Club card government

In a 'rare intervention' into the domestic political arena, from which he has triumphantly ascended, Tony Blair has advised us that the recent riots (predicted incidentally by Nick Clegg before the election, when he was campaigning against, not in tandem with the Conservatives) were not the result (as David Cameron says) of a general moral decline in society, nor (as Blair's successors in the Labour Party suggest) the result of the coalition government's policies and cuts. According to Blair, the rioters are a distinct and discrete canker - the great bulk of society has nothing in common with the rioters.

It is probably true that there are, among the rioters, people from whom most of us would feel deeply alienated and with whom we would find it almost impossible to forge any relationship. Yet one has only to follow the reporting of the riots and of the court appearances since to see that also amongst them were many who were far from being hard-bitten social disfunctionals and who were either almost surprised at what they had done, or whose alienation was almost trivial; people that is who were responding to a social and cultural development rather than creating it through the force of their malign personalities.

Tony Blair's remedy is 'early intervention' - special state 'support' targetted at distinct individuals and families, preferably identified before they actually offend by information gathered against a range of theoretical or statistical indicators. Blair began this in his final years in office; Brown abandonned it; but, Blair now says, "the papers and the work are still there" handily lying in government offices waiting for Cameron to pick up, once he sees the light.

I find there is always something chilling about Blair's approach. Social institutions and relationships are not at fault or in need of adjustment; rather it is malfunctioning individuals who are to receive the specific ministrations of the state to ensure that they fit the social model. It is not that I think people cannot be deeply influenced and changed by encounters with others, but when the interaction is part of an organised programme conducted by a state or social body, one is in different territory. Perhaps there is something of Blair's churchly inclinations here, but it also makes me think of a different model - the supermarkets, those new Jesuits of the consumer society. Our habits and doings are monitored by government data-gathering, like the supermarket 'club card' (this is a club we are "all in together"), but, unlike Tesco amending its stocking and marketing to fit demand, the government moulds the recalcitrant individual to fit society.

Schleswig-Holstein digested

The long-running tale of furniture designer-makers reforming their association has reached some kind of conclusion, but in the two or three year long process has become rather like the Schleswig-Holstein question. When I die no-one will understand it except our founder, who, by then, will be in a lunatic asylum after his long battle against the committee-ising tendency.

So, before I forget all about it, here, for the benefit of posterity, is my digested read.

There once was an association called DMOU without rules or leader. It had an internet forum called Discuss, or the forum, but you couldn't join Discuss except by being a member of DMOU, though you could be a member of DMOU and not take any part in Discuss. Being a member of DMOU was if existing members recognised you as such. After the Two Hundred Years War a majority of members of DMOU voted to call themselves FDMA, call Discuss the Forum, adopt a set of rules which nobody read but everybody thought were jolly good, and elect a committee which wasn't meant to do anything except keep the money, answer the post and deputise for each other when they fell ill from too many committee lunches. (Some hope there!) Since DMOU had no rules, no-one could say whether this was legitimate or not, but FDMA had 'force majeure' on its side. Following the example of David Owen when the Social Democratic Party merged with the Liberal party, some old lags from DMOU declared the vote was not legitimate and that they embodied the continuing DMOU. Others, like aging bishops slumped in their armchairs in the library of the Athenaeum, no longer knew what they belonged to. There then ensued the War of the Succession, which lasted for the next five hundred years, outlasting the survival of furniture as it was once known, and which, as I hardly need tell you, in our day has been totally replaced by Gravity Control Differential Force Fields and Invisibility Cloaks. If you're interested to know what 'furniture' actually looked like back then I think you can still find a few examples in Reserve Collection 5C of the European State Museum of Antiquities (normally open every third Wednesday afternoon of the month by appointment). As I recollect, there are even one or two pieces reputed to have been made by members of DMOU or FDMA. It is now difficult to know what functional purpose theses strange-looking objects possessed, and at least one of them has a peculiar mark called a 'Guildmark'. No-one now knows what that mark represented, but it is thought to have had some significance in the War of the Succession. Or not.

I hope that makes it all clear

Post-generational change

In western societies we are accustomed to regarding our own time as one of unprecedented change. In a sense it is, but, in another, the generation born early in the twentieth century, my parents’ generation, experienced far greater change in the pattern of their personal lives and society. Theirs were the lives that saw the full transformation from a rural to an urban society (in the sense that agriculture, following the Second World War, ceased to be a significant employer); that saw the flowering of mass communications and of instant personal communication; that saw the achievement of almost universal personal physical mobility; that saw a major increase in leisure and disposable income.

Current times have seen a proliferation of technological devices. Now we have bread makers, espresso machines, electric tin openers, but nothing new that has so radically altered our lives as theirs were by the washing machine, the refrigerator, the vacuum cleaner, the motor car, the telephone and the radio, all of which became widespread in the decade after the end of the Second World War.

Today our cars can automatically adjust their seats to our body shape and sense when it is raining, features that we scarcely need, and we passively anticipate the moment when they break down and are too expensive for us to bother to have them repaired.

We live in a time of superfluous technological sophistication. On a more serious level, technological advance delivers, for example, in medicine, benefits that are applicable to, or affordable by, only a very small minority in usually western society – whilst malaria kills in Africa for the lack of mosquito nets. Or we marvel at space exploration that extends our understanding of the universe, and delivers marginal technological benefits to our consumer society.

Similarly ours is a time of superfluous, signs and information that paradoxically drive meaning out of our experience through cross referencing overload. The conflict of social and political ideals has vanished, not because one set of ideals has convinced us over another, but because all ideals have lost meaning for us. Everything now is ‘post’ – post-modern, post-structuralist, post-industrial – defined by reference to something we have not fully left behind yet cannot energise. Only cataclysmic events might restore our sense of meaning. In the US 9/11 produced such a reaction on a minor level but it quickly slipped back into the old moral, cultural and political confusion.

Meanwhile change in our time is driven by the acceleration of population growth rather than socially significant technical advance. That growth leads to the depletion of the earth’s natural resources, a process that simultaneously stimulates technological development and prevents it from transforming – or preserving – our social organisation.

Surely, one might think, computers and mobile phones contradict my view. With them, technological invention has produced something new and made it available to the mass of us at steadily decreasing price. They have certainly transformed the pattern of our lives and enabled new manners of social interaction, and social isolation, but the change has been more cultural than social or economic in broad terms. Famously, although computers made all sorts of business methods and practices newly possible, economists have been unable to trace an increase in productivity commensurate with the amount of investment in information technology except in individual cases. It has not been a new industrial revolution.

Computers give us the illusion of control. As we strike keys or click the mouse, information is instantly displayed. A further twitch of our fingers shows us in a flash the effect of changing this or that variable, but seldom is this degree of control or choice able to be transferred straightforwardly to the real world. The effects of this are seen most dramatically in the growth and near collapse of our international financial system, where computerised functioning has created a complex accelerating web of virtual activity that is entirely dysfunctional. As the survival of some of our largest and most sophisticated banks teetered on the edge the only direction in which they could turn for immediate funds was in many cases laundering the profits of organised criminal drug supply, where grubby cash changes hands for the supply of small packets of physical substances, and produces one of the largest by value and most thriving of international trades.

Is this a juggernaut I see before me?

Sources of information: blogs versus politicians

Is it all we can do was to lie down before the approaching juggernaut of economic and social collapse?

'Juggernaut' comes from a Sanskrit word meaning 'lord of the universe' and is one of the forms of Krishna. At one temple devotees were thought to cast themselves under the wheels of a massive chariot carrying statues of Krishna as a deliberate act of devotion. Or perhaps they just slipped.

I am no kind of expert at all, but judgement is always about ranking opinions more knowledgeable than one’s own, and, sometimes, one has to nail one’s colours to the mast if only to allow others to steer clear.

The sources of information now are numerous and range from blogs to politicians. At one extreme many blogs, though of independent mind, are so overwhelmingly concerned to complete their own interpretive scheme that they are sometimes little concerned to identify which specific triggers of change are likely to occur first. Yet, in their defence, one must recognise that there is too much variability in the world, too many possibilities of both negative and positive feedback, too much irrational behaviour, and then the occasional small piece of enlightened rationality, too many unforeseen circumstances both benign and malignant, too complex a web of inter-connectedness in the political-economic structure we have erected, for anyone to know exactly what is going to happen and when.

On the other hand, information from those actually involved in trying to move the levers of power is highly compromised. Is ever a politician willing to lose office for the sake of telling the electorate something it needs to know, or do they all, like Vince Cable, believe that the marginal results they personally achieve in office completely outweigh public understanding?

Underlying instabilities

Beneath it all, at the level of historical perspective, it is not difficult to identify major and largely inexorable trends that threaten our current way of life: climate change; environmental degradation; population increase; natural resource depletion; increase of social/economic complexity; decline of state competence; decline of democratic control. Our cleverness, busy-ness and short-sightedness in coping with the here and now give us an amazing capacity for ignoring the ground beneath our feet and also for maintaining our balance, but there are good reasons for thinking it cannot go on much longer.

Which of these instabilities is most likely to hit us first, if not hardest? In my view it is the increase in social/economic complexity and more specifically the implosion of our financial system.

The only system that works?

When one posits a financial or economic collapse people tend to react that capitalism will go on for ever, that it is the only system that ‘works’, that there is no alternative system. Whether or not it is the only system that works is hardly worth debating. There certainly have been and are other social economic systems, but nothing to rival the scale of capitalism. Capitalism certainly works in its way, and it has a unique capacity to facilitate and accelerate economic growth. In our lifetimes it has produced unprecedented economic growth. People nowadays, in claiming that capitalism will go on and on, mostly identify it with precisely that phase that we have recently experienced. Capitalism inherently requires constant expansion. It is a pyramid structure, subject always to periodic collapse. It can restart after collapse, but there is no inevitability that it will regain the former level of activity and prosperity.

The collapse of capitalism? The view from the top of our pyramid

There have been capitalist booms and busts in the past, and there are always minor fluctuations in the ascents and even descents. Yet it is clear that we now stand at the peak of an economic pyramid whose summit is of historically unprecedented height.

The foundations of our pyramid were laid in the industrial revolution. It was thereafter fuelled by the western world’s colonial expansion or its settlement of new continents and dispossession of the native inhabitants. After 1930 it was further boosted by an exploitation of the earth’s material resources on a scale and with a rapidity totally unprecedented. Things were flagging a little by the time of World War 2, but reconstruction helped, and when, in the 1970s, resource limitations were beginning to be felt, trade globalization achieved essentially a recreation of the benefits of imperialism for the developed economies without the necessity for legal or physical occupation. However the engines were essentially decelerating and the final, brilliant boost from the 1980s onwards was the development of massive international financial expansion and deregulation.

That financial turbo-charging of our economy is what tottered in 2008 and is still threatening to collapse. In fact it cannot avoid collapse.

Financial instability and collapse

In the past few decades financial transactions internationally have outgrown trade in physical goods and services by several orders of magnitude. For banks the financing of trade and industry is now a very minor part of their activity and profit generation. Even a manufacturing company, such as Porsche, may make more money from financial transactions than physical production. Such financial transactions are ‘rent seeking’ activities that draw money out of the productive economy without generating wealth.

Such activity requires constant acceleration to avoid collapse. It is achieved by private finance’s destruction of state regulation, escape from state taxation and by a constant expansion of debt-based trading. Because financial trading has so enormously outstripped economic growth, this debt is backed by vastly overvalued assets (see sub-prime etc) and complicated financial insurance (see AIG etc) for which there are insufficient funds to meet eventual claims. Because the financial system is so complexly and inextricably inter-connected, financial trading insurance is far riskier than insuring casual risks such as theft or illness. In fact it is inherently unsustainable, but it is intended to underwrite the whole international financial edifice.

Banks are uniquely allowed to fictionalise their accounts. Governments, spurred on by the big international accounting firms, have recently allowed them to value their assets not according to what they might fetch on the open market (‘mark to market’), but according to what their computer models value them at if certain inconveniences and ‘disruptions’ to the market were removed – such as the fact that there are no willing buyers for their assets (‘mark to model’). Add to that all banks’ use of complicated corporate structures in tax havens, and their accounts become totally opaque.

The credit crunch was the panicked recognition of all banks that not even they could trust the solvency of their fellows. The immediate crisis was averted by state intervention but virtually every bank remains insolvent if any half-realistic valuation is placed on its assets. Since the credit crunch we have seen a series of government sponsored ‘stress tests’ applied to the commercial banks. These they have all passed, but in some cases (see Ireland) only weeks later they have required massive further state support.

Reactions and remedies

State governments have not only lost control of the financial system but their own financial ministries and advisers have become completely infiltrated by the financial classes (‘regulatory capture’). Nevertheless there is genuine alarm, even panic, at the instability of the financial system. (That is what explains the complete capitulation of the Liberal Democrats to the expenditure cutting agenda once they were admitted to coalition government.)

Governments seek to shore up the financial system by a combination of not always compatible measures.

The immediate reaction has been, and still is, to transfer the liability for much commercial bank debt via government to the tax-payer, either by guarantee or by buying bank debt at optimistic valuations. Quantitative easing injects massive amounts of liquidity into the economy through the banks, where it almost entirely remains, used not for productive investment, but for commodity speculation (see food prices and Middle East unrest). Regulatory control is fiercely resisted but governments are trying to impose higher liquidity requirements on the banks, which will make them ‘safer’, but will also reduce both their profitability and their lending capacity.

These measures may help shore up the financial system but they do nothing for the productive economy, whose fortunes come a very poor second in government priorities (see ‘Main Street’ versus ‘Wall Street’). Our economic system, as David Cameron might like to put it, is broken – and no-one knows how to fix it. It is all too complex and inter-connected. China is not the new economic paradigm; it is the last gasp of the old one.

Public burdens

Ironically, as globalisation fails, because third-world countries begin to resist the imposition of exploitative terms of trade upon them, the burdens imposed by non-democratic institutions such as the IMF and central banks are increasingly directed at first-world publics. Commercial bank debts are transferred to governments, who must then cut public spending, increase taxation or transfer it from corporations to individuals (see VAT increase and ‘internationally competitive’ corporation tax) and suppress wages and labour negotiating rights (see Wisconsin). When nations are severely distressed financially, many of these measures are effectively dictated by the IMF and other funding governments in contradiction to the inclinations and commitments of the democratically elected government. The IMF has an explicit policy of reducing labour costs in all European countries.

‘Rescue packages’, as in Greece and Ireland, are designed not to benefit the national economies directly, but first to save banks from collapse. Despite widespread public opposition to 'bailing out' 'lazy' PIGS in Germany, where Angela Merkel is caught in approaching election trap, several German banks have had highly improvident involvement with Irish banks (where regulation was lax even within its own legal requirements) and the German banks are likely to become insolvent if Ireland and/or Greece default. The Irish banks have just failed another stress test (is it the fourth?). How is it that every time these wise (and highly paid) financial people look at the Irish banks they find they missed a few score billions last time? Is it that there’s a hole in the bucket and the banks are even now creating new losses? Everyone knows Ireland will default: it is just a question of how long Germany and France can delay the inevitable. Some British banks are likely to be affected also. (Why else did UK extend its own individual loan to Ireland with money 'it did not have', even given that we're making a profit on the deal?)

European PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) can now borrow to fund their deficits, either from private bond investors or from national or international ‘rescuers’ only at rates well above even optimistic forecasts of growth in their economy. Their debts can only get worse, cuts deeper, public unrest more vociferous. The European Central Bank has signalled a forthcoming rise in interest rates (probably now slightly delayed by the Japanese disaster). European banks have total claims on Portuguese, Irish, Italian, Greek and Spanish debt of 2.4 trillion dollars. Do they really think they're going to get it all back?

In the US the housing market is in continuing decline, and the solvency of major and minor US banks still depends on overvalued mortgage-backed securities. Rising interest rates are possible (or yet more quantitative easing further increasing US debt, except that it's just again breached the congressionally approved limit) following Japanese sale of US bonds, thus increasing mortgage defaults. There is political paralysis at federal level and growing budget crises and possible bankruptcies at state and municipal level. US unemployment has just decreased sufficiently to boost not only the Dow but the FTSE as well, but few bothered to notice that the number of employed people had also dropped. Research shows almost half of the US population of working age has no full time job. Approaching a half of all US citizens are benefitting from food stamps. (The big banks administer the food stamps system and make a nice profit on it.) Meanwhile Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase (‘the most dangerous man in America’ and Tony Blair’s new boss) is busy telling us all that the problem pre-2008 was too much financial regulation.

In the UK most economic indicators are turning down - growth, unemployment, housing market, consumer confidence. Inflation is up. Bank profits rise. The government’s Office of Budget Responsibility forecasts that private debt will increase massively over the next few years as public debt, maybe, declines. The full scale of cuts and transfers to the private sector, and the public anger at them, is yet to be felt.

Tipping points

The burdens placed upon the public in the first world, by political and business leaders seeking to maintain the financial system, are, in anything but the short term, insupportable, but there is no other plan. The burdens placed upon the public in the third world, by economic exploitation and commodity speculation, are equally or more immediately insupportable and contribute directly to popular uprisings in the Middle East, including the supposedly oil-rich nations. State forces have shot and killed demonstrators in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. Saudi troops are in Bahrain.

Japan’s misfortunes threaten to destabilise the bond and currency markets. The Bank of Japan’s immediate reaction is a massive dose of quantitative easing. Industrial disruption in Japan is likely to ripple out to industry internationally. It may be worse than a shortage of batteries for iPads.

Against all this it is difficult to believe that we are not in serious and present danger of financial and economic implosion.

Deflation and depression

It will take the form of severe deflation and depression. The money supply will drastically reduce as financial debt cannot be honoured. Over 95 per cent of money in circulation is not government issued currency but debt-based money created by commercial banks.

There is certainly too much money (and debt) in the system now, but economies always over-react and there will shortly be too little. Money is necessary to facilitate human exchange of goods and services. People are unemployed in a depression not for a lack of any possible activities useful to themselves or their fellow citizens, but because the mechanics of the system for rewarding them for their work with some token they can use for obtaining goods and services they require from others has broken down. It is quite possible in a depression for farmers to be throwing away food they cannot sell, whilst nearby people are starving because they cannot afford to buy it. Neither supply nor demand are absent; just the mechanism to bring the two together.

There will still be rich people in a depression, but fewer of them and they will be more worried. There will still be a market for expensive goods, but a much smaller one and suppliers will be much more vulnerable.

Middle income people, even up to a quite high level, will suffer a drastic reduction in their wealth and purchasing power. The poor will grow and struggle. Asset values will plummet; the effective price of essentials will rise; governments will withdraw from public support.

It is not a happy prospect for furniture designer makers.

Where do furniture designer makers fit in?

These developments will affect every section of society, including furniture designer-makers, but there is a particular way in which we fit into them.

It is no accident that the ‘British craft furniture revival’ happened during the post-war boom and that it reached its climax of widespread public attention (not necessarily its largest membership) in the seventies and eighties. Our natural market is the inconspicuously rich (‘the lower edge of luxury’). That market has for many of us been augmented by more structured forms of wealth disposal amongst corporate customers (now largely faded) and the rich clients of decorators and interior designers. But those we access by piggybacking on other professionals. All of these markets and mechanisms will suffer severely in a depression.

A few of us have gained custom under our own steam from the conspicuously rich, and have done so by projecting a certain kind of extravagance of design and making. Only a few of us have the talent or aptitude to do that, and it depends in any case for its effectiveness on a level of exclusivity.

When we try to promote our group fortunes in any organised way, as FDMA intends to do, we have a tendency to lift up our eyes to this market of the conspicuously rich – in my view in vain. Even if we do not imagine every one of us can access that market, we slip too readily into the assumption that we need to emulate the characteristics of that furniture to make all of us more commercially successful.

In the coming depression there will still be some conspicuous-rich demand but it will be a contracting niche and it is hopeless to think that more of us will be able to climb in. The inconspicuously rich are going to be severely squeezed. There will be more localised markets for basic and durable items. In that situation I think it is very unwise for FDMA to take its character (or its leadership) from what has been established as the apogee of furniture designer-making in the preceding decades. Most of us are going to have to establish radically new models if we are to survive as businesses in a changed world.

There is a further, more particular way in which our group development reflects the unsustainable economy in which we are set. A significant number of us depend for a substantial part of our income on training new would be professional designer makers. I believe we are training more people than can expect to succeed in their own businesses. We are running in effect our own Ponzi scheme. Unless we have a much clearer idea than I have seen of a successful business model for furniture designer-making in the coming decades I do not think we should be actively encouraging people to join our ranks. There will be enough who do so without encouragement.

Recovery and its limits

The world will recover, though it took the best part of a decade and a world war to recover from the last depression. Capitalism will survive (probably), but it will not return to anything like the level of economic activity, of prosperity and of internationalism that we have seen in recent decades.

That is because other underlying limitations will catch up with us following financial collapse, in the form of energy deficiency, climate change, and general resource scarcity.

Oil and gas are certainly beyond their peak. The energy returned on energy invested ratio on new supplies is between a fifth and a tenth of what it was on the primary oil field discoveries. The boom may make new difficult (and very small) oil reserves look economically viable, but the failing economic recovery that rising energy prices helps bring about will mean that many of these new discoveries are never exploited.

Even if nuclear and renewable energy had the inherent capacity to substitute for our present level of energy use, which many informed people doubt, we do not, from where we are now, have the economic ability to create the massive new infrastructure required. That infrastructure would have to be created from the ‘old’ economy and from conventional energy. We have simply left it too late.

There will be other scarcities too, most notably of food and water. Water supplies are inadequate and compromised in many parts of the world (including the USA). It may be true that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone, that it is just in the wrong place, but that doesn’t remove the problem. China and India have difficulty feeding their present populations and are currently buying up enormous swathes of agricultural land from impoverished countries that are more inured to seeing their own populations periodically starve (see Ethiopia).

And modern food production is of course highly dependent on cheap energy and petrochemical inputs – and increasingly in competition for land usage with bio-fuels.

Is that a juggernaut? I think it is. Can it be stopped? I think not. Can we, as individuals in local communities or small groups, dodge it? Possibly.

Where are we in the world?

I recently initiated a thread on the furniture designer-makers forum to which I subscribe trying to identify our place in the wider social and economic currents swirling around us. This, I suppose, was the heart of it:

It can hardly be denied that 'We make expensive objects that few can afford'; that even our batch produced furniture needs a more than average level of disposable income; and that many of us are uncomfortable with that - just as William Morris was all that time ago.

Long ago our society and economy got to the point where no ordinary person could afford the fruits of 'hand production', except for very small items and the repair of important technologically produced goods, like fixing our cars. Yet even there the range of those mass produced items that it is 'economic' to repair by individual labour rather than just buy a new one is, as we all notice, shrinking rapidly, and many are explicitly manufactured in a way that means it is impossible to take them apart without destroying them. (How many of us incidentally have any concern for the possibility of taking our furniture apart non-destructively in decades to come?)

And things have moved on, so that here most people cannot afford even mass-produced objects unless the relatively low labour content they still require comes from third-world workers, whom we regard with an uncomfortable mixture of guilt that we are exploiting them, and moral self-approbation that we are 'lifting them out of poverty'. (Never mind that we are also lifting them out of their own cultures, and we usually put aside the thought that once we have so lifted them the added burden on the world's resources will become truly insupportable.)

And things are moving on still further, so that the globalised economy is moving towards an end where generally labour will be unable to earn sufficient money to purchase its own product and wealth becomes increasingly invested in assets of inflating value rather than in productive industry. This is, as far as I understand it, the collapse of our economy that some people predict through a combination of simultaneous inflation in one area and deflation in another.

The one indispensible item for us all where a relatively high element of hand labour is difficult to eliminate or outsource to the third world is our houses, which have inflated to a value where they become a life-time burden on our personal earnings and a key asset prop of the whole unstable financial/economic system, ripe (or over-ripe) for corruption by those who believe they can manipulate the system for their own advantage.

My point is that, however morally aware and troubled we are, it is a difficult treadmill to step off.

You are right too that we attach tags to our furniture to redeem it. 'Green' is one of the most common, but some time ago Barnaby pointed out that the carbon footprint of a small workshop was likely to compare very unfavourably with that of larger production. So we concentrate on how sustainably we source our raw materials and gloss over the sustainability of our whole operation, let alone the fact that a large proportion of our sustainable timber ends up in the dust extractor.

'Heirloom' is perhaps safer if we just mean that we expect our furniture to out-last us and we hope it will still be valued by succeeding generations. Yet we have to steer clear of meaning 'value' in any monetary sense, because when our furniture does reach the resale market it commands pretty miserable prices, and, in the 'antique' market generally it is only a very few outstanding and 'collectible' items that attract high prices, and the vast bulk of well designed and made furniture from the past sells for low prices in the sense that no-one today could possibly make it from scratch so cheaply.

That is a reflection of the nature of the asset market that characterises the wealthiest end of our society and economy, and what is, I think, most ethically uncomfortable for us as designer-makers is a tendency to aspire in our work to the trappings of that level of luxury. Mostly the hope is vain, but it results in very expensive furniture with a very high level of finish and a sophistication verging on the absurd, a rarified claim to be taking our product to unprecedented, never before thought of heights. (And here we break ranks with our Arts and Crafts predecessors.) That sort of approach of course finds willing allies in the ranks of professional marketers and promoters, publicists and even 'critics', and maybe associations. It is inimical to any more culturally distinct or articulated characterisation of a body of craft or art work. Historically, work that has been so characterised has often met, initially, with surprise, incomprehension or hostility from the contemporary market - which is not what our new association is aiming at.

The Automatic Earth

A few days ago I went to hear Nicole Foss, who, as Stonleigh, is one of the authors of The Automatic Earth blog, give a talk in Bridport. She is anxious not to be dismissive of the possible positive responses individuals can make to the depression she sees coming, but the upbeat, post-apocalypse reconstruction part of the message seems a little bit thin and pious. I'm surprised she doesn't link into some of the commentary on the social and economic collapse in post-communist Russia and how much less resilient to that sort of thing American and western European communities would be.

I also think that, like many blogging commentators, she seems too concerned in completing her interpretative model to take much interest in what people at the economic coal face are doing (though there is a lot more detailed stuff on the blog). It's as if they were writing a modern Gibbon's Decline and Fall in advance. I expect she would counter that the situation is well beyond the control of anyone at the coal face. That is probably true, but it still might not mean that they won't have some significant influence on the way in which it all falls apart. In Bridport a section of the audience actually found her talk quite amusing in a superior kind of way, and she slightly plays to that reaction. There are other blogs that I find more enlightening on the economic/social/political situation than Automatic Earth, or perhaps that seem more psychologically engaged.

In the end the judgement we make as people living in the world has to be about something other than understanding, or even knowing all the facts, and so it has to carry with it the recognition that it may very well be wrong.

Nevertheless I think her underlying analysis is convincing that an excessive and very uncomfortable economic correction is inevitable; that it will be what hits us first; but that energy and resource scarcity thereafter will prevent us ever 'getting back to normal'.

It's easy to fall back into thinking that, despite ups and downs, overall things will go on broadly as we think they always have done. But that is to ignore the very steep upward changes there have been over the past few decades - like thinking the rocket we lit a few minutes ago is actually a steady-state fixture in the sky. And, as another maker responded, the point is that we are all riding on the rocket rather than looking up at it in the sky.