Concluding thoughts about the book ‘Alice™’

Having finished reading it, I’ll try not to give spoilers because I think it’s such a worthwhile read.

But I can’t help making some observations, to give a kind of warning.

In my initial comments on the book at - https://www.skool.com/debunking-economics-7964/initial-reaction-to-stuart-kells-alice-book?p=6539c01e I described its author Kells as something of a modern-day Diarist. That likely seemed negative, and I meant it to be so. On encountering the book I doubted the author’s provenance to be able write with precision about intricate details of the distinctly non-obvious world of high finance, since Kells was and is a complete outsider to that world. Yet in the second half of the book, onwards from Section 4 ‘The Invention’ almost to the end, the skills and outlook of a meticulously detail-obsessed diarist are exactly what I think are needed, to tell the complete and full story with all its broad and profound implications. A specialist would likely have too narrow a grasp to properly encompass the whole. And Kells has - as is obvious from his extensive 'Acknowledgments' - something of an army of specialists at his side.

Second 4 shows just how many parties and how many different sorts of skills lay behind the Alice project, while Sections 5 and 6 describe the tangles of the complicated and evolving context of the project, financially, politically and socially. My warning is about the concluding part of Section 6, called ‘Don’t look back’, where diarist-Kells doesn’t flinch at making disappointment, pain and tragedy leap off the page. So I’d say the book’s message to activists is that the game really is rigged - even the supposedly neutral and objective law isn’t necessarily unbiassed.

Yet the story the book tells doesn’t really end there - and it might well continue to have ‘legs’ into the unforeseeable future. In the last full Chapter, ‘Today and Tomorrow’ Kells turns philosophic, writing more like a pragmatic systems-analyst than any kind of Diarist. He explains why he thinks the decisions that led to the outcome of his story are a mis-step, with broad and serious consequences. I think he implies that hope for the future requires amending those decisions, however impossibly-hard a task that might seem today.

So my recommendation stands better than before - I think ‘Alice™’ is a cracking book and (in a slightly sad way) relevant to both thought and action within the ‘space of the possible’ for all our futures. In justification of that relevance, I think it's worth quoting a few sentences from the start of the final Chapter, that seem to sum up the Alice-project's aims -

"Protecting customers, taxpayers and the community in general from the excesses of modern banking requires a new conversation about the role of banks and governments in finance; a new underastanding of loans, deposits, and derivatives as one family of financial contracts; and a new awareness of the privileged position of private corporations in the global financial system. Crucially and urgently, society as a whole needs to think differently and more deeply and creatively about the nature of money - possibly by first discarding the term itself. 'Money' encompasses a range of phenomena that have materially different purposes and risks.".

Later in that Chapter, Kells continues -

"Above all, financial institutions and the financial system need to be recast to serve the interests of consumers and taxpayers. As part of a post-Ayn-Rand, post-neoliberal, post-Thatcherite, post-Friedmanite world, the purpose of finance needs to be reoriented towards the interests of countries and citizens. How to get there ?".

The circumstantial effects of the 2008 crash led me to question and explore the nature of money - which I'd never thought of doing before. That exploration led me to economics, Steve and Skool - all of which now makes me much in agreement with all that Kells, in those few sentences, has said.

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