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Step into the minds of leading academics with UCL Press Play: a podcast and documentary series featuring groundbreaking voices and cutting edge ideas.
Join UCL academics as they uncover ground-breaking new ideas and fresh insights on diverse topics such as queer histories, neurodiversity, and climate justice.
Season 4: A Cup of Tea With… is your chance to share a tea break with inspiring academics from UCL (University College London). Join Professor Judy Stephenson, Professor of Economic History of the Built Environment, to learn how they got into their field and hear insights from their research. Plus, find out how they like their tea!
Website and transcripts: https://uclpress.co.uk/ucl-press-play/
Judy Stephenson: Hello. Welcome to A Cup of Tea. I'm Professor Judy Stephenson, and I'm going to bring ten questions to our academics about research, about what drives them and about what the challenges ahead are. A cup of tea is a global commodity. It's also a British tradition. Let's get started.
Judy Stephenson: Welcome to A Cup of Tea, where we are interested in how academic research can change the world for the better. I'm here with Professor Dame Henrietta Moore. You’re the founding director of the Centre for Global Prosperity. We've got ten questions which aim to understand more about you, your research and what's happening to the world of research generally. So, the first one is- it's a cup of tea, which is a global commodity and a British tradition. You have chosen.
Henrietta Moore: Something with lemon. Might. Might be okay. Might be okay.
Judy Stephenson: Any particular reason why that's your chosen tea tipple?
Henrietta Moore: I don't like milk.
Judy Stephenson: Good reason. Good reason.
Henrietta Moore: Ruins a cup of tea.
Judy Stephenson: It's always polarizing, isn't it? So the first question about research for you, then, is, if you had 1 million pounds to personally spend on a research project, what would it be? How would you spend it?
Henrietta Moore: Well, if I had 1 million pounds right now, one thing I think I might be doing is choosing one particular part of the UK and getting together these big transdisciplinary teams that I work with, and working out why it's impossible for the government to get all the relevant bits moving at the same time in the right direction, to improve the quality of people's lives. It's actually not that difficult, but it does require a lot of coordination. And that's the thing the government's not very good at.
Judy Stephenson: So when you're talking about coordination and coordination of what bits?
Henrietta Moore: If you can imagine the kind of thing that governments normally do with traffic, this gives you a good idea of why they struggle with the economy. So they decide that they're going to introduce a new traffic neighbourhood. So they introduce a low traffic neighbourhood and then the traffic moves somewhere else. So that causes another problem. So then they try to fix that problem. And then that causes a traffic jam on the local roundabout. So then they try to fix roundabouts. And what they find is that on top of that they either run out of money or they've been voted out of office, and everyone is still stuck in the traffic jam. So that's a bit like how the economy runs. So if you wanted, for example, to have distributed new green energy systems, then you would need to have a workforce who could support those distributed green energy systems. So you would need to train them to do it, instead of which you say to people, we're going to have green distributed energy systems. We're going to bring in this wonderful high tech from outside the region with lots of outside workers, and they're going to create these new energy systems, at which point everybody inside the area who's already living there says, well, we don't have a job, so we don't like green energy and we don't want clean energy.
Judy Stephenson: So this is the kind of problem that goes on all the time?
Henrietta Moore: Yeah. Actually we have in the United Kingdom large numbers of people of working age who are not working and not seeking any work. Most of those people are classified in one way or another as unable to work, and so in that situation, if you're going to create lots and lots of new jobs, you need to do something about people's health. And if you can do something about their mental health, you have to do something about the structures that are sustaining them. So as you can see, there are a lot of moving parts. And most of the time it gets absolutely impossible for the structures in government to deliver on these kinds of things. So an alternative way of doing it is you actually get to the local area itself, and say, okay, so you know, you're all living here. What needs to be done? Which is what we often do in the institute. So we very, very rarely come with a blueprint or an idea from outside. We always start with what's going on at the local level. So as somebody with a background in economics, all that literature on the fundamental problems of coordination, we can kind of- you're saying don't get too bound into that. Concentrate on what's happening on the ground and look for the answers there. And that's where the money would go. To understand the economists, what we would say is don't worry about macroeconomics, although that's important. And they need to be taught right. And don't trouble the bank with micro economics and household stuff too much. Fiddle around in the area that I'm at- the bit in between the middle, the bit where the micro economics meets the macroeconomics, the bit the people actually have to live in their everyday lives. The way we all live in the messy middle. And we have to remember that in the UK today, 1 in 5 adults lives in poverty, 1 in 3 children lives in poverty. That's- that's 30% of all the children of the UK in the 21st century. That's- that's a scandalous number of young people. That’s the kind of thing that motivates me.
Judy Stephenson: So on this project, this million pound project, do you have a particular hypothesis about one thing that could make a difference?
Henrietta Moore: I’m particularly thinking about transport. If you look at the UK overall, we are one of the most unequal countries in the developed world. And so the disparities regionally are very, very large. And those disparities we have tried to tackle over the decades. Since at least the 1970s, we spent a lot of money on the so-called left behind areas of the United Kingdom and the result is that we've moved the dial relatively little. And that's because there are structural problems which are common to all these areas. And then they're very specific local problems. So government policies are all about, you know, grace and strength. It's just about what kind of industries can we get into those areas, even if you've gone into those areas and did all those things, you probably wouldn't be moving the dial as much as you should. And one of the things that economics recognises very well, in fact, if you talk to almost any economist, you choose to do this question- why is productivity so dismal in the UK? You'll come up with lots and lots of structural features. But one of the things you need to mention to me and then when you run out of things to say, is you're going to say, well, there is this problem with something called culture. And so you have to understand how things are actually working in the local area. And if you want to make them work well, you need to work with organisations what are the major blocks and start with those, because as soon as you release those, you get a set of cascading benefits.
Judy Stephenson: So this is great practical local stuff. So you're in this field of prosperity studies global prosperity. Tell us about how you got into the field.
Henrietta Moore: Well, I got into the field because I was sitting in the William Woods chair at Cambridge doing Anthropology. And I suddenly thought, really, I should be doing something a little bit different because I'd already, you know, written a lot of books, and I really taught a lot of people anthropology. And I'd already given lots of advice about anthropology. And I thought, actually the quality of people's lives around the world, given that we're entering the 21st century, is not really going in the right direction. And UCL, being very forward looking, asked me if I'd like to come and do something about that at UCL. So I said yes, so that was the origins of the Institute.
Judy Stephenson: What's the most common misconception about interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work in that field that you would like to dispel if you could?
Henrietta Moore: Well, I think the most common misunderstanding, in a way, is that all you need to do is get a lot of other people together, and then the answer will be solved. And actually, it's not like that at all, because the first problem is they will think they're working on a different problem. So the first thing you have to do is to get the team to come together to work out what it is that they can really do with each other. And that's the way that certain kinds of thinking sparks other kinds of thinking. So you're passing the baton backwards and forwards, and that's what really that's what really works. And once you get it working, people are very excited about it because it's enormously productive, because it turns out that when you get large numbers of people together, you get different ideas in the room, and when you get different ideas in the room, you get different perspectives. And when you know different perspectives, you have different solutions.
Judy Stephenson: This is so exciting. I love the idea of getting people to work together, interdisciplinarily. But maybe you can tell me about how that's working on something you're working on at the moment. What's your- what's a current project and how have you got involved and what are the sort of barriers to making it happen?
Henrietta Moore: And so the first thing to say is that, you know, you can't just sit in London. We have large numbers of intellectual collaborations. And so we have a basic library. We have a base in Beirut. So we run out of the Middle East. We run into that. And those collaborations are responsible for delivering on certain kinds of areas. So the team in the Middle East focuses on what is prosperity in the age of mass displacement. And in Africa, those teams work primarily on what is happening with environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and food security. You can work on inequality at the state. So that doesn't mean that the problems that you got here- those areas are not going on everywhere. What- what it means is that you don't have all the theoretical work done from London. It doesn’t just go out to other parts of the world as a social development project. It doesn't work like that. You need to have people who are coming together specifically with different ideas and different solutions, because I'm passionately committed to the idea that many of the solutions we have to solve all contemporary problems will come from the global South. And that's because they're on the sharp end of all kinds of challenges, and because they are not already embedded in a series of structures or frameworks which they find impossible to shift.
Judy Stephenson: So the next question I’m- I'm dying to hear what this is, bearing in mind the breadth of what we've just heard, which is- What's the scariest thing you've ever had to do as a researcher?
Henrietta Moore: Oh, well, that probably goes back to something way, way back in the early years of my research, I would be driving up a very, very steep and wildly unmade road late at night with someone seriously injured in the night, a long way from from the medical centre- that's probably the scariest thing springs to mind.
Judy Stephenson: And you can't see it because it's so steep, and it's dark- that's, that's out in the field.
Henrietta Moore: So that is the first kind of scary. But then you build about the scary things that you can do. I mean, it's quite scary being in these very complex situations when you research- could potentially do a lot of harm. You have to be very careful what you're doing. And you know, you have to work very, very closely with very experienced academics. And you can only do it if you're all working together as a team and you take it very seriously, what you're trying to do. There's a responsibility. All the teams in the Institute have what we call citizen scientists working on the teams. So these people, we train the local residents to be part of the science teams. And those people are working alongside the main science teams. So one of the things that I think UCL has done, which is most impressive, is that because of the work that we were doing, UCL agreed to set up the UCL Citizen Science Academy. So we now train these people, but much more importantly, the university accredits them. So I have accredited citizen scientists, many of whom have not finished school. Many of whom have not even been to school, who are working in Lebanon and in Africa on these projects. And of course, we have many, many, many in the UK and in London and so on. I want to get to know everybody.
Judy Stephenson: Definition of research impact. That's it. Okay. This is wonderful. Thank you. Is there a researcher or an author in your field or in another who you find inspiring and who you'll often go and read?
Henrietta Moore: Well, yes. It's a sort of- there's a huge, huge number of those. I mean, it would be very difficult to. Is there a favorite to say? But I mean, I think the important thing is about how you learn to think, which is something you need to do when you’re a very junior academic, and which you don't learn. Actually, I have to say, when I'm taking an undergraduate degree, I know, and not even if I take a master's degree, because thinking is about how you proceed. So a lot of people think that what you have to do with research is you have your theory, and then you got- we collect your data and then you decide how does it work? The really good research is I'm thinking of the woman who was the William Morris chair before me. And what you notice with people who are very, very able in their field is that it's not so much they're asking themselves, how does the theory work with the data that I've collected? They're asking themselves, what are the pre-theoretical assumptions in the theory that I'm using, which may or may not stand the test of time? Where's the paradigm and where you know which bits of it are beginning to frame. And how being attached to those things prevents you from being innovative. And it also prevents you from hearing other academics in other disciplines because you can't see it from that point of view.
Judy Stephenson: Right.
Henrietta Moore: So there's a little bit of serendipity in these things. When you work with someone who's gifted has managed to momentum for many decades, so you see her making that move, you making the leaps. Okay, you realize when she's got to a certain point in the argument and then she suddenly says, but of course, that isn't the way she looked at it, the way she looked at it this way. And then so- and that's how you then think that thinking is a really made up of a lot of different kinds of things. For anyone starting a PhD, I hope they can please look at this.
Judy Stephenson: No, it's- it's vital. There's so much in what you're doing. But if we were to ask you, what are the three significant problems? Just three that your research can make a positive contribution to in terms of making the world better? You have to choose three. And let's just say which we face in the UK at the moment. Let's go with them.
Henrietta Moore: I would say housing. We just do not have adequate housing. The housing is a walking disaster just because most of our houses are not even remotely futureproof. So imagine the mess we're in now. Imagine the mess we're going to be in 30 years time when we haven't done any more investment than people already did. So yeah. The other thing that's a problem is that we are just walking into a storm around food because we are not dealing with some of the challenges here. So we're a small island. There's a big pressure for carbon net zero, which I approve of, but a lot of that is being done through things like rewilding, taking land out of production and so on. So we've got a crisis in farm farmer livelihoods. We've got lots of people who are living in food deserts in the cities, so they're eating terrible stuff. We're allowing our supermarkets to dominate the price- I mean, that is such a terrible mess, the food system. And of course, we will always have to bring in food. And then I think the other one is we need a new kind of social contract for the younger generation, because at the moment the younger generation, really struggling with a lot of disadvantages, but also there's a lot of populist feeling of unnecessary divisions between the generations around the fact that somehow the other generation has eaten everything and left nothing for them on the table. That isn't actually, strictly speaking, true. And so it means that needs to be negotiated, but it will need to be negotiated through a rethink of how we are all working together to ensure that future housing, food, intergenerational equality.
Judy Stephenson: Okay. So is AI- is artificial intelligence going to steal your job or is it going to transform your job?
Henrietta Moore: Well, it depends what you mean by artificial intelligence. So again, we do quite a lot of work in the Institute on artificial intelligence for social purposes and we are all used to scaremongering around AI. So, you know, it's bad for children's brains. It’s, you know, posing kind of- problems in schools. It's causing the rise of populist nationalism. It's doing all kinds of things. Right. But the reality is that, ordinary language models are trained on what we've got out there. And so if you're really dealing with a problem that you haven't seen before, it's most unlikely to be very helpful with it, especially if it's a social problem because there's nothing out there. But what- most of us who use AI, because we all have to, because we have to know what we do. What I notice is that if you ask a very simple question from the research point of view, say, can you tell me about all the Gen Z protests that have taken place in Africa in the last five years?
Judy Stephenson: It’ll just provide the references.
Henrietta Moore: Right. So on the first run, you will get most of what you might have thought of. You'd spend 25 minutes on the internet and it does it in 5. Okay, so that looks good. If you say I don't really think you've got the you know the right answer here, what I want to do is X and ask another question, you might get a refinement, but you also might get a lie, and you also might get data. That's absolutely nothing to do with Africa, which is not a mistake that I would make if I was looking at it myself. So by this time I answered the question, it took four minutes and two minutes for the next one after that, and three minutes. So we're kind of heading up to ten, and I could probably do it myself in 22, but I wouldn't make any errors. So it depends on what you- what you want to do I think.
Judy Stephenson: Why does it lie?
Henrietta Moore: When you ask a question, the first thing that it will do if you don't like the answer, is it will expand its reach and start pulling in stuff that's not relevant.
Judy Stephenson: So then it becomes an exaggeration.
Henrietta Moore: Yeah. And then once it's an exaggeration, then you go down further. It will just keep producing stuff that you think will satisfy you. Basically it's not for me. So yes, of course it is going to transform all our lives. But I think at the moment the kind of debate that we're having about it is rather scaremongering. It's belligerence and it's not focusing on what we can do with it. It's focusing on what it's doing to us, which seems to me to be a very impoverished way of approaching it. If you're going to carry on thinking about AI as if it were a form of coal or oil extracted out of the system all the time. But that's a view of productivity. That's the, you know, the current paradigms of productivity about squeezing things from things. And this is very it's about extraction, which is why we spend a lot of time in the Institute talking about, you know, that, you know, what is prosperity for the 25th century, the new economic models of the 21st century, because everybody knows that. You know, once you've squeezed all the juice out of the lemon, there comes a point when there isn't any more juice in it.
Judy Stephenson: That leads on sort of to hopes and fears in my mind. So the question is, what's the kind of what's the shift that needs to happen, and then I'm going to ask you about what are your hopes and fears? What are your hopes for academic research, and what are your fears?
Henrietta Moore: Well, the issue is that productivity growth in the last, say, 15 years in the United Kingdom has been about half in the United States. Now, I don't think we've had huge productivity growth, as is also in France, Germany, which is concerning because they're our neighbors in the right next door. So if our productivity growth had been that of France and Germany in the last 15 years, people will be significantly better off 25%. Significant? Yes. Then they can't pay off now. Why not? And the answer is because we've not invested, we've not invested in our infrastructure. We've not invested in our technology, we've not invested in our people. If you look at a third of your children, a poor, what do you think they're going to do at school? So one of the things I think that- os that we need to make sure that our universities are focusing on the issues that we're actually all facing and not allow those issues to be politicised. And this kind of constant politicization of things, which we need to have a shared assets between us is very poor politics, because it's very short term. It's not futureproof because it leads us to fund the wrong sort of research, the wrong sort of questions on. You need to be very careful with research, because research does not function well in these kinds of environments. We have to remember what universities are for.
Judy Stephenson: You've helped us understand that.
Henrietta Moore: Thank you very much indeed.
Judy Stephenson: I hope you enjoyed a cup of tea. I very much, thank you very much indeed for talking to us.