Money talks
“After [having children] I became a rather below-stairs actor; you wouldn’t think of me now in the same way as Maggie Smith… It was because I didn’t have the money to shop or time to buy clothes, so I didn’t look smart anymore. If you want a role, you have to dress the part.” Actress June Brown (pictured), aka Dot Cotton, quoted in The Times
“They must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.” Victorian polymath John Ruskin on what makes for a worker’s happiness, quoted by Andrew Hill in the Financial Times
“Shops are donating potatoes, leeks, cabbages, but I can’t get rid of them. They’re getting handed back to me because people are saying, ’It costs too much to cook’.” Labour councillor Gerard Woodhouse, who runs a food bank in Liverpool, quoted in The Guardian
“It’s important when you haven’t got it.” Singer Shane MacGowan on the value of money, quoted in The Guardian
“At the poshest dinner party I ever went to – businessmen, cabinet ministers, heirs – I mentioned my brother’s disability benefits being frozen. The man I sat next to – who worked for a charity – sympathised, with, ‘I guess he’ll have to sell his car – or holiday home?’. Columnist Caitlin Moran on the struggle of the rich to empathise with the poor, quoted in The Times
“I don’t really have to work… I could retire… But I don’t feel the need to broadcast that with expensive clothes or cars.That radiates insecurity. When you see somebody with a $1m watch? That’s peacocking. It can feel like they’re overcompensating.” Actor Alexander Skarsgård, in The Times
“Scenario planning” is a helpful aid to strategic thinking for decision makers, especially those having to deal with situations of turbulence and uncertainty, say Matt Finch and Marie Mahon. The similarity between what is involved in that and science fiction has long been recognised. The power in both is that, unlike in forecasting, the idea is not to predict a likely future, or assign probabilities to future events, but to bring to light unexamined assumptions and aspects of the problem excluded from present frames of understanding. Science fiction can help us to anticipate and prepare for the unpredictability of complex problems that stem from our own actions – as in pandemics and climate change.
Better than forecasts
Such scenario planning originated in the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear conflict challenged American strategists to plan for situations without precedent. From there it entered the corporate sector, championed by Shell executive Pierre Wack among others. In the early 1970s, Shell experimented with scenario planning as a potentially better framework for thinking about the future than forecasts, which were perceived as a “dangerous substitute for real thinking in times of uncertainty”.
The futures presented by Wack’s team left Shell better placed than its rivals to navigate the shocks following the SixDay War and the subsequent Opec oil embargo. Wack’s scenarios had worked with situations where the price of oil fell to $10 a barrel, then considered unthinkable. When the unthinkable happened, Shell was better able to accept and adjust quickly to the new reality.
More recently, the Imajine project in Europe explored questions of justice and inequality in plausible imagined futures. Four scenarios were imagined – the Silver Citadel, where the EU had achieved its goals of economic equality through strict state capitalism guided by centralised machine intelligence; the Green Guardian, where climate catastrophe triggers a flight from disease-ridden cities and drowned coastlines and the embrace of a greener, postcapitalist order; the Silicon Scaffold, where citizenship rights come to resemble software subscriptions; and the Patchwork Rainbow, where culture wars lead to wildly divergent and hence impoverished societies. None of these scenarios are preferred or considered probable, but each tests assumptions about the kinds of environments policymakers might one day have to operate in and challenge the illusion of calculation and control fostered by forecasts.