It took me a couple of tube journeys to read Peter Lunenfeld's The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the computer as a culture machine. If I were being unkind, I'd say this speed of reading was due to the absence of much analysis to chew on and to the rather breathless writing style. Professor Lunenfeld teaches in the Design Media Arts Department at UCLA and although he writes infinitely better than most academic sociologists/critical studies folks, he doesn't entirely avoid their stylistic tics.

However, I'm being kind. The book is a short provocation arguing that unlike previous media technologies, the computer/internet technologies enable us to cease being passive consumers and become instead active, mindful producers of creative content. As well as 'downloading' (sitting on the couch with the remote) was can 'upload' (film videos, write blogs….). Instead of all our entertainment being professionally generated, we could enter a mode of 'unfinish' in the media, and complete the job of creation for ourselves.

There are also some good stories and telling points. Indeed, Prof Lunenfeld devotes a whole chapter to a theme that's been preoccupying me (a big theme in The Economics of Enough), the absence of any faith in the future. Whatever one thinks about modernism and the many negative as well as positive turns history took in the 20th century, there was a surfeit of possible futures.

“In the 20th century, though, we seem to suffer from a vision deficit, an inability to imagine a future or futures that we would actually like to live in. What is needed is something to quicken the heart about the future, something to invest us with hope, excitement, vision and will. In other words, where are out jetpacks?”

Edgelands: Journeys into Britain's True Wilderness by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts is a delight. It's a worthy successor to Richard Mabey's The Unofficial Countryside, recently republished, a guide to the unexpected wildness found in and around London in the gaps in development, construction sites, allotments, riverbanks. It also reminded me a bit of Remains of Elmet by Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin.

Roberts and Farley grew up near Bolton in Lancashire, not far from my own childhood in either space or time, and they evoke marvellously the freedom children in that time and place had to wander around the countryside that lapped up and into the edges of northern mill towns. But they roam widely through modern borderlands throughout the country – around office and retail parks, under motorway flyovers, through derelict factories, along the side of major roads. They have an acute eye for the vigour of nature in these man-made landscapes, and for the kinds of low-status and semi-outlaw activity that any edgeland anywhere will accommodate. So there's social analysis as well as nature writing here. The book is beautifully written, as well.

It sent me to look at the report Kate Barker wrote for the last government on the madness of the UK planning system. This makes it almost impossible for new homes and commercial buildings to be built where people want to live and work. One result is that the price of land with planning permission is many multiples of the price of any other land (Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber did the background research on this for Kate's review). In England and Wales excluding London at the time of the review, land with no planning permission was valued at £10,000 per hectare, land with permission for business use at £779,000 per hectare, and with permission for residential development £2.6m per hectare. Of the 15 most expensive locations in the world for commercial space, five are in England. Rents in Manchester and Leeds are similar to midtown Manhattan.

A second result is that only a small fraction of the land in England has been developed. In every region outside London only 10-15% of the total land area has been developed, the rest being either water or 'greenspace' – albeit much of it edgelands rather than 'true' countryside. Is it worth the price? My inner child and inner free market economist might just be at odds over this one.

As trailed here a few days ago, I sent off for a copy of Harold Nicolson's Diaries and Letters (inspired by the library at Sissinghurst Castle), and started reading them today. After a disappointing 3rd class degree at Oxford, Nicolson worked hard to succeed in the competitive entry into the Foreign Office and became a diplomat. His duties at the Versailles peace conference features early in the diaries, and Nicolson shares the views Keynes put forward so eloquently in his Economic Consequences of the Peace. Nicolson says in a letter to his father about the terms imposed on Germany:

“Now that we see them as a whole we realise that they are much too stiff. They are not stern merely, but actually punitive. …. There is not a single person among the younger people here who is not unhappy and disappointed at the terms.”

This set me thinking about the truths that 'everybody' sees but international agreements seem unable to acknowledge. The field of international debt is littered with these. Every economist I know is clear that the people of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Iceland cannot possibly repay their debts to the global banking industry. For example, Morgan Kelly in the Irish Times points out that in theory the debt burden on each Irish worker is €120,000; with the real interest rate in excess of the economy's growth rate, that notional figure will be going up. German taxpayers feel disgruntled because they think they are bailing out Greek taxpayers; but what they are in fact doing – Greeks and Germans alike – is bailing out the banks that extended unrepayable loans in the first place. Yet the international negotiations are unable to face reality.

The same clash between reality and debt realpolitik was evident in the 1990s when it came to the Highly Indebted Poor Countries and the Jubilee 2000 campaign to win them debt relief. It was obvious that at least some of the countries concerned would never grow their export revenues fast enough to escape the debt and interest burden. But it took years of campaigning (and the determination of Ann Pettifor) to win adequate debt relief from the World Bank and IMF.

There's no better text on the inevitability of default on unbearable debts than Carmen Reinhardt and Ken Rogoff's This Time is Different. Punitive debt repayment terms never do better than achieving an unacknowledged default and sometimes have far, far worse results.

This is the first time I've reviewed a book by a druid, although it wears its robes lightly. The book is The Ecotechnic Future by John Michael Greer. It takes its place in a genre that is small (in the context of the economics literature) but perhaps growing – namely the crossover between thermodynamics and economics. The founding title is Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), which I found almost impossible to understand when I tried it a few years ago. There is a novel called The Burning by Thomas Legendre, which – like so many novels of ideas – is compellingly awful as fiction and mildly interesting for the ideas. And, coincidentally, a new title has just reached me, Thermoeconomics: A Thermodynamic Approach to Economics by John Bryant. (It needs more physics than I can muster, so anyone who'd like to read and review it please let me know.)

The starting point of The Ecotechnic Future is that we are at or past peak oil, a fact that makes painfully apparent the dependence of human society on fossil fuels. Greer compares humans to weeds, a species that triumphantly colonises an entire ecosystem by consuming all its resources. Sustainability requires us to shift to a different ecological strategy, more like hardwood trees than weeds, using resources far more efficiently but limiting our expansion as a species. He's rather cheerfully pessimistic about the prospects for attaining this state, predicting that we are likely to go through a long phase of eking out the use of fossil fuels, and then a further stage of salvaging what we can from industrial civilisation in a kind of post-oil Dark Ages, before reaching a new ecotechnic basis for society. On the way, we will see depopulation, mass waves of migration and the collapse of existing cultural and political orders. He sees the start of this 'culture death' already in the demise of traditional cultures and the pervasiveness of advertising-driven mass consumption and celebrity obsession.

What we need to do to navigate this impending collapse is return to a homesteading lifestyle, Greer argues. It was at this point that he lost my goodwill, after an interesting analysis of trends and plausible social strains in the first half of the book. The second half of the book is yet another expression of the profoundly unrealistic romantic yearning for an Arcadian past. Grow-your-own meals is not a practical basis for a transition to an energy-efficient economy when more than half the world lives at high density in cities and productivity levels in food production need to increase, and when the real gains in human welfare have indeed come from urbanisation and the possibilities for exchange that go along with it. Without pragmatism, nothing will happen.

So I was disappointed by the book as I read on. It's quite a good read. Greer has some nice turns of phrase – I like the idea of money as a “mass hallucination” for example. But there's still a gap in the literature for someone to bring the sensibility of economics to the realities of thermodynamics. The most interesting areas of economics have always been those at the borders with other disciplines – I firmly believe economics needs to be at least consistent with and preferably linked to the natural sciences. As it was when David Hume began to think about it in the 18th century, economics is the projection of scientific discovery onto human society, whether that's ecology (as is now in fashion), cognitive science (ditto) or physics – because we are part of the natural world and anything we do is subject to its laws.

To start with, a confession: I downloaded Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation weeks ago and haven't yet read it, probably due to my psychological resistance to non-physical books. Maybe I should print it out, if the Kindle software permits that.

Anyway, the longer I leave it, the more thoughtful comments on it come my way. The latest (thanks to a pointer from @nevali) are from the blog of Timothy B Lee, who expresses in a most clear and articulate way my own gut response to what I had already heard of the book's argument, namely that Cowen seemed to be taking an implausibly narrow definition of the new technologies and their effects. There are two posts, well worth reading, here and here. These quotes sum up the argument:

Reading The Great Stagnation, one gets the impression that
someone making $50,000 in 2010 lived about as well as someone making
$50,000 in 1990 (in real dollars as computed by the BLS) except that the
guy in 2010 had more fun when he turned on his PC.
…
The low-hanging fruit of our generation is not just “the Internet,”
but software powered by Moore’s Law.
Moore’s Law made the modern Internet possible, but it also gave birth to
the personal computer, various consumer electronics devices like iPods
and smart phones, electronic financial networks, medical breakthroughs
(e.g. medical imaging, computational genomics), and a vast array of
embedded systems (computerized fuel injection in cars, airplanes with
auto-pilot, industrial robots).
Looking at this list, it’s obvious that software innovation is not
necessarily (in Cowen’s words) “interior to the human mind rather than
set on a factory floor.”

All the more relevant on the day Intel announced its next step forward in microchip design.

I'm also very pleased to have discovered this blog, Bottom Up, which looks a great addition to the bookmarks. So thanks Mo!