Behind every policy there is an idea and behind the ideas that have ruled in Britain in Blairite times there has been a particular - and peculiarly narrow - conception of how we behave.
Signal a price to people, and they will respond, says the model; money is what matters. Economists rule the policy roost and with them what's called rational choice. It's dead simple: make something more expensive and people will want less of it. In the era of capitalism's triumph, it is not surprising commercial models are so dominant.
But look around: so much of the way we actually behave doesn't obey the logic of prices or "rationality." From obesity to climate change, why and how we do what we do needs more textured explanation and subtler policies to go with it.
Coincidental with Gordon Brown's arrival in power, the intellectual climate is shifting away from the desiccated calculating machine model. A new book from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) captures a mood that is also expressed in new thinking about "wellbeing," and how we need to recalibrate what the government does on the basis of whether it makes people happier, not just better off (especially if the economic growth fixation actively damages contentment).
Ministers are prone to think that passing laws makes people behave differently. Witness the great raft of criminal justice legislation in recent years. The trouble is that the causes of crime, that the man was going to be tough on, are complicated and the kind of interventions needed to address them (an interweaved bundle of early year, policing, income support, housing, jobs, mentoring, probation etc) demand time and defy soundbites.
The government can and must intervene, but it needs to be much cleverer about how or when, says the author of the report, Miranda Lewis. And that means cleverer in the sense of employing more psychologists - of whom Whitehall has none. But if government needs to be subtler, it also has to escape the stranglehold of economics and the attempt - we've seen it in health and social services - to define the public as "consumers" of the public sector. Among the idiocies of recent times has been application of this language to policing and inspection. Behind all this is the dominance of a single model of behaviour, as if we are permanently trapped in the aisles of Tesco and our only response is to sample a row of cans and buy the cheapest.
At the launch of the IPPR report Geoff Mulgan, former head of the prime minister's strategy unit now director of the Young Foundation, coined the phrase "soft paternalism." Much of what government does isn't supplying services as if it were Marks & Spencer. Instead it remedies needs and reprimands, as if it were a parent.
But it has to be a much wiser parent. Take household bins and recycling. Getting people to change their ways, for the sake of sustainability, can't be done by command and control or ministerial edict, or by some new tariff. It's going to take a subtle mix of policy tools, not excluding charges, but also including public engagement and attitudinal shift of a sort that can't be easily engineered.
Programmes work, witness the seat belt laws. Public sensibility shifts markedly and legislation can push and respond, witness smoking. Be very careful, says the IPPR report, that interventions are fair and not just targeted, as many are, on the poor. But let's abandon, for good, both the neoliberal reflex that all interventions are bad and the economist's dogma that only prices matter. The government can and must intervene to change the way we behave, for the better. But it needs to be a lot more informed about how and where.
