Author Archives: Diane Coyle

The Enlightened Economist Prize 2015 – the long list

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A bit late this year, here is my shortlist for my personal prize for the best book I’ve read since last year’s shortlist. The rules are that date of publication doesn’t matter, only my date of reading the book, and that the winner in a week or so will be entirely my arbitrary choice – the one I enjoyed the most. The prize, apart from glory, is my offer to take the winner out for dinner .

So here they are in no particular order:

[amazon_link id=”0393246418″ target=”_blank” ]Economics Rules[/amazon_link] by Dani Rodrik (How to do economics well – review here )

[amazon_link id=”0241003555″ target=”_blank” ]Why Information Grows[/amazon_link] Cesar Hidalgo (Information based economies  – review)

[amazon_link id=”000752076X” target=”_blank” ]Who Gets What and Why[/amazon_link] Alvin Roth (Market design – review)

[amazon_link id=”0300195664″ target=”_blank” ]Learning by Doing[/amazon_link] James Bessen – (Technology and work – will review very soon)

[amazon_link id=”1781688451″ target=”_blank” ]The Happiness industry[/amazon_link] William Davies – (Scepticism about behavioural economics and utilitarianism – review)

[amazon_link id=”0571308015″ target=”_blank” ]Nothing is True and Everything is Possible[/amazon_link] Peter Pomerantsev (The scary truth about modern Russia – review)

[amazon_link id=”1846146410″ target=”_blank” ]The Reckoning[/amazon_link] Jacob Soll (The history and influence of accountancy – review)

[amazon_link id=”0465059996″ target=”_blank” ]Rise of the Robots[/amazon_link] Martin Ford – (Technology and jobs, a pessimistic view – review)

[amazon_link id=”B00UJD8AS2″ target=”_blank” ]Other People’s Money[/amazon_link] John Kay (Pernicious modern finance – review)

[amazon_link id=”0262016494″ target=”_blank” ]Cybernetic Revolutionaries[/amazon_link] Eden Medina (Using technology to shape society in Allende’s Chile – review)

[amazon_link id=”0691152845″ target=”_blank” ]Mastering Metrics[/amazon_link] Joshua Angrist and Steffen Pischke (Econometrics of the best kind, made fun – review)

[amazon_link id=”B00WQRFC30″ target=”_blank” ]Inequality[/amazon_link] Anthony Atkinson (What to do about it (and why), a practical agenda – review)

[amazon_link id=”0691160392″ target=”_blank” ]Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels[/amazon_link] Ian Morris (Long run economic history – review)

[amazon_link id=”1783350644″ target=”_blank” ]Swimming with the Sharks[/amazon_link] – Joris Luydendijk (The sociology of pernicious modern finance – review)

 

Standards, interoperability and innnovation in infrastructure

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A request via Michelle Brook on Twitter: what has been written about the relationship – in the context of large scale infrastructure – between standards/interoperability and innovation? A quick search via Google Scholar revealed a few papers, mainly about communications networks. Other than that, all I could think of was Pierre-Richard Agenor’s [amazon_link id=”0691155801″ target=”_blank” ]Public Capital, Growth and Welfare[/amazon_link]. Oh, and also business history case studies such as Bernard Carlson’s terrific [amazon_link id=”0691165610″ target=”_blank” ]Tesla[/amazon_link] biography, Jon Gernter’s [amazon_link id=”1594203288″ target=”_blank” ]The Idea Factory[/amazon_link], or maybe [amazon_link id=”0787971545″ target=”_blank” ]Fast Second[/amazon_link] by Geroski and Markides. But if others have other suggestions, please do add them – or let Michelle, @MLBrook, know.

[amazon_image id=”0691155801″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Public Capital, Growth and Welfare: Analytical Foundations for Public Policy[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0691165610″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”1594203288″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0787971545″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership)[/amazon_image]

What’s new about nudges?

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As I prepare to lecture on behavioural economics in public policy tomorrow, I’ve been riffling through the books I have in the room here & am struck by how similar they all are. The most recent is Richard Thaler’s [amazon_link id=”1846144035″ target=”_blank” ]Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics[/amazon_link], which is as the subtitle suggests about the debate within economics about foundational assumptions as well as the content of behavioural economics. It’s very good and accessible. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is still my favourite. There’s [amazon_link id=”0141040017″ target=”_blank” ]Nudge[/amazon_link], of course, by Thaler and Sunstein. The Dan Ariely books – I have [amazon_link id=”0007256531″ target=”_blank” ]Predictably Irrational[/amazon_link] here – are jolly reads. Mullanaithan and Shafir’s [amazon_link id=”0141049197″ target=”_blank” ]Scarcity[/amazon_link] is an important book. A more scholarly volume is Eldar Shafir’s edited volume [amazon_link id=”0691137560″ target=”_blank” ]The Behavioural Foundations of Public Policy[/amazon_link]. Somewhere too in here is Colin Camerer’s [amazon_link id=”0691116822″ target=”_blank” ]Advances in Behavioural Economics[/amazon_link]. And I have [amazon_link id=”0691164371″ target=”_blank” ]Government Paternalism[/amazon_link] by Julian LeGrand and Bill New, somewhat cautious in its embrace of behavioural policies.

[amazon_image id=”1846144035″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0141040017″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0007256531″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0141049197″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”B00P6ZJ6LS” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Government Paternalism: Nanny State or Helpful Friend?[/amazon_image]

The thing that strikes me looking at these volumes covering a dozen years is how much overlap there is in the material they cover, often exactly the same examples. Does this mean behavioural economics has not really moved on from the central insight about people’s inability to calculate probabilities as if they were Mr Spock from Star Trek, and hence the “irrationality” of much decision-making concerning uncertainty and predictions of the future? The big questions I have  – and can’t readily find the answers to – are:

1. What do we know about the boundaries between situations in which people are “rational” and “irrational” (ie individual choices lead to the market outcome as predicted by conventional economic theory, or not) – is it as simple as any situation involving having to predict the future?

2. What do we know systematically about the interaction between individual decisions and social influencing (other than that it exists)?

3. What do we know about whether people adjust over time to ‘nudge’ policies and change their behaviour, as they do to any traditional economic policies?

If those who have read more of the behavioural literature know where I can find relevant material, I’d be very grateful.

Technology paradoxes

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I’ve started reading James Bessen’s [amazon_link id=”0691143218″ target=”_blank” ]Learning By Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth[/amazon_link], and it promises to be very interesting. He starts with a paradox: That “the effects of the new technology are all around us,” but for one place: our paychecks. “Since the beginning of the personal computer revolution, the median wage in the United States has been stagnant.” (I’ve yet to get far enough to know whether the book only talks about the US – phenomena like the stagnant median wage and increased income inequality are at their extreme there.)

[amazon_image id=”0300195664″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Learning by Doing: The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth[/amazon_image]

It set me thinking that actually there is another paradox that’s the twin of Bessen’s: that the main (only?) thing that has benefitted many people in economic terms in the past couple of decades is – technology. People greatly value their smartphones and other ever-cheaper/better consumer electronics, internet access, free online content and services. This consumer surplus story is well-known; among others, Brynjolfosson and McAfee point it out in [amazon_link id=”0393239357″ target=”_blank” ]The Second Machine Age[/amazon_link].

So we have the meta-paradox of limited if any gains in monetary incomes and potentially large gains in non-monetary consumer surplus (although there are some reasons for caution about the scale as ‘free’ is not free), and no obvious way to evaluate these, You can’t eat consumer surplus but people see internet access as a basic right (pdf), a sign that they put huge value on the technology. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about these measurement/welfare questions.

Thinking and writing

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It was one of 20 minutes gaps between appointments, and of course I spent the time in a bookshop. I escaped with just one paperback, Steven Pinker’s [amazon_link id=”0241957710″ target=”_blank” ]The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century[/amazon_link]. To be honest, it was the cover image that sold it to me: I’m a sucker for monochrome photographs.

[amazon_image id=”0241957710″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century[/amazon_image]

Normally I don’t read how-to-write books. After all, I’ve been writing for aeons: school essays, 2 essays a week at university, a PhD dissertation (economics, but still, it had words), policy notes, client reports, magazine and newspaper articles, books. Just recently, though, I’ve read two excellent ones (the other being Oliver Kamm’s [amazon_link id=”0297871935″ target=”_blank” ]Accidence Will Happen[/amazon_link]).

[amazon_image id=”0297871935″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage[/amazon_image]

Pinker’s book is of course written with even more than his usual clarity and elegance. He makes it quite funny, too. The aspect I found most useful was the advice on writing to accommodate how our brains process language. This pertains to sentence structure, and also to the structure of longer pieces of text. Structure is absolutely the hardest aspect of any long piece of writing – the longer, the harder. This is because thinking is hard too. Clarity of thought and clarity of writing are strongly positively correlated.

[amazon_link id=”0241957710″ target=”_blank” ]The Sense of Style[/amazon_link] also has a long final section which runs through the usual questions: when to use ‘I’ or ‘me’; can you put prepositions at the end of sentences or start with a ‘but’ or ‘and’? I enjoyed the advice about the subjunctive mood because I had never known the difference between that and the use of ‘were’ (“If I were a rich man, dah di dah di dah di dah di dah di dah di dah di dah…”), the latter being in fact called ‘irrealis’. If that doesn’t entice you to buy the book, nothing will.