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Wednesday 24 October 2012

Is sport an art?



In the early 1990s, there was a famous Reebok t-shirt with the simple slogan: "Sport is an art." Nice idea, but is it true? Can sport - which, by definition, is practical (score runs, take wickets) and competitive (beat the other guy) - belong to the same sphere as painting, literature and music?
The debate is not helped by the fact that sport and the arts are usually portrayed as antagonistic opposites - athletes v aesthetes, hearties v arties, jocks v thespians. From school to adult life, it is often (wrongly) assumed that there is little overlap between artistic creators and sporting competitors. (Writers, in fact, are often just as fiercely competitive as sportsmen.)
And yet no one (well, almost no one) disputes that sport can be beautiful. Last month, I tried to describe the aesthetic pleasure of watching David Gower bat - or just seeing him stand languidly and unhurriedly at the crease. When we watch Sachin Tendulkar turn his wrists at the very last moment, flicking the blade of the bat towards the on side just as the ball arrives under his eyes, we have experienced something beautiful: not just poise and grace but also concision and completeness. Nothing can be added or taken away from that Tendulkar flick that would not diminish the shot. Within its own terms, it cannot be improved upon.
A couple of years ago I watched Arsenal play Barcelona. The game finished a draw, but it was the spectacle rather than the result that left the deepest impression on me. Judged in terms of pure beauty - the physical grace of the players, the inventiveness of their movement - the match was surely the equal of any artistic or cultural event taking place in London that evening. Only someone with his eyes closed could pretend that the match had been defined completely in terms of goals scored and points bagged.
Occasionally I still hear arts-lovers complain that all sport is dull or anti-aesthetic. They are watching the wrong stuff. Anyone who loves ballet must surely recognise Roger Federer as one of their own. Again, elegance is matched by economy: the Federer effect is created not only by what he does but by what he avoids doing. There are no false brush strokes, no unnecessary chords, no superfluous sentences. There is no straining for effect, nothing is artificially tacked on.
There is another parallel between sport and the arts. In each sphere, the greats often have golden, productive spells late in their careers - periods when the insecurities have faded, when the urgent confusions that follow from deep ambition have receded. In his essay "Late Style", the academic Edward Said described how "age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works". Yes, the artist may have been at the peak of his powers in his middle or "High" phase. But there is something even more moving about the final creative outpouring. (If you take only one thing from this article, listen, as I am doing now, to Richard Strauss'Four Last Songs - true Late Style.)
Said was writing about the arts, but the same principle applies to sport. The discerning fan will know the feeling of having watched a great player near the end of his career play sport on a higher level - without the fear and frantic-ness of his younger, restless days. We saw Late Federer in the Wimbledon final this summer, conjuring victory despite being outplayed for most of the first two sets. Late Zidane, too, seemed to grasp the whole football pitch before he made even the simplest pass. There was greatness in the small things - especially the small things.
But being beautiful does not make something an art. Many things are beautiful that cannot be classified as art. In The Principles of Art, the English philosopher RG Collingwood (no relation) set out to define the difference between an art and a craft. A skilled worker in a furniture workshop might be highly skilled - and might derive deep satisfaction from his work - but he is not an artist. He is a craftsman. A carpenter assembles bits of wood according to a plan for a table and, usually, the more exact the plan the better the table.
In contrast, art (according to Collingwood) demands a separation of means and ends. There must be an act of alchemy, the emergence of a creative vision. A poet "converts emotions into poems". Unlike the assembly of a table, the final poem is more than - and different from - the sum of its parts.
 
 
A great sportsmen, very occasionally, does something that transcends the activity of scoring a goal or making a shot. He taps into a deep instinct that he cannot quite understand
 
Where does this leave sport? I would say sport usually has more in common with craft than art. The batsman practising in the nets over many years is honing his craft. He is searching for a technique that is reliable, consistent, resilient and robust. And if one bit breaks or becomes damaged, he hopes the rest of his game will function adequately while he makes running repairs. The job of a good craftsman is to create a finished article that can be repaired without the whole thing always needing a structural refit.
But sport is not limited to being a craft. A great sportsmen, very occasionally, does something that transcends the activity of scoring a goal or making a shot. He taps into a deep instinct that he cannot quite understand, let alone articulate. But I suspect this artistic strand can only be achieved by accident. If I was a coach, I would be worried if my star batsman said, "Today I am going to bat beautifully." Far better that he tried to bat as simply and naturally as possible - and the beauty happened along the way, as a happy but unintentional by-product.
Sport, I think, can momentarily touch the arts. But it cannot permanently belong as one.
But sports certainly fulfil some artistic roles. In the classical world, the arts had a defined religious purpose. For the Greeks, watching a play was a communal act of piety, a form of shared worship. Modern sport achieves something similar. What do we feel when we walk among the masses to a vast sports stadium? We are part of the crowd, we share a purpose and sense of hope with the thousands around us - we belong to a broader congregation. That religious language follows naturally. The art critic Robert Hughes famously wrote that train stations were the cathedrals of the industrial age. To update Hughes: sports stadiums are the cathedrals of the post-industrial age.
Above all, sport provides us with timeless stories. It reveals, in dramatic ways, essential elements of the human condition. A few years ago, speaking at a BBC debate called "Sport v the Arts", the classical scholar Edith Hall made this startling claim: "Sport has only two narratives - either you win or you lose - how boring!"
The truth could not be more different. A moment's reflection reveals that within the overarching narrative of victory or defeat (there are also draws and ties, Edith), there are countless twists and subplots - often far more interesting and affecting than the headline-grabbing result. Sometimes you have to look more carefully to see the real story.
Sport can be experienced at many different levels. Just like the arts.
Former England, Kent and Middlesex batsman Ed Smith's new book, Luck - What It Means and Why It Matters, is out now. His Twitter feed is here

Drinking two cans of Monster Energy drink on consecutive days kills 14 year old?




Monster Beverage Company is being investigated by the US Food and Drug Administration after a 14-year-old girl died after drinking just two cans of its popular energy drink.


The company is also being sued the family of Anais Fournier, who had a pre-existing heart condition, but says it does not believe its product was “in any way responsible for the girl’s death”.

The lawsuit, and reports of several other similar deaths, is likely to add to questions over Monster’s safety, and to escalate calls from its critics to change the way the beverage, which is the fastest growing energy drink in the US, is marketed.

Ms Fournier died of a heart attack brought on by ‘caffeine toxicity’ after drinking two 24-ounce Monster cans - containing 240 milligrams of caffeine, or seven times the amount of the caffeine in a 12-ounce cola - on consecutive days in December 2011.

An autopsy revealed the teenager, from Hagerstown, Maryland, died of cardiac arrhythmia due to caffeine toxicity that impeded her heart's ability to pump blood. The medical examiner also found that she had an inherited disorder that can weaken blood vessels.

Miss Fournier's parents Wendy Crossland and Richard Fournier claim Monster failed to warn about the risks of drinking its products.

Ms Crossland told the Record Herald: 'I was shocked to learn the FDA can regulate caffeine in a can of soda, but not these huge energy drinks.

“With their bright colors and names like Monster, Rockstar, and Full Throttle, these drinks are targeting teenagers with no oversight or accountability. These drinks are death traps for young, developing girls and boys, like my daughter, Anais.”

With double-digit growth through the third quarter of 2012, Beverage Digest Editor John Sicher said he expects energy drink sales to exceed $10 billion this year. He declined to speculate about future growth.

“I don't think they are going to ban energy drinks,” said Morningstar analyst Thomas Mullarkey. “The question arises whether or not it gives them more firepower for increased regulation.”
Monster Beverage Corp said it does not believe its drinks are 'in any way responsible' for Miss Fournier's death.

'Monster is unaware of any fatality anywhere that has been caused by its drinks,' the company said in a statement. It said it intends to vigorously defend itself in the suit.

So how long can the US hold the world to ransom with the dollar?



On 8 November 2010, the German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble told the Wall Street Journal: "The USA lived off credit for too long, inflated its financial sector massively and neglected its industrial base."
US gross government debt currently totals around $16trillion (£10trn). The US government holds around 40 per cent of the debt through the Federal Reserve and government funds. Individuals, corporations, banks, insurance companies, pension funds, mutual funds, state or local governments, hold 25 per cent. Foreign investors, China, Japan and "other" (principally oil exporting) nations, Asian central banks or sovereign wealth funds hold the rest.

Historically, America has been able to run large budget and balance of payments deficits because it had no problem finding investors in US Treasury securities. The unquestioned credit quality of the US, the unparalleled size and liquidity of its government bond market, ensured investor support. Given its reserve currency and safe haven status, US dollars and US government bonds were a cornerstone of investment portfolios of foreign lenders.

During this period, emerging countries such as China fuelled American growth, supplying cheap goods and cheap funding – recycling export proceeds into US bonds – to finance the purchase of these goods. It was a mutually convenient addiction .

Asked whether America hanged itself with an Asian rope, a Chinese official told a reporter: "No. It drowned itself in Asian liquidity."

Given the sheer quantum of US debt, foreign investors may become increasingly less willing to finance America. Japanese and European investors, struggling to finance their own government obligations, may simply not have the funds.

Given its magnitude and the lack of political will to deal with the problem of debt and public finances, the US is now deploying its FMDs – "financial extortion", "monetisation" and "devaluation" – to finance its requirements.

In a form of extortion, existing investors like China must continue to purchase US dollars and bonds to avoid a precipitous drop in the value of existing investments.

Debt monetisation – printing money – is another strategy. The US Federal Reserve is already the in-house pawnbroker to the US government, purchasing government bonds in return for supplying reserves to the banking system. Expedient in the short term, monetisation risks setting off inflation. The absence of demand in the economy, industrial over-capacity and the unwillingness of banks to lend have meant successive "quantitative easing" has not resulted in higher inflation to date. But the risks remain.
Monetisation is inexorably linked to devaluation of the US dollar. The zero interest rates policy and debt monetisation is designed to weaken the dollar. As John Connally, the US Treasury Secretary under President Richard Nixon, belligerently observed: "Our dollar, but your problem."

Despite bouts of dollar buying on its safe haven status, the US dollar has significantly weakened over the last two years, losing around 20 per cent against major currencies since 2009. As the dollar weakens US foreign investments and overseas income gain in value. But the major benefit is in relation to debt owned by foreigners. As almost all its government debt is denominated in US dollars, devaluation reduces its value.

This forces existing investors to keep rolling over debt to avoid realising losses. It encourages them to increase investment, to "double down" to lower their average cost of US dollars and debt. It also allows the US to enhance its competitive export position.

Major investors in US government bonds now find themselves in the position John Maynard Keynes identified: "Owe your banker £1,000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1m and the position is reversed."
Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the French finance minister under Charles de Gaulle, famously used the term "exorbitant privilege" to describe the advantages to America of the dollar's role as a reserve currency and its central role in global trade.

That privilege now is not only "exorbitant" but "extortionate". How long the world will let the US exercise it is uncertain.

Satyajit Das is a former banker and author of "Extreme Money" and "Traders, Guns & Money"

Tuesday 23 October 2012

Navratri and the lessons of fasting for atheists

Spiritual disciplines can teach us much about food discipline – I found my 10-day fast extremely rewarding



Julian Baggini

guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 October 2012 15.34 BST



It might seem odd but I, a convinced atheist, have recently completed a 10-day fast based on the Hindu festival of Navratri, which is being celebrated this week. Fasting is refraining from eating at all, or more usually certain proscribed foods.





These days, if we limit what we eat, it is almost certainly because we are trying to lose weight, detox or realise some kind of health benefit. The idea that we might seek to forgo certain foods for moral improvement seems bizarrely anachronistic. The penance of Catholic Lent and Friday fasting make as little sense to most of us as the once common idea that food should be avoided after a death for fear that food around the deceased would be impure.





But there are some real lessons we can learn from spiritual disciplines around food. For the Benedictine former abbot Christopher Jamison, only eating certain things at certain times is a way of countering our tendency to slavishly follow our desires. "It's a way of exercising choice very knowingly," he told me, "and at the same time a way of exercising discipline around food." Similarly, the Buddhist abbot Ajahn Sucitto says that too often eating becomes just one of those "compulsive activities which on a functional level are not necessary. We do it just because of a psychological habit."





For reasons like this, I thought fasting was worth a try and Navratri – literally meaning nine nights in Sanskrit – looked like a good model. It heralds the start of autumn, and is dedicated to Shakti, the deity responsible for creation. My rules were that I would eat three meals a day, with no snacking in between of any kind. I would forgo meat, seafood and dairy products and would not drink alcohol or eat sweets or cakes. I would strive to eat each meal mindfully and thankfully and on the last evening would have some kind of feast, a celebration of the pleasure and variety of good food rather than an excessive gorging. The idea can be summed up as countering the bad A of automaticity with the three good As of right appreciation, right autonomy and right action.





I found the 10 days extremely rewarding. It wasn't meant to be a trial, and when I did feel hungry I reminded myself that such feelings pass, and unless we're really starving, we can always choose to wait until our next meal.





I'm not the only atheist learning from religious fasting. The philosopher James Garvey, my successor as editor of the Philosophers' Magazine, has also followed a version of the Ramadan fast several times. "There is some sort of discovery of a part of yourself involved, or maybe a discovery associated with the human experience," he told me, "a feeling of being in control of your appetites for once. I can see why so many religions do it."





I've become quietly evangelical about it. Some people have no trouble controlling their appetites or just don't care much for food. But I suspect most of us eat too thoughtlessly too often. I plan to repeat my fast twice a year, around the spring and autumnal equinoxes. The next one starts on 14 March. I'd be happy for you to join me.

Be Your Own Dick Tracy


                 
Just walk into the nearest spyware shop, and grab the gizmo of your choice.






In a basement office-cum-showroom off Green Park in south Delhi, a demo is in progress. “Recording time is 12 hours, the images and sounds will be so clear you can see and hear everything,” offers the sales assistant. The customer, a man in his 40s with dark-circled eyes, is convinced; the deal is sealed. In an hour or so, the digital table clock he just bought should be sitting on his bedside table; hopefully, worth every penny of the 12,000-odd rupees he spent on it.

The innocuous clock is in fact a spycam, bought to combat “domestic abuse” in his bedroom, he confesses, even as he advises us on the best cam for our job. There are, after all, plenty of options: caps, wristwatches, sunglasses, buttons, pens, belts, pendants, photo-frames, iPhone lookalikes, cola cans, even chewing gum packs, each fitted with pinhole cameras and tiny recording devices to be your eyes and ears when you need it to be.

For anything from Rs 1,500-Rs 30,000 or more, you can play detective with a lifetime’s supply of spy devices available off the internet, in discreet shops, or through smses peddling the snare ware. A request to an online directory for details of shops selling spyware like pen cameras throws up nine addresses in south Delhi alone. No wonder Bhavna Paliwal, director of Tejas Detective Agency, has had to reluctantly ditch the pen camera as a work tool because it is “so common now”. Clearly, spyware has stealthily attached itself to the underbelly of urban relationships, with spouses, partners, friends and colleagues relying increasingly on guileful gizmos to catch their kith and kin in the act.
Mueen Pasha, founder of the Bangalore-based Spy Zone, has been selling spy gadgets for eight years, but it’s only now that his business is truly thriving—he sells at least a hundred gadgets a month, in the price range of Rs 4,000-Rs 15,000. “Sales have gone up, and in the last two years, family problems have come to the fore. These days working hours are so long that one doesn’t know what is going on at home and some people will go to any lengths to find out.”

In Mumbai, Mahmood, a salesperson in a spyware shop he didn’t want named, says, “Most often people buy these gadgets when they suspect their partners of infidelity. Many discuss their problems in detail, so that we can suggest the best gadget. Others claim they want to fix cameras in their shops or homes after a theft, or to keep an eye on their domestic helps, but we can tell they are lying.”
He has seen enough customers to know that the real reasons may be very different. Sanjay Singh, director of Indian Detective Agency, doesn’t hesitate to call the use of spycams a ‘trend’. “People going for business meetings try to sneak in devices to record conversations. Many who come to us have already tried these DIY spykits,” he says. One woman, he recalls, approached him to help her bring her husband to book. The gentleman in question, she alleged, was enjoying the company of other women behind her back. “I was surprised by the knowledge she had about spy devices!” Singh says.
Paliwal too has had clients trying to cut costs by doing the digging themselves instead of hiring a private eye. “Very often they fail,” she laughs, recounting how a newly-married man tried hiding a tiny camera in the air cooler. Only, he hadn’t factored in his wife’s keen eyesight. “As it turned out, he had no reason to suspect her,” she says. Another client, a professional working in a multinational company, made a mess of “investigations” trying to record his wife entering her office. “Their divorce case was under way, and if he could prove she had got herself a job, he wouldn’t have to shell out maintenance money,” she explains.

So common are these devices, and so diverse their customers, that Devendra, from Anand India’s sales team, finds it difficult to sketch up a client profile. “Aajkal to bahut chal raha hai,” he concedes, counting journalists, lawyers, doctors, wives and husbands among his customers. One popular product, he says, is the spy bug—a matchbox-sized device fitted with a SIM, which can be yours for Rs 3,000. “Once you put the sim into the device, and call that number, you can hear whatever is going on around that device.” If that sounds difficult to pull off, it isn’t. Arun (name changed) vouches for it. His “friend”, he claims, had once hidden this spybug in his girlfriend’s handbag when she went to meet a former classmate. “He suspected the two of them were more than friends and figured that listening in on their conversation would clear things up.” Obviously, the girl’s word that there was no funny business going on wasn’t enough.

Paliwal feels shows like Emotional Atyachaar, where cheating partners are spied upon and confronted, sparked the dubious inclination to peep into our own bedrooms. This inclination has been fuelled by easy access and low prices. Singh says, “Five or six years ago, we would buy pen cameras for Rs 15,000-Rs 20,000. Now Chinese versions of it can be bought for Rs 1,500 or less.”
That cannot be good news for unsuspecting subjects at the receiving end. As Singh cautions, misuse is an obvious danger. “I know of teenagers using these gadgets, they are so tech-savvy anyway. People know all about these gizmos; even leading dailies run advertisements for them. Girls often bear the brunt, being filmed without their knowledge and viewed by hundreds once the video is posted online.”
Even if the footage is for the eyes of the “spy” alone, the act itself is an invasion of privacy, a breach of trust. As Paliwal asks, “Will a wife who knows that her husband tried to record her activities on the sly ever trust him again?” Whatever the answer to that, it is a risk not a few are clearly willing to take.

Spy Camera
 
Belt Rs 7,500 Pinhole camera inside clasp with one hour battery back-up    Watch Rs 5,500 Two-hr battery back-up, 4 GB internal memory,
5 MP camera

 
Silk Necktie Rs 11,000 Pinhole camera in pattern. 4 GB internal memory.   Photo Rs 35,000 Can record for 2 months. Has an HD camera.

 
Canvas Cap Rs 7,500 4 GB memory, 1 hr back-up, 3 m microphone range    Chewing gum Rs 5,000 Can record 90-min video and take photos with 5 MP camera

Glasses Rs 12,500 Can record audio-video with 2-hr battery back-up.

Monday 22 October 2012

Ugly is the new Beautiful


REX FEATURES
view gallery VIEW GALLERY

At the launch tonight of Design Museum co-founder Stephen Bayley's new book, Ugly: the Aesthetics of Everything, guests will be served ugly canapés and ugly cocktails.

In attendance will be Mugly, an eight-year-old hairless Chinese Crested dog from Peterborough, who is the recent winner of the Ugliest Dog in the World contest, held annually in California, as well as models from the Ugly Model agency, including one woman credited with "looking like a fish".

At what is billed as London's first "ugly party", a grand café will be decked out with "ghoulish objects" and "revolting curios", including a stuffed pug giving birth to a flying pig and blown-up images from Bayley's book, including one of Myra Hindley. "My barman is working on a grey- coloured cocktail and Martinis with gherkins in them," says Bayley. "Talking about beauty is boring – when you get talking about ugliness it gets interesting."

His book Ugly explores the complexities of ugliness and makes the point that without ugliness, there would be no beauty. He has cherry-picked items for his book, including kitsch flying ducks, hideous pink-haired troll dolls – even the postmodernist architecture of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery gets singled out. Ugliness is fascinating, he claims – take the repugnant The Ugly Duchess by Quentin Massys – "It's one of the most popular postcards sold in London's National Gallery shop and rivals the sales of Monet's tranquil Water-Lilies," he says.

There are also images of the Eiffel Tower and the Albert Memorial: "In 1887 leading Paris intellectuals ganged up and said the Eiffel Tower, which was being built, was a 'hateful column of bolted tin… useless and monstrous'", he says. "Now the Eiffel Tower is regarded as one of the most touching, romantic French monuments. The Albert Memorial was loathed and detested – now it is charming, delightful and evocative."

There are no chapters in Ugly, which is Bayley's sequel to Taste, published 1991; instead it's full of long paragraphs of ideas exploring ugliness – a subject not many people have written about.
"I'm not being prescriptive about what is ugly – I'm just provoking ideas about our assumptions of ugliness," says Bayley.

"I'm not looking for agreement. When we talk about design, it is this attempt to introduce beauty by the Modern movement. They told us that if things were functional they would be beautiful – but as soon as you investigate what is beauty – I would say the evidence is mixed. A bomb-dropping Boeing B-52 is extraordinarily functional, but is it beautiful even though it is morally repugnant? What about a gun?

"Our view of what is and what isn't beautiful changes over time. Maybe there are no permanent values in the world of art. It is certainly a question that needs to be asked. If the whole world was beautiful it would in fact be extremely boring. We need a measure of ugliness to understand beauty. You can only understand heaven if you have a concept of hell. "

Bayley focuses on Ernö Goldfinger's Trellick Tower in west London: "If there ever was a test for taste, it's this," he says. The tall housing block built in 1972 was listed by English Heritage in 1998. "It was deplored by many as a brutalist horror. Now half the world regards it as an eyesore – the other half regards it as heroic and uplifting. Maybe they are both are right. Any minute now Prince Charles will come to admire it. "

Gebrüder Thonet's mass-produced Model No. 14 chair (1859), the original café chair, was revered by Le Corbusier as "the ultimate in elegant design".

"I like the chair – I like clean, unfussy, undecorated things – but I don't think it's inevitably, timelessly perfect," says Bayley, who also includes an image of an Amorphophallus titanum, known as the corpse flower, which "smells of death" and looks phallic. "Can nature be ugly? Personally, I think it can," he says.

There is no end to the fascination of ugliness for Bayley, whose book opens with a photograph of a pig and then Frankenstein. He adds: "If you are talking to architecture students and you ask them to deliberately design something ugly, it is very difficult. It is very difficult to create ugliness – what we call ugly seems to be accidental."

But whether you would want Matthias Grunewald's oil painting The Isenheim Altarpiece (1516) of a man with skin disease on your wall is quite another matter. Or indeed Hieronymus Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490-1510) depicting Hell, and full of disfigurements and mutations.

There is an image, too, of John Constable's Windmill among Houses and Rainbow – not because it is ugly. "I want to make the point that while we are all worried about the industrialisation of the countryside, this is what Constable's idyllic scenes of the countryside were often about."

Bayley also includes gargoyles from Notre-Dame de Paris, and anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda posters, in which Jews are depicted as ugly caricatures.

One section of the book, "The problem with hair", has images of the monster in I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), which shows, he says, "how abnormal hair retains a disturbing power".

"Firstly if you take a long view of the history of art, ideas about beauty are not permanent – and secondly, things that are ugly can be fascinating and perversely attractive" says Bayley. "No matter what your views, you couldn't read this book and not either come out lacerated, stimulated, annoyed or in total agreement with my genius. 
It's not a historical narrative but it's a collection of consistent and interesting and stimulating ideas."
'Ugly: the Aesthetics of Everything', by Stephen Bayley, is published by Goodman Fiell (£25
)

IMF's epic plan to conjure away debt and dethrone bankers



So there is a magic wand after all. A revolutionary paper by the International Monetary Fund claims that one could eliminate the net public debt of the US at a stroke, and by implication do the same for Britain, Germany, Italy, or Japan.

IMF
The IMF reports says the conjuring trick is to replace our system of private bank-created money. Photo: Reuters
One could slash private debt by 100pc of GDP, boost growth, stabilize prices, and dethrone bankers all at the same time. It could be done cleanly and painlessly, by legislative command, far more quickly than anybody imagined.
The conjuring trick is to replace our system of private bank-created money -- roughly 97pc of the money supply -- with state-created money. We return to the historical norm, before Charles II placed control of the money supply in private hands with the English Free Coinage Act of 1666.
Specifically, it means an assault on "fractional reserve banking". If lenders are forced to put up 100pc reserve backing for deposits, they lose the exorbitant privilege of creating money out of thin air.
The nation regains sovereign control over the money supply. There are no more banks runs, and fewer boom-bust credit cycles. Accounting legerdemain will do the rest. That at least is the argument.
Some readers may already have seen the IMF study, by Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof, which came out in August and has begun to acquire a cult following around the world. 
Entitled "The Chicago Plan Revisited", it revives the scheme first put forward by professors Henry Simons and Irving Fisher in 1936 during the ferment of creative thinking in the late Depression.
Irving Fisher thought credit cycles led to an unhealthy concentration of wealth. He saw it with his own eyes in the early 1930s as creditors foreclosed on destitute farmers, seizing their land or buying it for a pittance at the bottom of the cycle.
The farmers found a way of defending themselves in the end. They muscled together at "one dollar auctions", buying each other's property back for almost nothing. Any carpet-bagger who tried to bid higher was beaten to a pulp.
Benes and Kumhof argue that credit-cycle trauma - caused by private money creation - dates deep into history and lies at the root of debt jubilees in the ancient religions of Mesopotamian and the Middle East.
Harvest cycles led to systemic defaults thousands of years ago, with forfeiture of collateral, and concentration of wealth in the hands of lenders. These episodes were not just caused by weather, as long thought. They were amplified by the effects of credit.
The Athenian leader Solon implemented the first known Chicago Plan/New Deal in 599 BC to relieve farmers in hock to oligarchs enjoying private coinage. He cancelled debts, restituted lands seized by creditors, set floor-prices for commodities (much like Franklin Roosevelt), and consciously flooded the money supply with state-issued "debt-free" coinage.
The Romans sent a delegation to study Solon's reforms 150 years later and copied the ideas, setting up their own fiat money system under Lex Aternia in 454 BC.
It is a myth - innocently propagated by the great Adam Smith - that money developed as a commodity-based or gold-linked means of exchange. Gold was always highly valued, but that is another story. Metal-lovers often conflate the two issues.
Anthropological studies show that social fiat currencies began with the dawn of time. The Spartans banned gold coins, replacing them with iron disks of little intrinsic value. The early Romans used bronze tablets. Their worth was entirely determined by law - a doctrine made explicit by Aristotle in his Ethics - like the dollar, the euro, or sterling today.
Some argue that Rome began to lose its solidarity spirit when it allowed an oligarchy to develop a private silver-based coinage during the Punic Wars. Money slipped control of the Senate. You could call it Rome's shadow banking system. Evidence suggests that it became a machine for elite wealth accumulation.
Unchallenged sovereign or Papal control over currencies persisted through the Middle Ages until England broke the mould in 1666. Benes and Kumhof say this was the start of the boom-bust era.
One might equally say that this opened the way to England's agricultural revolution in the early 18th Century, the industrial revolution soon after, and the greatest economic and technological leap ever seen. But let us not quibble.
The original authors of the Chicago Plan were responding to the Great Depression. They believed it was possible to prevent the social havoc caused by wild swings from boom to bust, and to do so without crimping economic dynamism.
The benign side-effect of their proposals would be a switch from national debt to national surplus, as if by magic. "Because under the Chicago Plan banks have to borrow reserves from the treasury to fully back liabilities, the government acquires a very large asset vis-à-vis banks. Our analysis finds that the government is left with a much lower, in fact negative, net debt burden."
The IMF paper says total liabilities of the US financial system - including shadow banking - are about 200pc of GDP. The new reserve rule would create a windfall. This would be used for a "potentially a very large, buy-back of private debt", perhaps 100pc of GDP.
While Washington would issue much more fiat money, this would not be redeemable. It would be an equity of the commonwealth, not debt.
The key of the Chicago Plan was to separate the "monetary and credit functions" of the banking system. "The quantity of money and the quantity of credit would become completely independent of each other."
Private lenders would no longer be able to create new deposits "ex nihilo". New bank credit would have to be financed by retained earnings.
"The control of credit growth would become much more straightforward because banks would no longer be able, as they are today, to generate their own funding, deposits, in the act of lending, an extraordinary privilege that is not enjoyed by any other type of business," says the IMF paper.
"Rather, banks would become what many erroneously believe them to be today, pure intermediaries that depend on obtaining outside funding before being able to lend."
The US Federal Reserve would take real control over the money supply for the first time, making it easier to manage inflation. It was precisely for this reason that Milton Friedman called for 100pc reserve backing in 1967. Even the great free marketeer implicitly favoured a clamp-down on private money.
The switch would engender a 10pc boost to long-arm economic output. "None of these benefits come at the expense of diminishing the core useful functions of a private financial system."
Simons and Fisher were flying blind in the 1930s. They lacked the modern instruments needed to crunch the numbers, so the IMF team has now done it for them -- using the `DSGE' stochastic model now de rigueur in high economics, loved and hated in equal measure.
The finding is startling. Simons and Fisher understated their claims. It is perhaps possible to confront the banking plutocracy head without endangering the economy.
Benes and Kumhof make large claims. They leave me baffled, to be honest. Readers who want the technical details can make their own judgement by studying the text here.
The IMF duo have supporters. Professor Richard Werner from Southampton University - who coined the term quantitative easing (QE) in the 1990s -- testified to Britain's Vickers Commission that a switch to state-money would have major welfare gains. He was backed by the campaign group Positive Money and the New Economics Foundation.
The theory also has strong critics. Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research says banks are in a sense already being forced to increase reserves by EU rules, Basel III rules, and gold-plated variants in the UK. The effect has been to choke lending to the private sector.
He argues that is the chief reason why the world economy remains stuck in near-slump, and why central banks are having to cushion the shock with QE.
"If you enacted this plan, it would devastate bank profits and cause a massive deflationary disaster. There would have to do `QE squared' to offset it," he said.
The result would be a huge shift in bank balance sheets from private lending to government securities. This happened during World War Two, but that was the anomalous cost of defeating Fascism.
To do this on a permanent basis in peace-time would be to change in the nature of western capitalism. "People wouldn't be able to get money from banks. There would be huge damage to the efficiency of the economy," he said.
Arguably, it would smother freedom and enthrone a Leviathan state. It might be even more irksome in the long run than rule by bankers.
Personally, I am a long way from reaching an conclusion in this extraordinary debate. Let it run, and let us all fight until we flush out the arguments.
One thing is sure. The City of London will have great trouble earning its keep if any variant of the Chicago Plan ever gains wide support.