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More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First
More Designing a World Where People Come First [Hardcover] Hilton, Steve; Bade, Jason and Bade, Scott
384 pages, Hardcover
First published May 21, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
November 11, 2016
I did not much like Kirsten Dunst in Spiderman. Too plain, too girl-next-door, too whiny.
Completely different story as Marie Antoinette, though. I mean OH MY GOD was she perfect in that role. Haughty, sultry, manipulative, vaguely Germanic. Is there any German in her? Probably.
Still, she’s got nothing on Steve Hilton.
He’s probably a re-incarnation. And he knows it, of course. Like when he proclaims that “those who want to see food produced through more human, less barbaric means are often dismissed as out of touch. You know: ‘let them eat seasonal, organic, locally sourced, fair-trade cake’”
And so it is that the author himself sums up the whole book on page 120…
You don’t believe me, be my guest and go read it; however be warned that
1. The tone is that of a rant, a whiny (that word, again) ”luddite’s manifesto”
2. Half the stuff that bothers him is on the mend
3. The other half really does not matter
4. The “more human” theme was added on top; it truly isn’t a common thread
So he worries about food quality, but the truth is Kellogg’s breakfast cereal is stuck on the shelves these days, along with fizzy drinks. Young people, poor young people, are eating better than ever before. The tide has turned.
He worries about how wasteful we are with energy, but Western European per capita energy consumption peaked in 1974, Japanese in 1990, South Korean in 1998 and US, finally, in 2008. The tide has turned.
He worries about the rich entrenching their children’s privilege through a donation-fuelled and tutor-enhanced attendance of the top universities, while from the other side of his mouth heralding the advent of continuous lifetime education through MOOCs like Udacity. The tide has turned.
He seems to have missed the fact that the Labor government (no friends of mine, but credit where credit is due) made it feasible for me to take two weeks’ paternity leave when each of my kids was born. The tide has turned.
And then there’s the stuff that’s really not that big a deal.
Yes, farming should be improved. The antibiotics thing really isn’t on. But good luck feeding 7 billion people on organically grown food, Mr Hilton. And in a world where 30% of kids born in India are stunted in their growth, let’s put the food on the table before we start getting too difficult. And in a world where there’s human organ harvesting in China (to say nothing of the roughly 10,000 executions per annum) it’s just a little bit too precious to worry about the suffering of chickens.
It’s not all bad. This was a book that singularly failed to entertain me, but at least it did have some good ideas (that’s what Steve Hilton is famous for) and it did make me think. To wit:
• There’s plenty to be said for “devolution,” which he advocates in the first chapter on Government
• He makes a strong case for a “living wage”
• His idea that we need to address families rather than their itemized problems has got to be right
• The idea that if you work for an institution that is backed by the government your salary should be capped at the same level as a government salary has a lot of merit (though the rest of the banking rant was quite possibly the worst in the book in terms of stridency per subject knowledge)
And there’s also some left-field stuff. Like making a law against our kids having mobile devices. Aha. And how exactly do we go enforcing that law? Suppose a cop catches my daughter with an iPhone. What next? A night at her Majesty’s?
I was trying to decide if this was a one star or a two star book. Then I got to the postscript which is entitled “A First Step” where Steve Hilton very eloquently makes the case that if you have strong feelings about stuff, like he clearly does, you need to stop what you’re doing and run for office.
And that made me realize that I can sit here and criticize him, but at least he had the whatever it takes to get involved in politics and try to change something, while I’m just sitting here lobbing criticism at his ideas, secure in my fat banking job. So three stars from me, then.
------------------------------------------------------
HOT OFF THE PRESS: In yesterday's budget (July 8, 2015), George Osborne has introduced a "living wage." As Janan Ganesh says in today's FT "the chancellor made the announcement twice to savour the reaction on the opposing benches, which blended rage at his plagiarism, shock at his daring and the gutwrenching realisation that here was a policy they could not possilby oppose." George Osborne may not have been plagiarising from Labour, though, as readers of this book know very well. So "bravo" to Steve Hilton.
Completely different story as Marie Antoinette, though. I mean OH MY GOD was she perfect in that role. Haughty, sultry, manipulative, vaguely Germanic. Is there any German in her? Probably.
Still, she’s got nothing on Steve Hilton.
He’s probably a re-incarnation. And he knows it, of course. Like when he proclaims that “those who want to see food produced through more human, less barbaric means are often dismissed as out of touch. You know: ‘let them eat seasonal, organic, locally sourced, fair-trade cake’”
And so it is that the author himself sums up the whole book on page 120…
You don’t believe me, be my guest and go read it; however be warned that
1. The tone is that of a rant, a whiny (that word, again) ”luddite’s manifesto”
2. Half the stuff that bothers him is on the mend
3. The other half really does not matter
4. The “more human” theme was added on top; it truly isn’t a common thread
So he worries about food quality, but the truth is Kellogg’s breakfast cereal is stuck on the shelves these days, along with fizzy drinks. Young people, poor young people, are eating better than ever before. The tide has turned.
He worries about how wasteful we are with energy, but Western European per capita energy consumption peaked in 1974, Japanese in 1990, South Korean in 1998 and US, finally, in 2008. The tide has turned.
He worries about the rich entrenching their children’s privilege through a donation-fuelled and tutor-enhanced attendance of the top universities, while from the other side of his mouth heralding the advent of continuous lifetime education through MOOCs like Udacity. The tide has turned.
He seems to have missed the fact that the Labor government (no friends of mine, but credit where credit is due) made it feasible for me to take two weeks’ paternity leave when each of my kids was born. The tide has turned.
And then there’s the stuff that’s really not that big a deal.
Yes, farming should be improved. The antibiotics thing really isn’t on. But good luck feeding 7 billion people on organically grown food, Mr Hilton. And in a world where 30% of kids born in India are stunted in their growth, let’s put the food on the table before we start getting too difficult. And in a world where there’s human organ harvesting in China (to say nothing of the roughly 10,000 executions per annum) it’s just a little bit too precious to worry about the suffering of chickens.
It’s not all bad. This was a book that singularly failed to entertain me, but at least it did have some good ideas (that’s what Steve Hilton is famous for) and it did make me think. To wit:
• There’s plenty to be said for “devolution,” which he advocates in the first chapter on Government
• He makes a strong case for a “living wage”
• His idea that we need to address families rather than their itemized problems has got to be right
• The idea that if you work for an institution that is backed by the government your salary should be capped at the same level as a government salary has a lot of merit (though the rest of the banking rant was quite possibly the worst in the book in terms of stridency per subject knowledge)
And there’s also some left-field stuff. Like making a law against our kids having mobile devices. Aha. And how exactly do we go enforcing that law? Suppose a cop catches my daughter with an iPhone. What next? A night at her Majesty’s?
I was trying to decide if this was a one star or a two star book. Then I got to the postscript which is entitled “A First Step” where Steve Hilton very eloquently makes the case that if you have strong feelings about stuff, like he clearly does, you need to stop what you’re doing and run for office.
And that made me realize that I can sit here and criticize him, but at least he had the whatever it takes to get involved in politics and try to change something, while I’m just sitting here lobbing criticism at his ideas, secure in my fat banking job. So three stars from me, then.
------------------------------------------------------
HOT OFF THE PRESS: In yesterday's budget (July 8, 2015), George Osborne has introduced a "living wage." As Janan Ganesh says in today's FT "the chancellor made the announcement twice to savour the reaction on the opposing benches, which blended rage at his plagiarism, shock at his daring and the gutwrenching realisation that here was a policy they could not possilby oppose." George Osborne may not have been plagiarising from Labour, though, as readers of this book know very well. So "bravo" to Steve Hilton.
August 20, 2015
There is much in this book that rings true. The basic premise is that the advances of the previous couple of centuries - democratic government, the welfare state, global companies - have spawned their own degenerate. This is bureaucracy. The interactions of the individual with their community, in the form of governmental organisations, are characterised by rule bound relationships that have very little flexibility. This way of operating extends to commercial organisations. For example, it is maddening to try to order something from the breakfast menu in a restaurant just five minutes after the cut off time.
Why has this arisen? It is because we have come to place the process before the people being served. Those who serve the process take priority over those who are being served. The needs of the bank are placed before the needs of the customer. The role of the education system is to employ teachers rather than to educate children. Mr Hilton considers 10 aspects of modern life where the system has taken over so that the process of delivery matters more than the people to whom it is being delivered.
The argument is well made. The problem is identified. Unfortunately, the solution seems to elude the author. Apart from a general wish that people could be placed more centrally than processes, the book is a bit thin on what to do about it. We need not fret too much because people are actually taking control anyway.
One of the big surprises to Whitehall in recent years is the degree of alienation towards the centre of the country. Britain is very tightly governed from London and people are starting to react against this. The best example of this is the desire of 45% of the Scottish electorate to break free completely. The progress of the SNP in the referendum led to almost panic measures in Whitehall. In the end, promises were made to Scotland that Whitehall will be unable to keep under the existing system. We could expect Scottish independence to be revisited in the near future.
Another aspect of alienation is cultural rather than geographical. Whitehall currently is at a loss about why it is that perfectly sane and well educated Britons from the Muslim community would choose to revert to the Dark Ages by joining ISIS. I see this as a symptom of deep alienation that The Establishment struggles to understand. It is not difficult to construct a narrative where growing inequality, lack of opportunity, and lack of social mobility engenders this alienation. The inhumanity of the economic and political systems described in this book simply makes the manifestation of this alienation more extreme.
This is not a difficult book to read. However, as I read it I continually struggled with the question of culpability. The author was well placed in the Cabinet Office for a number of years. Why is it that he did so little when he was able to change the system against which he now writes? He does address this question, but I found his answer just a little superficial. Perhaps that is the problem. He was unable to do much because he simply lacked the constituency for change. This tends to support the view that profound change needs to be external because the system is incapable of change from within.
Why has this arisen? It is because we have come to place the process before the people being served. Those who serve the process take priority over those who are being served. The needs of the bank are placed before the needs of the customer. The role of the education system is to employ teachers rather than to educate children. Mr Hilton considers 10 aspects of modern life where the system has taken over so that the process of delivery matters more than the people to whom it is being delivered.
The argument is well made. The problem is identified. Unfortunately, the solution seems to elude the author. Apart from a general wish that people could be placed more centrally than processes, the book is a bit thin on what to do about it. We need not fret too much because people are actually taking control anyway.
One of the big surprises to Whitehall in recent years is the degree of alienation towards the centre of the country. Britain is very tightly governed from London and people are starting to react against this. The best example of this is the desire of 45% of the Scottish electorate to break free completely. The progress of the SNP in the referendum led to almost panic measures in Whitehall. In the end, promises were made to Scotland that Whitehall will be unable to keep under the existing system. We could expect Scottish independence to be revisited in the near future.
Another aspect of alienation is cultural rather than geographical. Whitehall currently is at a loss about why it is that perfectly sane and well educated Britons from the Muslim community would choose to revert to the Dark Ages by joining ISIS. I see this as a symptom of deep alienation that The Establishment struggles to understand. It is not difficult to construct a narrative where growing inequality, lack of opportunity, and lack of social mobility engenders this alienation. The inhumanity of the economic and political systems described in this book simply makes the manifestation of this alienation more extreme.
This is not a difficult book to read. However, as I read it I continually struggled with the question of culpability. The author was well placed in the Cabinet Office for a number of years. Why is it that he did so little when he was able to change the system against which he now writes? He does address this question, but I found his answer just a little superficial. Perhaps that is the problem. He was unable to do much because he simply lacked the constituency for change. This tends to support the view that profound change needs to be external because the system is incapable of change from within.
February 7, 2017
Documentary relic of the Cameron government. I'm in a book group, and this is the latest dreary non-fiction choice I've had to put up with. But unless you're an historian in the year 2117 writing a study of the collapse of the UK there's no reason to look at this, and it's only worth a paragraph of your thesis anyway.
July 12, 2016
Too ahead of its time. Like kimchi in the 70's or sushi in the 80's. Maybe in a couple of decades this will seem Orwellian? If not, we'll probably be at war or extinct.
March 6, 2020
Steve Hilton is a minor bureaucrat with major dreams. If this babble catches, who knows, maybe his career will rise as well.
August 13, 2015
I loved this book as it gave a completely new perspective on so many of the issues that we deal with on a regular basis.
Rather than looking at issues in a holistic way or from a distance, as we frequently do, it rather asks the question of how should decisions be made whilst recognising the impact on the individual.
Given the very broad nature of the topics covered (Health, Education, Food, Planning etc.) it's unsurprising that certain chapters won't interest everyone, but for those chapters that are of interest, I think this will be a book that I'll return to time and again.
However, there is the slightly disheartening factor that at the end Steve Hilton encourages us to be elected to effect the change. Having been elected I have the unfortunate knowledge that being elected is only the beginning of the struggle as the number of those elected who resist change and don't care for the human interaction with government are many and the forces of stasis and preservation in aspic are strong.
It's not just the system that's self involved and unwilling to change, the politicians are just as likely to be that way inclined. For that reason I gave the book a 4 star rating rather than a five star.
Rather than looking at issues in a holistic way or from a distance, as we frequently do, it rather asks the question of how should decisions be made whilst recognising the impact on the individual.
Given the very broad nature of the topics covered (Health, Education, Food, Planning etc.) it's unsurprising that certain chapters won't interest everyone, but for those chapters that are of interest, I think this will be a book that I'll return to time and again.
However, there is the slightly disheartening factor that at the end Steve Hilton encourages us to be elected to effect the change. Having been elected I have the unfortunate knowledge that being elected is only the beginning of the struggle as the number of those elected who resist change and don't care for the human interaction with government are many and the forces of stasis and preservation in aspic are strong.
It's not just the system that's self involved and unwilling to change, the politicians are just as likely to be that way inclined. For that reason I gave the book a 4 star rating rather than a five star.
September 4, 2016
Easy to read and thought provoking but a tad repetitive. The central idea of making society in general more about people as individuals rather than statistics is a good one but some of the proposed solutions are either too vague to have substance or just unrealistic. Agreed with maybe half of what Hilton was saying though and considering his previous relationship with the Conservatives that's pretty good!
April 26, 2019
The overarching idea of creating a "more human" world is appealing and ambitious. The author attempts to break the idea down into aspects of society such as education, space, nature. Overall, the book feels like a personal reflection journal, ie expect sections of ramblings and venting of the author's frustration towards politics, bureaucracy and society's apathy towards the issues he has raised.
July 11, 2015
Absolutely loved this book. It was eye opening for me! I was also fortune enough to meet Steve Hilton while I was reading the book, giving me an opportunity to discuss it with him! I can't recommend this book enough!
October 26, 2017
There's an episode of Father Ted in which Dougal has an idea. Pressed for more detail to flesh out his vision, he panics, complaining that he didn't realise that having one big idea would mean he had to have lots more little ones. More Human feels much like this: an interesting central tenet - that of considering human impacts when making policy - fails because of the little details.
Hilton himself seems to be aware that he has failings, but he is less than honest about what they are. In the introduction, he glosses the book's issues, claiming that because he is coming at the problem from neither left nor right, he is bound to upset people of both leanings with his proscriptions. That isn't strictly true: it's not that you look at an issue and say that it's too statist or too free-market, it's that so much of what he sees as a problem is based on a classic grab-bag of detached middle-class urban biases. So, for example, when he talks about food production, he goes on about the inhumane conditions of pig farms, something which a Londoner will happily believe as entirely true, but which someone who actually lives in the countryside will know to be a gross misrepresentation. And when he talks about business, he's perfectly happy to attack Tesco (always hated by the middle classes) but bends over backwards to justify the behaviour of Google or to praise Apple. His attack on the spread of chain stores - another classic middle class hobby-horse - flies in the face of the very localism he claims to espouse. After all, the shops wouldn't prosper if people didn't shop in them, and the purpose of a high street is to provide useful goods and services for locals, not a range of swanky boutiques for middle-class tourists. The overall feeling is that the book is retrofitting a value system to the author's biases, not looking at the situation from the perspective of other humans.
In other places, Hilton's failing is that he lacks the logical abilities to analyse things properly. So, whilst it is true that children tend to do better in families where the parents are married, it doesn't follow that marriage itself is responsible. This is an issue handled rather well in a Freakonomics podcast, and it's clear that what's actually happening is that the kind of people who are happy to commit to marriage tend to make better parents, rather than that the act of marriage improves people's parenting skills in itself. That's not to say that everyone who is brought up by unmarried parents suffers as a result either, but viewed statistically and through a narrow range of metrics, it is easy for someone with a totemic belief in the institution to make it sound that way.
Ultimately, this book would have been better if written by a group of people with understanding in each field and sufficiently broad backgrounds to null the biases. Because if you want policy to be more human, ultimately you have to realise that not every human shares the same view of the world as yourself. This is Hilton's failure and it weakens what could otherwise have been an interesting book.
Hilton himself seems to be aware that he has failings, but he is less than honest about what they are. In the introduction, he glosses the book's issues, claiming that because he is coming at the problem from neither left nor right, he is bound to upset people of both leanings with his proscriptions. That isn't strictly true: it's not that you look at an issue and say that it's too statist or too free-market, it's that so much of what he sees as a problem is based on a classic grab-bag of detached middle-class urban biases. So, for example, when he talks about food production, he goes on about the inhumane conditions of pig farms, something which a Londoner will happily believe as entirely true, but which someone who actually lives in the countryside will know to be a gross misrepresentation. And when he talks about business, he's perfectly happy to attack Tesco (always hated by the middle classes) but bends over backwards to justify the behaviour of Google or to praise Apple. His attack on the spread of chain stores - another classic middle class hobby-horse - flies in the face of the very localism he claims to espouse. After all, the shops wouldn't prosper if people didn't shop in them, and the purpose of a high street is to provide useful goods and services for locals, not a range of swanky boutiques for middle-class tourists. The overall feeling is that the book is retrofitting a value system to the author's biases, not looking at the situation from the perspective of other humans.
In other places, Hilton's failing is that he lacks the logical abilities to analyse things properly. So, whilst it is true that children tend to do better in families where the parents are married, it doesn't follow that marriage itself is responsible. This is an issue handled rather well in a Freakonomics podcast, and it's clear that what's actually happening is that the kind of people who are happy to commit to marriage tend to make better parents, rather than that the act of marriage improves people's parenting skills in itself. That's not to say that everyone who is brought up by unmarried parents suffers as a result either, but viewed statistically and through a narrow range of metrics, it is easy for someone with a totemic belief in the institution to make it sound that way.
Ultimately, this book would have been better if written by a group of people with understanding in each field and sufficiently broad backgrounds to null the biases. Because if you want policy to be more human, ultimately you have to realise that not every human shares the same view of the world as yourself. This is Hilton's failure and it weakens what could otherwise have been an interesting book.
February 18, 2019
A centrist utopian griping about the absolute state of the place. Nothing he says is wrong or particularly abrasive, but you can tell he's an academic by the sheer volume of words he insists on using. This book could've been more powerful by several orders of magnitude if trimmed down by half.
As with most utopians, he doesn't offer many solutions outside of "we need to legislate this, somehow" and "there's a startup of 12 people that's doing this RIGHT and we need to universalize it (also somehow)".
The dude is correct about schools, helicopter parents, the extinction of community, housing, market competition, right on down the board. Everything sucks because we've turned everything into shoddy manufacturing plants, and while that works for Pop Tarts or something likewise entirely synthetic and known to be poison, it's less effective as a means of producing meat or educating children.
Unfortunately, the solution "make it better!" isn't. He wraps it up with "well maybe robots will make it better".
Yeah. Maybe. Got me thinking about factory farming, though. I'm not about to hop on the PETA bandwagon, but the sudden onset bloodmouth carnist guilt forced me to research Aldi's meat sourcing. (Spoilers: they're good. Better than virtually any other supermarket chain, and you can't beat the price. Going local is better, but I don't have the income to be quite that superciliously compassionate yet).
As with most utopians, he doesn't offer many solutions outside of "we need to legislate this, somehow" and "there's a startup of 12 people that's doing this RIGHT and we need to universalize it (also somehow)".
The dude is correct about schools, helicopter parents, the extinction of community, housing, market competition, right on down the board. Everything sucks because we've turned everything into shoddy manufacturing plants, and while that works for Pop Tarts or something likewise entirely synthetic and known to be poison, it's less effective as a means of producing meat or educating children.
Unfortunately, the solution "make it better!" isn't. He wraps it up with "well maybe robots will make it better".
Yeah. Maybe. Got me thinking about factory farming, though. I'm not about to hop on the PETA bandwagon, but the sudden onset bloodmouth carnist guilt forced me to research Aldi's meat sourcing. (Spoilers: they're good. Better than virtually any other supermarket chain, and you can't beat the price. Going local is better, but I don't have the income to be quite that superciliously compassionate yet).
April 1, 2019
I am not yet done with this book but I wanted to write some of my thoughts now before I forget them. So far this book is very busy. There is a LOT of information. Hilton makes a lot of good points but it seems like he is jumping around from one idea to another and sometimes he seemingly contradicts what he just said. For example: He says that hospitals are turning patients into the iPatient where the doctors never come and talk to you and they only look at your digital information. But then he goes right into talking about how the "More Human" way of doing things would be to allow people to stay in their home and send digital information to their doctors. True he pointed out that the doctors could communicate with you while you were in your home but it seemed contradictory to me.
My biggest issue so far is his discussion on animal cruelty in the Food chapter. Again, he made a lot of good points about the way we get our food in America, but then he goes on to compare the animal cruelty to slavery! Let's be clear here, animals are NOT people! I am not saying that that means that we can treat them poorly I am just saying that to try to compare them to how we treated actual humans is not "More Human" in any way. And when he brings up the slogan of "Can they reason? Can the talk? Can the suffer?" without then relating it to what we do to human babies in the womb is terrible! He even makes a statement that babies who are only one day old can show empathy. So what about negative one day old? Why isn't he saying that the biggest thing we as a society can do to be "More Human" is to stop killing humans?
Again, he makes a lot of interesting points that are good to think about and I do hope that a lot of the things he brings up could change for the better. I do plan on reading this book through to the end but with the way it is written and organized and with him blatantly leaving out some serious topics like abortion I can tell that I will not be giving it a very high rating.
OK I have now finished the book.
I think there are certainly parts that I would reread but all in all I think much of what he says is not reasonable to accomplish. I like the idea behind it all. We certainly can improve but it would take nothing short of a miracle to make all of what he says work out. I really like how he emphasized the importance of the family and I think that is the biggest take away from the book. Strengthen your family bonds. That is something that everyone can do.
My biggest issue so far is his discussion on animal cruelty in the Food chapter. Again, he made a lot of good points about the way we get our food in America, but then he goes on to compare the animal cruelty to slavery! Let's be clear here, animals are NOT people! I am not saying that that means that we can treat them poorly I am just saying that to try to compare them to how we treated actual humans is not "More Human" in any way. And when he brings up the slogan of "Can they reason? Can the talk? Can the suffer?" without then relating it to what we do to human babies in the womb is terrible! He even makes a statement that babies who are only one day old can show empathy. So what about negative one day old? Why isn't he saying that the biggest thing we as a society can do to be "More Human" is to stop killing humans?
Again, he makes a lot of interesting points that are good to think about and I do hope that a lot of the things he brings up could change for the better. I do plan on reading this book through to the end but with the way it is written and organized and with him blatantly leaving out some serious topics like abortion I can tell that I will not be giving it a very high rating.
OK I have now finished the book.
I think there are certainly parts that I would reread but all in all I think much of what he says is not reasonable to accomplish. I like the idea behind it all. We certainly can improve but it would take nothing short of a miracle to make all of what he says work out. I really like how he emphasized the importance of the family and I think that is the biggest take away from the book. Strengthen your family bonds. That is something that everyone can do.
April 9, 2024
Ain't it just great: Steve Hilton has got it all. Politics, economics, farming, urban planning, parenting, marriage, ecology. All in distress, all in need of urgent reform. And the answer to all is: make it more human.
Who is going to make us more human, asks me. And aren't we human already. See, in Hilton's idealistic vision, things will get right of policies become more human-centric. Nice one. However, greed, hypocrisy, outright lying is what got us here. Too human, perhaps.
Annoying as it is, the book is not without merits. Starting the discussion, inspiring others and hope for the best. The references, to say the least, are well documented and rather intriguing. Steve Hilton abhors statistics, but uses it nonetheless. And thankfully so.
Who is going to make us more human, asks me. And aren't we human already. See, in Hilton's idealistic vision, things will get right of policies become more human-centric. Nice one. However, greed, hypocrisy, outright lying is what got us here. Too human, perhaps.
Annoying as it is, the book is not without merits. Starting the discussion, inspiring others and hope for the best. The references, to say the least, are well documented and rather intriguing. Steve Hilton abhors statistics, but uses it nonetheless. And thankfully so.
May 30, 2017
This book is totally relevant in today’s world which turned out to be so “in human” Steve Hilton invites the reader to explore the “in human” aspects of our civilization within: politics, government, schools, health, food, capitalism, business, poverty, inequality, childhood, spaces and nature. All throughout the book is extremely well documented and current. He is not in any way fear mongering or complaining, no he is trying to show clear facts and at least maybe some of us will waken up and start the change – the invite is in the postscript ☺
It is high time to change for future of humanity.
It is high time to change for future of humanity.
March 15, 2025
EN: Steve Hilton’s 'More Human' is a fresh take on how to fix society and make it more people-focused. I didn’t expect to agree with everything, since I enjoy exploring different viewpoints, not just ones that match my own. Hilton, who worked for David Cameron, surprised me with some progressive ideas, like giving more power to local communities, but I wondered why he didn’t push for more of these changes when he was in government. I must also say that some of his suggestions feel a bit too idealistic for now, but they’re still worth thinking about. Overall, its easy to read and has some good ideas on lots of topics.
February 7, 2020
I absolutely loved this book, Me as a person who does not put forth efforts to the political agenda whatsoever would totally recommend to the ones who has a passion of learning about the way and how society works.
There's a lot you can learn from it, which you previously had no idea about and it indeed changed my perspectives about Government and Politics.
My my time spend to this book was totally worth it and i would be likely to reading again in short time.
There's a lot you can learn from it, which you previously had no idea about and it indeed changed my perspectives about Government and Politics.
My my time spend to this book was totally worth it and i would be likely to reading again in short time.
March 24, 2021
Hard to get through as it felt like a confirmation of almost all my current views. A few interesting anecdotes and it was nice to summarise my political stance. However there is no instruction as to what to do and the entire way through I was frustrated by the fact he was in a position of power and did so little of what he professes
October 17, 2018
I was hoping this would outline a more participatory method for policy making...
Some interesting thoughts but feels a bit like reading a manifesto. Maybe that's what its meant to be, I don't know, but wasn't what I was looking for.
Some interesting thoughts but feels a bit like reading a manifesto. Maybe that's what its meant to be, I don't know, but wasn't what I was looking for.
May 16, 2019
Interesting, enlightening, and an enjoyable read. I particularly appreciated his perspective that it is within families that so many positive changes to society need to start-- so what can we do to support families/marriages and change society from a micro level?
January 6, 2022
Whether you agree with the ideas or not the book itself is well argued and clearly written. The individual chapters could be read separately and would provide good introductions to the subjects. The book was written in 2015 and some things have changed since then but lots hasn’t.
August 17, 2018
It's what should be appearing in political manifestos and all policy making. Sad that we are no where near to doing it. Good read.
September 29, 2018
Struggled to stay interested in this, and didn’t finish it, despite liking the theory of people first.
July 21, 2020
didnt finish
January 4, 2021
A book a will read again and again.
Read
July 22, 2022The Citizen needs help!
Politicians should do what the people want? When elected they forget who elected them! This book gives voice to this simple idea.
Politicians should do what the people want? When elected they forget who elected them! This book gives voice to this simple idea.
April 3, 2023
Despite not agreeing with all the author’s politics and ideas, I found the ethos of the book compelling. It was also readable and used interesting case studies.
May 23, 2023
Worth the read, even today although much has changed since first published, too much remains the same.
August 16, 2025
Certain parts were interesting but a lot of it’s boring
September 4, 2025
Many books contain one fresh idea with lots of superfluous padding—not so Steve Hilton's More Human, which is full of real food for thought. And, yes, I was thoroughly enjoying More Human even before I found one of my own bits of research referenced in an endnote ;-)
November 19, 2025
Unfortunately, I struggled to stay engaged with this book, which often comes across as a rant and is overly dense with information. It's best to pass on this one.
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