Adrian Wooldridge: The West is facing five fearsome new giants

The Second World War was won on the home front as well as the battlefield. As early as 1942, the British government pledged itself, as soon as the Nazis were defeated, to slaying “Five Giants on the road to reconstruction”: Disease, Want, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. This pledge boosted morale and provided the template for the postwar welfare state. A “revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching,” wrote William Beveridge, the Liberal grandee who wrote the government report that identified the giants.

Today we are involved in another war and another revolution: an undeclared war against the “axis of autocracy,” led by Russia and China, and a revolution driven by technological innovation. The Five Giants that Beveridge identified have largely been vanquished: Life expectancy across the west is about 20 years longer than it was in 1942. But new giants have emerged: giants that are more subtle than the old giants but no less fearsome. These giants explain why the west is gripped by such a sense of malaise despite relentless material progress and why its citizens’ confidence in the future is fading.

What are these new giants, and how can we defeat them?

Loneliness. More than a quarter of U.S. households consist of one person living alone: cat ladies and cave men. Many workers, particularly in the just-in-time economy, work alone as well as live alone. A quarter of U.S. 40-year-olds have never married, up from just 6% in 1970. Social isolation is bad for individuals, increasing the chances of premature death as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, but it is also bad for the species. The German fertility rate is just 1.35 children per woman and the South Korean rate is 0.7.

Addiction. Addiction is a growing problem thanks not only to a new generation of super drugs, such as fentanyl, but also to the skill of supposedly respectable companies in encouraging addictive behavior. Food companies are some of the leading culprits here, engineering their products with an irresistible blend of sugar, salt and fat. More than two in five Americans are obese. Digital companies design clever algorithms to keep us clicking and scrolling. Hence our third giant.

Distraction. The internet has become a distraction machine: Headlines blare, emails drop, special offers ping. But it is only one of many: 24-hour news programs feature “crawlers” that provide yet more information. Cars come with all-enveloping entertainment systems. Young people who were brought up in this buzzing new world find it difficult to concentrate for any length of time or perform complicated tasks. The so-called Flynn effect, whereby average IQ had been rising relentlessly for decades, has been showing signs of reversal since the turn of the century.

Lies. Lies are on the march as never before, thanks to a combination of technological innovation and information warfare. The internet giants are the first big broadcasters to be exempt from strict standards of truth or balance in what they publish. Hostile powers, particularly Russia, are using this free-for-all to inject lies, designed to inflame antagonisms or simply muddy the waters, into the bloodstream of democracy. This is eroding the bedrock of liberal democracy, informed debate.

Complexity. Complexity smothers everything, like Japanese knotweed. Passwords get convoluted. Forms get longer. Government departments get ever more Kafkaesque. Moses’ Ten Commandments have become Ten Billion Commandments, many of them contradictory. Complexity is deeply inegalitarian, acting as a tax on people with low IQs while creating jobs for lawyers; it’s also deeply anti-progress. Scientists devote their lives to making grant applications, or sitting on grant committees, while building companies devote more time to regulations than to pouring concrete.

These five giants support each other. Addiction holds hands with both Distraction and Loneliness, for example: Young people (particularly men) who are addicted to their screens retreat from society into the land of the infinite scroll. Collectively, they create a general sense of a world spinning out of control. We must slay our giants to restore a sense of agency and progress.

Governments need to fight on as many fronts as possible: Departments of agriculture need to think about their role in promoting addictive foodstuffs just as departments of education need to think about opening children’s eyes to information manipulation. Four policies could produce outsized benefits:

Re-introduce national service: Offer school-leavers a choice between military service or voluntary service. National service would help to address both the division of society into social groups that have little to do with each other and the rising epidemic of loneliness. More than a million British 18- to 24-year-olds are neither in work nor in education, disconnected from society and wasting their lives in electronic distraction. Far-seeing (and Russia-facing) countries such as Sweden and Finland have already reintroduced national service.

Prioritize reading: Reading is the antidote to distraction because it obliges people to focus on a single text for a sustained period. (The great Austrian writer Stephan Zweig defined a book as a “handful of silence that assuages torment and unrest.”) Yet reading is a dying habit. Just 30% of Britons aged 8-18 say that they enjoy reading in their spare time, a 36% decrease since the reading survey began in 2005. Countries everywhere should do everything they can to reverse these trends, from pro-reading campaigns to a renewed focus on the written text in schools.

Tackle complexity. Governments should put their own houses in order by reducing their own addiction to complexity. This will involve taking on interest groups that thrive on complexity such as lawyers and bureaucratic jobs-worths. They should also force private sector companies to prioritize simplicity over complexity and intelligibility over gobbledygook. Governments have occasionally embraced this cause. Cass Sunstein put the reduction of “sludge” in the form of bureaucratic complexity at the heart of his work as head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2009-12. But complexity-busting needs to be a permanent government priority rather than an episodic enthusiasm.

Crack the whip at digital companies. Wherever you look — at the epidemic of lies or addiction or distraction — the digital companies are at the heart of it. The companies must be forced to deal with the social pollution that we are causing. Start by repealing Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act which grants them limited federal immunity for what they publish online. They also need to be encouraged to side with the bright side rather than the dark side. AI gives us a great opportunity to tackle the giant Complexity. Algorithms can be adjusted to encourage concentration as well as distraction.

The public sector across the world can often seem bloated and inert. But that is not because it is populated entirely by jobsworths. It is because it is disconnected from the new challenges that trouble the world. Give the state sector a new set of giants to tackle — giants that touch and trouble us all — and it may well surprise us with its energy and zeal.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”