature at the Royal Society of Literature Tonight at University College London. King's College London, I beg their pardon. The event is sold out, I'm afraid. But a recording will be posted on the Royal Society of Literature website next week. Raymond Talis takes a swipe at neuroscience and Barbara Sakayathan is talking about the ethics of mind reading. But for now, thank you and goodbye. (upbeat music)

Producer: Katy Hickman.