Yesterday I attended the Long Finance conference, taking some of the principles of the Long Now foundation and trying to apply it to capitalism and market economics. There were two panels, the first on the Long Now & long-term thinking with Stewart Brand, Brian Eno and Alexander Rose, and the second on enduring value and the eternal coin, with Edward Bonham Carter, Professor Sir Roderick Floud, and Bernard Lietaer. In between were a few other short presentations, and, errr, surprisingly successful attempts to get bankers singing.
Very very rough notes, with little attribution – the density of different thoughts, questions and ideas was quite something, especially when I’m not completely au fait with all the economic theory. E&OE.
Long finance – trying to answer the question “when will we know our finance system is working?”
There’s been a systemic failure in the current system.
How could finance look forward even one lifetime?
The recent crunch involved just 15 banks, 4 brokers, 3 credit rating agencies, and controlled a third of all money (200 trillion) – and the solution has been more consolidation – not a good market.
When can you recommend a financial retirement structure to a 20 year old?
Move from responsive to anticipatory governance.
Eternal coin – could a coin exist that doesn’t lose value?
Panel 1: Long Now
Brian Eno: the scale of things makes a difference to how it operates – Aristotle
Societies that thought in terms of weeks and months work differently to those who think in years and decades.
New York in the 70s – everyone was there just for a short period. Used the city as a springboard to somewhere else. Caused the city to stop functioning. A short now – exciting city but not functioning or smooth running.
Looking for long now societies.
Alex Rose: Making a clock that runs for 10,000 years.
Danny Hillis – wanted to make a monument scale clock.
Physical objects have an ability to change conversations.
5 design principles for the clock – but they are pretty good to measure anything against them.
solar time vs. absolute time – a problem for a 10,000 year clock
Purchased the site for the clock: Mount Washington in Nevada. Dark sky site, 5 hours drive to anywhere. Also home to some of the oldest living organisms.
Currently building machines to build the base.
Stair cutting machine – 9ft blade 32ft reach robotic chainsaw.
What foot pitch should the staircase have for 10,000 years time?
Rosetta Project – collect all the languages and transcribe them in stone.
1500 languages, 13000 pages microetched onto a tablet.
Why bother?
Maeslant Barrier in Holland. Designed for a 1 in 10,000 year event. Costs €600m.
Hurricane Katrina – a once in a century event – cost €10 billion.
100x leverage for thinking in these longer timescales.
Stewart Brand: Heinlein – Time For The Stars, 1956.
A Long Range Foundation – only spends money on something so big or so long a return that no government or organisation would touch – such as space travel, seems a good pit to pour money into. Keeps on making so much money, has to keep spending and investing more.
Puzzled by the economics of infrastructure. No good economic theory. Always – financial excuses are made, initial investors lose money, gets bought and re-bought. Normally the 3rd owner makes money. BUT – we keep on making them.
Bridges – make London possible. But the river is infrastructure too, and can be maintained in a similar way to built infrastructure.
Now got to scale up infrastructure management to the whole damn planet.
We need people to be comfortable thinking in long terms, and long finance to do this with.
Q: why 10,000 years? Not 50-100 years?
Peter Schwartz – Long View book. Towns started 10,000 years ago as the ice retreated. Always good to imagine being in the middle of things.
Can we think about the last 10,000 years in the same way as thinking about the last week?
Q: Does this relate to the average person in the street?
BE: Physicality, not just a thought experiment. Something to visit.
Building it lets us think of all the design problems. Even 1,000 years is further than anyone thinks.
Q: Our culture is increasingly faster and disposable, why look at the opposite?
Danny Hillis – built the fastest computer. Aware that horizons are getting closer and closer.
New College, Oxford – in 1860s the beams started to decay and started looking around for suitable wood to replace them. The woodsman at the College had planted trees 500 years ago when originally constructed for just this purpose.
As a person, we’ve never been more powerful, and less responsible.
Q: are people planning in decades less democratic?
AR: If a monarch, knowing you’ll have to run the country, you think longer term. There’s remarkable consistency in monarchy.
Democracy and finance work well in the growth phase.
Germany – was thinking (may have?) altered constitution to protect future rights of future generations.
Q: Generational equity?
SB: Problem of discounting the future. How do you finance a forest? 70 years investment for not much return.
Externalities etc. – not solved financing the future, long-term democracy.
BE: look at religions – remarkably long survival. Other rewards than monetary.
Q: Can this be achieved through the free market?
BE: No such thing as a free market – there’s always restrictions. A free market would be utterly chaotic. It’s a spectrum from total control to total freedom. Where do you want to be?
SB: Land as sustained value. Cities have lasted even longer than religions. Cities have longevity and adaptability.
Want to see an economic theory of infrastructure, an economic theory of the informal economy, and an economic theory of real estate that reflects history.
Q: Copenhagen?
Countries don’t play ball.
192 countries with veto power. Set up for failure.
Have to make things “more expensive” – especially coal. Need to look at game theory.
Q: Some countries don’t even see the benefits of trade. Stronger international regulation?
SB: Geoengineering – the engineering is easy. Hardest is political problem. $300b to regulate the climate – nothing. And some countries may just do that – China? Need international regulations to work out the norms. Global governance.
BE: People are terrified of the idea of global governance. BUT we’ve been living with it for ages – e.g. the Universal Postal Union, set up in 1874. It’s a very sophisticated mechanism. Reciprocal agreements of 165 countries. International agreement for genetic labelling of mice – 59 countries.
Q: If an eternal clock had existed before industrialization what would have changed?
AR: There’s a thought that if we dig, we’ll find the clock already there. Neal Stephenson’s book Anathem.
SB: Want to make long-term thinking automatic and common.
BE: Images and metaphors last for very long periods.
****
Bernard Lietaer – the Terra mechanism
Using value discounting and positive interest automatically discounts the future.
Demurrage = time-related charge (the opposite of interest)
Need diversity – another currency for value in long-term.
Used in Dynastic Egypt – “Age of Cathedrals”
Terra – a standardised basket of a dozen key internationally traded commodities & services. e.g. oil, copper, wheat, gold, carbon emissions.
4x less volatility, inflation resistant, fully backed by inventory receipts.
Storage costs = 3.5% demurrage paid by bearer.
No central bank, just an accountant : Terra Alliance.
Would be countercyclical.
Terra makes countertrade/barter trade bankable.
Sustainable capitalism is an oxymoron. Needs something like this, need to realign shareholder interests with societies.
Regulation never works (lobbyocracy), and never been an example of preventative care of the economy.
****
Panel 2: enduring value
Edward Bonham Carter: reminds me of the marxist theory I studied at university. If changing systems, you have to reduce perceived short-term pain. Not capable of organising ourselves because of the short term. Need a system of incentives for change. As human beings, you react to the incentives you’re given.
Prof Flagg: Glad that history is being taken seriously. We’re all very bad at predicting the future. Gresham College – long term thinking to educate the city of London.
Q: are there benefits of volatility?
GDP down 6% in current slump – but still a lot more than when we were born. 300% more than 68 years ago. Now at 2005/6 levels. Is this really the end of the world?
UK Economy has had 1.8% growth for the last 150 years (with peaks and troughs).
World without crisis – less dynamic, creative.
Schumpter.
e.g. wars – when do the disturbing aspects outweigh the innovation and creation? Positive and negative aspects to most things.
Human nature – not a patriarchal society. Multiple currency environments. Programming another incentive scheme.
Q: isn’t one of the problems the definition of GDP?
PF: Has a perverse effect on happiness. Long term stability – reflected in other factors: height, longevity.
(argument about whether the tallest women were now or in the 12th century)
EBC: Ecological/sustainable investing – trying to find the right metrics.
Asset inflation – after a crunch. Always need more money the later you fix something.
Q: Incentives – systemic mis-allocation of money. Is the financial system working for society?
Has to be servant of its clients.
Worst system, but it’s the best we’ve come up with.
More intelligent use of privacy system. Use short-term thinking.
Dubious relation between monetary system and rate of growth.
Capitalism doesn’t think. It’s in the heads of many individuals.
Egypt: was long-term thinking for the benefit of a very small few.
12th Century: King’s currency, invalid when king dies, with 25% tax.
Q: the dollar?
Dominant currencies will change. New emerging markets. Disallocation and reallocation of resources.
Need to think in longer term. That’s what governments are for – recovery plans are long-term thinking.
But Gvts not good at long-term thinking that’s preventative. Should we meddle with the future?
Gvts can mitigate effects of economic exuberance.
Short-term democratic system. Most people vote on deferral of pain. Market failure is a discount mechanism in the long term.
Q: What eternal coins do people want?
Eternal coin of knowledge (universities are another structure that has lasted long-term)
Eternal coin of atoms. It’s where we end and where we came from.
Asylum, my Lyddle End 2050 building:
OMA’s interlace residential complex:
Tbilisi Roads Ministry Building:
(via Owen Hatherley)
Great LGS again tonight, looking at wine and coffee. We were also given a sample of a very interesting white wine (macerated, unusual for white wine) – it was yellow, cloudy, smelt of sweet apples, tasted herbal, slightly metallic. Also, two samples of coffee, one tasted quite traditional to me, but the second was mindblowing – smell of farmyards, just about turning perfumed/bergamot when drunk. Showed just how different coffee can be.
Definitely something worth unpicking about how context and knowledge changes perception – of taste, quality, and worth. Russell’s spoken before about pre-experience design (particularly with luxury goods), and there’s some interesting science going on in this domain. I’m also interested in how genetics play a part – much like modern pharmacology. The idea that a wine tasting is an interaction between taster and wine rather than a scientific report feels right, and an extension of a lot of thinking about experience design.
Rough notes:
Flavour of Wine – Jamie Goode
PhD in plant biology, science editor, started a blog about wine (wineanorak.com ).
Single species – vitis vinifera – 1000s of varieties.
Vines – freeloaders, grows up trees, when hits sunlight it grows a bunch a grapes.
Great vineyards – low vigour, enough water (reducing later in growing season), cooler temperature during final stages, low disease pressure (no harvest rain), low frost, hail risk.
Terroir – sense of place.
Burgundy is the test case. Wines from adjacent fields processed in the same way – 900 euro difference per bottle.
Choices:
when to pick? – when they are ripe, but when within that is an important stylistic choice.
de-stem? inoculate with yeast or use natural on the grape skins? immediate or delayed fermentation? (for red wine) maceration – how? in what? post-ferment maceration (using CO2)?
Extra pressings from the must – normally kept separately as different flavour.
Barrels?
Elevage – raising of the wine. Benefits from oxygen in very small doses (that barrels give, even if neutral in taste). Or use stainless steel. Or now, concrete eggs.
Wine tasting – think of it as an interaction between taster and wine – context, experience. The information around changes the perception.
Quite literally – stick ‘em in an MRI!
Sommeliers vs. novices – they use different parts of the brain when tasting wine.
There’s lots of higher-order processing in our senses.
Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness – study showing that knowing the price of the wine changes the perceived taste.
Things like interesting creative wine writing can change perception.
From Q&A:
Biodynamics?
Interesting but weird, for a scientist. Lots of the best wine growers have converted – and the wines get better/more interesting. Need to look more carefully at the parts of biodynamic preparation, work out how and what works.
Cork vs. screw caps?
There is a difference – 2 kinds of screw caps too. Tin+saranex and just saranex. Tin + saranex means very little oxygen transmission – conditions, develops differently.
*****
Flavour in Coffee – James Hoffman
Started in 2004. 2006 – won UK Barista Championship. THere were 2 coffees in the blend – one from El Salvador. Was invited over, went to see his 1st coffee farm.
Tried a ripe coffee cherry – sweet, tart, watermelon taste.
It gives context to how coffee is experienced.
Creation:
The moment you pick the cherry, creation stops. Cannot make it better – but you can obscure or degrade if not handled well.
Most coffee ripens red (some yellow, orange).
Not as advanced an industry as wine – but terroir – weather, soil, altitude – do make a difference.
Great coffee need altitude – slower grown, denser beans.
knowing it’s “from Brazil” means nothing – 2/3rds the size of Europe.
Volcanic soils, phosphorous in soil (Kenya) do give taste differences.
Many varieties of coffee. Combination of right variety in the right place with the right microclimate – coffee that sells for $130 a pound, rather than $1.
Yield. Lower yield gives better coffee.
Ripeness. Coffee doesn’t ripen uniformly. Up to 3 stages of fruit on the same branch (due to rain). Have to hand pick, many times – expensive.
Cup characteristics – sweetness, aromatics, acidity. From cherry, terroir, and processing.
Coffee beans grow inside a parchment casing, inside the mucilage, inside the skin.
3 main ways of processing/removing beans from fruit.
Natural/dry process – just laid out in the sun. Some will go bad. Can be positive in done carefully.
Pulped Natural Process – Pulped by machine, then dried using sunlight.
Washed process – most desirable due to less defects. Normal for single estate coffee.
Then the beans are hand sorted to remove any defects.
Roasting:
Roast depth. Initially smells of rice, then baked bread. Boils off all water before interesting flavours can occur. First crack – beans double in volume due to gas pressure, then crack to release.
Believes in roasting as transparently as possible, not to mask flavours.
Roasting removes acidity (no natural sweetness, sugars all react) but adds bitterness. Looking for point of balance.
Different roasting philosophies – Scandinavia: lighter, more acidic, West Coast: v.dark roast/charcoal/Starbucks. UK: no defined character. Italy: N Italy lighter than S Italy.
Extraction:
Most frustrating part. Most coffee sold is horrible – due to poor extraction.
Coffees have a recipe (amount/temperature/time).
How much do you use? Test the coffee, as dissolved in water – refractometer, TDS meter. 18-22% extraction – generally perceived as good. (average for Europeans, some differences per country, and chart was drawn in 1965 – currently being updated).
Strength – technically – ratio solubles to solvent.
+ personal preference
60g of coffee = 12g of coffee dissolved for right extraction.
Common mistakes:
If not enough dissolved – people use more coffee. But – then underextracted. Instead use hotter water, finer grind, longer steep length.
My quick fragmented notes from Stewart Brand talking at the RSA (who should be posting the audio/video on their site soon, and there’s another version of the talk viewable here):
Rethinking green.
Climate change changes everything.
He majored in ecology in the 1950s – when no-one was thinking about it.
“It’s all gardening”
Positive feedback and invisible thresholds in the environment.
MORE SCIENCE NEEDED – in data and in models.
Nature doesn’t kill you. People fighting for resources do.
There are some hidden negative feedbacks too, and we need to understand those.
e.g. E.hux algae.
Whole earth problems need whole earth solutions.
Predictable climate is a natural infrastructure.
City population: 3% in 1800, 14% in 1900, 61% by 2030.
1.3m new people a week in cities.
Moving away from subsistence agriculture -> land improves, cash crops.
Not cities as we imagine/live in – squatter cities – currently 1bn people. Another 1bn expected.
(see the video clip at 11:00 on fora.tv)
Creating own homes, jobs, infrastructure. Informal economy relates to the formal economy. The economics of collaboration.
Not people crushed by poverty – working hard to get out of poverty. They are green – that green as they’re that poor.
And we shouldn’t try to stop them getting out of poverty.
book – The Places We Live by Jonas Bendiksen
Next 30 years – new cities of young people in the global South, old cities of old people in the global North. Where will the action be?
*****
Baseload electricity – mainly coal and gas. Some hydro, some nuclear.
the choice now is – coal or nuclear.
CO2 waste is invisible and huge.
Wind – footprint issues. 1GW = 250 square miles of wind farms. + pylons and infrastructure. And only if it’s windy all the time (normally 20% of potential compared to nuclear 90% of potential)
1GW = 50 square miles of solar farms.
Chernobyl still haunts us.
But it’s now the biggest wildlife refuge. The problem there now is economic, not radiation.
One in 10 American homes gets energy from turning Russian nuclear warheads into electricity (Megatons to Megawatts)
Governments have an enormous role, in nuclear, in geoengineering, and in keeping coal expensive.
small, modular reactors – 35MW
2010- availability of Russian barge-mounted reactor, water cooled, for newly un-iced sea and shipping lanes.
Nuclear batteries – 10-50 MW.
Small, sealed, transportable, modular.
New fuels – thorium (better for India, as more prevalent there than uranium)
*****
Genetically engineered food
Biotech is the most powerful technology today.
book – Doubly Green Revolution by Gordon Conway
book – Tomorrow’s Table by Pamela Ronald
book – Mendel in the Kitchen by Nina Fedoroff
40% of crops lost to weeds or pests.
Tropical farming is different, needs these crops to work.
Also: enriched foods, biofortified.
book – Starved for Science by Robert Paarlberg
GE pig with extra omega-3 fatty acids – as good as fish.
GE rice with cholera vaccine.
*****
Geoengineering
Mitigation has no hope of succeeding.
Geoengineering is surprisingly cheap.
Free – Mount Pinatubo eruption – 20m tons SO2. Cooled planet by 0.5 degree.
1 Pinatubo a year = 3 degree long-term cooling.
But – acidified oceans.
30 blimp supported hoses, pumping out 3m tons of SO2 costs $300m a year.
John Latham – brightening ocean clouds – a huge yacht-like inkjet printer.
But these are just hobbies, with no Government funding or backing.
Biochar – sequestering carbon by pyrolising plant waste.
We are terraforming Earth anyway. Created the anthropocene.
We are gods and have to get good at it.
*****
various answers from Q&A
Devils’ advocate: do I stop recycling, if it will all be taken care of.
Practicing and taking part at a small scale. Ned to do large scale too, but it’s all hands on deck.
Why are environmentalists so suspicious of science and economics?
THere was a flip – green used to be a conservative issue.
Environmentalists need to move on from strictly leftist ideology. De-ideologise environmentalism. Pragmatism.
Where does innovation come from?
In California, you’re expected to create things and run things. Active intellectuals.
Engineering comes from permission – social, political, economic.
You can judge the quality and longevity of a civilisation by its soil.
40% of ice-free land is agriculture. GE means less pesticides, chemicals. Synthetic biology and open source will prevent monocultures and large agra controlling.
[2]
I wandered around London on Christmas Day morning, and my film has just been processed. A set on Flickr here.
Soho and the more officey areas were the emptiest, but even Oxford Street was quiet enough for committed joggers to run down the road.
Not completely empty though, and not completely closed – I managed to get an eggnog latte – but certainly a different feel to normal London life. Mainly bored Italian and Japanese tourists. Thankfully the Angus Steak House on Leicester Square looked like it was about to open, so they’d have somewhere to eat.
Pachube only made sense to me when I heard Adam and Usman discussing it last year. I’d been derailed by its use for energy monitoring – something interesting to yourself and possibly useful to yourself, but not interesting at a public level, unless aggregated with a significant take-up.
There are a few things I’d like to sense, track, record and analyse.
an 87 and a 77 lurk in the distance
The first is detecting the buses that pass by my front door so I know generally how long I’ll have to wait for the next one. A selfish act, yes, but one that has a useful public shadow when broadcast: magnified and multiplied when others record, share and analyse similar data too (of course, TfL could just offer up iBus feeds, but I’ll believe that when I scrape it).
Similarly, I’d like to track number of pedestrians and number of cars. Everything is time and place stamped, allowing analysis, filtering, and city sense making.
Next I’d like to wire up Nike+ to Pachube. Nike+ is a sensor that fits in your shoe that, basically, transmits constantly and publicly whenever you’re walking and running. I’ve got the Nike+ sensor talking to an Arduino, thanks to the SparkFun breakout board, but I’m limited in time and programming ability to go any further (also, any more info that a basic ID is locked up in readable but undecipherable chatter between iPod and Nike+ receiver). I’m interested in the semi-anonymous: personalised IDs detected in public that make no sense until you (as holder of the ID) plug it into the system and sees what in the network lights up or remembers.
Another leap in my understanding of the power of bottom-up sensor networks was the launch of the Pachube logger iPhone app. This lets you create and update data feeds manually from your iPhone. It lets you take the idea of Daytum, and plug it into a standardised data sharing system. Most importantly, each update is dripping in metadata; time and place.
This reminds me of Jones, Insam and Taylor’s herejustnow, which, with iPhone ubiquity and pachube now seems a lot more possible and usable than when originally conjured. It lets you say that you’ve just seen or heard something – most importantly time and date stamped. This creates maps, similar I guess to #uksnow, but for anything and everything.
I’m excited that it’s now possible to wire up a city nervous system without any government or authority, just mass enthusiasm and participation.
[1]
And if you want to pretend to be a cctv control room operator, you can try here. E&OE, contents may settle.
So, impending snowpocalypse. Even though the rest of Europe is feeling the pinch too, living in a properly cold country for a winter or two means that England’s snow problems seem laughable, baffling, and slightly depressing.
Given that we’ll all soon be able to be cctv operators, watching the watchful eyes at home feels like the recently possible future. Who needs Celebrity Big Brother?
Google may need a few more graphic designers.
Chrome’s marketing and mass-media advertising feels very… Microsoft.
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