Paperjam

A Call To Arms

Rant // Nick // 13th June 2006

There have been plenty of big ideas over time. Squeezing some random herbivores’ tit for a drink was one. Chucking another herbivore on a fire for a bit then eating it was another. Finding a good combination of sugar-rich grain or grape and leaving it to fester in a bucket was one that I particularly appreciate, especially as finding the right level of yeasty extract (one can only cringe at where this first came from) or spit to get the fermentation going must have involved a fair amount of, in current day parlance, bad home-brew moments.

The question is ­ what big new ideas have the latest batch of humankind come up with?

A common theory these days is one of punctuated equilibrium. This, in essence, means that not a lot happens for a while and then stuff goes into fast forward. It has been used in numerous fields; to explain the big jumps in evolution, stock market fluctuations, acne on teenagers etc. Generally it seems to be a catch-all to explain that stuff is random. Of course there are a lot of technical explanations and mathematical theories to do with bunching and chaos and the like, but the predictive value of this is purely statistical. And statistics can mean anything.

Example: There is a 1 in 10,000 chance of a nuclear plant blowing up in the next 100 years, and it will kill 100,000 people. 10 people will die every year due to coal mining for coal fired power stations. Which is best? That’s all about risk and your perception, plus a whole bunch of information and assumptions that aren’t contained in the question. That question was asked as part of my entrance exam to Oxford University.

I got offered a place by giving the kind of answer they wanted, but I didn’t take it up as it was full of people I’d rather not associate with. The kind of people who would treat this as an academic conundrum rather than a real-life quandary.

But now I think I was wrong. This question, and many others equally hard require answers, and not theoretical ones but concrete policy. We need big ideas:
- Do we commission nuclear plants or wind power?
- Do we raise tax on energy to curb global warming, or do we increase overseas support to help those most affected?
- Do we spend money eradicating opium fields in Afghanistan to help the war on drugs whilst increasing impoverished farmers’ support for the Taliban or licence Afghanistan to produce medicinal opiates that are globally in short supply? (OK, that’s a no-brainer, but our guys up top can’t seem to see it). It is incredibly difficult to weigh up these questions if you think about the individuals involved. If you get emotionally involved you end up saving one life and sacrifce thousands. One woman has Herceptin and increases her life by a few years in the UK. The cost could save 10,000 infant deaths from cholera in Africa.

Back to the question - Who comes up with big ideas anymore? We are facing a whole raft of problems to which we have no answer.

The existing global infrastructure is entrenched as monetarist system. Regardless of however well intentioned individual companies may be, they are structured purely to create excess and distribute this to the investors; those who already have the means to invest. This is not the biggest inequity, the main issue is that the economic structure is based on ideas going back to the likes of Adam Smith.

Smith was a very intelligent man, and also a moral man; he first identified the workings of a commerce based society, and established that the division of labour, along with allowing the ‘invisible hand’ to establish a free market would increase efficiency and reduce prices. Along with his other Enlightenment friend Hume they also recognised with concern that this division of labour would result in people ‘with the most limited scope and understanding of culture’ and so (slightly patronisingly, but it was intended to improve society) advocated public education, theatre and other diversions. Marx was clever, but it was a political slant rather than invention.   What Smith could not have foreseen was the situation we are in now. The premise of his economics was an open system, where there was no limit to inputs. We now know that this is untrue. The earth is, largely speaking, a closed system with limited resources and a carrying capacity that we have probably already exceeded.

So where are the big ideas? If there was any equilibrium that needed to be punctured it is the current state of affairs. The global market as it stands is short term and rapacious. Political pressures (until the entire eastern seaboard of the US is under water) mean governments will not enforce sufficiently tough measures, or use tax revenue to bail out other countries. Developing countries such as China will not want to pay the ecological price tag for development when the West has not, and refuses to change its’ ways. We are already at the point where meta-national companies have larger GDPs than any but the top twenty Western countries.

However…

and yet….

We have the internet.

MySpace saves the world???

Big Ideas lost in a deluge of shit, read by a few net-heads who can't even be bothered to e-mail their local politician. We're all doomed.