Third Annual Feasta Lecture

The Lean Economy: A vision of civility for a world in trouble

Dr. David Fleming, an independent economist based in London, talks on his forthcoming book, The Lean Economy, which argues that the market economy will collapse catastrophically if it fails to generate enough economic growth to prevent a rising tide of unemployment.

Fleming sees this collapse as both inevitable and imminent. It will, he says, lead to a period of hyperunemployment in which governments will not have the resources to maintain social welfare payments.

This will bring an abrupt end to the period in which people used their increasing incomes from the market economy to buy in more and more of their requirements. Instead, they will have to do much more for themselves. Not only will they have to develop lean production methods, but lean designs, a lean distribution system and a lean culture, all of which his lecture will explore.

Dr Fleming will speak at Trinity College, Dublin on Tuesday, October 30th and on the following night at University College, Cork, at a meeting co-hosted by the Cork Environmental Forum, the UCC Geography Department and the UCC Earthwatch Society.

David Fleming's book, The Lean Economy, is the product of some twenty years of research into the closing phases of the global market economy and its transformation into the stable post-market successor. The stabilised model of society - in a world without oil, gas, coal or nuclear power - would have to be almost unimaginably different from the present day. Fleming's attempt to build realistic solutions has required a re-examination of fundamentals of economics, society and culture.

After reading History at Oxford 1959-1963, David Fleming worked in manufacturing (textiles), marketing (detergents), advertising and financial public relations, taking an MBA at Cranfield in 1968. From 1977 to 1995 he practised as an independent consultant in environmental policy and business strategy for the financial services. He edited a manual on the formation and management of investment funds in the Former Soviet Union, which was published in 1995.

He was the Ecology (Green) Party's economics spokesman and press secretary between 1977 and 1980, It was at this time that he started to develop the concept of The Lean Economy on which he continued to work until its completion in 2001. In order to research the economics underlying the concept he took an MSc in economics at Birkbeck College, University of London in 1983 and a PhD in 1988.

Fleming was Honorary Treasurer and then Chairman of the Soil Association, the UK's leading advocate of organic farming, between 1984 and 1991. He has been a regular contributor to Country Life, and has published in Prospect and other journals, and in the academic literature. He was editor of The Countryside in 2097, published in 1997.