Dan Hannan stares into the future... | News & Politics | News & Comment

FIRST POSTED APRIL 22, 2009

historiography is Marxist, in the sense that he sees humankind as having a direction, and politics as being ultimately about economic control. But he uses Marxist methodology to predict the rise of freer markets and freer citizens who will, in time, transcend the state. To put it another way, he turns the Orwells and Huxleys and Burgesses on their heads.

Is he, however, repeating their mistake in another way, viz by assuming that current trends will continue? I don't think so. Very few people truly grasp the magnitude of the technological revolution. In the past week, we have seen politicians and journalists struggling to explain the phenomenon of online news sources (such as The First Post). They don't understand that the internet has pulverised monopolies, that they no longer get to decide the headlines. Attali understands that change, and extrapolates from it.

For those who still don't get it, let me spell it out. The days when a front-bencher could brief a dozen lobby correspondents and thereby dictate the next day's news cycle are over. Millions of online readers and writers now reach an aggregate view of what is interesting. Amateurs are crowding out professionals – something that will soon transform medicine, law and teaching as much as politics and journalism. Why ask a GP to look up your symptoms when you can do it yourself online? Why pay a notary to fill in forms when a simple programme does it for you? Why send your child to school when you can download enough to teach him the national curriculum in less than two hours a day?

Attali predicted the financial crisis: "The credit pyramid, based on the value of American housing, will collapse".

These points are not Attali's. He makes rather more sweeping generalisations about the return of nomadism, the value of leisure time, the spiritual role of music and the like. But the theme is the same: his vision of the future is based on the individual.

Why should we listen? Well, here's a reason. In between the French and English editions came the credit crunch. So, by sheer accident, we can tell exactly what Attali was writing before the event. This is it: "The price of real estate in the United States will plummet; the credit pyramid, based on the value of American housing, will collapse. The crisis could also come from the inability of the financial system to hold on to its own savings, which will be invested in increasingly speculative fashion in funds managed on the internet from tax havens. The profitability of capital will no longer be maintained by the rise in the value of assets. The financial crisis is about to explode".

I'd say that gives him the right to be heard, wouldn't you?

FIRST POSTED APRIL 22, 2009

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Taking nothing away from the man, the current economic crisis (recession/depression/credit crunch, call it what you will) was forewarned by quite a number of commentators, with good basis and quite some time ago. For example, see Fred Harrison at 'renegadeeconomist.com' to name but one.

Posted by The Anti-Pawn at 1:01pm on April 23, 2009

The very idea of any futurist coming to conclusions that are correct is a fanciful flight into the world of 'imagine.' Why we should listen to one person and not the other is beyond me, any futurist can come up with a 'future lifestyle' that will protect and serve, whether whatever they protect and serve is the state or the individual. Their personal opinion and viewpoints come into play in any prediction that is made, personally, some of the worst predictions made are spouted by the politicians and pundits that inhabit the world of television and journalism. I would rather put my time to good use and not listen to these supposed 'seers of the future,' and work towards making the future a better place to live.

Posted by nrobi at 3:19pm on April 24, 2009

'The end of the American empire will be followed by planetary empire, then planetary war, then planetary democracy'. What utter tosh. But then Hannan's statement 'Those who are most convinced that the world is overheating were warning us, in the 1970s, of a new ice age' is yet more of the same old nonsense trotted out by the hard of thinking who don't want to admit the greens [hippies even, ouch] were right all along. Actually, those warning of the [possibility of] a new ice age, were not the same people that are 'convinced the world is overheating' it was just a few scientists speculating, followed by tabloid sensationalism, but I expect they impressed the [very young] Daniel, who is obviously unconvinced climate change is reality, putting him in the 0.001% of doubters. Perhaps he should get out more, he might notice the climate is changing. As for Hannan's penultimate paragraph, well, I've been saying exactly the same thing for years [so do I have the right to be heard also?], and I can't see why it wasn't blindingly obvious to everyone including Daniel, or perhaps he too was caught up in the greed mania of making a fortune from housing and didn't have time to think too deeply about how first time buyers could continue to fuel the profiteering frenzy. But I'm not a fat Eurocrat, so my opinion isn't worthy of his attention. Along with most politicians, he's just noticed online media, so we should be grateful for that.

Posted by Peter Simmons at 1:54pm on April 27, 2009

Hannan, like other Thatcher children, just can't acknowledge that the 80s greed-is-good (when he was supposedly growing up) was never a viable option and, like all spoilt brats, keeps fingers in orifices shouting ''nyaa nyaa, can't hear reality a'knocking". I have even less time for french sophistry but even a broken clock is correct twice a day. As they say in Oz,"yer ain't wrong" but that is far from the same as being correct. Unfortunately, like PeterS, I gotta live with the idiocies that anyone with a basic understanding of arithmetic saw coming decades ago.

Posted by allan kessing at 1:35pm on April 29, 2009