Introduction

This chapter reviews where the debate on systemic risk frameworks now stands. The unprecedented costs and the complexity of the 2008 financial crisis have spurred academics and policy experts to look afresh at systemic risk and a number of different approaches have emerged with different practical implications for policy-makers. After some discussion of the background to this rapid rise in intellectual interest on systemic risks, this chapter groups different analytical approaches into three broad categories and then examines the data and policy implications of each category.

The 2008 crisis as a spur to systemic analysis

The cost of the 2008 crisis was enormous. For example, in the USA, the incremental loss above what one might think of as a normal downturn was about 3% of GDP, according to Phil Swagel of Georgetown University (Swagel, 2010). Andy Haldane, Bank of England Executive Director for Financial Stability, put the total first year loss of world output in 2009 at 6.5% of global GDP. If only 25% of that loss proved to be permanent, the net present value of the total loss would be close to one entire year's worth of global GDP (Haldane, 2010).

Economists from across the theoretical and political spectra have offered up various explanations of the crisis and generated conflicting proposals for how to prevent another one in the future. No dominant consensus has yet emerged on what was the fundamental cause.

At the time of writing, the global crisis is not over.

Background and schooldays

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari in the eastern part of Bengal Province, India. (For consistency, we will refer to Eric Blair as George Orwell throughout despite the fact that he didn’t adopt that pen name until 1933.) Orwell would carefully categorize his family as “lower upper middle class,” typical of his fascination with all matters relating to class. His family background was rather better than that. One ancestor on his father’s side had married a daughter of the Earl of Westmoreland. Orwell’s father, Richard Walmsley Blair, was descended from an eighteenth-century family that had made its living in the expansion of the British Empire. Richard Blair was born in 1857 and joined the Indian Civil Service in 1875 as an agent in the Opium Department. He served in that capacity with moderate success until his retirement in 1912.

Although she also was born in England, Ida Limouzin, Orwell’s mother, was of French descent. The Limouzin family had settled in the Far East where they were engaged in the timber business in Burma. While on a trip to India, Ida Limouzin met and married Richard Blair who was eighteen years her senior. The marriage was a typical late Victorian arrangement. Two children were born in India: Marjorie in 1898 and Eric five years later. In 1904 Orwell’s mother took the two children to England where they settled in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Orwell would not see his father again until he was eight years old except for a brief visit in 1907 when his sister, Avril, was conceived. The lack of a male authority figure would have consequences later in Orwell’s life.

Burmese Days

From his youth Orwell saw himself as a writer. He tells us in his essay “Why I Write” that he had “the lonely child’s habit” of making up elaborate stories featuring him in various situations, a phenomenon not uncommon with young people. He also relates that he was fascinated by the very sounds of certain words. Orwell fought this lure of the literary life when he joined the Imperial Police in Burma. But the need to write was such a powerful force in him that he eventually gave in. His dilemma was the choice of what to write.

Orwell tells us that while living in Paris for eighteen months he wrote constantly – short stories, poetry, prose – anything that took his interest. He even made stabs at writing novels. Very little of this material has survived. He did succeed in getting some journalism published before returning to England in late 1929. But at heart he believed that to be a writer one must produce “enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings,” as he noted in “Why I Write.”

Preface

Since his death in January 1950 at the age of forty-six, George Orwell’scritical and popular reputation has ascended and spread wings. Three majorbiographies were published during the last decade and Orwell’s papershave been edited in twenty volumes by the British scholar Peter Davison. Specialstudies dealing with Orwell’s career and writings appear annually.

Recognized internationally chiefly for his last two masterpieces –Animal Farm (1945), his brilliant satire on the RussianRevolution, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), his grippingdystopian portrait of the future – Orwell’s other body of writingalso enjoys an appreciative audience today.

Our study examines the reasons for Orwell’s ongoing appeal. Combiningbiography with an analysis of his writings, we focus on the main literary genresin which Orwell wrote: his traditional novels, his essays, and his documentaryjournalism.

In the 1930s, Orwell struggled to write realistic fiction. Two of his novels inparticular, Burmese Days and Coming Up forAir, exhibit skillfully developed characters and descriptive passageseven as they reveal the limitations of his fictional imagination.

Orwell’s essays are among his best writing. He took a format that wasbeing swamped by belles-lettres and breathed new life into it. In his greatestessays – “A Hanging,” “Shooting an Elephant,” and“Politics and the English Language” – Orwell discovered settingsand subject matters that suited the prose style that he had developed: clear,direct, pared of artifice. By writing about topics avoided by serious authors(comic postcards, murder mysteries, and other mundane everyday things), Orwellalso helped create the genre of popular cultural studies.

Just days before he died in January 1950, George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903) penned in his notebook one of the epigrams that typified his stylistic talents: “After 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” Unfortunately, he never lived to fifty. He died at age forty-six, on the threshold of becoming “a famous author,” his boyhood dream. In the years since his death his fame has only grown.

Orwell’s active literary life spanned less than two decades and yet he became perhaps the best-known English literary figure of the first half of the twentieth century. As he declared in “Why I Write” (1946), Orwell aspired to raise “political writing into an art.” In his greatest essays and his two final masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), he succeeded. In a poll done by Waterstone’s, the English bookstore chain, readers ranked Orwell’s last two works as the second and third most influential books of the twentieth century. (J. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle came in first.)

Starting out in the 1930s

Orwell’s reputation as a writer in literary London began modestly. The period 1928–32 represents the writer’s five years of struggle as “Eric Blair.” Eager to find journalistic and reviewing assignments on his return from Burma in December 1927, he soon became a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines such as the New English Weekly and Adelphi. Scraps of biographical evidence and letters referring to lost stories with titles such as “The Sea God” and “The Man with Kid Gloves” suggest that Orwell was writing descriptive fiction (somewhat along the lines of what would later become Burmese Days). He wrote two novels during this time, both of which so displeased him that he destroyed them. These years witnessed only one effort of more than biographical interest, the superb, apparently autobiographical essay, “A Hanging” (1931). Yet for Etonian Orwell this was nonetheless a time of decisive déclassé experience, much of which he recast in later publications (e.g., his hop-picking and school teaching in A Clergyman’s Daughter, and his two weeks in a Paris hospital in “How the Poor Die”).

A larger work – a curious pastiche of novel, memoir, essay, and reportage – also emerged from his descent into the underworld of the transients and urban poor. Working as a plongeur in Paris and tramping throughout southern England, he drafted a manuscript that became his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London. Uncertain about its reception and anxious about how any publicity about his transient life might be received by his family, he considered at least four pen names, finally telling his publisher, Victor Gollancz, that he “rather preferred George Orwell.”