Money's too tight to Menschn

Forgot Nostradamus and the Mayans, we’re about to lose a living prophet, to the United States at least. I speak, of course, of Louise Mensch.

It might seem at first that Louise Mensch lacks the celestial foresight of Nostradamus. After all, she failed to predict the descent of Comet, although it should come as no surprise. It’s been in trouble for years, and shops cannot survive without customers. It was all part of the grand economic narrative in which the clunky retail giants and their dusty display units were outmanoeuvred by the plucky dotcom start-ups, who were more light-footed (perhaps because their staff wore sandals to work), and who used sparkly internet magic to make stuff cheaper. As consumers, we had nothing to lose but the old retail chains.

But now we know that Comet never deserved its fate. The smokescreen has been revealed: behind friendly homepages that welcomed you by name lay colossal global enterprises, playing the same tax-avoiding, devil take the hindmost tricks as the mega corporations. And hindmost there were plenty: Woolworths. Clinton Cards. Game. Peacocks. JJB Sports. La Senza. Blacks. Hawkin’s Bazaar. Barratts. Oddbins. Borders. Virgin Megastore. Consumers, myself included, preferred the convenience and competitive prices of internet shopping over queues and car parks, but because the new dotcoms had a tax gameplan they deluded us into thinking it was a fair contest. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world its head of operations was in Luxembourg. 

Neither Louise Mensch nor the Mayans could have predicted that in 2012 a whole AA-to-Z of firms and famous figures would have their tax tactics scrutinised by such diverse forces as Vince Cable, UK Uncut, Anonymous, and the Public Accounts Committee. Indeed, thanks to the tax bods at AA and Acromas, I have something to look forward to the next time I’m out cycling and a motorist tells me I should pay road tax. (Instead of replying “there’s no such thing”, I can politely inform them that although 98% of my tyre-to-road interfacing occurs on UK transit infrastructure, the multi-channel leasing arrangements of my cycling operations to myself via several offshore tax havens means that despite having pedalled over 500 miles this year, my distance travelled is actually at a net loss and I am therefore not liable for any tax. And then I will cycle away very quickly so they can’t get me.)  

What led me to realise the true wisdom of Mensch was the recent news that Caffe Nero might have sidestepped its tax bill. 

I liked Nero because for years it helped me cultivate a coffee-connoisseur smugness with which I annoy friends and colleagues. To me, other people were mere slaves to purveyors of that burnt bean, murky run-off that needs adulterating with aspirational adjectives and gallons of milk to make it palatable, whereas I eschewed the big tax-avoiding brands, only getting black coffee at Nero in the proper I-talian style. So, while friends wasted their mornings ordering and waiting for fraudulent skinny frappie-frothies and criminal tall icy-ones, I simply walked in and ask for a medium-black-americano-take-away-with-a-little-bit-less-water-than-usual-oh-I-don’t-know-up-as-far-as-half-a-cup-or-something-yes-please-umm-well-that’s-probably-still-a-bit-too-no-it-doesn’t-matter-it’s-fine-thanks, and went on my way. 

And when Louise Mensch chose the medium of the television programme “Have I Got News For You” to impart her prophesy that only all or nothing relationships with capitalism were morally-consistent choices, I laughed along when she was butchered by Baker, Merton, and Hislop. “Ain’t no-one gonna stop me from grumbling about globalisation, just because I walked past a Tesco once in 1998”, I didn’t hilariously say at the time. And as Hislop did hilariously say at the time, “you don’t have to want to return the stone age to complain about the financial crisis”. 

But in our mockery of Mensch we failed to comprehend her transcendent perception, her crystal sagacity, her intellectual poise when she told us we couldn’t be “against capitalism apart from the lattes”. She’s right, we could not. 

If indeed it turns out that the Nero has fiddled, then, as Louise Mensch knows, in the future there won’t be any decent, honest, taxpaying coffee shops left. In fact there won’t be any taxpaying shops left at all, just miles of A-roads straddled by Amazon distribution centres and racks and racks of Google servers. In the future, you’ll have to swallow a bastardised ultra-capitalism or you’ll have to fashion your clothes, food, and coffee out of stone and half-completed loyalty cards. Louise Mensch wasn’t being crass on Have I Got News For You, she was sending us a warning. And rather than heeding her parables we drove her into exile. Come back Louise Mensch, your people need you!

Learning from the Equitable Life

Last Friday I was present at the presentation of a report "Did anyone learn anything from the Equitable Life?" issued to mark the 250th year since the founding of Equitable Life.

Over the summer I had helped the author, Professor Richard Roberts of the Institute of Contemporary British History, King's College London, with some of the background research and interviews, so I had been looking forward to the report launch for some time.

The launch event itself comprised a short talk by Roberts himself, followed by a panel discussion chaired by Adam Boulton, and questions from the floor, where a good number of Equitable policy-holders and members of the EMAG awaited the chance to air some strong opinions. On the panel were Lord David Owen, Prof Robert Winston, and Alex Brummer, City Editor at the Daily Mail.

In short, the report's conclusion was that "if lessons had been learned from the Equitable Life collapse in the late nineties, the severity of the banking crisis might have been lessened saving taxpayers millions". (The full report can be downloaded here.)

While the report itself focused on flawed governance models, executive hubris, risky business models, and regulatory/supervisory failure as factors of financial crises, the ensuing discussion raised a lot of interesting points and questions with regard to the moral culture of late financial capitalism. What follows is partly a summary of these points and partly an exploration of them and related ideas (all reflecting my own interest, which is not necessarily proportional to the time spent in the debate on these or other topics).

• Professional values. The panel seemed to agree that professional values in finance had been eroded during the last twenty-to-thirty years, and that we could look back to an age where things were done with a greater degree of mutual trust, and when gentlemanly leaders took personal responsibility for failings. Some members of the panel seemed to support the idea that the breadth of modern financial regulation actually discouraged the development of a true respectable code of conduct, one that was not enforced by law. There are similarities here with the ideas of those who argue that reducing road signage and removing physical barriers between traffic, pedestrians, and other road users ("regulation") actually encourages better driving by shifting the responsibility of care to the drivers themselves. There are also echoes of the anti-socialists of the nineteenth century, who denounced any legislation which they believed aimed to reform society without first reforming man. 

• Some reasons for the loss of professional values included the the mechanisation of operations and centralisation of decision-making in the financial sector. Technological change meant that transactions are less likely to be carried out face-to-face; and so agents became removed from the human consequences of action and de-sensitized to the results of exploititative or predatory behaviour. There are echoes of Ruskin here in terms of his critique of the cash nexus, which destroyed the paternal relationship between employer and employed. Along with technological change came globalisation, meaning the decision-making powers of regional managers were weakened. Sound finance based on long-term relationships and knowledge of the local community was gone; in its place, managers were left to simply implement centralised, model- and metric-based decisions that took no account of individual circumstances nor of the values embedded at the societal level. The ruthless application of centralised logic based on the rational, wealth-maximising principles at the heart of financial capitalism required sentiment, consideration, and compassion for the local to be stamped out. 

• Part-time and amateur Chairpersons. It was felt that the modern Chairman (I deliberately use the gendered term here to reflect the discussion) typically spent just 40-50 days a year performing duties as part of their role, and this lack of quality time spent engaging with their firms was compounded by the fact they were now more often non-technical specialists in their company's industry or market. Full-time, expert Chairmen were needed in order to scrutinise the company's affairs, and to expose the dangers of unexplainable profits. Indeed, it was noted more than once that it was unexplainable profits that were a greater cause for concern than greater losses which could be explained.

• Short-termism. From the floor, the modern-day short-term profits, short-term rewards culture in finance was cited, in noting that in the past rewards would have been paid later in life, a practice that encouraged businesses to work according to long-term cycles. There may well be links here with the Kay Review (which I have not read), and such ideas also chime with some aspects of my current reading, Hutton's The State We're In (aiming to post my thoughts on this volume in the next month or so, but we shall see...) Brummer mentioned that "short-termism" had been in the line of fire since Harold Wilson's report in the 1970s. 

• The 'magic circle', composed of leaders of large and profitable enterprises, chief auditors, top regulators, CEOs and Directors, all of whom rotate around the top jobs. There are conflict-of-interest issues when auditors move into leading positions of former clients, and when firms' executives become regulators. Also, it was mooted that auditors spend too long nurturing relationships with their clients, and that there were significant barriers to entry below the big four audit firms (or 'big three' as it was referred to in the debate - wonder who the missing one was) due to the globalised nature of the most lucrative audit clients. That add-on consultancy fees outstrip audit fees and as such impinge on independence of thought was also raised. This is all ground that has been covered in the past few years; the more interesting question is whether or not anything will be done, or indeed, can be done about it. But overall I am more interested in the notion of a 'magic circle' and how it relates to what I term the "discourse of the City", namely, the shared assumptions, conceptual possibilities, and the set of implicit and explicit beliefs all refracted from economics and "business thinking", and which informs and circumscribes the behaviour of City firms and the governments they back financially and relentlessly lobby. Is there some form of diffuse, soft, or institutional/industry-wide, groupthink at work here?

• Recruitment. This didn't come up in the discussion but I note it here as an addendum to the point above. To what extent is institutional groupthink perpetuated by the recruitment policies at work in the City? For both entry-level and executive roles.

In the report, one of the lessons Professor Roberts suggested might be learned from the experience of Equitable and the ongoing financial crisis in Britain was "the development of a formal and continuous process of learning from crises within sectors, across sectors, and internationally", adding that "now is the time to get this wired into the new regulators' modus operandi".

But why should the regulators have to enforce something which should be happening anyway? In fact, the best businesses in most other sectors do "formal and continuous learning" all the time, albeit, it might be suggested, with much reinventing of the wheel along the way. Firms outside the financial sector are compelled to learn from their own and others' mistakes and crises - which do nonetheless still occur - through competitive pressure and the discipline of the market.

The financial sector, however, seems to think it knows better. Is this just hubris, or is it a rational, calculating reflection of its power and influence in British society? Indeed, it might be argued that because crises in finance can devestate the wider economy and society with such rapidity and ease, society, in the form of governmental regulation, is forced to do the lessons and learning leg-work for the financial sector. Right now, it seems British society has little choice but to nurture and kowtow to the City, because, in a long process beginning a few hundred years ago, the former has too bought itself too big a stake in the latter. Throwing away the financial sector's armbands and chucking it in the deep end is pretty risky; if it can't stay afloat by itself, it might well drown us all in trying.

On the other hand, it may be worthwhile exploring further the hypothesis that in recent times the financial sector has lost a critical mass of professional values, and that modern-day financial crises are largely the product of a poisonous corporate culture in the City. It may be worth asking whether such professional values really existed, and if so, when and why did they begin to evaporate? What events in financial history - from the 1970s oil shocks, and the end of the Keynesian consensus, through Thatcher and the Big Bang, and to the 2007-08 financial crisis (via Equitable) - are the key driving factors of change, and which were mere milestones in the journey? Finally, what might be done to reintroduce or reinforce professional values in finance; what preconditions, mechanisms, policies, processes, and regulations would be necessary for the emergence of a respectable, responsible, and professional financial capitalism?

What makes a plastic fan?

Something about the football got me thinking about inequality in the face of scarcity, and how this may lead to value-judgements being formed about others both from within and without one's clan.

There is a high-profile game today for the Swans. Manchester United visit the Liberty Stadium, and it's the evening (and therefore televised fixture). In case you didn't know, Swansea City were promoted to the top flight at the end of last season, after working their way up through the three lower leagues since 2003 (when they very nearly dropped out of league football altogether).

As might be imagined, the fixture has revived various debates about the nature and quality of 'supporterhood' (for want of a better phrase). Some bemoan those locals whose interest in the game stems from the fact that they follow the bigger club. To some extent this is a standard re-hash of a common and long-standing argument that holds in higher regard the support for a local team - whose matches you attend in person, and for whom, it is assumed, failure and mid-table, mid-week drudgery is commonplace - over the support for a so-called 'telly team' for whom success is at least as frequent as failure.

There is also scorn against those who have never shown any interest in the Swans whatsoever, but - it is perceived - have grabbed a ticket in the home end in order to cheer on United. It is argued by most that this is wrong, and while I agree with both this and the previous argument above, neither argument is what I wanted to discuss here.

What I intrigued me was the idea of the more casual and occasional Swansea fan going to the game because they were also, or even primarily, a fan of Manchester United.

More generally I took interest in the contempt with which 'casual' supporters of Swansea City - those whose interest in the team has been re-ignited (or ignited for the first time) following its promotion, and especially those who will be in attendance today - are viewed. Interesting also is the language used to express this disdain: these occasional supporters are labelled 'plastic fans', who have 'jumped on the bandwagon'. They are contrasted with the 'genuine' supporters, whose loyalty is measured by the number of years they have held a season ticket, by their longstanding attendance 'during thick and thin' and for the 'rainy nights at the Vetch', and at pivotal fixtures in the club's history, most notably the victory against Hull in 2003 which kept the club in the football league.

I have no interest in contrubuting to the debate about which type of supporter is more worthy than the other.* 

But I am interested in two aspects of this phenomenon. Firstly, the targets - that such negative language is reserved not against the fans of the opposition but for those who, with whatever degree of legitimacy, designate themselves Swansea fans and therefore 'on the same side'. Secondly, the medium and location of this discouse - while the away fans will tend to be verbally abused through songs and chants during the match itself, 'plastic fans' are often termed as such during the lead-up to games, during post-match chatter, and between other (the 'genuine') fans on the internet, and in person outside the ground.

And it is this that got me thinking about whether or not such attitudes are linked to scarcity, in particular the scarcity of seats at live matches, and the subsequent inequalities between people that arise from this scarcity.

The recently-constructed Liberty holds just under 20,000, of which 14,000 are season ticket holders, and around 1-2,000 held for away fans and the buffer of empty seats required to surround them. As expected, demand for most (or all) matches this season is greater than supply, and as expected, this was not usually the case during previous years in the Championship at the Liberty and in the lower leagues at the Vetch Field (some big games aside).

The club has some schemes in place to try to reward loyalty and attendance at less prestigious fixtures. Nonetheless, there will be Swansea City fans inside the ground today whose support has been to date more 'casual' than other fans unable to secure a ticket. Is this perceived displacement at root for the value-loaded langauge used to describe 'casual' supporters?

Compare the situation at Swansea with that of the Welsh National team. Wales are able to use the Millenium Stadium (capacity c75,000), but very often they do not because they sell far too few tickets. Instead, they host matches at the welsh clubs' grounds - and yet still they never (or very rarely) sell out. The Welsh FA are therefore desperate for the occasional fans to turn up more regularly, and in more numbers, to fill the plentiful seats available.

It is interesting to note that these potential fans are not labelled 'plastic', but are instead referred to as 'families', 'new fans', 'young supporters', 'children of the fans', 'fans of Welsh football', and suchlike. In many cases the revered potential Wales fan will be one and the same person as the reviled plastic Swans fan. It seems to me that the value of a fan's support, and by implication their worth as a person, is determined not by their character or actions but by something entirely arbitrary and subject to circumstance: the ratio of the number of seats against those willing to pay to sit on one for a couple of hours.

It will be interesting to see if the juxtaposition between labels for the same person continues when, as hoped, Wales perform better and begin to enjoy some success on the world stage, while still being able to accommodate all who would wish to see them. This will help to answer the question of whether it is success, rather than scarcity, than contributes to the conception of a 'plastic fan'. I would argue that success is often the underlying cause of the scarcity, rather than a standalone cause of intra-fan vitriol, because a team will sometimes outgrow its formerly all-accommodating ground as a result of actual success or the expectation of immanent success - but it is not always so. Sometimes the ground can accommodate all its fans, or at least enough of them to prevent the notion of the plastic fan gaining currency. In some cases this may be because a hike in ticket prices leaves few able to afford regular attendance, and here the supporter angst is usually directed at the club's ownership rather than at the engorged fanbase (who arguably make such price hikes possible).

With some caveats, a further interesting comparison can be drawn between Swansea City FC and a team which, like the Welsh football team, occupy the Millenium Stadium - the Welsh rugby team. In this sphere I have not come across the idea of the 'plastic fan'. But doesn't the fact that the Millenium is usually a sell-out for Welsh rugby disprove the idea that scarcity leads to intra-fanbase vitriol?

Possibly. But we must also consider the fact that unlike in football (mostly - exception noted below), stadium attendance is not an integral component of 'genuine' support for the Welsh rugby team. With Welsh rugby, it is generally accepted, and even celebrated, that the match 'experience' occurs as much outside the ground as inside it. It is possible to show 'genuine' support for the team as you watch matches in the school hall, in the pub, in the rubgy club, or at home with friends and family. Thus there is no scarcity of resources (seats), and no need to begin to discriminate between supporters of varying degrees of quality or loyalty. The casual Welsh rugby fan is as welcome in the flag-bedecked pub as the die-hard, and by implication equally welcome to participate in the club of genuine supporterhood. My guess is that the situation is similar for the very biggest British and European clubs, for whom it has been long accepted that supporters will always outnumber seats in the stadium, and other locations for 'genuine' fandom have arisen.

Note also the correlation between the rise of the notion of the 'plastic fan' and the decrease in available seats for many top clubs' matches (as a result of club success, all-seater stadiums, and the general rise in football's popularity). I am not a historian of sport, but from conversations with other historians who are also football fans, I get the sense that in previous years it was possible to be a 'loyal supporter' of a particular team while also attending the games of other teams (even fierce rivals, and even if your own team had a simultaneous fixture) from time to time.

This would be anathema to many modern supporters of football clubs, but remains standard practice for an ever-shrinking number of fans of the sport of football (I do not seek to judge either set). However, it is becoming more and more difficult (not to mention very expensive) to do. Scarcity of seats at the more desirable matches has made it very difficult to be a casual supporter of one or more teams, because scarcity means clubs are able to introduce mandatory membership fees and loyalty schemes. Although they are probably the least unfair way of distributing something for which demand outstrips supply, such schemes become the most outwardly obvious measure of inequality between fans of the same team: it splits them most decisively into the deserving and undeserving.

But even with such schemes scarcity of seats remains. And this scarcity of seats - when sold at prices affordable to both the die-hards and the casuals - make it ever more important to exclude the non-deserving and cement your own place at the table by creating hierarchies amongst those who should be your brothers in arms but instead become competitors for that which you cherish.

Scarcity of seats also means that business-like football clubs seek ever new and inventive ways for fans to buy into, and by implication participate in, the club's success. However, one cannot buy his way out of the plastic tag, no matter how much plastic they flash. A fan who watches games on the telly could spend as much of their income (in relative terms) as a matchgoer normally spends on tickets, by trying to show their support for the club by buying its various products. But they would not be considered a 'genuine' fan by those at the matchday coalface. It is not a lack of financial sacrifice that gives rise to intra-fanbase vitriol, but the importance of being known to be deserving of a rare and precious commodity - a seat at the match. Again, it seems the value of a fan's support, and by implication their worth as a person, is determined not by their character or actions but by the ratio of seats to those willing to pay to sit on one. This would be profoundly worrying even if it applied just to football, but I suspect the notion has wider applications.

What's the answer (for football at least)? Increasing the capacity at the grounds is the obvious solution; and if large-scale improvements are prohibitively expensive then supporters' clubs should agitate for the creation of safe standing areas. One proposed solution - increasing ticket prices further - would be misguided. Some hikes have already implemented, either directly increasing the price of the ticket itself, or by adding extra costs to the privilege of being allowed to compete for a ticket (season tickets, membership fees, loyalty points, away supporters; clubs), and yet the vitriol remains.

Could some form of progressive allocation prevent the rise of intra-fanbase vitriol? In a sense, a version of this sometimes occurs. When tickets are sold on the door, long queues often form, and it can be argued that the pain and inconvenience of the wait discourages all but the deserving from securing tickets. But this does not account for the desire of those unable to wait, because they cannot afford not to work or attend school that day, or because they are elderly or infirm, nor for the desire or otherwise of those who know somebody who can get queue for them, and those with nobody to ask. In addition, if this became the standard allocative system, those with enough cash could simply afford to pay somebody to queue for them. 

Which brings us back to the market, and to pricing. What would happen if the price of a ticket to each individual was determined as a function of the buyer's income? (It could not simply be a flat percentage of income because 5% of a poor person's income is a greater sacrifice to that person, than 5% of a rich person's income is to that rich person, and for some poor people it may even be an impossible cost to meet.) If the ticket price increased incrementally according to a geometric function determined by the buyer's income, it could be a way of equalizing the financial sacrifice required in order to gain a seat. To prevent a black market, ID checks would take place at turnstiles and re-sales could only be conducted through the club. And there could be other ways of generating 'credit' to pay for some or all of the ticket, so long as the means and availability of this credit is available to all. If demand remains too high then tickets could be allocated by lottery, as it would not be unfair to introduce the element of chance when all the participants have made a sacrifice that all agree is equivalent. It wouldn't mean that nobody would ever miss a game they wanted and 'deserved' to see, but it might prevent people from turning on each other in the face of scarcity.

So there you go - get on the case Sepp, you champion of equality and self-worth against persecution.... Oh.

* Declaration of interest: I am a supporter of Swansea City and of The Arsenal. The Gunners were my 'telly team' since I was aged 10 (jumpers for goalposts), and around that age I started going to Swansea games because a family of a friend kindly let me have their spare ticket. I later went to games with 2 or 3 different friendship groups as time went on, but always intermittently. Sometimes this was because I had no money, or was less interested in football; more recently it was because I would play football myself on a Saturday afternoon (goalposts for goalposts), and for the last four years I have lived away from Swansea (and have no friends). This piece isn't intended to defend myself against accusations of being a plastic fan - in fact to my knowledge nobody has referred to me as such, partly because I have not attended any highly sought-after, exclusive fixtures in recent years or even at all (I went to the play-off final but tickets for that did not sell out for ages), but mostly because I am not a hot conversation topic for the average Swansea fan (outrageous, I know!). Yes, my background and personal situation affects my viewpoint, but that doesn't make my argument any less right (or wrong), and besides, none of us is getting out of that particular boat any time soon. I promise I will redraft the post the minute I discover the secret of pure reasoned thought that transcends the boundaries of human experience, its intellectual baggage, and its cognitive structures. It's on my to-do list.

Testing...

Can I post from my mobile? Is the future really here? We'll find out soon...

Firstly I want to draw attention to two excellent websites:

Stuart Whitton
- illustrator and loud-mouth extraordinaire. What this man can't do with a pencil shouldn't be attempted by the sane. Just don't get him talking... (only joking Stu). In seriousness, he is hugely talented and keeps his blog up to date with his work - check it out.

The History Blogging Project
- a venture I fully support and which my old friends at the History Lab have also put their weight behind. It's high time that the more interesting developments, findings and approaches associated with 'doing History' made it out into the wider world. Although blogs are a new platform, previous generations of historians appreciated the value of micro-dissemination. It will never replace books and articles, nor should it, but we have a responsibility to share our knowledge with whoever seeks it.

In other news...

As for me, the last 6-9 months have been some of the most challenging in my life so far. The PhD funding came to an end which meant job-hunting took over my time. Almost as soon as that was resolved, we decided to move to a new flat. 

The new flat is beautiful - now - but initially required a degree of work to be done quite quickly, meaning that there were a lot of late nights/busy weekends as we approached winter. Christmas allowed a respite for family and recovery after a six-month period of job-hunting, new-job-starting, packing, moving, painting, building, fixing, despairing, and generally wanting to die.

Since late January 2011 progress has been much better, and I have returned to the successful balancing act of work/life/thesis that I managed in the first few weeks of employment (before the new flat drama kicked in). It is difficult, and sacrifices have had to be made, but there is light looming at the end of the tunnel. Even if the tunnel is littered with syringes full of pain and face-eating rats. Did I say tunnel? I meant colon. 

It was actually good to have a short break from the thesis because it helped me to read my text with fresh eyes, and to see how I could improve the prose to make my arguments clearer. Subtle changes that needed to be made to the structure and prose throughout now seem obvious; the thesis increasingly hangs together as one. It is a coherent narrative rather than a collection of related chapters. Important points raised in earlier chapters have payoffs later in the argument. This can only be good.

There will be dark days ahead. But it won't be long before the dark days ahead are fewer that those behind. March is a make-or-break month. Whether it is a success or not depends partly on forgetting about it being a make-or-break month and just continuing to hone, to polish, to perfect.

Like on cup final day, I must forget about the enormity and significance of the occassion, and all the pressure it brings, and just concentrate on playing my game. Fingers crossed that'll be good enough. If not, hey, it's only four years of my life down the pooper. 

The work of two theorists from my research - both called Wallace - cropped up in the news today, but independently of each other.

I was back in the archives this week, working on some loose ends regarding J. Bruce Wallace.

J. Bruce Wallace favoured Alfred Russel Wallace's Land Nationalisation scheme but in the meantime he threw his energy into establishing a mutual co-operative that used its own 'labour notes' currency, something he thought would be 'the easiest road to socialism'.

After feeling that his Brotherhood Trust was losing sight of its original principles, he set up a new co-operative, the Mutual Service Circle, before going back to his anti-industrialist roots by getting more fully involved with the Letchworth Garden City movement. His periodical, Brotherhood, then became the organ of the Alpha Union, Wallace's means of bringing Theosophy to Letchworth.

I was interested to see, then, that today's Guardian has an article proclaiming that 'Planners are going back to the ideals of Victorian model towns to meet the present-day challenges of community cohesion and environmental sustainability'.

The article quotes Jody Aked, project manager at the New Economics Foundation's Centre for Well-being, who says that 'nothing makes us glummer than the daily commute'. One US study showed that 'of all daily activities, commuting was the one that led to the least happiness – sex was the one that led to most'.

Taking the analytical methods of economic science and applying them to the maximisation of happiness and well-being, rather than wealth, was exactly what the Christian Socialists of my period were trying to do.

But I came across something new after reading about Red Plenty, a new book by Francis Spufford that re-examines the Soviet Union, and how it was regarding in the West, in the late 1950s and early 1960s - a time he calls 'The Soviet Moment'.

The extract (again, in the Guardian) talks about cybernetics, a term once used to refer loosely to science and engineering in the USSR but which had developed globally into the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems.

Cybernetics is applied now to computer science, biology, mathematics, sociology and more (Spufford seems to suggest that it might lay the foundations for an alternative to the consumer market) - but a bit of digging revealed that the study of corrective feedback mechanisms had a history.

It turns out that the way that James Watt's steam engines regulated their own speed was identified as an example of the principle of evolution by... Alfred Russel Wallace!

In an unpublished paper that he sent to Darwin in 1858, called On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type, Wallace wrote: 


The action of this principle [of natural selection] is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow.

And if that wasn't enough to show that the ideas of Christian Socialists are still talked about today, just before his bit about steam engines Wallace wrote that

"Neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for the purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions, and on the first scarcity of food were thereby enabled to outlive them."

- an idea that Mark Evans and Joy Reidenberg were at pains to point out in last week's Inside Nature's Giants on More Four. (They also proposed that the long neck's role in fighting for the right to mate with the group's females might, in fact, be the way in which natural selection occurred in giraffes.)

Why does nobody seem to remember Alfred Russel Wallace?
In short: 1) He didn't publish his stuff until after Darwin, and 2) because his spiritualist and socialist beliefs may have been a sticking point for the scientific community.

That Richard Dawkins appears alongside the scientists in Inside Nature's Giants is clearly an attempt to show that natural selection debunks intelligent design.

But while I agree with their stance, I think it might do more harm than good to gloss over the fact that, historically speaking, for a lot of people the principle of natural selection did not suddenly shatter their religious mindset. Instead they did what people had done for centuries: they integrated the new science into their religious vision of the world.

Richard Dawkins strove to point out that natural selection wasn't a perfect system; while it allowed animals to better adapt to their environment, it also reproduced their deficiencies, it remembered the mistakes. When constructing our histories of ideas in society, we should also remember the 'mistakes' as well as the moments of progress.

Some bits from the City planning article below; full article here.

Do you have a long commute to work? If so, you're a dinosaur – your ways will soon become extinct. Or perhaps you cycle or walk to work, but return in the evening to a neighbourhood containing few friends or co-workers. If so, that lost sense of community is being linked to health and well-being issues. Worse still, those homeworkers hibernating away from human contact. The answer? The Victorian philanthropists' model towns such as Saltaire and Letchworth Garden City. Let me explain.


For those unfamiliar with the great Victorians such as Titus Salt and Ebenezer Howard, the founders of the above mentioned towns respectively, their ideas were as simple as they were revolutionary. Driven by religious conviction and appalled by the squalor and destitution urban workers were subjected to in the industrial age, they designed towns and factories. Clean and safe, arranged around green leafy surroundings, with schools and communal institutes a short walk from the mill or factory. Other new towns followed, such as Port Sunlight on Merseyside and Bournville in Birmingham...
...
However, the ideas and ideals behind their construction are beginning to re-emerge. The urban expansion of the industrial revolution is happening again in the developing world, most notably in China, prompting the same questions about provision for workers. Europe and America are reflecting on their own cities and workplaces, and questioning their appropriateness for the challenges of our age; health and happiness, community cohesion and environmental sustainability.


In terms of health and happiness, according to Jody Aked, project manager at the New Economics Foundation's Centre for Well-being, nothing makes us glummer than the daily commute. "A study in the US of 900 or so participants showed that, of all daily activities, commuting was the one that led to the least happiness – sex was the one that led to most," she says.


On top of that, replacing a car with a bike or a swift pair of feet will yield obvious health benefits: "The extent to which we engage with our surroundings, and walk instead of taking a car, has a positive impact on how we experience our lives."
...

Little is being planned along similar lines in the UK, other than the Prince of Wales's commendable, yet not entirely successful, Poundbury. Former prime minister Gordon Brown's plans for eco-towns appear to have been shelved, replaced by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith's wish for communities to be broken up, replaced by economic nomads roaming around in search of jobs.


Intriguingly, we don't have to go far back into our social history to find strong live/work communities. The mining towns killed off by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s ticked many boxes. If such communities were rebuilt on a larger scale, and this time offered diverse, safe and satisfying work, then you'd have the ingredients for happiness and productivity.


The Victorian visionaries knew it and today's architects know it: "The early 21st-century city's high density/low public transportation model is not responding to what we might call 'happiness generation'," says Diamond.

Herman Daly, Professor of Ecological Economics at the School of Public Policy (University of Maryland) has written a thought-provoking blog post on the New Economics Foundation site.

Daly applies the ideas of Henry George to our time. George was a nineteenth-century American economist who, through his most famous work Progress and Poverty as well as his lecture tours around Britain, became an important influence on late nineteenth-century Christian Socialist thought - as well as on the Fabians and most of the British Left from 1880.

George's big idea was the 'Single Tax' - a tax on the unearned increment arising from land values. That the rental value of land was caused not by labour nor human skill meant it was morally justifiable to tax it in order to pay for public improvements and social welfare.

Daly argues that because 'the biosphere is now scarce, and becoming more so every day as a result of growth of its large and dependent subsystem, the macro-economy' - the ideas of Henry George are now more relevant than ever. Modern-day options for implementing the Single Tax include an 'ecological tax reform, or... quantitative cap-auction-trade systems'.

In the early twentieth century, most Christian Socialists (like most of their secular socialist counterparts) moved on from Henry George, because they felt the Single Tax alone could not solve the social problem. But their time was different; many of the measures that they advocated have since found their way into law (only for some of them to be reversed, but that's a different story).

A modern-day Single Tax may or may not be possible, but what is key is the point Daly makes here:

For resources the necessary supply price is the cost of extraction — so any payment above cost of extraction is rent. Since land has no cost of extraction all payment for land is rent. If no rent is paid, land does not cease to exist. Neoclassical economists accept this definition of rent but resist Henry George’s ethical emphasis on rent as unearned income.

and here:

Our present practice of taxing away a lot of the value added by individuals from applying their own labor and capital creates resentment, and discourages the supply of labor and capital. Taxing away value that no one added, scarcity rents on nature’s contribution, does not create as much resentment, and the resentment it does cause is less justified. In fact, failing to tax away the scarcity rents to nature and letting them accrue as unearned income to a landlord class has long been a primary source of resentment and social conflict.

The task as I see it is the extension of participation in the discourse of economics to everyone. Terms such as 'neoclassical', 'value added', 'scarcity rents' and, more generally, 'opportunity cost', 'marginal utility' or 'heterodox economics' mean nothing to the vast majority of people - yet the fundamental ideas above are widely understood and debated.

The more specialised and scientific the discipline of economics becomes, the more it is seen by most as something which it is not: the language of greed, the science of exploitation, the toolkit for banking and finance alone. Those who are immersed in the discipline can all too easily forget that this crude charicature is a passable representation of economics in the eyes of many people.

A very interesting article by Gary Younge in The Guardian today - some of which I agree, some of which I don't. Younge talks about the political arguments made in the last decade or so by the American right and left about the economy and the narratives with which they were substantiated. He also talks a little about Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant.

As such the article serves as a useful reminder of the need for greater understanding of the conceptual space co-habited by economic theory, popular knowledge, received wisdom and ideology.

Full article here, extract below:

As we in Britain edge towards an autumn of swingeing public sector cuts, it is crucial that the left reframes popular understanding of the origins of, and options emerging from, this economic crisis. So far the right has made all the running. According to Ipsos Mori, in March the number of those who opposed the Tory strategy was double that of those who backed it. By the end of last month the tables had turned, with 44% backing swift deficit reduction and 35% against it.

In no small part, the right has been able to achieve this by framing the impending pain as an unavoidable consequence of Labour's reckless spending. The only way to emerge from this period intact, they claim, is to inflict savage spending cuts on a bloated public sector and let the private sector create the jobs. Those who refuse to accept this inevitability offer only a kneejerk response to inescapable economic reality.

This is nonsense on many levels, not least factually. The main reason it has worked has been the absence of a coherent counter-narrative from the left about how we got into this situation and therefore how we might get out of it. The good news is the left has a far more believable story to tell that has the added benefit of being true. The trouble is, with the scions of New Labour battling it out for the leadership, there are too few to tell it. Each new coalition proposal prompts isolated rebuttals from the contenders – but rarely set in a broader context. Rather than sounding prime-ministerial, they appear petulant.

After a two-week break during which I constructed and dismantled scaffolding inside the Glastonbury Festival's Property Lockups (which made a welcome change from doing the same thing to the thesis - though it was no less physically and mentally exhausting), it was back to the grindstone. 

I've worked solidly for the last 8 days, and have managed to redraft, restructure, and rewrite much of the main body of the thesis in this time. That amounts to 91,000 words of second-draft material. 

The introduction/literature review (currently 15,000 words) needs a bit more attention, so I'll look at that in the next 2 days. After that it'll be time to make like a Tory and subject the whole thing to swingeing cuts. 

But those cuts will be made to improve the quality, clarity and cogency of the thesis, not to create the opportunity for those omitted sections to be taken over and run by the private sector, i.e. businesses owned by the sons of my Dad's chums. Having said that, if any sons of my Dad's chums are reading, they are welcome to try to make a cash profit from the excised material. I hear cushions still require stuffing, even during the recession.

Whilst looking for an old file I came across something I wrote pretty much this time a year ago, when I was preparing to stop researching and start writing. I gave a rough version of it as a paper in a PhD workshop in Swansea. I sent a rough version to GRADBritain, who asked me to work it up into a full article but then declined to put it in the magazine. It is reproduced below, and makes for interesting reading (to me at least, having now completed the year that the article looks forward to).

The PhD Pendulum (written around Spring 2009) 

Last month marked the 60^th anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Normally I would need little, if any, excuse to crowbar a bit of Orwell into my writing, but actually this here article is all about 'the need for Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) to practice doublethink in order to successfully complete their thesis' – so there.

Also, mentioning the anniversary of the first appearance of Orwell's magnum opus in print seems apt because this is the month when I will finally begin to write up my thesis. The vision I have of my future is certainly Orwellean enough: I picture a blinking cursor stamping on a blank word document forever…

During a brief pause between migraines I began to think about the reasons why I ventured on my area of research in the first place. So I dug up my original research questions. Conceived twenty five months ago, they shone with a sense of definite purpose.

They were free from the cynicism, the tears, the despair, the pain and the grief that had followed. The methodology was refreshingly crisp: Secondary literature had covered this – but had missed out this – thus, my thesis will explore this.

Alas but for all their childlike optimism, my original research questions would always be intellectually stunted. They had to change. I had to change. The process would make a great film (or, more likely, a rubbish one): THE THESIS.

Recall with me now the cinematic montage of lightbulb moments that illustrate the PGR's growth and development into a higher being: 'Ping' – the new idea inspired by attendance at a research seminar; 'Ping' – the new understanding wrought from better knowledge of the wider issues involved; 'P-p-pernngh' – the drunken conversation about one's field at a conference.

And in the film version of THE THESIS, look now as to the sound of rocking drums and powerchords my research questions re-emerge. They're stronger. Fitter. Leaner. No longer do they merely question and challenge the conclusions of the existing secondary literature, but they critique the entire conceptual framework around which an analysis of my topic should be built. A bit. I hope. Probably not, actually.

Anyway, the point is, a thesis is structured around certain themes which correspond to, or seek to answer a set of research questions. These themes are the bones around which the flesh of our research hangs. But what is, or rather, what form should the process for constructing them take? (This question has come up time and again in discussion with those embarking on their PhD studies)

In part, these research questions must be planned, anticipated from the outset, conceived at the start, thought up in advance. There is so much material that we need guiding principles in order to know what to look for.

But on the other hand, they must also be partly discovered, unearthed, derived from the research, from the evidence. The difficulty, especially early on, comes in reconciling these opposing origins.

As the clock ticked ever on towards my submission date, my mind was drawn towards the movement of a pendulum, and how it was a bit like the momentum of a research project's progress. The pendulum swings in one direction towards the need to 'anticipate' the themes or research questions, while the necessity of 'discovering' them lies at the other end of the arc.

Of course, to start off with, the pendulum needs to go in one direction or the other. We can probably only begin by looking to anticipate the themes, or by relaxing and hoping they would crop up through reading.

The mistake I made was trying to anticipate all my themes and research questions perfectly at the start for too long a time. If you push the pendulum too far in one direction, it becomes increasingly difficult and immobile the longer you try.

You do need to start with some anticipation, but the overall process tends to be more fluid, more dynamic, some would say more chaotic and haphazard. There is some anticipation, then some discovery, then some anticipation, then some more discovery. As the momentum builds, the project's movement and progress becomes self-sustaining, needing only the occasional nudge in either direction, probably from your supervisor, to keep it going.

My wish to anticipate all the reseach questions in advance stemmed from a huge fear of going off in the wrong direction and wasting valuable time. I can forgive myself for this mistake: I had at least realised the importance of making your first plans and research questions as good as you can possibly make them, and of defining your field as well as you possibly can.

Here is where we can benefit from a bit of doublethink. You need to define your field as if you will never need to consider it again, and to prepare, research, draft, and refine your initial plans as if it will be the very framework around which the final thesis will be built, while at the same time knowing that after three years of research and re-evaluation, of the pendulum swinging back and fore, those same initial plans will necessarily be almost embarrassingly inadequate.

The key is to be able to hold these two opposing ideas in your mind simultaneously, and most importantly, being comfortable and content with them both despite the inherent conflict between the two. If you can do this, you may not emerge on the other side having finally learned to love researching the thesis, as Winston Smith learned to love Big Brother, but at least you may be better prepared to deal with that eternally blinking cursor when it arrives.

Written on Thursday 27th May

Woke up before the alarm, set for 6.45; this conference has an early start at 8.30 – you'd never catch other historians starting that early. Who said economics was the dismal science?

Was generally feeling much better than yesterday, and had an enjoyable chat about child labour over breakfast (only a historian could say that) and looked forward both to that paper, and the other panels, and my own (I know I said 'both', but I don't claim to be good with numbers despite being, obviously, fantastic at numbers). 

Here are some pics from Bom Jesus, Braga. The conference took place in the buildings surrounding the church, in the same grounds (my hotel, one of the conference venues, is just visible in the bottom right-hand corner of the trees in the first photo):

(There are more of the conference itself, Bom Jesus and Braga, on my facebook page, so go there if you're interested. Not sure on privacy settings, you may need to add me as a friend)

To start the conference, there was a plenary lecture by Prof. Li Bozhong (Tsinghua University), a distinguished Chinese economic historian, followed by comments from the also distinguished Prof. Patrick O´Brien (LSE), which introduced what must be a fiery debate.

The first session proper was very enjoyable and stimulating, and there were crossovers with my own work. The second even more so, despite my expectations of it (which feared that much of it might go over my head).

By now I was really starting to enjoy the atmosphere and the surroundings, and the nature of the discussion meant I was looking forward to my paper and session.

Lunch was stupidly generous, consisting of soup, salads and pastas, plus roast veal with veg and cakes for dessert. If we're getting veal for lunch I expect nothing less than swan for dinner, and in the banquet they'll probably give us gold bricks to munch on.

As for my paper, it went well enough from my perspective. I was able to ad lib, albeit very slightly and sporadically, without completely tripping over my words too much. And the panel was very interesting.

Despite us all being, as a couple of us suspected, lumped into the 'doesn't fit into anything else' panel, the paper before mine had a lot of crossovers and I'm looking forward to discussing them further.

It was about public reception and response to the financial crisis in the Ottoman Empire in the C19th through newspapers (strangely enough, it was the second time in a row that my paper has followed one on the OE economic crisis).

We overran a little, and people were waiting to come in for the next session, but our chair said he was chairing that session also and so they could wait. But I was anxious to make my escape before the braying mob could tut me to death.

So I went for a beer on the terrace with some good company, and we compared the state and nature of academia in our various nations (Ireland, UK, and Finland). 

I was thinking that us Europeans really are more alike than different, but then reconsidered and thought maybe our similarity was due to other reasons (living in modern cities? being highly educated? probably the latter. Geeks are geeks the world over. We know our kind).

There followed a reception and dinner. Buffet again; this time the hot meal was salt fish (possibly scad) and potatoes. They replenished all the food once it had run out, and bearing that in mind, see if you can guess how many different types of cake they had out on the dessert table. And they were proper, nice, home-made fare as well.*

After dinner we were sung to by the University of Minho choir. Had a nice chat with Ana from Coimbra, between Porto and Lisbon, who explained that all the universities had their own special song which everybody learned. I said we had something similar, but the songs were mainly about beer...

With the World Cup approaching football is never far from my mind. Ana in fact brought up the subject. She goes to watch Coimbra every week, and she says during these hard-pressed times the attendance is around 2-3,000.

This really puts in perspective how lucky we are in the UK that teams in the lower divisions, and even, I'd imagine, some non-league teams, enjoy those sorts of crowds.

But I did point out that it was partly because British people, myself very much included, were mainly quite stupid and couldn't handle anything more cultured than football.

You only have to consider that the discussion of tactics is seen as a geeky, almost European-boffin thing here, and the image persists of the greatest English footballers ignoring or even rejecting the idea of tactics and just being their brilliant selves. I'm thinking here of the public perception of Rooney and Gerrard.

And of course there's the 'just-lump-it-into-the-box' merchants, who stick to their long-range guns in terms of tactical nous. Though given the right opposition, long ball can effectively exploit an opposition's weakness, as Inter showed in the Champions League final. It is scary to think that Wimbledon could have won the CL; they were capable of scoring similar goals. Not Bolton though.

* The answer is 17. That's 17 different types of cake. I've tried 2. Must try harder.

Wednesday 26th May

Today was the day I was to leave for Braga, Portugal, to give a paper at the Economic and Business Historical Society 35th Annual Conference.

Normally I am very prepared for these sort of things; a routine trip to Swansea would be planned weeks in advance, for the last conference Durham I knew exactly what I was going and where to go.

This was not the case this time. Finishing off the final chapter of the thesis (with just some supplementary sections left to go before the first draft is complete) plus my trip to Swansea on Monday & Tuesday to complete some exam marking meant that I had had no time to really prepare my travel plans.

I had, though, booked the flights well in advance, and I knew I was going to take public transport which I had checked was comprehensive.

So, I was up packing until 2am on the Tue night, having only arrived back from Swansea at midnight. Plus I still had to work on my paper and slides; I needed to have one run-through at least before giving it!

Wednesday was one of those days where the littlest things go wrong which, taken alone and with no plane to catch, wouldn't induce an eyelid to be batted.

1. I woke up at 7.30, which in hindsight was too late (though I needed the sleep).
    
2. I gave myself a haircut, which took time, and so needed to wash my hair, or rather my head. But the boiler wasn't working. It needs repressurising all the time but this was a new problem which just required the reset button to be pressed. Which worked fine... After 8 times and 20 valuable minutes of trying.
   
3. I went to get some Euros from town and then planned to catch the district to Victoria for the Gatwick Express. I forgot my hat, so had to buy one. But then on the way to the station I realised my jacket had a stain so I ended up having to go home and change it.
   
4. By now it was quicker to get the Piccadilly line from near the flat, but I was getting increasingly worried that I'd miss the flight.
   
   Luckily I got there in time. The Gatwick Express was quick, and I'd checked in online so beat the queues, meaning I had bought all my toiletries and was sat with coffee in departures 30 mins after stepping off the train.
   
5. When I got to the hotel, a certain bank had blocked my card because I didn't ask their permission to use it abroad. I'm sure all the fraudsters are using stolen card details for hotel bills and not for buying laptops, guns, or drugs. Luckily, I had another card but on top of everything else it was causing me some anxiety.
   
   
   So I tried to sort it online, but couldn't get my wireless to work anywhere in the hotel. Later I found out it only worked in another building in the hotel, but I couldn't get it to work there either.
   
   

Though I probably shouldn't have worried about it, by now I was pretty fed up and I wasn't able to fully enjoy the surroundings, though Braga was very handsome, and Bom Jesus spectacularly resemblant of a level from Tomb Raider.

I did manage to give my paper a quick read-through though. One might have added 'having to cross out and correct large bits of the paper and the slides' to the list of 'fings wot went wrong', but I've come to expect that by now. 

And I did manage to get online with my phone, and saw my account was (as I should have expected) fine.