Reason on trial

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I’ve been putting off reading Prisonomics by Vicky Pryce because I’ve known and liked and admired her for many years, and was absolutely shocked by her getting a prison sentence. In the book she says she had her first good sleep for a long time on her first night in Holloway, after the stress of two trials and the media frenzy, but I spent that night sleepless worrying about what the experience would do to her. The book is her account of her time in prison, and what she learned from both personal experience and subsequent research. I’m very glad to have read it. It’s actually a page turner, well-written, full of information and insight, and a powerful analysis of the extremely poor value the UK gets from the way its criminal justice system treats women. And it turns out Vicky coped well with being in Holloway and then one of the country’s only two open prisons for women, thanks in large part to the support she got from other prisoners.

It wasn’t really a surprise to learn that imprisoning women is terrible for their children, has no deterrent effect, and that lots of women in prison have mental health and drug problems. But the figures set out in the book are staggering. The research suggests 40% of women in UK prisons have learning diificulties, and 48% have a reading age of 11 or lower. Nor did I know that prisoners are released with just £46 even if they have no accommodation – many (4 in 10) lose their homes while inside, and the book tells of one woman deemed by her local authority to have made herself ‘intentionally homeless’ (and therefore not meriting housing) by being sent to prison. Ex-prisoners find it hard to get jobs because they have to declare their convictions. Reoffending rates are high after prison sentences at least in part because of sheer desperation.

Very few women prisoners have committed violent crimes, yet the high rate of imprisonment in the UK (compared to other countries) inflicts dreadful emotional violence on their children, contributing to family breakup and children going into care – and thus increasing the likelihood of their lives deteriorating. There is so clearly an overwhelming value for money case for spending public funds on helping women bring order to their lives, getting training and jobs, rather than imprinsoning them at high cost and with adverse effects on the rest of their lives and their children’s. Yet the UK saw a 27% rise in the women’s prison population between 1996 and 2011. We have a public culture that emphasises retribution in criminal justice and that demonises women too.

So Vicky’s book makes a powerful case for change, and her experience has turned her into a ardent campaigner for reform. I do recommend reading it, not only for its inherent merit but also because royalties go to the charity Working Chance. But it’s depressing too. The system is awful. But can you imagine a single high-profile politician campaigning for criminal justice reform rather than competing to appear ‘tough’ on crime? There is truth in the cliche: you can’t reason people out of what they were never reasoned into.

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What shall I read next?

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I have a lot of travel this week, and am very indecisive this morning. The options are:

The Son Also Rises by Gregory Clark  

Prisonomics by Vicky Pryce 

The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin  

or The Everything Store by Brad Stone  

There’s a lot more in the pile but I wouldn’t want to subject readers of this blog to the psychological distress of the paradox of choice…. Please vote soon!

 

Is economics leaving Wonderland?

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Bill Easterly’s The Tyranny of Experts and The Idealist, Nina Munk’s book about Jeff Sachs’s Millennium Villages project in Africa, The Idealist, were reviewed in an interesting article by Andrew Jack in the Financial Times yesterday. The books – neither of which I’ve yet read – seem to be part of the big shift that has occurred in development economics in recent years. That shift reflects a welcome shedding of the belief, at least on the part of many economists, that a single conceptual approach will deliver a ‘silver bullet’ solution or method that can be applied everywhere.

  

This is obviously far from a universal view, or Easterly and Munk would not have written their books. However, a number of the OECD economists I was lunching with on Friday were discussing exactly this subject. One said that he thought the RCTs approached, as so brilliantly described in Duflo and Bannerjee’s Poor Economics, would turn out to have transformed the field when we look back in a few years’ time. He was keen to see the developed economies scrutinise their own policies as rigorously as some aid interventions are scrutinised now.

As well as the methodology question, though, there is the tendency so widespread among economists to assume away the importance of historical and geographic specificities. One of the reasons I so loved Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher, was its emphasis on this aspect of Hirschman’s development work, the crucial importance of the specific context.

The reductive turn in economics that dominated our subject from the 1970s to the 2000s is tenacious, but it seems to be on the retreat. Development economics is one of the straws in the wind. Perhaps I’m overoptimistic, but I do think economics is returning to the real world from its surreal Wonderland.

Economists out to lunch?

Freedom and virtue

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On the Eurostar to and from the OECD yesterday, I read The Needs of Strangers by Michael Ignatieff, an old book first published in 1984, with my 2nd hand paperback even more mauled by the fact that the dog got to the post before I did that day.

I wish I’d read it before attending the recent Christ Church, Oxford symposium on How Much Is Enough? by Edward and Robert Skidelsky. It’s on the same territory. Ignatieff makes very clear the possibly irreconcilable tension between freedom to choose and a shared agreement on the constituents of ‘the good life’. The book starts with a reflection on the welfare state. It assumes everyone is equal, and reasonably so, but in uniformity of treatment is unable to respond to individuals’ specific needs. Hence the seeming lack of care in the way welfare is sometimes delivered to people. He writes: “We think of ourselves not as human beings first, but as sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, tribesmen and neighbours. It is this dense web of relations and the meanings which they give to life that satisfies the needs which really matter to us.” Hence the utopian aspect of Rousseau’s writing or Marx’s – freedom and happiness have to be reconciled by everybody making choices anchored in equality and fraternity.

The book goes on to explore the tension between communitarian visions of moral agreement about necessities of the good life and the restlessness of commercial society, as reflected by Smith and Hume. “How is moral virtue possible in a society which is constantly pushing back the limits of need?” The Skidelskys claim that needs were satisfied by 1974, but that seems absurd to me. Since then we’ve had everything digital, vastly improved medical treatments, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, central heating in most homes in the UK, and so on. Rousseau would have been happy to ban machines and trade – virtuous stasis came above freedom in his eyes.

Ignatieff doesn’t answer the dilemma of course, but the book is a very interesting exploration of how it continues to be relevant to modern societies.

Austerity, algebra and theology

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Florian Schui’s Austerity: The Great Failure is a readable book, which has seen me through my Tube journeys this week, but an odd one. He presents thinking about austerity through the ages as seen through two prisms: the religious and moral strand of thought in western tradition about the inherent virtue of modest living and thrift; and the sensible economic perspective, reaching its pinnacle in Keynesian thought, that analyses consumer spending and fiscal expansion as the source of prosperity. Modern austerity, from Thatcherism and its Hayekian emphasis on the small state, to the post-crisis argument for austerity, is therefore described as essentially theological.

“Today, there is general agreement that growing consumption is a pre-condition for economic growth and the satisfaction of potentially unlimited material wants is accepted as one of the principal objectives of economic activity,” Schui writes. The environmental movement is portrayed as a quasi-religious movement descended from the 19th century Romantics. Yet the final chapter of the book is an assessment of the ‘good life’, in much the same vein as in How Much is Enough? by Edward and Robert Skidelsky. It’s a pretty sudden corner turn right at the end.

Another oddity is that the book hardly mentions debt (as I noted on glancing through the index). Given that today’s case for austerity – and indeed previous versions – rest heavily on debt-related arguments, this is a glaring omission. I think it makes David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years, for all that it is a flawed book, a far more credible critique of austerity measures.

A third strange bit of the argument here comes in the discussion of why Keynesianism fell out of favour because of stagflation in the 1970s, to be succeeded by Thatcherism. Schui argues that the true cure for stagflation was not the Hayek-inspired effort to shrink the state that we got (and that had great popular support, given the massively disruptive public sector strikes as unions tried to win higher pay rises), but instead more government spending and indeed an extension of central planning as practiced in the Soviet bloc. This is a boldly contrarian argument to say the least.

A final complaint is that the book claims economics can explain how to maximise growth but can not answer the question, do we need more growth? I think it’s exactly the other way round. Economics says, yes we need more growth – very few of the world’s people enjoy the good life of a distinguished western European academic; and as many economists – including for example Joel Mokyr in The Gifts of Athena (and me too in GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History) – point out, growth is the name we give to the constant process of innovation that has improved our health, life expectancy, and quality of life so massively.

What we don’t know is how to increase growth, the elusive gold of our kind of alchemy. If we did, nobody would see austerity as a dilemma. Faster growth would remove any need to worry about debt. Without it, rescheduling/default or inflation are the more troubling options. This is algebra, not theology.