What follows is a transcript of the Daniel’s presentation and the discussion, lightly edited to make it more readable and convey the sense of the speakers’ contributions. [These kinds of brackets denote added pieces of information for reference, explanation or words inferred by the speaker at the time].

Sean introduced Daniel, remarking on Bryan Appleyard’s Sunday Times review, which said the discussion was very important.

Daniel Ben-Ami: There are various elements to the book including a discussion of environmentalism and happiness, inequality and development; different debates. So absolutely feel free in the discussion to raise those things. But in my introduction I’ll focus more on the economic debate, particularly in relation to Britain, although I think a lot of what I say applies more generally. I want to focus particularly on the idea that the way the government is dealing with the economic crisis in Britain is unavoidable – to use George Osborne’s phrase. They are pursuing the only possible way to deal with Britain’s economic trouble; high deficit, recession, low growth. Only their approach which involves mainly spending cuts, to certain extent tax rises – that’s the only possible way to deal with it their view.

I want to argue first of all that that’s quite a peculiar argument, even from the perspective of conventional, orthodox economics. Then, of course, that begs the question of: “Well, if it is such a strange argument, then why has it got so much purchase? Why do people accept it? Why is it not being challenged?” That relates more to the material in the book about what I call growth scepticism, which is the pessimism and anxiety about economic growth which I argue is mainstream in society. It’s not just a question of a few hard-core greens that it’s quite possible to take the piss out of and laugh at, it is a much more pervasive mood in society which affects all the main parties; Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and across society – it’s a very influential mood that I want to talk about and is really the main subject of the book.

So just, very briefly, to outline the government’s view and then to say what’s wrong with it - people are probably very familiar with the government’s view, and that is: Britain has had a big financial crisis that led to an economic crisis and now Britain is building up a huge amount of debt. The only way to deal with that debt is to cut public spending and maybe to raise a bit more money through taxation. The balance of the austerity should be through spending cuts, but there has to be austerity, there has to be restriction on consumption – we have to face tough times ahead and that is completely inevitable, in their view. To the extent we should have a debate or engagement exercise as they prefer to call it, it should be about exactly what we should cut. Should it be parks, should it be schools, should it be libraries? Would it be better to have wage freezes or should we cut pensions? Is it more important to keep child benefits or pensions at a decent level? That’s the kind of debate but it all follows from the idea that the government’s approach is unavoidable.

Now what’s wrong with that? Even from a very simple economic model you can see what’s wrong with that, because it is true from a basic economic model that one way to deal with the crisis is to impose austerity, is to squeeze people’s living standards so that with the proceeds that you can get, you’re generating a certain amount of revenue and spending less and you can pay off the deficit and you can get out of economic crisis eventually after a few years. In the textbook model that would be one way to deal with it. Of course, there is another way to deal with it which is to work out a way to generate more economic growth. To work out how to restructure the economy so you can grow more, so incomes rise so you can pay off the debt and you can deal with the deficit that way and also benefit more generally from economic growth. What’s very peculiar about the current discussion is that almost all of the debate is about cuts and squeezing consumption and very little is about growth and boosting output. So even in those conventional economic terms it’s a very one-sided debate. It can be a bit misleading sometimes because politicians still pay lip-service to growth and if, for example you read the Financial Times or even The Guardian this week they’ll say there’s this great debate about austerity verses stimulus and how we should go forward. But it’s very limited, it’s very much about when should we turn the taps off in relation to economic stimulus – “should we turn the taps off now or wait for a year or two” – it’s really about timing. It’s not a debate about “is the best way forward to focus on squeezing consumption, and austerity, or is the best way forward to focus on boosting growth and having more prosperity?” That debate isn’t really happening in society. That is actually quite peculiar because, historically, growth has been seen as a good thing and there has been a debate about how to achieve growth and prosperity, but on the whole, the goal of prosperity has been seen as positive, both from left and right. They might disagree about the means, so you might have free-marketers saying “the way to achieve growth is through the market mechanism” and left-wing people would say “the way to achieve prosperity is through transformation of society”. So they disagree very strongly about the means but they would typically agree with the goal of prosperity. Now there’s very little debate about prosperity as a goal, at least in the conventional sense. I think the reason for this very much relates to the trend I call growth scepticism in the book. That is something that pre-dates the current economic downturn. You can trace it back to the 1970s, becoming mainstream then and becoming stronger and stronger since then. It has been strengthened by the economic crisis, certainly, but it wasn’t created by it. What that is, is not a blanket rejection of growth, it’s much more an ambivalence to growth, adding all sorts of caveats to the demand for growth. In fact, adding so many caveats it becomes virtually meaningless. One way this does this is through the notion of limits, so for example politicians will say “of course we’re in favour of growth but there are environmental limits and we’re running out of resources, we’re damaging the climate and that threatens humanity, the population is growing too fast for the environment to cope”. Environmental limits is one set, there are what you could call social limits that includes happiness. So they’ll say growth can’t make you happy, it might even make you miserable, you’ll suffer from affluenza. It also leads to inequality. [In response to audience chuckling] I did make a list of all the disease metaphors – there’s stuffitis, the shopocalypse – all sorts of bizarre terms are used to portray prosperity as kind of disease. Then there are the moral limits to growth – greed led to the economic downturn, of bankers and of ordinary people who consume all of these goods. Their greed caused the financial bubble, it burst, and that was to blame for the economic downturn.  So that’s one set of arguments used against growth and I haven’t time to go into all the counter-arguments now, they’re in the book.

Another set of arguments is to redefine prosperity. It no longer means what people normally meant by prosperity, it no longer means material wealth, it is much more about happiness, emotional well-being and how good you feel about yourself. Maybe your wages have been slashed but emotionally your well-being is positive. It redefines things in that way. There’s a best-selling book called Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson, who’s an official British government adviser, which is very much pushing this viewpoint. And there was the Sarkozy Commission from the French president with a lot of Nobel Prize winners on the board that was talking about redefining GDP, but was really putting forward this argument that prosperity shouldn’t be defined in terms of material things. I’d be here for days, probably, if I started putting forward all the counter-arguments. But first of all, these are quite formidable arguments against growth, anyone who tries to argue for growth or prosperity will come up against these kinds of arguments. To use just one example, the climate change example, as it is such a big and pervasive discussion, the ways it works in terms of the mainstream is that, if you argue for growth and prosperity, they’ll say: “No, you’ve got to be really careful about that because you’re using up all these resources, you’re promoting industry that emits greenhouse gases – methane and carbon dioxide – you’re damaging the planet” and the only way forward, in their view, is to restrain growth, to have less consumption. And the measures that they really emphasise in relation to climate change are lifestyle measures. It’s all about not keeping your TV on standby, not having your tap running when you’re brushing your teeth, using the car less to get to the shops – it’s all essentially about rationing. They don’t tend to use the word rationing they prefer to say mitigation or phrases like that, but what they really talking about are rationing and restraint as a way of dealing with climate change, what they see as this environmental limit. It almost becomes a new morality about this is the way you should behave, recycle and so on and if you don’t do that you’re a morally bad person.

I would accept that climate change is a problem but I would treat it as a practical problem not a moralistic one. The way to deal with it to the extent that it’s a problem is to have more growth and more prosperity because that gives you the resources to deal with the problem. You can invest, for example, in nuclear power stations that don’t emit greenhouse gases, you can invest in measures that help you adapt to climate change like higher sea walls -  I don’t know if Brighton’s threatened by rising sea levels but if you wanted to you could build a big sea wall if you were worried about rising sea levels. Maybe more high-tech solutions like sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere - I don’t know in practical terms what would be the best solution but the important point is not to say that we are constrained by environmental limits and they constrain what we do, but to say what we need to do is try to go forward to try to work out how to overcome these problems with more prosperity, more growth and more technology, rather than to say “oh my god there’s a problem let’s stop”.

In relation to the economy what that means is that we need to start having a discussion about how to promote economic growth, particularly how to start the productive side of the economy moving in a more positive kind of way. I don’t have a detailed programme but some measures I could suggest. For example, this banker-bashing is a complete diversion from dealing with the problem of economic growth. You can see why politicians might want to bash bankers because it’s a way of absolving themselves of any responsibility for the crisis, and I haven’t got time to talk about why I don’t think it is right to blame bankers for the crisis, not that they were saints but I don’t think it was caused by bankers. Certainly, getting obsessed with bankers and reregulating the banking sector, I don’t think helps regenerate the economy it the way is needed. I think there needs to be a reduction in regulation but I’m not so concerned about what’s called red tape and the number of regulations that you have, but more what I’d call green tape. What I mean by that is that you have all of these regulations that embody the idea of restraint, like the precautionary principle – better safe than sorry – which is part of European Union law and, as I understand it, embedded in British law, or the idea of sustainability. All of these things embed the idea that, whatever we’re going to do, if it’s to build an airport or a power station or whatever, we’ve got to go through these long consultation processes and we’ve got to be concerned not just about  relocating people but about the ostensible rights of birds and bacteria and whatever. If we’re trying to improve the physical infrastructure, for example, we’ve got to be so, so careful about the environmental damage that we might do that it becomes very, very difficult and expensive to start taking any positive measures forward. I think we should certainly have measures to improve the infrastructure. That would include roads, which I know are very unpopular in certain circles airports, IT infrastructure, all sorts of infrastructure.

Also there’s a group called Big Potatoes – we have an infiltrator here, sitting there, James Woudhuysen – which wants to encourage a more innovation and more positive, bold, outward-looking attitude towards economic growth. That’s very important, to encourage risk-taking, thinking big, innovation in all sorts of ways. I think they’re the kinds of ways forward that could really, really make a difference.

To sum up, I just don’t think that it is right to say that the government’s way forward is unavoidable, I think there are alternatives, that are not about when to turn off the stimulus but they are about promoting growth in the real economy, but to put forward that argument is quite difficult because there is this whole cultural notion that growth is problematic and that we should be anxious and nervous about growth and I think if we are to go forward we do need to start cutting through those arguments.
16.34

The discussion
Dan Travis: You alluded to the possibility of road-building as a stimulus for the British economy but there is also an absence of discussion about what the potential for restimulating growth would look like. One could look at the transport superstructure and energy. What do you think of, say, the pharmaceutical industry, food storage and production, what is your vision of what growth would look like?

Brendan: I think one of the big problems is that our government doesn’t understand industry at all and that this country industrialised such a long time ago that even the general population does not appreciate what a wonderful thing it is and what would happen if we lost it. There’s a lot of screaming hippies who think it would be great if we had no more roads and no more planes but people don’t realise how much we depend on it and how much we stand to lose if we cut back on this kind of infrastructure. You touched upon the inequality thing, a lot of people have a deep fear of inequality even though it’s inevitable with growth that you will get inequality. I think a lot of environmentalists have a sort of envy of wealth masquerading as a way of putting limits on the rich, basically, so they have one holiday a year to Tuscany or something like that but they don’t want the super-rich jetting off everywhere and equally they don’t want the poor taking easyJet flights everywhere. You get this kind of snobbery in all directions and a lot of it’s environmentalism in disguise.
Anil: In order to achieve some of these projects of a large scale, would they work better in a society where there was less inequality? Would a more equal society in terms of wealth distribution be a more efficient one? Would it necessarily be more efficient?

Daniel: I don’t have detailed programme in the book, a specific economic programme for Britain or any other country. Trying to cut through the growth sceptic culture is difficult enough and took several years but I hope other people will develop the more specific arguments. I singled out roads for a particular reason, not because I’m obsessed with roads particularly, but as far as I can see in relation to Britain’s transport policy it seems to be largely about penalising car drivers and also a real distaste for people who do fly easyJet or Ryanair to different parts of the world. There’s not a discussion that says “what we want to do is have a rational transport system, what would be the best way to do it, the best mixture of road, rail, air, all the other different methods”, it is a very moralistic discussion. “We don’t like car drivers, we must penalise them and we must put controls in city centres that makes it very difficult to drive around them. We don’t like these Ryanair people, these ordinary people flying everywhere”. Whereas my starting point would be: “How can we have a rational transport system and how can that help people move around?” Which is a good thing, and also “how can it help increase economic output?” which is also a good thing. So I don’t have detailed plan for transport or any other sector, but that would be my general approach to these questions.
In relation to industry I think that’s an important point. What I didn’t talk about, but there’s a chapter on it in my book, is why I think this growth sceptic mood has come to the fore. It’s a combination of different factors and one of those, I think, is the demise of industry in the west, at least as a proportion of the economy. It’s become much less important. You don’t need to go back to the industrial revolution, even if you compare Britain in the sixties and the seventies with Britain today as proportion of output, manufacturing is much, much less, I forget the exact statistics. Partly as a result of that you have a kind of estrangement from production, so most people don’t have much contact with production or understand industry and, partly because of this demise of industry, although there are other reasons for it as well, people tend to view the world from the perspective of consumption. When they talk about human beings, they just them as consumers.  So human beings are using up all these resources, they’re a drain on the planet and there are too many of them. They don’t see that human beings are also producers and they can create things and solve problems and they have ingenuity. I think the demise of industry is one part of that story. I wouldn’t say that it’s just a few hippies thinking that, it’s a completely mainstream way of looking at the world, from this perspective of consumption.

Inequality is a very big debate and there’s a lot to say about it. As I argue in the book, I don’t think it’s right to say inequality’s not a problem, but I really object to the argument that, while we have inequality, what we have to do is hold back, have restraints and less growth because there’s inequality. I argue that, to the extent we have inequality, and there’s a lot of it, what should try to do is to move forward and have more growth and more prosperity. Obviously, that doesn’t fully answer your question but perhaps we can come back to it in the discussion.
23.43

Steve: I agree with everything you say and we’ve got a sort of rampant Luddite mentality. As a child of the baby boom I expected to be living on the moon now. My question’s much more pragmatic; if you had this low growth economy, how would that operate in a world which essentially dominated by high-growth economy? How could that possibly operate?
James (the Big Potatoes “infiltrator”): Well, I don’t agree with everything Daniel said, even though he’s a great friend – unanimity is always a dangerous thing, I think. We could be a little harsher on our friend in green, only in the sense that a response would be: “Hey, we live in a service economy, so you’re out of date. You think manufacturing is the whole deal – it isn’t, for the reasons that Daniel said, so it’s no good going back to an industrial policy, you know, picking winners in the white heat of a technological revolution.” In sales, which I’m not in I’m pleased to say, you have to anticipate objections. So I would say that what we need for as a big Potato is a programme for innovation in the service sector as much as in manufacturing which, by the way, is only a part of industry. There’s extractive industries and agriculture quite separate from that. Service innovation: What would it mean? Better railway services, better energy services, a tourism system that, even without an Apple, told you where you were, what it was like 100 years ago and how to get out of there. Take retailing, the only big innovation in the last 50 years is cash back. Compare that with the department store. Actually, there’s some supply chain innovation that we don’t see a lot of. We can’t afford to be complacent about what needs doing in innovation and it is to do with restructuring and it is to do with manufacturing and also to do with services.

Brendan: Actually I agree with you. I wasn’t just talking about manufacturing. I’m a computer scientist –
James: We’ve all got our problems!

Brendan: - who owns a retail company, so I totally agree that the service sector is a valid sector. We have a very narrow focus at the moment on certain service industries like banking and financial services and we ignore the wide gamut of other industries, but I agree the service sector is a valid sector.
Sean: We seem to have compiled so far a sort of wish list of this really nice place where we’d like to live where all the trains run on time!

Rory: I just want to question whether the Conservative party are growth sceptics or whether they think that growth can be achieved through different means so they have to cut in order to make the government more viable to achieve more growth in the private sector.
Unidentified man: I would take up the issue of whether growth scepticism is as widespread as you say it is. I think the government has tried to increase growth, the corporation tax cut and other things. I don’t think it’s as sceptical as you say.
27.52

Daniel: I’m sure that if David Cameron was here, he would very strongly argue that he’s in favour of economic growth and prosperity. Growth scepticism is about this ambivalence towards growth. The growth sceptics are not the hippies saying “no growth”. I think if you look at the substance of what the government is doing, the Liberal [Democrat] - Conservative coalition agreement, for example, [there’s] a huge amount of public spending cuts, a huge amount on banking reform, a lot on the environment, very little about growth. To the extent that they do talk about growth it usually is in relation to maybe the stimulus or the tax reform, which is why I was talking about the real economy, not because I wanted to stigmatise services, as James was outrageously suggesting, but more because I was trying to say we’ve got to get to the fundamental guts of the economy – not just manufacturing, I accept that it is broader than that – you got to get to the guts of the economy to restructure it, rather than have a few tax reforms here, a little stimulus there. But also I would say the Conservative party, or in America the Republicans, they accept all these notions like sustainability which embodies the notion of limits or the precautionary principle; all of these ideas have been taken on board by the Conservatives. Of course, you will get some Conservatives, especially free marketers, who will say they’re pro-growth, but to me they’re very much more ambivalent about it than might be suggested by their headline arguments.

On high growth and low growth, that is a real question in the sense that it is something that is happening in the world today. Large parts of the developing world at the moment do have rapid growth, in China for example, also India and other places, and across most of the western world you do have pretty slow growth. I’m glad that the third world is growing quite fast but I think that is problematic. If you have a prolonged period of really slow growth in the west, because I think growth and lack of innovation and scientific progress are quite closely correlated, I think not only will the people in the west suffer as a result, but I think that’s also likely to have a negative knock-on effect on the third world and on the poorer countries. If we develop high technology here, and develop our markets here, then they can benefit from that. If the west is really sluggish I think even countries like China, which is growing very fast at the moment, could suffer as a result.

Anil: I’m sure the reason the politicians are focusing on cutbacks and austerity – internationally, not just in Britain – is because they’ve got to please the financial markets and that’s the first force breathing down their neck. They’ve really got to balance the books before they can even think about growth in the future and that’s the priority right now.
On the wider scale, you could argue that the chickens are coming home to roost – we’ve had our good days in the west and we’re no longer fit to manufacture anything, we’re too expensive, we have expensive social programs – why shouldn’t Romanians manufacture fitted kitchens that we import, they’ve got a right to make a living too?
Inevitably there’s a state of flux. You’re bound to have a global economic transformation, nothing is going to stay still, there’s going to be a shift one way or the other. Maybe one day, a long way down the line, we’ll get some sort of equilibrium. We’re still at the see-saw stage at the moment.

Sean: Can I just ask you what kind of equilibrium you see, what would, for you, mean equilibrium?
Anil: Probably more balanced wealth distribution across the world and more stability in economic and political terms. Probably growth, but within sort of sustainable constraints as to how we use our resources, because the way we use resources is pretty critical in terms of things like forests, fisheries and things like that. Something along those lines – I haven’t got the answers either.

Dan: A question about the lack of leadership, to put something else on the table here: What seems to be taking place, very much as I think Anil’s tone was suggesting, you have these forces out there, the chickens are coming home to roost and other such metaphors, that everything is outside our control. There are forces that mean we are just sowing seeds in the wind and there’s nothing else we can do. I think what we’re seeing now, particularly with the Tory-Lib pact, is that process of saying that we can’t do anything, our hands are tied. Is that not reflected in the entrepreneurial class? Where are they? They’re very good at appearing on television at the moment, on Dragon’s Den, and we have celebrity capitalists, and Richard Branson and Virgin, who are very good at buying up rubbish and making it look good. But there seems to be a kind of hollowness to the capitalist class at the moment, its own direction and leadership manifest, I think, by the fact that it’s spent the last 10-15 years in a very hollow and disastrous boom in house prices. I know that’s been the case in Britain for a hundred years, that’s what the capitalist class tends to do but I do think that crisis in leadership is there.

Steve: I was listening to this programme about China yesterday and they were talking about how they have taken on high-speed rail technology from Japan and there’s contracts where if Japan wanted to invest in China they would have to accept that China would take over some of Japan’s intellectual property. So China is a very aggressive economy, incredibly aggressive and incredibly successful and it strikes me it’s almost like we’re just rolling over. It seems there’s a completely fatalist point of view. For me it’s like we’ve become economic pacifists. We can’t just ignore the fact that we’ve got incredibly aggressive economies in the world and there doesn’t seem to be any leadership around that.
Dan Travis: You’re saying China’s aggressive? Interesting, I completely disagree with that.
Steve: Yes, I’m not saying it’s wrong, just extremely aggressive.

Brendan: The whole thing about government austerity at the moment and whether or not he’s trying to please the financial markets, I actually think that Cameron hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. I don’t even think he thinks about that. The Tories always wanted to cut every Labour project from the last 30 years. Austerity is the biggest, most amazing excuse ever. That’s as deep as it gets – I don’t think they’re thinking about financial markets or anything.

James: I think Anil has raised two very important issues; inequality and resource usage. But the argument that our hands are tied goes back to John Major [last Tory PM before Tony Blair, for those under 20], he said that globalisation means governments can’t do anything. Now we’ve got a new argument which is that Moody’s means we can’t do anything, you know, the ratings agencies, which is kind of even at a lower level. I think that’s very sad and it’s subordination to an IMF that hasn’t even moved in yet. You just sort of raise this spectre and say that’s why it’s unavoidable. I think Daniel’s done a great job in the book of pointing at the emperor’s new clothes on all of that. Having said that, the popular prejudice, which I’m sure you don’t articulate [to previous speakers] that there’s nothing we can do because the bankers will kill us is very strong. Maybe that’s a third issue you could come back on, Daniel.

In relation to some of the discussion, don’t be unfair on the Luddites. Read E.P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class, you’ll find the defect of the Luddites was not that they thought that technology was a problem, breaking up machines was just a tactic for them against the employer. The defect was to think that they could get redress from the state for their plight – he’s very clear on this in the chapter called An Army of Redressers – so let’s hear it for the Luddites. Even computers may be broken up if the cause is right.

On pharmaceuticals, the Big Potatoes people are hopefully setting up a work group on medicine but I’ll tell you one thing, we talked to the ex-CEO of Pfizer, who really did provide progress with the Viagra drug, and he said that the big clampdown on regulation of pharmaceuticals happened in 2002 with Merck and the Viox drug. After that the Federal Drug Administration states that even one death in clinical trials means no more of that drug. Obviously we can usually go back to Thalidomide, as we can go back in housing to Ronan Point, and it’s amazing that those old historic episodes, 50 years ago now, still evoke and still have a passionate response today. What’s interesting about pharmaceuticals is that all of that regulatory attack happened after John le Carre’s The Constant Gardener, from January 2001, and the 9/11 attacks in September, so the impetus for restraint can come from outside an industry, from the general cultural zeitgeist and the result is we don’t have all the drugs that we would like. Even if you take the Chinese rail thing, they want to make a Beijing to London [service] in two days. You think that’s good news but you can be sure that the greens will be along to ask how many meals will be eaten on that train and wouldn’t it be faster to fly, and somebody else will say the holding back [of commercial flights] above Beijing is getting very bad as well, so wherever you look there’s an argument for restraint. It’s not just undone by a quick counter-argument; we really need a whole battery of ammunition, especially in Brighton. It’s 40 years since I went to school around here, so when Daniel so courageously took on the centre of the Green party nationally here, there are some special Brighton arguments that can be adduced as to why road scepticism is so strong.

Sean: I should like to point out that if you look at political constituencies in Brighton, there’s one Green MP in the middle one and the Greens came nowhere, absolutely nowhere in all the constituencies around it so it’s a very particular, very local thing just down there [points out of Waterstones’ window toward the Pavilion] rather than a general thing. We’re not all Green in Brighton.

Nick: You talk about a national low growth but what are all the multinational companies doing? Surely they are going further afield creating growth? While politics talks about lack of growth, I’m sure BP aren’t holding back, they are operating in 80 countries ect, and all their other chums will be equally aggressive about the world with growth.
Another Dan, at the back: Have you considered local currencies as a way of encouraging growth? Lewes [just a few miles outside Brighton] has a pound, Brighton has a new currency called the Bright and there’s the Local Exchange Trading Scheme called Lets. Do you not think that putting money into an economy causes growth? What would be wrong with a local currency?
42.29

Daniel: There’s a lot of things to come back on and a lot of the stuff is in the book. Briefly on BP, on observation is that it’s made a big deal for several years about no longer being British Petroleum but Beyond Petroleum. I think that’s quite significant because it shows that even multinational companies are taking on board this green, growth sceptic agenda. Obviously they do want to make profits but at the same time they are on the one hand restrained by regulations but on the other influenced by this broader culture which sees growth as problematic. Profit-making is problematic; it has to responsible and ethical.
I’m not interested in Lets currencies and I don’t think currencies, in and of themselves, create growth.
On banking and finance, I have written a book about the financial markets called Cowardly Capitalism, published in 2001, I could speak for a very long time on this, but to try and put the discussion in the broader context; one of the explanations I give for growth scepticism is the demise of industry and of the productive sector, but another one, probably even more important, is the demise of the idea of progress, particularly by the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Left, which was traditionally seen as the movement that wanted progress and social change and a better world. In the late ‘80s, although it began before that, the idea was that not only had the left gone out of the window, but the very idea of there being a possibility of an alternative to the market, of a better world, went with it. The whole idea of social progress, the possibility of humans having a different way to run the economy and a different kind of society became very unpopular so the idea of progress was really subsumed. The possibility that humans can really influence their lives became quite unpopular. In a way that does relate to the banker argument because it’s just a question of David Cameron cynically saying “we’ve got to do this because otherwise our credit rating will be downgraded so we’ll have to pay more for credit so the financial markets will force us to certain things. It’s also that politicians share this sense that not much can be done to influence events and the financial markets is just one way that they experience that.

I think the importance of financial markets and bankers is really exaggerated. I haven’t time to go into detail about the financial crisis, but very briefly, it was true that there was a financial bubble and it was true that the bubble burst and created all sorts of problems and that was the immediate backdrop to the crisis. It’s not true to say that that was the fundamental cause of the crisis, which was a different matter because if you look at why the financial bubble emerged in Britain and in America it was very much encouraged by the state authorities that kept interest rates low, kept public spending high, they had deregulation so a lot of lending practices were allowed that weren’t allowed before. So the authorities played a key role in encouraging that bubble. The reason they did that in turn was because they saw that their economies were so sluggish and weak, so rather than ask how to deal with the fundamental problems, they thought “well let’s help create this sort of debt-financed consumer boom that will help overcome problems in the short term but not really deal with them. It will help consumption keep ticking along”.  So I would say that the bubble and bust was fundamentally a response to a sluggish and weak economy, it wasn’t caused by greed – greedy consumers or greedy bankers – that’s quite a superficial way to look at it.

On the discussion on a global level, I wouldn’t call China aggressive; I would say ambitious, it wants to grow, it wants to compete, it wants its people to have better lives, which is a very positive thing –
Steve: I see it as positive actually. I was using aggressive in a positive sense.
Daniel: Oh that’s fine, if you want to use aggressive in a positive sense! I’m quite happy to use it in a positive sense; I’ve no problem with that! But I don’t see it as a zero-sum gain in the sense that just because the third world is becoming richer and industrialising I don’t think it means the west has to suffer. I think in principle you can have more prosperity in the west and in the third world because I don’t accept the notion that there’s a limit in resources. Potentially I think growth in the west can benefit the third world and growth in the third world can benefit the west, it’s not zero-sum gain at all.
Sean: I think that you’re giving Daniel a really easy time about some of the things he’s been saying and I’m surprised that no one has come back.

Steve: What are your views about what part the government would play in creating growth? I’m sort of going back to the New Deal. Is there a role for the state in creating big public works as after the Great Depression or is that kind of naive economics?  What role can the state play in eliciting growth?
Rory: Malthus was obviously wrong about the eighteenth century, but I don’t how you can be so confident about the challenges of resources such as dwindling oil and challenges of global warming. I don’t see how you can see a solution so easily.
Anil: With resources, some things can deplete very quickly like fisheries and forests.
Sean: Are you saying that growth would necessarily make these problems worse? I suppose Daniel’s asking why it must necessarily be the case that growth would make these problems worse.

Rory: It’s the idea that you can’t possibly continue growing if global warming does pose the problem that many scientists think, then you won’t be able to just continue growing in the way you’re saying, it will pose a challenge to growth.
Sean: Let’s say we have fusion energy in 20 years [see http://www.thebrightonsalon.com/Talks/fusion-cheap-energy-for-all.html].
Rory: This is it. There’re possible solutions but I don’t know how you can be so confident about those solutions, there’s uncertainty.

Sean: I don’t know. Daniel is saying that it’s now common sense that growth is a bad thing and it’s become attached to every kind of problem, when I can’t see specifically why that should be. Some say there are far too many people and they consume too much and we will run out of trees and fish, so does that mean you can run the growth argument on to every problem? [Strange looks] Perhaps we should move on...
Young man at the back: Not exactly moving on...
Sean: Oh, OK.

YMATB: The question of whether growth necessarily leads to problems is one issue but another is that there should be no limits, or there are no real limits to resources and so we can build roads wherever we like. So the difference between [saying] bigger growth will help solve these issues with new technology and innovation, but there are also real limits to deal with and maybe growth isn’t really to with that and maybe you shouldn’t build the roads or whatever, there are actual problems. I think there are two issues.
51.49

Dido: Your mentioning of a sea wall [to Daniel], that seems to me to be the response of a limit to a limit. It seems like you’re coming up with another limit-driven solution to something as opposed to a more expansive, adventurous idea of how that could be dealt with.
Sean: Actually there is a sea wall here but it’s to stop Brighton falling into the sea rather than the sea coming over Brighton – at the moment, anyway.

Daniel: On the role of government, I am involved in discussions with James and various other people about exactly what it can be, but i would say in general terms that a lot of government would benefit from being removed in terms of all these precautionary principles and sustainability and those kinds of things. Certainly, physical infrastructure would be a positive thing. There’s a debate to be had in terms of what role government can play in terms of developing new industries and that kind of thing. I’m not completely decided on that question. Maybe it’s another one for the pub.

In relation to the other questions, there’s a very general answer and very specific answers in relation to the areas of forests, fisheries and global warming. I think the specific answers are quite different cases but my general starting point is that when we’re deciding to do anything we should work out what’s good for human beings - that should be the criteria. It’s a kind of human-centred morality which Bryan Appleyard criticised me for having, but which I’m quite happy to have. That doesn’t mean that I’m saying that we should build roads that literally cover the earth’s surface, I wouldn’t argue that, it’s more that if we’re talking about building roads or anything else that we should ask “how should we have a rational transport infrastructure? Should we have more roads, more rail, what kind of roads, what kind of rail?” The fundamental starting point should be what benefits human beings, which might sound like an obvious starting point but nowadays is seen as being very problematic, that we should be concerned about birds or whatever, animals, flora and fauna just for their own sake. I don’t want to destroy all sea birds or something for its own sake, but the key criteria is: “What is good for human beings?” If humans can benefit from an airport even if it means destroying some bird colonies, then yeah, maybe we should do it. In other circumstances we might want to do things differently but what’s good for humanity is a kind of fundamental moral principle.

In relation to Malthus and these different cases, and I think the specifics are quite different; Malthus himself argued back in 1798 and again in the early nineteenth century that population tended to grow faster than food supply therefore of population continued to grow unchecked you would have all these problems like famine and war and starvation, and historically you can say very clearly that Malthus’s literal argument has been proved wrong 210 or more years on. We had about a billion people in the world when Malthus put forward his argument, now there are almost seven billion people in the world, but despite the fact that we’ve got seven times as many people we’re far, far better off than we were in 1800 in all sorts of ways. But there are people saying that Malthus was wrong in 1800 but now, in 2010, maybe that kind of approach is right today. In general terms I would say that where he went wrong was because he was so one-sided. He did very much see human beings as consumers and he talked about them consuming all this food and they won’t be able to consume any more. He underestimated their capacity as producers to increase the food supply and increase their agricultural activity. I think greens today make a similar mistake to Malthus. Their method is the same as Malthus, it’s not just their specific predictions. They have a very one-sided view of human beings, in other words, so they tend to make the same mistakes.

Having said that I do think these are different cases. So in relation to forests, for example, I don’t think it’s as big a problem as people suggest, in fact I think I’m right in saying that Europe is becoming more, rather than less forested. If you can have high-tech, very productive agriculture, then you can produce a lot more food on a small area of land and if you choose to have more forest in the world you can do that. For example, on average, agricultural productivity in America is ten times agricultural productivity in Africa. If you could bring African productivity to American levels, or even half American levels, you can produce a lot more food on even less land and you can make Africa more forested, if that’s what you want to do. So in principle, anyway, I don’t think forest is such a big problem.

As I understand it, and I’m not a specialist in this area, I think fisheries is probably a much bigger problem. That doesn’t mean it can’t be dealt with but I think it’s a bigger problem. What you essentially have in terms of fish is a high-tech hunter-gathering operation in relation to fish. So you have the fish in the sea, but obviously they’re no longer being fished with just a line and nets or however you traditionally caught fish. I know nothing about fishing, as you can see! But now you have these very high-tech trawlers fishing on an industrial scale and fish supplies are being depleted. So I think that is a bigger problem and you would have to work how to have fish farming on a larger scale, different kinds of fish farming, change socially the way you organise fisheries. I think fisheries probably is a big problem.

Finally in relation to climate change, just to emphasise I wasn’t saying climate change isn’t happening, or that it’s not a problem. What I would say for sure is that I don’t think rationing works. Rationing is not desirable in terms of decreasing the amount people consume and I don’t think it will help tackle climate change. The idea that all this “leave your TV on standby”, “drive five miles less a week”, “don’t leave your tap running”, the idea that this is a practical solution to climate change I just don’t buy. Whatever you think of my alternative, I don’t think that is a solution. I do think that technology does provide the solution, but I wouldn’t claim that I know the best possible mix of technologies. I think you do want to partly de-carbonise the energy supply, which James talks about in Energise! a book he’s written on the subject [with Joe Kaplinski, see http://www.thebrightonsalon.com/Talks/more-power-to-the-people-the-future-of-energy.html], have nuclear power, have renewable energy on a very large scale, other forms of energy. I think it is fair enough to adapt, I don’t think it’s an outrageous compromise to suggest that if you have sea levels rising in Bangladesh, say, that you have sea walls. And these other high-tech solutions like sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or diverting the sun’s rays in space. I don’t know the perfect mix or the perfect solution but what I am confident about is that deal with climate change you will need technological solutions. It should be seen as practical problem rather than this great kind of moralistic thing where we all have to behave in a morally pure way and use less and obsess over recycling. I don’t think that’s a solution to climate change at all.
Caroline: On a broader level, what is the everyday average person in the street going to do, how have they got a voice on all these issues and how are they going t feel that they can actually make a difference? A lot of us have probably had some thoughts about this but there’s nowhere to be heard, really, and a lot of us probably feel that voting now is a waste of time even if we still do it.

Gordon: I wonder about the huge potential to take care of each other. I’m the only old, old man here. I’m at an age when I will soon be taken care of. It’s very low-tech!

Daniel: You mean individuals taking care of their family and the state providing for people?
Gordon: I mean taking care; we take care of the children and we take care of old codgers and there’s a huge, exponential demand for it, caring for the elderly if nothing else. Without building high-tech hospitals, it’s a matter of finding people who can and will do it.
Sean: Last year at a Brighton Salon somebody introduced high-tech carers from Japan [see http://www.thebrightonsalon.com/Talks/challenging-relationships-love-companionship-and-robots.html] – robot seals were supposed to look after children and old people!

Brendon:  Just a quick, slightly curved ball: Do you think that we could colonise the sea? Because I think it’s a possible solution to growth, particularly the fish thing. The Channel Tunnel’s shown that we can traverse the sea not using planes and stuff. There are all these possibilities. Yeah, you’ll be laughed at if you talked about that, years ago you thought we’d colonise the moon [to Steve] and it shows how far we’ve stepped back in a way, in terms of our thinking.
Steve: I think a real solution in Brighton is to build over the sea. You can’t build on the Downs, or if you said you were going to build on the Downs [Physically, you can! said a couple of others]. Well, yeah, I know. But basically people in Brighton don’t want to see the Downs built on and we don’t want a high-rise in Brighton so we could build on the sea on stilts. What’s the problem with that? Not under the sea, but over the sea.

James: I think the demographic question is important. I would say to tentative Malthusians, you know, who would you cull next? My verdict is Malthusians. Not you, because you’re here. It’s possible to talk about robots and old people, but oddly enough, I speak as somebody who recently gave an address to the European Federation of Pet Food Manufacturers, and if you want a solution for older people, some of it, oddly enough, might be to mix robotics with dogs. Dogs are very sensitive to old people’s condition, in fact, I think the latest research suggests that they pick up who’s dying on a cancer ward faster than medics can. I hate animals, don’t misunderstand me, I don’t much like robots either, but by all accounts, if you have a dog with a video camera linked to a GP [interrupted by audience laughter]. It’s not the same as human care and I’m sure plenty of uncertainty attends it but we’ve got to think more widely because there’s going to be lots and lots of older people, robots are very expensive and all Japan’s experience hasn’t really got them that far, and yet we know that the big society which I thought you were hinting at where we’re all volunteering to care for you...

Gordon: No, we don’t volunteer, there are people who earn a modest living doing it; very modest, chased around like nobody’s business by managements.
James: Well quite, but is that a formula for growth?
Gordon: It’s a formula for living. It’s a formula for being human.
James: No, I agree with that and I think there’s...
Gordon: Doesn’t that come into it?
James: No, it does, it should be properly paid for and so on, but if we’re looking for something that will go beyond even that and there is the great need for paying carers and training properly, giving the most professional care and so on, but it’s going to be, especially in older societies like Japan, it’s not something that purely human beings or purely robots can solve. Is there a lot of uncertainty in what I’m saying? Dogs as robot, for God’s sake, yes there is. To boldly go is the spirit of Daniel’s book. The certainty that human beings are to blame for everything and that we’re all consuming too much and all of that and there’s no place for ingenuity, a lot of greedy consumers, a finite planet and all of that, I can’t get along with that certainty.
Exeter University has just set up the One Planet MBA. A whole master’s degree in business administration devoted to showing that there’s only one Earth. Now that’s an MBA [audience noise] in only one Earth. I’ve heard that so many times that I’m convinced there’s 1,500 Earths. We’ve got to get beyond that and thinking the unthinkable was the spirit of Brighton, if I may just say, 30 years ago and people used to indict Shumaker’s and the Club of Rome’s The Limits of Growth by saying it was Malthus with a computer [E.F. Shumaker, author of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered]. Now, in this part of the world, even beyond these confines, the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex where I trained is one of the foremost in putting forward the doctrine that everything is uncertain except that we’re bastards, that we’re completely certain of!
1.08.01

It’s really a sad turnaround, we do need this curiosity. A few people are going to die in the process. We do need to get the numbers right. Daniel’s quite right about forests; they’re growing all around the UK, especially in Scotland. We must talk about Brazil; we must get the numbers on that but you’ll find the rate of deforestation is very small with the amount of forest that’s out there. Daniel’s right about fish; there is a case to answer. Where there’s a case to answer we’ve really got to say fair enough, things need to be done. There’s a decline in the quality of the fish we eat; I’d go along with greens and localists on that. Salmon doesn’t taste the same as it did; we need a way round that. But, do we have some optimism about the human race? That’s the main thing. Can we make a better world? That’s what we need to revive. We only need to make some of the arguments publically. I’ve found there’s a great appetite for someone to put the contrary view because the discussion with finger-waving is great out there that you only have to begin to do Daniel’s emperor’s new clothes manoeuvre and you’ll find a third are really hostile, a third are kind of either way and a third are right behind you. We just need to get out there and do that.
Dan Travis: Locally the issue of Hastings was brought up again the other night. It just seems so tragic to me. I’m seeing this, potentially, a city rotting. It’s right at the end of any line that we can imagine and people say that the problem with Hastings is that it’s really isolated. Well, yeah, because no one built the railroad from London to Hastings through the period of largesse that we’ve just had. The Hastings example is one where we could get involved, and I don’t mean in any kind of New Labour project. There’s a potential there for regeneration and a tremendous boost to the local economy, even in terms of road-building and rail it would benefit immediately while it wouldn’t benefit from any of the pro-sceptic think and local approach.
Steve: I think Brighton is incredibly conservative and it has atrophied. It’s an example of the kind of fear that we can’t develop anything and we can’t develop anything. All we do is paint new lines on the road and we’ve got a few bendy-buses – whatever happened to the bold new world? Look at the marina; it’s a dog’s breakfast. It was an amazing opportunity for an amazingly futuristic development and it’s just like part of Surbiton dumped down on below the cliff. It’s a joke!
Daniel: This question of the increase in the elderly population is very important. I’m not going to comment on dogs with video cameras. I know nothing about that. The most interesting discussion I’ve seen about this recently, just in the press so I don’t have any details, there are doctors working on how to slow down or even reverse the aging process because a lot of diseases like cancer and other diseases are correlated to age. So the older you are the more likely you are to get them. In the long term that could be quite an important way of dealing with some of these questions. Inevitably the regulation discourages people from looking at these things with that perspective because you’re encouraged to look at one disease like cancer or heart disease or whatever rather than taking a broader approach.

On a more everyday economic level I would make the point that technology is crucial, not so much in the sense of robots looking after elderly people but if you have a high-tech productive core economy that can generate wealth, then you have a lot of resources to have a lot of people caring for the elderly or caring for kids. It is very centrally related to that: you need to have a productive economy in order to be able to have a human policy towards people, who for whatever reason, maybe they’re disabled, maybe they’re frail and elderly or maybe they’re kids, but they can’t look after themselves, to generate the resources to look after them, you do need a more productive economy. It’s an example of an area where I think, that rather than being kind of cold and robotic, going for economic growth is a very positive and humane thing to argue for. I won’t talk in detail about colonising the sea and all that stuff, I  principle, is a very good thing – Antarctica; I think there are various treaties about not using Antarctica, but in principle I’m sure there’s loads of resources in Antarctica, under the sea, all sorts of things, with the appropriate safeguards we can use and get resources and that would be a very positive thing.

That’s a key question about changing people’s opinions and the way I see the book is, in an embryonic way, beginning to develop the arguments which can be used to sway people, but obviously it’s a start of a very long process; you need to develop the arguments, have more arguments, prior to encouraging a wider number of people. It’s just the start of what I think is a very important process.

Nick: I haven’t read your book, but do you discuss the weapons industry which is something which has always been a cornerstone in innovation in this country? It’s still thriving, I understand, in some secret guise, Buckminster Fuller’s idea about innovation, which was that you start with killing machines  which are then moved into the social sector, so refrigerators were first used on warships and then they came onto land, that sort of progression from weaponry to domestic use. Is that a growth industry that you could see we could use? [Richard Buckminster Fuller, architect, designer of geodesic domes whose name has recently been used to describe the largest molecules ever found on the galaxy]. We know the Ministry of Defence is trying to work out to make windmills not come up on radar; those kinds of clever techniques used by the military can have a trickle-down. Do you see the industry helping in the growth?

James: Just on that, I used to specialise in the military and industrial complex, it’s not just Fuller, but it’s a standard left-wing view that capitalism only progresses through the military and so on. I think it’s a bit more complicated than that, as I’m sure you’d agree, but I’ll tell you one thing on uncertainty; I read Liam Fox this morning upbraiding George Osborne. Osborne had said: “Maybe we don’t need Trident.” Liam Fox said that nobody knows what will be happening in 2050 it’s completely uncertain so that’s why we definitely need Trident. The most incredible invoking of uncertainty; one thing he’s certain of, is that 40 years on we’ll need Trident. But it is a very distorted way of doing R and D, it does give a lie to vulgar attacks on the government when people say you should never pick winners, we don’t pick winners, which is what Vince Cable says. The fact is we’re already picking winners; it’s called the defence industry.  It’s an enormous industrial policy which really skews research and development and distorts growth much than population or any of these things. And it’s a fact that it’s really changed things in a dramatic way.

Moving to the point that Anil made, about the disequilibria between east and west and the chickens come home to roost for western economies. I think what we should recognise is that what the United Nations calls race to the bottom is very wrong. The doctrine that low-wage economies are the ones that are going to grow, they’re the only ones that can have manufacturing; for us it’s just intellectual things, cultural things, maybe a bit of research and some services is very foolish because wages are only a component, one small component, more and more, in an automated world. If you take mobile phones made in China, wages are very small. [With] iPods at Foxconn, wages are a very small component of all of that. So that’s why you find that Britain actually has, not in employment terms because it’s very productive, but in output terms a non-British but extremely thriving car industry, in Britain, which will be around for a long time yet: 800,000 jobs are dependent on it; number two luxury producer next to BMW in the world; number two in mass-production of a lot of things. It sounds a joke if we all think of Leyland, another historic example of how that’s all history, all we can do is the city – it’s not true. If it was just wages, it would be true and then China would have decimated those 800,000 jobs, but it ain’t just wages so we need a bit of a balance on it. It’s not just that they are rising and have collapsed, it can look that way easily in Britain, but there’s a number of factors that one needs to consider.

Anil: I’d answer that with how much of your wardrobe is made in Britain? Very little, a lot of industries have been shipped wholesale overseas. And mass production is pretty hard in the west. But that’s just that point.
James: A wardrobe, even among ourselves in the way that we dress is actually a diminishing part of our consumer expenditure. If you look at consumer expenditure, more than 50% has now moved into services so it’s in fact all your haircutting and things that Chinese are not [going to be doing] anytime soon. It’s beauty and many other things, apart from apparel that we now spend our money on and a lot of that I fear to say is local and I might prefer it to be global, but it is local. Even there one has to get the balance. I’ve got some good news: Kiwi fruits are going to be grown in Kent!

Sean: Talking about that global division of labour, I would cite the two most successful motorcycle companies in Europe at the moment, BMW and Britain’s Triumph. BMW makes most of its engines now in China [for the smaller models, I should have said] and Triumph makes all of its bikes in Thailand. That division of labour can be beneficial to both the east and the west and it’s not necessarily that one suffers or the other. Probably no one wants to debate the motorcycle industry, so, Daniel, would like to sum up?
1.21.05

Daniel: I’ll just sum up in relation to the key points in the book, because there isn’t a discussion of the military sector in the book – I’m not saying it’s not important but I think James has covered it and also in relation to wages being a small component looking at output in China or anywhere else. I would like to emphasise the point that growth scepticism is mainstream. There is a temptation, I imagine particularly among people in this room, to laugh at the hard-core greens or the more blatant, no-growth steady-state economics people who are a very small minority. It’s quite easy to make fun of them and laugh at them but this is a much more mainstream phenomenon because it is so slippery. Because people will say: “Of course I like growth, of course I like prosperity.” And then they’ll add all these caveats. There are all these very difficult arguments to be had about resources and the environment and happiness and all the rest of it. They are quite hard arguments and we shouldn’t caricature them, we should try to take them on board, but having said that, I think that there are advantages on our side. If you talk to ordinary people they do want to have prosperity and they do want to have better lives. They do recognise not just that they could gain from having more material possessions, although that’s fine, but that being more wealthy gives them more possibilities to travel, to have more of an education, to take time off work, to look after dependents, whatever they want to do, it does give them those possibilities. So although the growth-sceptic arguments are very strong, strong in the sense of pervasive, there is also a real common-sense appeal to prosperity and growth so should really try to appeal to that positive sense that we have and work out how to counter the growth sceptic arguments.
Ends 1.23.15

The Brighton Salon would to thank Daniel Ben-Ami for speaking and Waterstones bookshop, Brighton, for hosting the event, and all who attended. The event was produced by Dan Travis, director of The Brighton Salon and was chaired by Sean Bell, secretary of The Brighton Salon.

Many of those who attended continued the discussion, and many other discussions, at The Victory round the corner, well into the night.

This transcript has been produced and edited by Sean Bell. If you have any complaints or questions, please email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .