This is Freeing Growth
Welcome to the home web site of the Freeing Growth trilogy of books! These three books attempt to lay out how the next age of human civilisation should look on the basis of a post-Cartesian worldview. Check out the about page for a detailed introduction with bibliography.
Book One (the Red Book) is the easy-to-read Introductory volume which uses as few technical and mathematical arguments as possible. It is broken into a series of sections with Sections One, Two and Three outlining the book's post-Cartesian philosophical worldview (an empirical metaphysics) via Scientific, Simplistic and Moral argument. Section Four briefly outlines a series of proposals for small, simple & conservative changes to multiple areas of Western society in order to achieve double-digit sustained economic growth not just for now, not even for twenty years, but forever. At ten percent annual economic growth, our economy would double roughly every seven years.
Where Book One is light on specifics, Book Two (the Green Book) describes the worldview and proposals of Book One in detail using mathematics and computer modelling as necessary. While not for the faint of heart, it is still written in clear and concise language which explains most of the methods & operations employed. Book Two is yet to be written.
Book Three (the Purple Book) is likely to be written some time from now and will attempt to cover the more difficult & contentious topics from which most tend to shy away. Issues such as the fundamental nature of God, the meaning of hatred, abuse and disgust, the specific proposals for the new computer-interfacing human language proposed in Book One and many other "blue-sky" topics.
Want to know more? See the much longer description of the books or check out our Frequently Asked Questions.
Interested in contributing to the content of these books? Visit the collaborative theory wiki for these series of books, Neo-Capitalism.
Recent News:
Announcement: Freeing Growth Foundation Taking Over This Site
Our apologies to viewers for this site being down for the last few weeks - we were hit like some 100,000 other sites by the VAServ outage which took down the server upon which this website is currently hosted.
We are glad to announce that the Freeing Growth project is being incorporated into a wider Freeing Growth Foundation non-profit organisation whose remit is considerably expanded beyond just the publication of the Freeing Growth books. As part of this change, we will be moving freeinggrowth.org and neocapitalism.org onto a new and much larger dedicated server around the start of July, and the Foundation shall be taking over the provision and running of freeinggrowth.org and neocapitalism.org along with a new site, deepereconomics.org. After the server migration we shall revamp freeinggrowth.org with information about its mission and purpose. We still intend to publish our set of books, though in tandem with other publications operating under different trading and brand names.
It will take some time before the Foundation can accept charitable tax-free donations - we will however keep you posted! We look forward to your continuing visits!
Current State of the Freeing Growth Project
Just a quick update to let you know where the Freeing Growth project currently stands. Despite the lack of anything new posted here since January, I have been investing significant amounts of work into the wider scheme of things. The albatross of university study is finally lifting - God have I hated wasting a year of useful time trapped in the Masters at UCC. Very soon now, I will be finally free.
The first realisation early this year was that publishers simply aren't interested in a non-fiction writer with any "big" platform unless they have a Nobel Prize in something, and even then you'd want a household famous name if you're writing something "off the wall". Even if I were just writing about Economics alone and from a semi-conventional standpoint, I'd need a minimum of having reached some high up academic position (a professorship) which implies a fair whack of peer reviewed publications in top journals. As the publishers aren't there, neither are the literary agents. It makes sense - after all, where's the business model? Add to that the current severe recessionary woes that the publishing industry in general is experiencing (at around 25% shrinkage, mostly due to much of it becoming obsolete) and none of them are feeling like taking risks.
The second realisation, and this is partially thanks to a conversation with Dylan Evans, is that you need to build and maintain "mindshare" i.e. to obtain and maintain a set of people who like to inform themselves of your opinion on a regular basis. Back when nedprod.com was actually interesting I had a lot of regular readers, though nowadays the only people who semi-regularly read it are people whom I have known and go there to check up on what's happening with me should they happen to think of me. As my life has become more boring, and indeed post frequency has dropped to about nine per year, there is no reason for anyone to bother reading. No wonder then that no one could give a crap about what I'd be doing.
Dylan, being of an older generation, still feels that the editorial column in the printed page is where it is at. I think him right in the sense of reaching those who currently have power - however I also think that the printed media has had its day in terms of influencing much of the future. Anyone under the age of thirty simply doesn't touch the stuff - even I at the age of thirty-one just about surface skim The Economist each week and that's thanks to the lavatory or picking Megan up from school. I just don't have the time to read books or newspapers: if it isn't electronic and there blinking at me when I wake up the computer in the morning, chances are I'll miss it.
If Print-on-demand (POD) publishing gets properly bound into customised and instant information (and I think this likely), then the printed page will remain only for fiction and extended treatments of some specialised non-fiction topic - newspapers, editorial columns and periodicals are definitely becoming obsolete (as their advertising revenues prove). I can definitely see how POD could literally turn book publishing into an entirely individualised experience i.e. a customer assembles a printed book consisting of chapters of various things off the web, and has just one copy printed and sent to them. As much as electronic book readers or even electronic paper might take off, I personally still find a printed book by far the easiest on public transport and looking around at fellow travellers, I am hardly alone. Unlike electronic books, paper ones are more reliable, need less maintainance and they're still much easier on the eye in dim lighting. You also don't need to fret if you lose them or they get stolen.
Now I have no idea where publishing is exactly going to be at in the future, but I am fairly sure it will need the content to be in an electronically accessible format which means getting it into machine-readable XML. To that end, I have developed a five point plan through which I am about half way:
- Given the feedback to the first draft, write a much shorter and easier to access summary of the main platform points in a short pamphlet type book suitable for people to quickly read and gather the most important points. I finished this some time ago - it's called The Neo-Capitalist Manifesto, and it's been uploaded to Google Books, Google Knol, and a few other places on the internet where original research is allowed.
- Upgrade the syndication feed infrastructure on nedprod.com, freeinggrowth.org and neocapitalism.org to route various mashed up content to feed readers. Just about every current web browser can subscribe to syndication feeds, as does the Google search engine and various blog reading tools, so being able to provide content in all sorts of various useful formats would surely be a boon to readers.
This turned out to be quite the endeavour, and it's taken weeks of effort. Firstly nedprod.com is an ancient 1990s type technology website which was designed around static HTML pages - it still runs on the original CERN web browser. I only introduced Unicode (international language support) in 2007 and I only backported the XML-compatible HTML variant XHTML support to diary entries from October 2006. I had to write a PHP script which parsed all the diary entry archives into an XML DOM object and used XPath expressions to mangle the data into an Atom feed output. Getting it right took some weeks, not least the patching up of style and hyperlink information.
The next task was also fairly involved: I had to completely rewrite Plone's RSS feed generator to output an Atom feed instead (the implementation of which I have since uploaded to plone.org) because Yahoo Pipes has issues with RSS feed inputs despite only offering RSS out. As of last night though, the Plone feed outputs now play nicely with the nedprod feed outputs which has allowed me to generate a super-duper feed of feeds: the All Things Niall Feed
which even comes in translated languages! - Convert most of the introductory content of the first draft of book one into Wiki format (a hypertextually linked repository of knowledge). We know that Google likes knowledge wikis and at some magic tipping point it will start to return knowledge wikis pretty high up the search rankings once they become diverse (and "fresh") enough. My efforts there are at an early but progressing stage - you can check out the embryonic Neo-Capitalism Wiki.
One of the huge advantages of putting the first draft into Wiki format (and to be honest, not an advantage obvious on first sight) is the ability to hyperlink it into other parts of the internet - most especially Wikipedia. Yeah, yeah I know that that's the whole point of wikis, but then I'd never written one before and to be honest, had found most of them apart from Wikipedia fairly useless because they tend to lack coherent structure. Anyway, that hyperlinking ability means that you can skip explanations which speeds things up quite noticeably. If the reader already knows what you're talking about they can move on, if they don't they can follow the link. It also allows the individual pages to link into one another in a much more cohesive way - this problem of interlinking made my first book draft particularly impenetrable because printed text does not lend itself well to "web" style knowledge. - Write and submit academic papers for peer-reviewed publication. I think this stage particularly important because of the self-discipline involved: it would be most self-productive for myself I think to break up my proposals into lots of little journal article sized chunks and to send them in for peer review. It'll take two years from start to finish, but it would do me no harm at all and would be very useful if I ever decide to apply for an academic role at a university. It is a shame it couldn't form part of my PhD, but I simply can't afford the fees right now plus finding a sufficiently tolerant supervisor would be tough. I did try experimentally uploading some essays I wrote for Economics at St. Andrews to RePEC, the central database for Economics articles. You can see them here.
- After generating and submitting the academic papers, start writing and publishing (via Lightning Source) a series of Freeing Growth books which expand on various points of the overall manifesto platform.
That's the plan - all I need is the free time and sufficient money to do it. In theory, should these ideas prove popular, the income from book sales, advertising from these sites (especially if people end up using neocapitalism.org as their discussion forum) and hopefully from more than a few donations should be capable of supporting myself and Megan within two years. In the meantime, especially given the job market, it'll likely be grinds and welfare payments keeping us alive.
It sucks, but then realising dreams is never cheap.
Looks like a rewrite will be needed
I have significantly improved the "About the Books" section again - it slightly repeats itself towards the end, but it's not bad at all in quickly capturing the essence of the books. I have also updated the book cover with the latest blurb and subtitle as I had had the older version there for a long while. I am particularly pleased with the thumbnail shrink - I used a tool called ClearScale from a Harvard Compsci project which uses RGB interpolation to improve the horizontal resolution just as ClearType does for Windows fonts. Without it the text towards the bottom of the back page was so blurred as to be unreadable.
Considering the feedback from the test reading group, it is looking increasingly likely that I will have to completely rewrite the first book next summer break into a sequence of smaller, focused volumes as the existing first draft has been perceived as trying to achieve "too much" and therefore most readers will be put off by the sheer density & complexity of the book. This suits me fine as the hard bit is coming up with a coherent explanation of the ideas & proposals of the books, so simply rewriting their presentation into something smaller may be time consuming but is not hard. Moreover, publishing a stream of books is better for cash flow and author positioning in the distributed mind than fewer, bigger books which allow memories to fuzz & fade.
Megan may have found me a line into Penguin's US non-fiction department. I'll keep here posted with news!
Content More or Less Done For Now
Much of this Christmas break has been spent adding content to this site, not helped by illness throughout. I had hoped to add quite a few more bits & pieces, not least a great deal more content to neocapitalism.org (which currently is almost empty) but what is here at present will do for the time being.
After all, the first book isn't even remotely published yet - in fact, I haven't even attempted to find a literary agent yet because the first draft is still undergoing review by my panel of selected experts plus the "Freeing Growth Girls" to whom the book is dedicated. I hear that the girls are roughly up to about page 100 after some three weeks with the book, so I am expecting many months yet before they return their copies with their notes.
I may possibly have a few leads going into getting a copy to the legendary literary agent John Brockman. I am flying out to the States tomorrow morning to spend New Year's with Megan's family in the mid-West, but while there I'll also investigate a few more leads. Chances are there won't be much more content added here for weeks to come as term at UCC gets going. I really wish I could be done with that course - I am impatient to be doing something actually meaningful, however I need it as insurance should the book fail and I must seek gainful employment.
As the book itself points out, it should be nothing like as hard as this to make ends meet and do something good for the world. Everything in our modern world tries to get you to self-optimise in a selfish fashion, never in an altruistic fashion. No wonder that we are standing in the end of days.
Announcement: Freeing Growth Foundation Taking Over This Site
