Monthly Archives: August 2025

From toffs to asset strippers via buccaneers and fat cats

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I’d read The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Captains of Industry by Michael Aldous and John Turner in proof form, to provide a quote and I just re-read it in physical form. It’s a very entertaining read, rooted in an impressive database the authors have compiled about the background and characteristics of chief executives – almost all men, though time and still now.

The book is then structured broadly chronologically, using the data to characterise waves of approaches to management and corporate governance. In the earliest days of the corporation as it emerged in modern form, aristocrats were generally in charge, with varying degrees of success. This gave way to founder- and family-led firms. Postwar came the managerial revolution, when at a time of increasing social mobility talented men were able to rise from the shop floor to the boardroom. The chapter on the 1980s is titled ‘The Buccaneers’ and then the book moves on to the Fat Cats, featuring the privatisations of the 90s (many people my age will remember Cedric the pig), and the subsequent attempt to introduce higher standards of corporate governance through the Cadbury code. Each chapter is shaped round characteristic examples, be it British Leyland or Slater Walker.

The authors are sceptical that such codes have done anything to moderate boardroom excess, and scathing about the spread of financialisation and the private equity asset-stripping model. So this is far from a tale of progress – more a story of how British companies managed to fail in every era. For example, UK plc remained highly sceptical about having graduate managers and lagged far behind the educational qualifications of German, Japanese or US executives. The same for specialist management education – Wharton was founded in 1881, Harvard Business School in 1908, but London Business School not until 1964 and Manchester Business School in 1965.

Along with this historical panorama there are many wonderful facts. Who has heard of John Ellerman, shipping magnate, who died in 1933 worth £13.8bn in today’s money? Who knew that James Hanson had been engaged to Audrey Hepburn, before she broke it off after filming Roman Holiday? So this is a very enjoyable book as well as raising serious questions about management quality in the UK, which seems to be a consistent problem.

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The magic of the technology business?

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For anybody interested in the history of telecommunications, Stephen Unger’s From Beacon Fires to Fibre Broadband will be a must-read. Steve is a former senior Ofcom Executive, with a career in telecoms before joining the regulator. (He has also been one of our Bennett Institute affiliates from the start.) The book is a combination of technological history – mentioning the beacon fires but really from the days of optical and then electric telegraphy through to fibre broadband – and policy history. The focus in the latter thread is the role of public versus private sector, and the balance between permitting or encouraging monopoly and encouraging competition.

The book covers four countries, the US, UK, France and Germany. Each produced some technical innovations but the real differences emerge in their respective policy choices. Not surprisingly, the French and German governments tend to be more statist, either for reasons of political control or focusing on national champions. But in all four countries the balance has shifted over time. One of the main conclusions indeed is that there is unlikely to be a single ideal model of shaping and regulating telecoms given how much both technology and context change.

There is an awful lot of interesting detail in the book but inevitably covering several countries and centuries it has a kind of meso-level focal length. This meant that the chapter I know most about, covering data networks, felt very abbreviated. My favourite chapter covers market liberalisation across all four economies from the late 20th century on, starting with the liberalisation of terminal equipment – that is, allowing people to buy telephones from suppliers other than the network operator, setting common standards so competing products can plug in. (Mickey Mouse phones were a thing at one point – there are plenty of ‘vintage’ 1980s models on Ebay.)

Of course, today it’s hard to imagine how the market power of the big tech companies determining the online world will be eroded, but Steve ends on a rather optimistic note: “Over the period of mode than 200 years described in this book, several compaines once thought to be unassailable have been wiped out by disruptive new technologies. The current generation of digital platforms may seem to be unassailable now but, taking the long view, that is unlikely to be the case. Their enormous success is due to them creating products that people want to buy, and if they cease to do so, I am confident that some currently unknown entrepreneur will work out how to take their place. That is the enduring magic of the technology business.”

Maybe – I think it depends on how lne that long view will turn out to be.

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Without nature, there is no economy

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I’ve just re-read Partha Dasgupta’s On Natural Capital, having seen a draft a while ago. It’s an important book. Its fundamental point is that the economy – like all human life – is not separate from nature but part of it. This has significant implications for economics, which has to date treated the environment as a separate domain. There is a huge amount of excellent work in environmental economics, of course, but the environment needs to be woven into the fabric of all of economics, and policy analysis.

The second key argument is that the resource envelope nature makes available to us is not growing exponentially. Partha sees this as imposing a strict limit on growth. He summarises this in an equation, the Impact Inequality; there is too much demand on nature if Ny/α > G – that is, if population times per capita income divided by a technology parameter α exceeds the capacity of the biosphere to renew itself. Much of the early part of the book demonstrates that, on the contrary, human economic activity has been depleting nature, particularly since around 1950.

Other people will see more hope than does Partha in the potential for technological innovations to alleviate resource constraints. My query concerns the definition of ‘y’, as a growing share of the value of GDP, the conventional measure, is accounted for by intangibles. So growth of course needs resources but perhaps less than one might think. In any case, the Impact Inequality is more important than the more famous r>g equation. And I’m completely on board with the idea that economic measurement and policy need to involve thinking like an asset manager about the whole range of resources needed in the economy (and life). I focused on this idea, which Partha helped pioneer, in my book The Measure of Progress.

In addition to wealth measurement and the portfolio approach, On Natural Capital goes on to discuss the role of social infuences and behavioural policies in bringing about change, and also the incentive mechanism of payments for ecosystem services.

It’s a terrific book, and aimed at the general reader as well as the economics and policy professions. The Impact Inequality is the only equation and the book is non-technical. It draws from Partha’s Biodiversity Review for the Treasury, which has all the technical material. There is also a wonderful New York Times video by Alexander Skarsgard about Partha and his work. After reading On Natural Capital, one can only weep at the way the salience of humans’ depletion of nature – and so also of our future economy – has declined in the public mind in recent months. I hope lots of people read the book.

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Catching up

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The first two weeks of August were a holiday reading fest, although mainly fiction. Now that I’ve climbed the email mountain waiting for me when we got home, I have time to reflect on the small number of books relevant to this blog.

Just as we left for sunny Wales, I finished Karen Hao’s Empire of AI. It’s a biography of OpenAI up to late 2024 by a journalist whose beat at the MIT Technology Review was AI. The subtitle, ‘Inside the reckless race for total domination’, sets the tone. The book is carefully reported – and none of the dramatis personae come out of it well. I did thoroughly enjoy reading it but didn’t find it at all surprising.

The other AI book was Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines. I’d spotted it via the wonderful Henry Farrell who has written two detailed blog posts – here and here –  about why the book is marvellous. He also explained what it says, which was useful as I didn’t understand it. Courtesy of this explanatory post, the key point in the book is that: “LLMs work as they do thanks to a remarkably usable mapping between two systems: the system of human language as it has been used and developed, and the system of statistical summarizations spat out by a transformer architecture, leading to a “merging of different structural orders.”” This figures. For example, Weatherby states that Shannon’s information theory is an implicit theory of language, and I can see this is so as language is how humans convey information. I can also see a parallel between LLMs and Wittgensteinian views of language. However, the book requires much more understanding of linguistics and structuralism than I have, so there were literally sentences I could not make sense of at all. Some points jumped out clearly. “The political risk in AI … is located not in the systems themselves but in the lazy methodological individualism we too easily revert to in thinking about them.” I’m on board for agreeing about the metholdological individualism but actually am not sure there is no political risk in the systems themselves.

Away from technology, I read The CIA Book Club by Charlie English, a thoroughly good read about exactly what the title says – how the CIA supported financially people smuggling books into Poland and reprinting and distributing them there, through the 1980s and the Solidarnosc era. One lesson to bear in mind: it takes real courage to read and share ideas that do not conform to the dictates of an authoritarian regime. The book made me wonder – again – why the remaining western democratic powers, and their security services, so easily forgot this lesson of the Cold War, that the battle of ideas and for minds is real battle.

Finally, when we got back I finished a book I’d started before leaving, David McWilliams Money: A Story of Humanity. As you’d expect it is superbly well written. It is a straightforward history and so ideal for people who haven’t read much on this before. The bit that was really new to me was a chapter on Roger Casement and the Congo – I learned that Casement was a veteran surveyor with much experience in Africa who told Joseph Conrad about the colonial horrors he had seen, so informing Heart of Darkness. The experiences made Casement an ardent anti-colonialist, a journey which ultimately saw him executed for treason by the British government which had previously knighted him. The book ends with a quick canter through MMT, crypto and MPesa, and chapters on the control of money in modern economies and the psychology of money. The book covers a huge span in its 350 or so pages, and is an enjoyable read.

Of the fiction in the pile below, I highly recommend Attica Locke’s trilogy set in Texas – this is the third. I’m a big fan of Natalia Ginzburg and – in a completely different register – enjoy the Elly Griffiths series. But there were no absolute turkeys in this year’s reading.

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