Peter Smith

 Fred Harrison was born in Cyprus in 1944, the son of a British serviceman whose postings would carry the family across the remnants of empire. Germany in the years after World War II. Singapore in the 1950s. Shropshire eventually, his father’s service finally stopped. It was a childhood without roots, and for that very reason, one that produced a man of unusually broad cultural roots. Harrison has described his upbringing as both fortunate and unsettling. Never in any school for more than a year or two, never long enough in any one town to belong to it, he absorbed instead what a child rooted in a single place could never absorb: the sheer variety of the world, its different topographies and rhythms, and underneath all of it, the quiet persistence of the same human conditions. People working, people struggling, poverty sitting alongside plenty. In India, passing through on transit, he could feel it in the streets. In Malaysia and Singapore, he could see it. He did not yet have t...

Eric Suquet has been farming for ten years. Before that, he had a successful freelance career in video production and, by his own account, made very good money. After a decade of sustainable farming in New York state, he recently sat down and wrote an essay that begins with the words “Fuck farming,” and then spent several thousand words explaining, with great precision and considerable pain, exactly why.     He writes about a specific phenomenon he has encountered personally: “the pitfalls of modern feudal lords buying up all the old farms, and allowing us serfs to work their pretty fields for tax breaks and bragging rights.” He has heard wealthy weekenders refer to “their farmers” as though they were rescue puppies. Now consider Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson is also, in a technical sense, a farmer, but in reality is just a new feudal landowner, taking charge of his new surfs and demonstrating his moral righteousness by his jovial banter and occasional care. He owns Di...

Every week, another pundit crawls out of the financial media to tell you that artificial intelligence is going to be great for house prices. AI-driven productivity! A new wealth boom! Better property markets! Higher prices ahead! It is fraudulent nonsense. And Fred Harrison is going to explain precisely why, in terms that any honest person can follow, because the stakes could not be higher. We are not talking about a market correction. We are not talking about a slowdown. We are talking about a collapse that has no floor under the current system, and a fiscal catastrophe that will make the 2008 crash look like a minor inconvenience. Buckle up. The Doom Loop Nobody Is Talking About To understand what AI actually does to house prices, you need to understand what it does to the economy at three distinct but interlocking levels. First, the labour market. When a firm adopts AI and raises its productivity, what happens? Its competitors are forced to respond. And how do they respond? They sac...