Nine documents, two parenthetic texts, and a birthday

Introduction

I’ve been sorting through some old boxes.  It’s part of the process.  Age, leave some sort of trail, scoop the trail into piles – some physical, some psychological, some virtual – and store.  From time to time the storage capacity is reached, or the stores themselves evolve or disappear.  Move house a few times, change computers, throw a few 3.5 inch disks in a shoebox, forget the password on an old memory stick, chuck a whole load of documents that seem important into a packing box and put the box in the loft and then leave the house and then collect the box and then move house again and then finally sit down with the box and peer inside.

How long has it been?

Some of this stuff has very obviously to be thrown away.  Some, equally, must be kept.  Some of it is valuable in and of itself; some might prove to be valuable in due course and I don’t want some later me to be cross with this present me.  I also know, the hard way, that a later me won’t necessarily recall what has been thrown away, so I do have some leeway.

Maybe, too, there are new piles implied by this latest sort.  This pile, for example, seems to contain essays from university; this pile from school.  Once upon a time it made some sort of sense to me to keep them separate: now, not so sure.

The floor of the living room slowly fills with 2023 edition piles.  Sometimes there is fission among piles, sometimes fusion.  Certainly there is a significant pile of stuff that is now ready to be discarded – though that, too, has a sub-division, between that which can simply be added to the recycling and that which must more carefully be destroyed.

One pile emerges with immediate ramifications: texts, of varying forms, retained at various points over the past decade or three, which seem worthy of a read, or a re-read, right now.  Something about them – I do not dwell too fiercely on the what – suggests that there may be some immediate value in their contents.

It makes me think of that wonderful process of the holiday reading, which comprises the mystery by which these books are selected at this time for this holiday.  Is the pattern that always emerges inherent to the process?  And, if so, where does its inherence most fiercely lie?  In the moments when first I acquired the books?  In the manner in which they remained in one or other tsundoku?  As I mulled over my holiday reading, as I first built the long list, as I selected the actual books that would travel with me, as I selected those books that I would actually read?

Is there really a pattern, or have I simply created one in order to cope?

Suddenly, on the sitting room floor in 2023, there a small pile of documents that have presented themselves for reading, right now.  I assume that there will be eleven, but it turns out there are nine.  Ah, I realise, that’s because I will need one section (this one) for the introduction, and one at the end for the outroduction.  Clever stuff.

All I need now is a train journey or somesuch, which the universe kindly provided on Monday: a bus from Maldon to Chelmsford, a train from Chelmsford to Liverpool Street, the Elizabeth Line from Liverpool Street to Bond Street, then the Jubilee Line to West Hampstead.  I arrived early (for a meeting of the good ship Youth Environment Service [on whose Steering Committee I have the privilege of sitting] at the offices of the marvellous Pears Foundation in the company of our wonderful host Bridget Kohner) which meant I had time for a splendid breakfast and the opportunity to finish reading the documents.

Here - following a brief pictorial interlude which acknowledges, on the occasion of my birthday, that I am now somewhat older than the chap in this photograph - is what I learned.

Document One - Bad Habits & Hard Choices

I’ve actually been responsible for three documents with the phrase ‘Bad Habits’ in the title.  The second, ‘Bad Habits & Hard Choices’, was a survey-based report published by Brook Lyndhurst in (checks the back) 2004.  It was sub-titled ‘In search of sustainable lifestyles’ and I thought, with nearly twenty years having slid by, it might be worth a quick once-over.

“The people of Britain don’t appear to behave in a very sustainable way,” it begins.  “We don’t recycle as much as our European partners; we drive our cars all the time; we’re wasteful with energy, consumer goods and resources of all kinds; and most of us live lifestyles that manage somehow to despoil the environment and promote social inequality at the same time.

Why do we do this?  Is it because we don’t believe that environmental issues are important?  Or because they might cost us money we’d rather spend on other things?  Or because we’re too busy?  Or too bored?

Maybe we don’t have enough choice: what kind of environmental choices do the people of Britain really have – and do we really want them?

And if the people of Britain did want to be able to make ‘good’ environmental choices, what kind of help might they need?  Leaflets? Money? Instruction? Should they help themselves, or is it someone else’s job?”

The rest of the report tries to address these questions, and I have to say that, by and large, the whole thing felt as though it could have been written yesterday.  

Which was, as I sat on the bus trundling through the Essex countryside, both warming (that is, I felt smug at having written it) and terrifying (that so little has changed).

PS I ditched the ampersand for the third outing without really noticing and the title of the book about obesity and Smart VAT is simply ‘Bad Habits, Hard Choices’.

Document Two – Help Yourself

This is a photocopied article from the RSA Journal issue 4, 2014, by Vincent Deary.  Jumping out at me from half-way down the second column is the paragraph which starts:

“We are not good enough patients, and we are barely adequate as people.  We lack character.  But don’t worry, there’s a policy for that.”

The whole article is a bit like that – funny, tender, clever, thoughtful.  Deary is concerned about our lack of security: the ideological Zeitgeist says that this endlessly turbulent world is something we must simply and Stoically cope with rather than strive to improve.  There is no respite.  The lack of security eats at our innards.  It reminds me of the thing Lord Stern said at that event at the British Academy: the most corrosive thing in human life is ‘anxiety’.

Document Three – Conscious Closure

This turns out not to be a weird Goop-like thing, but is from the same zone of north American positive psychological reflection.  It’s by Vanessa Reid, who’s Canadian, and who I met once upon a time or two in the early days of Smart CSOs.  The document seems to be from around 2010 and it outlines her experience, and the lessons she drew from that experience, as she and her colleagues closed down a magazine.

That makes it sound awkward, or a bit silly, or it evokes some sort of ‘Eh?’ response.  Maybe her intro is better:

“How do we know it is time to bring our work or organisation to completion?  And how do we actually go about doing it?  What does it mean to steward our organisations though their life cycles, including the phase of dying, completion, release?”

She’s a leadership guru, so she is of course focused on organisations, but I feel this has a wider relevance: yes, it applies to e.g. Brook Lyndhurst, it having gone ‘virtual’ an incredible seven years ago now; but does it not also say something about the death of ideas, or people, or projects?

Document Four – New Paradigm Economics

Downloaded from ‘real world economics review’, issue 65, and dated 2013, a two-page article by Edward Fullbrook (mastermind of the review in question) which he explains thus:

“This little piece is indebted to the hundreds of new-paradigm economists who have published papers in this journey.”

The ‘little piece’ consists of a single table, in two columns.  On the left-hand side, ten characteristics under the heading ‘Old Paradigm Economics’; on the right, paired to each of those on the left, a characteristic of ‘New Paradigm Economics’.  Thus, on the left:

“Anti-pluralist (as in classical physics)”

and on the right:

“Pluralist (as in modern physics)”

It is the sort of one-pager (there is a second page, comprising footnotes for the ten characteristics) that you should have stuck up on the wall, acting as an aide memoire like Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium or Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion projection world map.  And indeed that’s exactly where it lived for several years, and to where it now – this minute – returns. 

Document Five – Economics and the Good Life: Keynes and Schumacher

Twelve pages of sheer bloody poetry from the sadly and recently-deceased Professor Victoria Chick.  Reading it filled my soul with hope.

(Prof Chick was one of the great authorities on Keynes, and once told me at a seminar to come and join her ‘on the naughty table’.)

From the 2013 edition of Economic Thought 2.2, the abstract gives you the gist (of both the content and the style) (oh, the style!  It’s like a practical demonstration of what Calasso means):

“It is, I think, interesting to compare the views of E F Schumacher and J M Keynes on the ethical aspects of economics – both the economic systems of which they were a part and economics as a subject.  Both agreed that economics (as commonly understood and taught) applied only to a limited sphere of life.  They agreed about the role of profits, the market and the love of money.  And they both believed that there was much more to life than getting and spending.  For Keynes, economic activity was the means to bring society to a position where the good life could be enjoyed.  Schumacher was even more ambitious: he thought economic activity should be made part of the good life.”

I could happily quote from it at length, but will confine myself (for reasons that will quickly become obvious) to:

“To Keynes, economic activity was merely a means to an end: a good life, where there is time for ‘friendship and the contemplation of beautiful objects’. He was content with the economics of enough – enough to provide for needs so that the good things of life could be enjoyed.”

[The quotation from Keynes comes from his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.]

Chick points out, however: “In his own life, [Keynes] earned far more than was necessary”… and “it takes self-confidence to dismiss keeping up with the Joneses and base ones self-esteem on other values.  Keynes had plenty of self-confidence – and plenty of non-material values.”

Document Six – Towards a Common Theory of Value

A photocopy of an article from the journal ‘Kosmos’, dated 2011, by James B Quilligan.

Do not bother reading this article.  It is a mix of impenetrable gobbledegook, proto-Ken Wilber philosophising, pseudo-deep diagrams and New Age drivel.  I hope Mr Quilligan has recovered and is now spending more time in the company of others.

Document Seven – Failure Report

Also from 2011, this annual report from the Canadian international development charity ‘Engineers without Borders’ brings together short pieces from a dozen or so practitioners, each detailing something from the previous year that has gone wrong.

As Sarah Elizabeth Lewis in her Foreword puts it:

“The competition to secure funding has… created a palpable reticence to disclose failures and mistakes.  Yet, try as we might to eliminate failure from the natural process of achieving any goal, we instinctively seem to know that learning from it has a transformative, irreplaceable, propellant power.  The gift of failure is a riddle.  Like the number zero it can be both the void and the start of infinite possibility.  So how do we multiply something by zero and increase its value?  How exactly does a setback become an aid?  As it turns out, there is a way.”

Excitement!  How beautiful is that?  You almost don’t need to read the report, the idea of the report is enough: if you were wrong, say so.  (And I did!  The first Post-It I put up in the meeting I attended at the Pears Foundation said “I WAS WRONG”.)

Document Eight – RSA Changemakers

Dated February 2012, this twenty-six page report was part of the RSA’s Citizen Power project from back in the days of David Cameron and the Big Society.  The Executive Summary’s big writing bit says:

“The results of our surveying indicate that such individuals are adept at driving positive change in their local area.  They appear rooted in their communities, have an impressive repertoire of capabilities, and are instilled with an appetite to apply their skills and experience to address local issues.”

Eh?

I have to be careful here.  I am a Fellow of the RSA, in fact I’ve been a Fellow since about 1992 or 93.  I was also a big fan of the new Chief Executive, Andy Haldane, during his days as a daring and heterodox-curious economist at the Bank of England.

But Haldane has pissed me off big-time since he arrived at the RSA; and the RSA’s relentless earnestness, and conviction of its rectitude, have long grated at my nervous system.  Add to that the fact that I have actually done some proper research into the issues covered in this report (notably for Defra in the 2005-2010 period) AND the fact that I know a little about Peterborough, the place in which the RSA conducted their ‘surveying’, and it is perhaps no surprise that this report rendered me cross, annoyed, bored, frustrated, disappointed, disheartened...

Hmm.

Paper Nine – NBER Working Paper 17994

Now THIS is what I’m talking about: “The World our Grandchildren Will Inherit: The Rights Revolution and Beyond” by Daron Acemoglu.  Acemoglu is (it says here) a Turkish-born American economist at MIT.  More importantly (from my NBER-inspired point of view) he’s one of those top, top minds that not only has a really solid-grounding and reputation in his chosen area of expertise, but also has the appetite to venture a little outside that area and the wisdom not to go too far.  On page 19 of this paper he writes:

“The honest answer is that I don’t know.”

The rest of the paper sketches his argument that the socio-economic history of the past century can best be told by referring to the relentless and in some cases dramatic progress of rights around the world – and by rights he is talking about human rights, political rights, secure property rights and so on.  He uses that argument then to hazard a guess at the rough shape of the next hundred or so years.

The paper came out in April 2012, so before Trump, before Brexit, before Covid, before the war in Ukraine, so some of it feels a little dated.  In particular, it has an optimism that feels… awkward.  In the matter of climate change, especially, it borders on naïve.

But it seems to me – as one who worked on a report called ‘Towards 2020’ back in 1990, and who has just published a Utopian novel – that we need this kind of thinking in the world, and we need people like Acemoglu to take the risk.

After all – as we learned from the Canadians above – getting things wrong is an essential part of learning to get them right.

Outroduction

So!  What was all that about?

The main answer is, of course: I don’t know.

But a few things strike me:-

First, we need to keep discussing values and virtues.

Second, we have to focus on anxiety - its determinants and its cures.

Third, it's amazing how long some things take to change.

Fourth, we really do need to figure out how to do 'enough'.