Author Archives: Diane Coyle

Autumn books

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I’ve already posted about the new season catalogue from Princeton University Press. Now the Harvard and MIT presses have sent their tantalising autumn/winter catalogues. Harvard is offering A Century of Wealth in America by Edward Wolff; Eli Cook on The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (this really looks my kind of book); and Giacomo Corneo’s Is Capitalism Obsolete? A Journey Through Alternative Economic Systems.

At MIT Press, The Chinese Typewriter by Thomas S Mullaney (“how Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China’s information technology successes today”) looks tempting. I’m intrigued also by Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Joseph E. Aoun; and Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing by Martin Erwig. (“How Hansel and Gretel, Sherlock Holmes, the movie Groundhog Day, Harry Potter, and other familiar stories illustrate the concepts of computing.”)

As it’s been one of those busy periods when I buy books because it allows me to fantasize about long, idle days sitting in the sunshine reading (hah!) (and I just spent three days at the Hay on Wye book festival), people really need to stop publishing interesting new titles for a while so I can catch up.

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And still more to read

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Having slightly daunted myself yesterday with the in-pile of books here at Enlightenment Towers, I picked up the Autumn 2017 catalogue from Princeton University Press. As they have the good judgment to have me as one of their authors, it’s no surprise that the list is full of what look like terrific new books :-). I’ve read in proof both Capitalism Without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake – an overview of the importance of intangibles – and Eloi Laurent’s Measuring Tomorrow – about the practicalitles of measurement ‘beyond GDP’.

There are so many other tempting titles it’s hard to pick out just a few. But how about The Infidel and The Professor by Dennis Rasmussen (about the friendship between David Hume and Adam Smith), Janet Browne’s The Quotable Darwin (I loved, loved, loved her Darwin biography), Scott Page’s The Diversity Bonus (he wrote the excellent The Difference), and Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters by Gloria Origgi (she’s appearing at the Festival of Economics in November, in another excellent line-up, which we’ll be announcing in July).

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They don’t make economists like they used to

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I’ve finished reading Will Baumol’s (1952) Welfare Economics and the Theory of the State. It’s a short and seriously impressive book, essentially pointing out that if you assume individuals do not either influence each other’s preferences or affect each other’s profits then you conclude that individual maximization delivers the most efficient outcome and the role for the state to restrict or co-ordinate activity is minimal. The laissez faire argument is inherently circular. However, social influence on preferences is pervasive, production by individual firms is interlinked when there are any economies of scale, and externalities in production and consumption are common. The book anticipates – briefly – much of the work done in the following decades in social choice theory, public choice, and Ostrom-style institutional political economy.

What makes it all the more impressive is that (a) it was Baumol’s PhD thesis and (b) he had read historical works including those in French and German – the book cites Petty, Say, Bastiat etc. He apologizes for not being able to read Italian. Clearly, Baumol was exceptional even for his time and surely was a serious miss by the Nobel committee; but I can’t imaging today’s PhD students ever dreaming of looking at any ‘history of thought’ texts, or (at least for the Anglophones) thinking it might useful to have a foreign language. They don’t make economists like they used to. Reform of the undergraduate curriculum has real momentum now (at least outside the US); time to turn our attention to the graduate courses?

Global gloom and community currencies

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I’m late to Mervyn King’s The End of Alchemy, which as all the reviewers have noted is a very well written and interesting book. It isn’t exactly cheering. On the contrary, it cast me into gloom.

As the final chapter puts it, “Without reform of the financial system, as proposed in Chapter 7 [a set of reforms with approximately zero chance of happening…..] another crisis is certain, and the failure to tackle the disequilibrium in the world economy makes it likely it will come sooner rather than later.” The chapter goes on to say not to worry, there’s something that can be done: forgive Greek debt and break up the Euro (or go for a full political union). Globally, stop struggling with Dani Rodrik’s trilemma of democracy, national sovereignity and economic intergration – King seems prepared to give up on the third leg. Change policies in China, Japan and Germany. In short, just tackle the underlying global imbalances and all the other problems or symptoms – debt overhangs, zero interest rates etc – will resolve themselves. No problem then.

To be fair, King does speak of “the audacity of pessimism”. Trouble is, you need a lot of people to get a lot more pessimistic before such policy changes would come about. As the book also points out, the last time there was such a big re-ordering was after the 1930s and 2nd world war.

More cheering is Dave Birch’s wonderful forthcoming book Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin, the latest in the Perspectives series (and the first full-length one). It surveys the history and the future of money. In this blog post, Dave suggests an e-currency for Manchester (and other cities). As in his previous work, Identity is the New Money, Dave points out the close link between money and trust – indeed, Mervyn King makes this point too. So financial stability is a question of communities of trust. It’s more comforting to think about trust from the ground up rather than global imbalances and crises….

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