Not waving but drowning

CONNECT’s green money man, ROBIN CURRIE, has been enjoying a little light summer reading - reports from the IMF and NEF

APRIL may be the cruellest month, but August is probably the most literary. This is the time that many of us retire to the beach for a little light reading. You’ll be able to get a view of how sad my life is when you realise that this article is based on my reaction to a report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and another from the New Economics Foundation (NEF).

For those of you who have been hiding under the sink for the last couple of years, the IMF is an economically ‘neo-liberal’ organisation that has embraced a politically ‘neo-conservative’ agenda. This largely means that it’s in favour of privatising everything that isn’t nailed down on the assumption that some enterprising chap will show a profit from running it. The enterprising chap usually turns out to be a huge US or European corporation, which expects to make an ongoing return without having to inject any real money to keep the project going.

The NEF are fundamentally repelled by that agenda and make quite a convincing case for an alternative strategy. A useful way to dismiss them without addressing their argument is to say they are idealistic old hippies not living in the real world.

Essentially the two reports are a nice fat conceptual argument about globalisation, made interesting by the insertion of one or two chewy bits of fact.

For example, the NEF points out that we’re actually worse off now than 30 years ago - before all this globalisation stuff hit the headlines. This is because the apparent rise in the value of paper assets held by the world’s leading economies has not been matched by a similar increase in real wealth. It’s all a con, they shout to an unheeding world. You’re living in a fool’s paradise.

So nothing new there, really.

However, I’d also been reading Alvin Toffler, the American sociologist who came to fame in the 1960s with the concept of Future Shock. Some years ago, Toffler developed the idea of the Third Wave, and it is the congruence between his views and those of the NEF that caused me to sit up and take notice.

Toffler says that the First Wave of the economy was agricultural and all human experiences were based on husbandry and use of the land. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, everything changed. In this Second Wave, the industrial city became the most common form of human settlement. New forms of culture emerged in a process that Toffler calls 'massification'. Thus mass markets, mass production, mass transit systems, mass consumption, mass media, mass political parties, mass religion and weapons of mass destruction (if you can find them).

The needs, wants and, crucially, contribution of the individual were ignored or discouraged.

And the Third Wave - which we are currently entering - will have been brought about by technology. Toffler thinks that we are moving fast from being a society that produces things to one that produces only information. And information has no physical boundaries.

There is an inference that we feel the need to belong to some external group. In the First Wave we identified ourselves with disparate agricultural professions, land-ownership and trades. In the Second, as belonging to mass units such as nations, cities or factories. And the fuzzier these external entities become, the narrower becomes our focus. Increasingly we identify with smaller and more distinct communities, including minority political, economic, artistic, sporting or religious interests. In other words, 'de-massification'.

The Third Wave encourages, promotes and requires this small-scale diversity so – if Toffler is correct - the last thing you want now is the kind of runaway standardisation represented by an expanding European Union. Their Second Wave values of conformity, bureaucracy and increased productivity are completely inappropriate to an evolving Third Wave community.

Within a Third Wave society, runs the argument, we should support enterprises with which we feel affinity, irrespective of their geographical location – organic Third World co-operatives, innovative Silicon Valley start-ups, Dutch sustainable energy producers. We should invest to celebrate the present and create the future rather than to stave off poverty. Instead of identifying with a huge, unwieldy super-nation we should - as Mao Tse Tung put it - ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’. Ironically, Mao was a great one for the forcible imposition of a single solution.

It should come as no surprise that an expanded EU is also supported by the neo-liberal neo-con Washington economists. Their common idea is that one economic model should be exported across the globe - and that model is consumer capitalism supported by privatisation. Never mind that this only works on paper and has demonstrably left us all worse off. By inference, they believe that globalisation leads inevitably to mass democracy, and mass democracy – a classic Second Wave invention - is the best possible system, even if it has to be imposed at the point of a gun. Mao would sympathise.

Then I woke up. It had all been a terrible nightmare. In the real world - according to the sweat-soaked IMF report still in my hand - the World Bank brings prosperity to the poor, the IMF supports a diversity of economic models and the World Trade Organisation insists on a level playing field between the rich and poor.
But I kept hearing a chilling laugh from the ghost of Alvin Toffler . . .



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Robin Currie is an Independent Financial Adviser specialising in green finances. He has offices in Exeter and Totnes. Call 01392-411630 or e-mail robin.currie@btconnect.com.