Abundant feudalism

A straight-talking friend of mine announced the other day: “The closer you are to government, the more f***king miserable you are.” C.S. Lewis, who had a gentler disposition, put it like this: “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.” 

Apathy and shame stalk our nation. These have much to do with the failure of our beneficent state project. After the Second World War, the West combined centralisation with largesse. It is a combination that has trapped Britain in a Keynesian paradigm from which there appears no escape. We receive less and less in exchange for more and more. 

It’s the little things that get one: the smears of crap (dog, mostly) along high streets fronted by barber shops. The personal stories of A&E, or being on a waiting list. Rents. There is a waxing sense of decline. Our world is becoming increasingly complex, but our existing power structures stand incapable of seeing us through the next century. The trend, over decades, is towards dirty and unloved public spaces, rising crime, eternal waiting lists and housing gridlock. As we move into a period of history for which Britain is not prepared, it seems less likely the situation will be reversed than that it will be exacerbated.

When the stakes are human lives and the fabric of our society, to have a single option — across all sectors, from housing to health to the money supply — is no choice at all. It does not give us the chance of the best services, institutions or outcomes. Moreover, as things continue to get worse, it is the poorest — those who are so often, by default, closest to the state — who suffer the most. 

Under this regime of abundant feudalism, an increasing portion of the population has to work for the state or its contractors (the “dark” state), takes a hand-out from the state, relies on services provided by the state, lives in state-owned housing and even takes out credit at a rate determined by the state. From cradle to grave, Britons rely on services to meet our basic physical needs, along with a host of other wants and desires, but which get worse by the year. 

This world, and our economy as a whole, relies absolutely on the state creating money. And the trouble with creating money is that it is not real: if you put more into circulation, it simply dilutes what is there. It continues to erode both our standard of living, and our social contract. Many argue that never-ending inflation does not matter if the whole system is predicated on it. But inflation is a tax on money. When the government controls the money supply, it turns money into a synthetic service that makes it easier to service the debt that justifies all other taxes. It also caps the innovation – by augmenting people’s behaviour because they are poorer – that would otherwise lead to real value creation. By definition, this heads only in one direction: a managed decline that at best prevents the world we could have. At worst, it is a pitstop to absolutism.

This is a poor start to our millennium. Our aim should be to bring an end to the increasing number of people having to live like this — and that includes all public servants, whether in Westminster or on the frontlines, who have to keep a hold of this fracturing system.

So what to do?

Today, governments have a hand in just about everything, whether directly or through regulation and legislation. This must not be the future; the more our lives are controlled centrally, the less inclined individuals are to ingenuity and ambition – the prerequisites of innovation and progress. People are waking up to this fact, and the precarious 2020s give us an opportunity to get the centre leaner and better. We also have the chance to take the biggest swing of all: get the state out of the way for a complete focus on abundant energy, from which all else flows. (Energy abundance is the only thing which diminishes the existential severity of government indebtedness.)  

But politicians, and the public, must also address an underlying problem: society’s suffocating attachment to “positive rights”. By that, I mean the difference between “I have no right to kill you” (negative right) and “I have the right to life” (positive right). It is a paradigm governed by the latter which compromises day-to-day common sense: police cannot enter the tents of rough sleepers on the street because of the right to private and family life, as stipulated in Article 8 of the Human Rights Act. Never mind that the person inside the tent might be in acute need of aid. 

But the greater crime of the positive rights paradigm is that it breaks the thing that makes us civilised: our advanced ability to cooperate with each other. In the positive rights world, individual-level cooperation becomes a hub-and-spoke relationship with the state rather than with our fellow man. The reflex that makes us unique as human beings, namely indirect reciprocity (I scratch your back, somebody else scratches mine), gets discounted: you do not need to consider your reputation if your interaction for survival is with one vast, faceless redistribution mechanism. Consider the fact that one fifth of new British cars are given out via a taxpayer-funded scheme for people with disabilities such as ADHD. Many consider themselves to have the right to drive a new car at the expense of taxpayers. This fragile, unnatural state is the challenge of our century. 

It is individual choice and control, rather than diktat and passivity, that will engender individual-level cooperation. As investors, two foundational areas stand out: health, and education. Health innovation is currently bifurcating between well-intentioned improvements to our lumbering golden calf, the NHS, or luxury scans and experiences. In the realm of luxury health, the assumption of a Tesla trickledown phenomenon (where initially high costs fall with sales, and thus become widely available) is correct, but the trickledown is neither fast enough nor broad enough. 

Yet there are many simple options on the table: better, and comprehensive, access to our health records (and AI to help us and medics parse them); subscriptions to, for example, on-call paediatric doctors and services (concierge services are commonplace in the US, and increasingly tech-enabled); and getting more drugs to market faster and more cheaply. The return of the family doctor is another nut to crack. Not only because it’s what most people genuinely want — a consistent, personal connection with their healthcare provider — but also because it’s the best proxy we have right now for a holistic approach to health: genuinely personalised medicine, that takes into account your previous medical history, life context, and past interactions. Doing that at scale, however, while AI comes of age, is the challenge.

For healthcare to work at scale, we also need to solve the upstream problem of keeping people healthier for longer. Like money, people hate to think about it. But we can now receive frictionless feedback from robotic kitchens and Amazon Go-style gyms, both of which collect lots of data on customer behaviour. Tap once, and you won’t need to input what you ate, the workout you did — you’ll simply get the facts and encouragement; it has all been logged already. We will soon see these next to and in hospitals, ready to serve those visiting and working there. This individualisation matters for the future, too. As humans become increasingly cyborg (think Neuralink and beyond), the choice and control an individual has, at least in making use of their data, are paramount. 

Meanwhile, in education, we are battery-farming children for an industrial world they will not be entering. Everyone can see this is a problem; nobody has fixed it. Edtech has, to date, been something of a damp squib. Take edtech startup Byju, which delivered online classes and sold associated apps and IT equipment. In 2022, it was one of India’s biggest startups, valued at $22bn. Two years later, it was insolvent. While Covid provided an artificial bump to many such companies, very few have managed to successfully scale. They’ve been blighted by two things: the innate requirement to plug-and-play with existing schools, and the fact it is ‘tech’, when so many parents are far from encouraging more technology into their children’s lives. National curriculums cannot keep up the development of AI. We must stop thinking of education as compulsory, nationalised learning that is front-loaded in life, and instead build services bespoke to individuals and their needs, across a lifetime. Now is the time for the shift from one-to-many to one-to-one. 

To bring this to pass, we need greater competition and different models. As with healthcare, it is a growing marketplace that will ensure both resilience and choice — something the state cannot, by definition, provide. Low-cost private, micro and distributed schools, with the right balance of human and machine, must be achieved at scale. 

On the ground, it becomes painfully obvious that the existing models don’t work, especially for children from poorer backgrounds. As a secondary school teaching assistant, I saw first-hand how most teenagers desperately wanted to be working. In a world where an individual can vibe-code a flight simulator in three hours using ChatGPT and start making £100,000 a month, is it so hard to imagine, with the right checks and balances in place, children earning money? It then becomes easier to envisage ownership models for entirely new kinds of educational establishments that see teachers, parents and pupils as shareholders. A new incentive structure for resilience and scale. And what greater way to incentivise lifelong learning? 

That is not where we are now. We are, at present, creating robber barons, or those that must toil under them. If the beginning of the twenty-first century marked confirmation of a languishing health system as the largest employer in this country, and with over half of the reliant on the state, what does that say about the next one hundred years? What does it say of our aspiration? Our failed project has left us pessimists and believers not in ourselves or each other, but in a supraindividualism that has forsaken us. 

But we do not need to save it, for it is doing none of us any good. If this country is to build for the impending world — marvellous, energy-abundant and interplanetary — we must build for choice and to raise standards. We must also question our proximity and collusion with the state, while those privileged to have power must cut it where it has no place being. We can be free of both omnipotent moral busybodies and robber barons. We simply need to make it so.