This blog will be taking a two-week vacation. I will, however, be spending part of it reading economics books and writing a chunk of my next one. Please come back in mid-August!

Mobile Communication by Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner was a bit of a disappointment to me. I always pounce on titles about the mobile industry, having spent five years now steering Vodafone's research programme into the social and economic impact of mobiles in developing economies (four of the reports available in Vodafone's public policy series – Africa, healthcare, mobile transactions and India). For such a transforative technology, there are surprisingly few books about it. Even the academic literature, though blossoming now, was sparse for years.

The co-authors of this book have written some terrific papers and reports themselves over the years, and are amongst the foremost experts on the impacts of mobile. However, this book covers old territory, not new. I suppose it's aimed at undergraduate courses. It's a brief canter through some of the main issues, descriptive rather than analytical. And this is no doubt my failing not theirs, but I hated the way they present points through 'vignettes' about real or invented people. Twee or what?

The text does refer to a couple of the papers done as part of the research programme funded by Vodafone, but to my mind ignores some interesting ones which would have supplemented points they make  – including the work on mobile transactions. Access to finance is so fundamental to livelihoods and economic development, and if there is to be mass access in poor countries it will be via mobile. (Also, I do think experts on the mobile industry should spell company names correctly… it's Vodafone with an 'f'.)

Having been so negative, this is nevertheless a solid introduction to the growth and social impacts of mobile (it doesn't touch on the economics much at all), suitable for students. There is a decent bibliography too. I didn't dislike the book but was underwhelmed. The authors are excellent people and I suppose they delivered what was commissioned. But for real interest, go direct to their papers, all widely accessible online, rather than this book. Here is Jonathan Donner's website, great stuff here.

Here's a link to a review of Complexity, a new overview of the field of complex systems by Melanie Mitchell. I haven't read the book, but it sounds worthwhile for economists interested in the potential applications of these models to the many millions of interactions between individual consumers or firms which constitute a modern economy. The review is from Bookslut, a new discovery to me.

Charles Murray has written a marvellously trenchant column about the lack of a sense of duty in our times, particularly amongst the financial services elite. I particularly liked this paragraph in favour of the return of a sense of hierarchy in society:

“…[I]t’s time to be honest about hierarchy. Some people end up with great
responsibilities that other people don’t. I don’t want a world in which
the underlings pull their forelocks as their betters sweep by. We
already have plenty of that. People at the top of American society are
fawned upon in ways that might have made Louis XIV blush. What we don’t
have is a corresponding ethic of obligation. The goal of reintroducing
structure in roles is not to make underlings know their place, but to
make overlings know their place.”

Reading Murray led me back, via a parenthesis, to Mark Twain after many (more than 30?) years. Twain worked for a decade and a half to repay debts incurred by his failed publishing firm, although under no legal obligation to do so. He said: “Honor is a harder master than the law.” It is the sense of honour and its fraught relationship with social convention that (amongst other qualities) makes Huckleberry Finn so marvellous a novel.

The meaning of debt – obligation in French, Anglohones note – is something we forgot in the financial frenzy. And not only the crisis but also the mountain of unacknowledged pension debt in aging societies will remind us forcefully about that meaning in the years and decades ahead. In fact, there is a social sustainability issue almost as profound as the question of environmental sustainability, given the multiply poisonous legacies we're leaving for future generations.

Lots of meat here for the relevant chapters of my forthcoming book!

The title of Ethan Kapstein's book, Economic Justice in an Unfair World, for a wild moment made me hope it was going to be one of those 'how to' books one finds in airport bookstores. Alas not. You won't find here the ten bullet point summary for delivery of global justice.

Nor is this a book with new economic theory or evidence about globalization. Heaven knows, the globalization literature is huge and hardly needs additions. Especially if, as the most depressing statistics and news indicate, there's a widespread retreat from globalization. (I think this will be cyclical given that there has been a whole generation's-worth of restructuring economic activity to increase specialization across borders. One can hardly imagine it being easy for any other country to mimic China's expertise in textiles logistics, or Taiwan's in chips fabrication, or central Europe's in specialized auto components. But the lesson of history isn't wildly encouraging, it must be said.)

Instead, this is a rather interesting book (albeit written in dull academic style) which looks at the welfare analysis of aspects of globalization. Specifically, Kapstein is interested in what steps will increase welfare, not in an ideal world but in the world of realpolitik. He rejects the demands of anti-globalization campaigners as ineffective in improving welfare, and instead focuses on how to make trade and aid deliver incremental benefits.

He starts by noting that there are two separate critiques of globalization. The first focuses on its adverse effects on domestic economic justice and argues for redistributive policies within the nation state (he calls this the communitarian model). The second is concerned with justice between individuals no matter where they live (the cosmopolitan model) and looks to policies which will redistribute between rich and poor nations. Kapstein favours what he calls liberal internationalism, recognizing these two distinct arenas of justice, and emphasizing policies which improve outcomes incrementally by giving national governments the capacity to engage at the level of the state in international institutions. Governments are the agents which matter to him.

Having set up this framework – and I think the distinction between communitarian and cosmopolitan is interesting and valid – in the early chapters, the later chapters which try to set it out in more detail in specific contexts are a bit disappointing  – too sketchy perhaps.  The section on controversial aspects of trade such as the TRIPS agreement particularly disappointed me because, 'free trader' as I am, I believe it to be a profoundly unjust dimension of the WTO;  Kapstein suggests the answer to questions such as the affordability of medicines in the developing world is better public health systems whereas I think there is no justice in creating for big pharma companies the same monopoly rents in new markets that the enjoy from IP protection in their core rich markets.

However, as this will make clear, the book covers interesting issues, and I fundamentally do agree with the argument that nation states still are decisive for the fairness or otherwise of outcomes in a globalized world. National politics does still determine the distribution of income and access to education.

Next on my pile of things to read is Amartya Sen's new book, The Idea of Justice, which has just arrived. I'm a Sen fan – his papers on social justive responding to Arrow are terrific, and his concept of capabilities seems to me intuitively valid. A review will follow post-holiday.