by Alex Evans | Nov 18, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
This from Jon Turney’s excellent Rough Guide to The Future
:
Jim Dator, a futurist at the University of Hawaii, developed a classification system in the 1970s that he has used ever since to order discussion about possible futures. He argues that there are just four main visions underlying attempts to outline possible or preferable futures. Here’s an outline of his four “Generic Images of the Future”:
Continued growth: This is still the most common view, and certainly the “official” view of most political and academic discussion. Growth is desirable because it has made good things possible for some people already, and will bring more good things to more people in future. The idea that growth might falter is usually discussed only in terms of economic recession, and almost always assumed to be a “Bad Thing” – as a glance as any newspaper will confirm.
Collapse of economic structures: This is the family of futures which descend from Malthus via The Limits to Growth. It has a popular constituency, who believe that the carrying capacity of the planet has already been exceeded, and that growth cannot be sustained much longer. The last straw may be climate change, oil depletion or a variety of other things, but the consequences are similar.
Disciplined, sustainable society: This is the first addition to the simple Malthusian versus Cornucopian visions. It means trying to manage things to avoid the worst. The “third way” is outlined in many detailed plans for organizing a transition from the current social and economic system. The premise is that growth cannot go on forever, and avoiding collapse is overwhelmingly important. So these scenarios try to outline paths to a sustainable, steady state. What form the transition might take is controversial, partly because of the difficulty of designing a no-growth economy that works according to the currently dominant capitalist model and does not fall into depression.
Transformation: These kinds of visions are about transformation, not transition, because they embrace a radical, usually technologically driven, alteration of the conditions of human life, and possibly of humanity itself. Under this heading are filed the future pictures which see the next stage of evolution as involving the immensely powerful development of, for example, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering or nanotechnology. These are “post-human” futures that perhaps include moving to off-Earth environments – one pretty convincing way of escaping from a closed system.
by Alex Evans | Nov 17, 2010 | Off topic
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/16885715[/vimeo]
Courtesy of the excellent English 50 Cent, who helpfully provides a running translation of 50 Cent’s tweets. More Global Dashboard hip-hop coverage here.
by Alex Evans | Nov 17, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, UK
Alex Barker at the FT Westminster blog has the details:
The plans are not quite finalised. But it looks like the Strategy Unit — which is staffed by a few dozen civil servants — will broadly be split in two.
Some staff will join Steve Hilton and Polly Mackenzie in the Policy Unit, which is mainly staffed by special advisers in Downing Street. The remainder will be joining Nick Clegg’s small but growing cadre of wonks. The Office of Civil Society, meanwhile, is to be beefed up to become The Big Office of Civil Society*. Gareth Davies, the current head of the strategy unit, will be its new director general.
Shifting policy specialists from a Strategy Unit to a Policy Unit will only set pulses racing of the most devoted Whitehall-ogist. But there is a genuine point to be made. These two teams were set up to do very different things…
New Labour wanted the Strategy Unit, staffed by civil servants, to instil a culture of long-term evidence based policymaking in Whitehall. Given the heavy day-to-day firefighting in government, Geoff Mulgan and others wanted to make sure that somebody, somewhere had a strategic overview of policy.
Over at the Institute for Government blog, Jill Rutter echoes the point, recalling her time in the Number 10 Policy Unit under John Major:
What became clear then was that it was too small to do anything other than get drawn into day-to-day fire fighting on behalf of the Prime Minister. Eight of us – a mix of civil servants and advisers – shadowed the whole domestic policy agenda. The Cabinet Office played its traditional coordinating and brokering role – but did nothing to move departments from their entrenched positions and look for positive solutions that cut across departmental boundaries.
A meeting on policy on lone parents chaired by the Cabinet Office, full of Grade 7s briefed not to concede an inch of departmental turf, was one of the most dispiriting two hours I ever spent in government. The Prime Minister – and the government – lacked a capacity to develop forward looking policies and to do the hardest of all things – renew itself in office.
It is there that the ability of the Strategy Unit to take a fresh look at issues (particularly those not on the immediate political radar and that do not sit neatly in departmental boundaries) and its ability to both challenge but also work with departments will be missed.
Barker and Rutter are both absolutely right in their analysis. Admittedly, many observers thought that the PMSU’s fortunes had waned in recent years since its glory days under Geoff Mulgan. But room for improvement doesn’t constitute a case for abolition.
The strategic deficit on global risks and foreign policy looks especially bad. Combined with a Foreign Office that’s now almost wholly focused on ‘winning business for Britain’, a new National Security Council apparatus that is (as predicted) having to focus almost all of its energy on firefighting, and DFID apparently being pulled away from its global thought leadership role in favour of an approach more along ‘aid administration’ lines, the question would seem to be less where the long-term strategic thinking on global risks is happening in Whitehall, than whether the new government wants any to happen at all.*
*All the more reason why we need a National Intelligence Council along the lines of the US model, as I’ve argued here before.
by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity
Tullett Prebon, if you haven’t heard of them, describe themselves as:
…an intermediary in wholesale financial markets facilitating the trading activities of its clients, in particular commercial and investment banks [in] seven major product groups: Volatility, Rates, Non Banking, Treasury, Energy and Commodities, Credit and Equities.
They are, in other words, not all that hard to tell apart from Friends of the Earth. So you might be forgiven a small double take when you read the contents of their latest report to clients:
The global economy is in the grip of a forest of dangerous financial and non-financial exponentials. A series of key indicators – including population growth, energy consumption, cumulative inflation and the money supply – all appear to have turned into exponential ‘hockey-stick’ curves.
Amongst the non-financial indicators, there are reasons to fear that exponential trends in population growth and energy consumption may not be sustainable, because both may be heading for practicality constraints. Meanwhile, the intrinsic values of the principal currencies (including the dollar, the euro and sterling) may be threatened by escalating debt, by dangerously rapid expansion in the money supply, and by continuing deteriorations in purchasing power.
We conclude that the ‘forest of exponentials’ is indeed highly dangerous, particularly because it is neither properly understood, effectively calibrated or coherently managed. In particular, we identify an urgent need to foster an understanding of energy returns on energy invested (EROEI), and to develop a universal system of measurement and calibration.
by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
…you may be wondering just how bad it’s going to be on climate change. Here’s a clue:
Last year, when John Boehner, of Ohio, the incoming House Speaker, was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about his party’s plans to address climate change, he had this to say: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen … is almost comical.”
Indeed it is, John. All this and more over at the New Yorker.
