0:02

Sir

0:02

Andrew Dilnot, our guest today, in a way,

0:04

is Mr. Social Science, a

0:07

career of distinction built on the disciplines for

0:09

which he was rewarded with a knighthood. Today,

0:12

he is the warden of Nuffield College, Oxford,

0:14

the famous graduate college that specializes in the

0:16

social sciences with a clutch of former

0:19

fellows winning Nobel Prizes. Social

0:22

Science is in Andrew's blood. Before

0:25

Nuffield, he worked for the Institute for Fiscal

0:27

Studies for 21 years, and

0:29

the last 11 as director. A

0:31

fierce advocate for statistics, he believes

0:34

before you begin to analyze any issue, whether

0:36

social care or low productivity, you

0:38

have to marshal the data. Only

0:41

then can you get near a solution. And

0:44

the UK social care system, or

0:46

not so much a system but a lottery, is on

0:48

a precipice. Two-thirds of

0:50

people who've used or had contact with social

0:52

care said they were dissatisfied with the service

0:54

they'd received or witnessed, according to a recent British

0:57

social attitudes survey. And

0:59

beyond just dissatisfaction

1:02

lie damning figures. There

1:04

were over 165,000 adult

1:06

social care posts left vacant last

1:08

year. What can be done? And

1:11

what can the stats tell us? Andrew

1:13

published his report on social care 12 years

1:16

ago, and still nothing has

1:18

been done. So for his views

1:20

on that and the gamut of issues facing

1:22

social science, here is the man himself.

1:25

Thank you so much for joining us today, Sir Andrew Dilnot,

1:28

direct from Nuffield College, Oxford.

1:31

It's great to be with you.

1:34

First off, I mean, you began

1:36

your career at the Institute

1:38

for Fiscal Studies back in 81. And

1:41

here we are in 2023.

1:44

What big things, if you had to single out

1:46

three big things that

1:49

have changed or of remark

1:51

that either worry you or delight

1:53

you over that period, what

1:55

would they be? So one big thing that has changed

1:58

that we knew even back then, was going

2:00

to change, but still I think we're struggling

2:03

to adjust to it in this country and around the world is

2:06

how much longer we're all living. So the aging

2:08

of the population has been really

2:11

striking. If

2:13

we go a bit longer than the start of my

2:16

and your working lives, we go back

2:18

to 1901. In this country, there were 61,000 people, over 80. By 2011, there

2:24

were 1.447 million, an

2:26

increase of a month per 25 by 2030. We think there'll

2:29

be so many people

2:31

in that category. That's something fantastic.

2:34

It's great. They're all living longer. In many ways,

2:36

that's what we would all be

2:38

looking for. But I don't think we've yet adjusted

2:41

in all sorts of ways to that.

2:44

I don't think we've adjusted to it fully as individuals.

2:47

We haven't adjusted to it as a society,

2:50

how we manage pensions.

2:52

And of

2:53

course, I would say this how we manage social care.

2:55

That's a huge issue that we just haven't

2:58

addressed. But that's

3:00

one very big change

3:02

that I think is good, but has

3:04

some tricky

3:07

consequences that we haven't addressed.

3:11

Massive growth, further growth

3:13

in the number of people going to university. And

3:16

I think that's an extraordinary and wonderful

3:18

thing. And not just

3:21

growth in the total numbers, but shift in

3:23

the gender balance. So again, if we go back

3:25

slightly further, we go back to the early 1950s. The early

3:27

1950s, there were about 3,500

3:30

women in the UK

3:33

going to university each year, and about 40,000

3:35

men. Now we're at over 3,000 women,

3:40

and a bit less than 300,000 men. So

3:42

a huge

3:43

increase in the overall number, but

3:45

also a massive shift in

3:48

one of the really critical gender

3:50

inequalities. And of course, we're not, there are all kinds

3:52

of inequalities of many types, including

3:54

gendered, that are still there. But that

3:56

has been an astonishing transformation

3:59

that I think is good.

3:59

we don't pay enough attention to.

4:03

That's something really too delighted. And

4:05

then with a slightly more

4:07

statistical sense, just

4:09

the availability of data had been

4:12

transformed over the last 45

4:15

years. So when I first worked

4:17

at the IFS, actually, I'm

4:19

afraid to say, Will, there was a mistake in your

4:21

introduction. I didn't start working at the IFS

4:24

in 1981. I started working full

4:26

time at the IFS in 1981. I had the astonishing opportunity

4:30

to go and work as a summer student while I was still

4:32

an undergraduate in 1980. In 1980,

4:35

I can remember being there

4:36

in the summer, we were using

4:39

the

4:40

computing service in

4:42

Oxford, a mainframe computer in

4:44

Oxford that reputedly, I don't

4:46

think it's true, but the anecdote was

4:49

that it consumed as much water to keep itself

4:52

cool as the domestic consumption of Oxford. I said,

4:54

I don't think it was true. There

4:56

was a noise that I thought was a pneumatic drill, which

4:58

is actually the card reader. This

5:01

was a whole different technology.

5:05

By 1981, it was possible to

5:07

use

5:08

PCs, micro computers, to

5:10

analyze

5:12

data from the family expenditure survey.

5:15

So for the first time at the IFS, we

5:17

were able to, in something like

5:19

real time, look at the distribution income,

5:22

write programs that would allow us to assess

5:25

the improve of potential changes

5:27

to the digital social security system on

5:30

the distribution income. What happened

5:32

over the last 40 years has been an astonishing

5:35

multiplication of that. So

5:37

the amount of data and the richness

5:40

that is available now for social

5:42

scientists to start to understand

5:44

more about how the labor market works,

5:48

how

5:49

an education system or a health system

5:51

is working, what kinds of decisions people

5:54

are making about retirement, all of that stuff. There's

5:57

now almost

5:58

too much data to look at.

5:59

And that means that we can answer all kinds of questions

6:02

that simply were impossible before. Well, we're

6:04

going to look at some of those questions over the next half

6:06

an hour. I'm very struck

6:09

actually, in a social

6:11

science, you go back to the 1890s, the early

6:13

part of the 20th century,

6:16

people looked at social science and data

6:18

very primitive as it was, but they thought, hmm, we're

6:21

really going to kind of solve the world's issues with

6:23

this. You know, the great surveys by

6:25

Booth of London and Seaburn Roundtree

6:28

in York. But

6:30

I mean, you know, little

6:33

progress was made. And again, there was hope for in

6:35

run up to the Second World War. And now you're

6:38

telling us we can do all these wonderful things now with

6:40

all this data. Are we making

6:42

enough progress with

6:45

the statistics and the data and analysis

6:47

and the trends and what we know about

6:50

ourselves? There's enough being acted upon,

6:52

given that we know so much more about, you know,

6:55

our social and economic structures. I think probably

6:57

the answer to that

6:59

is inevitably no and

7:01

never. We never make as much progress

7:03

as we would like. And

7:07

one of the things that I suppose

7:10

is most worrying is whether

7:13

policy decisions are

7:16

as informed by data analysis, they

7:18

should be. And my reflection

7:20

after these few decades

7:23

of working in these areas is that I sometimes think

7:25

that we pay too much attention to policy

7:28

and not enough attention to the ways

7:30

in which the world changes that

7:33

aren't driven by policy that

7:35

might be driven, for example, by technological

7:37

change, by better understanding. So in

7:40

some senses, you know,

7:41

what's one of the most important changes

7:43

that's occurred in the last hundred years

7:45

or so, the massive reduction

7:48

in infant mortality rates from

7:50

the beginning of the last century,

7:52

one child in 10 dying before the age

7:55

of five to in this country, that

7:57

number being now around three in

7:59

a thousand. Not much

8:01

of that

8:02

has been result of explicit

8:04

policy changes, but I don't think it's

8:07

pulling levers. I'd ask

8:09

that it has been technological change, better understanding

8:12

of hygiene, better medication. And

8:15

I do think there's a tendency for us all

8:17

to get caught up in a bubble where we

8:19

think the most important thing that can be done is

8:22

a change in policy when often the most important

8:24

things that have happened have been the result

8:27

of technological change, behavioral

8:29

change, of changes in attitudes.

8:32

The increase in the number of women going to

8:34

university hasn't come about because

8:36

a government pulled a particular lever. It's

8:39

come about because we've changed

8:42

our attitudes, some attitudes that

8:44

were wrong towards

8:47

the idea of women going to university, to attitudes

8:50

that now welcome and support on

8:52

the whole, not of course everywhere and at

8:54

all times.

8:56

So it's not all about policy. Hold that

8:58

thought because I am going to come back to that.

9:01

But I just wanted to kind of push you a bit about

9:03

the British economy in the

9:06

early 2020s or the mid-2020s. Productivity

9:12

flat for the best part of 15 years,

9:16

stagnant real wages, public services

9:20

and tremendous pressure, debt

9:22

service, the cost of actually servicing

9:25

our national debt for

9:28

a bunch of reasons that we know well, has

9:31

now approached 10% of all tax receipts.

9:35

Our international accounts are all over the place. How

9:38

do you see it? I mean, are you going to point

9:40

out and say, well, that's far too pessimistic. Here's

9:43

all these bright spots. I agree

9:45

with you and here's more

9:47

worrying figures. I

9:50

mean, first of all, just give us a rounded

9:52

picture of actually how serious you think our

9:54

national plight is and then kind

9:56

of give us some pointers about, I mean, you've

9:58

only got a couple of minutes here. a couple

10:02

of pointers about what you would

10:04

focus on and then let's come in on those.

10:06

Well, so

10:08

I don't think we're looking very different from the rest

10:10

of the developed world. And

10:13

one of the things that's happened in the last few weeks is there

10:15

have been some revisions to our

10:18

estimates of the overall

10:20

size of the market economy that

10:22

now make it look as though the performance of the

10:24

UK is roughly in the middle of the performance of

10:28

the developed nations in the post-COVID

10:29

period.

10:31

And I think there's something a bit chastening

10:33

there, which is to remember that

10:36

all data when it comes out is an estimate and

10:39

it can change later. And the second is that we're

10:41

a pretty small nation and it's going to be unusual

10:44

for us to be performing

10:46

or behaving in ways that look very different to those

10:49

around us. The story of the British economy

10:51

is on the whole the story of

10:53

the world economy and British

10:57

politicians and academics

10:59

and public servants and journalists. So

11:01

we're a bit less important

11:02

than it sometimes becomes a big

11:04

wheel. That's a disgrace. What

11:06

a disgrace we think is there, I can't believe you've said

11:08

that. We're driven

11:11

by the world. We're in our very

11:13

small part of the world and we respond as the

11:15

rest of us. Let me talk a bit more about

11:17

something where I could claim to have a bit

11:20

more experience and knowledge. And that's

11:23

the level of public

11:25

spending, the size of the national debt, which is

11:27

something people have got very agitated

11:29

about. Yeah, OK. Yeah. Go there. The

11:34

stock of debt as a share of

11:36

national income is now roughly under a

11:38

percent.

11:38

And

11:41

that is higher than it's been for most

11:43

of the period in 1960. But

11:45

it's lower than it was for most

11:48

of the period from the First

11:50

World War to 1960.

11:52

And it's lower than it was for the whole of the period

11:54

from 1750 to 1850.

11:59

it's been is more than 250% of national income.

12:03

It is not the stock as it is, it's the cost of

12:05

servicing it. They're really of the... So

12:08

the cost of servicing it at the moment is high

12:10

because inflation is high and we have quite

12:12

a lot of index linked debt.

12:15

This is an area where

12:18

I just think as economists

12:20

and as policymakers, we

12:22

haven't done a very good job. We

12:25

talk about things that we say are fiscal rules

12:28

and the rule might be depending on

12:30

who the government is and when it's a large change, it might be

12:32

that

12:33

the stock of national debts should fall

12:35

or that we should only borrow to invest.

12:38

These are very

12:39

inadequate ways of thinking about borrowing.

12:42

If we think about how we think about borrowing for

12:44

ourselves, if we

12:46

think about borrowing as individuals, then we might

12:49

want to borrow to buy a house. And

12:51

then what we're doing is we're borrowing money so we can

12:53

buy something we use over a long period. And

12:56

we do it if we think the price that we will

12:58

pay for the asset and the borrowing

13:01

is less than

13:03

the value of the consumption. So we should be applying

13:05

those kinds of rules to the way

13:07

we think about what we do together.

13:10

Government is in the end just what we do

13:13

together. So very odd simply to have a rule

13:15

that says it should fall. There

13:17

could easily be occasion that we saw in both

13:19

Covid and the response to the war in

13:22

Ukraine when that's just not the right thing

13:24

to do. We should be evaluating

13:27

borrowing in that light. And we should remember that it's

13:29

true that

13:32

we have a higher

13:34

stock of borrowing and therefore a higher cost of

13:36

servicing with debt than one of the other

13:38

G7 countries.

13:40

But every other G7 country has

13:42

a higher, and in some cases

13:44

much higher level of national debt than

13:46

we do in Japan. For example, it's

13:48

over 250%.

13:49

I struggle with this. Most

13:52

of my working life trying to outmake that argument and

13:54

also to try and make the argument which

13:57

has kind of ancillary to it. You

14:00

know one should look at the kind of stock

14:02

of national assets and actually the kinds of things

14:05

that you know You're spending money

14:07

on I mean I I really believe

14:09

that a kind of well-designed

14:12

investment program financed

14:14

by borrowing that probably

14:16

was going to kind of lift productivity

14:19

and Growth in the medium term would actually

14:22

not Freak out the financial

14:24

markets actually It

14:27

was kind of this trusses unfunded tax cuts

14:29

that freaked out the markets nonetheless,

14:31

I mean I do The

14:34

first time and I and I'd put my fears

14:36

to rest I mean I I mean we have I

14:39

mean There's only 15 years

14:42

get worthy Average

14:44

length of British public debt was 14 or 15 years

14:46

longest in the g7 now It's

14:49

two years because of the impact of quantitative

14:51

easing and then that's and

14:53

then the and that's very very very Kind

14:56

of susceptible to short-term Change

14:58

interest rates with the character of that and

15:01

then you've got you know about quarter national

15:03

debt is indexed to inflation And

15:05

that has swollen forever as

15:08

a result of the inflation of the last kind

15:10

of two years and ongoing into next year

15:12

So, you know, it's kind of a it's

15:14

kind of a thing and actually Either

15:17

one has to grow faster or one has to have

15:20

a higher tax base or

15:22

one way or another, you know What's got to kind of manage

15:24

it? as Well as as

15:27

well as organized investment. I mean I as

15:29

well as tell people not to worry about the actual stock So

15:33

I agree. I agree with all of that

15:35

So there is no doubt a

15:38

short-term issue with the current servicing

15:40

national debt

15:42

But I think it is short-term issue. Yeah Yeah,

15:44

yeah I think I think the real the

15:46

crunch issue in a way this may relate to some some

15:48

stuff that you want to talk about later in the context of

15:50

the social care is how we address

15:53

what we want the states to be doing and One

15:57

of the things that I think I can see over

15:59

the

15:59

ideas that I've been looking at this is

16:02

that

16:03

on the whole we've gone on as a

16:05

society and as politicians

16:08

wanting to increase spending in certain areas

16:11

health is one obvious example. The

16:13

other is support of all the people

16:15

as the number of all the people has grown massively. Cost

16:18

of paying pensions other forms of

16:20

support has grown massively. So we've gone on increasing

16:23

a whole set of things

16:25

which you'd expect us to want to spend more on as

16:27

we get wealthier and

16:29

we haven't wanted on the whole to

16:31

do that by increasing the overall level

16:33

of taxation. So we've cut other

16:35

things and at the beginning of the post-war

16:38

period there was an easy thing to cut and that was defence.

16:40

It had been 9% for national income, it's now down

16:42

to 2. But then we've

16:44

ended up cutting infrastructure and capital projects

16:47

and there's now nothing left to cut. And it's

16:49

also worth noting that one of the consequences

16:52

of increasing spending as

16:54

a share of national income on health and on support

16:57

of older people has been that at the same time

17:00

we've reduced the share of national income that

17:02

we spend on education. That's great. Yeah,

17:05

thinking back to your what are three changes,

17:08

the change that probably bothers me most of all

17:11

is that in 1975-6 we spent 6% of national income on

17:13

education. And

17:17

now we spend between 4

17:19

and 4.5% national income on education.

17:22

It's a complete disgrace. Over

17:25

a 50 year period when we've grown on

17:27

average much better off real incomes

17:29

have grown a lot.

17:31

Surely education is something

17:33

that in economist terms we

17:35

call luxury goods. The income elasticity

17:38

of demand is greater than one and if you get richer

17:40

you want to spend more of your income on education.

17:42

Thank you for explaining that. Thank you for explaining that. I'm sure

17:44

some listeners won't know what the elasticity of

17:46

demand means. But how on earth

17:49

have we managed as a society to

17:51

reduce by a quarter

17:53

the share of our economy that we dedicate to

17:55

education? And it just seems to

17:58

use a technical term.

17:59

Well, some of it has gone off balance sheet with

18:02

student loans, hasn't it? I mean, I guess you could

18:04

say. Yes, but the number of students

18:07

has grown. In 1975, the number

18:09

of students in higher education

18:11

was tiny. Now, it's

18:14

true that there have been some demographic changes,

18:16

but basically we just have, we have

18:18

reduced the proportion of

18:20

our economy that we spend on education. And that seems,

18:23

that seems very, very

18:25

surprising.

18:27

I just want to take a moment to talk to you very

18:29

briefly about the organisation behind the WE

18:31

Society. The Academy

18:33

of Social Sciences is a national body for

18:36

academics, practitioners and learned

18:38

societies in the social sciences.

18:41

As the president of the Academy, I can tell you that

18:43

we champion the vital role social sciences

18:45

play in education, in government, in business,

18:48

the list goes on. You can find

18:50

out more about the Academy of Social Sciences work,

18:52

support us or read up on our fellows

18:55

by going to the website acss.org.uk.

18:59

That's acss.org.uk.

19:03

Tell us what we should be covering, who we should

19:05

be speaking to by emailing wesociety

19:09

at acss.org.uk.

19:13

Now, back to the conversation.

19:21

We have not, as a community,

19:24

been grown up and honest

19:26

about how much

19:28

we want to spend on the things that we do together.

19:30

And the challenge that has faced a whole

19:33

series of governments since

19:35

the mid 1970s is that

19:37

we want to spend more on our health care.

19:41

We want to spend more on looking

19:43

after those paying pensions to those, the

19:46

increasing number of people who are over pension

19:49

age. But we haven't worked

19:51

out whether there's something that we're willing

19:53

to stop doing together or

19:55

whether we're willing to pay more for this. And of course, if we were if

19:57

these were all things that we did on our own, we would be spending a lot more on the things that

19:59

we do together.

19:59

our own and we find those changes

20:02

very easy. So if we look at the composition of

20:04

consumption then it's organised

20:06

individually. It changes very radically.

20:08

The proportion of our total consumption that

20:11

goes on food has fallen very dramatically

20:13

over the last 50 years because as

20:16

we on average have got richer, on average

20:18

we spend a smaller proportion of our income on food.

20:20

The proportion of our income that we spend on transport

20:23

has gone from 4% to 12% because

20:26

as we get richer we choose to

20:28

do more of that. We're very good at adjusting our

20:30

individual

20:31

consumption. We're very poor

20:33

at and what the political system is being very

20:35

poor at is adjusting our

20:37

communal consumption. There's no doubt that

20:39

we will want to spend more on food care. We

20:41

probably, most of us, want to spend more on education.

20:44

We probably, most of us, want to spend

20:46

more on our incomes in retirement. But the

20:48

consequence of that is

20:49

we need to spend more together and

20:52

if we're going to go on doing all the things that we're doing at the moment

20:54

that means that taxes need to go on

20:56

going up. And that's why we have a

20:59

higher level of taxation now than we've heard

21:01

in the post-war period despite having a

21:03

government you think on the whole for the last 13

21:05

years would have been in favour of lower

21:07

rather than higher taxes. But

21:09

the truth is that the

21:10

expectation of

21:13

public consumption has meant

21:15

that those tax levels

21:17

have stayed up

21:18

and we need to have an honest debate about what

21:20

we're going to do over the next 20 years.

21:23

If we want to go on with the kinds of structures

21:25

we have at the moment,

21:27

paying people like you and me

21:29

a pension in retirement through the state,

21:32

paying our health care, paying for our children's

21:34

education, then we're going to need taxes to go up.

21:37

And if we don't want taxes to go up, we're going to have

21:39

to make some choices that

21:42

most people find very unpalatable.

21:44

We're not very honest about that. The political debate

21:46

here is very poor. Of

21:49

course, I buy all that. I mean, it's

21:51

kind of, it follows inexorably from

21:53

the data. But I

21:56

want to really call you

21:58

out a bit and call a spade a spade.

31:40

student

32:01

fees, which are currently 9,250

32:03

and in real terms need to go to 12 grand. Is that one

32:06

way? Would you extend it to

32:09

the principle to training so

32:12

all trainees can borrow and so you

32:14

make it demand led? Does

32:16

that mean that you get insufferable, intolerable

32:18

amounts of debt hung around

32:20

the shoulders

32:23

of our young people, burdening

32:26

them for kind of their early career?

32:28

What's the answer?

32:31

I don't know what the answer is except that I

32:33

know the wrong.

32:35

I genuinely think that

32:38

under almost any plausible set of

32:40

assumptions,

32:41

as an economy grows richer, the

32:44

rational thing and the thing people want to do is spend a large

32:46

proportion of the economy's total

32:49

output on education. We've

32:51

reduced it by a third in the

32:54

last quarter or

32:56

a quarter in the last 25, 25 years.

33:00

That seems to me that

33:02

we're failing

33:05

to put

33:07

into practice what I think almost

33:09

all individuals would feel,

33:11

which is the importance of looking

33:13

after the next generation.

33:16

So I think rather than it being a question

33:20

about details of policy on which I'm

33:23

simply not expert, I know that's something

33:25

maybe I'd like to get more experts on. There's

33:28

a bigger existential

33:31

question about how we

33:33

value that kind of communal

33:35

consumption and how we pay for

33:37

it. I don't think we've

33:38

been honest enough about it and it's

33:40

resumption that I think we're

33:42

splitting current generations

33:45

of little children

33:46

down. And this is almost the obverse

33:49

of the social care for the healthy

33:51

problem. It's hard to get people

33:53

to think about

33:55

the difficult challenges that some

33:57

older people face and that will

33:59

face. It's pretty easy to

34:01

get people

34:03

to look at and think about

34:05

primary schools. I cycled past on

34:08

hand-open primary schools on my way into work this

34:10

morning. And the

34:12

lifting of the spirit that we all experience

34:15

seeing little children and their parents

34:17

and their carers dropping them off and their teachers welcoming

34:20

them. And that's so enchanting. And you

34:23

think,

34:23

well, given how enchanting it is and

34:26

how important and that sense of potential

34:28

and delight and let's

34:32

get it right. Absolutely. No,

34:34

I mean, completely right. I mean, we

34:37

have amongst the shortest five-year-olds

34:39

in Europe because of nutritional problems.

34:43

And then

34:44

we just don't spend the money on bringing

34:48

them to give them the opportunity to

34:50

flourish and to acquire

34:53

whatever the

34:56

gods have given them to

34:58

develop them so they can make their own

35:00

lives kind of great and also in the act make

35:02

our lives great because we all

35:04

benefit. And in particular, in the 21st

35:07

century economy, it's

35:10

obvious and it's a real must. Well,

35:13

look, on that note, we should end. It's been a remarkable 45

35:17

minutes talking to a leading social scientist like you, hearing

35:21

you describe your internship

35:24

in 1980, the

35:27

magic of growing data, life

35:31

expectancy, growing

35:34

numbers of the gender balance at university

35:36

changing, your view that

35:38

we should think about public spending

35:41

as actually consuming,

35:46

collective consuming, collective provision

35:48

of things that we cumulatively want

35:50

to have, your notion of risk

35:53

pooling which underpins your reports

35:55

on social care and that final

35:58

kind of wonderful.