I’m reviewing The God Species by Mark Lynas for The Independent, so will not post a review here. But it did underline for me the convergence of debate between economists and environmentalists about sustainability and the impact of humans on the planet as a whole. Until quite recently I would have said the perspectives of the two disciplines could not possibly converge, with economists fundamentally believing that if a trend is unsustainable, it will not be sustained because people’s behaviour would change in response to incentives, and environmentalists fundamentally gloomier about the scope for self-correction.

However, I’m starting to think there is a real effort on both sides to reach a mutual understanding about sustainability. I’d put my own The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters in this basket, alongside some economics books more directly concerned with climate change – Nick Stern’s Blueprint for a Safer Planet comes to mind. Mark Lynas’s book is an environmental campaigner’s pragmatic effort to include economic tools in the kit of responses needed to avert catastrophic environmental change.

I’ll link to my review when it’s out in The Independent.

PS A note to regular readers – I hope you like the new format. We made a software and server switch, which is why the blog has been quiet this week. Feedback is welcome – I’ll be making a few more changes. There will also be links to Amazon as it seems to make sense to join the affiliates programme – the only one available at present.

This morning's Financial Times features its recommendations for summer reading. I always enjoy lists of books, and all the more so this time as it includes The Economics of Enough. There are several economics and business, and also politics, books on the list I'd like to catch up with this summer. For example, Paul Allen's memoir Idea Man is one, along with Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order. This looks intriguing too:

And my new boss, BBC Trust Chairman Lord Patten, is recommending Off Message by Bob Marshall Andrews, so I shall certainly read that.

But here's the question for readers of this blog. Can we draw up our own list of summer recommendations? Rather than restricting it to newish hardbacks, the rule is paperbacks that can be left behind in the holiday house, and that are intellectually stimulating without being hard work. Please comment here or send me a tweet (@diane1859), and I'll compile a list.

The BBC has posted the archive of transcripts and talks from the Reith Lecture Series, which started in 1948 with Bertrand Russell and this year features Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi. It's a complete treasure trove and I started with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1966 lecture on The New Industrial State.

It sent me back to browsing the book and, of course, considering the parallels between then and now. The figures he gives for concentration in the US economy at the time are still staggering: at the end of 1974, the biggest 200 manufacturing firms in the US (less than a tenth of one percent of the total number) held two thirds of all assets and accounted for three fifths of all sales.  I wonder what the corresponding figures today would be – one would want to include services as well as manufacturing, but the picture would be no less concentrated, for sure.

In many ways the book of course reflects its times – the Cold War, and the corresponding emphasis on the 'military-industrial complex'. But some of its themes remain relevant, including the relationship between technology, capital requirements and economic organisational forms, and between economic power and political power. This is a lesson we have painfully re-learnt since the financial crisis, thanks in no small part to economists such as Simon Johnson.

I'm not a fan of J.K.Galbraith's work. I've always found the rhetoric insufficiently rooted in evidence, and his prose rather pompous. In short, the books are too woolly and full of purple prose. I once met the great man, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, and felt simply too short to be of any interest to him – so maybe that explains my antipathy.

Still, his emphasis on the link between economics and politics is certainly right, and so well worth taking to heart is Galbraith's point about the gap between the romantic (Anglo-Saxon) view of the economy as a competitive field of small enterprises and the reality of large corporations wielding power. As he notes, the myth is an ideological one, and not one most economists subscribed to at the time – or now either, even if much of the profession was diverted down that path by the political spirit of the 1980s.

I've nearly finished reading the terrific new book by BBC presenter Evan Davis, Made in Britain (haven't yet caught up on the TV series). The fact that I agree almost entirely with Evan means it is obviously an excellent book, not to mention a good read – it almost made me miss my tube stop yesterday.

In a nutshell, it gives a balanced perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of UK manufacturing. The strengths include some significant advanced manufacturing sectors, quite a few thriving niches, and real strengths in innovation and creativity. Together these mean that although employment in manufacturing has fallen dramatically over recent decades, and its share in the economy has also declined sharply, the level of output, and consequently the productivity of UK industry, has risen. We are nowhere near as weak compared to other leading industrial nations as we typically think. Needless to say, there are weaknesses too, all of them well-known, including the national mania for investing in housing and the unbalancing effect of our financial services industry.

I particularly like the clear logic the book applies to the natural evolution of the economy from primary to secondary to tertiary activities, and the consequence of productivity growth in the dynamic sector of its day for that sector's future size relative to total GDP and employment. I also applaud the book's calm insistence that trade with China – its cheap consumer goods for our investment goods and services – is on balance a good thing for both the Chinese and the British. I haven't seen the calculation of the likely costs and benefits set out in such an accessible way anywhere else.

One chapter that is particularly intriguing looks at the psychology of manufacturing. Why do we worry particularly about the health of manufacturing? Why is there something especially satisfactory about doing a job whose output is tangible? The book compares the innate job satisfaction of working on building aircraft at BAE Systems versus selling advertising space on a commercial radio station. It argues that the tangible must have a special psychological status, and references books on craftsmanship. There is obviously something in this – it's a constant trope of the literature of work. Although all the increment in GDP since around 1980 has been intangible and literally weightless (see The Weightless World – pdf), and although many people inveigh against materialism, physical stuff seems to have a privileged status in our minds.

But this isn't the whole psychological story. Some service sector jobs also have a privileged status in most of our minds – teaching, nursing, and caring, I would suggest, perhaps also being a musician or an artist – but not working as an actor or a lawyer or banker. And some manufacturing jobs would be seen as inferior too, depending perhaps on how they are labelled. Working on an aircraft engine is one thing, or working as a lathe operator, but what about working on the assembly line in a food processing factory? This carries over to our views about different sub-sectors themselves, the caring professions as opposed to the exploitative ones, the romantic engineer as opposed to the pathetic chicken-plucker. I don't have an uber-theory about the status of these different economic activities, but my ideal economy would have a lot of us earning our living making music, dancing and painting – and making TV and radio programmes, creating beautiful clothes and devising delicious meals –  as well as caring for children and the sick. And I'd be happy for my sons to become engineers, or economists, but definitely not investment bankers.

One of Amartya Sen's consistent themes is the importance of process justice as well as justice in outcomes. It is, he argues forcefully, the reason why freedom is so important an aspect of human well-being. This theme, which features in all his work but especially The Idea of Justice, is applied in a new volume he has edited, Peace and Democratic Society, just out from Open Book Publishers. (It can be read for free online, important to Sen with this volume so readers in India could access it freely, or bought as a download or physical volume.)

The introductory essay draws on the findings of the
Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding, chaired
by Sen. In this new essay Sen underlines the importance of democracy as a process, rather than as a collection of formal institutions as it is conventionally understood. Simply put, democracy is the best set of arrangements for reaching a collective agreement, the best hope of averting violent conflict.

The report has one chapter specifically on the question of poverty, inequality and violence. It focuses on inequality rather than poverty as a contributory factor, and specifically the inequality of economic outcomes for specific groups when this forms one of several forms of unfairness or exclusion affecting specific groups. As it notes, the same degree of poverty, and even the same degree of inequality, is consistent with different patterns of violence. There is no simple formula linking the economic conditions of a society and the prevailing level of violence.

A couple of the other chapters, which I've not yet read, also look interesting. I'm not sure how fruitful the conclusions will prove. The recommendations are rather general, and it's always those who least need to bother who sign up first for motherhood and apple pie. But the key point, surely, is to focus on the process and keep on talking.