The Imagination of our Ancestors

27. July 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Climate Change, COVID-19, Economics, Science Fiction
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.

A pandemic of economic stories

21. July 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Climate Change, Economics
Source: Maya Eilam. You can purchase a poster of this image at https://tenderhuman.com/shop/shapes-of-stories-by-kurt-vonnegut-infographic-print-and-poster

I first came across Maya Eilam’s fabulous infographic of Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 story shapes in 2016. Kurt himself wrote his master’s thesis on it which was rejected by the University of Chicago, and once described it as his “prettiest contribution” to culture – you can find further details about the idea in this article by Stephen Johnson.

The reason I bring Kurt’s story shapes up now is that I have been struck by how, instead of stories making shapes, the shapes are now making our stories. Take inflation, for example.

Yesterday we were told that the headline inflation rate (that average of an average of an average which disguises a continued food inflation rate above 17% alongside much else driven by the manic desire to reduce all inflationary pressures within the economy down to a single number) had fallen further than expected to 7.9%. Cue media stories about the Bank of England being under less pressure to raise interest rates further and the Daily Express to confuse inflation falling (ie the percentage increase in prices falling from one positive number to a slightly smaller positive number) with prices falling.

Last month it was all about Rishi Sunak telling us to hold our nerve and that there was no alternative. In May we apparently had an inflation “surprise” with sugar and milk in particular soaring. In April, the Mirror described inflation as a “living nightmare” and in March the BBC were reflecting on how the hyper-inflation in Germany in 1923 had shaped economies and politics in the 100 years since. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut says throughout Slaughterhouse 5.

Behind all of these stories and the frequent use of the word “surprise” lie expectations of the story arc. These have been partly set by the OBR forecasts from November last year:

This is then compared, month by month in forensic detail, with the emerging reality from the ONS:

Source: ONS

This is despite us being fairly early in the OBR’s narrative and broadly following the suggested trajectory, although not as quickly as either the Bank of England or Rishi Sunak’s pledge need it to be. We appear to want our fairy stories to be quite precisely predictable at times.

But which of Vonnegut’s story shapes are we in? Sunak must hope he is Man in Hole and will eventually escape to the sunlit uplands, whereas many of us fear that he is instead condemning us to the From Bad to Worse narrative arc. Under these circumstances, muddying the waters and gaslighting are reasonably successful policies for the government as they can tip us into the less electorally damaging Which Way Is Up? as a story, a strategy employer very successfully by first Big Tobacco and then Big Oil to stop us acting in our own best interests for decades. If you also bring in Brexit, then you are starting to talk about the creation myths on the second row.

Our economics and politics are driven by the stories we tell ourselves. Therefore, to create economic and political change, we need to create new stories to tell. Which brings me to Neil Gaiman and his suggestion that the stories may be living off us as much as we are living off them:

You can just view people as this peculiar byproduct that stories use to breed. Really, it’s the stories that are the life-form — they are older than us, they are smarter than us, they keep going. But they need human beings to reproduce, much as we need food… we need things to keep ourselves alive. Maybe stories really are like viruses…

If stories really are like viruses, then I would really like a vaccine to roll out against some of the economic stories active in the population. The pandemic of daft economic ideas about the cost of climate change for instance, or the idea that a country’s debt is like a household’s. Both have been regularly debunked only to keep returning, often in slightly mutated form, to live amongst us again.

The Government is using the latest pay increase to actually reduce its funding to the NHS for the second year running

19. July 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Economics
Pinhead and spikes wait on a bench outside the doctor's room

NHS pay is supposed to be set with reference to the recommendations by the NHS Pay Review Body. The terms of reference of this body, often referred to as “independent”, mean that they are unlikely to make truly unaffordable recommendations, as two of their six considerations in making any recommendations are as follows:

  • the funds available to the Health Departments as set out in the Government’s Departmental Expenditure Limits; and
  • the Government’s inflation target.

Despite this, as recently as last month, Helen Whately, the minister of state for social care, was saying that the “government has to look overall at what is affordable”, adding that the PM has said ministers must be “responsible with the public finances…We take the advice and recommendations from the pay review bodies, but you’ll understand that government has to be responsible with the public finances. That’s why I can’t say here and now what the outcome of the whole process is going to be”.

The Government then finally confirmed that it would accept the recommendations of the Pay Review Body (report here), but that:

The government will fund this pay award through prioritisation within existing departmental budgets, with front line services being protected.

Existing budgets in the NHS were set on the basis of a 3.5% pay rise, rather than the 6% for most doctors, 8.1-10.3% for junior doctors and 5% for senior leaders which has been agreed. So it will mean a reduction in non pay budgets to meet the shortfall.

The NHS Confederation’s response is that:

If health leaders are expected to raid their own budgets to somehow plug this funding gap at local levels, it will almost certainly result in cutbacks to patient care elsewhere.

What they didn’t say was that the government will effectively be reducing their net spending on the NHS by not funding the award. As Richard Murphy has pointed out:

Firstly, all of these pay awards will be taxed. They extra pay will be the top part of a person’s pay. It’s likely that tax of 20% and NIC of 12% will be paid by each employee as a result.

On top of that employer’s NIC of 13.8% will be paid. In other words, of the gross cost (pay plus employer’s NIC), just over 40% will return to the Treasury in tax.

It makes no sense, in that case, to refuse that 40% back to the departments that are paying these people.

And that is even before you take into account indirect taxation and multiplier effects.

Not only does it make no sense for the government to use this of all moments to reduce their net contribution to the NHS, it also clearly goes against the wishes of the majority of voters. 82% think more funding is needed and support is found across all age groups, UK nations and across the political spectrum (63% among Conservative voters and 94% of Labour voters).

The main reason given by the government is that it “balances the need to keep inflation in check while giving some staff significant pay increases.” If that “balance” is achieved by robbing Peter of his operation due to a lack of beds or equipment in order to pay Dr Paul, then what sort of an achievement is that? And why, if the government are not prepared to actually fund the pay review body recommendations, do they have a say in whether they are accepted or not?

And this is not the first time. In July 2022, the failure to fully fund the recommended pay increase led, according to the NHS Confederation, to a shortfall of £1.8 billion, adding to the shortfall already due to inflation and increasing energy costs of over £4 billion. Then, as now, these increased costs will need to be absorbed by already over-stretched individual NHS trusts.

This will mean further additional avoidable deaths and more record waiting lists. It is a policy which is anything but balanced.

Sleaford-upon-Sea and the future none of us wants

05. July 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Climate Change, Demographics, Economics, Prediction, Science Fiction
https://coastal.climatecentral.org/map/9/0.0491/52.7048/?theme=warming&map_type=decadal_slr&basemap=roadmap&contiguous=true&elevation_model=best_available&esl_model=ipcc_2021&percentile=p50&refresh=true&slr_year=2100&temperature_rise=2.7&temperature_unit=C

The year is 2100. Earth is approaching a peak population of 9.5 billion people. Despite some notable progress in decarbonising our activities and more progress on carbon capture of various types than expected 80 years ago, overall we have not managed to shift much off the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) middle-of-the-road shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP2). Some countries have done much better than others, with income inequality a problem both within and between them. Carbon emissions stayed fairly level until 2050 before starting to fall, but net zero has still not been achieved.1

Temperatures have risen by 2.7 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels. Africa has split between a north which has seen a recovery of rainfall and a south which is no longer habitable for humans. The Indian monsoon rains have failed. The Himalayan glaciers providing the waters of the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow rivers have reduced by 90% from their pre-industrial levels.

The Amazonian rain forest basin has dried out completely. In Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia, East Peru and Bolivia life has become increasingly difficult due to wild fires. Drought is now permanent in the sub-tropics and Central America. Australia has become the world’s driest nation.

In the US Gulf of Mexico high sea temperatures drive 180+ mph winds.2 Flooding is widespread with sea levels having risen by 0.6 metres on average compared to 2020.3 Many plant species have become extinct as they were unable to adapt to such a sudden change in climate.

Food prices continue to soar, with temperatures, droughts and the inundation of arable land adversely affecting many crops. Massive migrations have led to increasingly severe military and police responses from the most popular destination countries. There is fear that we have not yet seen the end of the terrible costs of climate change, with temperatures continuing to rise.

England has a new Eastern coastline, which became a certainty once the decision was taken that the cost benefit analysis did not justify the expense on the massive coastal defences which would have been required to prevent it. Sleaford is now a seaside town. Birmingham is the only major city which has not been significantly affected by sea level rise4 and there are calls for the capital to be moved there. However London hangs grimly on following the failure of the Thames Barrier in the 2040s. An Intertidal Property Pricing Index (IPPI) has sprung up, which sucks in money as investors bet on the development opportunities in the aftermath of the catastrophe.5

This, or something like it, is the future we are currently on track for but none of us wants. So let’s change the trajectory.

Notes:

  1. The IPCC’s SSP2 narrative description.
  2. Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future On A Hotter Planet, Harper Perennial, 2008 for the scientific consensus at the time on the consequences of 3 degrees warming
  3. https://sealevel.nasa.gov/ipcc-ar6-sea-level-projection-tool?type=global (accessed 5 July 2023)
  4. https://coastal.climatecentral.org/ (accessed 5 July 2023) for the maps of England following 2.7 degrees warming by 2100 following current trajectories
  5. IPPI borrowed from Kim Stanley Robinson’s depiction of a future New York after two pulses totalling 15 metres (50 feet) of sea level rise in New York 2140, Orbit, 2018