Category Archives: Main Page

Markets and humans

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Brank Milanovic has an interesting post on what he decries as the commodification of life by markets, something that will surely strike a chord with the many fans of Michael Sandel’s [amazon_link id=”0241954487″ target=”_blank” ]What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets[/amazon_link] and others. While I absolutely agree that there ought to be limits to what resources are allocated by markets as opposed to other means, Branko lost me in this early paragraph: “The most obvious case is commodification of activities that used to be conducted within extended families and then, as we became richer and more individualistic within nuclear families. Cooking has now become out-sourced and families often do not eat meals together. Cleaning and child-rearing have become more commercialized than before or ever.”

The trend towards buying ‘domestic’ services outside the home dates back decades now, linked to urbanisation and women’s participation in the paid workforce. The switch from home cooking to ‘outsourced’ meals, and similar market activities, has saved women millions of hours of labour in the home. I’m all for it.

Indeed, one of the social advantages in general of a switch toward markets (or ‘commodification’) is precisely the anonymity of the market as compared with the personal (patriarchal) power relations involved in from home production and household/village economic activity. Robert Putnam’s classic [amazon_link id=”0691037388″ target=”_blank” ]Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy[/amazon_link] touches on this in its contrast of northern and southern Italy – the south being more family-centred, with ‘strong ties’, in all sense of the word family, the north more oriented toward ‘weak ties’ in the wider urban community. Partha Dasgupta’s Economics of Social Capital is very good on this tension.

Branko’s post goes on to criticize the so-called ‘gig’ economy. Again, I think this isn’t so straightforward. Some of the ‘gig’ corporations are deeply unpleasant and the conditions of work unsatisfactory. However, those conditions are determined by workers’ outside options in the job market, so corporations’ behaviour to these workers can be improved by the framework of labour law and its enforcement. There is every reason to believe – from the numbers participating if nothing else – that very many people appreciate the opportunity to make money from participating in this segment of the economy; and indeed that it offers a route into the formal job market for people who otherwise find it hard to participate (see for example this on Uber in France by Anne-Sylvaine Chassany).

Branko writes: “The problem with this kind of commodification and flexibilization is that it undermines human relations and trust that are needed for the smooth functioning of an economy. ” This seems obviously true, and indeed the tension was identified by Daniel Bell in his [amazon_link id=”B0028QL03K” target=”_blank” ]The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism[/amazon_link], and all its forerunners.

I’d certainly agree that western economies are not in a good place in terms of this balance now. But to illustrate this, I wouldn’t pick on the exactly the examples of markets that empower women and marginalized workers.

[amazon_image id=”184614471X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”0691037388″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton Paperbacks)[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”B0028QL03K” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]By Daniel Bell – The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism (20th Anniversary Ed)[/amazon_image]

Ethics *and* dirty realism in public policy

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Ethan Bueno de Mesquita’s new book, [amazon_link id=”0691168741″ target=”_blank” ]Political Economy for Public Policy[/amazon_link], has just landed at Enlightenment towers. I’m excited about this book, which I read at the proof stage. As I say in the blurb I provided, “This book brings some much-needed clarity and rigor to the analysis of public policy: What are the aims of policy, what are the inescapable dilemmas and trade-offs, and what are the pitfalls in government action? Above all, its essential message is that effective policy analysis is impossible without taking account of the political realities and the difficulties of implementation.” And as one of the other comments puts it, there is no other book like it.

[amazon_image id=”0691168741″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Political Economy for Public Policy[/amazon_image]

Why so? Well, it’s a mildly technical textbook – nothing too alarming – combining the rigour of economics in approaching public policy (voting rules, game theory, Arrow etc) with the philosophical foundations and politics of implementation. It aims for a consistent synthesis, and largely succeeds. I like the way it starts with the ethical issues, and puts questions of trade-offs and distributional issues up front. And I like just as much the fact that it is so clear about the incentives faced by policymakers and the dirty realism of political constraints.

As a bonus, there’s also a super-clear appendix explaining game theory for students who haven’t come across it elsewhere.

Well worth a look if you teach political economy or public policy. There are exercises at the end of each chapter, and further reading. I will set some chapters for my course.

Containing multitudes

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The blog has been down for a few days, for which apologies.

Twitter pointed me to the fantastic visualisation of container shipping below. It’s a good excuse to revisit this obsession of mine. The ur-book on this subject is Marc Levinson’s [amazon_link id=”0691170819″ target=”_blank” ]The Box[/amazon_link], a fascinating account of both the industry itself and the general role of standards, and the wide and permanent social consequences of technological innovations. A more recent title on the same subject is also excellent, [amazon_link id=”0262028573″ target=”_blank” ]The Container Principle[/amazon_link] by Alexander Klose – more of a cultural studies perspective on the subject. I also enjoyed Rose Geroge’s account of life on a container ship, [amazon_link id=”1846272998″ target=”_blank” ]Deep Sea and Foreign Going[/amazon_link].

I’m immensely looking forward to reading Richard Baldwin’s new book, [amazon_link id=”067466048X” target=”_blank” ]The Great Convergence: Informaiton Technology and the New Globalization[/amazon_link], on what he describes as the second great unbundling, the post-1980 reorganisation of production on a global scale, splitting up supply chains to take ever-greater advantage of specialisation through trade. It couldn’t have happened without the containers.

[amazon_image id=”067466048X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”0691170819″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Second Edition with a new chapter by the author[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”B01DHN62IU” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]By Alexander Klose ; Charles Marcrum ( Author ) [ Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think Infrastructures By Feb-2015 Hardcover[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”1846272637″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Brings You 90% of Everything[/amazon_image]

 

More holiday reading

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One of my other holiday books was Orhan Pamuk’s [amazon_link id=”0571275990″ target=”_blank” ]A Strangeness in My Mind[/amazon_link]. I love all his books – his ability to make real the characters of people so very different from the reader is extraordinary. Given the context of what’s happening now in Turkey, all the more reason to read this saga of family life from a village in Anatolia in the 1960s to Istanbul now. This is a love story, a reflection on family, but it sheds much light on the rural to urban shift, the clash of cultures, the effects of the deracination caused by migration, the corrosiveness of poverty, the tension between secular modernism and Islamic traditions.

[amazon_image id=”0571275990″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]A Strangeness in My Mind[/amazon_image]

And I *loved* China Mieville’s [amazon_link id=”033053419X” target=”_blank” ]The City and The City,[/amazon_link] a random title picked for Son 2, who ignored it. I’ve read a couple of his others. This one is pure genius, an apt read for these increasingly nationalistic times.

[amazon_image id=”033053419X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The City & The City[/amazon_image]

As well as a few thrillers, of varying quality, I read Brooke Harrington’s [amazon_link id=”0674743806″ target=”_blank” ]Capital Without Borders[/amazon_link] and Ryan Avent’s [amazon_link id=”0241201039″ target=”_blank” ]The Wealth of Humans[/amazon_link] and will post reviews closer to their publication date.

Summer murder

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One of the joys of being on holiday is of course the extra reading time. Among the thrillers and novels, I read Jill Leovy’s [amazon_link id=”1784700762″ target=”_blank” ]Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America[/amazon_link]. It’s a brilliant piece of reportage about the many murders of young black men in southern Los Angeles, mainly killed by other young black men.

[amazon_image id=”1784700762″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Ghettoside: Investigating a Homicide Epidemic[/amazon_image]

The book mixes in a gripping narrative a few individual cases – the dead youths and their families, the immediate events, the detectives working on the case – along with a wider analysis of both the sorry history of the high murder rate and the structures of society and policing that (she argues) largely account for it. Leovy’s fundamental point is that the apparent lawlessness of the ghetto is in fact the law of the streets filling the vacuum left by the absence of ‘normal’ law, and the state’s abdication of its monopoly of violence in such territories. She, like her few heroic detectives working hard to solve every case like any other murder, sees the absence of genuine law enforcement as the root problem.

As she writes: “Gangs could seem pointlessly self destructive, but the reason they existed was no mystery. Boys and men always tend to group together for protection. They seek advantage in numbers. Unchecked by a state monopoly on violence, such groupings fight, commit crimes, and ascend to factional dominance as conditions permit. Fundamentally, gangs are a consequence of lawlessness, not a cause.”

One of the eye-opening aspects of the book lies in its descriptions of how little resource the homicide divisions in the south of LA have been allocated, compared to policing fads such as visibly patrolling streets, or preventive schemes. This extended to under-manning, overtime bans (on murder cases!), not allowing detectives to take their cars home, and even stationery shortages.

Interestingly, the epilogue describes a recent steep reduction in the murder rate, albeit remaining many times higher than other parts of the city and state. Leovy argues that there have been a number of contributory factors including demographic change (fewer blacks and more Hispanics in the city itself) but highlights in particular a significant increase in social security payments to poor black people, specially men, and especially to people coming out of prison. Supplemental Security Income payments give individuals a crucially different set of incentives: “Money translates to autonomy. Economic autonomy is like legal autonomy. It helps break apart homicidal enclaves by reducing interdependence and lowering the stakes in conflicts.” It is easier to walk away from the calling in of tit for tat favours by other gang members. Leovy suggests the Affordable Care Act will reinforce this autonomy. The section briefly notes the high rate of imprisonment too – David Skarbek’s [amazon_link id=”0199328501″ target=”_blank” ]The Social Order of the Underworld [/amazon_link]is a great complement to this book, looking specifically at the interactions between gangs and the US penal system.

Still, Leovy concludes, it is important not to lose sight of the key lesson that too little policing and enforcement of the law is corrosive. Every desperately sad story in this book underlines the message.