Author Archives: Diane Coyle

Better than (Karl) Polanyi

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There was some debate on Twitter yesterday about Karl Polanyi’s [amazon_link id=”080705643X” target=”_blank” ]The Great Transformation[/amazon_link]. Noah Smith linked to this post reporting some research (can’t say it sounds very rigorous) taken to indicate that economists don’t read this book. Summary finding:

“All in all, 66 persons responded (25 percent). This isn’t at all bad, considering that these were cold calls. Approximately 3 percent of economists at elite departments have read Polanyi (assuming that those that did not reply have not read him).”

Hmm. Not sure about that assumption. Anyway, Noah’s response was that economists tend to read new books. Dani Rodrik said: “Polanyi is a hard read and hard sell for economists. But he’s been incredibly influential for my own work.” I got some (very) mild Twitter stick for saying I had read it but wouldn’t set it for my students.

[amazon_image id=”080705643X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time[/amazon_image]

There are several reasons for this. Above all, the book is historically inaccurate – Deirdre McCloskey is the latest of many people to point this out in her new book, [amazon_link id=”022633399X” target=”_blank” ]Bourgeois Equality[/amazon_link]. So if one reads it, it needs to be from a history of thought perspective. Secondly, it’s about social relations and culture, so not central for economics students even though I wholeheartedly agree that economists in general need more hinterland in other areas of social science and history.

It’s also a dense read, and there are better books to recommend to students to introduce them to the social context of markets. I’d say the original Albert Hirschman books have aged better – [amazon_link id=”B00E31J3ZA” target=”_blank” ]Exit, Voice and Loyalty[/amazon_link] for one – and aren’t marred by inaccuracies like The Great Transformation. Of more recent vintage, I think John McMillan’s [amazon_link id=”0393323714″ target=”_blank” ]Reinventing the Bazaar,[/amazon_link] James Scott’s [amazon_link id=”B00D8JJYWA” target=”_blank” ]Seeing Like A State[/amazon_link] and Michael Sandel’s [amazon_link id=”0241954487″ target=”_blank” ]What Money Can’t Buy[/amazon_link] cover the territory better.

[amazon_image id=”0674276604″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”0393323714″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”0241954487″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”B00DO8SACA” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale Agrarian Studies) by Scott, James New Edition (1999)[/amazon_image]

Incoming disruption

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Aha, [amazon_link id=”0262034484″ target=”_blank” ]The Disruption Dilemma[/amazon_link] by Josh Gans has just arrived at Enlightenment Towers. Looking forward to this one. It promises to tell businesses how to deal with disruption, so in principle it has a large market! Along with it, [amazon_link id=”0262034573″ target=”_blank” ]The Sharing Economy[/amazon_link] by Arun Sundararajan, which is due out in June – also looks very interesting.

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Men’s studies

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I’ve zipped through Myra Strober’s [amazon_link id=”B01CRU4QV4″ target=”_blank” ]Sharing the Work[/amazon_link], propelled both by enjoying this memoir of a life as an academic economist and by righteous anger. (In fact, I’m posting this review 3 weeks too early on the tide of this sentiment.*)

Professor Strober embarked on her career in the late 1960s, and was therefore one of the pioneering feminists to whom my generation owes so much. The book starts with her initial experience at Berkeley, being told by the department chairman that she will never get tenure – ostensibly because she lives in Palo Alto, in reality because she has children. The shock of realising the truth on her drive home across the Bay Bridge launches her into a commitment to feminism in general and to tackling the sexism of economics and the academic world in particular.

[amazon_image id=”B01CRU4QV4″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught Me about Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others)[/amazon_image]

This is not an angry, polemical book at all. It’s a warm and readable memoir about family and friends as well as career and the politics of gender. Professor Strober grew up in Brooklyn in a loving family, and was the first to go to college and graduate school. She tells of the tensions of moving away from that background, and also the tensions in her marriage to an ambitious medical student and researcher – a marriage which eventually ended in divorce. Athough not at all bitter in the telling, the book is a reminder of how hard it was for a woman to combine career and children. (It still is – just think about the relatively small proportion of prominent women who have children.)

Thanks in part to the battles fought by earlier cohorts of women, the sexism we face in the workplace today is as nothing compared to those early days of the struggle for recognition. But the anger reading this book kicked in when I reflected on the continuing male dominance of economics in particular – our proportion of women being closer to computer science and mathematics than to any other social or natural science. Just as I finished reading [amazon_link id=”B01CRU4QV4″ target=”_blank” ]Sharing the Work[/amazon_link] I happened upon this reflection on getting tenure written by Ellen Meara. Nor is this a US issue – it’s as true in the UK and EU. Economics has a women problem – as Justin Wolfers and Noah Smith among others have noted – and that means economics has a problem. A subject done by men about men can’t claim to be either social or a science.

There is, I think, some recognition of the problem in the economics establishment, and some well-meaning efforts to address it. However, these efforts do not yet extend to a wide acknowledgement of some fundamental points – above all that there is something wrong with the (mainly male) insiders’ definition of what makes for ‘good’ economics.

At the end of last year I sent a survey to about 30 teachers of economics in high schools, asking what they thought were the main barriers to girls choosing to study economics at university; for although the total number of people doing economics degrees has been rising in the UK, the proportion who are female has been declining. The single most popular reply was that it was the ‘character of the subject’. I recounted this to a highly sympathetic and non-sexist male colleague. “Well,” he replied, “It’s not clear to me that there’s anything to be done about this.” That’s the problem. If the trend continues, we’re going to have to rename economics ‘men’s studies’.

I admire Professor Strober for spending her career actively doing something about it. This is a book to inspire all female economists and give all male economists pause for thought. [amazon_link id=”0262034387″ target=”_blank” ]Pre-order it [/amazon_link] now!

* It’s 22 April for the Kindle edition – the hardback will be out in mid-May.

Computing, the British way

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I’ve *loved* reading [amazon_link id=”1472918339″ target=”_blank” ]Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer [/amazon_link]by Tom Lean. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable mix of business history and social observation, written with the enthusiasm and affection of somebody who got his first Commodore 64 at the age of 8 as a Christmas present.

[amazon_image id=”1472918339″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer[/amazon_image]

The book starts with Britain’s pioneering role in computing, opening with Manchester’s ‘Baby’, the first electronic stored program computer, built on wartime expertise. It then skips straight to the late 1970s to explore why conditions then enabled the flourishing of a number of innovative computer manufacturers in the UK, and alongside this supply the expansion of mass market demand. Parts of the story are very familiar, including the competition between Sinclair and Acorn so well told in Micro Men. Other parts are less familiar. I for one didn’t know anything about Prestel, and why it failed where France’s Minitel succeeded so well. One key difference was that the French state gave business and home users free terminals at the rate of 10,000 a week by 1984. Impossible to envisage Mrs Thatcher ever thinking that a good idea.

The book has a very nice chapter on the origins and vitality of the UK games industry too. I love some of the early games: Dennis Through the Drinking Glass featured Dennis Thatcher hunting around 10 Downing Street for a G&T while trying to avoid Mrs T. There was a game based on the TV series Auf Wiedersehen Pet, which gave users the chance to play a Geordie brickie building a wall in Dusseldorf – the book doesn’t say how successful this was. The commercially unsuccessful Deus Ex Machina featured Dr Who actor Jon Pertwee, historian E.P.Thompson, rock star Ian Dury and comedian Frankie Howerd; astronomer Patrick Moore turned the gig down. Fabulous.

The book highlights the key role in the spread of computing and programming played by the famous BBC Micro, a complex but hugely successful initiative by the BBC. Many of the successful video games pioneers, including David Braben, started off with this machine, which was also familiar to many from school. The book’s epilogue features the Raspberry Pi – it was obviously written before the launch of the BBC’s MicroBit, now going free to all Year 7 high school students in Britain to prepare them to move on to the Raspberry Pi and other coding efforts.

The hope of course is that these tiny new computers will inspire another generation to innovate and create in the industry. But the history of the 1980s personal computer industry shows as well the importance of the scale and sophistication of American competitors. It is clearly right to try to familiarise and even excite all young people with the potential of the beautiful new machines, but achieving large-scale industrial success with them will need some strategic thinking by the government, of which there is disappointingly little sign at present.

Can the welfare state survive?

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Earlier this week Andrew Gamble did a seminar at Manchester on his new book, [amazon_link id=”0745698743″ target=”_blank” ]Can the Welfare State Survive?[/amazon_link] It’s hardlly a spoiler to say he answers, yes, it can and must.

[amazon_image id=”0745698743″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Can the Welfare State Survive?[/amazon_image]

The book starts with some observations on the historical origins of the welfare state, and the various motives for its creation – the moral imperative, the practical need for a healthy workforce, the pragmatism of capitalism averting more radical political responses. Then it separates the challenges to the existing welfare state into four categories: affordability and the political unwillingness to pay taxes; the forces of globalisation affecting the tax base and business decisions about where to employ people; the ageing population making growing demands on the welfare state; and what he calls ‘new social risks’, which includes structural social and economic changes such as women’s changed expectations about work and family life, new patterns of working, the transition to services and intangibles and so on.

Despite this array of challenges, the book argues that the welfare state will adapt and survive because if it does not, then capitalism won’t and can’t survive. I too have great respect for the ability of capitalist democracies to adapt, and to ensure there are institutions to benefit the majority of people, often in just the nick of time to avoid revolution. Yet the book – not surprisingly for such a short one – does not engage fully with the problem that the welfare state we have does not actually do a good job, and yet it is hard to see a political path from the dysfunction of today to a better model of insurance against aggregate risks tomorrow. Today’s structures are built around the breadwinner, the traditional family, long periods of conventional employment in a company that will be around for a long time to deliver many of the policies of the welfare state. Nor is there any sign of this changing. The latest pensions and apprenticeships policies are to be delivered by companies. The new welfare state will have to be shaped around individuals taking a myriad of different paths through life. Otherwise even the people it is supposed to be protecting will find other ways, and support for paying for the ‘welfare state’ will decline further.

[amazon_link id=”0745698735″ target=”_blank” ]Can The Welfare State Survive?[/amazon_link] presents a nice overview of the issues, nevertheless, and I do agree that the moral and practical cases for it remain strong. The challenges to the welfare state are political, and paradoxically are posed more by its ostensible defenders who do not want anything to change.

This book, by the way, is one of another new series of short, polemical series, competing with my own Perspectives, and one from Palgrave in which my esteemed colleague Adam Ozanne has a new book out, [amazon_link id=”1137553723″ target=”_blank” ]Power and Neoclassical Economics[/amazon_link] (albeit with a mad price of £45 for 110 pages). There are lots of others. Despite – or rather because of! – the competition, I think this is a healthy phenomenon, a sign of the hunger for ideas and debate.

[amazon_image id=”1137553723″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Power and Neoclassical Economics: A Return to Political Economy in the Teaching of Economics[/amazon_image]