It's three years since the word collapsonomics popped into someone's mouth, half-way through a conversation, and none of us could ever quite remember who said it first.

Lately, it seems to be travelling further and further towards the mainstream - with Paul Graham Raven's profile of "the collapsonomics crowd" in the first issue of Arc magazine, a name-check in the opening of Paul Mason's 'Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere', and a mention of this blog in the cover story of the latest Big Issue. (At this rate, it can only be a matter of time before it makes an appearance in Hansard...)

If you want to dig deeper into the cultural and technical questions which converge in the study of "what still works, when systems we grew up taking for granted let us down", then Vinay Gupta and I are teaching a five-day residential course at Schumacher College in a few weeks' time (30 April - 4 May). 

Meanwhile, three years on from that first conversation, I find myself thinking about the roots of what became collapsonomics. It grew out of a friendship between people with very different skills, knowledge and experience. Others brought a knowledge of infrastructure and supply chains, the workings of finance and the wranglings of policymaking. What I valued was that they were willing to listen seriously to me, as someone fascinated by the social and the cultural, where ideas come from and how they spread.

The models of reality you acquire in the study of engineering and the study of English literature have little in common, and it's rare to find a situation in which the two come together in a sustained attempt to understand and learn from each other. If the ideas that came out of those conversations were rich enough to go on travelling well beyond the original group, perhaps it owes something to that unusual starting point.

And if I had to trace the roots that led me to that point, I'd draw a line back to two seemingly opposite fascinations - with the old and the new.

The strangeness of the past

From studying literature, history and anthropology, I came to see the sheer variety of different ways in which people had made life work and made life meaningful. And to realise that this was not reducible to a march of progress, in which all of those ways of living were simply crude prototypes for the way of living into which I happened to have been born.

Ivan Illich used to say that we could learn to see the present through looking into the mirror of the past: as our eyes adjust to the strangeness of how people have lived in other times and places, we become aware of our own strangeness. Our sense of inevitability loosens, and we discover that we can face the loss of things we grew up taking for granted, painful as it will sometimes be, without mistaking this for the end of the world.

So when I write or teach about collapsonomics, this is my starting point: an invitation to loosen our attachment to the way we happen to have been doing things lately around here. Without fooling ourselves that there was a golden age, we can learn to see the past as a rich source of examples of people making life work as best they can, and perhaps to find certain dropped threads that can be woven back into the story.

The mystery of the new

If my fascination with the past grew out of time spent with books, the other line that led me to collapsonomics was more practical: a fascination with the process of bringing new things into reality. Several times now - with School of Everything, Space Makers and Dark Mountain - I have been part of the journey by which an idea among friends becomes a practical project which captures people's imaginations and spreads far and wide.

There is something mysterious about this process, which is not captured by dry business-school speak about "innovation". What makes one idea catch fire, while another disappears unnoticed? How do you nurture a possibility and the people with whom you share it, while accepting the limits of your ability to control or predict the direction it will take? And how far can any of this help us, in the years ahead?

Just today, Vinay posted on Twitter, in a discussion of some of the stories coming out of Greece:

I think there is a *very* good chance of an explosion in social and technical innovation around #collapsonomics in the next year or so

I wouldn't suggest that the projects I've been involved in offer solutions for the converging crises which frame the territory of collapsonomics. A key distinction in collapsonomics thinking - one which we picked up from John Michael Greer's The Archdruid Report - is between "problems" which may be solved and "predicaments" with which we have to learn to live. 

But as we do our best to find a path through the troubled times around and ahead of us, I suspect there will be more hope in ideas which emerge from unlikely places - and spread in the way that a story or a joke can spread - than we'll find in grand plans and official agreements. So along with the strangeness of the old, the mystery of the new is another doorway through which I think we can approach the questions which collapsonomics has been asking.

Exploring together

This is the kind of ground I want to explore with people during the Schumacher course, as well as in the talks and the writing that I'll be focusing more of my time on following my move to Sweden. To balance out my focus on the social and cultural, we'll also be spending time working with Vinay's tools for simple critical infrastructure mapping and thinking about the relationship between infrastructure and politics.

Above all, this isn't intended to be a knowledge dump - you can get access to pretty much all our talks and writings online already. Rather, it's a chance to spend five days thinking together, with each of us bringing our own perspectives and experience, and I hope we'll all go away with our models of the world changed by what we've learned together.

If you'd like to join us at Schumacher but can't afford the fees, do contact the college, as they have told us they're keen to offer bursaries.

And if you want to follow these threads further, here are some starting points:

• Vinay's original post from 2009 on collapsonomics thinking for policymakers.
• Andrew Taggart's philosophical reflection on "collapsonomics" and how new ideas emerge in times of collapse.
• 'Black Elephants & Skull Jackets' - more on the origins of collapsonomics, and a dialogue I had with Vinay.

Full details of the course on the Schumacher College website.

History has been moving rather fast - and I've been trying to write a book, so haven't had much time for this blog. But I've got a number of public talks coming up, where I'll be exploring themes relating to Collapsonomics.

Here's news of a couple in the UK - one in London on May 11th and one in Birmingham on May 26th. (There are more coming soon in the Netherlands and Sweden - and if you'd like to book me to speak in your part of the world, please get in touch.)

'Making Ourselves Scarce'
Scarcity Exchanges, University of Westminster
May 11th, 6.30pm

I'll be speaking alongside Andrew Simms from the new economics foundation. It's part of the Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment project, led by Jeremy Till, which I recently joined as "thinker-out-of-residence". Andrew and I will both be giving talks, followed by an open discussion, so come and have your say. Places are free, but you do need to book.

Here's the abstract for my talk:

A significant factor in how well or badly we handle the disruptions we are living through will be how our understanding of scarcity continues to evolve. This applies to areas ranging from ground-level responses to economic decline, to the choices made by the environmental movement, to the adaptation of the "cultural industries" to technological change.

Economics has tended to define itself as the study of the choices we make under conditions of scarcity. From there, it proceeds to explore all aspects of our social existence as characterised by such conditions, while showing rather less curiosity about how these conditions arise. Two areas of interest emerge when these are considered more closely: the complex nature of scarcity, as a function of the interaction between hard material realities and softer social and cultural realities; and the inadequacy of the understanding of human desire implicit in mainstream economics.

The rise of networked technologies has brought some of this into question - in discussions of the "information economy" (where "information" is characterised as peculiarly non-scarce, in contrast to traditional economic goods), as well as more radical "post-scarcity" thinking which anticipates a future in which new technologies make the reproduction of material goods as simple as the reproduction of data. It is easy to get carried away in these directions - and, at the same time, their discourse frequently relies on unexamined assumptions inherited from conventional economics.

Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, Dean Bavington and Anthony McCann - as well as John Berger's explorations of "incommensurability" - we may find a more radical perspective, in which "scarcity" and "abundance" can be recognised as (among other things) attitudes, ways of looking at a situation. This is not to deny the force of material conditions, but it is to say that - most of the time - there is social and cultural room for manoeuvre. This room for manoeuvre may be of real practical importance in how good a job we make of navigating the crises which lie ahead of and around us.

'Redefining Innovation: How new stuff enters social reality'
Sir Adrian Cadbury theatre, Aston Business School
26th May, 5.30pm

For a long time, I've wanted to explore the parallels between modern innovation theories and esoteric models from Hinduism and Kaballah. I'm far from an expert on any of these complex fields of knowledge and practice, but - in my amateurish way - I have found setting them alongside each other highly illuminating. And now someone has been bold (or mad) enough to invite me to talk about this in a business school. (I promise this is not the beginning of a career as a New Age management guru...)

Again, this event is free, and I don't think you need to book - but I will post a link to the details on the university site when I get them. Meanwhile, here's the abstract:

Can we break open the jargon usage of "innovation" by comparing modern innovation theories to the ways in which other cultures have understood the processes by which "new stuff enters social reality"?

Everett Rogers' 'Diffusion of Innovation' curve has been one of the most influential descriptions of how new products and services reach mass adoption. By considering its history and use in comparison to models from Indian and Jewish philosophy, can we identify the most universal elements within Rogers model and also its more questionable assumptions?

Through these comparisons, the aim is to see "innovation" in business and technology within the wider context of political and social change, how ideas and beliefs spread through society, and how radical changes in the structure of our businesses and organisations could emerge in response to the crises and opportunities of the 21st century.

As usual, I'll do my best to ensure these talks are recorded and posted on the Internet Archive for those who can't be there in person.

A couple of weeks ago, I did an interview with Willi Paul for PlanetShifters magazine. We ranged around across all kinds of things, connecting the themes of Collapsonomics to my other work as part of Space Makers and Dark Mountain.

This passage touches on a subject I'll be returning to in a future post:

I think we’ve become used to metabolising money to a dangerous extent. We’ve lost the knack of getting things done without using either money or coercion - not entirely, not everywhere or in all corners of our lives, but compared to how people have tended to live in most times and places, we’ve become very rusty.

One of the things I’ve been exploring in my work with Space Makers is how we can reground our economic lives within a social and cultural whole, within custom and community, in the pockets where the mainstream economy is most visibly failing.

For now, you can read the rest of the interview here.

Since I started this blog last summer, it has been circling around a basic argument:

• something has gone wrong for the people in the middle of the richest societies in the world; 
• this pre-dated the current economic crisis, but is becoming more acute and visible as a result of it (and shows little sign of easing even when headline economic figures improve);
• what is happening to these people matters because their lives are supposed to be the evidence that the economic system works: the sufferings of the poor are easily accommodated within the story the system tells, whereas the gradual collapse of the rich world's middle classes threatens that story.

One of the subtleties in making this argument is that the collapse of a way of living is not simply an economic phenomenon. I wrote about this a while back, when I quoted Karl Polanyi:

a social calamity is primarily a cultural not an economic phenomenon that can be measured by income figures or population statistics

What we are dealing with is a complex, qualitative set of changes, which amount to something of great significance, but for which we will not find a single measure. When it comes to statistics, the best we can hope for is to find traces of the process.

The study of student emotional health reported in yesterday's New York Times is one such trace. Here's a chart of the data, from Stuart Staniford's post about the story:

One line stood out in the NYT piece. Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at South Oregon College, told the paper:

Students know their generation is likely to be less successful than their parents’, so they feel more pressure to succeed than in the past

I'm fascinated by this logic. I can see how it works - if there are to be fewer winners in this generation, the odds of being one of them are worse, and so the pressure for those intent on playing the game is greater.

But I can't help thinking that there is another way of framing the situation. If we are collectively going to be less successful, couldn't that also be grounds for taking the pressure off? Why not embrace the diminishing likelihood of what used to be called success, walk away from that particular game, and explore all the other possibilities for what we can do with our lives? After all, it sounds like we'll be in good company, so these other paths ought to be less lonely than they were a generation ago.

It's this alternative logic that I want to pursue as this blog continues. Not least, I'm looking for practical examples of people walking away from the game and making other possibilities work - so if you have suggestions, I'd like to hear them.

The broadcaster, academic and glamour puss Dr Charlotte Frost kindly invited me to contribute to a proposal for a panel at this September’s International Symposium on Electronic Art in Istanbul. The title is ‘Share workers: the techniques and meanings of sustainable digital networking,’ with a particular focus on how artists are using digital networks to find a way through economic downturn and drastic funding cuts.

I’ve spent so much time hanging out with artists over the years - and I think one reason is that they feel like the pioneers of collapsonomics, improvising these precarious, meaning-fuelled ways of living. Bruce Sterling said something related in his 2009 “State of the World” thread at The WELL:

I'm a bohemian type, so I could scarcely be bothered to do anything "financially sound" in my entire adult life.  Last year was the first year when I've felt genuinely sorry for responsible, well-to-do people. Suddenly they've got the precariousness of creatives, of the underclass, without that gleeful experience of decades spent living-it-up.

Let’s not get romantic - I don’t have any data on life expectancy for artists, but Nick Stewart was talking at this week’s Dark Mountain meetup about having seen some of his contemporaries die as a result, directly or indirectly, of the paths they took in order to pursue their art.

At the same time, when I went to a few of the Making A Living events that Sophie Hope organised in 2009-10, I found myself baulking at those artists who thought they should be organising to demand the same level of pay as other professionals with postgraduate qualifications. (Is art really a “profession”, anyway?)

Sterling seems closer to the truth - that artists have things to teach the rest of us about how we make a good job of getting poorer. Because, if events continue to unfold in roughly the direction we’ve been talking about, this is the challenge for the years ahead - to slough off much to which we’ve grown accustomed and learn cheap and meaningful ways of living.

Hopefully our panel will get picked - although I’ve no idea right now how I would fund a trip to Istanbul. Anyway, here’s what I propose to talk about:

"Think what you’d do if only you had the money, then figure out how you can do it anyway.”

That was the motto of the UK email ‘zine Pick Me Up which ran from 2004-6. As editors, we stumbled into using the internet to organise things in the real world, substituting imagination for money.

In 2006, five of us went on to found the web startup School of Everything. I spent the next three years around angel investors, venture capitalists and people who wanted to be dot com millionaires, discovering how ramshackle that corner of global capitalism actually is.

Since 2009, with Space Makers, I’ve worked to address situations in which conventional economic systems are failing, by using social technologies to mobilise collective effort and re-embed local economic activity within a larger social and cultural whole. Our projects look like pockets of unconventional economic regeneration, but they are also testing grounds for an approach intended to be applied on a larger scale as recognition of the depth of the global economic crisis deepens.

If I’ve learned one thing in these years, it’s this: the internet isn't here to help us get rich, it's here to help us get poorer in less painful ways.

If you’d like to invite me to talk about this kind of thing, please get in touch.

After the original flurry of posts on this blog, I've been busy elsewhere for the past few months - but I predict that 2011 will be a year in which the questions we've discussed here will come increasingly to the front of political debate in the UK.

As if to prove this, the housing minister Grant Shapps is quoted in today's Observer declaring that the era of booming house prices is over for good:

I think it is horrendous that a first-time buyer would need to be 36 on average if they do not have the support of mum and dad... The main thing everyone requires for their subsistence is a roof over their head and when that basic human need becomes too expensive for average citizens to afford, something is out of kilter.

I think the answer is house-price stability. We had this crazy period from 1997 to 2007 when house prices almost tripled, which is fine if you have a house.

Shapps goes on to "give the example of a 'rational' market, where property prices rose by 2%, while earnings increased by 4% - meaning a real terms drop over time."

The trouble with this is it brings us back to a question I asked last August - and to which I'm still waiting for an answer. In a rational market, anything which goes from being an inflation-beating investment vehicle to long-term underperformance is going to be substantially priced down. So, how much can we expect to wipe off today's house prices to get to a level which reflects the use value of housing, minus the casino value of the house-as-investment-vehicle?

I'm not imagining that anyone can put a precise number on this, but I would like to hear some serious economists either explain why I'm wrong, or give a rough estimate of how much home-owners stand to lose.

The usual caveat here: this is not about having pity for those who profited from the boom, it's about having realistic models of how things are likely to unfold. In fact, the Shapps story seems indicative of how far British politics has managed to digest "collapsonomics": the situations I've been writing about are increasingly acknowledged, but we're not yet at a point where our leaders can acknowledge the extent of the difficulties which they imply. The events of 2011 may well give them a shove in that direction.

I've visited Ireland regularly over the last few years, most recently in September when I rode shotgun on Vinay Gupta's Through The Looking Glass speaking tour of Dublin, Cork and Kilkenny.

What struck me more clearly from that trip - and the many conversations about the Irish crisis which took place over those two weeks - was the peculiar quality of Irish politics. Between us, we came to a conclusion which seems particularly relevant to the events unfolding right now:

Irish politics is unlike that of any other country in Europe, because it is rooted in the practice of sabotage.

This is not meant rudely. For centuries, under English colonialism, sabotage was the smart tactic: to undermine the state was to undermine the English, and so to further the cause of the Irish.

The rulers have changed, but old habits die hard, and so it seems - to this humble English observer - that sabotage remains deep in the DNA of Irish politics.

The significance of this is that the fate of the Euro appears to hinge right now on Irish politics.

If the drama currently playing out were taking place at Westminster, you could assume that everything would be resolved quickly to the satisfaction of the EU and the IMF. This is not because our country is more rational, but because its political culture is rooted in habits of order. (This can be a weakness as much as a strength.)

Irish politics has different roots and different habits, and these add a great unpredictability to what happens next - as well as a certain Flann O'Brien flavour.

As the Irishman said to the IMF official who asked for directions, "Ah, now, if I was you, I wouldn't be starting from here."

A year or so ago, I was sitting in the cocktail bar of Brown's on Albemarle Street, whose menu informs the drinker that it was in this very hotel that FDR spent his honeymoon and Winston Churchill regularly took lunch. They still serve a potent Churchill martini - the gin shaken and strained, garnished with an olive, the vermouth only glanced at across the room - and it was over several of these that we had convened, myself and two fellow founders of the Institute for Collapsonomics, the maverick disaster specialist Vinay Gupta and our banker-about-town, Kalam Ali.

On the evening in question, Gupta had been outlining vivid scenarios for the possible collapse of the United States, its currency or both.

"That's very convincing," I said, "but I'm more worried about the Euro."

I wish I had gone home that night and written up what I said next, because in those days you didn't wake up to hear William Hague speculating about the currency's survival on the Today programme, or witness Will Hutton, Irwin Stelzer and Gillian Tett gathered around the Newsnight cauldron, seeing ill auguries of its future.

For what it's worth though - and granted that I am a layman, most likely stating the obvious - here is the argument I made. (As always, I'm more interested in working out what may be wrong with it than in being right, much as being right is fun...)

The short version

Any area with a single currency system needs either political support for significant economic redistribution, or sufficient cultural homogeneity for a very free movement of labour. Without at least one of these, the strains between stronger and weaker geographical regions will eventually break the system.

The long version

It begins with a place called Argentiera: a silver-mining town, as the name hints, in the northwest corner of Sardinia. Within living memory, it was a town of 5000 households. By the time I visited, there were 50 at most and one cafe open, the rest a ghost town, and more haunting because it did not feel like something from another era, its abandoned buildings no older than those of the surrounding towns.

What happened was that the mine closed, in 1963, and the people left.

At that time, I had been working for several years as a news reporter in South Yorkshire, so I thought I knew something about ex-mining towns. In Argentiera, though, I saw a different pattern to the one with which I was familiar. Here were two quite different ways in which a local industrial collapse could play out.

People don't generally live somewhere for the view: a place becomes populous because it has an economic rationale. (Dinnington, South Yorkshire, a town I sometimes reported from, grew in population from 250 to 5000 following the sinking of Dinnington Main Colliery in 1905.)

Sometimes, that reason for being there weakens, or disappears altogether. What happens next tends to follow one of two patterns: either you see a movement of labour from that place to other places, where (hopefully) work is available, or you see an effort to pump money from other places - where the economy is doing better - into the weakened place. (This may be used as capital to build a new economic rationale, or else as a long-term subsidy to support a larger population than the remaining local economy would otherwise support.)

Where the place in question is a country with its own currency, there may be other options: if the value of the currency falls against those of other countries, its goods will be cheaper in foreign markets and this can boost its industries. Or the country may tighten its borders against imports and try to generate more activity by localising production. (I am not arguing that this is a good idea, only that it is an option.)

For any area with a common currency, however, the geographical strains produced by the strengthening of some places and the weakening of others will tend to be addressed through either migration or redistribution.

Here in the UK, even the places worst hit by the collapse of the heavy industries in the late 20th century did not become ghost towns. We have seen more and less successful attempts at regeneration - that is, the creation of a new economic rationale for a place - and, more fundamentally, a significant proportion of the population in the affected areas have spent a generation living on welfare benefits. (During the Thatcher era, the number of people in receipt of benefits for long-term sickness doubled nationally, and trebled in the areas worst affected by pit closures.)

In the US, where the safety net of welfare benefits is alarmingly thin, migration plays a greater part - indeed, the astonishing history of migration which has defined the United States is surely at the root of its political resistance to redistribution. (As further evidence for this, the New Deal - the great redistributive moment of American political history - was used as a lever to require the unruly hobo population, the highly mobile reserve army of labour of late 19th and early 20th century US capitalism, to settle down. Early plans for New Deal benefits were amended to exclude single men, specifically for this purpose.) The migrant habit, or the impossibility of doing anything else, remains a shaping force in the economic geography of the US: Detroit has lost half its population since the 1950s.

What is wrong with the Euro is that neither of these modes of "stress mitigation" operate to a sufficient degree to make it sustainable.

In the first case, the EU does not have the political legitimacy for the kind of redistribution it would take to assure the Eurozone's long-term stability. We have begun to see this, with the German electorate far from keen to subsidise the early retirement of the Greeks.

At the same time, the cultural and linguistic boundaries and the rooted cultures of Europe mean there is no comparison to the ease with which Americans will swap coasts or YouHaul their lives across six states. Of course, migration within the EU is a reality - particularly for the eastern European accession states, where it has offered opportunities for a grassroots form of redistribution - but it tends to create a degree of friction quite different from the default fluidity of a continent whose immigrant origins are never far from the surface.

For these reasons, I suggest that if the Euro is not broken on the floors of the bond markets, it - and the political project which it represents - is likely to break more slowly, in the politics of the member states in the years ahead. And, while I have no great fondness for the City, the second scenario sounds even uglier than the first.

It's been a while since I last posted here, but I do plan on returning to our conversations soon. In the mean time, here are a couple of videos of recent talks which touch on the Collapsonomics theme.

Thinking about Money was a talk I gave in Dublin in September, as a warm-up for Vinay Gupta's Through the Looking Glass. The audience were mostly drawn from the Transition movement and the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. They had been traumatised by a recent visit from Stoneleigh, so this is our attempt to offer some broader and longer ways of thinking about economic crisis - and, in Vinay's case, practical models for the role of Transition and other groups in a sudden crisis. My talk is a brief introduction to some ideas about how the monetization of more and more areas of our life becomes counterproductive.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the market is what happened when I was invited to speak to the London conference of trends agency PSFK. It's a light tour through my journey from squatted social centre, to internet startup, to empty shops projects. The theme is the difference between the marketplace as a social institution and the market as a pervasive ideology. (I think I may have been too soft on them at the end, though.)

There are also a couple of new posts this week on my personal blog: a recording of the talk I gave at last month's Landscape/Mindscape Dark Mountain weekend and a poem I wrote in 1996.