Debate: The End of Money?

Our popular debate series looks at familiar things that we take for granted but which are threatened by change. Our reporter Charlotte sat in on Monday's debate which explored the theme of money

Debate:The End of Money?

Globally, countries are experiencing troubling financial times; worryingly this includes the USA, UK, Greece and Italy. On Monday evening the Book Festival took the time to question the future of money in its current form, and if we may in fact be nearing the end of money. Esteemed Scotsman Executive Editor Bill Jamieson chaired the debate with participating authors Ian Morris, Stephen Armstrong and Julie Hill.

Money will be redundant

Ian Morris proposed that presently money has three main uses: the medium of exchange, a unit of account and a score of value. Morris, who wrote Why the West Rules-For Now, went on to argue that we won’t need money in the future because the human body is fusing with machinery. Soon we will all pay for things, communicate and even surf the web by a silicon chip implanted in our arm or head. According to Morris the Six Million Dollar Man has become a reality but will cost a lot more than six million dollars. The roles that money currently has will be redundant in the future.

Price is the problem

While Stephen Armstrong wasn’t particularly impressed with Morris’ argument he agreed it was a true vision in science fiction. According to Armstrong, who wrote The Super-Rich Shall Inherit the Earth, price is the issue, not money, and in particular the price of debt is a huge problem for America and the UK. Stephen urged us to move towards a dawn of thoughts exchange and said that in order to to reach this place without money we need to remove the current price differential. Armstrong commented: ‘The feral rich won’t pay taxes and the feral poor can’t pay taxes’.

An issue of resources

Julie Hill, famed for her book The Secret Life of Stuff, didn’t agree with either gentleman. Hill believes that so far we have failed to price resources, particularly the natural ones that underpin our economy. Looking towards the future Hill is concerned that there won’t be sufficient natural resources for basic sanitation and food for our ever-growing population by 2050, and questioned what money will mean to us if we don’t have the natural resources to provide the solution.

Questions from the floor

Encouraged by floor questions the panel went on to discuss many of the issues relating to the influence of money today, and how we could perhaps move towards an equal society. Armstrong advocated that there is often less trouble in countries with higher wages and suggested that to help us become more equal we could raise the present UK wage bill. Hill commented that, although the health and science of a country was often linked to income disparity, the fear of crime often strengthened relationships with many poor societies rating themselves very happy and content because of their solid family and social interactions. 

The audience questioned the role of corporations in the end of money. Ian Morris believed that corporations as we know them presently will disappear in the future because the huge engines of economic growth will not be needed when we have implanted silicon chips inside our bodies. Armstrong highlighted that we should be more concerned with private equity funds than corporations because they are wealthy investors that buy businesses cheap and sell them on for high profits. Additionally they help to finance political parties and don’t have to bow to public demands. Most importantly the private equity funds pay little or no tax which will not help debt reduction. 

So What does the end of money mean?

To end the debate a brave audience member asked the panel: ’What does the end of money mean?’ Ian Morris stated: ‘if technology continues to advance why would we need money if we are living on a super technology highway?’ and claimed that, in many ways, we are already there. When we buy things on our mobiles or the web money is moving from buyer to seller conceptually, not physically. Julie Hill believes that the implications of creating a cashless economy would be enormous.

The Revolution Will be Followed by a Signing Session in the Adjacent Tent

This year we have invited a number of guest bloggers to write about the Book Festival. Today’s post is by Ken MacLeod who came to see Alan Warner. Ken is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum writers team.

This year's theme for the Edinburgh International Book Festival was decided last year. With what was described at the launch party as uncanny prescience, the theme was 'revolution'. There was a definite echo of that in the voice of the first author I heard on Saturday: Alan Warner, Edinburgh University's newly appointed Writer in Residence. Catchily if clunkily billed as 'Sopranos author does trainspotting', the event, chaired by Zoë Strachan, centred on Warner's reading from the MS of his forthcoming novel The Dead Man's Pedal. It's about a lad who by mistake becomes a trainee engine-driver on a West Highland railway line in 1973-74: a moment when Britain seemed to edge closer to a pre-revolutionary situation than at any time before or since - though not quite as close as some of Simon's more radical work-mates think, as they trade banter in the station hotel bar. Warner first came to prominence with Morvern Callar, which like his later The Sopranos and his current The Stars in the Bright Sky was hailed for its brilliant evocation of young female voices. In the section he read, the man from Oban showed a similar - and on the face of it less surprising - fluency with a range of male voices, from political badinage over a pint to pained recollection of war's absurd horror between swigs of the hard stuff. But catching the cadence of the industrial work-place, and indeed of working-class socialism, isn't as easy as it seems or as easy as it used to be - not that many have tried.

Answering questions from the chair and the audience, Warner explained that The Dead Man's Pedal takes place in the same 'place of the imagination' as his other novels set in and around 'The Port', a town which is not quite Oban. The place has become so vivid over the years that on visiting Oban he now finds himself wrong-footed by his own imaginary geography. His approach to writing is not to attempt a 'perfectly crafted 220-page Booker novel' but - following his exemplars Beckett and Kelman - to give his characters scope and freedom to develop, to say their piece; and then to edit down the long manuscript that results. He begins on more than one novel at a time, and works until he knows which is the one that demands to be finished - for which approach he's thankful he has an understanding editor with a steady nerve. Asked why the sentences in his later novels were easier to understand than some of those in his first, Warner wasn't sure he agreed, but added that he'd found that writing doesn't get easier if, as he does, you set yourself harder challenges as you go along. This bracing directive was followed by a reading of a passage he said was as close to its real-life source as he could make it: an account by the narrator's (and Warner's) father of a grotesquely needless loss of four lives in an armoured car in an Italian ditch. This sobering account was lightened by the interruption of loud explosions, from the fireworks opening the evening's Military Tattoo.

'Eighty-eights' Warner said, cocking an ear. 'I'd recognise them anywhere.' Even the most realistic writing has to go beyond experience. 

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Born in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Ken has been a full time writer since 1997 authoring thirteen novels, including The Star Fraction (1995) and Intrusion (forthcoming, 2012), plus many articles and short stories. His novels and stories have received three BSFA awards and three Prometheus Awards, and several have been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards. In 2009 he was a Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum. Learn more from Ken’s blog The Early Days of a Better Nation.

A celebration of new writing talent

One of the great things about the Book Festival is seeing all the fresh new writing talent that comes through the doors every year. There’s nothing better than discovering a great debut novel, or sitting in an event listening to a writer at the very start of their career and who might, just might, be the next famous face on the literary scene.  

This year is no exception. The programme is packed with great first novels, as well as some fantastic international works of fiction translated into English for the first time. To celebrate this profusion of new writing the Book Festival is once again running its award for new novelists – the Newton First Book Award – the winner of which is selected by a public vote. This year there are 47 titles up for the award. All 47 authors are appearing at the Festival and you can buy their books in the bookshop in Charlotte Square Gardens. So pick your favourite and place your vote online!

The Festival has landed!

The 2011 Book Festival got under way yesterday morning and what a first day it was!

The gates opened at 9.30am when the book-loving masses flooded through the doors to be greeted by the exuberant sounds of the Edinburgh Samba School.

First up was the amazing Julia Donaldson who took to the stage with an entourage of musicians and colourful characters - much to the delight of the packed audience. And the high-spirits continued throughout the day.

Despite the seemingly-endless downpours of late, the day was thankfully (almost) rain free!

Here’s to the rest of the Festival, to lots more sunshine, and to tons and tons of lovely authors, books and events.

How to build a Book Festival

 

Have you ever wondered what it takes to put the Book Festival site together in Charlotte Square Gardens?

 In addition to the work that goes on behind the scenes, programming, organising and promoting the Book Festival, there’s the not-so-small matter of building the site where it all takes place. It takes over two weeks to construct and furnish all of our venues, bookshops, spaces to eat and drink, the entrance tent and all of the walkways, as well as everything else required to keep our customers and authors comfortable and happy.

Watching the whole thing come together is quite magical. Photographer Chris Scott captured some of this magic with his camera, and he’s written a lovely blog piece about it.

What we’re reading… Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

Here at Book Festival HQ we’re lucky enough to have every book in the programme at our disposal. Over the next few weeks we’ll be bringing you some reviews of what us Book Festival folk have been reading. Today it’s the brand new Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru…

In this striking novel by Hari Kunzru, what at first appears to be a series of disparate and unrelated stories soon emerges as the unfolding history of a place; a specific spot in the Arizona desert which acts as some kind of bizarre conduit to another dimension. This is a magical landscape where anything seems possible, but where time leaves little trace of the secrets and stories that it might hold.

Reading it, you often feel like you are in the middle of one of Louis Theroux's 'Weird Weekends' complete with wacky tales of alien encounters, hippy cults, creepy military bases set up as fake Iraqi encampments and mythical stories of voyages into the ancient native Indian Land of the Dead, but what emerges from all these 'far out' scenarios is both a sense of how little we know for sure about things beyond ourselves and a deep sense of interconnectedness.

Despite taking place decades or even centuries apart, the characters jump between stories, appearing in another character's tale in a different guise or a different age and reminding us that no act that we commit is a single, unrelated event and that even the most seemingly random and insignificant encounters are in fact only part of a much bigger chain of being. 

The episodes are often told with humour and a tongue-in-cheek playfulness whilst challenging our beliefs, or perhaps rather our lack of belief. Only one thing remains certain and that is that we can never know anything for sure…

Hari Kunzru will be at joining us in Charlotte Square Gardens on 14 August at 7pm. Tickets cost £10 (£8 concessions).   

What we’re reading… Jack and the Flumflum Tree by Julia Donaldson

Here at Book Festival HQ we’re lucky enough to have every book in the programme at our disposal. Over the next few weeks we’ll be bringing you some reviews of what us Book Festival folk have been reading. Today it’s one for the kids - Jack and the Flumflum Tree written by Children’s Laureate Julia Donaldson with illustrations by David Roberts…

The hero of the tale, Jack, is tasked with going to the Isle of Blowyernose to seek out the fruit of the Flumflum tree – the only cure for his Grandmother’s Moozles (she’s is covered in large purple spots – EEK!).  

Accompanied by his pals Stu and Rose, and equipped with a patchwork sack full of objects kindly donated by his Granny, Jack sets sail on the open sea to a schnozzle shaped island. Overcoming shark infested waters, a leaky boat, a man overboard with balloons, chewing gum and a skipping rope, the trio succeed in fetching the fruit and curing Granny.

Julia Donaldson’s humorous rhyming text deals deftly with courage, adventure and teamwork and is a delight to read aloud. I’m sure the refrain ‘“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” said Jack “Let’s have a look in the patchwork sack”’ will soon be a popular catchphrase for little ones and adults alike.

David Roberts’ illustration has a wonderful retro feel. From patchwork quilts to a rather fetching Fair Isle jumper, the pages are reminiscent of the homes of grandparents across the land. Bright sections of primary and complementary colours dominate the pages, along with wonderfully expressive human and animal characters. Don’t forget to try and spy the witty illustrative reference to one of Julia's other picture books. Clue: it rhymes with Buffalo…  

We are delighted that Julia is our Guest Selector for this year’s RBS Children’s Programme. She will be joining us on several occasions across the Festival period.