After a two-week reading fest on holiday in the Italian countryside, I’m back with a fistful of reviews. As it was a holiday, the books I took with me were not as directly economics-related as my everyday reading, but of course there’s economics in everything.

The first two I happened to read were [amazon_link id=”0713998687″ target=”_blank” ]Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56[/amazon_link] by Anne Applebaum and [amazon_link id=”0857208861″ target=”_blank” ]The Arab Uprisings: The People Want the Fall of the Regime[/amazon_link] by Jeremy Bowen.

[amazon_image id=”0713998687″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”0857208861″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Arab Uprisings: The People Want the Fall of the Regime[/amazon_image]

The latter is reportage by the BBC’s distinguished Middle East editor, and it combines his clearly extensive knowledge of the region with the edge-of-seat quality of reportage from the extraordinary events that started in Tunisia – it already seems a long time ago. The subtitle is a slogan that has appeared frequently in the countries where uprisings have occurred. However, the hope of the early ‘Arab Spring’ has given way to the horror of civil war in Syria and increasing violence in Egypt; of course, no book can keep up to the minute. I can’t say it left me feeling optimistic.

On the face of it, Anne Applebaum’s detailed and authoritative work on the descent of the Iron Curtain on Europe in the post-World War 2 years is entirely different. But one commonality struck me between the two books, namely the way that apparently endless and powerful authoritarian regimes are hollowed out by economic stagnation, no matter how violent they are. One day, it seems nothing can ever change, and the next day the whole edifice has collapsed. Sometimes, when it’s the secret police versus the economy, the economic forces win. This brought to mind Ben Friedman’s powerful arguments in [amazon_link id=”1400095719″ target=”_blank” ]The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth[/amazon_link].

The main part of Applebaum’s superb book is not, though, the collapse of Soviet-dominated Communism but rather its construction in the first place. It is going to be a standard reference on this time and place in history, a companion volume to Tony Judt’s [amazon_link id=”009954203X” target=”_blank” ]Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945[/amazon_link]. She details the methods by which communist parties –  assisted by Soviet military dominion in the post-war years, and by the collapse of order after the Nazi defeat – systematically destroyed all institutions and aspects of society that were not part of the state apparatus, even extending into family life as the years went by.

The violence and inhumanity documented are simply horrifying. So is the ‘total’ in totalitarianism: “No-one could be apolitical: the system demanded that all citizens sing its praises, however reluctantly. And so the vast majority of East Europeans did not make a pact with the devil or sell their souls to become informers, but rather succumbed to constant, all-encompassing everyday psychological and economic pressure. The Stalinist system excelled at creating large groups of people who felt nevertheless compelled by circumstances to go along with it.” The idea of there being no private space even inside one’s own mind is intolerable.

If I have one complaint about the book, it is that there isn’t more of it: Applebaum has spent years interviewing people around Eastern Europe and I would have liked to hear more from those interviews. Although the book does not cover the post-1956 or post-1989 periods, it is an essential read for anybody interested in the shadows East European history continue to cast.

As I’ve already confessed, I’ve read very little by Albert Hirschman. By the time I was learning economics, he and the mainstream of the economics profession had moved quite far along divergent paths. The mainstream was embracing mathematical techniques for modeling and – more significantly – the reductive assumptions about human behaviour and social context that made this approach feasible. Hirschman became increasingly interested in the connection between economic policies and politics. The one book of his I had ever been introduced to was [amazon_link id=”0674276604″ target=”_blank” ]Exit, Voice and Loyalty[/amazon_link], and possibly as part of my politics reading rather than economics.

This means Jeremy Adelman’s superb biography, [amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O Hirschman[/amazon_link], has been a real education. Its 600+ pages never flag; this is a very enjoyable book to read. It also means I’ve got some of Hirschman’s other books on the in-pile now, for the great lesson of recent years is that economists need to stay alert to the politics and the human behaviour that define the possibilities of economic choice; and that political scientists and other social scientists for their part need to pay more attention to economic incentives and to the domain of economic choice. Hirschman emerges as above all a careful observer of actual societies and economies, who therefore was multidisciplinary to the marrow.

[amazon_image id=”0691155674″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman[/amazon_image]

The biography begins with his extraordinary early life in the tumultuous Europe of the 1930s and Second World War. A second chunk concerns his work in and on Latin America and economic development more generally, based in a variety of institutions. The final leg covers Hirschman’s more settled period, mainly at Princeton’s IAS, as a distinguished political economist and author of a number of classic books. The book covers in some detail The Passions and the Interests and also his last book, [amazon_link id=”067476868X” target=”_blank” ]The Rhetoric of Reaction[/amazon_link].

Hirschman’s conclusions about the nature of capitalism and economic growth have real resonance for the current situation. His reading of the classics, including Adam Smith, made him one of the first people to reclaim (from Milton Friedman and other economists) the wiser Smith who understood that “moral sentiments” as well as self-interest determine people’s behaviour. Adelman sums it up: “The rule of passions could lead, without checks, to horrible utopias; the rein of interests to soulless pragmatism.”

Hirschman argued against the kind of theorising that insisted on pre-determined outcomes from given pre-conditions, insisting instead on the number of possible paths depending on happenstance and unintended consequences. I suppose we would call it pervasive path-dependence; it contrasted greatly with both the mainstream and the alternative or heterodox approaches of the time. He also identified the way that beliefs or expectations constrain outcomes – in the context of developing economies, he thought that policymakers and economists fettered themselves by their own perceptions of insurmountable hurdles or cultural inferiority. Latin America in the 1980s, he thought, was imprisoned by clashing intellectual paradigms, the false dichotomy between free market ‘neoliberalism’ (as we call it now) and Marxist revolution. He wrote: “The obstacles to the perception of change thus turn into an important obstacle to change itself.” Many economists point out the importance of expectations for economic outcomes, but usually in a rather abstract way in a model; expectations are what people believe to lie in the realm of possibility, and are shaped by intellectuals and economists and policymakers, among a whole host of others. We live in a world shaped by ideas, both embedded in technologies and embedded in policies and beliefs.

As the years went by, Hirschman turned increasingly to reading the classics of economics and the Enlightenment. As Adelman writes: “The pathway to recasting self-interest in a way that did not make it incompatible with the public good required going back centuries to the founding of its modern meaning.” His final book, [amazon_link id=”067476868X” target=”_blank” ]The Rhetoric of Reaction[/amazon_link], is now at the top of my reading list. Although seen as a response to the politics of the Reagan era, Adelman argues that it should be read in a broader way as concerned with the kind of public discourse that sustains democracy. The rhetorical habits Hirschman describes in the book have not only become pretty pervasive, but are also amplified by online media. The state of civic discourse is a vital question in itself and because it shapes beliefs and therefore economic possibilities.

In these comments, I’ve picked up themes that interest me particularly, including the light cast on the state of economics. [amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link] has a lot for readers with other interests too, particularly development economics (I touched on this in an earlier post). It’s also the well-told life story of a fascinating and obviously charming man. Half way through 2013, I’m sure it’s going to be one of my books of the year.