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.”

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.

David Morley, who used to run the firm’s banking practice before becoming managing partner, was interviewed in the London freesheet City AM. On the future of the banks, he has three things to say:

• it is “political inevitability” that there will be greater regulation in the banking sector.
• that the winners from the crisis have become bigger and have gained market share. US government data says that more than 100 banks have disappeared because of the crisis. So, “risk is now more concentrated.”
• “People talk about some banks being to big to fail. But there is a case for saying that some banks out there are too big to save if they went under. It is a puzzle how to solve this dilemma.”

In the interview there’s also an interesting systemic perspective on the crisis (my reading, not his), which reflects, in a way, Chuck Prince’s defining phrase, “But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance”.

Morley observes it became clear in 2006 – before the crisis – that there was too much easy credit floating around: “It is easy to say that now. We were all involved and share some of the responsibility. But it is difficult for a lawyer to make that point to a client.”

And that’s probably where I part company. Lawyers are professionals (they have to pass exams to become lawyers) who therefore have a duty to their clients not only in the short term, about the benefits of a particular deal, but also in the long term as well. In fact, along with accountants, they are exactly the people who are in a position to say that there are risks in pushing ahead. But there’s an incentive problem here; City advisers earn their big fees from deals, not from suggesting that it’s in people’s best interests to stay out  of them.

A lawyer could “make that point” to a client. But probably not a lawyer who is running a City law firm  which turns over a billion pounds a year and whose equity partners take home around a million pounds each.

The picture at the top, from the website of Foster and Partners, shows the Allen & Overy head office in Bishop’s Square, London.

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.

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.

Accountability first: surely a sign of things to come, but there is a clear ‘ecological statement’ pinned up near the door, whch lists the steps taken to reduce the environmental impact of the exhibition. Wall texts, providing information about the works, have been printed on the back of old Barbican posters. Exhibition furniture and ‘detail’ has been built from the walls and signage of a previous exhibition. Gallery guides are printed on recycled paper, using soy inks, on “an energy efficient stencilling duplicator” (the return of the gestetner machines of my youth?), in small batches to reduce wastage.(The guides look fine, by the way).

Parts of the exhibition seem fairly energy intensive to me – the bright lights which burn continuously on Henrik Hakasson’s ‘Fallen Forest‘  for example – but of course the statement raises the question of why – if you were serious about your environmental impact – you wouldn’t do most or all of these things for future exhibitions, no matter what the subject.

On openness, several of the exhibits are elsewhere – one (‘I am so sorry. Goodbye’, seen in the picture at the top of the post) constructed on the Barbican’s Lakeside, free to access and – on the afternoon I went – serving cups of hibiscus tea to visitors, with two more in Dalston, several kilometres to the north-east.

And, inside the exhibition, adjacent to the Harrison’s installation ‘Full Farm’, recreated for the exhibition, there’s an open door leading on to a balcony, with a wind blowing in. Whether intentional or not, this seemed to me to be quite subvervise of the usual idea of the museum, which is almost always conceived of as a closed space. (Indeed, the last time I blogged about museums, I mentioned Declan McGonagle’s paper on ‘the museum as commons’ which also addresses this question.)

It reminded me of thefinal lines of Miroslav Holub’s fine poem ‘The Door’:

Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.

At least
there’ll be
a draught.

The picture at the top of the post is from Extra!Extra!’s review of Radical Nature, and is used with thanks.

http://www.extraextra.org/Review_Art_Radical_Nature_09.html

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.

The political analyst Vernon Bogdanor pointed out in an article last week that UK party membership has collapsed. Conservative Party membership is currently 145,000 – down to a quarter of what it was in 2005.  (In 1975, the Conservatives had one and a half million members, ten times the present numbers). Labour’s slump in membership has been slightly slower, but no less woeful: 150,000 members now against 400,000 in 1996.

The long-term trend is also dramatic, as Bogdanor summarises:

Fifty years ago, one in 11 of us belonged to a party. Now, it is just one in 88. This decline in party membership is probably greatest among young people, and that is also the group least likely to vote. Generational change is fuelling scepticism towards the orthodoxies of tribal politics. The major parties, as mass organisations, are dying on their feet.

All of this is disguised in the UK’s overall system of representation by the first past the post system, which focusses attention on share of votes cast (largely overlooking proportions of those bothering to vote) and encourages people to vote for parties they don’t actually support strongly whose candidate has a chance of being elected in their constituency. There’s never such a thing as a controlled experiment in political systems – events keep getting in the way – but the gap between the shares at the last UK general election and the European elections is an indication of the gap: in 2005, 10% of those who turned out to vote voted for a party other than Labour, Conservatives, or Liberal. In the European election this year, conducted on a proportional representation system, those three parties got 60% of the vote:

The combined vote for Ukip, the Greens and the BNP was just 0.5% less than that of the winning Conservatives, who gained only 28% of the vote.

Similar proportions have been seen in recent opinion polls. In Scotland and Wales, where the nationalist parties are involved in government, it’s possible to argue that proportional representation has created more energy, and greater fairness, around representation. But it is important to separate the issue of representation from participation.

As Peter Mair demonstrated convincingly in an article, memorably entitled ‘Ruling the Void?’, a couple of years ago in New Left Review (subscription required), the decline in party membership has occurred across Europe (even if the UK now manages to achieve some of the lowest numbers), regardless of voting system.

There’s a bigger question sitting underneath the data, if you like. It’s customary to respond to comments about the decline in the numbers involved in party politics, actively or passively, by observing that far more are involved in single issue campaigns, and that the internet enables this. The social research data also suggest that the overall levels of interest in politics – even among the young – is no lower than it used to be.

So there are two related issues here. Participation in party politics has fallen to levels that are all but terminal. (250 members per constituency does not mean 250 activists per constituency). There’s a clear gap between how people would choose to be represented in a fairer electoral system, and how they vote in the tightly constrained system we have. Both issues can lead – and probably will – to a democratic crisis. (It is quite likely that David Cameron’s Conservatives will have a substantial majority on the basis of the smallest numbers of votes per seat ever cast for a winning party). But even if we fix the representative issues, if we believe that democratic government matters, we’ll still have to sort the participatory issues. It may seem an old-fashioned view, in the digital networked age, but it is the active engagement of party members which stop representatives floating away into an ether in which their peer group is more important than the people. Party funding mechanisms are likely to be critical.

The picture is of Jack Straw canvassing in Blackburn ahead of the 2008 local elections (but could have been of any of the main parties). It is used under a Creative Commons licence from Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Why a hundred years? Because Robinson thinks it is “the hardest zone of all (which is why I asked the writers here to give it a go) – the time about a century from now, when our growing capabilities will be confronted by immense dangers, creating an unstable and unpredictable future.”

Of the eight pieces one – by Geoff Ryman – eschews fiction and more or less writes a trends piece, peppering his text with good questions about uncertainty. He concludes,

The future will look like Darfur, Lagos and Shanghai. Wonderful, terrible, depending on who you are.

But he declines Robinson’s invitation, and looks no further than about 2030, which he sees as the end of “the oil culture”.

The end of the oil culture will be mass creative destruction and I have no idea what lies the other side of it. At this point I echo the delicacy of Canada’s great SF writer, Elisabeth Vonarburg: “I can’t face writing across that mountain of corpses.”

Others aren’t so squeamish. Nicola Griffiths’ piece, ‘Acid Rain‘, is quite like a poem:

The rain when it came burned through their skin and down to the bone, which bled.

Womenfolk fled, children hid in dread, and the sky stayed wide and open….

It rained until the world was stone, and bone, and famine.

Paul McAuley also picks up the environmental theme, but is slightly more optimistic. Sure, half the Earth’s population is living in slums along new coastlines, but his characters are reclaiming for farmland the defrosting edges of Antarctica.

The rest of the stories, in their different ways, look at technology. While this is perhaps a more traditional area for science fiction, these tiny stories are stretching. Stephen Baxter imagines a conversation with a simulated Lord Kelvin, one of Britain’s most distinguished scientists (who gave his name to the Kelvin Scale) but who was also consistently wrong about the future.  Justina Robson gives us a clone who is asking that her digital and biological records are returned so that she is the last in the line. Ian Watson foresees a world in which virtual people have both proliferated and acquired rights (“deletion would be genocide”), creating a virtual population crisis, while Ian MacDonald has women deprived of education – a ban which is subverted by a secret phone app.

Finally, Ken MacLeod’s story is the lightest one here, playful, even funny. He conjures up a future of jetpacks, heads-up visual displays, and skin-tight shiny clothing. So far, so knowing. It turns out – spoiler alert – to be the breakfast table sharing its night-time dream with its owner.The owner wants it to skip the dream and get on with breakfast.

[Update: There's a long and worthwhile review of Peter Maass' book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, on the subject of the destruction associated with the end of the oil culture.]

The image at the top of the post is by the artist Michelle Lord, and is from her project, Future Ruins.

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.

Just a little more background here, since the professionally interested will no doubt turn to the (long!) article in due course.

• Why the question? There seem to be quite a lot of comparative methods assessments out there, but none have applied different methods to the same core data. And there’s also an assumption which wanders around at the edge of the scenarios field which suggests that the same sorts of scenarios will emerge from futures projects – because there are only so many futures stories.
• What base data did we use? The material was from the the Carnegie UK project on the future of civil society in Britain and Ireland. This is in the public domain, it’s a subject that most people have some knowledge of, Wendy and I had both worked on the project (and had access to background material if necessary), and the client was sympathetic.
• What methods did we test? The 2×2 double uncertainty matrix, causal layered analysis, futures archetypes, and Manoa. (We started on morphological analysis, but ran out of time, and we weren’t trained in la prospective.)
• How did we do the research? It was only a pilot. Two half-day workshops, two methods per workshop, with help from some of my Futures Company colleagues and some other interested practitioners.
• What did we find out? The different scenarios methods didn’t just produce different sorts of scenario stories. They also generated different types of understanding and different types of participation. One of our conclusions was that should take more care in matching methods to desired outcomes; a second that there was more scope for mixing methods within projects to generate richer layers of insights.

The title, of course, comes from Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I noticed the other day that the language was similar to the opening section of The Four Quartets, where T.S. Eliot writes:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened.

Futures, of  course, has the luxury of taking the other passages to the other doors, of travelling down the more and less travelled roads, at least in the imagination.

The picture at the top of the post is from the Holton Lee blog, with thanks.

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.

August unemployment in the Republic was running at 12%, almost twice as high as in the North, and even allowing for measurement differences it was a clear sign that the good times have gone. Ireland’s deflation rate is now the highest of any rich country.

As the Bank-of-Ireland-economist-turned-writer/broadcaster David McWilliams has observed, the so-called “Celtic Tiger” was built on easy credit, cheap oil, and ready sources of migrant labour. The easy credit has gone, the cheap oil can no longer be taken for granted, and migrant workers are less willing to move to weak economies. The collapse of the property bubble has been swift; the value of commercial property has fallen 50-60% from its peak. I was told that on the Inishowen peninsula, in the north of Donegal, that three-fifths of the houses were empty, built speculatively as holiday or second homes against demand that is no longer there.

NAMA leaves quite to be desired, and without going into the small print, it fairly clearly buys the toxic assets at over-valued prices at the taxpayers’ expense. At time of writing, the Greens’ who are the junior partners in the governing coalition, may still scupper the proposals. The Irish Independent’s resident grumpy old columnist, Kevin Myers, even suggested that such corruption was endemic to the political history of Ireland’s ruling Fianna Fail party:

The honest folk of NAMA are, in effect, being assembled to rescue our rapacious developer-class, the shady ruffians who were such generous contributors to Fianna Fail over the years. And naturally. For modern Ireland is the diseased polity that Sean Lemass created out of de Valera’s failed state. He conjured a new speculator class into existence, on the quid pro quo that it would then subsidise his party, as meanwhile the state protected it.

David McWilliams, for his part, wondered why the government wanted to prop up banks or developers when they could buy cheap land from them instead.

With so much prime land now available to the State for a song, the obvious thing is for the State to profit from the bankers’ and developers’ stupidity and greed by buying the land for next to nothing and then putting it to public use. In almost every banking disaster we have seen in the past two decades, the obvious thing to do is let banks go. The State guarantees deposits, transfers these deposits to a new bank and the economy starts again. From the Swedish crisis of the early 1990s to the Asian Tiger collapse and the USA today, banks go bust and the countries recover.

Brendan Keenan, writing in the Irish Independent’s business section, observed that even if the Irish government hits its improbably optimistic budget targets, it will still have one of the largest proportions of public expenditure as a share of the overall economy. Cuts seem inevitable, since the country is almost completely dependent, economically, on the goodwill of the international bond markets, who worry about the share of public expenditure in an economy.

There are some hard lessons here. In the 80s and 90s Ireland sucked in inward investment (much from the US) from companies looking for a base in the European Union with low-cost skilled labour. The English language was an advantage. But low wages are only ever a temporary advantage (they increase rapidly on the back of economic success) and Ireland now has some of the highest wages in Europe (and highest living costs as well). And as English continues to spread as the language of business, having native speakers may be less of an advantage.

Historically, Ireland has exported its skilled workers through migration. The view on RTE’s O’Gorman programme (he talks to members of the public, in this case at a social welfare office in Cork) was that the depth of the current recession worldwide meant this was not an option this time. One commentator suggested that Ireland should concentrate on its traditional strengths, of food and tourism. They won’t bring back the boom years, but at least both should be sustainable in the medium-to-long term, as food security becomes more important and energy costs make tourism increasingly short-distance. And the well-educated workforce will continue to be an asset, esecially if the government, or the state of the world economy, can persuade them to stay at home.

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.

Since this blog is about futures rather than film, however, I’m going to concentrate on the apparent social and economic world of the film, not the movie itself. Sam Bell is reaching the end of a three year contract as a technician, working on his own, on a moon base set up to extract helium. When we (he) visit the “harvesters” working the surface, it’s like nothing so much as a large open-cast mine, dirty and dangerous. The dirty moonsuit he dons when he leaves the base for the first time – shades of Outland – differs from the clean world of 2001, or come to that, the first moon landing.

It takes three days to get home. The communications technology appears to be unreliable. Why someone would volunteer for such conditions is unclear, although there are hints that the job of “astronaut” still has some cachet. Sam seems to be hallucinating a bit after three years on his own. There’s a sharp contrast between the cleanly stencilled base furniture and the unruly plants, pictures, and post-it notes which have accumulated.

Corporate worlds

The base computer, ‘GERTY’, which (like HAL) appears to be the name of its maker, is solicitous and attentive, as when Sam scolds himself early on. As the story continues, it’s clear that it also has its loyalties to Lunar Industries Inc, which owns the base. Having studied some industrial sociology, I was delighted to see Sam indulge in some old-fashioned industrial sabotage to circumvent a restriction imposed by the computer. There’s a fine corporate moment later, when Sam appears to be about to leave the base for home, when a corporate videogram pops up to thank him for helping to keep Lunar Industries as the leading global provider of clean energy.

In fact, without giving too much away, the corporate model turns out to be more sinister and quite a lot more cost-effective. Overall, it seems to be a plausible and coherent view of a future in which the Moon is harvested to deal with energy shortages on Earth, even if some of the the technical details are left blank (How does the helium reach earth? It’s not a doctorate, it’s a film).

With one caveat: in this plausible and coherent future, it is much more likely that the technicians pulling shifts on the moon will be Chinese, not American. China has a more ambitious space programme than the United States, and China is already buying farmland and other production resources outside of its resources. Lunar Industries will most likely be a Chinese company as well.

Finally, without giving away any of the plot, the film turns into a smart reflection on identity and memory. And (in terms of film trends) I liked the fact that the lunar landscape shots owe much more to models than to CGI.

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.

Benn told Leo Hickman:

“This is how I believe change occurs. If you raise an issue, it’s usually ignored. Then if you go on, you’re labelled as mad. If you go on further, you’re dangerous. Then there’s a pause. Then you can’t find anyone at the top who doesn’t claim to have thought of it in the first place. That’s how progress occurs.”

It’s a model he’s used before, in platform appearances and lecture sizes since he stepped down as an MP. It seems to be a (slightly more famous version of a phrase used by a more famous activist. Mahatma Gandhi put it this way:

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

And in turn Gandhi may have been influenced by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”

In their way,  all of these map on to the Three Horizons model, which I have helped to develop, which explores how new ideas and discourses succeed (or not) in passing into the mainstream. using Benn’s quote, in the “ignored” and “mad” phrases it is still on the edge of the mainstream, but becoming more visible. In the “dangerous” phase, there is direct conflict between the new idea and the dominant discourse. And in the “anyone at the top” phase, it has won.

Benn was asked how far along the line he thought that climate camp had got:

Well, I think they’re beyond madness, and halfway beyond dangerous towards that pregnant pause”.

I think this may be radical optimism. For myself, I’d put it somewhere between “mad” and “dangerous”.