Fantasy economics

When I was seventeen, I thought it about time that there was fantasy fiction for adults. And lo, now, the sci-fi and dystopias are out-published by fantasies of quests and personified ultimate evil and strange names. Meanwhile, real life is liable to copycat. What some first imagine, others are liable to do.

It's now about time for Fantasy Economics. For imagination to cast ahead of what is immediately practicable to what might be, like Jules Verne, throwing a line ahead, and seeing if it can be reeled in.

Humans are animals that can fear the future, because they have the imagination to do so beyond conditioned responses to stimuli that they have known before. They have also, the imagination to try to do something about it. That has been the evolutionary function of imagination, that put them to the head of the rest. Why then, in the face of so many predicted calamities, don't they?

Climate change, global warming, nuclear bombs, mutating viruses, world terrorism, monstrous droughts, floods, stock market crashes, secret governments, animal extinctions . . . People dare to think about many of these, for entertainment. Blockbuster films and horror thrillers and dystopic sci-fi rub them into conscious and unconscious minds.

Future fiction has encouraged imagination to think about ways of getting away from it all, in space-ships carrying the remnants of us to the farthest points of the universe, and scientists work on how to divert possible meteors before they hit us. In terms of national defence mechanisms, these could be labelled as projections, displacements and compartmentalisations. When it comes to facing the looming threats s realities in individual lives, the defence mechanisms are denial, suppression, repression, rationalisation, and splitting. Intellectuals make analyses and publish books – when these cannot arouse action, that can be labelled intellectualisation.

I would like to raise the question of why more imagination is not going in to what might be done about these looming crises and calamities, which we now know so much about. The secondary function of imagination in evolutionary terms has been as a way to teaching, a transfer of knowledge through stories, and a third function has been escape, to help make living in the present bearable. But the primary function has been imagination as a means of progress – "What if?' And so people moved out of trees, used fire, planted seeds, rode logs in rivers . . and always what was done was first imagined.

But down through the ages, the common man has more often had to bear with helplessness than had a chance to find a way out. People sat in cities, helplessly watching the enemies arrive that will destroy them, sat watching plagues spread, been forced to build castles with dungeons for the warlords that will use them imprison their protest. They have been unable to leave as pogroms drew the nets tighter.

Every day even the weather is a reminder that although man ascends into the heavens to see beyond galaxies, and manipulates the very makings of life with nanotechnology, gods we are not. Humans can imagine death, but their efforts to prevent it still fail.

And so often, the marvellous things that are achieved are almost immediately countered by their abuse – split the atom and make nuclear bombs, receive information from the uttermost parts of the earth – and soon most of it is spam. Heal, or dig wells, build dams, drain swamps – the next thing it only Seemed a Good Idea at the Time.

So now here we are, looking over cliffs in every direction and responding according to our own immediate self-interest, whether to deny, to escape, to devise stratagems to continue to accumulate wealth, or to think of doing something so small it will make no difference, or something so big that its failure will be another disaster.

The little green aliens who may land on our planet after it is dead may wonder why no intelligent life managed to prevent the catastrophes.

Consider the motor-car, space shuttle, bionic ear, in vitro fertilisation, cyberspace, cell-phones, skyscrapers and undergrounds. Consider all the inventions that were inconceivable when I was a child.

What then, is inconceivable now, that might be possible within a decade, or preferably less, given that we may have less time than that? Social inventions that take into account that we all suffer from Original Stupidity and the range of unsuitable defence mechanisms. Let us be as naive as Jules Verne – and look what happened to his ideas. Let's have eco-fi that considers just how the wonders of sci-fi and Quests are supported and produced.

In our busy world, we are all so busy writing and doing about other things, as the tsunami wave is going out to sea before it rolls back.

In schools, students study Revolutions, not reforms. Revolutions pull down with the aim of building anew – every builder prefers that to renovation. Jericho is built and rebuilt, city upon destroyed city. There are many plans for new economic systems that could be built when the old is wrecked. A clean slate. One type of ecofantasy.

But another type of ecofantasy is reforms, so that the old is not simply destroyed. Consider the goals, and set the vision of artists and thinkers to cast a path to reach them. What exciting TV series, and Mini-Ideas for radio!

Capitalism could be improved – it is only partly developed and still full of bugs. Its major problem is that it is like a bicycle that dare not stop – unsustainable growth has to be sustained – unless we change how capitalism works. "What is the use of saving the planet if the economy is wrecked?' asked NSW Premier Iemma. We could have an economy that does not get wrecked, that grows in quality not quantity.

Suppose the response to the risks of carbon emissions is not to set up carbon trading –to my mind a swiz, and a smokescreen pretending something is being done, so that emissions can continue on their merry way by those who can pay for it, as if planting trees can even make up for all the many more trees being simultaneously clear-felled, and as if their future nurture were guaranteed somehow.

Suppose instead, the production of waste is stopped. Half of all that is produced is wasted at some stage or other. Possibly half our carbon emissions goes to producing waste! And another ten percent on getting rid of it.

Cutting waste would of course drastically affect commerce, as people wasted less and bought less, and refused to buy built-in-obsolescence and unmendability and undurability and biscuits sent for trade across the world to compete with other biscuits.

And of course, the greatest waste is producing armaments and the increasingly horrible means for civilian destruction, and clearing up the destruction of thousands of years of civilisation.

The finance that now goes into producing waste could go into paying for jobs and producing products that are needed – (only work out how to pay.) If all the jobs needing to be done were being done, there would be no unemployment.

Suppose the concept of usury returned, so that only risk capital returned more than 5%. Suppose investors made money from investment, but not share-trading. That there was an end to the continual development of hedge funds and future-trading and money-trading and negative gearing and private equity companies and all those other ways that make financial dealing more profitable and exciting than actually using money as a means of exchange of goods and service and to finance the jobs and products that are needed.

Fantasise - if directors saw no profits for themselves if companies are taken over and asset-stripped and empty-shelled. If pirates could no longer make hostile take-overs of prosperous concerns, how much boardroom action could be directed into actually running companies rather than expending their major energies trying to expand by take-overs and mergers, or trying to expand in order to make themselves safe from takeovers, with themselves devouring as a way to avoid being devoured.

Professor N. Parkinson and the Peter Principle among others have noted the problem of size when human minds are not big enough to cope with it. The parallel of the need for child-scale in primary schools is human-scale for adult activity. Otherwise what is happening may be building ever higher inverted pyramids too easily unbalanced and toppled, and the bigger, the bigger the crash.

Fantasise a parallel eco-universe – it is publishable at least, even if not yet incarnated - in which CEO's bonuses depended upon the improved value of the company's service to the customers and the nation. Poor maintenance response? Customer complaints increase? Cut Telstra CEO's bonus to minus $1 million.

Salary and wage scales? In the parallel eco-universe, public opinion sets the base and the range. Supply and demand can set individual increases above the range - not the power of a set of individuals to reward themselves. A parallel committee made up of average-pay citizens sets out a parallel r set of scales for remunerating members of Parliament. Resigning unnecessarily before your term is up? Pay for the bye-election from your pension.

The basic defect of capitalism is greed, which insatiable and grows by being fed. CEO's incomes are the living model. The basic problem of socialism is laziness and common stupidity, which so easily wrecks socialist states and cooperative workshops. Some form of public enterprise would be preferable to public-private-partnerships, to make the most of both social justice and individual enterprise. A survey of history not only shows that aggression pays off, but also that all worthy achievements have required more cooperation than competition.

The fair reward that is not 'who can, takes'.

Rather than Medibank private being sold off so that there is no competition to limit the greed of private medical insurance companies, the principle of public-private competition can be extended – a state companies registry for buying and selling stocks and shares, a state real-estate register for buying and selling property, patronise them if you will.

Let us consider banking – or rather, since fantasyland is even more wondrous here than in fantasylawland – let us leave this to our next episode of fantasy-almost-fiction. But some hints – inflation is not countered by letting banks make millions by raising interest rates, and public saving is not punished because banks don't need it because they borrow cheaply abroad to increase the foreign debt,

Many words in economics are baskets with lids – and the lids should be off. What do you mean by 'growth', what do you mean by 'free trade'? A problem with a single enormous global economy is that one blow out can wreck the whole lot. Shudders in New York cause earthquake ripples. It is manipulated by those who can. What a shocking solution to African problems to seek to cut European farm subsidies so that Africans can export commodities in return for European value-added – thus leaving Africans deprived of self-sustainability even in agrarian land for their own food, and still the beggars to the industrialised world. Fair trade for the coming days would encourage all countries to be as self-sustainable as they can be, and trade to be for what they themselves cannot produce, with none forced to drop protection for good produced by sweated labor overseas.

But this arouses the obvious point - so many countries cannot sustain themselves, nor can they produce exports to pay for what they must import. The populations of the world are imbalanced in their locations. How can ten million refugees with camps often like permanent cities, dependent on food aid, ever be self-sustainable again?

Fantasy economics has to take facts into account, in building a world that is a haven to everyone. And one fact that is in denial is that the growth of human population is at the expense of everything else, including our own future. Even in the lands with the 'growth' complex that unless their populations keep growing, they will not be able to support the elderly as now they support the young, cities are taking over countrysides, rising values of real estate make the biggest fortunes, there are water shortages and social discontents.

While from the rest of the world, the economic refugees increase in number, and seek to stream across borders. Nice for employers wanting docile workers – but not the dream for fantasy economics. The greatest aid that developing countries can be given enables them to develop their own economies so that everyone can live in their own country at a decent standard of living.

In every country currently riven by civil disorders, populations are growing too fast , and the bigger they are, the less that slowing stabilises the actual numbers multiplying. Fantasy economics would expose the political, religious and commercial interests that drive population growth and that prevent women having the chance of being able to bear only the children they want.

You might think it wild-fantasy economics if the United Nations had a convention supporting the right of everyone to reproduce (that is, two per couple) backed up with ensuring the right of those children to have a chance of a healthy life.

At present world economies are at risk because the people of the United States are not consuming as much as is needed to make the wheels go round, they are not buying enough houses, despite population growth. How mad! That the biggest consumers, debt-ridden as they are, must continue to consume and waste more and take on more debt, or the world shakes.

Fantasy economics would prioritise the needs of the poorest people in the world who are to be the users (not consumers) that make the wheels go round.

Fantasy economics does not measure everything in dollars. Money is only a means of exchange. The measurement of quality of life could end up with sums in which the human population stabilised at five billion covered only half the land in its footprints, and the other half was shared with the rest of life – in jungles and rainforests, woodlands and bushland, savannahs, tundra, ice, and deserts that crept no longer.

Imagine. In my city of Melbourne, no longer condemned to a thousand more people every week, we might still be able to drink the finest tap water in the world, to have wildlife in our gardens, and place for children to play outside, and to enjoy close at hand, fine beaches and unique bushland and fertile farms.

A country like Tonga need not be dependant for 70% of its revenue on the expatriate funds from its children sent overseas, and so value continuing large families to make the problem even more incapable of solution. Solomon Islanders would not have to rely for funds on having their forests ripped out for timber, and in Kalimantan the jungles of the orang utang and the Dyaks would not have to give way to soil-doomed palm oil plantations and Javanese transmigration because the Indonesians must survive too. And in sub-Saharan Africa people would not need to turn the semi-arid into deserts by over-grazing and eat bushmeat.

When I worked in schools, one of my most popular projects was 'My Dream Island'. Ten-year-olds had readings about some other dream islands and a stack of books was left in classrooms – ranging from Narnia, Robinson Crusoeand Gulliverto Utopiaand Revelations, and then everyone designed their own – and we had everything from Lollyland and Criminal-land to visions and hopes that some of them still remembered ten years later. Adults today need wider possibilities for fantasies than our entertainment and our dystopias allow, and that can even exceed the parameters set by computer games like SimCity, stimulating as these can be to say to our minds, 'Hey, things can be different from what we have!'

Sometimes analysing in-depth what we have today is rather like stirring round chicken entrails to discern the future. Let's see where the live birds might fly to as well.