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Wednesday 18 April 2012

Argentina Re-Nationalises an Oil Company

Standard & Poor's puts Argentina on 'negative watch' over YPF nationalisation plan

Standard & Poor's has put a "negative watch" on Argentina's credit rating, citing "rising restrictions to international trade" and "steps to nationalise oil company YPF" as reasons for the move.

Spain’s Repsol has threatened legal action against any company that attempts to invest in YPF following its expropriation by Argentina last week as the government expressed determination to “pay nothing at all” in compensation to the Spanish oil company.
Women walk past a poster that reads "CFK - YPF. They're ours, they're Argentine" in Buenos Aires last week. Photo: Reuters
Despite affirming its "B" credit rating, S&P added that the South American country's recent actions "could exacerbate existing weaknesses in the economy", pointing to high inflation and increasingly rigid government expenditure.

The news came after Spain’s Repsol threatened legal action against any company that attempts to invest in YPF following its expropriation by Argentina last week, as the government expressed determination to “pay nothing at all” in compensation to the Spanish oil company.

The move would discourage external partners from providing the investment YPF needs to exploit vast shale oil deposits discovered within the Latin American country and is the latest attempt by Repsol to fight back against the illegal seizure of its subsidiary.

“We reserve the right to take legal action against any party investing in the YPF and its assets following the unlawful expropriation of the company,” Kristian Rix, a spokesman for Repsol in Madrid, told the Daily Telegraph on Monday.

The Spanish energy company believes billions of dollars are required to develop Argentina’s prospects including at least €25bn a year over the next decade to exploit the Vaca Muerta shale discovery made last year.

Julio De Vido, Argentina’s Planning Minister has already approached Brazil's state-run oil company Pertobras over investment in YPF and plans to contact other foreign oil companies including Exxon, Chevron and ConocoPhilips.

The development comes amid yet more rhetoric from Argentina as government sources insisted the offer of compensation would be “zero pesos”.

Shares in Repsol and Spanish builder Sacyr Vallehermoso, which owns a 10pc stake in the company, fell by 4.7pc and 10.7pc respectively on Monday after government sources quoted in Argentina’s daily newspaper La Nacion said the government was “determined to pay nothing at all to Repsol”.

Antonio Brufau, CEO of Repsol has argued that its YPF stake had a value of $10.5bn.
“They are looking into and finding out everything on the management of Repsol: irregularities, lack of investment, defective technical plans, financial and accounting issues. There is a debt of $9bn,” an unnamed official told the newspaper.

The government is assuming that any legal action processed through international tribunals could take five or six years, confided the source.

Meanwhile, details of the aggressive tactics employed by the government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner towards Spanish executives at YPF during the takeover emerged in a briefing issued by Spain’s foreign office to all its embassies fermenting hostilities between the two countries.

Mr de Vido and Axel Kicillof, the deputy economy minister, arrived at company headquarters with armed security guards who used “physical violence and threats” to force Spanish YPF employees from the building giving them five minutes to collect their personal belongings, the internal memo said.

Spanish YPF executives were then “hunted down” for “harsh interrogation” and they and their families sought refuge at the home of a senior executive awaiting repatriation to Spain.

In addition, eyebrows were raised over the state appointment of one of new managers of YPF. Exequiel Espinosa, the head of state oil company Enarsa, was once embroiled in a corruption scandal that threatened to derail Mrs Kirchner’s campaign for presidency in 2007.

Mr Espinosa was one of the Argentine officials on board a plane carrying Guido Antonini, a Venezuelan businessman who was caught landing in Buenos Aires with a suitcase of $800,000 allegedly destined for Mrs Kirchner’s campaign.

The matter forced the resignation of Claudio Uberti, an Argentine government official involved in trade and investment deals with Venezuela and cost Diego Uzcategui, president of Venezuela oil company PDVSA as both were on board the plane.

But Mr Espinosa, who was also one of the eight passengers on the private jet hired by Enarsa, survived the association unscathed.

“He’s a complete Kichnerista crony and now he’s in charge of exploration and production at YPF,” said a source connected to the Latin American energy industry.

Repsol may fight a move by the Eskenazi family to buy back shares in YPF citing a “force majeure” argument to declare the agreement void.

The company could argue that the agreement to buy back Eskenazi shares in the event that Repsol was to lose its majority stake was not applicable in the context of expropriation.

It also emerged on Monday that Argentine officials had searched a property used by Mr Braufau in Buenos Aires, seizing computers and documents apparently without an official court order.

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Argentina's oil grab is timely retort to rampaging capitalism

Cristina Fernández's actions, however clumsy, are part of a worldwide reaction to exploitation by business and the rich
ARGENTINA-fernandez-KIRCHNER-ELECTION
Cristina Fernández's move was populist and clumsy, but perfectly understandable. Photograph: Daniel Garcia/AFP/Getty Images
Suppose the British government knew that a key shareholder in Centrica, our last great British energy company and owner of British Gas, was to sell its stake to Gazprom, so making Russian state ownership inevitable. I hope that, in this scenario, the government would expand the provision of the Enterprise Act that allows Britain to block takeovers that are against the national interest to include gas and nuclear power. (The act is currently confined to defence, financial services and the media.) I'm pretty certain that Centrica chairman Sir Roger Carr, also president of the CBI, shares the same view. No country can be indifferent to the ownership of strategic assets and thus the use to which they might be put. Its first obligation is to the well-being of its citizens.

The Argentinian government was faced with just this dilemma last week. YPF is its national oil and gas company, which it sold to the Spanish oil company Repsol for $15bn in 1999 as part of its privatisation drive. It has not been a great deal for either party. Argentinian oil and gas production has slumped, exploration for new reserves has been run down and this oil-rich country is now an oil importer, with Repsol accused of looting the company and betraying its obligations.

Repsol's excuse is that Argentinian price controls are absurdly tough. It has wanted to sell its holding for some time and last July finally found a potential buyer: the Chinese state oil company Sinopec. On Monday, fearing that the deal was about to be done, the Argentinian government seized the lion's share of Repsol's stake to get majority control. Better that YPF is owned by the Argentinian government than the Chinese Communist party is their reasoning.

Many governments would have done the same. Ownership matters. Yet Argentina has been roundly condemned – the EU, Spain, Mexico and even Britain have all weighed in. The Economist thunders that President Cristina Fernández's antics must not go unpunished; nationalisation is a sin beyond redemption. The inference is that Repsol should have been allowed freely to dispose of its shares to whichever buyer and at the best price it could achieve. Argentina and its citizens have no right to intervene.

Ms Fernández was certainly high-handed and very arbitrary. She only seized enough shares from Repsol to secure 51% control and has yet to say what the state will pay in compensation; the other shareholders are hapless bystanders with their investment shredded. There is more than a whiff of shameless populism to her actions. But to portray Repsol as an injured innocent whose natural rights have been unfairly suborned is to traduce economic and political reality.

For too long, companies and the rich worldwide, egged on by American Republicans and British Tories, have shamelessly exploited the proposition that there is only one proper relationship between them and society: they do what they want on their own terms. And society must accept this because it is the sole route to "wealth generation". Capital exists above state and society.

Fernández's actions, however clumsy and unfair in their execution, are part of a growing worldwide reaction to the excesses that this proposition has brought. Repsol does not, and did not, have a God-given right to sell control in YPF to whomever it pleases while Argentina's interests can go hang. It exists in a symbiotic relationship with the society in which it trades. The right to trade and to own are privileges that come with reciprocal obligations as the Ownership Commission, which I chaired, argued earlier this year. They cannot exist in a vacuum because companies' actions have profound effects.

Moreover, companies, especially energy companies, need public agencies to help mitigate the risk of undertaking huge investments in a world where the future is unknowable. Across the globe, business and the rich insist on denying these elementary truths. Now they are reaping the whirlwind as a hostile reaction gathers pace worldwide. Capitalism's self-appointed custodians have become its worst enemies.

It is the driving force behind the Occupy Movement. It is why Jean Luc Melénchon, the hard left French presidential candidate, has had such a successful election campaign. It is why so many governments are co-ordinating their investigation into Amazon, the company paying negligible tax on its worldwide profits. It is why President Obama has adopted the Buffet tax on millionaires as a popular part of his re-election campaign. It is why George Osborne felt he had to balance his high-risk reduction in the top rate of income tax to 45%with a passionate declaration of war on the rich evading tax.

The reaction is long overdue and is producing some long-needed corrections. For example, in the last fortnight alone, Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein, Barclays' Bob Diamond and Citibank's Vikram Pandit have all faced angry shareholders, responding to the new mood, protesting about the extravagance of their bonuses compared to their institutions' paltry performance. They are being forced to accept less. Proportionality in top pay is beginning to be restored, if still a long way off.

But the mood needs to be channelled. Argentina may have done everyone a service by forcibly reminding global business that there are unpleasant consequences for neglecting economic and social responsibilities, but summary nationalisation without compensation is hardly a solid template for the future. It is a harbinger of Chinese-style arbitrary government; a move from crony capitalism to crony statism. It is time to reassert that while capitalism may be a proven route to prosperity, it only works in a complex interdependence with the state and society. There have to be rules at home and abroad to make a desirable world of open borders, free trade and free business work. Taxes have to be paid rather than evaded. Pay has to be proportional to contribution. Labour leader Ed Miliband was roundly and universally criticised as a leftist innocent just seven months ago when he differentiated between good and bad capitalism; now he looks extraordinarily prescient.

If more of his party – especially the shadow cabinet – would rally to his cause, there is a phenomenal political opportunity. The mood is changing. It needs to be channelled: the creation of a new and different compact with business, finance and the rich. It is what electorates across the world want to see. President Fernández, in her gauche way, has tapped into a global mood.

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Argentina's critics are wrong again about renationalising oil

In taking back oil and gas company YPF, Argentina's state is reversing past mistakes. Europe is in no position to be outraged
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner
Argentinia's president, Cristina Kirchner, announces that the oil company YPF is subject to expropriation. Photograph: Daniel Garcia/AFP/Getty Images
The Argentinian government's decision to renationalise the oil and gas company YPF has been greeted with howls of outrage, threats, forecasts of rage and ruin, and a rude bit of name-calling in the international press. We have heard all this before.

When the government defaulted on its debt at the end of 2001 and then devalued its currency a few weeks later, it was all doom-mongering in the media. The devaluation would cause inflation to spin out of control, the country would face balance of payments crises from not being able to borrow, the economy would spiral downward into deeper recession. Then, between 2002 and 2011, Argentina's real GDP grew by about 90%, the fastest in the hemisphere. Employment is now at record levels, and both poverty and extreme poverty have been reduced by two-thirds. Social spending, adjusted for inflation, has nearly tripled. All this is probably why Cristina Kirchner was re-elected last October in a landslide victory.

Of course this success story is rarely told, mostly because it involved reversing many of the failed neoliberal policies – that were backed by Washington and its International Monetary Fund – that brought the country to ruin in its worst recession of 1998-2002. Now the government is reversing another failed neoliberal policy of the 1990s: the privatisation of its oil and gas industry, which should never have happened in the first place.

There are sound reasons for this move, and the government will most likely be proved right once again. Repsol, the Spanish oil company that currently owns 57% of Argentina's YPF, hasn't produced enough to keep up with Argentina's rapidly growing economy. From 2004 to 2011, Argentina's oil production has actually declined by almost 20% and gas by 13%, with YPF accounting for much of this. And the company's proven reserves of oil and gas have also fallen substantially over the past few years.

The lagging production is not only a problem for meeting the needs of consumers and businesses, it is also a serious macroeconomic problem. The shortfall in oil and gas production has led to a rapid rise in imports. In 2011 these doubled from the previous year to $9.4bn, thus cancelling out a large part of Argentina's trade surplus. A favourable balance of trade has been very important to Argentina since its default in 2001. Because the government is mostly shut out of borrowing from international financial markets, it needs to be careful about having enough foreign exchange to avoid a balance of payments crisis. This is another reason that it can no longer afford to leave energy production and management to the private sector.

So why the outrage against Argentina's decision to take – through a forced purchase – a controlling interest in what for most of the enterprise's history was the national oil company? Mexico nationalised its oil in 1938, and, like a number of Opec countries, doesn't even allow foreign investment in oil. Most of the world's oil and gas producers, from Saudi Arabia to Norway, have state-owned companies. The privatisations of oil and gas in the 1990s were an aberration; neoliberalism gone wild. Even when Brazil privatised $100bn of state enterprises in the 1990s, the government kept majority control over energy corporation Petrobras.

As Latin America has achieved its "second independence" over the past decade-and-a-half, sovereign control over energy resources has been an important part of the region's economic comeback. Bolivia renationalised its hydrocarbons industry in 2006, and increased hydrocarbon revenue from less than 10% to more than 20% of GDP (the difference would be about two-thirds of current government revenue in the US). Ecuador under Rafael Correa greatly increased its control over oil and its share of private companies' production.

So Argentina is catching up with its neighbours and the world, and reversing past mistakes in this area. As for their detractors, they are in a weak position to be throwing stones. The ratings agencies threatening to downgrade Argentina – should anyone take them seriously after they gave AAA ratings to worthless mortgage-backed junk during the housing bubble, and then pretended that the US government could actually default? And as for the threats from the European Union and the rightwing government of Spain – what have they done right lately, with Europe caught in its second recession in three years, nearly halfway through a lost decade, and with 24% unemployment in Spain?

It is interesting that Argentina has had such remarkable economic success over the past nine years while receiving very little foreign direct investment, and being mostly shunned by international financial markets. According to most of the business press, these are the two most important constituencies that any government should make sure to please. But the Argentinian government has had other priorities. Maybe that's another reason why Argentina gets so much flak.

An Indian's analysis of America


Being Different - Rajiv Malhotra


Tuesday 17 April 2012

Total Football - Barcelona style


Be it the 2-3-5, the 4-3-3, the 4-2-4, or the 4-4-2, Barcelona have consigned mathematical rigidity in football to irrelevance. They have done the same with the ancient and venerable notion that centre halves, or centre forwards, should be tall and strapping. Also torn to shreds is the article of faith that dictates all teams need a “stopper”, a specialist in defensive destruction, in midfield.
What’s more, Barcelona have signalled a democratic revolution in the sport. They have shown, through their success, that the qualities a football player requires to prosper are technical skill and intelligence on the ball. Size doesn’t matter; neither does the position of each player on the pitch.
The seed of it all was the “total football” of Ajax Amsterdam, patented by one of the sport’s philosophers, Rinus Michels. His favourite disciple, Johan Cruyff, brought it to Barcelona, first as a player and then as manager. From there the Barcelona “Dream Team” of the early Nineties emerged.

What we are witnessing today is the perfected version of that model, a purified distillation of the ideology of Michels. What the “Pep Team” delivers is more than total football; it is absolute football.
Michels led the great revolution of modern football. He bequeathed a legacy that included three consecutive European Cup triumphs for Ajax, from 1971 to 1973, and that took Holland’s “clockwork orange” team, with Johan Cruyff as standard-bearer, to the World Cup final in 1974 and 1978.

The system was based not on the manner players were distributed on the field – by a clear division between defenders, midfielders and forwards – but by a change in attitude that led the entire team to perform, and think, in a different way. The defender was no longer a mere stopper, he had to be capable of distributing the ball as adeptly as a midfielder. Possession was the indispensable prerequisite.

A player in a Michels team had to be comfortable with the ball at his feet, whatever his position. When he recovered possession, he would lift his head, find a team-mate and initiate another attack. The game was suddenly being played at an entirely different rhythm. Ajax and Holland appeared to play with more speed than any other team in history. They gave this impression because it was true.
Michels carried the orange torch to Barcelona, where he was coach for two spells in the 1970s, failing each time to make his model gel. He did, though, leave his mark, not least by his decision to sign Cruyff, even if they were unable to break the dominance of Real Madrid.

The turning point came when Cruyff took over the team’s reins in 1988. Suddenly the coach was king; his philosophy would now become the key to success. Cruyff’s first season at the helm was, however, a disaster. Had it not been for his legendary name, and if he had not believed so stubbornly in his own abilities, Barcelona would have sacked him. Cruyff convinced the president of the club, Josep Lluís Nuñez, to forget about the short term and think strategically, allowing time for the concept of total football that had captivated the world 15 years previously to permeate the club. This was the path to adhere to, this was the cause for which it was worth fighting.

In a private conversation back then, on a particular evening long on Heineken consumption, Cruyff confided to one of his drinking companions, “I am going to change the world of football.” How? “My defenders will be midfielders; I will play with two wingers and no centre forward.” Cruyff’s interlocutor wondered if that might have been the beers talking. It wasn’t.

Without a centre forward to preoccupy them rival centre halves would be left bewildered, unemployed; with two wingers the available space opened up enormously and from such a tactical platform a team whose players were all masters on the ball were free to play expansively.
Cruyff’s Barcelona never defined themselves in terms of European triumphs accumulated, like Real Madrid or Ajax, but his trophy haul was not inconsiderable: four consecutive Spanish Liga titles, a King’s Cup, a Cup-Winners’ Cup, European and Spanish Super Cups and that one, coveted first European Cup, at Wembley, courtesy of a goal from Ronald Koeman, total football made flesh. The Cruyff blueprint became emedded in the club’s DNA.

The seductiveness of the Cruyff playing style captivated the fans, the Catalan press and the youth players, none more so than the most intelligent and receptive of them all, Pep Guardiola, who rose to the first-team captaincy under Cruyff, where he remained after the Dutchman’s departure in 1996. Two Dutch coaches, Louis van Gaal and Frank Rijkaard, perpetuated the club ethos, with varying success but unwavering fidelity.

When Guardiola, Cruyff’s protégé, ascended to the first team bench, he coincided with the emergence of a group of players who had been immersed in the in-house philosophy from adolescence, among them Xavi Hernández, Víctor Valdés, Gerard Piqué, Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi.
What they had been taught, as their chief article of faith, was that the ball was sovereign; possession the primary — practically the only — priority.

The striking thng about Guardiola’s team is that, while tactical discipline is strict, one is never sure exactly what position on the pitch at least three quarters of the players are supposed to occupy.
The images showing the nominal formation of the starting 11 flash up on the television screens at the start of each match but when the whistle is blown the Barca players pop up everywhere, defying the game’s ancient orthodoxies. Dani Alves is listed as a right back but he often plays more an attacking midfielder or a winger; it has never been made clear whether Andres Iniesta is a right or left winger, or whether his natural position is in the centre of midfield. Alexis Sánchez is a centre forward — the smallest target man in the history of the sport — but disguises himself as a winger. Messi is a “false nine”, occupying a deeper position than a traditional centre-forward, and much more.

As for Cesc Fàbregas, the former Arsenal captain defies all analysis of the position on the field he is supposed to occupy. It is his superior football brain, and his years in the Barcelona youth teams, that have allowed him to impose order, under Guardiola’s watchful guidance, on the apparent chaos of his role.

Xavi Hernández is, of course, the conductor of the midfield orchestra, but he tackles back. Messi also wins back possession; if it were ever necessary he could perform perfectly ably as a full-back. Valdés, the goalkeeper, passes the ball more often than he stops shots.

Guardiola requires his players to pass the ball, even in defensive extremis, because the cardinal sin is to play a random long ball, to reduce football to an anarchic game of chance.

It is the dream that Cruyff aspired to and Guardiola finally transformed into hard, trophy-winning reality. Possession is the sacred principle, as much in defence as in attack, because if the opposition is deprived of the ball, there is no need to defend.

The team’s forward movement operates on the principle of a wave in the sea, gathering momentum until it breaks on the shore of the opposition penalty area. Even if a goal is not the outcome, even if the ball is lost, the rival team recover control so deep in their own half that they have a long and winding road ahead before they can mount an effective threat on the Barca goal. The opposition are obliged not only to cover the entire length of the field to mount a threat, along the way they have to thread a way through a team under orders to chase the ball like a pack of rabid dogs. Barca are artisans, but workers too.

What Barcelona have done is to invent a new language, or what Fábregas, since his arrival from Arsenal this season, has described as the Guardiola “software”. It is hard to assimilate for those who have not been raised from an early age at the club’s La Masia academy.

Some, such as Eric Abidal and Javier Mascherano, have managed to pick it up. But it is a measure of how tough the challenge is that two such reputed superstars as Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic failed to adapt, each ending up as awkward misfits, only fitfully effective, in the Nou Camp ballet.
Barca have imprinted an instantly identifiable picture on football’s global consciousness. Physicality and athleticism have bowed to refinement and technique, the warrior spirit remains but has been leavened by intelligence and the killer grace of the champion swordsman, or the matador. It does not matter if a player is tall or short, wide or thin, so long as he knows how to caress the ball.

Will Barcelona’s triumphant run last? Who knows? Guardiola may leave the club; Messi might suffer a career-diminishing injury, or simply run out of steam; a rival coach might come up with the antidote. It is possible, if highly unlikely, that Barca won’t add to the 13 out of 16 trophies they have won in the past three seasons. But whatever the future may hold, they have left an indelible mark on the game and its history. Nothing will ever be the same again.

From The Telegraph

Economics has failed us: but where are the fresh voices?


Mainstream economic models have been discredited. But why aren't political scientists and sociologists offering an alternative view?
Actually do some meaningful work? Us? Top academics, The Young Ones
Actually do some meaningful work? Us? Top academics, The Young Ones Photograph: image.net

When the history of how a good crisis went to waste gets written up, it will surely contain a big chapter on the failure of our academic elites. Because just like the politicians, the taxpayer-funded intellectuals at our universities have missed the historic opportunities gifted to them by the financial collapse. And it will be the rest of us who pay the price.

At the start of the banking crisis, the air was thick with the sound of lachrymose economists. How did they miss the biggest crash since 1929? Professors at the LSE were asked that very question by the Queen – and were too tongue-tied to reply. A better answer came from Alan Greenspan, until recently the most powerful economist on the planet, who went to Capitol Hill and confessed to a "flaw" in his model of the world. Clearly, the economic crisis was also a crisis of economics.

With the all-powerful dismal-ists temporarily discredited, an opportunity opened up for the sociologists, the political scientists and the rest to charge in, have their say – and change the way public policy is shaped.

If all that sounds like a battle of the -ologies to you, then consider: no discipline has so profoundly shaped Britain or America over the past 30 years as mainstream economics, with its almost unshakeable faith in markets, and its insistence on taking politics out of the public sphere. Displace that narrow, straitened form of economics from its position as the orthodoxy on modern capitalism, and you have a shot at changing capitalism itself.

So have the non-economists grasped their moment? Have they hell. Look at the academic conferences held over the past few weeks, at which the latest and most promising research in each discipline is presented, and it's as if Lehman Brothers never fell over.

Britain's top political scientists met in Belfast a couple of weeks ago, and you'd have thought there'd be plenty in the crisis for them to discuss, from the technocrat governments installed in southern Europe to the paralysis of British politicians in the face of the banks. But no: over the course of three days, they held exactly one discussion of Britain's political economy. There was more prominence given to a session on how academic research could advance dons' careers.

Perhaps you have more faith in the sociologists. Take a peek at the website for the British Sociological Association. Scroll through the press-released research, and you will not come across anything that deals with the banking crash. Instead in April 2010, amid the biggest sociological event in decades, the BSA put out a notice titled: "Older bodybuilders can change young people's view of the over-60s, research says."

Or why not do the experiment I tried this weekend: go to three of the main academic journals in sociology, where the most noteworthy research is collected, and search the abstracts for the terms "finance" or "economy" or "markets" since the start of the last decade.

Comb through the results for articles dealing with the financial crisis in even the most tangential sense. I found nine in the American Sociological Review, three in Sociology ("the UK's premier sociology journal"), and one in the British Journal of Sociology. Look at those numbers, and remember that the BSA has 2,500 members – yet this is the best they could do.

Sociologists are reliably good at analysing the fallout from crises: the recessions, the cuts, the dispossessed, the repossessed. I'd expect them to be in for a busy few years. But on the upstream stuff, the causes of this crisis, they are practically silent. At Oxford, Donald MacKenzie has pulled off remarkable close-up studies of financiers in action but without context or politics: the view is all cogs and no car. Indeed, leave aside three remarkable books from Karen Ho, David Graeber and Alexandra Ouroussoff, all of whom are anthropologists (and all discussed here previously), and the bigger picture is still in the hands of those formerly shamefaced, but now rather assertive, economists. One promising initiative has just begun on the Open Democracy website called Uneconomics, where non-economists do chip in on the upstream causes of the crisis. But that's it: a cheap and cheerful internet forum. The Second International it ain't.

It wasn't always like this. One way of characterising what has happened in America and Britain over the past three decades is that people at the top have skimmed off increasing amounts of the money made by their corporations and societies. That's a phenomenon well covered by earlier generations of sociologists, whether it's Marx with his study of primitive accumulation, or the American C Wright Mills and his classic The Power Elite, or France's Pierre Bourdieu.

But those sociologists were public academics, unafraid to stray outside their disciplines. Compare that with the picture of today's teacher in a modern degree-factory, forever churning out publications for their discipline's top-rated journals. Not much scope there to try out a speculative research project that might not fly, or to collaborate with specialists in other subjects.

Nor is there much encouragement to engage with public life. Because that's what's really missing from the other social sciences. When an entire discipline does what the sociologists did at their conference last week and devotes as much time to discussing the holistic massage industry ("using a Foucauldian lens") as to analysing financiers, they're never going to challenge the dominance of mainstream economics. And it's hard to believe they really want to.

Daughter, my generation is squandering your birthright


When my second child reaches my age I fear the NHS, along with the tiger and rhino, will be part of a mythologised arcadia
Daniel Pudles 1704
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
 
Three weeks old, warm and gently snoring on my shoulder as I write, you are closer to nature than you will ever be again. With your animal needs and animal cries, moved by a slow primordial spirit that will soon be submerged in the cacophony of thought and language, you belong, it seems to me, more to the biosphere than to the human sphere.

Already it feels like years since I saw you, my second daughter, in the scan, your segmented skeleton revealed like an ancient beast uncovered by geologists, buried in the rock of ages. Already I have begun to entertain the hopes and fears to which every parent has succumbed, perhaps since early hominids laid down the prints which show that the human spark had been struck.

Let me begin at the beginning, with the organisation to which you might owe your life. When I was born, almost 50 years ago, in the bitter winter of 1963, the National Health Service was just 15 years old. It must still have been hard for people to believe that – for the first time in the history of these islands – they could fall ill without risking financial ruin, that nobody need die for want of funds. I see this system as the summit of civilisation, one of the wonders of the world.

Now it is so much a part of our lives that it is just as hard to believe that we might lose it. But I fear that, when you have reached my age, free universal healthcare will be a distant fantasy, a mythologised arcadia as far removed from the experience of your children's generation as the Blitz was from mine. One of the lessons you will learn, painfully and reluctantly, is that nothing of public value exists which has not been fought for.

The growth of this system was one of the remarkable features of the first half of the period through which I have lived. Then, wealth was widely shared and the power of those who had monopolised it was shaken. Taxation was used without embarrassment as a means of redistributing the commonwealth of humanity. This great social progress is also being rolled back, and, though perhaps I am getting ahead of myself, I fear for your later years. My generation appears to be squandering your birthright.

This destruction echoes our treatment of the natural world. In my childhood it would never have occurred to me that birds as common as the cuckoo, the sparrow and the starling could suffer so rapid a decline that I would live to see them classed as endangered in this country. I remember the astonishing variety of moths that clustered on the windows on warm summer nights, the eels, dense as wickerwork, moving downriver every autumn, field mushrooms nosing through grassy meadows in their thousands. These are sights that you might never see. By the time your children are born, the tiger, the rhino, the bluefin tuna and many of the other animals that have so enthralled me could be nothing but a cause of regret.

We now have a better understanding than we did when I was born – a year after Silent Spring was published – of the natural limits within which we live. The new science of planetary boundaries has begun to establish the points beyond which the natural resources which make our lives viable can no longer be sustained. Already, this tells us, we may have trespassed across three of the nine boundaries set out by researchers, and we are pushing towards three others.

You may live to see the extremes of climate change I have spent much of my life hoping we can avert, accompanied by further ecological disasters, such as the acidification of the oceans, the loss of most of the world's remaining forests, its wetlands and fossil water reserves, its large predators, fish and coral reefs. If so, you will doubtless boggle at the stupidity and short-sightedness of those who preceded you. No one can claim that we were not warned.

There is another possible route, which I have spent the past two years researching and to which I have decided to devote much of the rest of my working life. This is a positive environmentalism, which envisages the rewilding – the ecological restoration – of large tracts of unproductive land and over-exploited sea. It recognises nature's remarkable capacity to recover, to re-establish the complex web of ecological relationships through which, so far, we have crudely blundered. Rather than fighting only to arrest destruction, it proposes a better, richer world, a place in which, I hope, you would delight to live.

There is one respect at least in which this country and many others have already become better places. I believe that family life, contrary to the assertions of politicians and newspapers, is now better than it has been for centuries, as the old, cold model of detached parenting and the damage – psychological, neurological and (some research suggests) epigenetic – that it appears to have caused finally begins to disappear.

Perhaps the greatest source of hope and social progress arises from our rediscovery of the animal needs of babies and young children: the basic requirements of comfort, contact and attachment. Yes, attached parenting is taxing (now you are beginning to writhe and rumble and I fear that your mother, exhausted from a night of almost constant feeding, will soon have to wake again), but it is, I believe, the one sure foundation of a better world. Knowing what we now know, we have an opportunity to avert the damage, the unrequited needs that have caused so many social ills, which lie perhaps at the root of war, of destructive greed, of the need to dominate.

So this is where hope lies: right at the beginning, with the recognition that you, like all of us, arose from and belong to the natural world.