Author Archives: Diane Coyle

Intellectual fuel for modern feminists

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There is one welcome side-effect of the unspeakable online threats made to Caroline Criado-Perez over her successful campaign to get Jane Austen on the next £10 note. It is the realisation that feminists, male and female, still have a lot of work to do.

Over at the Teen Economists blog today Viva Avasthi has reviewed Virginia Woolf’s [amazon_link id=”0141183535″ target=”_blank” ]A Room of One’s Own[/amazon_link], still a timely essay. The classic feminist text that opened my eyes in the 1970s was Simone de Beauvoir’s [amazon_link id=”009974421X” target=”_blank” ]The Second Sex[/amazon_link].

Recently Sheryl Sandberg’s [amazon_link id=”0753541629″ target=”_blank” ]Lean In: Women, work and the will to lead[/amazon_link] has gained a lot of attention. It’s quite good but puts all the onus for improving women’s economic standing on their individual actions; it omits discussion of the institutional barriers women face to progress at work and in society.

Another fairly recent book, startling in its findings, is [amazon_link id=”069108940X” target=”_blank” ]Women Don’t Ask[/amazon_link] by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. It reports research showing that part of the reason women’s pay is lower than that of comparable men is that, indeed, individual women need to ask for promotions and raises. The trouble is that when they do, they are disliked – it’s unfeminine, aggressive to put yourself forward, and male colleagues and bosses find other ways to punish women who do ask.

[amazon_image id=”069108940X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide[/amazon_image]

Other books include Arlie Hochschild’s [amazon_link id=”0143120336″ target=”_blank” ]The Second Shift [/amazon_link]on the burden of unpaid domestic work, especially childcare, on working women; and Susan Faludi’s [amazon_link id=”009922271X” target=”_blank” ]Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women[/amazon_link] – old now but the backlash seems fiercer still now; and of course other classics of the 70s and earlier such as [amazon_link id=”0007205015″ target=”_blank” ]The Female Eunuch[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”1860492827″ target=”_blank” ]The Women’s Room[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”0860680290″ target=”_blank” ]Sexual Politics[/amazon_link] etc.

There is of course also a large scholarly literature in economics on gender discrimination such as Claudia Goldin’s research, Heather Joshi‘s, Betsey Stevenson’s, and much more. Enough to know that it’s time to act again.

Reading about inequality

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In a post on the Oxfam blog, Nick Galasso has suggested three books about income inequality. They are Branko Milanovic’s [amazon_link id=”1459608151″ target=”_blank” ]The Haves and the Have-Nots[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”1416588701″ target=”_blank” ]Winner-Take-All Politics[/amazon_link] by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and Chrystia Freedland’s [amazon_link id=”1846142520″ target=”_blank” ]Plutocrats[/amazon_link]. These are billed as summer reading.

[amazon_image id=”1846142520″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich[/amazon_image]

For further reading, I’d add an earlier book by Milanovic, [amazon_link id=”0691121109″ target=”_blank” ]Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality[/amazon_link]; Thorstein Veblen’s [amazon_link id=”0199552584″ target=”_blank” ]The Theory of the Leisure Class[/amazon_link] (albeit skimming the denser parts – he wasn’t a good writer); the papers by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty on the historical data; [amazon_link id=”0718197380″ target=”_blank” ]The Price of Inequality[/amazon_link] by Joseph Stiglitz; [amazon_link id=”0805078541″ target=”_blank” ]The Status Syndrome[/amazon_link] by Michael Marmot; and [amazon_link id=”0300089538″ target=”_blank” ]Mind the gap: hierarchies, health and human evolution[/amazon_link] by Richard Wilkinson (but not, for my money, The Spirit Level; I know it has been revised in response to critiques but I was irrevocably put off by the first edition).

Thinking aslant about development economics

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I’m about half way through the biography of Albert Hirschman ([amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link]) now, and despite the arm-ache from holding up the book, am enjoying it more than anything I’ve read recently. My interest was particularly caught by an account of a paper Hirschman delivered at a conference at MIT in 1954, “Economics and Investment Planning: Reflections Based on Experience in Colombia” (sadly it seems to be only available as a mimeo, not published anywhere, but if anybody knows differently, please tell me!)

At this time, Hirschman was working for the World Bank and then as an independent consultant based in Bogotá, having been unable to get a job in Washington because of post-war anti-communist paranoia, even though he was anti-communist himself. His biographer Jerry Adelman reports that Hirschman’s paper went down badly with the audience of top academics, as it criticised the academic methodological orthodoxy, and in particular the claim to universality and abstract thinking – albeit applied to competing models of development. This gave rise, he believed, to a (false) presumption of the superiority of the western expert over the locals who understood what was happening in the economy. Hirschman advocated instead using case studies to try to identify which businesses were thriving or not, and a policy emphasis on experimentation and improvisation. He was also unusual in his focus on private investment rather than government planning.

Reading this biography is making me embarrassed to have read so little else by Hirschman over the years. Still, it has set me thinking about development economics. This field seems to me to be in quite good health these days, after decades of suffering as one of the ideological arenas of economics. There have been lots of terrific books published in recent years, including those such as [amazon_link id=”1611747511″ target=”_blank” ]Poor Economics[/amazon_link] riding the wave of field experiments. Still, it is the mavericks of development economics who until recently provided some of the most interesting perspectives. Think of Mancur Olsen’s [amazon_link id=”0300030797″ target=”_blank” ]The Rise and Decline of Nations[/amazon_link], Peter Bauer eg [amazon_link id=”0674200330″ target=”_blank” ]The Development Frontier[/amazon_link], Deepak Lal’s [amazon_link id=”0262621541″ target=”_blank” ]Unintended Consequences[/amazon_link] or even Hernando de Soto’s [amazon_link id=”0552999237″ target=”_blank” ]The Mystery of Capital[/amazon_link], briefly fashionable but academically dissed.

It is as if some economists are not considered by the orthodoxy to write authentically about development, and I wonder if the identification of these writers with right-of-centre political views means the left-of-centre establishment of development economics rejects them? If so, Hirschman seems to have pulled off the combination of the ‘correct’ political identification with a more or less Hayekian methodological approach and – like my other examples – a strongly multidisciplinary flavour. This isn’t my field so I will defer to people who know more, but will be interested in reactions.

As for Hirschman, Adelman writes: “He was not prepared to abandon his views in favor of more acceptable theories.”

[amazon_image id=”0552999237″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Mystery Of Capital[/amazon_image]

Update: Francisco Mejia has pointed out another review of the biography making a similar point:

http://blogs.iadb.org/desarrolloefectivo_en/2013/06/14/hirschman-or-the-years-of-thinking-differently/

The loneliness of the long-distance whistleblower

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For Tube reading, I turned to Michael Woodford’s [amazon_link id=”0241963613″ target=”_blank” ]Exposure: From President to Whistleblower at Olympus[/amazon_link], his account of his whistleblowing as President of Olympus on the huge fraud perpetrated by some of his colleagues. The blurb compares it to a thriller, and that’s no exaggeration.

To recap the story, he was made the first foreign President of the company he had worked his way up for 30 years. There had been only three foreigners before him to hold similar positions, so his appointment was high profile indeed. Soon after taking the job, he was alerted to reports of nefarious financial dealings published in a small investigative magazine. Woodford soon found the claims seemed to have some substance to them. Some of his senior Japanese colleagues tried to play them down, then freeze him out. Woodford instead went public.

[amazon_image id=”0241963613″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Exposure: From President to Whistleblower at Olympus: Inside the Olympus Scandal: How I Went from CEO to Whistleblower[/amazon_image]

His account of the experience of being a whistleblower is convincing, and gripping. The book is very good on the psychological ups and downs – mainly downs – and on the strains the pressure imposed on his family and friends. The cost of such an act of individual courage is obviously enormous, all the more so as there were through this period hints, never proven, of Yakuza involvement (“Goldman Sachs with guns,” as they’re described here). The book also paints a persuasive and not at all flattering picture of Japanese business culture, at least in a hierarchical company of this kind – Woodford clearly loves the country despite all that happened. In the end, he was wholly vindicated.

It’s a very pacy read, well worth picking up for a flight or the beach.

La trahison des clercs

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I’m about a third through Jeremy Adelman’s superb biography of Albert Hirschman, [amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]The Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link], and thoroughly enjoying it. We’ve got to the end of the second World War, by which time the young Hirschman had already had a lot of History to contend with, in the shape of the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, the Spanish Civil War, running with Varian Fry an escape route for Jews through Marseilles, Spain and Lisbon, and his own flight to the US and re-enlistment in the US army – alongside learning economics, reading widely and speaking several languages fluently, and getting married to a Russian-French-Californian intellectual and beauty.

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

Needless to say, I’m particularly interested in reading about Hirschman’s reading. He was a fan of Camus, but not Sartre – definitely the right preference ordering. When fleeing Vichy France as the authorities closed in on his escape route, and able to take only one book with him, he chose Montaigne’s [amazon_link id=”B0081LMNKA” target=”_blank” ]Essais[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”B0081LMNKA” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Montaigne – Les Essais (French Edition)[/amazon_image]

There is an interesting passage about Julian Benda’s attack on the abandonment of Enlightenment reason for nationalism by European intellectuals, [amazon_link id=”224601915X” target=”_blank” ]La Trahison des Clercs[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”3640206096″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Julien Benda – La Trahison Des Clercs[/amazon_image]

Reacting to the argument, Hirschman wrote of the “hybrid position of intellectuals in the modern world: neither masters, nor prosecuted, but technicians.” Most saw their role as working out the most effective means for politicians to achieve the ends they selected, but this meant intellectuals had abdicated the responsibility to study “the thirst for power and domination.” There is no possibility of pure technocracy, he argued – that in itself is a political choice. An interesting reflection given the return of technocracy in Europe post-crisis.

I’ll do a proper review when I’ve finished the book, which is going slowly because it’s too big to carry around. There have been other excellent reviews, such as this by Justin Fox and this by Cass Sunstein.

Meanwhile, I want to honour the name of Hiram Bingham IV. I’d never heard of this State Department official. This rich and well-connected diplomat, based in Marseilles from 1939, had become disillusioned with the Department’s policy of doing little to nothing to help refugees from Europe reach the US, and so embarked on his own freelance mission to issue thousands of US visas, both legal and illegal, to help the Varian Fry and Albert Hirschman rescue operation. The beneficiaries included Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall as well as hundreds of people lacking the protection of fame. The State Department retaliated by posting Bingham to Argentina, where he turned his attention to tracking Nazis. He resigned from the foreign service in 1945 and didn’t speak of his wartime work again.