Surviving the Future Quotes

“The claim that industrial agriculture is the only way of feeding a large population is about as scientific as a belief in Creationism - and far more damaging.”
― David Fleming, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy

“I think capitalism is a good thing. The only problem with capitalism is that it destroys the planet, and that it’s based on growth. I mean apart from those two little details it’s got a lot to be said in its favour.”
― David Fleming, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy

“While democracy has advanced, the part we ordinary citizens have played in the making and sustaining of the places and communities we live in has diminished. Never has so much been decided for so many by so few.”
― David Fleming, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy

“Unfortunately, the critics of economics have had a tendency to discuss the whole structure as a tissue of misconceptions. It is a critique that fails. The strength of economics is its considerable, if far from complete, understanding of the flows and comparative advantages that underlie trade, jobs, capital and incomes, and the logic of optimising behaviour, all backed by glittering accomplishment in mathematics. That makes it a powerful analytical instrument, so that just a few misconceptions – such as a failure to understand the informal economy or resource depletion – have leverage: like a baby monkey at the controls of a Ferrari, they can turn it into an instrument with extraordinarily destructive potential. If it were a tissue of errors, it would not be dangerous: it is its 90 percent brilliance which makes it so.”
― David Fleming, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy

“This is a favourite fallacy of today’s economics, which lacks a coherent concept of time—or, at least, it has a mechanical technique for dealing with time which can be applied uncritically. The key principle underlying the treatment of time here is the rate of interest. Economics recognises that if a person needs to borrow money from another person with whom he or she is not in a close reciprocal relationship, then the lender will reasonably expect to get something back for the money he provides (usually interest), in the same way as any other provider of goods and services. That introduces the principle of “discount”—money you won’t have until a future time is worth less than it would be worth if you had it now. The problem arises when the discount principle is applied to other assets. For example, the value in a hundred years’ time of a stock—such as a fishery—discounted at a rate of 3% per year, is just 5% of its present value, and if a valuation of this kind is taken literally, it can be used as a justification for fishing it to destruction now, because it is a depreciating asset. The fact that the interest rate calculation can be made does not necessarily mean that people will be foolish enough to make it, or to apply it uncritically, but, if they do, economics provides an apparent justification.”
― David Fleming, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy

“To answer this we need to think about time, and about the networks of parts (or “holons”) that make up any system.13 If these parts, each complete and functional in their own right—systems-within-systems—are to be useful to the larger system, they will vary in size, they will do different things in different ways; they will have the freedom to experiment, to repair and recover, to adapt and evolve. In a healthy system, each holon is able to operate at its own pace, according to its own clock. It is protected from above by the larger, slower-moving system to which it belongs; it is stimulated by, and responds to, the smaller, faster, shorter cycles of innovation and response of the holons lower down.14”
― David Fleming, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy

“Exploitation: early entrants make use of the wealth of opportunity in their environment to multiply. Most fail, not least because they are poorly-connected individuals facing a dangerous world on their own, but some may eventually build a system with potential and connectedness. This is known as the r phase: r has for many years been used as a label for the rate of growth of the population of an ecology (example of phase: young trees).2 2. Conservation: the system persists in its mature form, with the benefit of a complex structure of connections, strong enough now to resist challenges for a long time, but with the weakness that the connections themselves introduce an element of rigidity, slowing down its reactions and reducing its inventiveness. This is the K phase, where the ecology reaches its carrying capacity (example: mature trees).3 In due course, however, the tight connections themselves become a decisive problem, which can only be resolved by . . . The back loop (moving from bottom-right to top-left in the diagram): 3. . . . release: at this point, the cost and complication of maintaining the large scale—providing the resources the system needs, and disposing of its waste—becomes too great. The space and flexibility for local responsiveness had become scarce, the system itself so tightly connected that it locked: a target for predators without and within, against which it found it harder and harder to defend itself. But now the stresses join up, and the system collapses (example: dying trees). This is the omega (Ω) phase, as suggested by Holling and Gunderson, and it is placed by them in its ecological context: The tightly bound accumulation of biomass and nutrients becomes increasingly fragile (overconnected, in systems terms) until it is suddenly released by agents such as forest fires, droughts, insect pests, or intense pulses of grazing.4 4. Reorganisation: the remains of a system after collapse are unpromising material on which to start afresh, and yet they are an opportunity for a different kind of system to enjoy a brief flowering—decomposing the wood of a former forest, recycling the carbon after a fire, restoring the land with forgiving grass, clearing away the assumptions and grandeur of the previous regime. Reorganisation becomes a busy system in its own right (example: rotting trees). This is the alpha (α) phase.5 In this phase, there is a persistent process of disconnecting, with the former subsidiary parts of the system being broken up. But our diagram is drawn on a graph of potential (increasing from bottom to top) and connectedness (increasing from left to right), which allows us to note a curious aspect of this back loop: the defining relationship of the fore loop—where more potential is correlated with more connectedness—is reversed. In the back loop (even) less connectedness goes with more potential. How can this be?”
― David Fleming, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy