The book explores the dual nature of family life changes over the past 60 years, highlighting both the benefits of increased opportunities for women and the negative impacts such as family breakdown and mental health issues in children. Goodhart emphasizes the demographic challenges posed by falling birthrates and how these disproportionately affect the working poor. He advocates for a new policy approach that balances gender equality with the need for stable families and community support, making it essential reading for those concerned with contemporary social and political issues.
The acclaimed and urgent new book from the celebrated author of The Road to Somewhere 'Brilliant, will become a classic' Daily Telegraph 'Utterly compelling ... one of the most important intellectuals in the country, if not Europe' Sunday Times The coronavirus pandemic taught us something we ought already to have known: that care workers, supermarket shelf-stackers, delivery drivers and cleaners are doing essential work that keeps us all alive, fed and cared for. Until recently much of this work was regarded as menial by the the same society that now lauds them as 'key workers'. Why are they so undervalued? In this timely and original analysis, David Goodhart divides human aptitudes into three: Head (cognitive), Hand (manual and craft) and Heart (caring, emotional). It's common sense that a good society needs to recognise the value of all three, but in recent decades they have got badly out of kilter. Cognitive ability has become the gold standard of human esteem. The cognitive class now shapes society largely in its own interests, by prioritizing the knowledge economy, ever-expanding higher education and shaping the very idea of a successful life. To put it bluntly: smart people have become too powerful. Head, Hand, Heart tells the story of the cognitive takeover that has gathered pace over the past forty years. As recently as the 1970s most people left school without qualifications, but now 40 per cent of all jobs are graduate-only. A good society must re-imagine the meaning of skilled work, so that people who work with their hands and hearts are valued alongside workers who manipulate data. Our societies need to spread status more widely, and provide meaning and value for people who cannot, or do not want to, achieve in the classroom and the professions. This is the story of the central struggle for status and dignity in the twenty-first century
A robust and timely investigation into the political and moral fault-lines that divide Brexit Britain and Trump's America -- and how a new settlement may be achieved.Several decades of greater economic and cultural openness in the West have not benefited all our citizens. Among those who have been left behind, a populist politics of culture and identity has successfully challenged the traditional politics of Left and Right, creating a new between the mobile "achieved" identity of the people from Anywhere, and the marginalized, roots-based identity of the people from Somewhere. This schism accounts for the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, the decline of the center-left, and the rise of populism across Europe.David Goodhart's compelling investigation of the new global politics reveals how the Somewhere backlash is a democratic response to the dominance of Anywhere interests, in everything from mass higher education to mass immigration.
One of Britain's most influential centre-left thinkers examines UK immigration policy and argues that there have been unforeseen consequences which need urgently to be addressed.
