2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
In the 1980s many Western governments were captured by groups which laid great stress upon reducing, and indeed often on removing, the government's impact on the individual. This was pursued with almost religious fervour - reducing government functions and, most characteristically, privatising these. Any intervention by government was, in theory at least, decried almost as some form of latter-day sin.
Underneath the surface, however, the reality was very different. Even direct intervention was discretely welcomed, when it was needed to support government's other objectives. More important, such governments intervened more and more in terms of regulation! Writing laws, even when they regulated the minutest detail of individual behaviour, was deemed to be a legitimate role - indeed the God-given duty - of government. Better still, in practice, it removed government itself from the problematic business of implementation - not least of potentially unpopular policies. They could, and usually did, say 'don't blame us we only set the policy'! Even better still, it could demand levels of efficiency in implementation far beyond anything it could itself achieve - and set resource levels which demanded superhuman levels of success by those charged with implementation - and, with the hypocrisy which seems to be one of the basic political attributes, it could point to the inevitable failures (even by its own supporters) as evidence of its own rectitude! Little has changed since that time, and the danger is that little will change even by 2020.
The so-called policies of de-regulation have, in fact, been typically limited to very specific areas; where they have also tended to benefit small groups, frequently of government supporters (and pay-masters) - a process which the electorate have come to recognise, and condemn. This has been taken to the limit by George Bush and his friends.
The tension here is not between intervention and non-intervention, except in the narrowest sense; an increasing degree of government intervention, in one guise of another, seems to be an inevitable accompaniment to the increasing complexity of society. Even the move to individualism will - paradoxically - demand even greater community (government) control, to allow individual freedom to expand! The tension is, instead, how the intervention is to be made; and what is the objective behind it. In this context, there does seem to be a rebound from the 'non-interventionist' (regulatory) approaches of the 1980s, towards more direct forms of intervention - which are more controllable (and make it easier to assign responsibility) - though the preemptive policies of George Bush have a rather less beneficent origin.
The level of government intervention, in general, will increase as the complexity of society grows. The major tension will continue to be between overt, direct intervention - with the greater control this offers - and covert, regulation - which allows government to conveniently distance itself from - the results of its actions. Though this point was recognized by research groups - who are on the receiving end of such regulation - and in particular by the participants in our earlier research on industry scenarios, most futurologists expect the process of 'deregulation' to escalate.
8 May 2003
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