Peak Oil?

A few weeks back I asked Whatever happened to Peak Oil? - and got a welcome comment from my ever-vigilant fellow blogger Boffy and from another reader. With some serendipity, an economics blog I follow posed the same question a few days later – and followed it up recently with an extensive answer which referred to an apparently famous bet that economist Julian Simon had made in the early 1980s with the famous environmentalist Paul Ehrlich that, over a decade, the prices of 5 raw resources would fall.

Ehrlich – having long argued the case that we were exhausting the earth’s resources – was emphatic that they would rise. The bet attracted a lot of attention – a lot was riding on it since each man represented schools of thought which had been locked in ideological combat. It was, surprisingly, the economist who won the bet – and fairly easily. The environmental cause has suffered massively ever since - for a typical article see this piece from “Wired”

The full story, I have discovered, was told in a book published in 2013 - “The Bet – Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon and our gamble over earth’s future” by (academic) Paul Sabin  

The history of Ehrlich and Simon’s conflict instead reveals the limitations of their incompatible viewpoints. Their bitter clash also shows how intelligent people are drawn to vilify their opponents and to reduce the issues that they care about to stark and divisive terms. The conflict that their bet represents has ensnared the national political debate and helped to make environmental problems, especially climate change, among the most polarizing and divisive political questions.

Sometimes rhetorical sparring partners hone each other’s arguments so that they are sharper and better. The opposite happened with Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. Despite their respective strengths, both Ehrlich and Simon got carried away in their battle. The ready audience for their ideas encouraged them to make dramatic claims. Their unwillingness to concede anything in their often-vitriolic debate exacerbated critical weaknesses in each of their arguments.

I said the book gave the full story – but this isn’t strictly true since the author fails to mention that, as blogger Blair Fix puts it, 

“the switch from physical scarcity to prices is one of economists’ favorite tricks for dispelling concerns about sustainability”.

We tend to be fixated by short-term price fluctuations and forget that the issue is how this relates to more long-term income (which has, for past decade, been in decline). As Fix puts it, 

“the key is to realize that resources can get cheaper at the same time that they get less affordable”

I am painfully aware of how ignorant I am about this critical field of Energy and a blog by Gail Tverberg called “Our Finite World – exploring how oil limits affect the economy” looks exactly what I need – it’s run by an insurance actuaralist who now makes a good living from her work on the energy issue.

I’ve also started to read a new book Oilcraft – the myths of scarcity and security that haunt US Energy Policy; Robert Vitalis (2020) – with useful interviews here and here although, like many others, it looks to be more about geopolitics than scarcity but is so chaotically written that I have some difficulty in identifying the thrust of his argument. It does, however, look to be a very useful challenge to general beliefs about both imperialism and political control of oil prices – demonstrating, for example, that the prices of earth’s raw material move together,

Our Carbon Democracy is an earlier book which looks more at the geopolitics – as you will see from the author’s article in Dissent in 2015

Jeremy Leggett is a fascinating character who started in the oil industry but is now a mix of entrepreneur and activist who wrote The energy of nations in 2013 and has this website

a taster for "Dispatches to the Next Generation"

 As I was born DURING the second-world war, I strictly don’t qualify as a “baby-boomer” since those were born in the more optimistic period just after the war but, in all respects, I belong to that generation - with all the sense of disrespect if not entitlement we brought with us….

In trying, in the past few years, to write something I call “Dispatches to the Next Generation” from a selection of my blogposts over the past decade, I have found it developing into

·         a critique of the degeneration of the initially successful post-war economic and political systems; as well as

·         an attempt to understand the mistakes my generation made; and

·         an exploration of what we have to do to avoid the fate that seems in store for us all     

 I don’t pretend to be an economist – although I lectured in that capacity in the early 1970s before I saw the error of my ways

Nor is it easy to pin a political label on me – although I did spend 22 years of his life as a senior Labour councillor with responsibilities for devising and managing unique strategies for opening up the policy process and for developing social enterprise in what was then Europe’s largest local authority. The subsequent 22 years I spent as an adviser on institutional development to ministries in central Europe and Central Asia

In its present form, the book has both a short and long version and I realised today that it has a combination of formats and elements which make it fairly unique –

·         The booklet I have just uploaded is actually a taster to the longer book (300 pp) which is not yet satsifactory enough for uploading

·         The taster version now has a narrative and is long enough (150 pages) to be read as a stand-alone version  

·         It is available in the top-right corner of the blog and is called Dispatches Taster and contains hyperlinks to more than 70 short essays - each of which you can access by a simple click

·         A few of these are contained as samplers in the relevant chapter

·         The annexes contain a guide to some 200 books published in the last 60 years which have been specially annotated to give the reader a sense of their significance 

Indeed that book guide is of one the highlights – and should probably not be relegated to the final section of the book!

What you will find in each of the booklet chapters

 

Chapter Title	Thrust of chapter arguments	Supporting theories
1. Critical junctures identified	History is written by the victors. Events were often finely balanced. There’s too much fatalism around	Covid 19 as a Critical Juncture
2.Trespassing encouraged	Most leaders of organisations are in the grip of groupthink and need countervailing mechanisms of accountability to help them see new realities	Janis, t’Hart, Syad
3. Economics relegated	Basic model is badly flawed and needs urgent reinvention	Steve Keen,
4. The Blind men probe the Elephant	Talk of capitalism and post-capitalism is too loose. Are we really clear what the core and marginal aspects of the system are – and can the beast be reformed?	Brian Davey’s ”Credo”
5. A new social goal is sought for the commercial company	Shareholder value ignores other dimensions Cooperative and social enterprises employ more people than we think – but have to struggle for legitimacy	Paul Hirst Colin Mayer Ed Mayo
6. Lessons of change explored	So much protest fails and few social enterprises have a multiplier effect. How do we ensure that there is real learning?	Robert Quinn
7. Change agents and coalitions sought	Progressives are good at sounding off – and bad at seeking common ground	??
8. Bringing it all together	countervailing power social enterprise

 

Snippets – Telling stories

1. Think Tanks do not, these days, generally get a good press. They have been increasingly seen as cheerleaders for the exploitative causes of billionaires such as Charles Koch – with funders of more progressive causes such as Soros and Gates being in a tiny minority

But Enrique Endizabal is a well-intentioned technocrat who, a decade ago, set up an interesting Foundation called On Think Tanks to 

“study and support the development of such policy centres”  

It is a very active website and had just published the 2019 report on the activities of some 2800 think tanks throughout the world as well as videos from its recent 2020 virtual conference from which I’ve taken just one example – on story-telling about which I have written a few posts eg Passion as Servant of Reason and Stories we Tell

Perhaps the most powerful expose of the role of marketing in perverting our natural inclination to tell stories is Christian Salmon’s little book Storytelling – bewitchingthe modern mind (2010) nb this is an epub edition and requires conversion to pdf format

An obvious question to ask those who support Think Tanks is about their ethical practice – about how they can allow into their ranks those who receive money from the likes of the Koch brothers and who are in the business of deliberate deceit?

Sadly I could see no reference to Codes of Conduct in their section on communities of practice

2. Resilience – and the strength of our social systems

My favourite blogger is the Canadian survivalist who has a typically thoughtful post questioning whether the much vaunted concept of “resilience” can really be relied upon to get us through the intertwined challenges which lie ahead for the human race - 

What exactly are our “social systems”? They are, in essence, a vast array of tacit agreements on how we will individually and collectively behave. These agreements are built on a mutual trust that it is in the collective interest of everyone to respect them. Some examples:

·         Contribution to shared services: We agree to pay a fair amount of taxes, tithes or similar payments to finance what we agree to be “essential services” — our collective health, education, roads, communications and other infrastructure, and “defence” and “security”.

·         Abiding by laws: We agree to respect and uphold the laws of the land, even when we don’t agree with all of them.

·         Unified response to crises: We agree to subordinate our personal interests to some extent to the collective interest in times of recognized crisis (wars, depressions, “natural” disasters).

·         Allow governments to do their best: We respect governments to have the collective best interest of the whole population in mind, even when we disagree with what they see that best interest to be.

·         Universal rights and responsibilities: We agree to respect a broad set of rights and freedoms for everyone, and to amicably and peacefully resolve differences when these rights and freedoms are perceived to conflict. These rights include property rights. These rights and freedoms come with a commensurate set of responsibilities, including the responsibility to ensure one’s property doesn’t harm others, and the responsibility to dutifully discharge one’s debts so as to not undermine confidence in the system of exchange.

 

Since the 1980s — just 40 years ago — most of the population in most nations has moved from a profound respect for these agreements to a position of no longer accepting most or all of these agreements. That is neither a good nor a bad thing in itself, and it is certainly understandable given the current utter dysfunction of most of our human systems. But the prevalence of this new antipathy towards any basic social contracts has profound implications for social cohesion, locally, nationally and globally. 

3. An Alphabetical Approach to Journalism

In the world of anglo-american journalism there are only a few editorial names who commanded deep respect amongst journalists over the past half-century – Katherine Graham of The Washington Post; Harold Evans of The Sunday Times and Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian.

The first died 20 years ago and the second 2 months ago. But Rusbridger has just produced a highly accessible guide to modern journalism called “News and How to Use it” - reviewed here by the Guardian   

In an age of information chaos, a good newsroom is, to me, as essential as the police force, the hospital, the fire station or the prison.

 

Covid-19 could not have announced itself at a worse time in terms of the question about whom to   believe. Survey after survey has shown unprecedented confusion over where to place trust. Nearly two-thirds of adults polled by Edelman in 2018 said they could no longer tell a responsible source of news from the opposite.

 

This was not how it was supposed to be.

The official script for journalism was that once people woke up to the ocean of rubbish and lies all around them they’d come back to the safe harbour of professionally-produced news.

You couldn’t leave this stuff to amateurs or give it away for free. Sooner or later people would flood back to the haven of proper journalism.

 

This official narrative was not completely wrong – but nor was it right in the way the optimists hoped it would be. There was a surge of eyeballs to mainstream media sites, but it was too soon to judge if the increased traffic would remotely compensate for the drastic loss of revenues as copy sales plummeted and advertising disappeared. It normally didn’t.

At the very moment when the UK government recognized journalists as essential workers, the industry itself looked more fragile than ever. Surveys of trust showed the public (especially the older public) relying on journalists, but not trusting them.

Another Edelman special report in early March 2020 found journalists at the bottom of the trust pile, with only 43 per cent of those surveyed holding the view that you could believe them ‘to tell the truth about the virus’. That compared with 63 per cent for ‘a person like yourself’.

 

Now, four years on from being full-time in the newsroom, I want to bring an insider’s perspective to the business of journalism, but also look at it from the outside. How can we explain ‘journalism’ to people who are by and large sceptical – which is broadly what most of us would want our fellow citizens to be? This book aims to touch on some of the things about journalism that might help a reader decide whether it deserves their trust, and offer a glimpse to working journalists of how they are viewed by the world outside.

 

Now, four years on from being full-time in the newsroom, I want to bring an insider’s perspective to the business of journalism, but also look at it from the outside. How can we explain ‘journalism’ to people who are by and large sceptical –which is broadly what most of us would want our fellow citizens to be?

 

This book aims to touch on some of the things about journalism that might help a reader decide whether it deserves their trust, and offer a glimpse to working journalists of how they are viewed by the world outside.

 

I have written in these pages about techniques, about transparency (or lack of it), about the people who own the press and how their influence works. I have written about some of the most celebrated practitioners of journalism and realise that, even after days spent looking into some of their work, I still have no measure of how much they should be trusted.

 

If that’s true of me, having worked in this imperfect trade for forty years or more, how can we possibly expect an average reader to navigate this maze? Should they pick a brand rather than an individual journalist? We have seen all too clearly how institutions change. Titles that were once incorruptible, or at least honestly campaigning – the Telegraph, the Express, the News of the World come to mind – can mutate into organisations that are ethically and editorially challenged. Why, at their worst, would anyone single them out for trust?

 

And then there are things that, as I’ve come to write this book, I find myself unable to explain. I can’t see why an industry that is fighting for trust and credibility would knowingly employ columnists who, for instance, are ignorant of the truth of climate change. Why would you do that? If journalism is trying to persuade sceptical readers that it is the safe harbor of reality, why would it handsomely reward and celebrate people for writing rubbish?

The book is highly readable – its entries are a series of mini-essays in alphabetical order and can be accessed at News and How to Use it: Alan Rusbridger (2020)

Lessons from a Life

 Charles Handy has been one of the few writers who has really touched and inspired me on my journey of the past 40 odd years.

It’s not easy to describe his appeal - since he is best known as Britain’s most eminent management guru and such people are normally publicity-seeking charlatans (see Huczyinski (1993) and Micklewait and Wooldridge)

Handy’s first book “Understanding Organisations” (1976) was written after 5 years’ experience of helping establish the country’s first business school and was indeed one of the few books on management available in Britain at the time. When the huge new Strathclyde Region set up a small group to review its departmental structure, the Chief Executive gave us a Peter Drucker paperback to give us ideas – it was the only paperback on the subject available….  “Understanding Organisations”  was written for the practising executive – management “students” didn’t exist then! There is an artificiality and technical smartness in the writing of management textbooks – but a humility and moral power in Handy’s writing. 

His next book - “Gods of Management” (1978) – was a shorter one which told the story of the 4 types of organisational culture. It was a superb read and was reflected in presentations I subsequently did in Central Asia in the early 2000s to help officials set the “one-man management” principle they were familiar with against alternative systems….

And Handy had a rare knack for anticipating the future – somehow he’s able to peer into the tea-leaves and help us make sense of the new worlds are emerging and to do so in the most crystal-clear and elegant of language. He did this first in The Future of Work (1984) when he coined the phrase “portfolio work” to describe how our careers in future would be a mixture of time-limited projects and also invented (in "The Age of Unreason” 1989) the phrase “shamrock organisations” to describe the form the organisations of the future would take – the (small number) of core workers; those on contract; and part-time workers. His books have had an increasingly chatty approach – helped probably by his experience of doing a lot of “Thought for the Day” pieces for the BBC which taught him, he says, to compress his thoughts into 450 words or so. For a very graceful assessment of Handy’s role and significance see this article

He’s reached the advanced age of 88 – and I was delighted to discover, on a recent visit to the little English bookshop in the nearby park, that he produced last year a little book 21 Letters on Life and its Challenges. It takes the format of short epistles for his grandchildren - summing up what he feels he’s learned about life.

It’s such a delightful read that, for my own benefit, I felt I needed to make a note of the main points of each of the chapters

Chapter Title	Key Points
Things Will Be Different	List of some key words whose meanings have changed dramatically in a lifetime (“chip used to be piece of wood or fried potato”) and the scale of change in that period – not least work. We are now “Creatives, Carers or Custodians”
The Human Imperative	But the really big issues and questions don’t change. “Trust but verify”
Life’s Biggest Question	Emerson’s advice – “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded” Doing the best you can with what you’re best at
God or What?	In the new diversity, can we tell right from wrong? Aristotle has twelve virtues: 1) Courage – bravery and the willingness to stand up for what you think is right; 2) Temperance – self-control and restraint; 3) Liberality – kindness, charity and generosity; 4) Magnificence – radiance, joie de vivre; 5) Pride – satisfaction in achievement; 6) Honour – respect, reverence, admiration; 7) Good Temper – equanimity, level-headedness; 8) Friendliness – conviviality and sociability;  9) Truthfulness – straightforwardness, frankness and candour; 10) Wit – sense of humour; 11) Friendship – camaraderie and companionship; 12) Justice – impartiality and fairness
Everyone Can Be Wrong	Closed and open answers; Galileo and Copernicus; Handy’s portfolio/clover idea – and the initial reaction against it
Curiosity Does not Kill the Cat	Travel with curiousity in your backpack
How Clever Are You?	Different ideas on the subject (Howard Gardiner). Schools have a strange notion “I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who” (Kipling).
Life Is a Marathon not a Horse Race	Defects of competition; Be your own master
Who You Are Matters more than What You Do	His wife photographs subjects with 5 objects to illustrate their different identities. Idea of “street wisdom”
Keep It Small	Edmund Burke’s “small platoons” Robin Dunbar’s organisations of no more than 150 and key groups of 5, 15 and 45. Federal systems best
You Are not a Human Resource	Pity Drucker used the management word – “work should be organised; things managed and people led”
You and Society	Complicated letter – suggesting we have excessive regulations; that rep democracy should be upheld
Life’s Changing Curves	We should start afresh before we are forced to
Enough Is as Good as a Feast	The Bushmen had a 15 hour week – the money poisoned everything (Rousseau) Handy separate NEEDS from WANTS (concept of free work)
It’s the Economy, Stupid	His father’s “stipend”; His wife’ separation of “investment” from “consumption” “Money and fulfilment are uneasy bedfellows”
‘We’ Beats ‘I’ all the Time	If there is a common purpose; Never take friendship for granted
When Two Become One	He confesses to selfishness in how he treated his wife
What You Can’t Count Matters More Than What You Can	“McNamara fallacy” means that mush of life gets pushed into 3rd or 4th place.. eg love, hope, kindness, courage, honesty and loyalty
The Last Quarter	future generations can look forward to last 25 years of their life being free of financial worried
You Are Unique	We have 3-5 identities
My Last Words	What he recommends for his grandchildren - Learn a foreign language, a musical instrument, a sport (individual better); write a diary and fall in love

Handy's little book inspires me to go back and look again at my draft - since the last version is from June...and is clearly too abstract and impersonal....it's subtitle "a bibliograph's notes" say it all! 

“Rebel Ideas” – at last recognition of the importance of divergent thinking

For some time I’ve been playing around with an interesting proposition – that those who straddle different “worlds” – be it of nation, class, profession, academic discipline – are not only more original in the ideas they produce BUT are also able to communicate these ideas more clearly to the general public than specialists stuck in more “homogeneous” worlds….

And it’s interesting that we often hang the label of “outsider” on such people

A post earlier this year indeed explored this issue in a rather daring way - by simply listing the names which came into my head as exemplars of clear, accessible writing and then – AND ONLY THEN – trying to identify anything to suggest their “outsider” status (whether in country, discipline, ethnicity or even gender). The result was quite stunning – with such “outsider” status being immediately identified for no fewer than 17 of the 18 names

Only a week earlier a post entitled In Praise of the Outsider had looked at a few academic economists who chose to break out of their narrow worlds and give us superbly-written analyses of modern capitalism.

That indeed was the moment when I decided to change the name of the blog to that of “Peripheral Vision” – basically to honour those who break out of the “tunnel vision” of their homogenising worlds and offer us fresh ways of seeing the world

This notion of the potential benefits of conflicting pressures I had first expressed in a diagram I scribbled some 40 years ago when I was exploring with students the different and indeed conflicting roles open to politicians (depending on whose voice they listened to) – to which I gave such names as  “populist”; “ideologue”, “statesman” and  “maverick” - and found myself suggesting that the most satisfying role was in fact the apparently impossible one of trying to identify the common element which came from the diversity of voices.  

I have this past week been reading the first book I have come across which recognises the importance for organisations to encourage such conflicting perspectives - it is Rebel Ideas – the power of diverse thinking; Matthew Syed (2019) which starts with the failure of the CIA to pick up the warning signals of the 9/11 attack and attributes this to its all-white homogeneous culture. It then looks at a variety of disasters (including an Everest mountaineering tragedy and an aircraft failure) in which participants failed to speak up at crucial points simply because of their junior status in the command structure

The book goes on to argue that  

Our social networks are full of people with similar experiences, views and beliefs. Birds of a feather flock together. We tend to bask in the warm glow of nicely agreeing, mirroring, parroting, corroborating, confirming, reflecting together. Entrenching in each other’s blind spots. That is where fads, stock-market bubbles and other bandwagon effects come from.

You need diversity. Diversity not only based on demographics but on cognitive diversity. The need for differences in perspective, insights, experiences and thinking styles.

 

More important now

Cognitive diversity was not so important a few hundred years ago, because the problems we faced tended to be linear, or simple, or separable, or all three. The critical point is that solutions to complex problems typically rely on multiple layers of insight and therefore require multiple points of view. The more diverse the perspectives, the more extensive the range of potentially viable solutions a collection of problem solvers can find. We need to address cognitive diversity before tackling our toughest challenges. It is only then that team deliberation can lead not to mirroring, but to enlightenment.

 

Here are some numbers to support diversity:

- A study by Professor Chad Sparber, an American economist, found that an increase in racial diversity of one standard deviation increased productivity by more than 25 per cent in legal services, health services and finance.

- Germany and the United Kingdom found that return on equity was 66 per cent higher for firms with executive teams in the top quartile for gender and ethnic diversity than for those in the bottom quartile. For the United States, the return on equity was 100 per cent higher.

- A diverse group of six forecasters, while individually less impressive, would be 15 per cent more accurate.

- A study by the Rotterdam School of Management analysed more than three hundred real-world projects dating back to 1972 and found that projects led by junior managers were more likely to succeed than those with a senior person in charge.

- 43% of companies in the Fortune 500 were founded or co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, rising to 57% in the top thirty-five companies.

- Those who studied abroad had ideas that were rated 17 per cent higher than those who had not.

Many companies hire all these great college kids with all sorts of backgrounds; all kinds of ideas brimming in their heads — only to watch them gradually remoulded to ‘fit’ the culture of the organisation. At most meetings, communication is dysfunctional. Many people are silent. Status rigs the discourse. People don’t say what they think but what they think the leader wants to hear. And they fail to share crucial information because they don’t realise what other people lack 

Groups typically need a leader, otherwise there is a risk of conflict and indecision. And yet the leader will make wise choices only if they gain access to the diverse views of the group. How, then, can an organisation have hierarchy and information sharing, decisiveness and diversity? This is the question that has dominated management books for decades, and the approach has typically been to position hierarchy and diversity in an inherent conflict.

Dominant leaders are, by definition, punitive. This is how they win and sustain power. They are also less empathetic. They don’t feel that they need other people, so don’t tend to take their perspectives or read their emotions.

The Silo Effect (epub) is another fascinating book on the subject produced in 20i5 by anthropologist Gillian Tett who is also an experienced correspondent for the "Financial Times" and author of an important book on the global financial crisis - "Fool's Gold". Here she explores "groupthink" in 8 stories of organisations as different as hospitals, city halls, Facebook, hedgefunds, Chicago police and Sony.