You don’t become a science superpower without taking care of the basics

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Moravec’s paradox, an observation much loved by technologists, suggests that robots do well what humans do badly and vice versa. So, for example, a computer can easily trounce the strongest human players at chess. But that same machine could not move the pieces on the board, a trivial task for a five-year-old child. 

A similar complementarity exists between the public and private sectors in a flourishing economy. Governments set national priorities, mobilise resources, build infrastructure and help nurture a well-educated, healthy and mobile population. Private companies provide entrepreneurial dynamism, investing in new market opportunities and technologies to boost the economy’s productivity. Purist economists may hate the horticultural analogy, but governments prepare the soil and compost, businesses give the seed and nutrients.

The trouble with Britain’s economy is that instead of cultivating beautiful flowers, the country is pushing up too many weeds. Rather than exhibiting complementary capabilities, the public and private sectors suffer from the same maladies: short-termism, managerial inertia, poor productivity and a reluctance to invest. For the past seven years, Brexit has imposed a massive additional distraction tax on both sectors. 

All that has fed the narrative of broken Britain, the impression that nothing really works anymore. The healthcare system fails to treat many patients speedily (almost 7.5mn remained on the NHS waiting list in May), the justice system does not deliver justice (consider the grotesque mistreatment of the wrongfully convicted Post Office sub-postmasters). Meanwhile, private sector water companies pump sewage into our rivers (only 14 per cent of England’s waterways have “good ecological status” according to a 2022 parliamentary report) while the City of London falls down on its core function of providing growth capital to new businesses.

The reasons for this malaise were explored last month at a refreshingly non-partisan conference run by Civic Future, a non-profit organisation founded last year to help train a new generation of leaders to improve public life. 

Ironically, one of the most optimistic takes on Britain was provided by the American economist Tyler Cowen, author of a book called The Great Stagnation that inspired the event. The UK, he suggested, was well placed to capitalise on three transformations that may be about to boost global productivity: the biomedical revolution, the diffusion of artificial intelligence and the energy transition. Only a few places in the world could take new research ideas in these areas and turn them into successful businesses, Cowen argued. With its world-class universities, rich human capital and venture capital expertise, “south-east England is one”, he said.

The cluster of brainpower in the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle — which includes the AI research company Google DeepMind, the Francis Crick biomedical research centre and four of the world’s top 10 universities — is impressive. And there have been a few great examples of the public and private sectors working well together in Britain: the expansion of the offshore wind turbine industry and the rapid development of the Oxford Covid vaccine, to name but two. 

But what was striking at the Civic Future event was the seething frustration felt by many of the British participants at the inability of successive governments to help realise this economic potential. Rather than indulging in overblown rhetoric about turning Britain into a science superpower, policymakers needed to focus on improving the performance of the core economy. That view has been echoed by a damning report this week from the think-tank Reform, which argues that for too long Britain has been papering over the cracks of an outdated social and economic model.

To believe that the British government and City investors share the strategic vision to build world-beating advanced industries in the way that the Taiwanese, South Korean and Singaporean governments have helped to do is to imagine an institutional capability that does not exist. That will require a more creative era of national renewal to ensure true complementarity between the public and private sectors.

Still, it should not be beyond the wits of a fag-end Conservative government to deliver on some smaller, but useful, ambitions to help fix broken Britain: to build more houses, extend the provision of more affordable child care and encourage greater business and public sector investment. Rather than doing the clever stuff poorly, it should at least strive to do the simple stuff well.

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