Steve Hilton - More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First

Copyright 2016 by Steve Hilton

First published in the UK in 2015 by WH Allen.

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hilton, Steve, author. | Bade, Scott, author. | Bade, Jason, author.

Title: More human: designing a world where people come first / Steve Hilton with Scott Bade and Jason Bade.

Description: New York: PublicAffairs, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016002227 (print)

LCCN 2016004482 (ebook)

ISBN 9781610396530 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Human behavior. | Practical reason. | Choice (Psychology) | Political planning. | Social policy. | Social change. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Government & Business. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / General. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economic Conditions.

Classification: LCC BF199 .H55 2016 (print) | LCC BF199 (ebook) | DDC 320.6dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002227

Editorial production by Christine Marra, Marrathon Production Services.

www.marrathon.net

BOOK DESIGN BY JANE RAESE

Set in 10-point Utopia

FIRST EDITION

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

TO ROHAN

Roop!

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

ON JUNE 9, 2014, Jennifer Devereaux boarded a JetBlue flight from New York to Boston. She was traveling with her two young daughters. Everything seemed normal: the passengers found their seats, the announcements were made, the plane left the gate and moved toward the runway for takeoff. But then it all started to go wrong. The captain announced that there had been a delay and the aircraft would have to wait on the tarmac for around forty-five minutes. Jennifers three-year-old daughter announced that she needed to use the bathroom. Because they were just waiting around on the tarmac, Jennifer thought it would be fine to get up and take her daughter to the toiletthey were sitting just a few rows away.

Big mistake. As soon as she started getting up, a JetBlue cabin crew member zoomed up and yelled, with that special kind of rudeness we all know and love: Maam, youre going to have to sit down.

But Im just taking my little girl to the restroom.

You need to sit down right now. The captain has the seatbelt sign switched on.

Please, can you let us go? Shes a three-year-old and she cant wait.

Maam, Im ordering you to sit down and fasten your seatbelts. You need to comply with my instruction.

That was just the start.

After another half-hour or so, the poor little girl couldnt hold it any longer and wet herself in her seat. Jennifer, upset and wanting to do anything to reduce her daughters discomfort, called a crew member and asked whether she could have something to mop up the messa cloth, some napkins, anything. The flight attendant walked offand didnt come back. After a few minutes of waiting, Jennifer couldnt bear it any longer. She remembered she had a sweater in the overhead bin and thought she could use that to dry her daughters seat a little. So she stood up to open the bin andyou guessed ita crew member raced down the aisle and screamed at her to sit down. Jennifer explained that because no one from JetBlue had brought her anything, she was just trying to get her sweater so she could mop things up and surely, as they werent even moving, it would be okay to

It doesnt matter what it isthe seatbelt sign is on, and you have to sit down right now!

In disbeliefremember the plane was just sitting on the tarmacJennifer kept going, reaching for her sweater.

Thats enough, maam. Sit down now!

Defeated, Jennifer did as she was told. You can imagine how she felt. And worse, how her poor little girl felt.

Then the captains voice came over the intercom.

Ladies and gentlemen, Im afraid that we have a noncompliant passenger on board and are going to have to return to the gate to remove them from the aircraft.

That noncompliant passenger was Jennifer, trying to look after her three-year-old daughter who needed to use the bathroom.

Rude, aggressive, lacking in compassioneven though, thanks to the last-minute intervention of an off-duty pilot seated nearby, the flight crew finally relented and allowed Jennifer and her daughters to remain on board, JetBlues behavior toward that family was inhuman. Talking about it after the event, Jennifer said, Why cant we just treat each other with kindness and decency, like human beings?

ITS A GOOD QUESTION and one this book will try to answer. You could look at that story and say, Well, thats just the way some of these airline employees behave. You see that kind of thing all over the place with officious bureaucratic-minded people. Thats just life.

But its not just life. Being inhuman is not the natural order of things. People dont instinctively behave that way: theyre made to by the circumstances theyre in and the structure of the world around them. And being inhuman is not just about bad behaviorits actually a big part of our deepest problems. Economic problems: our efforts to end poverty, to deal with rising inequality, to make sure everyone has the chance to get a decent, well-paying job. Social problems: how our children grow up and are educated, how we organize the places we live and the health care we receive. Political problems too: the way were governed and the way we make policy. We have designed and built a world that is inhuman. Government, business, the lives we lead, the food we eat, the way our children are raised, the way we relate to the natural world around us... its all become too big and distant and impersonal. Inhuman.

In governments the world over, political leaders who mean well (and who are, if anything, underappreciated for the good they do) preside, frustrated and impotent, over vast bureaucratic systems that routinely disappoint and leave citizens enraged that they cant control what affects their lives. The schools we send our children to, the hospitals that care for us when were sick, the very food we eatweve allowed these intimate things, that matter so much, to be provided by anonymous, distant, industrialized machines. Business, such an awesome vehicle for human ingenuity and interaction, has become dominated by a detached and unaccountable global elite who think that the solution to the social and environmental problems they cause is to fly to Davos and pontificate on panels and in plenaries. Technology, with its incredible power to liberate and educate, has become unhealthily fetishized as an end in itself, while those who dare to question its remorseless rise are dismissed as mador, worse still, old fashioned. Nature? Who cares, lets conquer another planet.