potlatch

Official 2012 Olympic Games Reading List

Regular visitors to potlatch (TM) will notice that the Olympics is something of a preoccupation around these parts. So as you can imagine, I'm as excited as anyone about the Greatest Sporting Show On Earth (TM) that is about to land on my doorstep this Friday. When I say "anyone", of course I mean the commuter who is stuck with their face in someone else's sweaty armpit, because London's pre-distressed transport network has been reduced to complete lock-down, thanks to the 2,000 journalists, 250 Australians and 650,000 business executives who are descending on London for the next fortnight. When I say "anyone", I do not, of course, mean the Olympic Committee, who are hanging out in Buckingham Palace, as part of their bribe (TM) for not giving the games to Paris.

As the unofficial scribe of the Olympics, I present to you the Official Potlatch (TM) Curmudgeon's Guide To the 2012 Olympics, compiled from the last 12 months of rants and raves:

Emotional Blackmail by Olympics, July 27th, 2011

The post-speculative Olympics, November 11th 2011

Olympics as political bottleneck, February 29th, 2012

How to restore pricelessness, April 15th, 2012

Against the cashless Olympics, June 1st, 2012

Essential anti-Olympic reading, June 23rd, 2012

And with that, I'm off to hide in a cave for the next 18 days or so. My dad offered me a ticket to the croquet or something, but faced with a dilemma between ethnographic curiosity and moral consistency I opted for the latter. So I'm staying well away from Stratford. Sadly, as demonstrated by the fact that the BBC 10 O'clock News (sprinking its coverage with updates on the Syrian uprising and the demise of European capitalism) now comes live from the Olympic park, the whole charade seems unlikely to stay away from me.

pigs might fly?

Inspired by the TUC's After Austerity conference, and more so by CRESC's recent report on industrial policy, I've posted a new article to the Uneconomics debate, on what type of expertise might be needed to move beyond the impasse of 'let the market sort it out'. As I conclude:

An industrial policy that wasn’t simply the outcome of corporate lobbying (e.g. copyright extensions) or an ultimatum (e.g. banking bailouts) or national nostalgia (e.g. rescuing cherished brands) would necessarily involve policymakers acquiring a new form of expertise, that was more sensitive to the organisational, historical and material elements of capitalism...

Too often, we assume that we need a new Keynes to come along and rescue us, or failing that, the old one. Somewhere, a very clever man must be working on a very complicated book that will produce a new and better economic policy template. We just need to wait for him to finish. What if this is misguided? What if all we can rely on is what the American political scientist Charles Lindblom characterised as ‘muddling through’? If this is the case, we might at least strive to muddle through in an informed and competent way.

Building up this information will take time. But, as US economist Dean Baker remarked grimly at After Austerity, “we have plenty of time” – this depression isn’t going anywhere. 

a break in proceedings

Potlatch is not a political soapbox, at least not without heavy lashings of curmudgeonly soapbox-scepticism to go with it, but occasionally the clouds of doom part sufficiently that one feels compelled to acknowledge where sunshine might possibly arrive from. Please do two things, now!

Move your money. Then sign this petition.

I've banked with Nationwide (building society) since 2004, after I began to realise that writing situationist slogans on the back of my HSBC credit card repayment forms wasn't having any impact on their business model whatsoever.