landscapes

Last month we saw a charming exhibition – “Iarna in Pictura Romaneasca” – some 80 winter landscapes by 20th and 21st century Romanian painters - and were quite taken with several, particularly those of Dan Hatmanu and Cornelia Dedu. I was particularly pleased to see at last some examples of modern realist Romanian painings since they are so hard to see in any of the commercial galleries I stumble across here. It seems so much more difficult to find them than in Sofia. A visit to the Cartelesti bookshop got us the latest issue of the small, free but elusive art mag Anticart which generously reproduced all the paintings. Although its website proved impossible to access, the search did allow me to find another excellent site containing the exhibition albums of many contemporary Romanian painters. I've reproduce the Dedu painting which originally caught my eye - and you can see lots more of this painter (who shares my year of birth!) on that site.

A good review (from a radical stance) of Hutton's book here.

wine and the Commons

I discovered a stunning red wine yesterday – a 2008 Feteasca Regal – available from the barrel at 2 euros a litre in the Tohani wine shop on Una Maia. I don’t normally go there - it looks too posh compared with the places in the Matache market area which I frequent. Tohani is a commune in my favourite wine area here - Dealul Mare - the area east of Ploiesti running to Buzau but I have been diverted from its wines by the great Riesling-Pinot Gris I found recently in the Recas wine shop round the corner from the Dealul Mare one at the Matache market. The Tohani shop was offering a Riesling from the barrel – but lukewarm! However their (Merlot) rose was tasty and will bring me back to the place. I worry at the moment about our future wine supplies – because the Chinese are just beginning to discover European wines. Their wines are actually more like liquors so it will hopefully take some time before their palates adjust. At the moment the wines they buy are top of the range French and are bought as status symbols rather than for enjoyment.
Another discovery was the cultural magazine available online from the Romanian Cultural Foundation – although nothing has appeared in 2010. A 2006 issue focussed on Bucharest – and had quite a few articles bemoaning the destruction of the archiectural legacy.

When you actually look, it’s amazing what is actually available on the theme of alternatives to the monstrous economic path we stumbled down some decades back. And during the night I actually discovered an example of what my previous post had been asking for – someone who has retired and is now using his experience, time and other resources to try to develop a more appropriate system.

I’m a businessman. I believe society should reward successful initiative with profit. At the same time, I know that profit-seeking activities have unhealthy side effects. They cause pollution, waste, inequality, anxiety, and no small amount of confusion about the purpose of life.
I’m also a liberal, in the sense that I’m not averse to a role for government in society. Yet history has convinced me that representative government can’t adequately protect the interests of ordinary citizens. Even less can it protect the interests of future generations, ecosystems, and nonhuman species. The reason is that most—though not all—of the time, government puts the interests of private corporations first. This is a systemic problem of a capitalist democracy, not just a matter of electing new leaders.
If you identify with the preceding sentiments, then you might be confused and demoralized, as I have been lately. If capitalism as we know it is deeply flawed, and government is no savior, where lies hope? This strikes me as one of the great dilemmas of our time. For years the Right has been saying—nay, shouting—that government is flawed and that only privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts can save us. For just as long, the Left has been insisting that markets are flawed and that only government can save us. The trouble is that both sides are half-right and half-wrong. They’re both right that markets and state are flawed, and both wrong that salvation lies in either sphere. But if that’s the case, what are we to do? Is there, perhaps, a missing set of institutions that can help us? I began pondering this dilemma about ten years ago after retiring from Working Assets, a business I cofounded in 1982. (Working Assets offers telephone and credit card services which automatically donate to nonprofit groups working for a better world.) My initial ruminations focused on climate change caused by human emissions of heat-trapping gases. Some analysts saw this as a “tragedy of the commons,” a concept popularized forty years ago by biologist Garrett Hardin. According to Hardin, people will always overuse a commons because it’s in their self-interest to do so. I saw the problem instead as a pair of tragedies: first a tragedy of the market, which has no way of curbing its own excesses, and second a tragedy of government, which fails to protect the atmosphere because polluting corporations are powerful and future generations don’t vote.

old men should be explorers

I mentioned on the Tuesday post that I had written a note ten years ago about making better use of my life. Before I come to that, let me put my life in perspective. In the 1970s and 1980s I got too caught up in political activity – neglecting my academic position and using my political position (which paid 20 euros a working day) to encourage community enterprise. It was what we might call pro bono work – and I entered my 50th year an exile with virtually no money in my bank account. Fortunately my parents’ minimalist way of life had taught me not only how to survive but to celebrate life on a pittance (I require only wines, a good cooker and books!). And the intellectual challenge of post-communist governance (how I hate that term!) reform, new cultures and consultancy fees were more than enough to sustain me (in all senses) over the next 2 decades. For the first time in my life, I was persuaded to put my (hard-earned) cash into investments – and saw them duly climb, fall and climb again. Ultimately I could not accept what lay behind it all – and pulled all my money from this rotten system just before the post-2005 decline and felt very flush. This was just after I had set out (and briefly explored) the following questions in a note -
• why I was pessimistic about the future and so unhappy with the activities of the programmes and organisations with which I dealt – and with what the French have called La Pensee Unique, the post 1989 “Washington consensus”
• who are the organisations and people I admire
• what they are achieving - and what not
• how these gaps can be reduced
• the role of an individual such as me in that

Part of the problem, I feel, is the sheer richness of analyses, writings and organisations – all dealing with part of what is a systemic problem. Those struggling valiantly with local initiatives often don’t have the time or patience to make sense of what they often see as over-shrill or theoretical writings; and those dealing with the large picture can sometimes be impatient with what they perhaps see as the naivety of the practitioner.

Having explored the various questions I then turned to what I should be doing – as an isolated individual.

A noticeable phenomenon is that, when some politicians retire and no longer have the competitive pressures on them, they become more critical about the domestic and global systems they accepted when they were in office. The same is true of many officials. There must be a great potential amongst those who have
• Time (now retired)
• money
• Education (higher than any previous generation) and potential understanding (because of the impact of the NGO critique)
• An interest (satisfaction in making a contribution)
• Conscience (“I’ve taken – now I should give a little back”)
• A greater chance of persuasion by virtue of their patent lack of vested interest – and being late converts
• networks

Surely a significant number of retired officials, academics and consultants in UK and some other countries can be encouraged to come together; learn from one another – and develop ways of communicating and acting to make their concerns about national and global systems more influential?

Ten years on, I pose the question again. What are people such as doing to make a difference - as the world around us implodes?
Moving to more urgent contemporary concerns, Cicero's songs offers a very good take on the European crisis here.

The fundamental problem is the economic structure of most of the European economies. The standard model of these economies has been to pay for today's bills with cheques drawn against the future. Instead of saving up for things today and acquiring them later, we have chosen to acquire them today and pay for them in the future. To a degree, it has worked: the levels of average prosperity in the present day would stagger most of our forefathers. Yet, there has always been a critical piece of small print: growth needed to continue, and not just economic growth, but population growth too, so that the costs were painless enough for the next generation to carry.
Yet about 40 years ago, the oil shocks created inflation that was not the result of economic collapse or war, but for several years was a normal part of business. In the face of this, real assets, especially property, held their value in real terms, but looked like they were appreciating sharply in nominal terms. Property became more and more popular, and banks began to prefer not only lending to property purchasers, but also lending against property to finance other asset purchases. All the time the central banks, trying to "even out" the cycle, provided excess liquidity in the downturn, while failing to tighten sufficiently in the upturn. Since this helped to erode money as a store of value, property began to look like a one-way bet.
At more or less the same time, we lost sight of another basic issue. People began to retire earlier and earlier, believing that the inflated asset-largely property- values that supported this decision were normal. Even as life expectancy increased into the eighties, people began to stop working in their mid fifties. The time a pension had to cover went from a few years to several decades. The cheques we were drawing against the future grew ever larger.
It was not just in the private sector that saving became a dirty word: States too began to hand out increasingly extravagant welfare packages: for millions of people, it was not economic to work. Skills rotted, and both Western Europe and the USA acquired a burden of the unemployable unemployed who nonetheless made a substantial call on the public purse.
It was a long time coming, but the property bubble finally burst. The result was not merely the failure those of banks most directly involved in property, but also those banks exposed to the ABS market- which in practice meant pretty much all of them.
The impact in Europe was twofold. Those countries most exposed to property: the UK, Ireland and Spain saw large parts of their banking system evaporate. Domestic rescue plans were initiated and guarantees were issued. Meanwhile those countries with large state debts based on an unaffordable welfare state found that their access to the capital markets closed. Populations to pay for the welfare are generally falling- and resistance to immigration is making the problem even worse.
At first it was the poorly structured economies that fared worse: Greece was forced to address its long term deficit. However, the absolute breakdown of the Irish property market increased Irish government liabilities to several times the Irish GDP. The deficit yawned to over 30% of GDP.
At this point the anti Euro crew will argue that had the Irish been able to devalue their currency, then the crisis would have been resolved, because the bubble would have burst far sooner if the demand for Punt, as opposed to Euro, assets had reflected the smaller size of the Irish economy alone versus the Eurozone as a whole. Furthermore, the Irish could have mitigated the crisis, as the UK has done, by devaluing their currency.
Mitigated, perhaps, but as the experience of the UK, which can devalue its currency, shows it is certainly not solved. Devaluation is only ever a temporary solution, and if it is used- as it has been in the UK- simply to avoid painful structural adjustment then it ends up permanently reducing the economic potential of the entire economy as people simply build in higher inflationary expectations. Arguably the reason for the instability in the Eurozone's periphery is a function of the fact Germany- the core Euro economy- has been undergoing a long and difficult restructuring, and has emerged extremely competitive, indeed too competitive for the other unrestructured economies to cope with.
Now the breakdown of the property based savings and welfare system is creating a second meltdown: not only a meltdown of the banking system, but also of the states that have issued guarantees to that banking system.
It is a meltdown that will lead to sovereign defaults, and not just in Europe. The policy of competitive devaluation can not work where China- the worlds largest surplus economy and the worlds manufacturing base- maintains its own artificially low currency level. Without the unlikely prospect of a dramatic Chinese revaluation, even the breakup of the Eurozone and drastic devaluation by the most insolvent economies will not solve anything. The Germans will remain efficient, the Chinese will remain efficient and investors will be more fearful than ever about the prospects of the ex-Euro countries.
The only solution is to do what the Baltic states have done: make a drastic cut in costs by an "internal devaluation", in the case of the Baltic by around 25%. That means wages fall by 30% and house prices by 50%, and the overall level of costs by about 15%. The Balts did in last year. The Greeks propose to do half as much over five years, the Irish by 15%- not 25%- over 3 years. Not enough, and the result is that these Euro-delinquents will require a rescue that is beyond the ability of the rest of the Eurozone to finance. A debt default is therefore now very likely. Only this is where we can criticise the ECB and the European Council: we still do not understand how such a default will be handled.
But after the inevitable default happens, we are in a whole new ball game, and no one knows what happens then. One thing is for sure, very few of my generation and none of the following one will be retiring from work at 55.
The age of austerity that looms before us is set to be measured in decades rather than years.

Enough is enough

I think I have at last come across the convincing narrative for these times – in a very accessible paper which documents the discussion last June in Leeds of the first Steady State Conference. The foreward indeed echoes the questions about the Why and How of social change to which I promised to return. Brian Czech, President
Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
Arlington, Virginia, USA
I owe the find to - a personal website which is worth keeping an eye on. And, if Enough is Enough gives the strategic arguments, let me strongly recommend Richard Douthwaite’s most recent book Short Circuit as one of the most definitive sourcebooks on the practicalities of change at a grassroots level - or, as Ed Mayo puts it "Douthwaite has undertaken the most extensive survey yet of community economics in the industrialized world".
I mentioned Douthwaite recently. His name came to my mind when I was thinking about the intellectual provenance relating to the criticism of consumerism. I remembered a couple of books he had written in the 1980s and 1990s – and a google search inidcated he was still growing strong – now at the Feasta Irish foundation. You can actually download the entire book (section by section) from the website! To encourage you to do that, let Ed Mayo complete his introduction -
Tudor Banus again - "livrevignes"

To fully appreciate the significance of this book, we need to ask ourselves why everything we hold dear seems to be threatened. As individuals, we face increasing insecurity in our working lives, on our streets and even within our homes. As societies, we face a ruthlessly competitive global economy, the threat of armed conflict, and a biosphere stressed to the point of collapse. In the face of all this, governments and businesses offer us, at best, a tattered, decaying safety net. Short Circuit's encouraging message is that the security we need can be found in our own communities by developing our local economies.
But why are communities and families fragmenting? Why are thousands of species disappearing and the world's climate becoming ever more unstable? Why is democracy slipping away, and ethnic conflict, poverty, crime and unemployment growing day by day? The root cause of all these problems often evades even the most intelligent and well-intentioned examination. The world economic system has become so complex, and the attitudes that it has given rise to so all-pervasive, that we now find it is extremely difficult to gain a clear perspective. However, there is a common thread running through these seemingly disparate crises: namely, a system of production and distribution that depends for its survival on endless expansion. This continuous growth has led to economic globalization, which essentially means the amalgamation of every local, regional and national economy into a single world system.
Economic globalization is not the result of superior economic efficiency. It is coming about because governments have been subsidizing international and long-distance trade for nearly two hundred years without stopping to assess the impact on society and nature. It is only through tax breaks, cheap fuel, and massive investments in the underlying transport and information infrastructure that apples from New Zealand displace French apples in the markets of Paris, European dairy products destroy local production in milk-rich Mongolia, and Dutch butter costs less than Kenyan butter in the shops of Nairobi. Even a child might ask, 'Why must food be transported thousands of miles, when it can be produced right here?' This is not efficiency but economics gone mad.
Globalization has also led to the growth of huge multinational corporations that have replaced the hundreds of thousands of small businesses, shopkeepers and farmers that traditionally generated most economic activity and employment. And since big firms, unlike small ones, can threaten to move their operations to countries where the fiscal environment is easier, almost every government's ability to raise an adequate amount in tax has been reduced. Consequently, by blindly subsidizing the process of globalization, the nation-state has promoted its own demise.
Moreover, by inducing people everywhere to rely on the same narrow range of industrial resources, the global economic system has greatly increased competition at every level. As a result, unemployment in the industrialized world has soared while, in the cities of the South, populations are exploding because millions of rural families are being drawn away from local self-reliance by the promises of the consumer society - only to be plunged into urban squalor and hunger. Meanwhile, wilderness areas and biodiversity are under increasing pressure as the demand for industrial resources grows.
The system that has emerged suits nobody: in the long run, there are no winners. Even at the highest levels of society, the quality of life is declining. The threat of mergers leaves even senior managers in permanent fear of losing their jobs. As for the burgeoning list of billionaires, try though they might to fence themselves off from the collapsing social order, they cannot hide from the collapsing biosphere.
It is therefore in everyone's interest that the process of globalization be reversed. The most effective way of doing this would be for governments to get together to curb the powers of the multinationals by negotiating new trade and investment treaties that would remove the subsidies powering globalization and give local production a chance. For example, if the hidden subsidies for fossil fuel use were removed, local and national economies would become much stronger. But such international measures would not in themselves restore health to economics and communities: long-term solutions require a range of small local initiatives that are as diverse as the cultures and the environments in which they take place.
Unfortunately, many people are opposed to the creation of stronger local economics for all manner of reasons. Some, for example, imagine that the aim of economic localization is complete self-sufficiency at the village level. In fact, localization does not mean everything being produced locally, nor does it mean an end to trade. It simply means creating a better balance between local, regional, national and international markets. It also means that large corporations should have less control, and communities more, over what is produced, where, when and how, and that trading should be fair and to the benefit of both partie.
It is also sometimes feared that localization will lead to repression and intolerance. On closer examination, however, it is clear that the opposite is true: the global economy is itself nothing less than a system of structural exploitation that creates hidden slaves on the other side of the world and forces people to give up their rights to their own resources. Localization is not about isolating communities from other cultures, but about creating a new, sustainable and equitable basis on which they can interact. In the North, being responsible for our own needs means allowing the South to produce for itself, rather than for us.
All over the world, campaigns against globalization are growing in strength as people see how it affects their lives, their high streets, and their neighbourhoods - and as they become more aware that there are alternatives. The significance of Richard Douthwaite's book is that he shows that globalization can be contained by using these alternatives in a coherent way. He also shows we can start to build alternative systems today without waiting for politicians to give us their blessing or for the world to burn.
When community initiatives work (and Short Circuit describes both successes and failures) they release the imagination of those involved and enable them to take further steps towards economic revitalization, stronger communities, and a healthier environment. But so far, as Richard Douthwaite points out, no community anywhere has implemented more than a few of the many techniques described in this book, so the potential for revitalization is dramatic.

I have a running dialogue with my steady state friends and colleagues. The subject is best described with the metaphor of a horse and cart. I say, if we want to succeed in replacing the outdated goal of economic growth with a steady state economy, we have to put the horse before the cart. The horse is the public opinion and political will needed for this change. Without this horse, I say, we have little hope of pulling a cart of steady state policies into the economic policy arena.
Many of my friends and colleagues, however, say otherwise.
They say I have it backwards. Citizens won’t be ready, they say, to support steady state policies unless it is clear in advance just what those policies are. Sometimes I think my friends and colleagues are right. Certainly one of the most common questions I get, after pontificating on the perils of growth and the need for steady state economics, is “Yes, but how do we do it?” When I describe the horse and cart, emphasising the horse, some of the audience don’t buy it. They want to know more about the cart before offering their horsepower.
I suppose we are all onto something. The horse and the cart may have to materialise more or less in tandem. Otherwise the horse may say “that’s enough of this” and walk away, as the grass may seem greener in more conventional “sustainability” pastures. On the other hand, even the sturdiest cart of steady state policies would mire down and rust without the horse of public opinion and political will to lead it into action.
The report, aptly titled Enough is Enough, provides more than just a cart of public policies for achieving a steady state economy.
Part One is mostly about the horse, describing why economic growth has become uneconomic — dangerously so — and describing the alternative: economic degrowth toward a steady state economy. However, the bulk of Enough is Enough is found in Part Two, which is all about the cart of policies. This constitutes the single most complete collection of steady state policy initiatives, tools, and reforms in the literature. That alone makes the report worth its weight in steady state gold. As if that were not enough, Part Three puts it all together into a plan to get the horse and cart moving together to begin the economic transition.
Enough is Enough is an extremely interesting and unique document. It puts the reader into the venue of a wonderfully orchestrated, interactive, and productive conference. One can almost hear the plenary talks from the podium in Part One, walk the halls to the diverse workshop sessions in Part Two, and reconvene with the conferees in Part Three.
Most conference proceedings, book-like or not, go quickly onto a dusty shelf.
I doubt this is the fate of Enough is Enough. Some of the graphics will be familiar to students and practitioners of ecological economics; others were developed at the conference or in the aftermath of this creative burst of energy. Beyond its academic uses, Enough is Enough has the potential to become a manifesto in the hands of policy reformers working on issues of environmental protection, economic sustainability, and social justice.
But most importantly, in my opinion, is that steady statesmen and ambassadors, present and future, won’t miss a beat when confronted with the challenging question of “Yes, but how do we do it?” With a sturdy cart of policies hitched to a horse of public opinion that grows stronger by the day, we are ready to set out towards the steady state economy

Grave thoughts

When, years ago, I visited the Sapanta cemetery in Maramures, I could appreciate only the aesthetics - the beautiful blue and red of the carved wooden carvings with their naif small paintings and (generally) humorous celebration of the lives (and sometime the deaths) of the villagers who lay below. Now, thanks to the bookfare and a Baie Mare publisher, I am able to study the artefacts at my leisure – eg the one with a painting of a guy at a still and the lines -

Here I am Husar Ion
Lying under this cold stone
In life all knew me handy
With my still and good plum brandy
Come on men and raise a cheer
Come and fill your flasks right here
Drink it now and be so merry
Girls have brandy from the cherry
I’ll not see you, share your mirth
From my bed deep in the earth

I was reminded of the medieval inscriptions I admired decades ago in the churchyards in North-East Scotland. I googled – and was delighted to come across various googlebooks – this one printed in 1704 whose opening inscription is -

remember man, as thou goes by
as thou art, so once was I
as I am now, so shalt thou be
remember man that thou must die

Also an 1806 Collection of Epitaphs and Monumental Inscriptions with a preface by Dr Johnson and a delightful „Advertisement” (as the introduction is called) with the careful grammatical construction they had in those days.

The editor has preferred the melange to that of a classification of subjects, and, if he shall thereby occasionally beguile the serious of a smile or the volatile of a few moments’serious reflection, who, otherwise, would have restricted their reading to the department most in unison with their sentiments, his object will be fully accomplished.

The guy anticipated the critique of the internet – all of 200 years ago! The entire book can actually be downloaded here.
While in maudlin mood, let me mention an idea I had as I was musing on Boffy’s latest blog. As might be guessed from his long posts, Boffy is retired. Like me, he presumably devotes a fair amount of his time to his reading and writing. Those of us who have successfully reached and passed the magic milestone; and have an over-developed sense of injustice might benefit from combining our time, energies and resources. Someone must surely already have tried to put this into practice? I remember drafting a note about this more than 10 years ago!

Finally some thoughts from John Lanchester in London Review of Books (who combined some time ago to give helpful explanation of the global meltdown) about the UK coalition government’s economic policy -

To the historian, especially of the 1931 crisis, the whole thing is sadly familiar. There is the same paralysis on the part of the Labour Party (which might now wonder whether a four-month leadership election was really a good thing) and everywhere the same ramped-up rhetoric: the country is on the edge, going bankrupt, capital will flee, and it is all Labour’s fault. And this time, as in 1931, there is much that is spurious. The country is not on the verge of bankruptcy. There is no evidence that the bond market was reacting against British debt, despite the best efforts of the Conservative Party to encourage it to do so. Our fiscal position was never like that of Greece, which had cooked the books and was struggling to cope with short-term government debt, though Osborne et al insisted it was. Why was it necessary to take such drastic action at all? Our debt ratio was much higher after the Second World War and neither Attlee nor Churchill felt any obligation to do what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne have done.

The importance of the cuts is not economic but political and ideological. First, they restore an apparently coherent, specifically Conservative and politically useful identity to the Conservative Party, distinguishing it from Labour. For the last 20 years or so the Tories have not had such an identity. They tried a traditional law-and-order Toryism for a few years, but the electorate found it unattractive. Then under Cameron they committed themselves to a form of New Labourism, a commitment that ended willy-nilly with the financial crisis. And, unlike Brown, who did eventually devise a fairly ordered response to that crisis, the Conservatives were all at sea. Neither Cameron nor Osborne came out of it with an enhanced reputation. But the ‘deficit’ gave them an opportunity; and the bigger the cuts the bigger the opportunity.
The cuts have to be big in order to confirm the Conservative explanation of what happened. That they saved the country from the brink, from disaster, from national bankruptcy – in other words from Labour’s incompetence and profligacy – is a line the Conservatives use well and often. And it is an explanation which historically the electorate has found acceptable. The notion that the state should conduct its own finances in the manner of a prudent household has always been thought plain common sense by many voters (though no one in the Treasury would agree), even if in the last 20 years the electorate has conducted its affairs anything but prudently. Thus from the point of view of a rather rudderless Tory Party the very hugeness of the cuts is an advantage: they magnify the crisis and Labour’s recklessness in causing it. Further, they restore a sense of authority to the Conservative Party and to its interpretation of British politics and society, something it has lacked for a long time. That the cuts are promoted by a coalition government including the soft-hearted Lib Dems is an added advantage. It shrouds the Thatcherism of the exercise in a cloak of fairness.
Second, the crisis allowed the Conservatives to transform a crisis of the banks into a crisis of the welfare state. This, they hope, will enable them to restructure government and ‘shrink’ the state and its welfare systems once and for all, something they have been trying to do for the last 30 years.

Books

A delightful day yesterday at the Annual Book Fair held in the huge Pavilion Expo beside the grotesque Stalinist Press House – which was „hoaching” (as we say in Scotland) with people. Shows that the intellectual habit is still alive and well here - despite the generally appalling nature of TV (although there are still some BBC3 type TV programmes). Fours hours passed before we dragged ourselves, rather wearily, from the scrum (and noise) weighed down by plastic bags with the results of our raids. The first two stalls took some time to negotiate – they were a Greek publisher and the Italian Embassy respectively and were not busy. But in the first I was seduced by a superbly produced book on Balkan poetry (with heavy velvet paper and old grey photographs) - 520 pages (all in Romanian) for 10 euros! And, although the Italian Embassy wasn’t selling books, it was displaying interesting editions of (some of) their older writers and had someone on duty happy to talk to us. They had, however, no Albert Moravia!
I was also very pleased with a new book on Bucharest – from village to metropolis (Romanian and English) by Giuseppe Cina, an Italian Professor of Urban Planning at Turin Univeristy; and a collection of the water colours of Romanian buildings by Gheorghe Leahu (both published by Capicel). I snapped up a book with Dan Dinescu’s black and white photos of Maramures; the land of wood which I had long lusted after – reduced to 2.5 euros – and, on opening it at home, immediately regretted not having bought 4 copies (for gifts). A book with the Sapanta cemetery painted headstones (actually carved from wood) completed the Romanian part of the haul. Wallony Region had a nice display – with copies of their great Espace Nord series (Belgian authors of the mid 20th century) on special offer. The final purchase was bought with some guilt – since we have so little space in the Bucharest flat – but I simply could not resist the 500 glorious pages of Cooking with Herbs and Spices (Hermes House) despite already having one book on each already - but up in the mountain house!
My visit to China at the beginning of the year – and the preliminary reading I did for it – has developed my interest in the country at both political and literary levels. A combination of the antics of the political class of the West and Daniel Bell’s books (The Canadian who has taught at a Beijing University for the past 15 years) have made me more sympathetic to the idea that the political model which could emerge there. ChinaBeat offers one of the best perspectives on modern China and this post has an interesting (if jaundiced) summary of a recent book.

All in our Minds?

Good old boffy continues his incredible commentary – with several pages of original take on the economic crisis. The reading which goes into his blog is quite remarkable – his posts are more like mini lecture and replete not only with classic marxist references but also with up-to-date quotations from a range of financial commentators. Was this guy a marxist trader?? Pity Taleb (of Black Swan fame) doesn’t blog. Boffy’s recent posts put the crisis in historical perspective; suggest that the UK housing market has a lot further to fall (60% has been wiped off the value of houses in Ireland and Spain); and argues that the UK Coalition presents a deliberately distorted, populist view of the crisis which runs counter to the needs of big capital.
My own post of yesterday was inspired by the book Injustice which I had just finished reading. Unlike Will Hutton’s book which comes up with a range of policy prescriptions, Dorling’s book is what I would suppose we would call post-modern – with the basic argument that it is our minds which we have to sort out!

We have allowed ourselves to accept the need for elitism, inequality, greed etc and there is little point in producing policy prescriptions until we have shaken off our prejudices. Hence the moral passion and ridicule he pours into his analysis. The recent economic literature on „happiness” which demonstrates that increased wealth gives increased happiness only at low income levels was all very interesting but hardly calculated to inspire revolution. The more recent arguments of Wilkinson and Dorling showing the effectiveness of those societies which are more economically and socially equal is far more powerful – since it begins to lay the moral ground for the attack on the immoralities of the wealthy and powerful. And the attack will come not from government or political parties but from ordinary people. I read an example this morning – of some Manchester United fans who got so sick with the way big capital has transformed their club that they set up their own team and structured it in a cooperative way more similar to that of German clubs. The article refers to other examples in other walks of life.

The UK government is being very clever in the rhetoric it has suddenly started to use – of transforming public services into mutual societies - apparently looking to the unlikely Chavez-led Venezuela for encouragement! I know that New Labour did try to put more support systems in place for community enterprise – and should read this up to see whether enough has been done to make a reality of this rhetoric. Boffy had a useful recent post on this as well. But basically all of this is peripheral as long as elitism is honoured in tax and educational policies.
Another think tank which has sprung up on the equality issues is here.
The lithograph is Tudor Banus' "Saunabibliotech"

our present moral bankruptcy

I usually enjoy the Economist blog (about Eastern Europe) but a recent post – giving the surprising news from the World Bank that the economies of the most recent members of the EU had managed the global crisis very much better than anticipated - grated. It grated since (however true its comment) it implies that the solution to our problems is for the lower paid to make the sacrifices (as they generally have in countries like Romania) - whereas the truth is the exact oposite. It is the pig-swilling greed of the wealthier which has contaminated our social systems in the past few decades; brought most of us (except them!) low; and which must now be brought under effective check.
Since the mid 20th century, various maverick voices such as Leopold Kohr (The Breakup of nations); JK Galbraith (The Affluent Society 1958); EJ Mishan (The Costs of Economic growth 1967); Ernst Schumacher (Small is Beautiful 1973); and Marlyn Fergusson (The Aquarian Conspiracy 1980) – to mention the main names - have warned us against the blandishments of consumerism.

In the 1980s some of us got hooked on community enterprise and business (as we called it then); the social economy (as we discovered the French called it); or social enterprise (New Labour’s phrase) – which got some support from the EU and other governments. Somehow, however, the political point got lost. The ventures were seen mainly as a way of helping marginalised people back into the economy. Only the Greens (and writers such as Richard Douthwaite) kept the more fundamental critique alive – but the energy the Greens have had to devote to the Energy and ecological questions has also diverted them from the larger issues of our economic system.

The literature became more personalised – how to reduce one’s ecological footprint and live simply. Very commendable – but basically being a modern version of Voltaire’s retreat to cultivation of one’s garden (Candide). In the last few years, the critique has come back – with books such as Oliver James’ Affluenza (2007) – arriving just in time for the latest global crisis. The publication in July 2009 of The Spirit Level – why equality is better for everyone seems to have crystallised the contemporary discussion in Britain – and Daniel Dorling’s Injustice – why social inequality persists is a rather tougher ride which gives historical perspective whereas The Spirit Level gives the comparative view.
Dorling’s book has the same caustic humour and philosophy as JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society which introduced to the phrase about private wealth and public squalour. Tragic that – after such warnings – we have reached this same point of having to persuade so many people of the declining returns from private consumption and the benefits of collective consumption ie state spending on public goods such as railways!
Thanks to Tudor banus for "Inondation"