#john lanchester

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance

THIS IS MY LAST POST FOR 2025! SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!

I'm at the end of my tour for my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification. My last two stops are CCC in Hamburg, Dec 27-30 and the Tattered Cover in Denver (Jan 22). Hope to see you!

I'm about to sign off for the year – actually, I was ready to do it yesterday, but then I happened upon a brief piece of writing that was so perfect that I decided I'd do one more edition of Pluralistic for 2025.

The piece in question is John Lanchester's "For Every Winner A Loser," in the London Review of Books, in which Lanchester reviews two books about the finance sector: Gary Stevenson's The Trading Game and Rob Copeland's The Fund:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/john-lanchester/for-every-winner-a-loser

It's a long and fascinating piece and it's certainly left me wanting to read both books, but that's not what convinced me to do one more newsletter before going on break – rather, it was a brief passage in the essay's preamble, a passage that perfectly captures the total social uselessness of the finance sector as a whole.

Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services."

The other 97% of finance is gambling. Here's how Stevenson breaks it down: say your farm grows mangoes, averaging about 100 mangoes per year. You need money before the mangoes are harvested, so you sell the future ownership of the harvest to a broker at $1/crate.

The broker immediately flips that interest in your harvest to a dealer who believes (on the basis of a rumor about bad weather) that mangoes will be scarce this year and is willing to pay $1.10/crate. Next, an international speculator (trading on the same rumor) buys the rights from the broker at $1.20/crate.

Now come the side bets: a "momentum trader" (who specializing in bets on market trends continuing) buys the rights to your crop for $1.30/crate. A contrarian trader (who bets against momentum traders) short-sells the momentum trader's bet at $1.20. More short sellers pile in and drive the price down to $1/crate.

Now, a new rumor circulates, about conditions being ripe for a bounteous mango harvest, so more short-sellers appear, and push the price to $0.90/crate. This tempts the original broker back in, and he buys your crop back at $1/crate.

That's when the harvest comes. You bring in the mangoes. They go to market, and fetch $1.10/crate.

This is finance – a welter of transactions, only one of which (selling your mangoes to people who eat them) involve the real economy. Everything else is "speculation on the movement of prices." The nine transactions that took place between your planting the crop and someone eating the mangoes are all zero sum – every trade has an evenly matched winner and loser, and when you sum them all up, they come out to zero. In other words, no value was created.

This is the finance sector. In a world where the real economy generates $105 trillion/year, the financial derivatives market adds up to $667 trillion/year. This is "the biggest business in the world" – and it's useless. It produces nothing. It adds no value.

If you work a job where you do something useful, you are on the losing side of this economy. All the real money is in this socially useless, no-value-creating, hypertrophied, metastasized finance sector. Every gain in finance is matched by a loss. It all amounts to – literally – nothing.

So that's what tempted me into one more blog post for the year – an absolutely perfect distillation of the uselessness of "the biggest business in the world," whose masters are the degenerate gamblers who buy and sell our politicians, set our policy, and control our lives. They're the ones enshittifying the internet, burning down the planet, and pushing Elon Musk towards trillionairedom.

It's their world, and we just live on it.

For now.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/18/self-licking-ice-cream-cone/#job-creators

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[jacobwren]

"Even the South Sea Bubble, the event which gave its name to financial bubbles, had an underlying rationale: who can deny that the expansion of global networks of trade and capital turned out to be a vitally important and vastly lucrative event? Even if all the investors in the original bubble – including Isaac Newton, who realised it was a bubble, but got caught up in the excitement anyway – lost their shirts. The historical pattern is typically that a big, genuine innovation is spotted on the horizon. Money floods in to take advantage. Too much money. The flow of capital is so great that it is impossible to allocate it correctly, and distinctions disappear between what is likely and what is impossible, what is prudent and what is reckless, what might happen and what never could. After the flood of money, the doubts; after the doubts, the crash; and after the crash, the gradual emergence of the phenomenon that got all the speculators so excited in the first place." - John Lanchester, King of Cannibal Island

[justforbooks]

“This is not a conventional cookbook,” writes Lanchester’s hero Tarquin Winot in this thriller-masquerading-as-foodie memoir. Over a variety of “seasonal” chapters, Winot weighs in about his various relatives and friends, “the many extant batter, waffle and pancake dishes” from “Swedish krumkaker” to “Polish naleśniki” and his convictions in relation to fish (“lemon sole is a very underrated fish, much closer in quality to its more highly regarded Dover cousin than wisdom normally permits”). Lanchester crafts Winot-as-author to be infuriating – he’s pompous, tricksy and pedantic – but a fancy prose style soon turns out to be the most innocent of his vices. A dark, funny and exquisitely crafted book.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[tanda-soal]

JOMP BPC | December 2: Currently Reading

I'm reading The Wall by John Lanchester for my "Literature of the Refugee" class. Unlike the other books I've read for this class, this one focuses on refugees created by the climate crisis.

[semper-legens]

44. The Wall, by John Lanchester

Owned: No, library Page count: 276 My summary: It’s Kavanagh’s time patrolling the Wall. It’s important work. It’s only two years. Everyone has to do it. And once his time is up, he’ll have so many opportunities open to him. The only thing he needs to do is survive. If the Others come, they will kill him. So he has to make sure that doesn’t happen. My rating: 4/5

Well, this is an interesting piece of political commentary. No prizes for guessing what the titular Wall is inspired by. This is set in a dystopian future England, where the sea level has risen and refugees from around the world are trying to get into the country for, you know, refuge. Kavanagh’s job is to stand on the Wall and shoot people if they’re trying to get in. It’s a chilling look at the mundanity of prejudice and hate, and the kind of culture that fosters said hatred. I thought it was very effective, though I have to admit the ending kind of petered out.

The interesting thing about this sort of dystopia is that it’s so close to just real, modern life. This is what it’s like to live in regular England. There are bad things going on in the world, so we repel them from our borders. We pretend they are not happening, escalate conflicts until people are legitimately desperate and then demonise them for being desperate and responding to our violence with violence. Climate change has ruined large parts of the world, but that’s not our problem! We send young people to fight and die for us, but that’s normal! We literally enslave people, but that’s fine because we grant citizenship to their children! It’s a very plausible future version of England, and that fills me with shame.

So this is about a climate disaster, but it’s mostly a background detail - until Kavanagh gets put to sea, the climate disaster doesn’t really factor in. What’s important are the Others. This is the generic name for refugees coming into England, mostly fleeing said climate disaster. They can be from any other country, though the one whose origin is known is from Somalia, so you can bet there’s a race/xenophobia aspect to this. The Others are made...well, literally Other, dehumanised and made into a seething mass of violent criminals, never mind that their options are to try and break into England or attempt to live in the ocean. The government of England is terrible - if any Others get through the Wall, the same amount of soldiers are abandoned to the ocean, and that’s seen as being a natural, if sad, thing that happens. Kavanagh doesn’t think it can happen to him, until it does.

And the commentary here is subtle, which I appreciated. Kavanagh is bigoted against the Others, and doesn’t see the problem with them being made into Help (basically slaves) if they break through into England, or straight up murdered by the people on the Wall. The only problem he sees with using Help is a class issue for him - he’s more working class, and having Help is a status symbol as you have to pay the government for their use. Not to do with the inherent humanity of these people, oh no. He’s just worried about looking posh. And yeah, that’s what we’re like, as a culture. We’re ready to throw other people under the bus and only care about ourselves. Lanchester never draws attention to this, lets the reader come up with their own conclusions. Kavanagh doesn’t really learn a lesson about tolerance and understanding. He just...is. And I think that works for the story Lanchester is telling.

Next up, a different flavour of dystopia, as things go from bad to worse in the FAYZ.

[richardarmitagefanpage]

Reality And Other Stories by John Lanchester, narrated by Richard and other narrators, will be released on Audible US and UK on March 9, 2021.

[probablyasocialecologist]

He was a baby politician, an infant member of the elite. He still had his training wheels. I may have been sleep-deprived, I might possibly still have been a bit drunk, but I fell for a moment into a reverie, a kind of guided dream, in which I imagined baby members of the elite being born from chrysalises, already wearing their shiny suits, their ties pre-knotted, their first clichés already on their lips, being wiped down of cocoon matter and pushed towards a podium, ready to make their first speech, spout their first platitude, lose their virginity at lying. They’d be made to do that before they were given any food or drink or comfort, just to make sure it was the thing they knew first and best, the thing which came most naturally.

John Lanchester, The Wall

[book-marked-reading]

Audiobook Review: Reality and Other Stories

Audiobook Review: Reality and Other Stories

Reality and Other Stories by John Lanchester (audiobook) I’ve really been trying to read (listen to?) more audiobooks, and what better than a bunch of horror stories? The narrators chosen for these tales were all great, really immersing you in the story. While I wouldn’t call most of these stories horror exactly, a couple did have decidedly creepy elements. The narration certainly added to this…

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