
I’m going to try to refrain from complaining about David Cameron in this post and be optimistic. Whilst there’s not much you can do about the coalition for a few years, austerity, at least in some circles, could be a good thing.
A lot has been said about the negative impact of the ‘austerity’ measures – The Guardian has a good blog dedicated to it. However not much has been said about the positives. How resourceful and creative will people become solving everyday problems? What kind of new counter-culture will bubble to the surface? How many new businesses and business models might be created that go on to really change industries?
Here’s one small example, but I love it. In a small village in Somerset, both the mobile library service and the phone box was about to be taken away due to cuts. So what do they do? Turn the phone box into a book exchange. Simple but genius.
Mark Hudson, in this Telegraph article, discusses whether hard times actually better inspire the arts and goes on to say: “The coming hard times, it is widely believed, will separate the wheat from the chaff, winnowing the work that has real purpose and need to exist – which will, it is said, always surface no matter how steep the odds – from a kind of ponderous, puffy official art that has thrived over the prosperity of the last two decades, created by people whose talents are for form-filling rather than self-expression, work whose disappearance few will miss, let alone lament”.
Here’s to creativity in times of austerity.


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