Paul Miller

There was a long-term study started at Stanford in the 1960s where the researchers put hungry four year olds in a room with a marshmallow on a table and told them not to eat it. They were told that if they didn’t eat it, when the researcher came back from running an errand they would get two marshmallows.

Some of the kids ate the marshmallow as soon as the adult left the room. Some thought about it for a while and then ate the marshmallow and others (about a third) waited until the researcher returned and got the two marshmallows. So far, so predictable.

But the researchers followed the children and years later checked up on how they were doing. The group that waited for the two marshmallows had more successful marriages, higher incomes, greater career satisfaction, better health, and – according to the study – more fulfilling lives.

Apparently it’s all about your ability to control your impulses, something that Julian Savulescu is saying at the conference here in Oxford could be an important aspect of human enhancement.

More about the marshmallow experiment here.

I’m at a conference in Oxford called Tomorrow’s people: the challenges of technologies for life extension and enhancement. Everybody here has had a copy of the Better Humans? book that James and I edited. Sitting in the main lecture theatre with 200 copies of your work being leafed through by some of the world’s leading thinkers and scientists is a bit scary.

You can see all the sessions being webcast here and get involved in a parallel online forum here.

Last Thursday I dropped in on the launch of a report I helped put together called Disablist Britain. It was hosted by Scope and DAA and featured the new(ish) Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton as keynote speaker. BBC News Online covered the launch here.

It was strange to see what we’ve helped to pull off. As a tiny part of a network of other organisations and people, I realised I’ve helped change the language and intentions of the Government.

Two years ago we published Disablism, deliberately setting out to get policy makers and politicians using the word and recognise that disabled people are the victims of prejudice as insidious and excluding as racism or sexism.

Taking our inspiration from the disability rights movement, we defined disablism as:

‘discriminatory, oppressive or abusive behaviour arising from the belief that disabled people are inferior to others.’

David Blunkett was the man in charge then and he was sceptical. Tom Shakespeare also took issue with it in an article for the BBC, but in the main, the pamphlet was very well recieved.

Just a few months later Andrew Smith was in charge and used the word freely, agreeing with much of what we’d said in the pamphlet. Behind the scenes in Whitehall a group of very bright and committed civil servants were using our ideas and support to push forward a Strategy Unit report called ‘Improving the life chances of disabled people’. Andrew Smith didn’t last long in the job but the work carried on in his absence.

Last Thursday John Hutton could have been reading from the introduction of Disablism. The issue of course will be in the implementation and the mainstreaming of the attitudes we’ve begun to instill in Government. I also don’t think he’s ‘got’ how differently work is defined by many disabled people and what that means for a Labour Government obsessed by ‘hard working families’.

I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned from working with people from the disability rights movement. I found it incredibly hard to begin with. They didn’t trust me or Demos and probably with good reason. They’d been abused, screwed around and ignored for a very long time.

I often find it hard to explain what Demos does in those situations. But I think we help to shape the story of policy, working with all the principal actors and helping them to develop a shared language for next steps. I describe it using Peter Gallison’s idea of trading zones where change happens when people with different viewpoints and expertise come together as equals. Shiv Visvanathan calls it cognitive justice.

When I first met Katie Caryer, it was the first time I’d had a conversation with someone who uses a communicator. She shattered all my preconceptions. Young, bright, entrepreneurial, feisty and with a very clear set of ideas about how things should change. I knew from that moment that disabled people had a heck of a lot to teach policy makers. A few months later and Katie’s story was the obvious place to start when I was writing Disablism.

I’m not sure what next. While not everything is heading in the right direction, other people like the Disability Rights Commission seem to be doing a good job of stimulating discussion about disablism. Scope’s own advertising campaign about disablism has had quite an effect. And movie’s like Murderball are shattering peoples’ preconceptions about disabled people. I’ll stay involved and watch with interest as things change – I hope for the better for disabled people.

The POWER inquiry was launched last week and got a heck of a lot of coverage. I went along to the drinks bash having read the executive summary and I’ve now had a chance to read the whole report. It took a while but was worth it. I like their direct style of writing and I certainly like their diagnosis of the problem.

The generally warm response the report has received is very different to a couple of years ago when Tom and I wrote about the decline of political parties in our FT Magazine piece called ‘Party Poopers’, and before that when Tom wrote It’s Democracy Stupid and people didn’t really get what he was talking about.

Our FT piece prompted John Prescott to call us Mekons on the Today programme, saying we were out of touch with what was really going on. He argued that Labour party membership figures were climbing again and that our assertion of the problem of falling trust in political parties was overblown.

John’s been a bit quiet in the follow up to the POWER inquiry.

The most interesting criticisms of the inquiry I’ve seen come from the ever-excellent David Wilcox. He’s decided it was all a bit top-down and I think I agree but I still think they’ve performed a valuable role by raising awareness of the problem.

My overall feeling is that the POWER inquiry’s analysis fits with my experience of the current state of democracy in the UK and although I think their prescription is a bit limited, I’m glad they’ve got a proper conversation going.

The question that I’m now turning to is what comes next. I think we need to accept that political parties are never going to be as dynamic and vibrant as they were in the 1950s and 60s and that voting is only a part of democratic life. As Paul Ginsborg points out, “we will perhaps vote (an activity of some three minutes) 12 times at a national level and the same number at a local one – some 72 minutes in all, perhaps one-third of the television viewing we do daily.”

What I’m interested in is people who are taking democracy into their own hands. People who are delivering democratic outcomes outside of formal politics by either taking decisions or delivering services themselves. Hopefully it’s going to turn into a long-term project for me – watch this space.

Some POWER inquiry links:

• The legends at MySociety have already produced a version of the executive summary of the report that you can comment on.
• The good folk at Make My Vote Count have set up a linkdump of all the UK coverage the report has recieved last week.

There’s been more coverage and debate about our Better Humans? book this week.

In the Guardian, Dylan Evans called for the creation of new equivalents to the ‘savage reservations’ in ‘Brave New World’, where ‘freed from the oppressive technologies that regulate life in the World State, the inhabitants develop individuality, independent thinking and initiative.’

In the FT (registration required), Richard Tomkins speculated on the drawbacks of eternal life.

I also noticed that the book has been reviewed on Amazon.co.uk – we get 3 out of 5. Not bad I suppose, but that is from a sample of one reviewer.

But the most interesting coverage for me was Radio 4′s Moral Maze because of the depth it got into about the issues. Interviewees included John Harris who will be giving a series of lectures at the Oxford Forum on human enhancement in a couple of weeks time and the Cyborg himself – Kevin Warwick.

Kevin was less gung ho than I’ve heard him being before, warning against military involvement in cybernetics and enhancement. His prediction for the invention of mind to mind communication though was : “within a decade”.

Melanie Philips took a conservative view of genetic selection, likening it to eugenics – an argument made in the collection by Rachel Hurst. She questioned John Harris pretty aggressively on the issue. Steven Rose agreed with Melanie (unusually) but Claire Fox couldn’t handle it describing the idea that deaf parents might prefer to have deaf children as abhorrent.

I’m beginning to look forward to the conference in Oxford. Things are warming up nicely.

The queue grows by a set of stairs that leads below TGI Fridays in Piccadilly Circus. It’s the entrance to the Comedy Store and it’s going to be a full house tonight to see the Players make things up as they go along.

Inside, the energy mounts in the dark, cavernous room. People take their seats. A disembodied announcer’s voice tells us the comedy is about to begin and would we please turn our mobiles off. Most people do as they’re told.

Neil Mullarkey steps backwards onto the stage and gives a flourish with his left arm to acknowledge the applause. He did this for the first time in 1985 when there were less than 20 people in the audience. His co-players included Mike Myers who went on to become Austin Powers and now include Paul Merton, Josie Lawrence and Richard Vranch. These days they play to a packed audience twice a week.

Neil had invited me and Paul along because he’s read our Demos pamphlet called Disorganisation. It’s not about comedy (although it does have a couple of references to The Office), it’s about how organisations will increasingly struggle with the tension between the demands of a globalised marketplace to be lean, mean and hyperorganised and their employees’ desire for more freedom and to be able to be creative in their work.

Improv is the ultimate mix of disorganisation and hyperorganisation. The rules of the games they play are strict, but there’s no way you can know what’s going to happen. They can turn up with no learning of lines or rehearsals. Beyond the simple structures, it’s completely reliant on the creativity of the comedians.

I’ve been trying out a few of the games with friends and having great fun. And I think improv is a skill that everybody should try to learn. I can think of plenty of organisations that could do with a bit more improvisation. I’m not saying that all businesses, much less organisations like the Police or Ambulance service, should make things up as they go along, but everybody gets placed in situations where it helps to be able to think on your feet.

• Neil’s homepage, including clips of his spoof management guru L Vaughn Spencer is here.
• Neil’s written about his improvisation workshops with businesses in this article.
• You can see the Players every Wednesday and Sunday night at the Comedy Store.
• Neil was on Broadcasting House on Radio 4 this morning talking about leadership. You can listen again (the piece is about 23:15 mins in).

First you have to find the number. No 118 118 or easy online directories here. It will take you three or four goes on Google or Yahoo! India to find a number that works. Then you have to explain what you want and who you are – they won’t take an order unless you have a phone number. And language will be a problem, somehow a lot gets lost in translation between English and English over India phones.

Turns out they do have Hawaiian pizzas everywhere though (except the ham is replaced with chicken) and twenty-four minutes later, the doorbell rings and there you have it: steaming hot boxes of globalised goodness.

Bangalore is comfortable with its newfound position on the international map. You’re almost as likely to find a French or Chinese restaurant here as you are in London. You can get good espresso from Coffee Day who have opened up 137 branches across India in the last couple of years. Wifi isn’t a problem – you’ll pay for it, but it works pretty well. Even the street booksellers stock Blink, Seven Habits and Dan Brown on their pavement stalls.

The reason Bangalore is happy with the in-bound side of globalisation is that at least some people are able to pay for it because of the things the city is exporting, which increasingly the West can’t live without. You probably know that many call centres are located here, but it’s much more than that. If you own a non-iPod mp3 player, a Bangalore company called Ittiam probably developed the technology inside it. They also designed the technology behind the headrest screens that you can watch on planes. And they’re not the only Bangalore success.

The story I heard repeatedly was that Bangalore is in the early stages of another boom. The last one was in 2000 (inflated by Y2K) and was promptly followed by a crash, but this one will be more elite than the last one; higher up the value chain particularly focused on research and development of new products and technologies. Most of the global tech firms like Intel, IBM, ARM and Microsoft all have labs here doing work that’s at a similar level of sophistication and secrecy to their labs in the UK or US. And like the glory days of Silicon Valley start-ups, Bangalore is full of start-ups based in anonymous residential areas. It’s just that here there may be a cow wandering down the street outside.

Economically, however, the city is on a knife edge. There are no big banks seriously investing in its future, no large family-owned conglomerates as there are in Kolkata or Mumbai. The state government talks the talk but is basically incompetent. Venture capital is learning as it goes, good with quick-win software companies and just getting into biotech, but it’s not confident with early stage finance that will create world-beating returns over the long term.

And then there’s the Bangalore paradox, that everybody will tell you about. ‘For every 30 kilometres you travel out of the city you go back a century’, as one professor said to me. There is shocking poverty within wi-fi range of the new coffee shops and it gets worse the further you look. India has no discernible practical strategy for poverty alleviation that measures up to the problem. Politicians talk about science and technology for the ‘common man’. But how many of India’s 260 million people who live on less than a dollar a day will get a chance to watch in-flight movies?

I’ve no doubt that Bangalore can create the wealth that it needs to sustain the odd Dominos franchise, but I don’t see any hope of it breaking the cycle of extreme poverty. And if Bangalore, with its international brand and incredible workforce can’t do it, is there anywhere in India that can?

Blimey. That was a hectic few days. Better Humans? seemed to capture the imagination of the media this week so I’ve been dashing around doing interviews. On Wednesday morning the car arrived at 6.15am to take me to the BBC to do 13 local radio interviews around the country.

I’ve done GNS (as it’s called in BBC speak) a couple of times before, but I got the feeling this was the topic that most animated the listeners and I’ve had a few messages from producers saying that they had lots of calls from people after I’d been on air giving their views. It’s a bit frustrating that I didn’t get the chance to listen to them.

We also got the prime spots on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme and on BBC Breakfast on TV as well as being well and truly plugged on Radio 4′s Start the Week on Monday.

And just to recap on print coverage:

Madeleine Bunting wrote an editorial in the Guardian.
Steven Rose’s piece from the book was in the Observer.
Our interview with Aubrey de Grey ran in openDemocracy.
The Financial Times ran an editorial by my co-editor James Wilsdon on Wednesday (registration required).
The Guardian website ran an interview with me yesterday.

And I’ve lost count of the mentions on blogs…

The launch event on Wednesday at the Wellcome Trust was packed and I thought was really interesting. Aubrey (who’s 42) did tell me that his mum was a bit annoyed to read in our interview that he swears though.

So I think we managed to achieve what we set out to do which was get a debate going. And there’s more to come as the conference at Oxford in March will attract even more attention to the issues.

There are reasons why you shouldn’t put question marks in the titles of books. James and I decided that we needed one in Better Humans? because we realised we didn’t know whether we thought human enhancment was ‘better’.

If you’re smarter, as Raj Persaud points out in his piece for the book, you’re not necessarily happier. And as I know from all the work I’ve done on disability over the years, having one idea about what’s ‘better’ physically is very dangerous.

But when it comes to people citing the book, question marks tend to just get left out, so our nuanced decision to be undecided (or fudge it, you might say) is getting lost as word spreads of the book.

OpenDemocracy have published our interview with Aubrey de Grey (we’ve just had a request to translate it into Romanian!) and the Observer ran an extract yesterday from Steven Rose’s piece about the potential downsides of the new resources available for brain science.

The full book is also now available online for free. The launch event in London is on Wednesday and it will be talked about more at the Oxford Global Science Forum in March.

David Cameron is a funny colour for a politician. Compared to the tanned orange of Tony Blair close up, he’s positively pink. For some reason it doesn’t look that way on TV, but when he walked a few feet in front of me on his way to the lectern at Demos yesterday, it was the first thing I noticed.

Cameron doesn’t project the strange charisma of Blair either. He speaks quietly, his body movements are understated. He’s not surprisingly tall, as Blair is. There’s nothing remarkable about his clothes. His verbal mannerisms don’t stand out except that there’s something about his pronunciation and intonation that reminds me of another New Labour architect – Peter Mandleson.

Cameron’s people rang Demos last week to ask if they would host the talk. They obviously wanted the undertone of the speech to be following in the footsteps of Blair. Demos played the most important role of the think tanks in developing the ideas that propelled Blair to power when he was leader of the opposition in the mid 90s.

I spoke to old friends of Demos afterwards who remembered Blair giving similar talks in 1995. For them the parallels were almost spooky but nobody was blown away. ‘Cameron doesn’t have the intelligence or drive of Blair’ one told me, ‘but he’s found a position that has a lot of mileage’. That position is the centre ground of politics and having a narrative about what the future could be like.

But of course it’s not about Cameron and Blair, it’s about Cameron and Brown – the elephant in the Demos office during the speech. And it’s Gordon who will have to make the next move. Cameron is holding back on specific policies because he wants to force Brown to go first.

My guess is that if nothing were to change between now and the next election, David Cameron would win and Gordon Brown knows it. So Brown has to do something drastic or inspired to ensure he becomes Prime Minister. He can’t just rely on his past record.

From what I saw on Monday, Cameron isn’t a natural but he has picked the right strategy. Brown will need to come out into the open if he wants to take him on and develop a story about where he will take Britain next.