Down to the ground

Whether you’re alarmed or reassured by this chart, from the National Institute for Esonomic and Social Research, probably depends whether you’re a glass half-full or glass hald empty sort of a person. It shows the comparative paths of five recessions – the red tracks the 1930s, the incomplete black line tracks the present  slump. It scared me.

The first ‘bounce’ in the 1930s was when Britain left the Gold Standard. But despite the billions of pounds pumped into the economy now by the Bank of England, and seventy years of learning about macro-economic management, the fall has been as steep as in the ’30s, even if the small turn in September came after a decline of only six percentage points in GDP, rather than the eight of the 1930s.

If you’re a glass half full person, you’ll be reassured to learn that the economics editor of the FT, Chris Giles, quotes the NIESR as saying that the reseccsion is ‘on track’ to be less severe than the ’30s. But in the coming months output is still as likely to go down as up. Giles also quotes the NIESR’s Director, Martin Weale, as saying: “The end of the recession should not be confused with a return to normal economic conditions.”

Banks ‘too big to save’?

Allen & Overy is the London banker’s solicitor of choice, so when its senior partner offers a view on the future of the banking sector it’s probably worth listening. Especially when that view seems some distance away from the platitudes offered by the politicians about the success of the bank bail-out.

Greening the tax base

I’ve not been able to post for a few weeks, due to a combination of work deadlines and holiday. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

For the moment, though, I have a post over at the Futures Company site, on this week’s launch of the Green Fiscal Commission’s report on the value of environmental taxes. The case for:

Environmental taxes are effective in changing behaviour, and efficient to administer. They create jobs (around half a million to 2020) at only a fractional cost to economic growth, and they are also, almost certainly, essential if we are to have a hope of meeting the tough carbon reduction targets in the Climate Change Act.

The case against is mostly down to political will. More here.

Opening up the museum

I went to the Radical Nature exhibition at the Barbican in London yesterday. It raises some interesting questions about how we see emerging issues, which I hope to write about later, but it also  suggested some interesting trends for the future of the museum and gallery. These are about openness and accountability.

The strange death of party politics

We’re so used to the dominance of party politics and party alignment in the UK that it’s hard for us to notice that it’s disappearing, and increasingly quickly, in front of our eyes. In fact, at a national level in the UK, the single member constituency/ first past the post system is disguising the collapse of the main parties and the shifting landscape.

Imagining the 22nd century

New Scientist gave the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson some pages to edit on the theme of fiction, and he wrote an essay on the place of science fiction in creating meaning in the world of 2009, and commissioned eight British SF writers to contribute short pieces on life a hundred years from now. It works as a kind of snapshot of the literary “long imagination”. Without giving too much away, they don’t expect things to turn out well.

Roads less travelled

I mentioned a few posts back that I’d had a couple of articles published but didn’t get round to mentioning the second one. The second article, written with Wendy Schultz, called “Roads Less Travelled” was a small futures research project to find out whether using different scenarios methods to develop scenarios from the same set of initial scan data would produce different outcomes. The full paper is published in the May 2009 Journal of Futures Studies (and can also be found on my Selected Articles page); and the answer to the question is yes.

The end of the Celtic Tiger

There’s a global financial crisis joke which goes, What’s the difference between Iceland and Ireland?  The answer: One consonant, and about six months.

Having been in Ireland during some of August, as the government tried to set up its”bad bank”, the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA), on what appeared to be extremely favourable terms to bank shareholders. amid the collapse of one of the country’s biggest property developers, Liam Carroll’s Zoe Group, the joke looks alarmingly close to the truth.

Working on the moon

Readers will know that I come back to the subject of space from time to time. Having seen Duncan Jones’ science fiction film Moon this weekend, it’s as good reason as any for a return visit – while trying to avoid any spoilers. As a film, it should be said, there’s a lot to like; an intriguing story, well told, and the production design is dazzling. It pays its respects to other space films, but is, unmistakably, a film of the ‘noughties’. As a piece of futures (it’s set in the mid-2020s) the on-board computer, with more than a nod to HAL and Dark Star, is like the human resources department of a global company – sometimes solicitous and caring, sometimes trying to enforce the bottom line – and the task the workers are engaged in is to harvest energy.

How change happens

Futures work is inextricably bound up with theories about social change, and in particular how new  discourses compete with existing ones, and eventually supplant them. So it’s good to see the now radical (and now veteran) British politician Tony Benn riffing on this in an article on the climate camp in London this week.