In an earlier piece I was lamenting that current political and economic thinking doesn’t seem to be getting us very far and went on to say “Conventional wisdom seems to be heading us in a downward spiral, maybe some unconventional wisdom will help us move in an upward direction.”
The question, of course, is where is that unconventional wisdom going to come from?
As so often happens, the other day, I was following another, quite unconnected, thread on the web, when I bumped into a reference to Roberto Unger, a Brazilian law professor who teaches at Havard. He seems to have some interesting political and economic ideas, which can be found on his web site in PDF format. I still haven?t had time to digest what he has to say and make my own mind up as to their value, but my intuition tells me that he is someone worthwhile engaging with. The following sample from an interview gives something of the flavour of his thinking:
?The market economy has no inherent form. Contrary to what the conservatives think, the market does not have a natural and necessary form. The market can be reinvented, it can be redesigned — it can be either more concentrated or more participatory. We cannot solve the crucial problems of the informal economy by imitating the forms that the market now takes in the rich countries. We must have a different kind of market economy — one based on a decentralised alliance between the little guy and the government. Today, the world over the progressives generally have no programme — their programme is the programme of their conservative adversaries with a ten per cent discount. My main effort in debates throughout the world has been to demonstrate that there is a sequence of institutional changes that allow us to do something more than put a human face on the globalised market — that allow us to actually reorganise our societies.?
The Sage of Leeds
I’ve been meaning to write something about Zygmunt Bauman for some time. Partly, because he is the first person I’ve come across who uses the term “post-modern” in a way I actually find useful in understanding what is going on now. But more, because being well into middle age myself, I find the idea of a man in his late seventies, tucked away in a suburb of Leeds, having a much better idea of what is happening in the world than many much younger commentators and publishing his thoughts about it prolifically, very encouraging. For me, Zygmunt Bauman stands as a beacon of hope, representing the possibility that aging doesn’t have to be a process of decline, but can be a period of active, intelligent engagement with a changing world.
A map is not the territory
In the past I have often used Alford Korzybski’s much quoted “A map is not the territory” when I have hit situations where our perceptions or models don’t seem to accurately reflect what is going on or what a situation is.
It was only very recently I came across a fuller version of this quote that seems much more interesting; “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness”
If we think of the world of finance as a kind of map of the world of people creating, making, building, buying, selling, exchanging goods and services I am beginning to wonder how well the map represents the structure of what is going on. I have a growing sense of a disjunction between the two. And, if there is, may be we have to question how we think about finance, economics and the real world of productive human activity.
The Importance of Disinterest
One of the things that irritates me is when we lose useful concepts when words are misused. Now, despite being a closet pedant, I am quite happy to accept that language evolves and that words do change their meaning. Attempts to freeze language are pointless and futile. More than that, the changing nature of language is a resource for thought. Often tracing the changing meanings of words like “education” or “jobs” is a means of generating new insights or innovations. But, there are words we can ill afford to lose. I am thinking, in particular, of words like “disinterest” and “disinterested”, which have come to mean in common usage the same thing as “uninterested”.
I was pleased to come across a piece by Terry Eagleton making a similar point. “Disinterestedness, a notion almost universally scorned by the cultural left nowadays, grew up in the 18th century as the opposite not of interests, but of self-interest. It was a weapon to wield against the Hobbesians and possessive individualists. Disinterestedness means not viewing the world from some sublime Olympian height, but a kind of compassion or fellow-feeling. It means trying to feel your way imaginatively into the experience of another, sharing their delight and sorrow without thinking of oneself.”
Issue Entrepreneurship
In July I wrote a longish entry, “It’s hard to predict”, where among others things I stressed the importance of what I call ‘network thinking’. I concluded that section by saying “the strongest advice I could give to any individual or business is to become sensitive to where you fit in your networks, learn to think in terms of nodes and connections and the complex interactions and feedback between them, and be conscious of the dynamics of your patterns of connection. Whether you are aware of it or not, your success or failure is going to bound up in how well or not you identify, create and navigate your networks.”
I was pleased to find the other day a piece by Philip Agre, whose work I have long admired, making a similar point:
“Successful people, in my experience, engage in a great deal of issue entrepreneurship, repeatedly evolving their issues and expanding their networks as they go along. A well-chosen issue will identify what sociologists call a structural hole: a bunch of people, preferably already well-connected in other ways, who ought to know one another but don’t. By identifying such an issue, the issue entrepreneur spots an opportunity to become centrally located in newly emerging social networks — a position that can generally be converted to some kind of advantage, even if the details of that advantage are not necessarily clear at the outset. There is nothing wrong with this. It is a powerful way of understanding the world, and I wish that everyone knew how to do it. Yet this central skill of social life is a mystery to almost everyone, with the result that society is filled with misguided theories, e.g., that power is completely seamless and static, or that success is simply a matter of hard work or else entirely arbitrary.”
The other September 11th
Thirty years ago on September 11th there was an attack from the air on another building of symbolic importance. Then it was La Modena – the Presidential Palace in Santiago de Chile – and the planes were Chilean Air force jets. While the numbers killed in the Palace were relatively small, about 3000 disappeared in the events that followed and thousands more were imprisoned, tortured, forced into exile or lived in fear. This too was an assault on a country with a democratically elected government by people who believed they had God on their side.
There will be others better qualified than me who will no doubt be drawing parallels between the two September 11ths over the next few days. What I would like to draw attention to is another less remarked loss from the first – the destruction of a cybernetic system designed to run a national economy in real time.
White Van Revival
I am currently basing my own thinking on two scenarios for the UK economy. The first is that the slowdown that seems to have affected IT, the media, advertising and marketing particularly badly has hit bottom and will now begin to improve. The second is that we ain’t seen nothing yet and because of systemic problems in the world economy are on our way to a major slump.
It’s hard to predict
I think it was Niels Bohr who said, “It’s hard to predict, especially the future”. But, driven by the number of my friends working in the interactive media industry, who complain that things have got very boring, I thought I’d venture a few predictions.
The first is that we should still expect a lot of disruptive, technological surprises to come.
The second is that network thinking, or what George Nelson called the “connections game”, is going to become a key ability in life and in business.
And the third is that analogue interfaces to digital media are going to be a hot area of development over the next few years.
Plus ca change…
…plus c’est la meme chose.
Scanning my bookshelves to find something to read in the bath, I picked out my 1988 edition of John Allen Paulos’s book, “Innumeracy”. (I will have some more to say about this in a later entry) What struck me was a paragraph on page 70 I opened by chance, which seemed to have a curious contemporary relevance:
“Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for evidence that the claim is true. Pat Robertson, the former television evangelist and Presidential candidate, maintained recently that he couldn’t prove that there weren’t Soviet missile sites in Cuba and therefore there might be. He’s right, of course, but neither can I prove that Big Foot doesn’t own a small plot of land outside Havana.”