Join John Lanchester to talk about Whoops! - our book of the month - Tues 2 Nov, 8pm

[GeraldineMumsnet]

Hi everyone, Tilly is in outer circles of internet hell so am posting on her behalf.

We've chosen Whoops! by John Lanchester as our October book of the month.

It's highly topical given child benefit cuts and the impending comprehensive spending review (ie even more cuts) because it succinctly and wittily explains why the credit crunch happened and what led to the current dire financial mess.

We're really pleased that John can join us for our next book club discussion on Tues 2 Nov at 8pm.

Whoops! is out now in paperback (a manageable 200 pages). Read more about it and John's other books, plus glittering reviews of Whoops! by many book club authors we've already discussed.

Hope you can join us, should be a great discussion. :)

I know about the curious debt thing. My parents have never had a credit card and were even wary for ages about the hole in the wall. Dh and I are not profligate but we do have credit cards and don't save for every big purchase......

LeninGuido: how do you propose to explain regulatory capital, how it is set and consequences of the various options to the general public?

I think the risk of popular action in respect of complicated subjects is that "the public" is too easily manipulated by the conveyors of information. Inevitably the media focus on a few aspects of the complicated subject and readers then focus on an even narrower part, so that change brought about by popular action risks addressing only some of the problem, potentially resulting in worse outcomes than those it is trying to cure.

Hello

Sorry I'm a bit late and John, I must confess haven't finished the book yet .

So apols if you get to this later in the book and I haven't got there.

How much of the credit issues do you think is down to the L'oreal attitude "because you're worth it" -i.e. why not have x or y NOW?

I can remember as a graduate on a salary of peanuts at the time, £14,500 in London 11 years ago looking at my peers on the tube and adding up what they were wearing - designer handbag, top-end high street coat, high-street-but-still-£100 boots and wondering how on earth they afforded it?

And capital requirements have already been increased, without popular action. The trouble with increasing them too much or too quickly is that it would stifle economic growth.

What about all those unfunny puns though?

No, not everyone is to blame. And the consequences, in terms of lost jobs, are going in many cases to fall on people who are blameless. I heard the wife of a firefighter who'd just been laid off saying, I think it was on the Today programme, 'Tell us what we did wrong? Tell us what we did that we should have done differently?' It was a question with great force, and one which a lot of people will be asking.

Most of the writers I know are like the rest of us, bewildered and anxious about the prospect of the next difficult years. As I say in the book, I think people are going to get steadily angrier.

@AsterixNotTintin

Axterix beats Tintin, in every way.

Asterix: historically informative, witty, believable (in that magic potion accounts for everything), heroes you'd want to have a drink with

Tintin: dodgy made-up places, grindingly unfunny (sole jokes: Snowy gets lashed on whiskey, Calculus can't hear and Thomson twins fall over), highly improbable plots, a prissy hero that makes you want to stick a fork in your head.

But my husband and two sons would disagree. I'm trapped in a household of no taste.

Anyway, back to finance...

I am one of the Annoyed. I didn't buy a house, or borrow money, or spend very much at all, over the last 10 years. Mainly because I didn't earn enough to buy a house or borrow that much money. Towards the end of the book you say we are all to blame, but I passionately feel we aren't. Yes, if you borrowed way too much then you should now not complain if asked to pay it back. But there must be thousands of us who haven't?

What do your fellow writers feel (I'm imagining most of them aren't in the Notting Hill mansion bracket, although maybe they are?)

Taking a breather from credit crunch for a second...

John, what was the children's book that you most love/most inspired you, and why?

I still wonder champagnesupernova. I think I am really a dour Scot at heart......

Yes, quite a bit of it is to do with that?mind you, I think we didn't go quite as nuts here as people in some other countries. I met a waitress in a cafe in Reykjavik while I was researching the book. I asked her in what way her life had changed. She said that now, when she went on holiday, she'd go camping with her friends, and she no longer thought it was normal to take a plane to Milan for the weekend and go shopping on the via Linate?on the proceeds of her job in the cafe and the strength of the krona.

@champagnesupernova

Hello

Sorry I'm a bit late and John, I must confess haven't finished the book yet .

So apols if you get to this later in the book and I haven't got there.

How much of the credit issues do you think is down to the L'oreal attitude "because you're worth it" -i.e. why not have x or y NOW?

I can remember as a graduate on a salary of peanuts at the time, £14,500 in London 11 years ago looking at my peers on the tube and adding up what they were wearing - designer handbag, top-end high street coat, high-street-but-still-£100 boots and wondering how on earth they afforded it?

LeninGuido: Whoops is an excellent attempt at educating the general public about some of what went on, but even it, brilliant as it is, cannot convey the complexity of the subject and the trade-offs that must be made.

Champagnesupernova: personally I think a good proportion of what went on can be attributed to the attitude you describe. Arriving in London as a young graduate I was stunned to discover that my fellow trainees were thousand of pounds in debt AND were taking on more to buy a car, a flat etc. I can well remember a conversation with two of them who could not understand that it was nuts not to put x% of their salary in our employer's pension scheme, so that the employer would add 2x% to their pots. To their minds, that x% of salary was better spent on the car/flat deposit etc rather than on the pension or on repaying their debts. It took the entire evening to get them to understand they were essentially turning down the 2x% pay that could have gone in their pension pot. And these were very bright graduates from the best universities...

We've only got 15 minutes left so I'm just going to flag up a few unanswered questions upthread (apologies John if you're already onto them)

poppyknot - who is on the commission (about the banks)

Attilathehen - can you have growth without debt?

champagnesupernova - is the 'you're worth it' attitude to blame?

(and there's my ones too but I won't be offended if you don't get to them...)

The first books I remember being utterly crazy about were?this is almost too embarrassing to admit?were the Billy Bunter books. Then it was Biggles, then Henry Treece, then I don't remember what until Tolkein. Because I grew up in Hong Kong the cultural frame of reference was slightly different and there are lots of great classics I'd never even heard of until I had children myself and started revisiting the area?I was forty before I'd even heard of Tom's Midnight Garden, which is pretty sad.

@TillyBookClub

Taking a breather from credit crunch for a second...

John, what was the children's book that you most love/most inspired you, and why?

The chairman is John Vickers, who is a tough-minded academic economist, no stooge, and one of the other four members is the FT writer Martin Wolf, who predicted something like the crash and has been very tough about the systemic failures in banking. So I'm pretty confident they'll come up with strong ideas; less confident about their implementation.

@poppyknot

Who is on the commission? How nuch common sense is there?

Thank you TillyBookClub for flagging up my question.:)

That hour seemed to go incredibly quickly - there's still so much I'd like to ask but we should let you go and have supper/a stiff drink/a rest from the keyboard.

John, thank you very very much indeed, both for coming to talk to us and for an exceptionally clear, fascinating and illuminating book.

Looking forward to your next novel and how all this plays out in fiction - are you allowed to tell us when it is likely to be published?

You won't let me discuss other countries so it's impossible to answer. :) As you know, a debt somewhere is likely to be a credit held somewhere else, and the West's debt is largely owned by China?you could even argue (many do) that it's largely manufactured by China. You can't consider debt on purely a national and local level. So the short answer is no, but the consequence of growth are on the long, planetary view more important than those of debt. Most of the world is richer than it used to be, and lives a measurably longer and better life?which matters more than a largely abstract consideration of how levels of debt have grown.

@AttilatheHen

John,

I'll have to be Paxmanesque:

Can we have economic growth without people/companies taking on more debt?

(Even in your younger years the system was still built on debt?)

Oh, and if you can possibly answer Attila's question in the next 2 minutes then that would be marvellous (but it might be rather a large question to pack into 120 seconds)

Thanks John and everyone. I am a lot clearer

Ah, my word, late as ever. Just wanted to say thanks for an interesting discussion, I shall seek out the book.

Blimey, that zoomed past and was both great fun and very hard work. Thank you very much and I'm sorry I didn't get to answer every question.

I have to go finish-finish the book, which I hope will be in the next few months, and then the publisher will take about a year to bring it out. You can shorten that year but you have to be willing to tell them what's in it and so on before it's fully finished, and I prefer to get the whole thing done and dusted first. Thank you for being interested, it's a great encouragement.

Thank you again to everybody for your very bracing questions!

@TillyBookClub

That hour seemed to go incredibly quickly - there's still so much I'd like to ask but we should let you go and have supper/a stiff drink/a rest from the keyboard.

John, thank you very very much indeed, both for coming to talk to us and for an exceptionally clear, fascinating and illuminating book.

Looking forward to your next novel and how all this plays out in fiction - are you allowed to tell us when it is likely to be published?

Sorry, crossed messages there.

Thanks again for a great evening. I hope that there's a copy of this book in every politician's pocket (maybe we should start a Mumsnet campaign?)