Parting Thoughts, 2019.
Words matter
I always look forward to the Oxford ‘word of the year’. The rise of neologisms reveal a lot about the Zeitgeist, and our preoccupations. In 2016 the word of the year was ‘post-truth’, which captured Trumpism, the misleading micro-targeting of voters on social media platforms, and alternative facts displayed on the side of Brexit campaign buses. In 2017 it was ‘single use’, the catch all term for the war on plastic choking our oceans.
In 2019 it is ‘climate emergency’, which tallies with blazing Amazonian rainforests, smouldering Siberian peat bogs, Fridays for Future protests, megacities threatened by swelling oceans and TIME magazine naming Greta Thunberg, the youthful face of climate activism, as their person of the year.
It is a term at the centre of our daily news, and at the centre of a semantic web that includes ‘climate crisis’, ‘ecocide’, ‘flight shame’ and perhaps most worryingly of all, ‘extinction’. If this year has taught us anything, it is that we must act now to stop the last of these words ever topping an Oxford list.
A blast from the past
I recently came across an essay called ‘The Coming Anarchy’ by Robert Kaplan. It sets out the consequences of our climate emergency:
‘The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution and rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts — [this is] the core foreign policy challenge from which most others will emanate’.
It is an urgent and timely read. The thing is, Mr Kaplan wrote it in February 1994. His words, like those of many others, have fallen on deaf ears. The collective inaction problem on climate change is not new, but it is now too late. Like many others, I have been oscillating between hope and despair for the best part of 2019.
I have found optimistic companionship in Andrew McAfee’s new book ‘More from Less, subtitled ‘The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources’. But I have also benefited from the sober realism of Simon Kuper’s weekly columns in the FT — from ‘emission impossible’ to ‘the myth of green growth’, he is the antidote to happy clappy silicon valley utopianism:
‘The sad truth is that moving from dirty to green growth will take much more time than we have. The infrastructure we’ll be using these next crucial decades has largely already been built, and it isn’t green. Most of today’s planes and container ships will still be in use by 2040. There are no green alternatives yet, nor enough vegan burgers or sustainable clothes’.
Merry Christmas everyone, and a happy new year.
Bullsh*t and Bezzle
A string of unsuccessful unicorn IPOs (WeWork stock, anyone?) have burst the bubble of once idolised industry disruptors. Ah, it was all so predictable wasn’t it. I mean, this bonfire is just a repeat of the dotcom bubble, or for older readers, the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Is it not?
Not so fast. Prior to the WeWork debacle, the majority of business commentators thought they were witnessing the latest incarnation of Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’; a cyclical process of industrial mutation, where new players revolutionise the economic structure of markets by destroying the old business models of incumbents and creating new ones.
As it turns out what we were really seeing was what J.K. Galbraith called ‘the Bezzle’, a form of corporate embezzlement characterised by the time lag between the commission of a crime and its discovery. In this case the crime was the transfer of large amounts of cash from ordinary savers (pension funds and private investors) to ridiculously overconfident individuals and their VC backers (aka the innovation industrial complex). To paraphrase Merryn Somerset Webb (Editor in Chief of Moneyweek), the defining feature of 2019’s Bezzle, was not so much the theft, but the complete lack of concern for the financial futures of the people who backed them.
The final word on this goes to Prof Galloway who said ‘[in 2019] the lines between charm, vision, bullsh*t, and fraud have become so narrow as to be one line’. Line em up Prof, and shoot em down.
Chicken Oriental
I fly back to London to see my family tonight and have been wondering what a cockney would have to say about the mass protests occurring in Chile, France, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Haiti, Guinea, Colombia, Iraq and elsewhere. Maybe something like…“It’s properly kickin’ off fella, they’ve all gone chicken oriental (mental). Protesting about their shawshank redemptions (pensions), unaffordable living costs (no cockney rhyming slang for this) and democratic rights (ditto)”. Or it could be that I’ve been away too long.
I won’t attempt to analyse the intertwined causes behind these protests (it’s probably a mix of demography, loss of tribal identity, stagnant real wage growth, a sense of powerlessness and the inflammatory potential of social media). But I have watched three things in the past year that have helped me make a little more sense of it. Maybe you’ll find a moment between Love Actually and the Queens Speech to watch one of them:
- Push — a documentary about the global cost of living crisis, and the structural elements behind it. The first half is illuminating.
- Joker — it is ironic that a film that grossed >$1bn at the box office, has become a symbol for the disenchanted, dispossessed and the plain angry. The adoption of the ‘mask’ during protests is more than blind imitation, it stands for the power of the mob versus an uncaring establishment. Film students, sociologists and political scientists have much to debate here.
- Capital in the 21st Century — a documentary adaptation of Thomas Piketty’s 2013 tome, with talking heads from the British political left (Paul Mason), business journalism (Gillian Tett), and big hitters from the world of political theory (Francis Fukuyama) and economics (Joseph Stiglitz). If nothing else, you are likely to get to the end of this one, unlike the book.
My notebook 📒 is empty, the Christmas biscuits 🍪 are gone and the scraps have been folded away. I wish you all a restful Christmas 🎄 break and a happy new year 🥳 . See you on the other side.
