Monthly Archives: February 2013

The English intelligentsia – a contradiction in terms

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One of the interesting aspects of Tony Judt’s [amazon_link id=”009956355X” target=”_blank” ]Thinking the 20th Century[/amazon_link] (which I’ve nearly finished) is the insider-outsider perspective he has on England. He grew up in London, the son of an immigrant father and second generation immigrant mother, and emigrated to the US in his late 20s. So he has a nice combination of familiarity and objectivity about his birthplace (and I mean England, not the UK, as he has a very London-centric view).

Given that I spent my teenage years in a small Lancashire mill town pining to be a philosopher sitting in a French cafe, I was particularly taken with Judt’s comments about the way the English dismiss intellectuals – ‘English intellegentsia’ is not a meaningful social concept. His hypothesis is “that the intellectual agenda which drove ideologically configured political movements in continental Europe was quite absent in London.” This lack of ideology was a blessing for most of the 20th century. As Judt points out, the penalty Eric Hobsbawm paid for being a lifelong Communist was no more serious than having to be a professor at the University of London rather than Cambridge. That tolerance would surely not have played out in the same way on the Continent.

There is also a nice passage describing the way the furthest reaches of Empire – George Orwell’s Burma, India, the Caribbean – seem comfortable and familiar to the English thanks to language and cultural references, whereas the Continent seems wildly exotic. Even for Shakespeare the “coast of Bohemia” was a mysterious distant land, and as for Slovenia or Bulgaria, or even the longingly imagined Paris of my adolescence….

[amazon_image id=”009956355X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Thinking the Twentieth Century[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”0140004564″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Burmese Days[/amazon_image]

The Great Rebalancing

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Chapter 1 of [amazon_link id=”0691158681″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy[/amazon_link] by Michael Pettis is available to read for free online at the Princeton University Press website.

It isn’t often that I bill anything as a must-read, but this really is, for anybody who wants to understand what has been happening in the world economy in the past decades, the causes and consequences of global imbalances. As another recent comment on my previous post on this book puts it, this book is a game changer. Click through and read the sample chapter!

[amazon_image id=”0691158681″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy[/amazon_image]

The 20th Century

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I’ve started [amazon_link id=”009956355X” target=”_blank” ]Thinking the Twentieth Century[/amazon_link], the final book by Tony Judt, a conversation with historian Timothy Snyder. The first of Judt’s books I read was the supreme [amazon_link id=”009954203X” target=”_blank” ]Postwar[/amazon_link], followed by [amazon_link id=”0718191412″ target=”_blank” ]Ill Fares the Land[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”009955559X” target=”_blank” ]The Memory Chalet[/amazon_link]. So I’ve been looking forward to getting the paperback of this last one.

[amazon_image id=”009956355X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Thinking the Twentieth Century[/amazon_image]

One comment in what I’ve read so far brought me to a halt, though,  in a passage about the wide and lasting damage inflicted by two wars on European culture but also the economy, due to the retreat from early 20th century globalization. “It took until the mid-1970s for even the core economies of western Europe to get back to where they had been in 1914. … In short, the industrial economies of the west (with the exception of the United States) experienced a 60 year decline, marked by two world wars and an unprecedented economic depression.” Reading this on the Tube, I was sure it was an overstatement – what about Les Trentes Glorieuses, the post-world war 2 golden years of growth?

And so it proves. Turning to the invaluable (xls spreadsheet) Angus Madison database of world GDP over the centuries, per capita GDP (in 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars) in western Europe grew by about half a percent a year between 1914 and 1945, and substantially faster after that. Still, the figures don’t undermine the underlying point about the economic price paid for political upheaval and war in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Nor do GDP figures capture the destruction of assets – and lives – or the psychological effects of that terrible half century.

Fear and loathing

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[amazon_link id=”1844678644″ target=”_blank” ]Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class[/amazon_link] by Owen Jones deserves the praise it has earned from other reviewers. It paints a picture of class division in modern Britain that is over-simplified in some ways, but captures an important truth. The big truth is that the worlds of the social classes have separated, and the middle classes and elites have grown more contemptuous – because fearful – of working class people the less contact they have with them.

In my own comfortable suburban milieu this takes the form of supposedly left-wing friends who nevertheless send their children to private schools. London’s state schools add more value than any other schools in the country so the ‘rationale’ for this choice in terms of not wanting to sacrifice one’s children’s education for the sake of one’s own principles is threadbare. I believe the reason is the fear of social contact with other classes. (My children have attended our local comprehensive.)

Jones pins the start of the demonisation of the working class as ‘chavs’ to the economic and political ideology of the Thatcher government. Housing policy seems key. The right-to-buy for council housing was taken up by those families with a bit more money, leaving the poorest in a shrinking stock of council accommodation, which was increasingly earmarked for the most troubled families and isolated from other parts of society. The knot of related problems we are so familiar with consequently developed in these estates – the unemployment, ill-health, low-quality housing, poor schooling, drug abuse, crime. (Lynsey Hanley’s [amazon_link id=”1847087027″ target=”_blank” ]Estates[/amazon_link] is brilliant on this issue.) Jones is equally scathing about New Labour, for acceding to the Thatcher revolution, and its depiction of the working class as something to escape from rather than a cohesive class to be proud of and raise collectively.

He also opened my eyes to just how disdainful and disrespectful is so much comment and language about the working classes. Clearly, I lead a sheltered life by never reading tabloid newspapers. The book is definitely onto something, too, in noting that the politics of race are sometimes deployed to disguise the politics of class – the white working classes can be portrayed as simply anti-immigrant and racist, another reason (for the commentariat of the left) for being disdainful about them.

However, there are some aspects of Jones’s pre-Thatcher perspective that lead him to underplay some of the complexities of class politics in modern Britain. For example, he argues that commentators malign the British working classes as work-shy couch potatoes who just want to claim benefits by comparing them with hard-working immigrants who, far from ‘stealing’ jobs, are doing them because the natives are too idle to bother. Until recently I was a member of the Migration Advisory Committee and spoke to many employers during my five year term about their reasons for preferring immigrant labour; it is a fact that large numbers of young native-born people have never been taught the basics of the workplace – punctuality, politeness, putting in some effort – and are essentially unemployable. This is not to say it is their individual fault. But to trace the reasons, schools are facing a social catastrophe with a portion of their intake. I have heard London teachers talk of the widespread low-level neglect of children who turn up at primary school lacking minimal social and language skills, unwashed, fed on crisps – all of which makes discussion of which kings’ reigns to cover in the national curriculum a bit, well, academic.

It is hard to know where to start addressing these multiple challenges, although clearly housing and education lie at the centre of the complex of problems. Chavs gives the impression of wanting to turn the clock back to the pre-Thatcher era of union power, which wouldn’t be my choice. Still, the book does a great service in calling out the unacceptable demonisation that has accompanied the growth of inequality and the withdrawal of the powerful elites and middle classes from their own society.

[amazon_image id=”1844678644″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class[/amazon_image]

A book that will change your mind

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As an author, I’ve learned that most readers take out of a book what they bring to it. We all have our pre-existing worldview and it is rare for us to alter it. So I was struck by this comment by Ian Bright on a book I reviewed here last month, [amazon_link id=”0691158681″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy[/amazon_link] by Michael Pettis. Ian writes: “I have now read Pettis book. It is as good (even better) than you outlined….. the book challenges much of the way I think about things.”

[amazon_image id=”0691158681″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy[/amazon_image]

As his comment notes, the recent FT review of the book was somewhat unfair. It says the author ignores the importance of history, and gives the impression that this weakens the argument. I don’t agree. Anyway, it addresses the overall pattern of global imbalances so it would be a monster task to embed that in an informative history of the world’s major trading blocs.

If you are interested in the global economy and believe yourself to have an open mind, I urge you to read it. It’s ideal for students too because it sets out so clearly the operation of the accounting identities of the balance of payments.