The decision by the British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to reclassify cannabis as a Category B drug, despite the opposing views of her expert advisers, has reminded me of the chaotic state of Britain’s drugs policy. It is an area where policy has remained completely immune to evidence - as one ‘killer chart’ demonstrates.

I first came across this chart which working on a set of scenarios for Foresight’s Brain Science, Addiction and Drugs project a few years ago - perhaps not surprisingly since Professor David Nutt. one of its creators, was a project adviser. (The other creator is Colin Blakemore, a former Chief Executive of Britain’s Medical Research Council.) The version here is from the Royal Society for the Arts’ Commission on drugs, published last year.

If the UK had a sensible drugs policy, there would be a reasonable correspondence between the colours and the ‘harm’ levels (the scores along the left hand edge); A-classification blacks would congregate at the left hand side, unclassifieds towards the right hand, with perhaps a few where their ‘external’ costs had changed their social impact and therefore their classification. The actual correlation is little better than random. The reason - several decades of knee-jerk political responses to drugs issues by successive Home Secretaries. Anthony Barnett has a wry post about this over at Our Kingdom. And, for the record, cannabis consumption in the UK is declining, according to the British Crime Survey, even if some strains are getting stronger.

One of the observations of last year’s State of the Future report (which I blogged about here) was that organised crime was one of the the three biggest threats to global security and prosperity. Misha Glenny’s new book McMafia (’a journey through the global criminal underworld’) comes to a similar conclusion - arguing that organised crime is a bigger threat than terrorism.

I haven’t yet read the book, so this post is based on sampling the reviews. The data - as best as can be assembled - suggests that organised crime accounts for 15-20% of the global economy. Other data points (from the Sunday Times’ review):

The EU estimates that identity theft generates £25 billion a year in profits worldwide. Fake goods, from aircraft spares to spurious Harry Potter stories, are worth up to £250 billion annually. China is responsible for 60% of the market in stolen intellectual property.

The causes: a combination of opening up the global economy in the 1980s and the end of the cold war, in particular the collapse of the Soviet Union and the very selective deregulation of the Russian economy. As Anthony Andrew explained (in The Observer):

All price restrictions were removed by government, except those of Russia’s natural resources: oil, gas, diamonds and metals. Overnight, a vast number of Russians were impoverished, while a tiny minority was able to buy up vital commodities at up to 40 times less than their global market price. ‘This process of enrichment,’ Glenny writes, ‘was quite simply the grandest larceny in history and stands no historical comparison.’ In turn the oligarchs required protection, and jailbirds and former KGB agents alike moved into the lucrative if deadly business of the ‘kryshy’ protection rackets, or ‘armed entrepreneurs’.After the failure of the Soviet Union, in which the law was subordinate to shifting party requirements, Russia effectively privatised crime.

$5bln passed through the Israeli economy from eastern Europe following the Communist collapse; an estimated $20bln went to Switzerland. But other oligarchic states do well as well; 150-250,000 barrels of Nigerian oil go missing every day (at around $100 a barrel this all adds up to a tidy amount pretty quickly). But the drugs trade is the driver; 70% of the black economy is fuelled by drugs money.

David Goldblatt (in the Independent) picks up on the globalisation point:

Our misfortune is that the explosive growth of this shadow economy coincided with the deregulation and globalisation of financial markets. … On every page Glenny lays bare human mendacity and greed, failing or failed police forces and judicial systems. But, just as surely, he takes us to the insatiable maw of the North as consumer of cheap labour, cheap sex and cheap drugs. He makes us see a grotesque irony of globalisation; that the very people made rich by the global economy return to its illegal shadow to sate the insecurities and neuroses of their opulence.

The losers, of course, are also hidden in the shadows: Chinese migrant labourers and their gang-masters, the trafficked Moldavian prostitute in Tel Aviv. All of this seems to me to be something of a blindspot in many readings of the global economy, the State of the Future notwithstanding. And even when we see the symptoms, as we did for a moment after the Morecambe Bay tragedy, the response is muted. Any effective response would have to be political, as John Dickie argues in the Guardian:

McMafia amasses an irresistible weight of evidence to support some simple but telling conclusions. Transnational crime is a far bigger threat than terrorism. Offshore banking havens should be shut down. Capitalism without sound law enforcement is banditry. Tooting cocaine, visiting prostitutes and hiring untaxed immigrant maids are no mere peccadillos. And for any politician who hankers after immigration controls or yet another war on drugs, Glenny has a blunt message: it’s the black economy, stupid.

And probably transnational as well. It’s probably not “misfortune” (and I suspect Goldblatt was being ironic) that the growth in organised crime has gone hand in hand with the financial deregulation that was an essential component of the latest wave of globalisation. They go hand in hand. In structural terms, organised crime operates in the gap between where “fair markets” have failed, and where politics and jurisprudence are not accountable. The Salon review has a relevant quote from the book:

“For globalization to work, the world needs to be a level playing field: the West has to stop its protectionist practices and it has to reassess its resistance to the free, or at least a freer, movement of labor. The developing world in turn needs to address the issue of corruption and the strengthening of the rule of law. This raises the awkward question of global governance and standards that might be compatible across the world.”

The Times has a podcast of Glenny talking about his research.

Kenya’s mobile phone-enabled payment system M-Pesa has grown explosively over the last nine months, according to Russell Southwood’s Balancing Act newsletter, which has been tracking the African mobile and internet markets for something like four years now. According to the newsletter the operator, Safaricom, gained 150,000 users in the three months to June last year, topped the million mark by December, and had reached 1.6m by January - despite, or perhaps because of, the country’s election-related violence. [Update: Now 2m - see Comment below]. Southwood describes it as a ‘breakthrough moment’ for mobile payments - one that’s being watched in the UK.

M-Pesa was developed by Vodafone, which has a minority interest in Safaricom, and it’s already been rolled out to Afghanistan as M-paisa. Plans to roll it out in Tanzania are going ahead, although a local operator, Zantel, has just beaten them to it, launching a service that appears to be slightly simpler but still designed to enable transactions via mobile.

Obviously it shouldn’t be surprising that mobile transactions are a successful service in places where financial infrastructure is poor. As Dave Birch has observed on his blog, “The M-PESA model works, the technology works and the business works, so I’m sure it’s going to go from strength to strength”. It also fulfils a social need.

But so far, mobile payments haven’t taken off in richer markets, despite the apparent attractions of putting a contactless card (like an Oyster card) into a device that you tend to carry with you everywhere. Some user research the Henley Centre did for an operator a few years ago suggested that the operators hadn’t gained ‘permission’ from users to be a payments authority, and given the widespread penetration of debit cards, and their associated infrastructure, it’s possible to see why this might be a problem.

Dave Birch reports a conversation with someone in the UK from a regulatory background who suggested that the M-PESA model might work here not among consumers who were well-connected to financial institutions, but to people who weren’t - for example for thise living where rural banks or post offices were closing. I can see the logic, and it would save the regulators having to take tougher action when market failure (or political failure) created ‘financial services deserts” (especially since in rural areas broadband connections are also poor).

I’ve not got the time here to go into how the diffusion of innovation plays out in the successful adoption of new technologies, but the fact that it works, and that there is a need, aren’t the whole story. Users have to be confident with the technology as well. Many of the adopters in Kenya have been in business. To make it work in the UK’s ‘financial deserts’, you’d almost certainly need to enrol the informal support networks which help to include the excluded - but that’s a post for another day.

Note: Balancing Act has published a recent report, M-money, covering all aspects of payments through mobile phones in Africa.

I visited the recently refurbished Royal Observatory at Greenwich last weekend, where there is, inevitably, a whole section devoted to Harrison and his clock-based solution to the ‘longitude problem’. (The story of his fight with the Astronomer Royal, Neville Maskelyne, and the astronomy establishment, which preferred the so-called ‘lunar solution’, is famouly told by Dava Sobel in her book ‘Longitude’.) But the reason for posting is that the Observatory describes Harrison’s fourth clock, the H-4 pocket watch, as “one of the most important machines ever made”.

The case can be made fairly easily; without being able to calculate longitude accurately, the seas are inherently unsafe, no matter how good your maps are. Harrison’s clock, especially as the price came down through widespread production, enabled the huge global expansion of trade which we saw in the 19th century. In an era in which globalisation, and its limits, are once more on our minds, the technology of global trade is more visible to us.

But I wondered if this was a widespread view. As it happens, in 1998 John Brockman asked the high-powered mailing list to his Edge website ‘what is the most important invention in the past 2,000 years?’ (not quite the same question, but I think close enough). I’m not going to round up the answers here, but Gutenberg’s printing press does well, along with electricity, the computer, the gun, the number system, and the technology needed to domesticate the horse. (Brockman edited the replied into a book, The Greatest Inventions, and there was press coverage, if you want to know more). Harrison’s clock isn’t mentioned.

The ‘grand problematique’ is a phrase sometimes used in futures works to describe that coming collision of population increase, food supply issues, energy shortage, and climate change impact - which, it’s said, could be making our lives hell by 2030. (Colin Mason called it the ‘2030 Spike‘). There has been a wave of related reports and news stories on this recently, so I thought it would be worth running a quick score. I’m planning a series of posts covering off the stories I’ve noticed - starting with population.

The conventional wisdom on global population is that the global population will peak somewhere around 2050 at around 9 billion - and then decline. It’s based on UN projections, and there have been some encouraging signs. Fertility levels in some parts of the less affluent world have fallen far more sharply than anticipated as women gain in status (often as a result of greater education). But the World Watch Institute has recently questioned some of these assumptions. The nine billion figure is the mid case in a range of projections that go from around eight billion to just under to 11 billion, but all of these assume falling fertility levels; quite a large if.

But right now population is still growing rapidly. It’s sobering to realise that the world’s numbers have doubled since the first Earth Day in 1970, less than 40 years ago.

In a recent ‘Vital Signs’ update from the Worldwatch Institute, Robert Engelman argues that sustaining falls in fertility levels will require fairly urgent investment by governments to improve access to good health care. These budgets have stagnated or fallen in recent years, and could be overwhelmed by social or environmental deterioration.

Another WWI article quotes Engelmann thus: “Governments will need to increase their spending significantly in these areas before fertility rates are likely to reach the low levels assumed in the most commonly cited population projections.”

Half of all women from 15 to 49 in developing countries risk unintended pregnancy because they are sexually active but using contraception improperly or not at all. Use needs to increase sharply if we’re to reach the lower fertility levels assumed in the population projections.

And the same is true closer to home, as far as the WWI is concerned. The US has seen an upturn in ferility levels - 2006 reached 2.1 - the highest level seen since 1971. The reasons appear to be similar: the funding climate, together with the politics of the religious right (my interpretation, not theirs) have led to greater proportions of young people lacking easy and affordable access to sexuality education, contraception, and abortion services.

Of course, when dealing with large numbers, and long time frames, relatively small changes now can lead to quite significant shifts in out-turns in 40 years time. Can the earth sustain 12 billion people? We don’t know - but the experiment wouldn’t be pretty.

I’ve been trying to stay away from the banking crisis, which is a big fast-moving story which has been well-covered elsewhere. But some of the events of the past few days have reminded me of the story about the definition of chutzpah: the boy who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.

In the Financial Times, Martin Wolf gets to grips with the case for tighter bank regulation in the face of bankers’ recommendations of ‘voluntary best practice’. The case is not very complicated; the historical record shows that they are extremely poor at regulating themselves, even over the last twenty years when conventional wisdom (i.e. the banks’ PR) has it that self-regulation has been satisfactory.

Wolf quotes a recent report from the bankers’ association, the Institute for International Finance:

In an interim report on “market best practices”, the Institute for International Finance, an association of bankers, offers devastating self-criticism.* Here then are some of the weaknesses it identifies: “deteriorating lending standards by certain originators of credit”; a “decline of underwriting standards”; an “excessive reliance on poorly understood, poorly performing and less than adequate ratings of structured products”; and “difficulties in identifying where exposures reside”. Would you buy a voluntary code from people who describe their own mistakes in this brutal manner? I thought not.

He cites two additional reasons to be sceptical about the banks’ capacity for self-regulation. The first is the obvious one; that in an industry under pressure, some will be tempted not to comply - which immediately tempts the hitherto honest compliers to break with the code as well.

The second is much more serious: that according to a recent paper, “the banks have form”. In 1983, large parts of the industry were effectively bankrupt, and they promised to sort themselves out. According to Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard (abstract here), the incidence of banking crises (measured by the proportion of countries affected) has been as high since 1980 as in any period since 1800, and the incidence of banking crises is correlated with liberalisation of capital flows.

In other words, as Wolf observes, the banks have failed - unlike pretty much every other industry or sector - to improve their standards of performance over a period of about 200 years.

At the same time, they are still hard at work lobbying governments to help them out. As has been observed several times since the current crisis began, one of the problems with the financial sector is that profits are privatised but losses are socialised, a continuing ‘moral hazard‘ - and an expensive one for the rest of us. On the Our Kingdom site you can almost see Tony Curzon-Price rolling his eyes as he describes the UK banks’ apparent proposals to the government to swap their now risky loans for government bonds.

Let’s be clear what this swap means: the banks hold loans, or derivative instruments on loans, guaranteed by properties whose value everyone now accepts were set in a massive debt-fuelled property bubble. Government bonds, on the other hand, are backed by the State’s power to tax us. Over the next three years - the term expected for these rescue loans - house prices will come close to halving, so the collateral for the banks’ mortgages will be bad. … No wonder the banks want to swap these assets for ones backed by taxpayers.

Curzon-Price suggests a different model for this trade-off between the citizens and the banks: as with Northern Rock, “if we own the risk, we own the bank.”

There’s a curious clue to the banks’ mindset - at least that of the US banks - buried in Paul Krugman’s blog today. Krugman follows the so-called ‘TED spread’ - which is the difference between the yield on all but risk-free Treasury bills, and LIBOR (”the London inter-bank offered rate”, or the reported rate at which banks are willing to lend to each other). Normally, these track each other reasonably closely; inter-bank lending has slightly higher risks, so LIBOR is normally slightly higher. A chart in his column from the Wall Street Journal shows how the inter-bank rate has surged at critical times during the current financial crisis. But the WSJ says it may be worse than it looks, because there are concerns that the banks are lying about the rates they’re having to pay. As the WSJ says:

The concern: Some banks don’t want to report the high rates they’re paying for short-term loans because they don’t want to tip off the market that they’re desperate for cash. The Libor system depends on banks to tell the truth about their borrowing rates.

In other words, pulling this together, banks are mendacious, unreliable, and are incapable of learning from their mistakes. You can imagine how the tabloid press might treat people with these characteristics who expected the state to give them money. They’d probably call them scroungers.

For some reason this brings to mind a joke I heard when I was working as a financial journalist during the 1983 crisis:

How do you buy a small bank? Easy - you buy a big one and wait for a while.

I’ve meant to write before about the Transition Initiative, which is in my view one of the most radical things happening in the UK at the moment - radical because it is local and community-oriented, radical because it is a thought-through response to both impending energy shortage and climate change. (If only the government was as coherent). Now the movement’s ‘founder’, Rob Hopkins, has written a book which is a combination of handbook, textbook, and manifesto.

The UK Transition Movement was started in Totnes, where Hopkins now lives, in October 2006. Since then, according to the blog, 43 places have signed up in the UK and a few more in Australia and New Zealand.

In the book, Hopkins describes the transition principles thus:

• That life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it’s better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise;
• That our settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil;
• That we have to act collectively, and we have to act now;
• That by unleashing the collective genius of those around us to creatively and proactively design our energy descent, we can build ways ofliving that are more connected, more enriching, and that recognise the biological limits of the planet.

From a futures point of view, a couple of things are striking.

The first is the speed of the growth of the Transition Initiative over just eighteen months - yet this has been almost invisible in terms of the political and media mainstream (probably just as well for the health of its development as a network).

The second is the emphasis on political change and fun - shades of DH Lawrence’s famous poem, A Sane Revolution - which for me links it to the more playful radical tradition which emerged in the mid-60s.

The third is the extent to which it has drawn on the use of futures techniques, especially visioning, to help the transition communities develop their desired future for their localities. It may be the largest visioning project in the UK right now. A whole section of the Handbook, “The Heart”, is about building visions, and the rationale for this is, “We’ve become so used to campaigning against things that we have lost sight of where we want to go”. Visioning, Hopkins notes, “has the added beneift of counteracting despondency”. There’s also an inspirational story about how a vision-based approach was used to prevent the development of an important local site in Lewes, one of the transition towns.

The book itself is broken into three sections, “The Head, “The Heart” and “The Hands”. The ‘Head’ section is about building the evidence for looming energy shortage, The Heart is about visions for alternatives, and The Hands is about the skills needed to bring those visions to life. As Hopkins observes, in terms of craft and physical skills, we may be the least competent generation in the history of the planet. The luxuries of cheap energy (and cheap technology) have deskilled us. The future will involve the recovery of some of these skills - a task that could easily take a generation. But this will also need better tools - by which I mean tools which are more accessible and more repairable; more ‘convivial’ in Ivan Illich’s exploration of the term. It’s worth exploring this a little further. In a well-known passage, Illich wrote:

I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.

Illich proposed the pursuit of ‘conviviality’ as a way of remedying some of the defects of industrial society. The Transition Initiative suggests that this will turn out the other way around. The combination of peak oil and climate change will expose the defects (energy dependency) of industrial society; we will need to recover his convivial tools to make good - or go under.

The death of Arthur C Clarke at the age of 90 reminded me of a post I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks now, about our certainty in the 1950s and 60s that in the future we would have interstellar travel and colonies in space. That future may still exist, although to my mind it seems less likely now. Why didn’t it arrive? Partly - but only partly - because we blew the money on the Cold War instead.

Clarke, of course, was one of the great evangelists of humankind’s future in space, a view that was deep in the heart of the cultural assumptions, at least in the rich world, throughout that post-war period. His collection of essays and articles, Voices From The Sky, published in the UK in 1966, was reprinted in 1969 with the sub-title, “Previews of the coming space age”.

The futurist Peter Bishop observed recently on an email list that one of the first public ‘Delphi‘ processes, in 1964, on the future of science and technology, was broadly accurate on a wide range of technologies, but “horribly wrong” on the future of space travel. According to Steven Schnaar’s book on forecasting, Megamistakes,

Most projections incorrectly assumed that the moon landing would be followed by space stations, manned trips to Mars, and other elaborate and expensive projects. Given that set of assumptions, forecasters foresaw permanent, manned lunar bases, space stations, commercial passenger rockets, and frequent visits to other planets, all in a setting where children wanted to grow up to be astronauts.

Schaars quotes from an example of some of the newspaper coverage of all this, a 1967 article in the Wall Street Journal headed ‘Manned Mars Landing, Moon Bases Are Seen As Likely Space Feats’. One expert was quote as saying it was ‘undoubted’ that we would have achieved these by the year 2000.

Such coverage only reflected the extent to which this space future was embedded in the culture. The recent ‘Space Age’ exhibition at London’s Museum of Childhood had examples of ’space toys’ from Japan and the way the Oldsmobile car company used space motifs to enhance its car marketing. There are fine poems from the period by, for example, Alan Bold on seeing Sputnik over Edinburgh; Edwin Morgan’s witty poem on ‘The First Men on Mercury“, and WH Auden’s reflection on the “Moon Landing” [scroll down], published in the New Yorker in 1969, which in its own way made the same connection which is made in the famous bone/spacecraft cut in the film 2001: “from the moment/ the first flint was flaked this landing was merely/ a matter of time”.

Despite Clarke’s voluminous collection of factual articles, short stories and novels, 2001, based on one of his short stories and directed by Stanley Kubrick, released in the US in 1968 (1969 in the UK), undoubtedly had the most impact. It probably marks the high water mark of the cultural idea of space travel.

Schnaar is dismissive about why space travel disappeared from the cutural map; he puts it down to money. “The manned Mars mission alone would cost between $40 billion and $100 billion”. There would be technology issues as well. But it seems to me that it wasn’t just about the money. There’s ideology at play here, as well as a sprinkling of special interests. What happened was that the budget that might have gone into travelling beyond the moon, or building the imagined space stations, got diverted instead into the defence budgets that fuelled the Cold War: from the stars to the Star Wars programme. Far greater sums were spent on this than were imagined by the space programme. But by the time Clarke suggested, after the end of the Cold War, that the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas should be marked by an international manned expedition to Mars, the idea had disappeared so far to the fringes that it appeared quixotic.

And maybe there’s more to this than just ideology. The 50s and 60s were essentially optimistic decades, which may be why surveys show them consistently as the decades which people would like to live in. By the 70s, the mood had turned to pessimism, with the oil shocks and their accompanying recessions, and in the US the Vietnam defeat and the disgracing of Nixon. Space travel is a task for optimistic times.

A couple of footnotes: yes, I know that Richard Branson is talking about offering space tourism, flying from a specially built spaceport in New Mexico, but this seems to be more about upping the ante of the ‘experience economy‘ rather than a sign of deep cultural shift.

And in 2001 there’s a lingusitic moment which locates it firmly in its time. As (I think) Dr Floyd arrives at the space base, early on, he’s asked for his “Christian name”. Diversity and multi-culturalism had put paid to that sort of language long before 2001.

Update 16th April: The Paleofutures blog, which specialises in just this kind of ‘lost future’, has just posted a copy of the 1963 General Dynamics book about the world in 2003, published as a limited edition. As Paleofutures puts it in their summary of the content:

The book gives some great insight into the general sense of optimism that so typifies 1960s futurism. Space colonies? Sure! Martian life? Why not! Teleportation? Easier than commercial space flight!

Related posts: Arthur Clarke’s Three Laws

I’ve been reading Keith Roberts’ 1960s SF novel Pavane, set in a modern England in which Elizabeth I had been assassinated in 1588, the Spanish Armada had succeeded, and the Catholic Church had triumphed - in England and in the rest of northern Europe. At the start of the novel, the grip of the Church is tight; and England is poor and essentially feudal.

Without giving the plot away, it made me wonder if this was a plausible counter-factual story; could it have led to to an England which was around 150 years poorer than it turned out to be?

It probably could have done, but to get there, you have to suspend for a moment the powerful hegemonic hold that the way things actually turned out has on our imagination. It’s worth doing, for after all, alternative pasts are also stories about alternative futures. So let’s walk through the steps.

Britain’s rise from a peripheral European state in the sixteenth century to the richest in the world by 1900 - and still among the richest a hundred years later - seems with hindsight to have been deeply path-dependent. The dissolution of the monasteries unlocked assets, both land and money, and created new opportunities, which were translated by the mid-to-late 17th century - initially through the short-lived Republic and then the later Bill of Rights - into a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the the British state. Protestant theology also underpinned a pattern of invention and enterprise that persisted for 200 years. (Cromwell also built up the Navy during his period of rule, creating a fleet that was substantial enough to operate in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Channel at the same time.). The subsequent development of empire, of course, represented a huge transfer of wealth to the UK from its colonies (depending on which interpretation you choose).

If this story accounts for the position of Britain, it doesn’t necessarily account for the absence of technology more generally. But in the novel, quite a lot of technology is suppressed by the Church. The use of electricity in the home, and the petrol engine, are both the subject of Papal veto, for example. One of the chapters in the book (or ‘Measures’) is about smugglers whose contraband includes an (unspecified) radio transmitting device, whose discovery prompts a massive military operation. Communications is managed by the Guild of Signallers and their complex semaphor towers. (Even the Church, it turns out, can’t suppress technology for ever).
And although Britain’s coal assets might have helped develop the economy, even this required technology and technological development; I blogged a few weeks ago about the complex of necessary conditions for the Watt and Boulton steam engine to achieve market leadership, and transform Britain’s production potential.

Hindsight always provides some solidity to the way things turned out, of course. But, but, but… Charles Nicholls’ excellent book, The Reckoning, on the death of Marlowe, conveys well the febrile Elizabethan times, and its dependence on the ruthlessness of the spymaster Walsingham to keep the Catholics at bay. The English Civil War was a close run thing. Other Parliamentarian leaders than Cromwell might well have been less interested in building up such a strategic naval capacity. The accumulation of wealth, knowledge and technical capacity was (and is) a slow process.

In her self-published book Feeling For Stones, Barbara Heinzen uses Britain as an example when she writes of ‘250-year waves’ in which economic and technological changes are preceded by a longer, slower and less visible period in which “social capacity” is built through the development and spread of literacy and learning, and of institutions to support them. We know the story of what happened when this was successful in the UK. Pavane tells the other story, of what happened when it didn’t work.

Updated: There’s also a good - and short - recent article (opens in pdf) from SFX by Christopher Priest which includes material on the history of Pavane.

I posted a couple of weeks ago on a paper by a couple of economists which argued in brief, that globalisation - taking a historical view - tended to fail for political reasons: effectivedly, those who lose from it put the brakes on. Cross-posting this to Shaping Tomorrow’s Foresight Network prompted a long and considered response by the futurist Stephen Aguilar-Millan of the European Futures Observatory (his blog here), who has done recent work on questions of globalisation. He argued that if you approach it from a geopolitical perspective you get a rather different perspective.

I’m not going to post all of his remarks here, but instead will quote some and summarise others. Stephen wrote:

In our geopolitical study, we identified that the world could be characterised by two countervailing forces - the integrative and the dispersive. In modern times, we call the integrative force “Globalisation”. … Equally, in modern times, we call the dispersive force “Nationalism”, be it in its political or economic form.

The model of globalisation they developed for the study characterised the past as an interplay of the integrative and the dispersive, and from this they projected these drivers forward into the future. They also identified six key actors (the US, the EU, Russia, China, Japan, and India) with a focus to 2025. Of these, only one actor (Russia) benefitted from adopting a ‘nationalist’ stance rather the integrative stance of globalisation.

Findlay and O’Rourke, who wrote the article I quoted in my original post, also suggested that globalisation tended to end with conflict. Stephen noted:

If they are right, and the current wave of globalisation is to end with a systemic war, who would be the parties to the war? We could point to the apparent belligerence of the US, but a relatively small operation in Iraq (compared to, say, Iran or North Korea) has extended the capability of the US to almost its limits. Findlay and O’Rourke cite Norman Angell to say that trade does not guarantee peace. However, the cost of war does. In our project, we relied on some costings by the Brookings Institution that the intervention in Iraq was costing $1bn a day. … Iraq is extremely expensive, and the US does not have the money to pay for the war - it is borrowing it from China, Japan, Russia, and the Middle Eastern nations.

Possibly a larger factor to derail globalisation could be the end of The Enlightenment, but that wouldn’t impact for more than a generation. However, if the dispersive does gain the upper hand, it will only be time before the integrative makes a comeback.

The Game Briefing EUFO developed to test how their six global actors can be found here. Globalisation is also one of the themes of EUFO’s London Futures Symposium on 18th April at South Bank University.