When experts disagree so fundamentally on how we are to clamber out of our financial pit, and the most confident analyses come from people who dropped us in it, it is time to turn away from the moneymen and politicians and put our trust in soothsayers and seers. My favourite prospectus for the future is Six Memos for the Next Millennium, written by the Italian author Italo Calvino just before he died in 1985. Not only are his prophecies optimistic, they make a sort of practical and instinctual sense.

Basically he saw the 20th century as “heavy” and the 21st as “light.” What he seems to have meant was that the previous 100 years were a time of ponderous machinery, brutal ideologies and vast, annihilating wars. This century would be radically different. Its six defining qualities would be lightness, quickness, multiplicity, exactitude, visibility and consistency. So far, most fit the bill.

Calvino was writing before the computer age got seriously underway, yet he saw exactly what it meant. You have only to think of the lightness of the internet versus the cumbersome industries of the past. Or the multiplicity of ideas and information swirling the globe, so that a school or power plant computer-designed in Germany can be erected a few months later in Xinjiang province, China. Or the quick fingers of the young on their mobile phones, and the downturn in their expressions when the music in a club is a month behind the times.

The new forms of exactitude and precision that we enjoy speak for themselves, and the greater visibility Calvino anticipated is there, for all their efforts to the contrary, in the processes of governments. On consistency it is a little early to pronounce. The danger of a new era of lightness and swiftness is, of course, that it could be swiftly over, but let's not get into that.

Now apply Calvino's prophecies to our present dilemma. The most dispiriting thing about it is that no one can tell us with the slightest degree of authority when the light will appear at the end of the tunnel, or whether the roof has fallen in and we are stuck there indefinitely. People speak about things looking up in the second half of this year, but there is equally talk of a decade of depression, spiritual and economic. So to whom do we listen? Bring in Calvino and things start looking up.

First, the logic of our position. Everyone agrees that what is happening is without precedent, and that for a dozen different reasons (globalisation is just one) analogies with the Great Depression don't fit. If we have no idea what's happening, it follows that our downturn could last a decade - or a year. Using Calvino as a guide it would be more like one or two than ten.

We have seen the lightness and swiftness he talked about at work in negative mode: the nonchalant way we took on debts, and the horrible suddenness with which retribution came. Six months ago we lived in another world. This speed and levity have to do not just with our light-mindedness, but with the downside of the communications revolution: making asinine economic decisions is far easier than it was, and their effects are swifter to spread.

The silver lining could be that what goes around comes around with increasing speed. How long will rectifying measures take to work, is the present cry. By Calvino's reckoning “quicker than you think.” Exactitude - meaning economic information - will come to our aid. While never exact enough, it is a lot better than in 1929. Garbage in/ garbage out, it is rightly said of computers, but with more reliable information solutions can come out swiftly. We are more in control than ever. Of course, this means we are in a position to foul things up on an epic scale, the environment notably, but if we do, we have less excuse.

Economists may object that Calvino and the constructions I put on him are hopelessly subjective. Certainly there is an element of that. But the judgments of the super-savvy investors who placed their millions in Mr Madoff's hands, on the basis that they couldn't understand what he was up to but what the hell, or that socially he was so frightfully well connected that everyone was doing it, darling, turned out to be pretty subjective too.

And when the distinguished bankers who played such a role in getting us into this mess have the effrontery to tell us how it will end, and expect to be taken seriously, the writings of more genuinely distinguished minds can assume practical as well as theoretical weight, even when, like Calvino, they are prone to playing metaphysical games. When the bankers say that property will shoot down another 15 per cent in 2009, the only practical response is to discount this prophesy totally, given its tainted source. Remember what Calvino says about the lightness and swiftness of the century will move, cheer up, borrow the biggest low-interest mortgage you can and sink it into the biggest cut-price property you can afford.

Apparently there is a boom in books about economics. But wisdom is not confined to the dismal science. Atmospherics matter, and a positive reading of Six Memos for the Next Millennium could help to spread the notion that it might all be over faster than we think.

George Walden's latest book is China: A Wolf in the World? (Gibson Square)

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