1) It is easier to point to progress if – ignoring how wellbeing is understood in traditional societies – you take as your benchmarks conditions which have existed for large proportions of industrialised populations through earlier incarnations of post-enlightenment society.

2) There are substantive crises arising from human behaviours, which should not be down played.

3) Alan, “hope” is one thing; “optimism” another: David Orr has some interesting things to say about this distinction:

http://www.treehugger.com/treehugger-radio/the-th-interview-david-orr-part-three-where-hope-and-optimism-split.html

I am, though, sympathetic to the need for a more appreciative critique of our circumstances and particularly a dilution of the adversarial politics enacted at Westminster. All the same, I believe there remains a role for grass roots agitation. Neither the present nor the future are rosy for many, and there remains a legitimate role for those without formally mandated power, to highlight injustice and to focus on fighting and righting wrongs.

At the start of the essay I outline the different ways in which a ‘crisis’ was named by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair and say that – as was the case at the time I was writing – British politics is characterized by a conflict over naming and defining a crisis. Your Rowntree survey provided examples of the ways in which people might define crises as social in nature and I mention it alongside alternative claims about economic and political crises. I then go on to outline how the Tories at that time were defining a crisis in society and show how sections of the Left appeared to be doing something similar but actually were doing something importantly different.

I stand by this sort of analysis.

For instance, to understand UKIP I think you have to see that what it does is say to people ‘here are some things you feel worried or anxious about…well, actually these are all part of one big problem, so big that it is a crisis – it’s a crisis in how we are governed…by distant and detached figures in Westminster and Brussels…if we get rid of them everything can be OK again’.

My analysis does not say whether or not the proposed crisis is real or significant. It only identifies the ways in which political movements are ideologically and rhetorically organized – because they can be quite successful when the crisis is non-existent or when they bundle up distinct problems and treat them as all symptoms of something larger or deeper. My ‘cast iron assumption’ (although, of course, it is rather stronger than an ‘assumption’ is that this is an established feature of contemporary politics. It might be a feature of all politics, or it might be a characteristic of ‘modernity’ or of ‘post-traditional’ societies – but that is something yet to be established.

I do suggest, in the conclusion to that essay, a problem which I think genuinely significant and which needs to be addressed: an accumulation of wealth and power in one part of society, and a consequent erosion of some of the institutions and dispositions which you here ascribe to Kantian enlightenment. I then suggest that this is a ‘crisis’ – one which is an outcome of a particular sort of ideological fantasy which “legitimated the self-interested accumulation of vast wealth and power by a very few people, who then expected the very same public realm they refused to support to make good on their inadequacy”. This is a long-winded way of talking about what you refer to as ‘possessive individualism’.

In short my argument is a little different to that which you summarise and it does in fact lead on to the question you indicate indirectly at the end of your post – is it possible for there to be a politics based on a proposition of hope and optimism rather than of crisis and decline?

Further, you can’t pay for outcomes, because genuine outcomes are the emergent properties of complex systems. Whenever you try to pre-determine an outcome, and then ‘make’ people achieve it (through whatever performance management system you choose) two things happen:

(1) the ‘outcome’ indicator that is being worked towards is different from impact in people’s lives (because genuine impact is too expensive and time consuming to meaure – so people choose proxy indicators that don’t equate to impact as its felt by those experiencing a service). So people end up working to change the indicator and not helping people with the actual issues they face (so, for example, they force people to get any job, whether that’s the right thing for them or not).

(2) ‘outcomes’ are too complex to be produced by any given intervention (or combination of interventions). So those who deliver services are being asked to be accountable for things that they can’t possibly be accountable for (e.g, you can’t get someone a job if there are no jobs to be had). This is why ‘gaming’ the system is inherent in PbR – because its the only way for managers of services to generate reliable income.

All this is well documented – whenever anyone tries to implement such a system, the same results happen. However, because people have viewed these as technical challenges to be fixed, people keep trying (wasting effort and lives in the meantime). We need to realise that such systems can’t be fixed – they’re conceptually flawed. Time for a different approach instead. People are begining to explore these different approaches. Check out:
http://www.saynotopbr.net

and a conference looking at the evidence around Outcomes-Based Performance Management (of which PbR is one example) and exploring alternatives – “Kittens are Evil” – 12th July in Powys, Wales:
http://www.systemsthinking.co.uk/docs/10%20July%20flyer%20LH.pdf