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SAM LEITH SUSIE ORBACH ROWAN MOORE AC gRAyLINg DAVID WILLETTS

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basic idea is simple: people join together in groups with particular patterns of ties, and these patterns then have important effects on the way they behave.

the shape of these networks has sur-prising effects. take an unlikely example: Broadway musicals. Brian Uzzi is a sociolo-gist at northwestern University in chi-cago. he is also a big music hall fan. From Cats to Spamalot, musicals have been big business for decades, but investors have to guess which shows will be a hit. Bye Bye Birdie, a profitable 1960 production star-ring Dick van Dyke, ran for 607 nights. Bring Back Birdie, its 1981 sequel, was a flop and closed after just four.

Intrigued, Uzzi used network science to find out why. he put together a data set of the 321 musicals that launched on Broad-way between 1945 and 1989, paying partic-ular attention to whether the top team of producers, director, choreographers and writers had worked together before. after crunching the statistics, he discovered something remarkable. teams who had never worked together, perhaps unsurpris-ingly, fared poorly: their “weak” networks meant a lack of creative vision, and lots of duds. and at the other extreme, teams that had worked together successfully also tended to produce flops. sometimes, lack-ing outside creative input, the team just rehashed the same ideas that worked the last time; sometimes, lacking newcomers, they “developed” their vision in daft ways. either way, lightning rarely struck twice.

But, in between, Uzzi found a point of balance. Groups with exactly the right mix of new and old participants reliably pro-

duced hits. this variation in the “density” of the ties allowed easy communication and fostered greater creativity—new ideas from the outsiders meshed with the experi-ence of the insiders. It didn’t matter if a musical was about cats or rollerskating trains, or who starred in it. Its success came down to the structure of the network binding its team together. the same thing has been found to be true of scientific invention or business innovation.

Bring these two insights together—that information flowing along social networks can change behaviour, and that the shape of networks dramatically changes out-comes—and there are some intriguing implications for policy. take health. We know teenagers are more likely to smoke if their friends smoke. But network science shows that they are more likely to smoke if friends of their friends (whom they don’t know) smoke too. that said, the same can be true in reverse. here, governments could make budget savings. Let’s say the nhs has £100, and wants to get ten peo-ple to quit smoking. If it spends £10 on each, one at a time, perhaps one might stop. But imagine if it brought them together in a new network. spend £100 on this new group, and three might quit. or, spend £20 on the most connected person, or a person ideally located in a network with just the right density of ties to other people, and their decision to quit could influence many others. outcomes improve, for the same (or less) amount of money.

David cameron’s tories have already recognised part of this possibility, saying in their January 2010 “a healthier nation”

networks

let’s all be friendsOur social ties can influence us for better—and for worse Nicholas A Christakis & James Crabtree

If friends of your friends begin to put on weight, you are likely to do the same—even if you don’t know the people in question, and even if they live hundreds of miles away. obesity spreads like a fad; it is contagious.

this striking finding about how obesity spreads through social networks was the result of a 30-year study in massachus-setts, as nicholas a christakis and James h Fowler note in their new book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (harperpress). research shows that the same is true for smoking, and a range of other behaviours and attitudes like drink-ing, depression, charitable giving, sexual practices—even the decisions to marry, divorce, reproduce, or vote.

Why is this important? Because from healthcare to climate change, governments today face a range of problems where they must persuade people to change their behaviour. But instead of relying on their powers of persuasion, politicians should consider taking a class in “network sci-ence.” true, many claims for the power of social networks are based on the hype sur-rounding websites like Facebook. But the

Spamalot: successful musicals need the right mix of new and old teammates

council tax and other local issues will also be strenuously resisted by local authori-ties, most of which are now conservative controlled, and which fear being burdened with policy or spending commitments they cannot afford. a weaker option would make such referendums advisory, meaning a successful petition would give supporters the right to have their proposals debated at a council meeting. But this isn’t exactly giving power to the people.

the risk of talking big but delivering small runs through all three of these notions. more worrying for the tories, all of them will alienate groups who should be their natural allies: conservative mps and councillors, judges and the police. this is bold, but perhaps not quite in the way cameron intended.Robert Hazell is director of the constitution unit at the school of social policy at UCL

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march 2010 · prospect · 27

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introduce more parents to each other? elsewhere, we know that prisoners who keep good social links to the outside world find it easier to rehabilitate. so helping them keep in touch with people outside should be a specific aim. even if some pris-oners do use Facebook to misbehave, or to influence others, the decision by the justice secretary Jack straw in February to ban some prisoners from using the site was probably a move in the wrong direction.

Why stop here? networked policies won’t solve the budget crisis, but they could help spark some new types of growth to help us out of recession. Business inno-vation is strongly influenced by the net-work structure of project teams and by communication between trading partners or scientists. policies could tap into this, just as they could try to set up new social norms for domestic energy conservation.

perhaps the most exciting prospect is ending social isolation. In 2009 Geoff mul-gan, head of the Young Foundation think tank, launched a report arguing that Brit-ain suffers from a quiet epidemic of loneli-ness. he noted that 500,000 British pen-sioners spend christmas alone. In the Us, researchers have asked people whom they like to spend free time with, or discuss per-sonal matters. It turns out that the average american has 4.3 such social contacts (including spouses, siblings and friends), but over 4 per cent of adults—or perhaps

as many as 10m people—report having not one such person. a comparable figure for Britain would suggest that more than 2m people are chronically alone.

other research shows that being friend-less, or even just being part of a poor net-work, can exact a shocking toll: a teenage girl whose friends do not get on with each other is more likely to contemplate killing herself than a second girl whose friends do like each other—regardless of how well she gets on with them, or who the friends are.

all of this suggests that new, network-infused policies can help governments unpick pressing problems on a tight bud-get. they might even help to bridge the divide between left and right. conserva-tives have traditionally concerned them-selves with individual freedoms, while social democrats have worried about the wellbeing of social groups. network sci-ence shows such a distinction to be at least overly simplistic. shine a light on how indi-viduals assemble into groups and you’ll also see how group membership affects individuals. taken together, this might not just improve policy and save money, but help our politicians to be more persua-sive—in the right sort of way. Nicholas A Christakis is a professor of medicine, health policy and sociology at Harvard University and co-author of “Connected” (HarperPress). James Crabtree is Prospect’s managing editor

green paper that “social norms are much more important than policymakers have traditionally assumed,” and announcing plans to try to create new, better norms (which, by definition, spread by social net-works). It’s a start, but other areas also seem ripe for a “network policy” approach.

If you can make musicals profitable by properly configuring the makeup of the team at the top, why would the same not work for those who run schools, hospitals, even a government department? and if you can target anti-smoking measures to take account of people’s ability to influ-ence others, there is no obvious reason why the same network-centric techniques could not be used to cut problem drinking, tackle obesity, or foster workplace safety.

more generally, if creating the right type of social networks helps people get on in life, shouldn’t the state seek to help peo-ple build such links? experts in “social capital” theory have pushed this for years, to little practical effect. But they do have a point: governments should try to build new social systems that support social ties, and design policies to take them into account.

how might this work? Families with young children, if they had better social links, could save money on childcare by relying on friends, or band together to hold schools to account, or even set up their own. Why then should schools, or sure start early years centres, not try to

everyday philosophy

what’s so special about god?By Nigel Warburton

Everyone is equal before the law—almost. Britain’s first asian judge mota singh suggested in

February that it could be discrimination to prevent young sikhs wearing their ceremonial kirpans to school, despite a general ban on carrying daggers. the pope, limbering up for a tussle with liberalism when he visits Britain in september, exhorted catholic bishops to oppose “with missionary zeal” a tightening of equality laws that would have required religious organisations to stop discrimination against gay and transgender candidates for jobs.

enforced equality invariably curbs liberties. But are there any philosophical grounds for exceptions? Immanuel Kant believed that one must scrutinise the principles governing one’s

actions as though they were universal laws. and he’s surely right about this: “What if everyone did that?” is the key question. What if all children were allowed to carry ceremonial daggers? What if all employers were allowed to discriminate against gay candidates? some people will bite these bullets and say “no problem.” that, at least, will get the issues out in the open.

But is there something special about religion that grants it privilege to trump local law from time to time? søren Kierkegaard invoked the “teleological suspension of the ethical”—that is, ditching ethics and even legality for the sake of something higher. In special circumstances—on those occasions when God asks you to sacrifice your only son, for example (daggers again)—

it may be best to ignore conventional morality. But that’s a risky strategy. could the inner voice that booms with such conviction be a psychiatric symptom rather than divine instruction? that was abraham’s anguish.

perhaps because people think and feel so deeply about it, it is often assumed that there is something special about religion that should remain immune to worldly considerations. Yet religious affiliation guarantees nothing, as the parable of the predatory priests demonstrates. the moral: it’s probably best not to do religion when you’re doing law. and an early heads up for the pope: it’s probably best not to do law when you’re doing religion either. Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University