Although the mass protests in several cities around the world in 2019 erupted spontaneously, they were not bolts from the blue. Trust in either governments or markets to give people a fair chance in life has faded in many countries. Compounding this, a sense of togetherness amongst people has given way to one of "us versus them".

These tensions manifest themselves differently depending on where one looks. But they reflect underlying realities. Social mobility is stubbornly low in many countries, median income growth negligible for a decade or longer, younger people see fewer prospects of getting good jobs and owning a home, and inequalities have widened.

Globalisation and new technologies have contributed to these trends, but they are not at the core of the issue. The few countries that have avoided wage stagnation and the hollowing out of the middle class - Sweden and Singapore, for example - have actually been more exposed to these forces than most. What matters is policy response, and whether governments, businesses, unions, educational institutions and other social partners take responsibility to address these challenges.

The problem is that the loss of trust and solidarity is itself fragmenting politics and undermining democratic institutions' capacity to muster an effective response. That, in turn, is undermining the ability of nations to cooperate to secure global growth, avert crises and ensure a sustainable world.

There is no simple or single solution to break out of this loop. But it can only happen if we rebuild confidence in the broad centre of politics, which has been weakened or even vacated across many democracies. The new political centre has to be driven, most fundamentally, by bolder social ambition.

We need more committed and sustained investment in the social foundations of broad-based prosperity if we are to restore optimism in the future. These foundations are in disrepair in much of the advanced world, and still greatly underdeveloped in most developing countries. We must give people better chances early in life, and second and third chances later, so that no one's path is determined from where they start. And through our politics, and in our schools, neighbourhoods and employment, we must develop the sense of affinity among people of different social and ethnic backgrounds that is critical to reducing the appeal of the populist right.

It is much easier to promote relative social mobility when you have absolute mobility, where everyone is progressing. We must ensure this moving escalator continues. When the escalator slows or stops moving, those in the middle cannot be faulted for becoming more anxious - not just about those who are moving further ahead of them, but also about those who might catch up from behind. Reversing the prolonged trend of weak productivity growth and restoring economic dynamism is thus indispensable to raising social mobility.

But governing from the centre must also involve intervening upstream to redress the sources of inequality. We must close the gaps in maternal health and the first years of a child's life that lead to lifelong disadvantages. We must upskill workers and match them to new tasks while they are on the job, rather than wait for them to be displaced by new labour-saving technologies. And we must redress the problem of increasingly segregated neighbourhoods in many countries, which have created growing social distances between people. None of these is easy, but it is far more difficult to tackle the larger problems that otherwise gather downstream.

These tasks cannot be left to the market, which on its own tends to amplify initial disadvantages and advantages - through assortative mating, better-educated parents investing more time and resources in their kids, different peer influences shaping different aspirations as kids grow up, and top employers hiring people based on educational or social pedigree. It is hence facile to object to upstream interventions on grounds that they amount to "social engineering". The role of the state, and of all of us collectively, must be to mitigate the "social engineering" of the market, make opportunities less unequal, and prevent an underclass and other legacies from becoming too entrenched to solve in democratically acceptable ways.



An iceberg photographed in June in Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland, Canada. In his speech, Mr Tharman said the political centre must take responsibility for making the world a sustainable place, and "we cannot keep postponing the large-scale collective actions needed to arrest the climate crisis". PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE



The social contract of the new centre must also engender both collective solidarity and personal responsibility. We should get past the traditional narratives of both the right and the left. The right tends to attribute life's outcomes to whether people take responsibility for themselves. But there has been no surge in personal irresponsibility to explain the prolonged low productivity and wage growth, the loss of jobs in the middle, or widening regional disparities in so many countries.

It is much easier to promote relative social mobility when you have absolute mobility, where everyone is progressing. We must ensure this moving escalator continues. When the escalator slows or stops moving, those in the middle cannot be faulted for becoming more anxious - not just about those who are moving further ahead of them, but also about those who might catch up from behind.

Rather than viewing collective solidarity and personal responsibility as alternatives, we should look for ways in which they reinforce each other.

We cannot keep pushing the burden of unfunded healthcare and pension systems on to the next generation. The political centre must commit to reforms that are socially equitable not just today, but sustained into the future.

Likewise, the left's focus on redistribution as a response to inequality is based on too narrow a view of the role of the state, and of our collective responsibilities to one another. Its approach has lost appeal even within the major social democracies. The traditional left would surely otherwise have done much better than it has since the 2008 global financial crisis, considering the great difficulties imposed on ordinary working families.

Rather than viewing collective solidarity and personal responsibility as alternatives, we should look for ways in which they reinforce each other. The state and its social partners must both broaden opportunities and provide the support that people often need to make the most of them, in order to earn their own success: in learning, jobs, owning a home, and indeed finding ways to contribute to the community themselves. This compact of personal and collective responsibility is what makes strategies for social upliftment succeed. Society never tires of supporting people who are making an effort to help themselves.

When designed well, progressive fiscal systems - using taxes and transfers that in combination give a fair deal to the poor and middle class - can support both growth and inclusivity. This progressive strategy is also critical in sustaining support for open, market-based democratic systems.

But the progressivity of the political centre must give much greater emphasis to strategies for social mobility, and on helping people, towns and regions to regenerate themselves when jobs and whole industries are lost. There are lessons to be drawn from successful examples of how local networks of public, private and educational players have spurred regrowth. These strategies seek to empower people, and are fundamentally different from traditional redistributive schemes that "compensate the losers", which have done little to redress a sense of exclusion.

Part of this solution must also be to refocus attention on public goods. Fiscal policy in many countries has undergone a decades-long drift towards spending on short-term over long-term objectives, and on individuals over the social good. To be sure, subsidies for poor and middle-income individuals are essential to ensure fair access to education, healthcare and housing, as are policies to top up low wages, such as through negative income taxes. But investments in public goods - efficient public transport, quality public schools and hospitals, R&D, museums and parks, and renewable-energy infrastructure, and the like - are ultimately vital to the quality of life for ordinary citizens, and breed optimism in the future.

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Finally, the political centre must take responsibility for making the world a sustainable place, and marshalling the energies of the young to help us get there. We cannot keep postponing the large-scale collective actions needed to arrest the climate crisis and the already dangerous shifts in the world's ecological balance. To delay any further is to risk crippling consequences for future generations everywhere.

Likewise, we cannot keep pushing the burden of unfunded healthcare and pension systems on to the next generation. The political centre must commit to reforms that are socially equitable not just today, but sustained into the future. But it also requires developing in our democracies the collective capacity to recognise the costs and benefits of our choices. Some societies are developing this capacity, but many have seen a growing tendency to promise benefits without acknowledging the costs to be met either today or tomorrow.

We must hence rebuild confidence in the political centre around these basic orientations in the role of the state, and in our whole way of thinking about our future:

• Ensure a moving escalator, to enable all groups to progress even as they shift places;

• Intervene early, and more boldly, to tackle the gaps in opportunities that create lifelong inequalities;

• Develop an ethos of both collective and personal responsibility, as the compact of values that is at the heart of lasting social upliftment, and ensures continued political support for progressive policies;

• Empower and help people and regions to regenerate themselves, not just compensate them for having lost out; this must include spending on public goods that create collective optimism;

• Take responsibility today to ensure a sustainable future, rather than obfuscate, postpone action and impose much harsher burdens on our children and future generations.

Developing this consensus and reclaiming the centre will take leadership, a strong sense of moral purpose, and some agility in today's fragmented political landscapes. Elements of these are present to varying degrees in today's world. But the longer it takes to rebuild the political centre, the more lasting the damage to both the quality of democracies and the multilateral order, and the more difficult it will be to restore them.

• An earlier version of this article was published in Project Syndicate. It was adapted from Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for Social Policies Tharman Shanmugaratnam's keynote speech at the 10th anniversary conference of the Institute for Government in the UK.