I’ve enjoyed a new book about this subtle, inter-disciplinary and creative economist, Albert O Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography by Michele A Alacevich. As the subtitle indicates, this is not an attempt to compete with Jeremy Adelman’s wonderful recent biography, Worldy Philosopher. (In that you get the full, astonishing, early life story of the man.) Rather, it is intended as a complement, focusing on Hirschman’s contribution to economics – mainly development economics – in the context of contemporary debates.

Like many economists trained in the mainstream and never having done development economics, I’ve caught up to Hirschman relatively late. I suspect this is a good thing, as I might have found myself less in sympathy with his views when I was a youngster who had internalised the standard econ of the 1970s and 80s. Now that I’m … not a youngster, his perspective is intuiitively appealing: the emphasis on the importance of political economy, the role of specifics of context (time, place, political happenstance), the dangers of technocratic approaches to policy backfiring.

From this book, I took away Hirschman’s early emphasis on the role of decision-making abilities – and their absence – in development. Not the role of specific factors (the typical list of ingredients for growth), but “the deficiency in the combining process itself.” Moreover, the ‘ability to make decisions cannot be economized’. Thinking about knowledge capital in the context of the UK’s leveling up debate (as part of my research for The Productivity Institute) this seems so relevant to the national/sub-national governance issues.

Another aspect that seems important and also intuitive is the need for significant social capital to operate the more social technologies – network industries such as electricity and rail. Again, this seems relevant to developed economies, thinking about the inability of Texas to maintain power supplies or the mess the UK has made of its rail network.

A third section I *really* liked (yes, this is weird) was about the 1970s debate on the use of cost benefit analysis, and Hirschman’s objection to the idea that this could be a technical, almost mechanical exercise. I’m mid-way through drafting a paper about appraisal of big projects so found this super-interesting.

All in all, I highly recommend this book, along with the Adelman volume (which is the one to start with if you haven’t read it – surprisingly expensive new but there are 2nd hand ones around). I not only learned more about Hirschman’s work and how his ideas evolved but also got some new insights into the history of thought in development economics.

I’ve written a review for another outlet of a weighty new book, but still want to flag it up here. It’s Measuring and Accounting for Innovation in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Carol Corrado, Jonathan Haskel, Javier Miranda, and Dan Sichel. The book is a conference volume, the papers presented at a 2017 NBER conference of the same title that I was lucky enough to attend.It was one of those rare and wonderful conferences where one sits bolt upright througout taking copious notes.

As ever, you don’t read an edited conference volume cover to cover like a normal book, and indeed a number of the papers are (as always in econ) out in the wild in working paper versions. Having said that, for those of us interested in the need to measure better – which means understanding better – the increasingly intangible economy, this is a really interesting book. It covers the waterfront from conceptual frameworks down to nitty gritty measurement questions. It’s much too costly to buy but there is a much much more affordable e-version (and may be worth recommending to the library too).

I want to plug a book I’ve edited published (via the Perspectives series with London Publishing Partnership), Gill Kernick’s Catastrophe and Systemic Change.

This is a really important book. Gill is a safety consultant with many years experience advising large, complex businesses about how to avoid disasters. As a former resident of Grenfell Tower, who watched that disaster unfold from her new home nearby, she turned her attention to public sector decision-making. Grenfell was not the first fire of that type. Why had ‘lessons ;earned’ from previous fires in fact not been learned?

We workshopped the questions at a Bennett Institute event in 2019, bringing together practitioners from different fields – fire safety, healthcare, regulatory bodies, the law – and academics from several disciplines. Gill has turned the insights from the workshop and her own experience and research into Catastrophe. There is also a podcast series and we are holding a Bennett Institute public event on June 15th where I’ll discuss the book with her and also with Jill Rutter from the Institute for Government.

The key questions is how to ensure lessons are learned – could there be any excuse for a repeat horror at some time in future? I’m not sure the book fills me with great hope. After a first couple of chapters specifically about how Grenfell happened, it diagnoses the multiple reasons why systems end up being unsafe, from complex and overlapping regulations and responsibilities, to fear of being blamed in political contexts, to the frequent failures to listen to people on the ground thereby losing valuable information about the risks. Having said that, one has to believe that systemic change is possible. Gill’s career has shown many businesses how to embed safety culture. I hope as many decision-makers as possible read the book so the lessons do spread through the public sector. These are often far more complex environments than the private sector, but on the other hand, the responsibilities of those in charge are correspondingly greater.

Do join us on June 15th, and do please read the book.