Why, oh why, can’t I write like Michael Lewis? Surely everyone who reads his books and dabbles in writing themselves must ask this. I read his latest, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, more or less in one sitting. It has the same pattern as his other excellent explorations of big, systemic things going wrong, The Big Short and The Fifth Risk. They are all superb books to set public policy students (and practitioners) as they concern the interaction between government and private decision-making: group-think, blame games, information and separating the signal from the noise, accountability, the role of expertise in democracies, of fear – and the rarity of clear thinking, moral fibre and courage. And they are all fantastic reads.

The Premonition concerns the lack of preparedness for the pandemic in the US: the politicisation of the CDC, the hollowing out of the public health system in previous decades, the malign ‘medical-industrial’ complex, and finally the toxic Trump presidency. It has some great characters, as in the other books independent-minded people who for whatever reason are not overly swayed by others around them in how they think or act. It has also given me a great addition to my lexicon: malignant obedience.

Anyway, highly recommended.

Less so – as it’s one for afficionados – Katrina Forrester’s In the Shadow of Justice about the influence of John Rawls. I was of the Rawls and Nozick generation of undergraduates – their magisterial books were reasonably new then. But I found this heavy going, philosophy academese not being a light read. This is another book that has had rave reviews but I struggled with, so I’m sure the fault is mine. Having subsequently read some of the reviews, it’s clearly an important book. I found this one helpful in telling me what to make of it.

I just read the new Princeton University Press edition of Vannevar Bush’s Science, The Endless Frontier, with an interesting introductory essay by Rush Holt. I don’t think I’d ever read the whole of the famous Bush document before, and it was interesting to see how he made the pitch. The rationale is all about the impact of research on living standards, jobs, progress. Famously, though, Bush advocated for expanded government support of basic research carried out independently and governed by scientists themselves. He argued for the early release of wartime results for the benefit of all (interesting given the contrast with the UK – perhaps we would have stayed stronger for longer in computing if the British government hadn’t kept the Bletchley work secret for so long).

I was also interested to see the essay starts by insisting on the need to include the social sciences and humanities in the body he advocated:

“It would be folly to set up a program in which research in the natural sciences and medicine was expanded at the cost of the social sciences, humanities and other studies so essential to national wellbeing.”

He also argued for a single agency to ensure disciplinary silos could be averted. Later in the essay, however, although the latter point is satisfied by Bush’s proposed structure for what became the NSF, he omitted the social sciences and humanities, believing they were ‘too political’.

Rush Holt’s essay notes that a competing proposal by Senator Kilgore wanted a new agency to serve the country’s economic and social needs more directly, and to ensure research funding was distributed around the US. And argues that the Kilgore vision was correct on this point. Holt writes: “Our scientific enterprise is failing to give citizens some importan things they need. These have not been failures of research …. Rather, they have been failures in the relationship between science and the public.” He argues on the one hand for reintegrating the social sciences and on the other for dialogue between scientists and public but also greater scientific literacy. Some research, he concludes, should be directed to social needs, and to regional economic development.

I hadn’t realised that today’s debate about these aspects of science policy dated right back to 1945. Both the Bush and the Holt essays are well worth a read. One of the lessons from the pandemic must be the high cost of not having better integrated social, medical and natural science research. There has been great work across disciplines, on the hoof – it should have been in place to start with. If we don’t fix this now, how on earth are climate change, biodiversity loss, demographic pressures and other big challenges going to be tackled?

Where do the days go? I’ve split my reading time between several books this past week or so, and finished only one: To Be Fair: The Ultimate Guide to Fairness in the 21st Century, by Ben Fenton. This is a wonderfully readable book (written by an ex-journalist) that both summarizes a wide range of scholarly literature on fairness – from psychology and evolutionary science to history – and at the same time advocates strongly for the need to put fairness at the centre of public life and policy.

The first part of the book is a summary of what different disciplinary approaches can tell us about fairness. I had read some of this (eg Frans De Waal’s primate studies) but not all. The main message is how profoundly important fairness is to humans. The second part looks at fairness (and its absence) in different contexts, such as sport, politics, business, tax, law and tech. I found these more interesting, and took away lots of nuggets of insight.

I liked the chapters on business and on media/communications best. There is a lot of injustice to skewer in either case. For example, the book points out: “Business and finance words that aren’t about stability are likely to be about sharing: equity, shares, dividend.” Of course there are lots of other business and finance words, but I liked the point. Or about private equity types: “To them fairness is a word for suckers. I am not sure why we keep letting them get away with it.”

Nor am I. The inequality scarring many societies today is fundamentally unfair – there is an absence of justice – and it has been getting worse. This past year I’ve been veering between optimism that this crisis will prove a turning point leading to major reform of an unfair economic system, and pessimism that such trends are only reversed after a period of significant conflict. After all, nothing changed after the 2008 financial crisis. I still can’t decide – who knows? But To Be Fair has found its moment.