The Talanoa Dialogue on Climate Change

Background

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is a treaty between essentially every national government on earth and is the collective response of humanity to climate change. Every year the 197 governments that are party to this agreement meet in what are called a ‘Conference of the Parties’ (or COP). The next meeting (to be held in Poland in December) will be the 24th COP.

Confusingly, “UNFCCC” is also the name of the United Nations Secretariat charged with supporting the operations of the convention and the COPs. The 197 governments get together once a year and it’s up to the UNFCCC Secretariat to organise it all and to mediate, negotiate and politic though this maze of interests to come up with a coherent position that all can or will adopt. The 2015 Paris Climate Accord was such an agreement.

At the last meeting (COP 23) one of the things that the 197 governments voted to do was to start a “facilitative dialogue” (decision 1/CP.21, paragraph 20). This ‘Talanoa Dialogue’ (named after a Pacific Island word for inclusive, participatory and transparent discussion) is intended to be “constructive, facilitative and solutions oriented“. It is open to ‘non-party stakeholders’ (i.e. everybody) and it essentially involves making a submission through a dedicated website. These submissions will be discussed (along with a lot of other things) at an advance meeting this May, and will then be summarised in a synthesis report for discussion at the COP24 meeting in December. The deadline for submissions for discussion in the May pre-conference is April 2nd. In practical terms that’s two weeks from this Friday.

Current Situation

It’s not easy to find the UNFCCC Talanoa Dialogue website (it’s not optimised for search engines and only a few other websites link to it, so it’s on the second page of a Google search). Although just a simple website it’s grandly called a “platform” and a “portal” but there has been little or no publicity or promotion for the website or process (if there has been any promotion it’s been very ineffective). The stark contrast between the discription of the intention (“inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue”) and the impenetrable legalese of the mandate would be almost funny if the arctic wasn’t melting. In general (and if you know about it… and if you can find it…) the Talanoa Dialogue website offers the basic information and functionality required by the COP23 decision, but nothing else.

What’s most interesting and disturbing, however, are the submissions that have been recieved so far. Remember, this is the global mechanism for groups, organisations, individuals, businesses, academics and other parties interested and involved in climate change to contribute their perspectives, ideas and concerns into the global mitigation process. This is the entire governance of the planet earth, representing the entire human species, and focusing on the vast, urgent and existential issue of climate change. The deadline is two weeks from Friday and there have been exactly four submissions.

Two of those submissions are previously-published academic papers and one is a previously-published report from a UN-sponsored group. The only actual, real submission is a 16-page document from a 177-employee institute of the Japanese government with the core conclusion that carbon pricing in necessary.

Just think about that for a moment: Climate change is the biggest, most important, most potentially catastrophic problem that the human species has ever faced. All of the goverments of all of the nations of the planet earth have agreed that there be an “inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue” through which any interested party can communicate their information, ideas, and concerns. Think of all the millions of people, all the organisations, all of the billions of dollars, euros, pounds and yen, all of the time and energy and resources, all focused on this one vast and urgent issue. And with the deadline just a couple of weeks away there’s just one real submission of a few pages, stating the obvious.

Two weeks left and only one real submission so far. Just think about that.

Proposal

I therefore propose, suggest, urge, plead and beg of you the following:

(1) Circulate this message and other information and awareness of the Talanoa Dialogue to as many people as you possibly can, as quickly as you can – and especially to those who’s work or passion involves climate change. The deadline is in a few weeks and nobody knows about it. Publicise it as much as you can.

(2) Make a submission to the Talanoa Dialogue process before the April 2nd deadline. It would be much better if you could do this on behalf of an organisation of some sort. Any submission would be better than no submission.

(3) If you are not sure about what to say in your submission, can I strongly suggest that you investigate and learn about carbon fee and dividend. This revenue-neutral policy puts a real, serious, behaviour-changing tax on carbon and redistributes the proceeds to everyone equally. Everybody’s prices go up, and everybody gets a monthly cheque. For most people the cheque is bigger than the price increases, protecting the poor and the middle class while dramatically inventivising people and markets away from carbon.

Carbon fee and dividend is politically realistic, and has political support from both the Right and the Left. It’s the only way to internalise the costs of climate change into the price of carbon without forcing the poor and middle class to freeze in the dark. In other words, fee and dividend is the only fair and politically possible way to include the costs of climate change into the price of carbon. If you don’t know what specific policy to suggest to the governments of the world in your submission, you could do much worse than propose carbon fee and dividend.

Conclusion

The Talanoa Dialogue for non-party stakeholders is the United Nations, on behalf of all of the governments of the people of the planet earth, asking for your views, opinions and ideas on what to do about climate change. If this process is to be anything more than a joke, a farce and a tragedy, then surely it needs to be known about and used.

This is climate change. It is our planet, our future and the future of our children, our grandchildren and of all the generations yet to come. We are the ones who can do something about this – it is up to us. This is the way to influence, however slightly, the entire direction of our planet and our human peoples on this urgent and existential crisis. The governments of the world have asked for your opinion about what should be done about climate change. The first deadline is very soon.

Please, please don’t ignore it.

 

Talanoa Dialogue
Talanoa Dialogue

Think Like Water

Change shortens your horizons. The faster things come at you, the more your attention is drawn to the immediate and the urgent and the further it moves from the long term and the important. But if you’re a corporation, government, fund, lender, organisation, institution or individual with assets, obligations or investments due ten, twenty, thirty or more years from now, you don’t have the luxury of focusing on the here and now. You’re paid to think about the big picture and the far future, and that’s getting a lot more complicated.

The vast, deep, systemic disruption we are witnessing spans economics, politics, media, business and society, including your industry, your market, and your customers, audience or constituency. Unfathomable technology has been unleashed in a world rapidly becoming one interconnected global network of human beings, with seismic results. Who knows where our assets, our interests or even our selves are going? Who knows what the world will look like five, ten, twenty or thirty years from now? When everything is moving fast and getting faster, how do you make a decision today that will have real consequences for decades to come?

In late 2009 IBM had lengthily, free ranging discussions with 1,541 leading global CEOs and senior government leaders. The recurring theme was accelerating complexity, and the inability of their organisations to deal with it. That was back in 2009 when Facebook had only 200 million users and before Instagram, Trump, Brexit, a lot of bad climate news and so much more. It’s much worse now.

Waves of Change

There are many models, conceptualisations, frameworks, ideas and other tools with which to think about change and what to do about it, each of them a way to reduce complexity by editing out everything except the most important things. Whatever it is that you consider important, it’s this simplification that allows understanding. The process involves not adding more information, but removing most information. It’s a process not of objective learning but of subjective judgement. From the chaos of data and complexity a new and higher pattern is born, and understanding occurs. These conceptual tools are maps, diagrams, narratives, summations and, ultimately, also cartoons, caricatures and other gross approximations of an impossibly complex real world. They are extremely simplistic, subjective and prone to error and bias. But they’re what we have to work with.

The model and conceptualisation of change presented here is based on McKinsey’s Three Horizons (3H) model, which views change as waves of decline and ascendance of prevalence or occurrence. The old, stagnant, increasingly useless and unsustainable patterns of the past are declining, weakening and ending (Horizon 1), while the new, vibrant, useful and sustainable patterns of the future are emerging, rising and strengthening (Horizon 3). In the middle, where these two waves meet, we have an interference pattern that looks a lot like the maelstrom of disruption we see around us (Horizon 2). This is the chaos that we must navigate, aligning ourselves with the new while letting go of the old. The Three Horizon view of change can be visualised like this:

The Three Horizons Visualisation of Change

By simply mapping imagined aggregate occurrence over time, the Three Horizons framework is as basic a model for visualising change as it is possible to get. While it does give us some sort of structure within which to think about change, it doesn’t tell us much. New stuff occurs more. Old stuff occurs less. Eventually disruption will settle down into some sort of consistency. That’s about it.

One way to develop this perspective is to look at H1 and H3 in more detail, especially at how they differ. One important difference is surely that we’re familiar with H1, since it’s been around for a long time. In contrast, H3 is new and therefore less familiar. Whatever H3 may be, it’s not nearly as clear to us as H1. The emerging H3 may be there all around us, but it has not yet ‘resolved’ into a coherent pattern or identity. We can see H1 in front of our faces, but we have to go looking for H3. In other words, while H1 is ‘normal’ to us, H3 is not.

A second important difference between H1 and H3 is what’s happening to the pattern, energy and ‘force’ behind it. In the declining patterns of H1 we might expect to see increasing divergence, decay, division and dissolution as energy, power and pattern weaken, decohere and dissipate. Meanwhile, in the rise of H3 we might expect to see the opposite: increasing convergence, growth, alignment and resolution, with energy, power and pattern strengthening, cohering and focusing. As our timeline moves through the intersection of a declining, fragmenting and weakening H1 on one hand, and a rising, cohering and strengthening H3 on the other, we see disruption increase as we would expect. As these forces cross, the resulting interference pattern appears extremely complex to us as we move through it and see H1 order dissolving into H2 chaos before resolving into H3 order. We could visualise this process like this:

Remember, this is just one step from the simplest of cartoon-models that we can use to think about change. The actually reality of vast, interconnected, foundational change is far, far too complicated to ever grasp. This is just one possible way to think about it all within some sort of structure. It’s a tool, nothing more. Its value is not in proving a truth, but in whether it is useful or not.

We are trying to explain and understand massive and accelerating change in search of useful insights, ideas and practices. With this aim in mind, and assuming that the aggregate change even might be occurring in patterns like these, the question then becomes; What’s causing these patterns? Why is H1 weakening, declining and dissipating while H3 is strengthening, rising and cohering? What are the organising forces behind these two patterns?

The following is one answer to this question that is both explanatory and (more importantly) useful. What makes it practical is that it is based on a concept that we are all familiar with, a concept central to the market, to legal, justice, academic, media and political systems, and to every other aspect of our modern lives – the concept of human choice.

Human beings have always had choices, but for the most part our ancestor’s lives were incredibly restrictive compared to our own. For most of history most people lived more or less the same way their parents lived, worked at what their parents worked at, lived or moved with the same small group in the same general area, and believed what their parents believed. Today, in contrast, the lives lived by more and more of us are vastly different. Our choices of food, clothes, products, connections, work, partners, locations, information, ideas and much, much more is unimaginable to our younger selves, never mind even our most recent ancestors. The point here is that, in the context of geological, biological, civilisational and human time, this explosion of mass expressed human choice is radically new.

Options & Expressed Choice
Co2 Emissions? Human Population? Number of websites? Social media use? This is a graph of all of these, and everything else.

Ideas or beliefs concerning choice, such as the nature of consciousness, the source of free will, or the inevitability of determinism are best left to philosophers, the religious and others. Whatever human choice is, and wherever it comes from, is irrelevant for our purposes – it is the actuality we are concerned with. Specifically, it is a fact that the number of options available to people, and thus the number of actual choices made by people, has exploded in recent years, decades and centuries.

In H1 we may be seeing the decline of a natural, historical, evolutionary force expressing itself as ever greater and more diverse complexity (like the Tree of Life). In contrast, the force behind H3, which includes the additional element of our own modern and individual awareness, choice and purpose, expresses itself as ever greater and more unified coherence and convergence. The result is that the new H3 becomes more focused, relevant, useful, powerful and real, while the old H1 becomes the opposite. While evolution selected for survival and reproduction, aware choice selects for goals, values and purpose. And the dynamics of these selection gates produce different results in that evolution works towards diversity while choice works towards singularity.

Since the singularity of the Big Birth evolution has worked towards complexity.

In other words, one way to look at the 3H model is as a map of declining evolutionary and historical forces on one hand (H1) meeting the rapidly rising force of human choice on the other (H3). Simply put, as innovation, technology and efficient distribution vastly expand real human individual, organisational and collective choice, that choice becomes ever more important in shaping our world, our society and our market.

Thinking of disruption as the result of a vast and deep collision between evolution and choice also makes some intuitive sense. Our society, our economy, our technology, and our highly complex systems and our selves have spectacularly developed, dramatically increasing our awareness, power and capability far beyond anything before. With an infinity of choices in front of us, we need some way to choose between so many options. This is the orientation of reasons, values and purpose. It wasn’t as important before because we didn’t have so many choices before. But now we do, so now it is.

You could think of H1 as the dissipation of historic evolution into complexity, and of H3 as the coherence of modern choices from that very same complexity. Both happening together, at the same time, overlapping. And both happening inside every institution, organisation and individual. As individuals, groups and organisations face more options and thus become more powerful, goal, value or purposeful choice overrides, counteracts and otherwise interferes with evolutionary and historical patterns.

Evolution didn’t design you to live like this.

We all know and experience this as individual people. When you can eat anything you like whenever you like, sooner or later you’ll have to start making informed choices about what you eat in order to stay healthy. You’ll feel the interference of making those choices every time you turn down a treat or drag yourself out for a run. Evolution has not designed you for so many food options, or to sit in front of a computer all day. So you have to override evolution and make your own choices in the direction of some sort of organising reason, goal or purpose – such as your immediate appearance or your long term health. Evolution collides with choice within you and the resulting interference is experienced as internal struggle or disruption.

Organisations too experience this collision between historical evolution and choice within themselves. Established organisations are left with legacy assets, structures, roles, systems, cultures, people, perspectives and other factors with which they must work. With these resources they are faced with customers, audience or constituents who are experiencing an explosion of choice, especially on the internet. As markets, networking, recruitment, public relations, branding, customer service and much more all move online, old buildings, systems or perspectives may no longer make sense. In attempting to grapple with this changing landscape and adapt accordingly, problems inevitably occur. Transition causes friction. It disrupts.

Banks used to be actual buildings. Expensive buildings.

Even fresh startups, free of legacy issues, must usually operate within a legal, financial, organisational and other structure that developed in a different time and that makes less and less sense in an age of interconnected hyper-choice. Even if the organisation has no legacy issues it still operates in a legacy environment that it must deal with. To the free and enthusiastic founders forced to deal with this legacy environment, the result is often frustratingly called “bureaucracy”. An evolved historical legacy meets an explosion of human choice.

When the entire planet came together to make a choice.

Even at the biggest and highest level we witness this dynamic as the governments of the world attempt to meet the historical legacy of carbon with the choice expressed in the Paris Agreement. For corporations, institutions and individuals living under the rule of these governments, the implementation of the choices made in Paris will cause disruption as they interfere with traditional energy patterns and associated cost structures. The evolved historical legacy of carbon is meeting the single, global human choice of Paris. In other words, human choice is being imposed onto the historical legacy that we were given. Choice is being imposed on historical evolution, with resulting disruption.

To sum up then, we began with the Three Horizons Model and imagined branching diagrams in order to think about the possible forces at work inside of H1 and H3. We hypothesised that the forces impelling these changing and colliding patterns were the vast explosion of expressed human choice on one hand, and the historically evolved legacy landscape on the other. The core contention is that, in the complex world of modern human affairs evolution divides, weakens and decoheres, while purpose attracts, strengthens and coheres.

By conceptualising the different forces at work inside of H1 and H3 like this we can give some structure not only to thinking about what is changing, but also about how things are changing and even about why things are changing, albeit at a deep, abstract and even philosophical level.

But what use is that?

Rivers of Change

Seeing disruption as a rising tide of cohering choices meeting a declining tide of diversifying evolution might be an interesting way of looking at things, but that’s not much use if you have real lives and money at stake, real problems to solve, and real decisions to make. For those more interested in managing and navigating disruption, a philosophy, conceptualisation or model of change isn’t much use without at least some indication of how it might be applied in practice.

In order to be practically useful, we must apply this highly abstract and even philosophical model of dynamic change to the real world of business, money, politics, economics, life and human affairs. But that’s a jump too far. What we need is a stepping stone – a way to see and imagine the dynamic flow of an infinitely complex sequence of choices and changes flowing through the patterns outlined above – that we can apply to human affairs. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to find such a stepping-stone analogy, since these patterns resemble nothing so much as a river system.

The declining, dispersing, decohering, dissipating and disappearing H1 brings to mind an old, mature river dispersing into a delta, its force spent. As it reaches sea level and its gradient and gravity disappear the river loses its central, coherent focus, structure, identity and form and branches out, again and again into disconnected complexity, eventually blending into the background noise of the sea. This is the old world, losing its power and coherence, and fading away.

The new world, on the other hand, while less familiar to us, is much more interesting. In our dynamic river model the future H3 is analogous to the early stages of a young, fresh and vibrant river as it comes down from the mountains. Drops become trickles, trickles become streams, streams become rivers, which in turn become bigger rivers until eventually there is one big and unified river. The water is drawn across the topography of the landscape and is animated, organised, formed and focused by gravity. This is where the energy and the future is, so it’s here we want to focus.

Oh, the places you will go!

Imagine a drop of water, freshly fallen on a mountain slope and about to begin its long journey to the sea. As soon as it lands it feels gravity, pulling it incessantly down the slope. The topography of the landscape guides this movement, as the water unfailing obeys the compulsion of gravity by following the easiest route, without thought or hesitation. Water always knows where to go.

As the water drop tumbles down the mountain slope it meets other water drops. It joins with these drops to form a trickle, all moving together and in the same direction as gravity draws the water downwards within the constraints of the landscape in the most efficient way possible. Trickles become streams, streams become rivers and rivers become larger rivers. Many billions of water drops, each acting independently under the influence of gravity applied over an irregular landscape, come together and become stronger and more powerful. Water effortlessly co-operates.

The secret of water lies in its molecular structure. Two small hydrogen atoms bind tightly to one large oxygen atom, but also bind weakly and intermittently with hydrogen atoms in other water molecules around them. This means that individual water molecules bond and let go, bond and let go, billions of times a second even in a glass of water. Connect and let go, connect and let go, connect and let go – over and over and over again. This is how a water molecule navigates its world under the influence of its gravity, and it is this characteristic that gives water its shapeless and extreme efficiency and ability to flow. Water is infinitely flexible.

Gravity acting over an irregular landscape brings water together.

A river system is much easier to understand, visualise and think about than an abstract model or deep philosophy of change, and it has the advantage of being dynamic. We can intuitively see and understand how individual water molecules, incessantly connecting and detaching, flow through a landscape under the compelling force of gravity, becoming more united and thus more powerful as they go. Armed with this Perspective we can now starting mapping some of the elements of our deep model of H3 change to the complex reality of modern business, organisational, economic, social, environmental, and other human affairs that we see around us.

There are three variables in our analogy of a river system: the landscape, the gravity and the water itself, each representing an aspect of our more complex, abstract and philosophical model of change. We ourselves, as individual agents, are analogous to the water molecules, flowing through the landscape of modern physical, social and economic reality choice by choice. Purpose is the orientating, cohering and unifying force over both ourselves and our ever-changing landscape. It pulls us, draws us, compels us and attracts us in a particular direction, and draws others in the same direction across the landscape of vast global forces, deep social trends and cold, hard facts. In a world in which everything seems to be turning upside down, purpose is our gravity.

The Three Variables of the River Model of Dynamic Change
The Three Variables of the River Model of Dynamic Change

To sum up then, we started with the Three Horizon model of change and speculated on the differences between the internal dynamics of the declining and rising patterns of H1 and H3 respectively. We explained these differences as the emergence of mass, expressed human choice as a force in the world interfering with the legacies and artefacts of historical evolution in disruptive ways. We then added dynamism and simplification to this conceptual model by using the analogy of water, comparing the emerging and future patterns of H3 to a young, fresh and vibrant river system, cohering and increasing in power. Finally, we applied the river system analogy to human affairs, seeing ourselves as water molecules flowing across the landscape of reality under the gravitational influence of our purpose.

Now we’re ready to look for examples in the real world around us.

Creators of Change

One person who seems to know exactly where he’s going is Elon Musk, who’s going to Mars. While I was writing this his SpaceX company launched his car into an elliptical orbit around the Sun that goes out as far as the Asteroid Belt. What passes for the car’s radio is playing David Bowie’s Space Oddity, and there’s a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the glovebox, along with a towel and a sign saying ‘Don’t Panic’. Musk’s car will orbit the sun essentially for eternity – a monument to the very beginnings of humanity in space.

There’s absolutely nothing boring about this… !

The car, of course, is a Tesla, from Musk’s revolutionary and intelligent car company. No doubt it’s powered by batteries from his Gigafactory or panels from his Solar City. And then there’s the Boring Company, who want to build a high-speed subway system for cars (solar-powered, electric cars, of course). Even Musk’s toys are cool and make money. You have to wonder: how does he do all this?

How does Elon Musk start and lead multiple organisations in multiple industries, each producing remarkable results? Why are he and his teams so creative, so focused, and so good at hard, technical, practical problem solving? How does Elon Musk lead others to turn dreams into reality, while satisfying the various markets in which he operates? How does he maintain his focus on the far future and the big picture, while meeting and exceeding expectations in the present? Why is he so good at spotting, capturing, navigating and creating change?

He’ll tell you himself. He looks from the perspective of the biggest of pictures in both space (Mars) and time (climate change), while remaining firmly grounded in science, empiricism, physical reality and the present. He is also firmly grounded in financial reality, but money is only a tool to him and those he leads, not a purpose. Even the development of self-driving cars and deliveries to the ISS are mere milestones towards much greater and grander ambitions: establishing humanity on Mars while preventing its destruction on Earth. Not to talk about it, discuss it, debate it or raise awareness about it. Not to lobby, campaign, urge, suggest or demand it. Not to write reports, papers and books about it, or have meetings, conferences and symposiums about it. But to actually do it, down to the last micron and nanosecond.

That kind of vast, significant and grounded purpose not only attracts the kind of talent that money just can’t buy, but tightly focuses them as well. I would guess that at the heart of research, design and development at SpaceX, Tesla, Boring and all the other Elon Musk enterprises you’ll find open, flexible and highly-focused teams of exceptional individuals. These are superteams of talent drawn together and focused by brave and vastly important common goals far beyond themselves, their company or the coming quarter. Boldly going where no one has gone before.

Starman
It’s amazing how far focused purpose, landscape knowledge and flexibility can take you.

And it’s not just technical talent that deep, global, significant purpose attracts and focuses. Executives, managers, employees, partners, investors, lenders, shareholders, regulators, customers and potential customers can all feel part of Musk’s overarching mission in some way. That deep, global, important and significant feeling and goal aligns them, orientates them, focuses them, motivates them, connects them and otherwise positively influences them in an almost magnetic direction towards a grand goal that can be reached step by step by step, like an Antarctic explorer drawn to the pole. There’s a lot of interest in and goodwill towards Elon Musk and his various companies.

Musk is an excellent example of purpose-driven leadership and what it can achieve, but he is by no means alone. By thinking, feeling and acting towards a significant, specified purpose beyond your self, group or organisation, you open yourself up to alignment with others who share the same purpose. The bigger and further and more important your purpose is, the more people you can potentially align with. Important, far, big-picture purpose runs deep in people, and people are complex beings, so that alignment can have powerful results. Clear, simple, overarching yet realistic purpose attracts people, drives people, aligns people, focuses people and guides people, allowing them to operate quickly and flexibly in complex ways. Superteams of all sizes need big, deep, far and positive goals in order to flexibly cohere. Money, including share price, just isn’t enough. Neither are votes, for that matter.

Think like water

Our world is changing faster than it ever has before, and the pace of that change is accelerating. Economics, politics, media, work, relationships, business, markets, the environment, the climate and a lot more are changing in front of our eyes. We ourselves are changing. This is not historical change like the rise and fall of dynasties or the invention of the printing press. This is something radically different – something new that has never happened before. There is a quickening. It’s getting faster.

The proximate cause of this accelerating change is, of course, technology. Highly automated systems produce food, products and services unimaginable to our ancestors at prices that are often trivial or non-existant. Innovation expands possibilities with a regularity that is disorientating. Global development, integration and highly efficient distribution means not only new competition but new markets, new threats and opportunities, new weaknesses and strengths. Technology in many forms has changed and is changing our world in many ways. However one new technology stands out for the sheer depth and scale of change that it has unleashed – the internet.

Over half of the population of the world now use the internet and that number is, of course, rising rapidly. Facebook alone has over two billion monthly active users. About ten billion searches are made on Google every day, just one of seven separate properties it owns, each with over one billion active monthly users. As of 2017, global social media use was about two hours and fifteen minutes per day per internet user… and rising. Entire ecosystems of market, social and cultural minnows exist around and even inside the tech giants, all with their own customers, audience, supporters and constituents. The internet is much more than an economy influencing $2.1 trillion in sales. It’s where humans increasingly live. Human attention is quickly flowing online.

Network of People
The internet is more than a network of computers. It’s a network of real, feeling, thinking and choosing people.

As disorientating as this dramatic shift can be, we can easily see where it’s heading. Since the planet and its population are finite, we’re clearly on the road to a situation in which for all practical purposes everyone is on the internet. And, since time moves on, eventually everyone will be a digital native, having known nothing else. Not all of life will be lived online, but much of it will. And it is there that we will do much of our business and, informed by the world, make many of our choices. The end point of internet development is surely one global, interconnected network of human minds, feelings and perspectives – an arena of almost infinitely available and rapidly expanding knowledge, connection and choice.

We are already living in such a world of global, interconnected hyper-choice, the potential of which is limited only by the human imagination. Although virtual, ethereal and somewhat unreal, what happens on the internet has very real effects and consequences, including for your industry, market, interest or niche. Adapting to this deep and fundamental change is not easy, even for those who have lived their entire lives in the midst of it. But it’s not as if we have a choice – we have to navigate through it. So here are some practical lessons we might draw from the river perspective of change:

1. Be flexible. All change, any change, essentially involves something new and something old. There are, of course, many old ideas, practices and perspectives that have come from the past, that are no longer fit for the present, and that we have to let go of. And there are many new, interesting and exciting ideas, practices and perspectives growing rapidly in many spheres. We must pick and choose as best we can.

But people are different. In a global interconnected network of human beings with few barriers, the rules of human interaction are different. No longer constrained by geography, spectrum, social class or other limiting factors, people have become free to follow, interact with, and associate with whomever they like. In such a world, mutual attraction is the connection that leads to action. Whether a giant corporation or a lone individual, if I don’t like you, or if I get the feeling that you don’t like me or care about me or value what I value… then we have a problem. And since we don’t like problems, we move on. But if I like you, and you like me, then we can do something together and make something happen, maybe business. For this to happen, we first have to attract each other. And that means being open.

Business Deal
Mutual attracting involves authenticity, vulnerability, trust, and being seen.

We cannot attract unless we are seen. Transparency, authenticity, openness and honesty allow others to know us more deeply and thus connect at a deeper level. If you want to get the best talent, employees, partners, investors, and to come to you, then you have to show them who you are. This involves vulnerability and trust and these, of course, have limits. But the deeper you reveal yourself, the deeper the connections you will attract.

Connect and let go. Connect and let go. Connect and let go. Like an orangutan swinging through the forest from vine to vine, we navigate our social and business lives individual by individual, person by person. We repel some, attract others and have no influence on many. It’s the ones we attract that are important. And it’s the ones from that subset that we are also attracted to that are really important. These are the ones you will be working with, in whatever it is you are trying to do.

So be flexible, and let your people be flexible. Open yourself to others and encourage your people to do the same. Manage for this flexibility. Design for this flexibility. Promote this flexibility. Remove barriers to this flexibility. Attract, connect, interact and let go. Attach and detach. Flow like water.

2. Feel your purpose. You can’t feel your purpose if you don’t know your purpose. If, like Elon Musk, you already and clearly know your purpose, then that is good and good luck to you. But if you’re still looking, then here’s some advice:

Whatever your purpose is it must be vast, significant and at least partly achievable if it is to meaningfully connect you with others. The bigger your purpose is, the more people are drawn to it and the more potential connections and allies you have. The deeper and more significant that purpose is, the more powerful the impelling force behind it. The strongest purpose is one that is far and deep, big and important, serious and meaningful, challenging but possible.

It’s amazing what big, audacious, widely shared purpose can do.

Big, important, audacious but possible purpose is powerfully attractive but it’s useless without specific goals, plans and action, and most people know that. Talk and words never changed anything by themselves without firm decisions, realistic plans and concrete actions to make something happen. While vague talk of values, intentions or imperatives might be temporarily attractive, purpose and the people who associate with that purpose focus around real, ambitious but achievable goals. Goals make purpose real.

Once you know your purpose and have a clear goal in front of you, it’s difficult to think of anything else. Such purpose gives the meaning to what you do, entices you to go further, and keeps you going when all hope seems gone. Clear, focused, important, deep purpose not only orientates you in a world of ever-expanding and mostly frivolous options, potentials, possibilities and choice, but it does so by pulling you, drawing you and compelling you. Focused purpose expressed in effective action motivates teams like nothing else. It is emotional, it is deep, it is spiritual, and it focuses and develops creativity itself. Our purpose is the gravity that causes us to flow and that orientates us. You know it when you feel it.

3. Know your landscape. This is your reality – the totality of everything you comprehend, especially things related to your business, interests or purpose. And it starts with your data. Whatever your market, industry, interest, agenda or niche, you won’t be short of data about it, especially if you collect and produce it yourself. But precision is not accuracy, interpretations are not reality, and the potential for bias is high. Not everything important is quantifiable and some of the most significant details lie hidden in the aggregates. Some of the most important aspects of your landscape are not contained in your data, however much of it you have. These are usually the parts that involve people.

All decisions, all choices, all preferences are ultimately made by human beings. Talent, employees, partners, investors, clients and customers are all people before they are anything else, and each has her or his own unique perspective, including about you, your company, your cause, your market and anything else you might be interested in. The only way to accurately discover this perspective is to actually talk to these people, in a relaxed setting and in an open, honest, equal and informal way. If you ask them they’ll tell you, but you have to ask in a way that suits and respects them. Humility helps. So does patience.

The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries.

Finally, your knowledge of your landscape must include a planetary perspective. Whatever the immediate details of and issues in your own particular area, market or niche, and whatever your ultimate purpose is, you’re not going to win by going against global facts, universal trends and unstoppable forces. These are the unalterable mountains of our landscape that we must all accept. In particular there are two absolute boundaries through which we must navigate – the twin boundaries of environmental and social sustainability illustrated so well by Kate Raworth in her conceptualisation of the Doughnut. Whatever your long term purpose, if it’s outside of either of those two boundaries then, one way or another, it’s not going to happen.

It’s easy to look around the world today and lose hope. The lives of many of us are increasingly stressful and difficult, even some billionaires worry about ever-growing inequality, and the permanent catastrophe of runaway climate change hangs like a shadow over everything we do. Donald Trump is in the White House, Britain is leaving the EU, and the seas are choked with plastic. It’s easy to lose heart and to slip into the uselessness of despair, cynicism and apathy.

But there are real and solid reasons for hope. Don’t forget, H3 is much less familiar to us than HI. The dominant H1 is in front of our faces – on the TV, on major news sites in polite conversations, and everywhere else. In contrast, we have to look for H3. The good news is that when we do, we see signs of H3 coherence everywhere. The internet is bringing people together, and it’s not doing this randomly.

We need purpose. We crave purpose. We want to work together to do important things. We yearn to belong. We love to feel useful and valued, and part of something bigger, greater and more important than our selves. It fills an important part of us. People are connecting as never before, and these connections are not stochastic or random. They are chosen by human beings and thus they are biased towards purpose.

Bruce Lee
“When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.”

There are stormy waters ahead, and things are going to get stranger before they settle down. There is much historical baggage to let go of, and not all of it will go quietly. There is a lot of novelty that will not last. There is great danger in the not so far future, for us all. Whether you are a large legacy organisation or a nimble independent millennial, it will not be easy.

But if you know and understand the world you are in to the best of your ability; and if you feel your purpose and know why you do what you do; and if you are willing to open yourself to the new and to let go of the old, then you will be OK. Whatever happens, you’ll know exactly what to do.

Know your landscape. Feel your purpose. Connect and let go, again and again and again. Think like water.

 

If you, your group or your organisation are surveying your landscape, developing your purpose, or otherwise seeking to connect and cohere I am available for consulting, freelancing and other hire. My full CV/resume is available here, my personal narrative (including an account of my explorations in economics) is available here, and I can be contacted here.

I am also seeking funding, sponsorship and support to enable me to independently continue my work and expand my reach. If you see value in what I am doing and would like to contribute, you can do so by making a one-off donation via PayPal, or by establishing a recurring sponsorship via Patreon.

Thank you.

My Adventures in Economics

You know that stage every young child goes through when their response to anything said to them is ‘why?’ Well, I got stuck at that stage. From my earliest years I always wanted to know, always wanted to experience, always wanted to understand the reason. I have always been curious, adventurous, and irreverent of academic, cultural or other authority. I’ve always wanted to know for myself.

I spent a Tom Sawyer childhood leading teams of small boys on various adventures and projects involving rafts, treehouses, tunnels and mountains. My father called me an “instigator”. I read voraciously, travelled regularly from a young age, and conversed seriously and intensely into the night with many fine minds. Five year of economics, psychology and intellectual exploration at a Canadian university led to a year teaching in China and a ringside view of the popular student uprising that ended at Tiananmen Square. Back in Canada, four years as a university instructor of academic English followed, until one day I’d had enough and applied to almost every university English department in Africa, accepting a position as a lecturer at the University of Sierra Leone, West Africa.

In 1992, the year I moved from Canada to Sierra Leone, the United Nation’s annual UNDP Development Report placed Canada at the peak of human development, and Sierra Leone at the bottom. After decades of corrupt, incompetent kleptocracy, Sierra Leone was in ruins, was in the middle of a deteriorating civil war, and was governed by a small group of poorly-equipped army officers who had found themselves in power after an accidental coup. There was no electricity, little communication with the outside world, and the sounds of AK-47s and anti-aircraft guns regularly punctuated the dark, tropical nights. I threw myself into this new and exciting environment, engaging with my students, making good friends and exploring the country. In particular I spent my lengthy university holidays travelling in what was patronisingly called ‘the interior’, ‘upcountry’ or even ‘the bush’.

I soaked it all up – the ideas, the feelings, the spirit – until I became overwhelmed and experienced what could be described either as a breakdown or a spiritual awakening, depending on your point of view. Remember, while I existed in great privilege compared to those around me, I was exposed daily to some of the most heart-breaking human pain, waste and unfairness that the planet had to offer. My heart had opened to this suffering, so whatever my inner journey was, it was extremely emotional.

At the core of this emotional, mental, inner experience was an essentially philosophical conversion. In my efforts to understand I’ve always tried to be rational and to face and accept difficult truths that, while they may be unpleasant, are true nevertheless. I read philosophy, I read physics, I spent many days and nights in intense, testing and enlightening conversation, and I was what is known in this area as a ‘determinist’. I believed in the Big Bang, I believed in cause and effect, I believed in quantum indeterminacy. Conversely, at heart and deep down, I did not believe that we – and that I – had free will. Essentially I believed in fate.

But in Sierra Leone, surrounded by senseless suffering, I essentially had a damascene conversion. It might sound silly, especially considering that I’d always been a free spirit, but that was the first moment in my adult life that I genuinely and deeply believed myself and others to be free. I had been a cold, calculating and detached determinist until I saw the light of a belief in freedom. For the first time in my life I believed that free will existed. And I recognised that freedom came with responsibility, and that they were one and the same thing. Until Sierra Leone I had coasted through life, treating it essentially as an interesting experience. Now, for the first time, I became driven with a need to do something, and had acquired a purpose outside of myself.

The rebels got closer, I fled to my childhood home in Ireland, spent a year sorting myself out, and then threw myself into saving the world. I became intensely involved in my community, leading and contributing to an arts centre, youth groups, a save-the-beach campaign and more. Being rational, I knew that if our environmental challenges were not solved then nothing else would make much difference in the long run, and so I threw myself into Green politics, supporting parliamentary and MEP candidates, engaging in national discussion, and knocking on doors. It was the very early years of the internet, and I quickly saw it’s potential in dissolving informational bottlenecks and bringing people together, and so I learned how to use it and tried to spread that knowledge to the groups that I had joined. I set up email lists, online groups, websites and more for groups that had never used these tools before. I threw everything I had into the fight, across dozens of groups and organisations focused on many causes.

I knocked on doors, handed out leaflets, marched in demonstrations, crafted letters, attended meetings, participated in workshops, built campaigns, led groups, joined others, emailed, argued and discussed. I wrote press releases, told stories, built relationships with journalists, spoke on radio, and played with the dark arts of spinning perspective. I felt the nervousness of meeting senior government ministers in an attempt to persuade them of something or other. I felt the searing heat of burning armoured police carriers in the teargas saturated streets of Genoa during the last of what were called the ‘Anti-Globalisation’ protests. Until one day, standing in the rain outside the American embassy protesting the U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto climate agreement, it began to dawn on me that, whatever it was I thought I was doing, it wasn’t working. I’d done it all and, from what I could see from the daily papers, it didn’t seem to be making a blind bit of difference.

This realisation was informed by my other life, in the corporate world of work and money. I’d been an early adopter of the internet and quickly understood that this was a vast revolution. I lived on the internet, at 26 bps. To learn more I studied, and then got a job on the phones, helping support the 20,000 customers of Ireland’s second largest internet service provider. That job led to other jobs – setting up a tech support department, quality control, network administrator. Until I cashed in my stock options and founded my own internet start-up.

My investors were the senior executives of a German-Austrian-Swiss consulting firm focusing on the pharma, nuclear and chemical industries. The key figures were former executives from Raytheon and Fluor. Their turnover was in the hundreds of millions, and they put about €300,000 into me. I burned through it during a frenetic two years with a team of eight, then watched my intended market evaporate as tens of thousands of mom-and-pop ISPs consolidated into a handful of big companies overnight. My startup had failed, and I bought back the shares I’d sold for €250,000 for only €1. It was better than any Harvard Business School education.

On weekends I would plot with passionate socialists, greens and anarchists, and then on Monday get my spreadsheets together for a meeting with rich and powerful men in fine suits who flew only business class. I drank with both, ate with both, got to know both, and had a foot in two worlds that rarely meet. On my corporate desk my penholder was a tear gas canister, picked up in the aftermath of a street battle. In a way I was embedded on both sides of the struggle, whatever that struggle was.

But one thing stood out. The market was powerful because it made things happen. The market was better organised than the protestors, more united, better equipped, more focused, and much more effective. Although my own market idea had failed, it was clear to me that the market could turn ideas into reality far more efficiently than the usual socialists, greens and anarchists marching up and down outside Dublin’s central bank for the nth time. Whatever its imperfections (and there were many), the market actually worked.

But, of course, it hadn’t worked for me – not this time. I had other internet ventures, other ideas, other projects, but my heart was elsewhere. In the ruins of my startup dream, and recognising the limitations of the campaigns to which I had devoted myself, I watched as the ice continued to melt, friends and neighbours continued to struggle, and one of the most spectacular housing bubbles in the history of the world continued to inflate. I became despairing, confused and burnt out. And so I ran away to sea.

During a maritime Greenpeace protest against plutonium being transported to a nuclear reprocessing plant in the UK I got a taste for the sea, and after that I wanted nothing else. I dropped commitment after commitment, did the minimum of paid work, and devoted my time and attention to learning the knowledge, getting the experience and adopting the attitudes necessary to make long sea voyages in small boats. A few years later I became a professional yacht delivery skipper, and spent many long nights under the stars thinking, feeling and finding myself again. Until, after a final year driving boats servicing offshore wind farms, I returned to land in the rubble of the 2008 banking crisis with a clear head, a confident heart, and a renewed commitment to changing the world for the better. I was determined not to fall into the scattergun approach of before. This time I was more focused, more targeted, much deeper, and more strategic than I was before.

Another year sorting myself out and exploring a few dead ends and I was focused on three core problems: (1) climate and the environment, (2) work and incomes, and (3) our system of banking and money. To be honest, this focus wasn’t difficult to find. After years in the trenches I was familiar of the nuances of environmental issues and politics. I was surrounded by friends and family struggling to match increasingly insecure incomes to absolutely necessary costs. And I was living in Ireland in the financial rubble of the 2008 debacle. Climate, incomes, debt. The environment, society, finance. Nature, ordinary people, and the Masters of the Universe. Three areas of our most significant dysfunction. I examined each of them through the eyes of economics.

Academia – the world of universities, journals, conferences and degree-granting authority – is somewhat frightening to many people, but it wasn’t for me. Remember, I’d spent a decade both studying and teaching at universities, deeply engaging all the while. I knew these people and, after six years teaching Academic English, I knew the language of academia better than most academics.

I also wasn’t intimidated by economics. I’d studied it formally at secondary school and university, and found it relatively easy. The concepts came naturally to me and I found it normal to think about the mass behaviour codified on charts and graphs. Although I drifted on into psychology (behavioural economics hadn’t been accepted yet), I maintained a strong interest, following economic and political affairs in the same compulsive and obsessive way that my friends followed sports. I was skilled in internet research and had all the data and ideas in the world at my fingertips. In these and many other ways, I felt that I had the tools for this inquiry. And this is what I found:

Problems

The economics of climate change is all about the price of carbon. The economic problem is that the real, actual costs of rising sea levels, droughts, floods and so on aren’t included in the real, actual price of the carbon you buy to heat your home, fuel your car, or turn on your lights. In economic-speak, the external costs of carbon are not internalised into its price, and so the market cannot even see those costs. As far as market forces are concerned, the environmental degradation of our planet may as well be happening on Neptune. Basically the problem is that the market can’t see climate change and all the other environmental damage.

The economics of incomes concerns the connection between work and incomes, and the changing nature of both work and incomes in the face of accelerating technology and globalisation. The core, unavoidable, costs of living are rising while incomes remain stagnant and increasingly insecure. Globalisation is a function of technology, and technology disrupts labour, and as technological development accelerates all around us the number of actual, feeling, voting human beings who are losing from these developments is outweighing the number of winners. Basically, machines and complex global supply chains are replacing us, so what are we going to do and how are we going to live? A lifetime of stressful drudgery at $11.35 an hour is not enough.

Finally, the economics of debt concerns money, and especially where it comes from – the money supply. This is the neglected, overlooked but vitally important realm of monetary policy, banking, and the structure of our financial system. Right now, in the system we have, almost all money is created from bank debt. Some of that debt is good debt, used for investment. But most of it is bad debt – debt for consumption and, worse, for speculation. Our monetary system doesn’t care where the debt comes from, as long as there’s debt. The events of 2008 were a very public illustration of the limits to this approach, yet this remains our system.

To me, crouched in front of my computer long into many nights, these three problems represented much of what was wrong with our world today. Each of these problems caused many other problems, and so I began to think of them as ‘meta-problems’ – overarching, systemic flaws from which many other individual human and environmental problems flowed. Climate. Incomes. Debt. Three core, fundamental, structural, systemic, deep, vast problems. Three economic problems. Three important problems. Three very specific problems. Amidst mounting and increasingly alarming evidence of the urgency of these three core problems I immediately began looking for solutions. And I quickly found them.

Solutions

Before I tell you what I found, let me be first clear about what I was looking for. I knew why I was doing what I was doing (I just had to look around me). And I knew more or less what we had to do (put a real price on carbon, get more money to more people, and remove at least some control of the money supply from private bankers). The question I was trying to answer now was ‘how exactly are we going to do that?’ Many hours on Google presented the answer in the form of three policy ideas, each with campaigning activists, groups and organisations behind them.

The first idea is that of carbon tax and dividend. The problem is that we need a price on carbon, carbon is embedded in everything, and so putting a serious price on carbon raises the price of everything. How do you tax carbon without forcing poor people to freeze in the dark? Without collapsing the economy? The answer is, you give them back their money. Basically, you tax carbon and then share the proceeds of that tax with everyone equally. Everybody’s costs go up, but everybody also gets a cheque in the post, and for most people that cheque will be bigger than their increased costs. Carbon tax and dividend is an economic policy that directly addresses the core economic issue involved in internalising the cost of climate change into the price of carbon, making it visible to the infinitely innovative and powerful market. Most importantly, by taking from heavy polluters to give to light polluters, it is also inherently fair. The fact that most people gain from this arrangement makes it politically realistic as well.

The policy of carbon tax and dividend has been partly implemented in British Columbia, Canada, has been endorsed by the state legislature of California, and is the preferred policy of veteran climate scientist and activist James Hansen. It is formally supported by 56 members of the US House of Representatives (28 of them Republicans and 28 Democrat), and that number is growing rapidly. This is the climate and carbon policy of both the U.S. Green Party and of the US oil industry. The group that I support and of which I am a member is the Citizen’s Climate Lobby. If you’re new to all this, their website is a great place to start. You could also follow Ted Halstead and the Climate Leadership Council. I encourage you to learn, join and participate. This is a policy thats time has come.

The second idea I found in my search for solutions was that of a basic income. This is the simple idea that every single person is paid a basic income, unattached to any work or wealth or other conditions. Essentially, everybody gets equal benefits, whether rich or poor, skilled or unskilled, urban or rural, driven or lazy. It’s a universal benefit that essentially turns the increasingly threadbare social safety net into a solid and safe floor, releasing effort, energy and enterprise and allowing risk without fear of destitution.

I could go on and on about the people and groups and organisations supporting this policy. I could tell you about the arguments for and against. I could outline the results of previous tests and point to ongoing and planned tests around the world. But there’s no point, because this idea is exploding so rapidly it’s hard to keep up. A good start would be to follow Scott Santens, Guy Standing or the Basic Income Earth Network.

The third idea is far less popular, far less understood, and yet just as important. This is the idea of monetary financing – of removing at least some of the power to create the money supply away from private banks, and to bring that power under independent central bank control for public benefit. It is called many things and there are many versions of it – Sovereign Money, QE for People, 100% reserve banking, helicopter money and more. But the core idea is that we adopt a permanent form of quantitative easing, with the benefits going to a shared, public purpose. If you don’t understand what that means, don’t worry about it – this kind of economics is not everybody’s cup of tea. Basically, we need money, banks create money via loans, and this causes problems. Carefully ‘printing’ more of that money directly allows much greater control and stability. And spending that money into the economy for some form of public good is only fair. After all, the money may not belong to us all, but the monetary system does.

The most dynamic and effective group politically campaigning for monetary reform is the UK’s Positive Money. They are joined by the EU sister group QE for People, by the self-consciously-named American Monetary Institute, and by about 30 other national and related groups around the world. But as much as these groups campaign to raise awareness, the real discussion is held by a small number of central bankers and monetary policy nerds. Everybody thinks about money, but few people think about what money is. But some do, and some is enough.

The point is that I now had my solutions. I had identified three problems – three deep, structural, systemic problems with the environment, with incomes and with debt. And now I had identified my three solutions – a carbon Tax & Dividend, a Basic Income and Monetary Financing. Each of the problems was vast, serious, destructive, worsening, unsustainable and potentially catastrophic. And each of the solutions was simple, focused, elegant, evidence-based, politically balanced, radical enough to effect systemic change, yet institutionally realistic as well.

I immediately threw myself into reading about these policies, writing about these policies, arguing these policies, and generally exploring these policies and the organisations, people and ideas behind them. Night after night, day after day, I soaking up the ever-expanding body of information and opinion behind these policy solutions until I was convinced. At some point in any career, any venture, any project, there comes a time where you have to stop studying and start applying. At some point you have to accept that the evidence in front of you will always be imperfect and you have to make a decision. Tax & Dividend, Basic Income, Monetary Financing. These were now my policies. I begain to believe.

And then something wonderful happened. I had an idea.

Integration

I called the idea ‘Equitable Capitalism’, and I threw myself into it. The concept was simple: I would integrate the three evidence-based, functional and specific economic policy solutions in which I now believed into one single, coherent whole. I would take three existing and important ideas and combine them in some way into one cause, harnessing and focusing the people, resources and energy behind each them into one focused purpose that would be greater and more effective than the sum of its parts. From three stories I would tell one story – a new story and a radical story I accept, but at least a possible story, which was more than I was getting elsewhere. In my mind and heart I was about to save the world in the most dramatic way – with one single idea.

I launched a blog, began a book, tweeted, posted and experimented with social media and memes. I engaged, I discussed, I reached out. I argued in support of my three polices, and strategically tried to introduce people supporting one of the three policies into the ideas behind the others. I tried to connect Right and Left, Libertarians and Authoritarians, Socialists and Capitalists. These ideas could save the world and give each faction what they wanted, I argued. From three policies, one cause. Solidarity, together.

I was encouraged in my quixotic endeavour by synchronicities between each of my three adopted policy solutions. The introduction of a carbon tax and dividend system would contribute not only reducing carbon emissions and ameliorating climate change, but would also introduce the mechanism and establish the seed of what could become a basic income. Monetary financing would create ‘fiscal space’ (i.e. money) for public investment into the transition to clean energy, and would relieve pressure on the housing costs faced by those on stagnant incomes. And so on.

I was even more encouraged by some of the people involved in campaigning for each of the three policies on which I was focused, and in particular by the connections between the issues that they themselves could plainly see. Fran Boait, executive director of Positive Money, came to monetary reform from climate science. Stanislas Jourdan, of the related group QE for People, was a lead organiser in the European basic income movement. Scott Santens, the leading U.S. basic income communicator, is a strong supporter of carbon tax and dividend. Guy Standing, one of the leading figures of the Basic Income movement, talks about tax and dividend and monetary reform too. Among the campaigns for each of the three policy solutions, there were others starting to connect the dots.

I was sure that I was on the right track, and every day the news and analysis websites confirmed it. The seas rose, the arctic melted, Brexit happened, Trump happened, Sanders and Le Pen and Corbyn happened, interest rates remained stuck near zero, the mountain of debt grew. The political centre seemed to be discredited and collapsing and, in the absence of any credible alternative, the resulting vacuum was often filled with those eager to use division to gain power and attention. In the absence of the best, we got the worst. In the absence of inspiring ideas we got fear of the bond markets. In the absence of a positive vision of a prosperous, sustainable and progressive future we got warning after warning of the environmental and social dystopia that awaits. The world seemed both terrified of an approaching nightmare and pregnant waiting for a new idea. Surely Equitable Capitalism was that idea – a synthesis of three specific and coherent economic policies into one new and evidence-based alternative, attractive across the political divide. Surely it was obvious? Surely, even if there was only a small chance it might work, surely we were was obligated to try? Perhaps this was the idea to save the world?

Needless to say, very little happened. A little correspondence, a few followers, a few engagements, some small, fleeting flashes of attention, but nothing substantial. I had identified the three core, specific economic problems behind humanity’s most important challenges. I had found three credible and increasingly popular solutions to these challenges. If I could just get people to recognise the potential connections between these ideas, I thought, we might have a chance.

But sitting at home, alone, like a million other keyboard warriors, I found little purchase for my new perspective. I might have combined three smart, progressive economic policies into one general, somewhat vague idea. I might have drawn connections between disparate economic campaigns pointing in the same direction. I might even have given it all a name. But no matter how hard I promoted my world-saving idea, very little came back.

And for over a year, that is how it was. Three problems, three policies, one Equitable Capitalism. I read, I thought, I wrote, I worked on my book, I tweeted and I posted. I walked the beach and fed the dogs and spent time on my computer trying to introduce the world to a concept, an organising idea and a direction that I believed could be vastly beneficial to us all. Make no mistake, I believed that this was an idea that might save the entire world, not metaphorically, but literally. Not one small bit at a time but all together, instantly. Not far in the future but now, and over the next few years.

My new and laser-focused purpose was to bring Equitable Capitalism to the world. But the world, it seemed, wasn’t listening. Until one day last week, when the phone rang.

Connection

The call was from Rachel Oliver, lead organiser for Positive Money, the UK group campaigning for monetary reform. The invitation was to a retreat of people with a passion and interest in monetary reform being held at the Centre for Sustainability and Leadership at the Ambleside campus of the University of Cumbria.  Ambleside lies on the shore of Lake Windermere, in the breathtakingly beautiful English Lake District. It was a wonderful weekend and I will tell you about it, but first let me outline where I was in my project to save the world.

In my eyes, Equitable Capitalism (the idea that global free market capitalism might be reformed through three specific and distinct economic policies) was now common sense. Everywhere I looked in the media I could see increasingly alarming evidence of the three core problems. Every time I checked in on the campaigns for my solutions I was encouraged by their explosive expansion. But nobody else seemed to connect the dots, as I did.

But what did I actually have? Sure, I was conversing with (and being taken seriously by) some of the top minds engaged in changing economics and economic policy for the better. Sure, there were economic connections between the ideas and solutions I was engaging with and championing. Sure, some of the people focused on one of these ideas were also often focused on others. There were connections – there were possibilities. But at the end of the day, all I really had was a list of three very different policy ideas and a vague, undefined notion that these ideas might somehow be organised and presented into a coherent whole. No wonder it wasn’t catching on.

In my explorations into how I might combine three stories into one, two things stood out. The first was the concept of ‘the commons’. This is the idea that all of us – every last one of us – are the shared legal and moral owners of some things. Our planet’s atmosphere is a commons. The seas are a commons. The resources of the earth and the sun are a commons. Most of the most important intellectual property in the history of humanity is commonly owned. Our public institutions and infrastructure is commonly owned. Our monetary system is commonly owned.

It seemed reasonable to me to view this commons as a wide array of very valuable capital assets, and to expect that we, the legal, moral and actual owners of these valuable assets, might expect at least a share of the considerable returns from them. Framed in this way, it was easy for me to see that focusing on ‘the commons’ offered a justification for the economic policy solutions I was advocating. Simply put, I own part of the atmosphere, and if you want to use that atmosphere to dispose of your waste Co2, then the least you can do is to pay me. Similarly I, along with everybody else in my currency jurisdiction, am a part owner of the monetary system and thus am entitled to at least a share of the considerable advantages that come from an ability to create money. In other words, the atmosphere and monetary system are valuable parts of the commons, and a basic income would be a fine mechanism to distribute some of the returns from these assets to you, to me, and to everybody else. In other words, my three policy solutions all seemed to derive their moral justification from the idea of common ownership.

The second idea was actually an image – of a doughnut. Conceived and popularised by Oxford economist Kate Raworth, this is the idea that the economic space within which we can safely operated is squeezed between the requirement for basic human needs on one side, and global, planetary environmental limits on the other. It’s basically a conceptualisation of the environmental and human space between what we need and what our planet can tolerate, expressed as a doughnut. Kate Raworth has many other positive, important, and urgent ideas in her book ‘Doughnut Economics’. But that one diagram, expressing our human social and environmental predicament in a such a clear, simple, understandable way, was a ground-breaking way of looking at ourselves and the world.

And so, obsessed with the problems and policies that I had made my own, convinced that there was at least the possibility of great value from my direction of thought, and armed with the idea of the commons and a copy of ‘Doughnut Economics’, I took the night ferry across the Irish Sea to England and to Windermere. And it was incredible.

There were about thirty of us, six from Positive Money and about two dozen supporters from various backgrounds, mostly money-related. Our focus was on how to understand, explain and communicate the ideas underlying our monetary system and the case for reform. These were rarefied, focused and extremely important subjects. These people had recognised that and had attached themselves to a group focused on organising and promoting this perspective and this platform – they were self-selecting. They were also open, passionate, friendly, focused and very, very smart.

The buzz was incredible, the connections immediate, and the conversation continuous. There was plenty of free and unstructured time for walks, pints, introductions and discussion, while in the structured sessions we focused on deep storytelling for collective action, and were introduced into the ideas of Marshall Ganz. Ganz believes that it is emotion that drives political action, and that emotion is transferred through deep attachment to shared values. These emotional values are best communicated through narrative – through shared stories. And that starts with an open, honest and authentic Story of Self. It is these techniques that I am now using as I write these words. I am no longer arguing a disparate bunch of economic policy points backed by statistical evidence and academic theories. Now I’m simply telling you my story.

Possibility

And that is how I got from there to here. Let me tell you where I am now, and what I think we should do.

Our climate is in serious trouble and we’re getting close to destabilising it irreparably. Despite the Paris Agreement and the spectacular success of renewables, our carbon emissions trajectory is still on the wrong track, and the damage and danger is increasing by the day. Around the world, millions of now surplus people scramble for low-paid work, living in the fear of being one pregnancy, car-breakdown or rent increase away from destitution. Meanwhile vast sums of taxpayer’s money have gone to prop up a grossly unfair and dysfunctional monetary, financial and banking system.

Under the onslaught of such systemic pressures, our political system is breaking down. The state-controlling socialist Left is discredited. The free-market, neoliberal Centre is discredited. And much of the Right seems to have drifted off into the insularity of protectionism, borders and other controls on movement. There’s nothing left – no ideas, no vision, no leadership, no direction, no path to a better tomorrow. For many people, our biggest idea is to build a wall. Trump, the Brexiteers, Sanders, Corbyn, and all the other ‘populist’ challengers from both Right and Left are political symptoms of very real, very deep structural economic problems. Politics is broken because economics is broken.

We need a new idea. The old, stale economic ideas and stories from the 19th and 20th centuries no longer apply in a 21st Century world of online shopping, Facebook and competition from Vietnam. Marx is dead. Keynes is dead. Hayek is dead. Friedman is dead. None of them understood the internet or thought realistically about artificial intelligence or 3-D printing. We clearly and unambiguously need a new economic and political story to orientate us towards a fairer, more civilised and more sustainable order in the world we are actually living in. We need a new organising idea.

I believe that the core economic policies of carbon tax and dividend, a basic income, and monetary reform must represent the key policy ingredients of such a new idea. I believe that the perspective of the commons and the visualisation of the doughnut are key to how that story might be formed, framed, justified and communicated. Essentially, I believe that it may be possible to consciously, deliberately and strategically create a new economic and political story fit for the technological realities of the 21st Century, and to open up a new path to a positive, prosperous and progressive future for us all.

The time to do something is now. We are in a crisis, and an emergency. Climate change is with us and accelerating. Every day countless millions of real, emotional human beings live ugly, desperate lives, trapped between absolute obligations and limitations on one hand, and the rapidly changing dynamics of the labour market on the other. Financial eyes watch property bubbles in Australia, Canada and elsewhere, wondering where the next global debt crisis will begin. In the absence of an overarching political and economic story to understand and counteract these forces, we are left without vision, without purpose and without hope. The gap is filled with useless cynicism, despair and apathy, and with lowest-common-denominator appeals to the worst of our nature.

This is happening now, while you read these words. The arctic is melting, the seas are rising, Trump is in the White House, the UK is leaving the EU and interest rates remain stuck near zero. Four in ten French voters wanted Marine Le Pen to lead, govern and represent them. Authoritarians are on the rise. The traditional Left-Right divide is fragmenting. The out-of-touch establishment seems useless. The barbarians are overwhelming the barriers. Almost every election throws up a once unimaginable surprise. The centre is not holding.

It is intolerable, in a world of melting glaciers, for one individual taking a private jet on a weekend break, to emit more Co2 than an entire town switching to low energy lightbulbs. It is deeply unfair that all productivity gains go to capital and none to labour, and that workers must engage with employers under threat of destitution. It is unconscionable that the finance and banking industry, which deeply damaged the economy and took many billions from taxpayers and through austerity cuts, remains essentially unrepentant, unaccountable and unchanged. It is tragic that the root causes of these moral outrages remain mostly unexamined in public discussion, while immigrants take the blame for the resulting pain. Our current order is clearly and blatantly unfair, immoral and unjust. This is wrong.

Now is the time for change. Everywhere we see the search for a new perspective. The two big political and economic organising ideas that began in the 19th Century and evolved during the 20th Century are no longer fit for purpose. None of them are relevant in a world of microchips, the internet and AI. Yet we remain without an alternative framework within which to understand and change our world. We have no vision of a bright and positive future, and no map of how to get from here to there. We are lost in the mist, without perspective or direction. We are frightened, unfocused, disconnected and useless. Adrift.

But there is a glimmer. Out there, appearing and disappearing in the shifting fog of current events, there is something. There is a possibility. There is a shimmer of potential, and a fragile gossamer thread of achievable action linking there and here. There is a vision. I have a dream. And I am not alone. Others see it too.

This dream is of our world one hundred years from now, prosperous and at peace. Co2 levels are falling steadily and most environmental indicators are dramatically improving. The economy is stable and boring. This is a world in which the environmental and social limits of market behaviour are taxed to pay for a universal and guaranteed basic income. It is a world in which productive and strategic public investment is funded by independent central bank control of the money supply. In this possible future, the returns from the commons are shared with the owners of the commons. The outside of Kate Raworth’s doughnut is taxed to pay for the inside, while the market remains free within that safe ecological space. This would be a new and better social contract, fit for the new world we are moving into.

The implementation of just three specific policies could make that happen, and help create that future one hundred years from now. Not all at once. Not perfectly. Not right away. But it could happen. Three vast, dangerous and intractable problems that are destroying our world and our future. Three simple, elegant, evidenced-based solutions, already emerging rapidly. We are close. From three important, separate and distinct economic policies it may be possible to construct one intellectually coherent, morally justified and emotionally contagious whole. Can we not just connect the dots?

There is a ‘feel’ to certain times. Sometimes there’s a free-floating energy in the air, just waiting to be grounded and made manifest. It’s like a nervousness – a general feeling that something significant could happen. I experienced this feeling as a young teacher in the People’s Republic of China early in 1989. At the time, China was just opening up and was just beginning its transition from state communism to free markets. For the first time in decades, street trading was allowed, and teenagers selling cigarettes made much more money than university professors. Inflation was rising and the iron rice bowl was shattering. As the first shoots of market freedom sprouted, the air was tense with uncertainty and dissatisfaction, but also pregnant with expectation and hope. It was like an ideological spring.

And what a spring it was! On April 8th popular politburo member and former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Hu Yaobang had a heart attack in the Zhongnanhai government buildings while discussing education reform. He died on April 15th and a small group of students protested at his funeral by breaking bottles on the ground (a reference to a double meaning in the name of premier Deng Xiaoping). On April 22nd fifty thousand students marched to Tiananmen Square to participate in Hu’s memorial service and deliver a letter of petition to Premier Li Peng. By May there were demonstrations throughout China, and tens of millions of people in the streets. The workers joined the students. There were rumours of army rebellion. For one glorious week the state media was absolutely and entirely free. Everywhere was solidarity, expectation and a hope that survived Tiananmen Square on June 4th, and that is still an important part of what China has become.

My point is that our time, now, feels like China did then, back in the spring of 1989 before Hu Yaobang died. It is as if the emotional-political landscape were saturated with petrol or gasoline, just waiting for a spark to ignite it. The tension is there, the stage is set, and the vacuum is waiting to be filled. Then something happens, and then something else happens, and then suddenly everything is different. When old orders are breaking down and everything is unstable, even the smallest things can make a very big difference. A handful of students breaking bottles at a funeral changed China.

China offers not only an example of almost spontaneous mass political movement and engagement, but of dramatic system change itself. The leadership of China, under Deng Xiaoping, recognised and admitted that their precious ideological system wasn’t working, and so they consciously and deliberately changed it. The same thing happened in the last years of the Soviet Union where, in an atmosphere of instability like our own, the entire political and economic system of hundreds of millions of people was changed, involving events ranging from the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to a misplaced phone call between East German border guards. Vast, systemic economic and political change is perfectly possible.

In 1947, thirty-nine scholars, mostly economists, with some historians and philosophers, were invited by Professor Friedrich Hayek to meet to discuss the state, and possible fate of classical liberalism. From that meeting came the ideas, ideology and organisation that was behind Reagan, Thatcher and what is now called modern, free market neoliberalism. One meeting that changed the world.

In 1962 two men, assisted by a handful of others, leased some land on the coast of California to establish the Esalen Institute and explore, organise and communicate the ideas of the nacent Human Potential Movement. These ideas informed and directed the counter-culture revolution of the later 1960s, and helped form the culture and society we live in today. Just a few people, a little money, and an idea. And they changed the world.

I myself have sat in the reading room of the British Museum where a passionate and impoverished activist, economist and writer wrote the words that expressed the ideas that dominated the political and economic landscape of the world for much of the 20th Century. One man, with pen and paper, in a safe and quiet place. That was all it took.

This has been done before. It may not be easy, but it is certainly not impossible.

Action

And so, dear friend who has read this far, this is where our stories begin to intertwine. Because if you accept that we have three core problems with the environment, income and debt; And if you even suspect that the three specific and rapidly emerging economic policies of Tax & Dividend, a Basic Income, and Monetary Financing might even possibly be a solution to these problems; And if you see a gigantic, vast and ever more urgent gap in the market for political and economic organising ideas and ideology, and if you can sense huge pent-up demand for such ideas. And if can get past the scale of the issues and catch just glimpse of the possibility that these three economic ideas might be combined into one simple and emotionally-communicable ideology. We’ll then, my friend, the question is, what are you going to do?

Feeling what you feel, about these deepest and most emotional of issues and values, and knowing what you know (including what I have just told you), what are you going to do about it? Our world is dying, our family, friends and neighbours are suffering, our financial system is dysfunctional and unfair. These are facts. The existing movements and campaigns for Tax & Dividend, a Basic Income, and Monetary Reform are already connected by the core concept of ‘the commons’, and are already framed by Kate Raworth’s doughnut. A lot is known about effectively developing and contagiously communicating stories and ideas.

It is not for me to tell you what to do. You are your own person with your own perspective and your own take on it all. You have your own job, your own network, your own platform and your own influence. God knows, you have your own distractions. So you know best what you can do the best from where you are and with what you have. But if you’re not sure of where to start, and for what it’s worth, here are my suggestions:

1. Learn. You probably know a lot about the three ‘meta-problems’ just from following the news. And if you are reading this you probably know a lot about at least one of the movements and campaigns involved, and the ideas behind it. You may even be familiar with two or even all three. But if there are gaps in your knowledge, I suggest that you fill them.

2. Believe. At some stage you’ve to stop studying and apply what you’ve learned. At some point you’ve got to stop reading about it and arguing about it and thinking about it and make a decision about what it is that you actually believe and what, exactly, are you going to do about it. Learning is good, but at some point you have to make up your mind. The information will always be imperfect. When looking at the range of our serious problems and at the array of solutions on offer, at some point you have to decide. In other words, you have to stop questioning and believe.

3. Connect. You’re not the only person thinking this way, feeling these possibilities, scenting the faint, sweet smell of hope in a political and economic desert of hopelessness. There are others too. Join them, follow them, reach out to them, meet them in person. Share your story and your dream with them, as honestly and openly and authentically as you can. All is not lost. There is a way out. There is a possible path to a safe and beautiful future.

4. Support. The idea that it may be possible to construct an ideology that saves the world may be quixotic. The odds of this endeavour succeeding may be small. It may indeed turn out to be “unrealistic”. But the resources required to get it out there and underway – to test it in the world – are relatively small in contrast to the potential benefit if it actually worked. In other words, while high-risk, this venture has a relatively small downside and a potentially unlimited upside. The potential returns are vast compared to the resources needed to test it in the market. For those with extra time, skills, money and organisational structure who want to invest wisely in changing the world for the better, investment in this idea is surely a good deal. Seed money and angel investment would nurture a lot of fragile roots at this early stage, not least my own.

Conclusion

The Positive Money weekend on Windermere, where we discussed telling the story of money and of monetary reform, was structured in the presentation, exercise and worksheet way familiar to the corporate, professional and academic worlds. At the end of that retreat we were each asked to share our dream and vision of the Positive Money campaign six months from now. It seemed a bit twee at the time, as these things often do, but I thought about this question on the train and bus and ferry home. And my dream is this:

Much is the same. I’m back at Ambleside in the beautiful English Lake District, on the same campus and in the same room. But this time, most of the people are different. This time, in my dream, Fran Boait, Ben Dyson and Stanislas Jourdan are there, from the monetary reform movement. Guy Standing and Scott Santens are there from the Basic Income movement, and Ted Halstead, Joseph Robertson and James Baker from the carbon Tax & Dividend movement (yes, that James Baker – it’s my dream!). Marshall Ganz would be there, and Kate Raworth and, for the deep historical perspective of narrative and all-round wisdom, historian Yuval Noah Harari. World Bank economist Paul Romer would be there. There would be others too, but the group would be small – under twenty.

This group would be there for a week – a whole week! – facilitated and structured by Positive Money’s indomitable Rachel Oliver, as before, and with lots of free and loosely-structured time for those spontaneous, intense and stimulating conversations in which the magic happens. As before, there would be homework – ideas and information to be read, watched and understood prior to meeting. Participants would be expected to be prepared. But this time, the topic and the focus would be different.

This time, the goal would essentially be to consciously, deliberately and strategically construct a new economic and political ideology fit for the 21st Century and the challenges we face. With the expertise and experience from each policy area, and guided by the best and wisest storytellers in these matters, we would try to merge three stories into one, and thus tell a new story. A story of survival, of progress, of potential and of hope. A vision of what the world could be. And a specific, explicit and realistic plan to get us there.

That’s my story – or at least an edited, framed part of it. And that’s my dream. Thank you for reading. If this has touched you, and if you want to do more than just read, then please do what you can.

Do it now. We have no time to waste.

The GOP Climate Solution is Best

The new head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, does not believe that carbon dioxide pollution is a major cause of climate change. In an interview with CNBC the Donald Trump’s appointee said “I would not agree that [carbon dioxide] is a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet, we need to continue to debate, continue the review and analysis.” In other words, as we reach 410ppm of Co2 in the earth’s atmosphere, we need to continue to deny, delay and dither.

Scott Pruitt, EPA Administrator
Scott Pruitt doesn’t know what’s going on.

Pruitt is denying the reality that Co2 causes climate change because he cannot imagine a solution that doesn’t involve state control over the market. He’s basically choosing values or ideals over reality and truth, at least strategically, because he sees the situation as zero-sum and either/or. He cannot imagine a perspective on climate change that includes both a free, healthy and prosperous market, and rapid and meaningful reductions in Co2 emissions.

But there is such a solution. It’s being promoted by the likes of former GOP Secretary of State James Baker, former GOP Secretary of State George Shultz, and former GOP Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, as well as by former NASA scientist and early climate activist Dr. James Hansen. This plan puts money into the pockets of nearly two thirds of people, powerfully incentivises the market in the direction of carbon sustainablity, and can be implemented gradually without sudden economic or market shocks, all through existing laws, institutions and structures. It does not increase government, but it does increase economic growth. It provides the nucleus and start of a Basic Income (the Baker-Shultz plan starts at $2,000 per family per year). It encourages and enforces environmental responsibility while expanding real, tangible human freedom.

That solution is revenue neutral carbon Tax and Dividend, in which a large and growing tax is placed on fossil fuels as they come out of the ground or arrive in port, and the proceeds from this tax are then distributed to everyone, equally. Essentially, you pay for your pollution, I pay for my pollution, and we’ll split the proceeds equally. It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s fair, it’s practical, it’s economically realistic and it’s politicaly realistic. And it’s the only chance we have of getting our global carbon emissions under control before we damage our planet for thousands of years (which in real, human, terms means ‘forever’).

Like it or not, Trump and Pruitt are in government and so they have to be sold on this plan. Jim Baker, George Shultz and others within the GOP are pushing carbon Tax and Dividend to Donald Trump. Elon Musk, a member of Trump’s tech advisory group, is pitching the plan. There are currently 13 GOP members of the bi-partisan ‘Climate Solutions Caucus‘ in the US House of Representatives. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s Secretary of State, is the man who turned Exxon’s climate policy from denial and delay to carbon Tax & Dividend. The California State Legislature has passed a resolution supporting carbon Tax & Dividend, as have 43 cities and municipalities, including Philadelphia, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Portland. There is real political movement in this direction.

Fee and Dividend
These two? Really? Wow! Maybe it’s obvious?

Make no mistake – we NEED a price on carbon as quickly as possible. Cap and Trade is a complex and opaque mess of entitlement, speculation and perverse incentives in which prices rise, and big business takes the money (whether to improve carbon efficiency or not). Straight carbon tax is a government grab in which prices rise, and the government takes the money (whether to invest in renwables or not). With carbon Tax & Dividend though, prices still rise – but YOU get the money. Gas and heating cost more, but you also get a check in the mail. For most people that cheque will more than cover their higher prices – and the more they switch to lower-carbon alternatives, the more extra money they’ll have in their pockets. Distribution would be from heavier polluters to lighter polluters. Sustainable behaviour would pay.

Arctic Sea Ice 2016. Fee and Dividend
Something significant changed in the Arctic last winter. Soon it may be too late.

Democrats, NGOs and others concerned about climate change should be supporting the efforts of Jim Baker, George Shultz, Elon Musk, the members of the ‘Climate Solutions Caucus‘, the Citizen’s Climate Lobby,  and others attempting to turn carbon Tax & Dividend from an idea into a law. The time is late. This is the policy that has the best chance of saving us in the time we have left. It is urgent, it is fair, it is realistic, and it has bi-partisan political support.

Get behind it. We need to do this now.

One Policy to Stop Climate Catastrophe

Markets made this blog possible. Markets allow activists to travel easily and cheaply to Marrakech. Markets give us light and heat. They put food on our tables. It was markets that lifted a billion chinese people from abject poverty, and markets that put mobile phones in the hands of most Africans. Markets have done far, far more to improve the lot of humanity than any government, NGO, or other organisation. Railing against them just illustrates rigid ideology and makes one automatically irrelevant to any serious discussion. In the struggle to solve the biggest and most important problem of our time (or of any time, for that matter), ‘market denial’ is as toxic to progress as climate denial.

economics bollox
The cost of this isn’t included in the price of heating oil, electricity, food, travel…

The market is the ONLY mechanism that can make our entire energy system sustainable in the short time we have left without inflicting horrific misery on billions of human beings. And it only needs one thing – a realistic price on carbon. If the real costs of climate change are included in the price of carbon, then the market will take care of the rest. If the price of carbon reflected its actual cost, then every single product and every single service that used carbon would be much, much more expensive, and every single product and every single service that didn’t use carbon would be, in relative terms, much, much cheaper. Just internalising the real cost of carbon into its price would cause market and human activity to flow from the carbon-based to the non-carbon based.

There are three ways that the cost of carbon can be internalised into its price:

(1) The first is the direct taxation of carbon, with the proceeds flowing to the government (like cigarette taxes). This would make every thing that contained carbon – light, heat, travel, food, etc., etc. – much more expensive, with terrible human consequences. Of course, government could use this money to help those badly affected, but that would be most people. And, of course, the vast bureaucracy of means-testers, scheme administrators and other controllers would be very expensive. Economic power would flow from people to government as people found themselves facing crushingly higher prices and mountains of forms to fill in for handouts to help them cope. For these reasons this option is not politically possible in a democracy.

(2) The second way to internalise the costs of carbon is through Cap and Trade, also known as Emissions Trading – what we have now. This involves government setting a cap on carbon use, then letting the market buy and sell pollution permits and offsetting credits. This method worked to reduce the sulphur emissions that caused acid rain and the CFCs that caused ozone layer depletion because there were only a few big players in those markets. But it doesn’t work in the much bigger market for carbon in which we are all involved.

Cap and Trade
It’s OK – they bought some credits from a tree farm in Moldova.

In reality, Cap & Trade rewards the heaviest polluters (who get more carbon permits), transfers pollution to jurisdictions with weak measurement and enforcement, and creates perverse incentives (don’t reduce emissions because then you’ll get fewer permits in the future). It even causes carbon emissions, with extra carbon being emitted solely for the purpose of gaining permits, which can then be sold. It raises costs for consumers and small business (who aren’t part of the market for permits), and transfers money from consumers and small business to big business. The ‘cap’ is set largely out of sight, so big business influence is considerable.

Pope Francis summed up Cap & Trade well in his encyclical on the environment: “The strategy of buying and selling ‘carbon credits’ can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”

(3) The third way to put a price on carbon is through carbon Fee and Dividend. This is ‘revenue-neutral’ carbon taxation in which all proceeds are distributed equally to everyone. Everybody’s costs go up, but everybody also gets a cheque in the post. If you use less than the median level of carbon then your cheque will be bigger than your extra costs and you’ll come out ahead. If you use more than the median level of carbon then your cheque will not cover your extra costs and you’ll lose out. Under Fee and Dividend two thirds of people would come out ahead, making a real, serious price on carbon politically realistic. Money would flow from heavy polluters to light polluters.

Fee and Dividend
Political tribalism and ideological rigidity don’t solve climate change.

James Hansen supports Fee and Dividend. The US Green Party supports Fee and Dividend. Elon Musk (who has used the market to do more to reduce emissions than all the climate activists put together) supports Fee and Dividend. The Democratic Party legislature of California supports Fee and Dividend. On the other side of the ideological spectrum Exxon supports Fee and Dividend, dozens of non-denying GOP congressmen and senators support Fee and Dividend, and many other big business people and corporations support Fee and Dividend.

Fee and Dividend
The red line is 2016. Something significant has clearly changed this year.

It may already be too late. Three days ago the temperature at the North Pole was 20C above normal, and in the depths of the arctic winter night the ice is still melting. Ice coverage data from the last two months suggest we may have already reached a tipping point (see image below). If we do still have a chance then it is not through big, bloated, controlling, bureaucratic, wasteful, out-of-touch government directly controlling people’s incomes and energy usage like some sort of God or emperor of old – nobody will vote for that. And, as has been amply proven, it won’t be through big corporations wheeling, dealing and speculation in pollution permits issued in the dark by heavily lobbied government, as we have now.

Fee and Dividend puts a real, high, serious price on carbon while making 2/3 of people richer. It is politically possible, viable and realistic – a policy that Exxon and the US Green Party agree on. It establishes the idea that polluters should pay and the polluted should receive. It has rock solid economic, philosophical and moral foundations. It gives power, choices and freedom to people, and not to fat, out-of-touch governments or greedy, shortsighted corporations. It can provide the foundation for a basic income. It can be implemented gradually, in any tax jurisdiction, and can be expanded internationally.

Complaining, whining and criticising does nothing for anybody – if you’re not FOR something then you’re part of the problem. No solution to carbon emissions will work without a real price on carbon. Direct carbon taxation at any meaningful level is highly regressive and thus not politically possible. Cap and Trade has been tried and shown not to work at anything near what’s needed.

Fee and Dividend is our only hope.

 

The Ongoing Collapse of Economics

We’re obviously at the end of an economic era. Clearly there are at least one, maybe several, fundamental, structural flaws deep in the heart of our economic system. Any financial news source from any day of the week will give you evidence of economic stagnation and instability. And any Trumpeteer, Bernie Bro or Brexiter will tell you that all is not well among the ordinary people of the heartland. Clearly something is badly wrong with the actual, real economy.

Is Economics Bollox?
Very serious people who think about very important things that affect us all. Or is it bollox?

Meanwhile, in the dusty halls of academia, of governments, and of banks, think tanks and other established and often ancient institutions, a bunch of people, mostly men, who like to think of themselves as smart are charged with fixing whatever it is that has gone wrong. They’re economists, and their ideas, perspective and advice not only strongly influences what governments and central bankers do, but influences how governments and central bankers think about what they do. Economists even frame the choices within which governments and central bankers operate. In a way, their theories help create real, actual economic reality for us all.

Money is important, governments have power, and economists influence what governments do with that power. Economists are therefore very, very important people doing very, very serious and important things that affect the real lives of hundreds of millions of people. This is serious stuff. Just ask them – they’ll tell you.

economics bollox
They don’t look very practical.

The thing to know about economists is that, like the magicians in the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, there are two kinds of them: Practical Economists and Theoretical Economists. Practical economists are the ones out to change something. They work for governments, banks, central banks, lobby groups, etc. They want to fiddle with the workings of the economic machine to make it better – for somebody, if not for everybody.

Theoretical economists, on the other hand, are above all that. They think of themselves as scientists and see their purpose as a search for Truth. The practical economists, occupied with many other matters, depend on the theoretical economists for their theories. In other words, theoretical economists (specifically, theoretical macroeconomists) create the theory used by practical economists to strongly influence power. Theoretical economists may be relatively unknown, they may be boring, they may be incomprehensible, but they are very, very, very important people.

This is unfortunate, because there are two serious problems facing the community of theoretical macroeconomists these days:

The first problem facing theoretical macroeconomists is that reality is diverging from theory. More specifically, reality is diverging from their theory. In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they’re not. In macroeconomic theory, X should be happening, or Y should be happening. Meanwhile, in practice, financial instability, weak growth, austerity, inequality, income insecurity and many other economic woes blight the lives of billions. In other words, whatever it is that macroeconomists are doing, or think they’re doing, it’s clearly not working.

economics bollox
That was a surprise! Oh well, these things happen.

And it’s not just that theoretical macroeconomists can’t fix the economy – they can’t even predict what’s going to happen! The 2008 financial calamity came out of the blue for most of them. Can you imagine the credibility of weather forecasting if the biggest storm in 75 years hit with almost no warning whatsoever? When an economic theory can’t even predict that, and seems useless at improving the situation, then what’s the point of it? It’s hard not to call bullshit.

Which brings me to the second problem facing theoretical macroeconomists today – the growing rebellion within their ranks. Essentially, theoretical macroeconomists are dividing into two camps, with more and more of them publicly doubting the orthodoxy. Faced with fact after fact that does not conform to their theories, more and more theoretical economists are, to their great credit, doubting those theories. Simply put, the ideas of theoretical macroeconomists affect the lives of millions, and there is currently an earthquake happening in their conceptual field.

The Chief Economist of the World Bank says that much of macroeconomics has become a religion, whose “pseudoscience” is infecting all social disciplines (that’s the Chief Economist of the World Bank). In a NYT article titled ‘How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?’ Paul Krugman questions the very assumptions that underlie conventional macroeconomic theory. Willem Buiter, the Chief Economist of Citigroup, calls most modern macroeconomics “useless“. Former Bank of England economist Charles Goodhart argues that economists need to start paying attention to money again. Olivier Blanchard, former Chief Economist of the IMF, calls the dominant strand of macroeconomic thinking “insular” and “imperialistic”.  And on and on it goes, with the recurring theme that macroeconomic theory has become orthodoxy, not science.

In other words, the macroeconomic theories behind the decisions of finance ministers, central bankers and other powerful people and institutions may well be bollox. Looking at financial instability, stagnant demand, tepid growth, austerity, inequality, income insecurity and all the other endemic economic problems of our age, it’s hard not to think that this might explain a lot.

You might think that the debate between orthodox theoretical economists and their colleagues who call bullshit would be dry, boring and filled with talk of phlogistons, cycle theory, DSGE models and other impenetrable concepts, but it’s not always that way. With a kind of morbid fascination at the spectacle of concepts behind many a distinguished career crumbling in the cold, hard light of factual reality, huge entertainment can be had from following the twitter feed of Paul Romer, the Chief Economist of the World Bank, as he appeals to his more orthodox colleagues to face facts. It would almost be funny if weren’t for all the real human pain behind it.

If we accept the rapidly growing body of evidence and authority suggesting that many of the core concepts of conventional macroeconomics are bollox, and that economists don’t really know what they’re doing, then the important question becomes ‘What next?’ As conventional macroeconomic theory crumbles in the face of facts, what will replace it?

One of the primary contenders is Modern Monetary Theory, which focuses on money itself (something which,  believe it or not, conventional macroeconomic theory doesn’t do). Another possibility is that macroeconomics will learn from complexity and systems theory, and that its models (and, hopefully, their predictive ability) will become more like those used in meteorology and climate science. Anti-economist Steve Keen is working in this direction, influenced by the Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) of Hyman Minsky, whatever that is.

But wherever macroeconomics is going, it’s clear that the old order is collapsing. The theoretical orthodoxy that has guided the highest level of economic management for many decades is crumbling. Either economics is an objective science or it’s not. And if economics is not an objective science, then we quickly need an economics that is. Countless livelihoods and lives will be deeply affected by the revolution we are witnessing in theoretical macroeconomics. It may be dry, it may be boring, it may be theoretical, and it may seem incomprehensible.

But it’s hard to think of any discussion that’s more important.

Making €1.2 Trillion out of Nothing

Yesterday, as happens every six weeks, the Governing Council of the European Central Bank met in Frankfurt to discuss monetary policy. In attendance, as always, were the six members of the ECB’s executive board and the nineteen governors of the eurozone’s national central banks. Together these 23 men and 2 women discussed economic conditions, interest rates and their €1,225,566,000,000 (and counting) quantative easing program.

The decisions made at these meetings are vast, and have very real effects on the financial lives of the 340 million people who live in the Eurozone. The results of ECB meetings dramatically influence markets, the economy and the amount that governments have to spend on public services. In other words, those 25 people who met in Frankfurt yesterday are, for all practical purposes, the gods of money for the 340 million of us who live in the Eurozone.

As usual, Mario Draghi, president of the group, held a press conference right after the Frankfurt meeting. Again, as usual, that press conference was published on YouTube as soon as it had finished. Four hours later that YouTube video had attracted a total of 35 views. A full 24 hours later and there have been 460 views. As I write this there are 650 views.

ECB Press Conference
Monetary policy for 340 million people. Not exactly riveting YouTube viewing – but only 650 hits?

However I know for a fact that at least a dozen of those views were mine, and I imagine there are others who also account for multiple views. And since the press conference is not exactly riveting viewing, I expect that many viewers only watched a little of it before clicking on elsewhere. Apart from the 50-odd people who were in the room, it’s safe to say that only a few hundred other people have actually seen the whole thing.

The last ECB press conference, on August 2nd, has had only 1,308 views in the 6 weeks it’s been on Youtube. The July 21st press conference has attracted 4,130 hits, several of them from me. The one before that only got 3,962 views since it was published nearly three months ago. Again, several of those hits were mine.

Now, money is very important to me, and I’m sure it’s important to you too. Money is especially important for poor people, who spend much of their time thinking about it, but many rich people also spend a lot of their time thinking about money. Many of us spend much of our lives working for money. It’s how we eat. It’s how we put a roof over our heads. It buys our clothes. It allows us to travel. It dictates what our democratic governments can and can’t do. Reach into your pocket or purse or wallet and take out some money and look at it. It’s important, right!

So despite money being, lets face it, the most practically important thing in the day-to-day lives of us 340 million people; and despite the fact that the financial sector accounts for around 20% of GDP; and despite the vast size and reach of the business and financial press and media, and the many thousands of people writing and communicating in this area; and despite the fact that highlights from Mario Draghi’s press conference were publicised in news broadcasts across the continent and around the world (it was even mentioned on my local radio station) – despite all that, only a few hundred people out of 340 million were interested enough to see for themselves what the Eurozone gods of money had to say.

The ECB’s website statistics tell a similar story. Their site gets around 216,000 visits a month, or about 50,000 a week. However it’s ‘bounce rate’ (i.e. the number of visits in which the viewer looks at only one page on the site, discovers they’re not interested, and moves on) is a phenomonal 65%. That means that there are only around 17,500 real visits a week or about 2,500 per day.

ECB Press Conference
The ECB website: A dense, boring, inpenetrable morass of euphemisms for ‘printing money’.

Now, 2,500 visits a day might sound like a lot, but it’s not – especially when you consider the importance of the institution and the fact that it controls the money supply of 340 million people. And, since many of those visits are multiple visits from the same people, and some are search engine bots and other non-human visitors, we’re probably talking about real traffic of significantly less than 2,000 actual people each day. And even among those 2,000 people the average visitor looks at only 2 pages and spends less than 2 min on the site. Almost none of this traffic (only 1.27% or about 200 real visits per week) comes from social media. My Twitter profile sometimes gets more than that.

The inescapable fact is that, despite the importance of the European Central Bank to the real financial lives of 340 million people, almost nobody, including most financial journalists, is interested in the details, minutiae and specifics of what they actually do. I suspect the same is true for the activities of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and other central banks.

This is a pity, because there’s some interesting stuff on the ECB’s wesite. For example, did you know that the ECB now owns €1,225,566,000,000 (i.e. €1.2 TRILLION) worth of assets (mostly government bonds) purchased with printed money through its Asset Purchase (i.e. QE) Program? Or that it has lent $20 billion of printed money to corporations since June and is printing and lending €7 billion more each month? Did you know that the ECB buys some of this corporate debt directly from the corporations concerned, even though it’s not allowed to deal directly with governments? And did you know that the ECB even promotes the availability of its printed money to corporations, advertising that “Market participants involved in private placements can contact the relevant national central bank”.

ECB Press ConferenceDid you know that the ECB lends out the corporate assets it has bought with printed money so that borrowers of those assets can sell them short and make a profit if the price falls? The ECB has already bought and lent out securities from SAP, Siemens, Allianz, E.ON, BMW, Volkswagen, BASF, Bayer, Bosch, Merck and many other corporations since it started lending out the securities it owns six weeks ago.

And did you know that lists of all purchases of assets with printed money (minus the amounts) are available on the websites of the six national central banks buying on behalf of the ECB, and that those lists are updated every monday? Did you know that the ECB does buy securities from corporations classified as “public undertakings” (i.e. owned or controlled by government), but won’t disclose any details of exactly what “public undertakings” it is buying from? And there’s lots more of interesting, juicy information that could easily be spun into accessible and interesting media stories.

ECB Press Conference
You can borrow the ECB’s freshly printed money to buy Monsanto, but not to buy groceries.

For example, the ECB says that it is lending €7 billion of freshly printed money each month to big corporations in order to “further strengthen the pass-through of the Eurosystem’s asset purchases to financing conditions of the real economy”. One of the corporations it lends to is Bayer, which is in the process of buying Monsanto for $65 billion, so the ECB is essentially printing money to help Bayer buy Monsanto. Surely that would be interesting to many people, if only they knew?

As one of the literally one-in-a-million Eurozone citizens who actually watched yesterday’s ECB press conference, and as one of the very few people who have waded through the ECB’s website, it seems clear that more people, including more financial journalists, need to pay a lot more attention.

The Answer to Trump is a Basic Income

Across the western world and beyond, the political status quo is crumbling. In response to the effects of automation and globalisation on the sufficiency and security of labour and incomes, and in the light of clear, blatant, and unambiguous unfairness in our political economic system, voters are revolting. Electorates in nation after nation, in election after election, are abandoning traditional ideologies, loyalties and political parties in favour of new radicals, revolutionaries, nationalists and populists from both the Left and the Right. Sometimes it seems like their policies are from both Right and Left.

Answer to Trump is a Basic Income
“My whole life is about winning. I don’t lose often. I almost never lose.” – Donald Trump, 2016 GOP Presidential Nominee

In the UK the narrowness of the Scottish independence defeat was a surprise, the popularity and rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the British Labour Party has been a surprise and, of course, the loss of the Brexit referendum was a surprise. In France it’s Marine Le Pen, in Iceland the Pirate Party, in Spain Podemos. In the United States, of course, there is Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Everywhere the barbarians are at the gate, and the comfortable classes (and media) are surprised. After all, their theories say things aren’t so bad.

Pope Francis
“We want change – real change, structural change. This system is by now intolerable”. – Pope Francis

But to many ordinary people – to voters – struggling to pay their rent, or their car insurance, or their utility bills – for the Amazon packers, the Uber drivers, the so-called freelancers and contractors of the Gig economy, and for the ones left behind when manufacturing moved on – for them it wasn’t a surprise. Their political anger, cynicism and sense of injustice is palpable. And since many see themselves as having nothing to lose, they are more and more willing to take political risks. Every country is seeing challenges to the intolerable economic stress, insecurity and unfairness of the Way Things Are. As Pope Francis spells out: “We are faced… with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. We want change – real change, structural change. This system is by now intolerable”.

When the people are suffering and their politicians ignore them or are ineffective in relieving that suffering, there is a political vacuum. Voters who are unrepresented by existing politicians will seek new ones – it’s as simple as that. And the unscrupulous, self-interested and power-hungry will seek to fill that vacuum and meet that demand in whatever way they can – including relying on the corrosive division of identity politics.

We’re already seeing this across the western world and beyond, as growing income stress and insecurity result in populist political challenges and political (and ideological) instability. And as the pain and the blatant and self-evident unfairness grows, so too will this political pressure.

Long before the 1% own it all, in some major country there will be the election either of a disastrous, conflict-causing leader, or of a pragmatic revolutionary agent of positive change. Either the problem will be solved, or change will happen – there is no middle ground any more. And that major country, whichever is the first to take that leap, will be an example – either a horrific example or a shining example – to the entire world.

Brexit may be that example, or maybe Trump will be. Or perhaps it will be France and Marine Le Pen. Or maybe it’ll be Jeremy Corbyn, or somebody who rises in his reinvention of the British Labour party. It’s too early to tell. But until individual economic stress and insecurity are alleviated it’s only a matter of when.

But how can economic stress and insecurity be alleviated without restricting the technology and globalisation that’s causing it? If you don’t now the answer to this, then you’re not paying attention to important economic experiments planned or underway in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Simply put, the answer to Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Brexit, Front Nationale, Jeremy Corbyn and all the other challengers is a Basic Income.

Burning Taxes for a Mistake

One way to think of debt is as an ever-growing mountain of interconnected paper, largely created out of nothing, and piling up against the gravity of finite income and ability to repay. The 2008 crisis was an avalanche of default in such a metaphorical mountain – initially triggered by defaults in US sub-prime mortgages. Today the mountain is much, much bigger, and the ability to repay is more limited. And, of course, the mountain continues to grow – both in absolute terms and, in many cases, as a percentage of income (i.e. the ability to repay).

So the question is not if there’ll be another financial crisis, but when it will start. It might begin with Italian bank debt, or Greek sovereign debt, or a collapse of a residential or commercial real estate market in China, or London, or Canada, or Australia. Or maybe it will be triggered somewhere else, by some other over-leveraged, unrealistic, boom-and-bust collection of debtors and creditors. And when the defaults get big enough they will cause other defaults, and on and on the contagion will go. Just like the last time.

Except the next financial crisis will probably be worse than the last one, because the vast effects of the last one are still with us. Some individuals, companies and countries will come out if it better than others, depending on their exposure, just like last time. And the sheer and utter stupidity of relying on consumption debt and speculative debt for the creation of our money supply will become even more farcical.

One of the most surreal aspects to this farce is that central bankers and government are and will be essentially taxing hardworking people and cutting desperately needed services, and then burning the some of the proceeds. For years central banks bought up vast quantities of government debt using directly created QE money fresh off the presses. In order to make the books balance in traditional economic theory, what came from nothing has to go back to nothing, and so QE has to be paid back in order to be destroyed. And who’s going to pay those $€£trillions back so that it can all be destroyed? That’s right – you are!

Burning money.
This is what happens to some of your taxes. It’s necessary, so that the economic models still make sense to those who have built careers around them.

You could sort of understand this if the economy was overheating and if inflation was raging out of control, but our current predicament is far from that. So why are they doing it?

They’re doing it because establishment economists can’t face the fact that the old equilibrium models in which money is just another traded good (models to which many have devoted much of their careers) are at best seriously flawed, and at worst a load of nonsense.

In other words, hundreds of millions of people are suffering, and will be on the hook for $€£trillions, just because a bunch of established economic ‘experts’ can’t admit they’re wrong. And because government and central bank economists can’t admit they’re wrong, they’re not even seriously looking at the solutions right in front of their noses.

They can’t even see the need for deep, structural and systemic change. They can’t even think about being honest about the money they’ve already directly created. They can’t even see the need for reform of our monetary system.

They have to keep pretending.

‘Taming the Populists’ with Waffle

Note: This post is a response to an opinion piece by Javier Solana. Since it’s a response, if you don’t want to waste your time you’ll have to read the original article first.

 

I’m getting sick of this waffle.

Solana may have finally grasped the problem – but that’s hardly grounds for congratulations. After all, hundreds of millions of ordinary, struggling people supporting Trump, Corbyn, Wilders, Sanders, Le Pen, Iglesias, Ukip, Syriza, the Austrian Freedom Party and all the other radical challengers to the system figured that out years ago when they had a problem paying the rent or insuring the car. Welcome to obvious, practical economic reality, Mr. Solana!

Javier Solana, waffler
Former EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Secretary-General of NATO, and Foreign Minister of Spain, and currently President of the ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Europe, and waffler, the “Most Excellent” Javier Solana.

You’d wonder why somebody as clearly smart as Solana can be so emotionally and empathetically dumb. I guess that’s what comes of having more money than you could ever morally need for most of your live, and having yourself and your family assured of economic security. Meanwhile, back in the real world with the rest of us, the electricity bill is due… No wonder they just don’t get it.

And look at his solutions: “Bold initiatives to tackle inequality”, “stopgap measures”, better and smarter education and training, “improve global governance” and, of course, the admonition that “leaders must ensure that discussion is translated into real action”.

What a crock of nonsense! What a weasly, vague, wishy-washy, meaningless list of nonsense! No wonder people despise politicians who come out with drivel like this. Oh, it sounds great – it all sounds wonderful! But the problem is that it doesn’t actually MEAN anything at all. What do the words “bold”, “better”, “improve”, “ensure” and “real action” actually mean? There’s nothing specific, nothing explicit, nothing defined, nothing precise, nothing clear and nothing real about whatever it is he’s talking about. What, exactly is he proposing? What, specifically, is he suggesting? Where can I find a link to the text of the law that he’s seeking to implement?

Nowhere, that’s where. This is all called ‘waffle’.

And it’s not even very good waffle. Does he really think that redundant factory workers, Uber drivers, Amazon packers, fast food servers and all the many millions of others struggling near or below the median income – does he really think that they’re all going to brush up on their math skills and get jobs writing code for Google? Do we all have to be high-tech entrepreneurs now? Is that it? What a crock!

And what are these “stopgap measures”? I’ll tell you what they are. Sometimes you’re forced by circumstances to do the right thing, but you don’t want to do it, and so you keep reminding everyone that it’s only temporary. QE is a ‘stopgap measure’, for example. Whatever Solana’s “stopgap” measures” are (and like I said, it’s all waffle), he doesn’t want you to think they might be permanent. After all, we don’t want real change, do we.

And don’t get me started about his idea that huge sections of the population have to be “tamed”!

Disconnected, bubble-insulated, comfortably status quo nonsense from a waffler, in my opinion.