I want to talk about The Future by Naomi Alderman. I read it last year, after wandering around the Hay Festival bookshop moaning that they don’t do science fiction and then coming across Naomi’s book and realising I had just missed her being interviewed. Then I watched the interview and bought both The Future and The Power (which I will talk about at some future date, but which is equally terrific).
The book is about Lenk Sketlish, CEO of the Fantail social network, Zimri Nommik, CEO of the logistics and purchasing giant Anvil, Ellen Bywater, CEO of Medlar Technologies, the world’ most profitable personal computing company, and the people working for them, and the people linked with those people. Zimri, Ellen and Lenk are at least as monstrous as Jeff, Sundar, Elon, Tim and Mark. And they are all preparing for the end of the world.
(If you need to remind yourself what Elon, Jeff, Mark and Sundar all look like milling around, below is a link to Trump’s inauguration:
Anvil is set up with alerts for signs of the end of the world being reported anywhere: giant hailstones, plague of locusts, Mpox, rain of blood which turned out to be a protest for menstrual equity involving blood-soaked tampons being thrown at Lenk and co as they emerged from a courthouse in Washington. The information Zimri, Ellen and Lenk have on everybody else in the world makes them feel all seeing, all hearing, all knowing. Combined with riches unknown to anyone before in history it makes them feel invulnerable, even to the end of the world, even to each other. Which turns out, of course, to be their decisive vulnerability.
It takes in survivalism, religious cults and wraps it all up in a thriller plot which is absolutely the kind of science fiction you want to be reading now instead of listening out for the latest antics of the horse in the hospital. And it was all written over a year before Elon even started with DOGE. The Future by Naomi Alderman is a fantastic read, particularly if you would like to see someone like Musk get an appropriate end to his story. I obviously won’t spoil it by saying what that is, but I don’t think I would be giving anything away by saying rockets are involved!
The Charybdis is a swirling water feature in the temperate house at Savill Garden. It was designed by Giles Rayner in 2006. https://funandgames.org/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-Charybdis_Savill-Gardens_9257-2-scaled.jpg
This is a quote attributed to Lenin (courtsey of Branko Milanovic’s X account, where a gentle exchange about whether it was genuine ensued), which seems perfect for the moment we are in.
It was back in 1998 that George Monbiot first pointed out that no sector was as wedded to PFI deals as health. The famous example in Captive State of the Walsgrave hospital in Coventry, knocked down and replaced by a smaller hospital at much greater cost, was just one of many. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but the wider lesson from these early examples, borne out by everything we have seen since, is that privatisation, in whatever form (and, after all, what is PFI but the privatisation of a funding source), always solves a smaller problem than the one you have. The history of privatisation in the NHS has been a series of smaller easier problems dealt with in some cases very efficiently by the private sector (although the efficiency only ever seems to increase the profits of the private companies concerned rather than reduce their price). As it has been in transport (with rail franchises yo-yoing in and out of state control whenever the ask becomes too complex for the train operators taking them on), and utilities, mail services, etc etc.
And the size of the problems that the private sector can take on would appear to be getting smaller.
Take insurance. Ann Pettifor highlights this week what Petra Hielkema, chair of the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority, has to say about the future of the sector in the FT. Apparently he told them that governments and banks will struggle to cope with the soaring costs of natural catastrophes such as floods and wildfires. More households will be unable to insure their homes and the mounting losses from natural disasters could destabilise banks. Two things he said were particularly striking:
“I think it is the biggest risk facing society, frankly” and “Member states — they can’t cope with this.”
This contrast between public and private ownership of problems struck me while I was reading the excellent report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter on climate change: Planetary Solvency. By taking the approach that an insurance company would take in determining its risk appetite and then seeing if its risk exposure matched up to it, it occurred to me that the reason this had never been done before for global climate change was that any insurer would have left such a market years ago on the basis of a brief initial analysis of the problem. Something that a private insurer can always do with any problem.
What if, instead of the NHS being threatened by covert privatisation, the threat is that even the smaller problems private health is currently solving within the system get handed back to the NHS? Because that is the difference. During the pandemic, the threat was that the NHS might not be able to cope with the surge in very ill people and that many would die without care as a result. The reason large parts of NHS operations were repurposed and we were all urged to “flatten the curve” was because, ultimately, there is noone the NHS can hand the responsibility back to and their resources are measured in hours of the right people available to work for them rather than pounds spent and so have a hard physical limit. Although there were significant failures as the Covid Inquiry is currently exploring, the NHS as a whole did not fall over.
However, neither did the US system, because an insurer merely withdraws from a market which might cause it to. It has no responsibility to the system as a whole.
As one MIT researcher responded to being asked about the lessons for the US system of the pandemic:
“The pandemic has revealed the American health care system to be a non-system.”
So it seems to me that arguments about privatisation and nationalisation are a bit beside the point. We have big problems, getting bigger every day, which absolutely have to be solved and limited physical resources with which to do so. Unfortunately His Majesty’s Opposition are still trying to disentangle themselves from the wreckage of Tufton Street’s “thought leadership”, risking a Trumpian climate change denying, health service privatising Reform Party replacing them, and His Majesty’s Government appear to have no idea what they are doing.
So reality does feel pretty radical at the moment. We need to be equally radical in our response to it.
The excellent report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature splits the risk trajectories into four sections: Climate, Nature, Society and Economy. I have focused on the Society one above as, in my view, this is the reason we are interested in all of the other ones. According to the Planetary Solvency report, we are on track for a society in 2050 described as follows:
Nature and climate risk trajectories will drive further biophysical constraints including stresses on water supply, further food supply impacts, heat stress, increased disease vectors, likely to drive migration and conflict. Possible to Likely risk of Severe to Decimation level societal impacts, with increasingly severe direct and indirect consequences of climate and nature risks driving socio-political fragmentation in exposed and vulnerable regions.
So what are we doing about it? Well the United States has just voted in Donald Trump as President. There was a flurry of executive orders issued in his first week (with the appropriate caveats about how many of these might actually be implemented), the climate-related ones of which are neatly summarised here by Bill McKibben:
The attacks on sensible energy policy have been swift and savage. We exited the Paris climate accords, paused IRA spending, halted wind and solar projects, gutted the effort to help us transition to electric vehicles, lifted the pause on new LNG export projects, canceled the Climate Corps just as it was getting off the ground, and closed the various government agencies dedicated to environmental justice. Oh, and we declared an “energy emergency” to make it easier to do all of the above.
Timothy Snyder has written about how to respond to tyranny in your own country. What is happening currently in the United States is threatening tyranny for many (as Robert Reich lists here):
The government now recognizes only two “immutable” genders, male and female. Migrants (now referred to as “aliens”) are being turned away at the border. Immigration agents are freed to target hospitals, schools, and churches in search of people to deport. Diversity efforts in the federal government have been dismantled and employees turned into snitches. Federal money will be barred from paying for many abortions.
The first thing you should do, according to Timothy Snyder, is to not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
And how did we respond to all of this in the UK? Well Keir Starmer was keen to tell The Donald that we were deregulating to boost growth in their first phone call. His reward for this was the story that Trump thought he was doing a good job. Supposedly an endorsement from the “Drill Baby Drill” guy is the proper corrective from being told he should be locked up by the Nazi salute guy.
And then there were the actions on the environment. From the talking out of the Climate and Nature Bill which sought to meet new legally binding targets on climate change and protect nature. To a housing policy which will be both hugely environmentally destructive and fail to make houses more affordable. To announcing the intention to overhaul the planning rules, in the upcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill, to reduce the power of people to object (and, as the Conservatives’ restrictions on protest have not been lifted, subsequently bang them up for years on end if we subsequently demonstrate about it) so that global firms would think that the UK was a “great place to invest” .
And then today we had Rachel Reeves’ big speech. Approval for developing the third runway at Heathrow, as had been extensively trailed, and the creation of “Europe’s Silicon Valley” between Oxford and Cambridge were the main announcements. There was quite a lot of talk about investment in sustainable aviation fuel (which means biofuels, the benefits of which have already been shown to be wiped out by rising demand).
And as for the Silicon Valley idea, I am not sure we want one. First there is the lack of real innovation despite the excellent game they talk. And second, is it going to be the authoritarian nightmare that the Californian one is turning into? The early signs are not good. Just last week Marcus Bokkerink, the Chair of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), was replaced by Doug Gurr, until recently Jeff Bezos’ head of Amazon UK. So not exactly standing up to Technofeudalism then.
Marcus Bokkerink, the outgoing head of the CMA, was amazing, and he had charge over the CMA’s Digital Markets Unit, the largest, best-staffed technical body of any competition regulator, anywhere in the world. The DMU uses its investigatory powers to dig deep into complex monopolistic businesses like Amazon, and just last year, the DMU was given new enforcement powers that would let it custom-craft regulations to address tech monopolization (again, like Amazon’s).
But it’s even worse. The CMA and DMU are the headwaters of a global system of super-effective Big Tech regulation. The CMA’s deeply investigated reports on tech monopolists are used as the basis for EU regulations and enforcement actions, and these actions are then re-run by other world governments, like South Korea and Japan.
When you see Trump flanked by Bezos and the other Tech Bros at his inauguration, it certainly feels like we are obeying in advance. Rachel Reeves’ speech had an enormous increase in energy demand implicit in pretty much every measure announced, which is expected because, GDP (the thing she is looking to boost) and energy consumption have been in lockstep forever. This is the implication of prioritising GDP growth over everything else.
What were missing were both a compensatory increase in renewable energy capacity and/or a reorganisation of our economy away from energy intensity. The problem for the government is that the latter would not increase GDP, so instead we get into the absurd position of the Business Secretary saying we “cannot afford to not build runways”.
However it seems that when the motivation is big enough (in this case to dispute the assertion that the Russian economy is doing well in wartime despite the official statistics, which the EU really needs to do in order to continue to make the case for sanctions) alternative ways to measure the economy can be found. In section 3.2 we find this:
The general assumption of connecting GDP growth to making people better off is not relevant in this situation, which should be included in any discussion of how the Russian economy is doing.
What is interesting about this analysis is that:
a. It is carried out by the kind of orthodox economists (the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics) who believe GDP would be a good index to use in normal circumstances; and
b. They are saying this even if the GDP figures published by Russia are technically accurate. As they go on to say:
What this analysis suggests is that if we believe in official Russian statistics, then Russia has economic capacity to sustain current policies in the short run, a conclusion shared with many other observers. We also find, though, that beyond the GDP numbers, the redirection into a war economy is already putting pressure on all sectors not directly involved in the war, causing internal macroeconomic imbalances, increasing risks in the financial sector, and eroding export revenues and existing reserves. Short term growth is kept up by a massive fiscal stimulus, but the impact is mitigated by necessary monetary contraction to deal with inflationary pressures, and structural factors (demographics, weak property rights) limiting the possible economic response to the stimulus.
Some of which sound familiar closer to home – “necessary monetary contraction” (things we cannot afford) and “increasing risks in the financial sector” anyone?
We are currently facilitating a world where the only capacity we are increasing is to fly over the climate-ravaged areas of the globe and their fleeing populations. Fly Baby Fly is not going to get us anywhere we want to go.
When I started writing this blog in April 2013, one of its main purposes was to highlight how poor we are at forecasting things, and suggest that our decision-making would improve if we acknowledged this fact. The best example I could find at the time to illustrate this point were the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth forecasts over the previous 3 years. They do not appear to have improved much since then.
The reason for all of the hype of course is the totally self-constructed cul-de-sac that the Government has built around its economic policy options. Tiny movements in government debt or CPI or GDP or indeed gilt yields have been given heightened significance by being explicitly tied to how much the Government will allow itself to spend on its various programmes. As stated in the FT:
Only the OBR can accurately predict how much headroom the Treasury has against its fiscal rules, the Treasury insisted on Wednesday. “Anything else is pure speculation,” it added.
I refer back to the aforementioned forecast history of the OBR and ask how we ever got in a situation where their forecasts would determine how the UK government behaved. As the recent essay by Stefan Eich (on Adam Tooze’s Chartbook) points out, Keynes said:
“Our power of prediction is so slight, our knowledge of remote consequences so uncertain that it is seldom wise to sacrifice a present benefit for a doubtful advantage in the future.” It was consequently rarely right to sacrifice the well-being of the present generation for the sake of a supposed millennium in the remote future.
Meanwhile we are now doing precisely this on the basis of OBR forecasts. As Rachel Reeves set out at the start of her chancellorship in July, in a precise inversion of Keynes:
Because if we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.
Unfortunately for the government, while they spend all of their time trying to solve this imaginary problem they have created for themselves, there are actual real problems that do need to be addressed, and which are currently being drowned out by the noise of political commentators with too little of substance to talk about apparently.
So Sir Michael Marmot, author of the landmark Institute of Health Equity reports on health inequalities in 2010 and 2020 and the recent report on the role of the property sector in improving health, referred to the maintenance of the two child benefit cap as “almost a form of eugenics”.
The Trussell Trust reports that:
A record 9.3 million people face hunger and hardship across the UK. This includes 6.3 million adults and 3 million children. This represents one in seven (14.0%) people across the UK, and one in five (20.9%) children. Current levels are more than a third higher than they were 20 years ago, when 6.7 million people faced hunger and hardship.
And a group from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, in partnership with Prof Tim Lenton and his team from the University of Exeter, set out in a report today (Guardian summary here, Planet Critical discussion here) the dangers of the current massive underestimation of climate change risk. As Tim Lenton says:
The choice is simple: continue to be surprised by rapidly escalating and unexpected climate and nature-driven risks, or implement realistic Planetary Solvency risk assessments to build resilience and support ongoing prosperity. We urge policymakers to work with scientists and risk professionals to take this forward before we run the ship of human progress aground on the rocks of poor risk management.
The part which really stood out for me (in such contrast to the equally massively exaggerated risks ascribed to movements in bond markets this week) was on the inadequacy of global risk management practices:
Policymakers often prioritise the economy, with their information flows focused on this. But our dominant economic model doesn’t recognise a dependence on the Earth system, viewing climate and nature risks as externalities.
Climate change risk assessment methodologies understate economic impact, as they often exclude many of the most severe risks that are expected and do not recognise there is a risk of ruin. They are precisely wrong, rather than being roughly right.
The degradation of natural assets such as forests and soils, or the acidification and pollution of the ocean, act as a risk multiplier on the impacts of climate change and vice versa. Traditional risk management techniques typically focus on single risks in isolation, missing network effects and interconnections, underestimating cascading, compounding risks.
Current risk management approaches fall short of the RESILIENCE principles detailed in this report for realistic and effective risk management. Consequently, policymaker risk information is likely to significantly understate the potential impact of climate and nature risks, weakening the argument for urgent action.
These limitations mean that policymakers are likely to have accepted much higher levels of risk than is commonly realised.
If policymakers judged these risks on the same calibration scale as they current view the knockabout on financial markets I doubt we would ever hear about the intricacies of the 10 year gilt yield or the decimal places of CPI ever again. Similarly, if the societal impact of prolonged policies targeting the poor was included (perhaps in the form of meaningful measures of poverty based on the work of the Social Metrics Commission), rather than the level of the FTSE 100, we might start to make inroads into the current dire statistics.
We have hard problems to solve which require a serious government prepared to be bold, do big things and take the political risk of doing so (because the political risks are so tiny compared to the actual risks the population face), not one so focused and constrained by minutiae that it defeats itself.
I thought I would return to a point I raised in my musings on Deadmeat before Christmas, because it has probably got the most reaction from readers of the blog of anything I wrote in 2024. Most of the reaction, it has to be said, was disbelieving. The point in question was this:
And this is the key I think. What economists call “public goods”, goods which are non-rivalrous (ie your use of the sun’s energy does not stop somebody else’s unless you put them in the shade) and non-excludable (ie you cannot easily stop someone else from using it, in this case by sticking a solar panel on their roof), are very difficult if not impossible to make a profit from. Private markets will therefore not provide these goods, possibly at all without extremely artificial regulation (something we have probably had enough of with our utilities in the UK) and certainly not in the quantity that will be required.
Economics by Sloman, Garratt and Guest, which informs the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ core reading for its Business Economics syllabus states (in its 10th edition) that a pure public good is:
A good or service that has the characteristics of being perfectly non-rival and completely non-excludable and, as a result, would not be provided by the free market.
It then goes on to say that:
There is some debate as to whether pure public goods actually exist or whether they are merely a theoretical idea.
This I think brings us back to the extremely artificial regulation I mentioned above, as a lot of the economists who have got their views into this book (the sort that have contributed to the “debate” over whether pure public goods exist) appear to struggle with the idea that markets cannot provide everything better, even if you have to embark on some pretty tortuous contortions to create them.
My conclusion in my previous post was as follows:
Therefore if the private sector will not provide public goods and renewable power is predominantly a public good, then it follows that renewable power needs to be in public ownership. And if the climate crisis requires all power to be renewable and zero carbon, which it does, then it also follows that the entire power sector ultimately needs to be in public ownership too.
However I now realise that this is not quite correct. There is an alternative to public ownership. Not the ridiculous quasi-markets which bedevil our utilities in the UK currently, which I don’t expect to be with us for many more decades, but something else which is alive and well and in the process of taking over capitalism as we know it: private monopoly.
As Yanis Varoufakis says in Technofeudalism about green energy in particular:
Advances in green energy are pushing down fast the costs of green electricity generation. Even though the life cycle of fossil fuels has been extended, ruinously for the planet, cloud-based green energy is growing – and, with it, so is the relative power of cloudalists.
“Cloudalists” are our modern feudal lords. Whereas capitalism was a system in which the most powerful people as owners of capital were able to dictate how and where workers could use their capital to make profit for them, under technofeudalism the money is made as rent.
In the section entitled “The New Enclosures” Varoufakis says:
“In the eighteenth century, it was land that the many were denied access to. In the twenty-first century, it is access to our own identity.” Expanding on this:
Strewn across countless privately owned digital realms, it has many owners, none of whom is us: a private bank owns your ID codes and your entire publishing record. Facebook is intimately familiar with whom – and what – you like. Twitter remembers every little thought that caught your attention, every opinion that you agreed with, that made you furious, that you lingered over idly before scrolling on. Apple and Google know better than you do what you watch, read, buy, whom you meet, when and where. Spotify owns a record of your musical preferences more complete than the one stored in your conscious memory. And behind them all are countless others, invisibly gathering, monitoring , sifting and trading your activity for information about you. With every day that passes, some cloud-based corporation, whose owners you will never care to know, owns another aspect of your identity.
As Cory Doctorow says in his review of Technofeudalism:
Varoufakis points to ways that the cloudalists can cement their gains: for example, “green” energy doesn’t rely on land-leases (like fossil fuels), but it does rely on networked grids and data-protocols that can be loaded up with IP, either or both of which can be turned into chokepoints for feudal rent-extraction.
To make things worse, Varoufakis argues that cloudalists won’t be able to muster the degree of coordination and patience needed to actually resolve the climate emergency – they’ll not only extract rent from every source of renewables, but they’ll also silo them in ways that make them incapable of doing the things we need them to do.
When did we get so complacent about private monopolies? As Cory Doctorow reminds us in The Internet Con, in the 19th century debate in the US Senate about monopolies, Senator John Sherman (of the 1890 Sherman Act) gave the war against monopolies equal importance to the recently won War of Independence from the British Crown:
If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.
The “harmful dominance” theory of antitrust (ie the idea that companies which dominate an industry are potentially harmful just because they are dominant, before they even start to abuse their dominant positions) led to the dismantling of several “empires”, including that of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company in the early 20th century.
But the power of the Varoufakis’ cloudalists vastly exceeds anything Rockefeller (oil), Carnegie (steel), Vanderbilt (railroads and shipping) and, of course, JP Morgan could muster even at the height of their influence.
Which brings me back to my original contention that the energy sector needs to be in public ownership. There may be many other “necessaries of life” which we may also want to consider bringing back into the public realm if their provision is otherwise going to slip beyond our regulatory grasp. Because the alternative is to relinquish any last vestiges of control over how we run our lives to puffed up billionaires. If you object to Elon Musk conducting polls about whether to stage a coup in the UK, then it is probably worth expending some effort on trying to stop someone like him deciding whether you can heat your home, cook a meal or charge your phone.
Imagine a super-hero who could not be killed. No I don’t mean Deadpool. A more apt name for our super-hero would be Deadmeat. Deadmeat is empirically dead, but, rather like the Monty Python parrot, is being energetically kept alive by the pretence of its continued existence amongst all of those around it. So much so that it becomes impolite to expose the pretence and point out that Deadmeat is in fact dead. If you really push, and someone likes you enough to want to give you an explanation, you will have a hand put on your shoulder and be led away to a corner to have the pretence explained to you. What that explanation turns out to be is something like this. Deadmeat is of course the Paris climate agreement from 2015 which committed 193 countries plus the EU to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C, and to keep them “well below” 2.0C above those recorded in pre-industrial times.
Deadmeat, it turns out, wasn’t shot. Deadmeat was overshot. Under overshoot, we bring the terrible thing back under control after it has done the damage and hope we can fix the damage at a later date. It’s a bit like the belief in cryopreservation or uploading our brains into cyberspace in the hope that we can have our bodies fixed with future medicine or be provided with artificial bodies. It means relying on science fiction to save us.
Andreas Malm and Wim Carton have considered this approach and how we got here in their latest book Overshoot. For me there are two big ideas in this book, although the account of how things definitively got away from us immediately post pandemic and exactly how that played out is mesmerising too. I thoroughly recommend a read.
The first big idea is the problem with the justification for overshoot in the first place, which is that at some point in the future we will be so much richer and more technologically advanced that it will be much easier to bring carbon dioxide levels down to sustainable levels than to try and stay within sustainable levels now. In what they call “The Contradiction of the Last Moment” Malm and Carton show how an intense fresh round of fossil fuel investment is almost certain to occur close to a temperature deadline (ie fossil fuel companies rushing to build more infrastructure while it is still allowed), whether it is 1.5 or 2 degrees or something higher. Then, as they put it “the interest in missing it will be overwhelmingly strong”. If an investment is 40 or 50 years old, then it might not be so disastrous to have it retired, but if a fossil fuel company has invested billions in the last few years in it? They will fight tooth and nail to keep it open and producing. And by prolonging the time until the retirement of fossil fuel infrastructure, the capital which has used the time to entrench its position and now owns a thousand new plants rather than a few hundred will be in a much stronger position to dictate policy. The longer we leave it, they argue, the harder it will become to retire fossil fuels, not easier.
The second big idea explains why, despite the enormous price collapse of solar power in particular, there is no Big Solar to compete with Big Oil. As they put it “there was no Microsoft or Apple or Facebook. More broadly, there was no Boulton & Watt of the flow, no Edison Machine Works, no Ford factories, no ascendant clusters of capital accumulation riding this wave.” The only remotely comparable company would be Tesla, but they produced cars. Why is this?
Malm and Carton talk about “the scissor”, the difference between the stock of the fossil fuel industry and the flow of renewable power. Fossil fuel’s “highly rivalrous goods: the consumption of one barrel of oil or one wagon-load of coal means that no one can ever consume it again. Every piece of fossil fuel burns once and once only. But supplies of sunlight and wind are in no way affected by any one consumer’s use.”
And this is the key I think. What economists call “public goods”, goods which are non-rivalrous (ie your use of the sun’s energy does not stop somebody else’s unless you put them in the shade) and non-excludable (ie you cannot easily stop someone else from using it, in this case by sticking a solar panel on their roof), are very difficult if not impossible to make a profit from. Private markets will therefore not provide these goods, possibly at all without extremely artificial regulation (something we have probably had enough of with our utilities in the UK) and certainly not in the quantity that will be required.
In Postcapitalism, Paul Mason discussed the options when the price mechanism disappears and additional units of output cannot be charged for. As he put it:
Technologically, we are headed for zero-price goods, unmeasurable work, an exponential takeoff in productivity and the extensive automation of physical processes. Socially, we are trapped in a world of monopolies, inefficiency, the ruins of a finance-dominated free market and a proliferation of “bullshit jobs”.
This also ties in with my own experience and others I have spoken to over the years about how hard it is to invest outside of fossil fuels and make a return.
Therefore if the private sector will not provide public goods and renewable power is predominantly a public good, then it follows that renewable power needs to be in public ownership. And if the climate crisis requires all power to be renewable and zero carbon, which it does, then it also follows that the entire power sector ultimately needs to be in public ownership too.
And then the motivation for overshoot becomes clear and how high the stakes are: not just the proceeds of the sale from one dead parrot as it turns out, but the future of private power generation. My fear is that the Deadmeat franchise may end up having as many sequels as Godzilla (38 and counting). With the potential to do rather more damage in the process.
Reconstructed image of Nebelivka (Forensic Architecture 2023)
One of the most idiotic things that Margaret Thatcher ever said is that “there is no alternative” or TINA, as it became known. More aimed at the “wets” in her own party than anyone else, it has become for some a statement of policy.
As David Wengrow pointed out at last year’s Hay Festival, talking about the excellent Dawn of Everything co-written with the late great David Graeber, of the 200,000 years of human history, the furthest back we can currently get back to and have some idea of how we might have lived is only around 30,000 years. Most of the other 170,000 years is a mystery to us. Have we always lived the way we do now? No, obviously not, even in the bit we do know about.
However the point the TINA people are making is that, once your society gets to a certain level of development and complexity, there is no alternative to the system of nation states operating within economies driven by globalised capital and all of the constraints that puts on any particular government’s policy options. So is that true?
Again apparently not. The Nebelivka Hypothesis exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which Forensic Architecture produced in partnership with David Wengrow, shows one example of a complex society which seemed to be constructed very differently:
Between the southern Bug and Dnieper rivers of central Ukraine, less than a metre below agricultural fields, geophysical surveys reveal the unsuspected legacy of 6,000-year-old settlements, similar in scale to the early cities of Mesopotamia. But these early Ukrainian cities are centre-less. Or rather, they are organised as concentric rings of domestic buildings, around a mysterious open space. No trace is found of temples, palaces, administration, rich burials, nor any other signs of centralised control or social stratification.
Even within the 30,000 years for which we have evidence, Graeber and Wengrow have shown how the archaeological evidence indicates that bureaucracy and hierarchy are not necessary in complex societies. Another prominent example of this, in addition to Nebelivka, is Poverty Point, in modern Louisiana. Constructed between 1700 and 1100 BCE by hunter gatherers, it had huge amphitheatres on a scale to match Athens but no temples or palaces.
There were other societies who flipped their social structure according to the seasons – for example, in the Great Plains in the main hunting seasons, when strict discipline was needed, a police force and hierarchy emerged, which then dissolved again when the need for it had passed.
Then there was Teotihuacan, a massive Aztec city of around 100,000 people where, until about 300, the colossal feats of engineering created pyramids and temples which had characterised the city up to that point stopped. Temples were desecrated and there was no new pyramid construction. Instead they started to build very high quality stone apartments for family units, with internal drainage, finely plastered floors and walls, providing comfortable accommodation for most of the city’s residents. Were they likely to be operating the same TINA system of the pyramid builders? It seems highly unlikely.
I had been struggling to imagine a society which flipped from one form of social organisation to another until I readThe Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers, about a Yorkshire valley in the 1760s. What both the TV adaptation (really a prequel of the book) by Shane Meadows and the book do in different but complementary ways is show how a society which had been working in one way might, under considerable pressure to survive, suddenly start operating in a completely different way with a totally different social hierarchy, switching from a rather ambivalent allegiance to King George III to a real devotion to the King David Hartley who had, at least temporarily, saved them from the starvation caused by the collapse of the wool market following the end of the Seven Years War in 1763.
The Cragg Vale Coiners’ attempts to evade detection led to a couple of murders before they were eventually hunted down by the authorities and that particular flipping of social organisation was snuffed out. How important it was that it was snuffed out is underlined by Christine Desan in the 18th century architecture of modern money, which describes this experimental time for money operating in the economy:
At the end of 17th century, the English resolved the debate over money they had conducted since the Restoration. For the first time, bank currency written against public debt circulated. It could be redeemed for silver or gold coin. That traditional medium—coin—would be reformed according to the notably non-traditionaltheory that it was a static amount of metal. An auxiliary kind of currency expressly based on the government’s own issue and promise of revenues, Exchequer bills, also began to circulate. The new order was a work in progress. In ways its authors only vaguely anticipated, the design was powerfully productive of modern capitalism.
So it seems that there are always alternatives.
Meanwhile one of the most pernicious examples of TINA is in response to the challenge of climate change. Chris Shaw’s appearance at the Dark Times Academy launch yesterday reminded me of this. Chris was talking about his book, Liberalism and the Challenge of Climate Change. In a wide ranging talk, he discussed the problem with the cult of the individual that liberalism has created getting in the way of collectivist approaches to shared problems like climate change. The book looks at how the philosophical and ideological challenge climate change poses to the legitimacy of free-market liberalism has been marginalised, closing off the possibility of imagining a different kind of future for humanity. Text book TINA.
And this is a particularly ridiculous use of TINA, when it is so obvious that there are alternatives to the relentless increase in habitat (including our own) and biodiversity destruction in lock-step with the ever-increasing and intoxicating levels of carbon we are filling the global atmosphere with. I discussed some of the arguments raging amongst those grappling with these challenges in my previous blog. But, rather than joining the discussion about the huge societal changes needed, we are instead told that fiscal rules are the priority for the current government and that any green new deal spending will need to wait until “later in the parliament”.
As Chancellor, Rachel Reeves has gone further, with a phrase which I really hope does not come to define this government:
If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.
This appears to be a deliberate, almost Animal-Farm-level, reversal of the famous quote from Keynes (from a 1942 talk for the BBC – transcript sourced from here):
Let us not submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income … Why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital … an ample theater, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, cafes, and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford. … We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life? …
Yet these must be only the trimmings on the more solid, urgent and necessary outgoings on housing the people, on reconstructing industry and transport and on replanning the environment of our daily life. Not only shall we come to possess these excellent things. With a big programme carried out at a regulated pace we can hope to keep employment good for manyyears to come. We shall, in fact, have built our New Jerusalem out of the labour which in our former vain folly we were keeping unused and unhappy in enforced idleness.
If we really are the complex sophisticated developed society that we think we are, then it’s time to put a tiara on Tina and start seriously discussing alternative approaches to all our problems.
The biggest battle in the climate sphere used to be between climate deniers and climate scientists, perhaps the battle we are most used to. Some, like Michael Mann for instance, are still earnestly fighting this one, but at the recent UK election, only 14% of voters opted for the one climate denial party (Reform). In fact the climate deniers are now more frequently climate denier deniers, ie denying they are or ever have been denying.
I think Solnit clarifies most starkly what her argument is all about when she talks about hope:
Hope is not happiness or confidence or inner peace; it’s a commitment to search for possibilities.
However Bendell is also focused on searching for possible solutions. He quotes the Kenyan climate activist, Dr Nyambura Mbau, who argues that “The millions of people being uprooted by climate change do not benefit from the ‘stubborn optimism’ of environmental elites. Instead, they will be better served by the stubborn realism of the experts and activists now brave enough to call for urgent degrowth in rich countries and fair adaptation everywhere.”
Then there is that increasingly less marginal idea of degrowth. Only this week, James Meadway, Aashis Joshi and Jason Hickel had a fairly heated exchange on X about the recent paper by Hickel and Sullivan called How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis. Joshi felt that the degradation already caused by climate change made the outcomes possible via better distribution of wealth suggested by Hickel and Sullivan unachievable. One of Hickel’s tweeted responses went like this:
To say you’re happy to live in a world where you get to use a phone and laptop, but these should be actively denied to people who don’t have them because… ecological collapse might happen? Not acceptable.
I saw another take on this by Chris Shaw earlier today at the Dark Times Academy launch event. He seemed to share many of the views set out by Bendell above, and his book, Liberalism and the Challenge of Climate Change, goes further in suggesting that liberalism cannot provide us with acceptable climate solutions as long as it continues to present net zero as solving all our problems rather than as the least worst option that will still leave us with a much depleted global environment. His dismissal of degrowth revolved around the lack of narrative of how we get from here to there, specifically the dramatic movement of political power that would be required. However amongst the academics presenting their new courses for the Academy, Piers Locke’s Future Thriving looked like it would present some challenges to Shaw’s critique.
It seems to me that there is room for different takes on the optimism/realism axis here. For instance Simon Sharpe’s excellent Five Times Faster, while not shying away from the size of the task ahead on decarbonising, definitely has a feel-good quality to it. It is designed to wake us up to the possibilities offered to us by exponential technological change and social tipping points. By contrast, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ Sustainability Group’s publication earlier this year, Climate Scorpion – the sting is in the tail, is all about waking people up to a higher level of climate risk than they may previously have been aware of. Meanwhile Sir David King, former UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, is currently Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group and founded the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge. He set out his thoughts about where we are here.
So there are many shades of hope and despair on show here (I could obviously have mentioned many more that the few picked out here). What really matters is how fast and how radically we can act as a global species to the climate emergency. And the UK would make a good start if it stopped pretending that £22 billion is a lot of money for a developed country to find.
The latest publication from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) is called Beyond the next Parliament: The case for long-term policymaking. It refers to a number of previous reports, such as the Great Risk Transfer report from April 2021 and the two more recent climate papers (here and here), all of which contained much thoughtful analysis even if I did not always agree with all of the recommendations.
The case for long-term policymaking is certainly something that needs to be made loudly and often, although I was perhaps expecting some discussion of concepts like cathedral thinking, ie a capacity to plan and implement projects over multiple generations, or intergenerational justice, an issue of particular importance when discussing responses to climate change, in tying these various reports together within a long-term narrative. The Good Ancestor by Roman Krzanic is a great starting point for considering such questions.
Instead the IFoA have chosen to go in a different direction entirely in linking this previous work together, displaying imprisonment by current short-term political thinking in a paper supposedly focused on the long-term to such an extent that I am now left feeling that I disagree with them about nearly everything.
Take pensions, for instance (bold type is mine):
With the decline of defined benefit (DB) pension schemes, the responsibility for investment and longevity risk is increasingly being placed on the individual.
In a world where responsibility for funding retirement is increasingly being placed on the individual, there is remarkably little consistent consumer information about how much someone should save into their pension, or what a ‘good’ pension pot constitutes.
The IFoA remains concerned that many UK households are not saving enough for later life, are not accessing free guidance or paid-for financial advice, and remain ill-equipped to deal with the risk of running out of money in retirement.
It is almost as if the transfer of risk to individuals is something inevitable, or beyond the ability of mere humans to control. In the words of the late great John Sullivan, in the theme song from Only Fools and Horses:
Cause where it all comes from is a mystery. It’s like the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea.
Why Only Fools and Horses you ask? Well have you ever heard a better description of defined contribution pensions than:
No income tax, no VAT. No money back, no guarantee
The IFoA’s main concern is that UK households are not doing enough about this new “responsibility” to provide for their own retirement. And the state? The state pension is mentioned only once here:
Naturally, the next UK Government will need to address the adequacy question as part of a wider pensions strategy for the UK that also considers big questions such as thesustainability of the State Pension and the triple lock.
This of course is so-called “positive economics” in action, which makes much of only relying on objective data analysis, but within a policy framework which is not up for discussion. Increased state provision, which one would have thought would at least need to be considered in the mix in this case, is reduced to obsessive focus on tiny questions like the triple lock while being kept generally outside this policy framework. Instead we get this:
We recommend that the government should reinvigorate its public messaging around minimum pension saving levels – particularly through workplace auto-enrolment pension schemes – to ensure that consumers are not lulled into a false sense of security as to whether their pension saving will be adequate to achieve their retirement income goals. In doing so, government should use expertise and evidence on testing behavioural responses to different messages and channels, to identify those that are most effective in impacting saving behaviour.
So at a time when, according to the Resolution Foundation, the marginal rate for low to middle income households have an effective marginal rate of tax of 63%, the IFoA apparently think it is acceptable to push the cost onto them even more in order to achieve a sufficient pension at retirement. A certain cost and uncertain benefit. It is not a basis for a minimum income guarantee.
The second section sets out the problems associated with long-term care, again asking for a greater contribution by individuals via an expansion of insurance and savings-based financial products.
We are back to the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea in the next section on keeping pace with rapid digital transformation, which states that:
there has been a trend away from broad risk pools and toward more granular pricing based on an individual’s specific rating factors (i.e. their risk characteristics)
Note the use of the passive tense there – it implies that noone is responsible and there is no way we can swim against this current back up to those old broad risk pools however hard we try. And so we shouldn’t try. The only option is to instead try and lower the premiums at the bottom end a bit – which is explained in their other report, The hidden risks of being poor: the poverty premium in insurance. The model for this is Flood Re, which is explained here. Of course this probably won’t work if you are underinsured as, it seems, 80% of us are.
Section 3 remains one I can cheer about, laying out more clearly than I have seen before to the financial community the risks of climate change, with the work on biodiversity at a somewhat earlier stage. However a framework is immediately assembled in the next section, Going for growth to build a better Britain (a slogan which I am sure Liz Truss would have been quite happy with), to limit the options for tackling these risks. An example:
Even though there is evidence that infrastructure development can promote growth and job creation, governments may be forced to defer such funding until the national balance sheet looks healthier. Although governments may be partially able to finance infrastructure projects, given their capital constraints they also need to attract investment from the private sector.
Unbelievably, the rest of this section then focuses almost entirely on what can be done to lure the private sector into investing in preventing their own doom (not framed in those terms of course, but in terms of boosting growth rather than curbing emissions) along with everybody else’s. As long as private investors are looked after, everything else seems to be a secondary consideration. John Sullivan again:
C’est magnifique, Hooky Street.
Of course I am just having a bit of fun here with the Only Fools and Horses references and I am certainly not suggesting that everyone involved in financial markets is a Del Boy looking to take advantage of every punter or government that comes their way. That would be a caricature as gross as referring to the “dead hand of the state” or talking about public servants as “The Blob”. What I am saying is that the jostle of the market place cannot be the primary solution to many of the problems so accurately analysed here.
I realise I have been very slow to fully appreciate the IFoA’s general direction of travel, but by putting all of these reports together in one place they have clarified this for me. I believe that the overall programme of recommendations here would condemn the poor to further immiseration and uncertainty while letting government largely off the hook for solutions and companies largely off the hook in terms of further regulation. It would further accelerate the financialisation of our economy with the promise of additional financial markets to be exploited by the already wealthy.
This is not acting in the public interest but as a cheerleader for protecting the long-term profits of fund managers. And I despair that, three years on from the IFoA’s Economics Member Interest Group coming into existence, there should still be so little pluralism on display here in economic thinking that this is regarded as a balanced narrative.
It is clear to me that views outside the IFoA’s current policy framework will need to come from elsewhere. I am currently researching a paper on alternative approaches to pensions provision with Alan Swallow which I hope we will be able to publish something about soon.
Source: One of Henrique Alvim Corrêa’s 1906 illustrations of War of the Worlds. HG Wells himself approved of these incredible drawings, praising them before their publication and saying, “Alvim Corrêa did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen.”
“We are living inside the imagination of our ancestors” said Gaia Vince in an article earlier this year. I was reminded of this more recently when Sandy Trust said something very similar in his excellent presentation on climate scenarios ahead of the publication of the The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios, which highlights how most climate-change scenario modelling in financial services excludes the possibility of tipping points and secondary impacts of climate change, thereby substantially underplaying the risk of us ending up with a hothouse earth scenario.
So I decided to remind myself of the imagination of one of our more imaginative ancestors and read The War of the Worlds. Despite having recently watched both the 2005 Spielberg/Tom Cruise film and the BBC adaptation, I found the content of the book quite surprising – much more focused on how the society of 1895 dealt with the Martians than the aliens themselves.
Wells delights in revealing the imagined human response at each stage. From concern about Martians trapped in their spacecraft in a pit near Woking, to sending a deputation to negotiate with it, to satisfying ourselves that they cannot escape their landing crater after their “Heat-Ray” has massacred 40 people surrounding it. As he puts it:
So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. “We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.”
That was on the Friday. By Saturday night there was still more interest in the breakdown of a train between Byfleet and Woking junction than in whether this had anything to do with Martians. The lack of response continues:
I have read, in another account of these events, that on Sunday morning “all London was electrified by the news from Woking”. As a matter of fact, there was nothing to justify that very extravagant phrase. Plenty of Londoners did not hear of the Martians until the panic of Monday morning. Those who did took some time to realize all that the hastily worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed. The majority of people in London do not read Sunday papers.
Wells has a theory:
The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed in the Londoner’s mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of course in the papers, that they could read without any personal tremors: “About seven o’clock last night the Martians came out of the cylinder, and, moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have completely wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details are known. Maxims have been absolutely useless against their armour; the field-guns have been disabled by them. Flying hussars have been galloping into Chertsey. The Martians appear to be moving slowly towards Chertsey or Windsor. Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey, and earthworks are being thrown up to check the advance London-ward.”
By Monday morning London is being evacuated in the wake of death and destruction. Wells could not sound more contemporary if he were to give his views about Lockdown or responses to the climate emergency. And we can look at these Londoners from nearly 130 years ago and see ourselves, busily discounting the far greater saturation of 24 hour television news, radio and social media and reading, watching and listening to the dire warnings of our own time “without any personal tremors”.
But if our children are going to be living inside our imagination, then what are we offering them? Ursula K Le Guin, in a talk originally called “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” and then changed to “The Question I Get Asked Most Often”, said this:
“The imagination can transfigure the dark matter of life. And in many personal essays and autobiographies, that’s what I begin to miss, to crave: transfiguration. To recognise our shared, familiar misery is not enough. I want to recognize something I never saw before. I want the vision to leap out at me, terrible and blazing – the fire of the transfiguring imagination. I want the true dragons.”
And that transfiguration of our experience, to embrace things we never saw before but can imagine, must happen in our stories initially. But if the stories are good enough they can then spread – to our homes, our workplaces, other places we meet our friends and people who aren’t our friends, to our politics, our economics, our society.
Roman Kznaric’s asks in his book, The Good Ancestor, whether there is an antidote to political myopia. His response is that there is and it lies in attempting to establish what he calls “deep democracy”.
In 2009, The Observer newspaper reported that a letter had been sent to the Queen after she demanded, during a visit to the London School of Economics in November 2008, to know why nobody had anticipated the credit crunch. There was one particularly telling sentence which was picked up widely at the time:
In summary, your majesty, the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.
To force our children to live inside our current imagination is to force them to live in a world stunted by the ever increasing influence and share of our head space which can be bought by the ever shrinking group of people we allocate our wealth to. But somewhere between the transfiguring imagination Le Guin talks about and the practical proposals of Kznaric and others, it seems to me that there is the first draft of an imagination which our children could live inside.
