Category Archives: Main Page

Are ideas catching?

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This interesting paper, Germs, Social Networks and Growth, uses a network model to explore the diffusion of technologies – ideas – in different kinds of society: an open, individualist one compared to a collectivist one with fewer external contacts. The authors, Alessandra Fogli and Laura Veldkamp, sum it up thus:

“Our theory for why some societies have growth-inhibiting social structures revolves around the idea that communicable diseases and technologies spread in similar ways – through human contact. We explore an evolutionary model, where some people favor local “collectivist” social networks and others do not. People who form collectives are friends with each others’ friends. The collective has fewer links with the rest of the community. This limited connectivity reduces the risk of an infection entering the collective, allowing the participants to live longer. But it also restricts the group’s exposure to new technologies. An individualist social network with fewer mutual friendships speeds the arrival of new technologies, which increases one’s expected economic success and favors reproductive success.”

What’s more, the type of society is endogenous:

“In countries where communicable diseases are inherently more prevalent,the high risk of infection for individualists makes the individualist trait die out. A collectivist social structure that inhibits the spread of disease and technology will emerge. In countries where communicable diseases are less prevalent, the collectivist types will be less economically and reproductively successful. Greater reproductive success of individualists causes the network to become fully individualist.”

They test the model using historical data on technology diffusion and epidemics, and find a strong link between individualism and productivity growth driven by technology adoption.

This work touches on a number of economic literatures: on technology diffusion; on social capital; on the effects of culture on growth; and on the role of institutions in development.  It’s a very interesting paper, and reminded me of two wonderful books. One is obviously Jard Diamond’s [amazon_link id=”0099302780″ target=”_blank” ]Guns, Germs and Steel[/amazon_link], although the argument is obviously a twist on Diamond’s case that European explorers took diseases into previously isolated populations. The other – for the metaphor of viral ideas – is Neal Stephenson’s brilliant novel [amazon_link id=”0241953189″ target=”_blank” ]Snow Crash[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0099302780″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”0241953189″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Snow Crash[/amazon_image]

How I read

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I’ve read, more or less, Erik Olin Wright’s [amazon_link id=”184467617X” target=”_blank” ]Envisioning Real Utopias[/amazon_link]. Hmmm. As I’ve agreed to write about it for a debate on another website in the New Year, here are my notes simply summarizing the book (this is how I work – notes on stickies, stuck into the book and assembled at the end).

Chapter by chapter

Here for greater clarity is my summary of the conclusions:

Do economists dream of electric people?

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With apologies to [amazon_link id=”0575079932″ target=”_blank” ]Philip K Dick[/amazon_link], the title for this post is inspired by turning back to a book I read some years ago, Philip Mirowski’s [amazon_link id=”0521775264″ target=”_blank” ]Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes A Cyborg Science[/amazon_link]. This in turn was prompted by reading Mary Poovey’s [amazon_link id=”0226675335″ target=”_blank” ]Genres of the Credit Economy[/amazon_link]. She traces the turn to (excessive) abstraction and rationalism in economics to the marginal revolution of the late 19th century onward, much earlier than in Mirowski’s account. For he, by contrast, blames the development of computers and the Bourbaki mathematicians in the mid-20th century.

I remembered not liking Machine Dreams when I read it. It’s heavy-going, and for my tastes too conspiracy-theorist. Still, I semi-agreed with this point in the conclusion:

“As a historian I think it would be unconscionable not to point out that every single school of economics that has ever mustered even a sparse modicum of support and something beyond a tiny coterie of developers has done so by accessing direct inspiration from the natural sciences of their own era and, in particular, from machines. The challenge for those possessing the courage to face up to that fact is to understand the specific ways in which fastening on the computer instead of the steam engine or the mechanical clock or the telephone has reconfigured our options for the development of social theory.”

Semi-agreed because I don’t think the source of inspiration needs to be physics. Biology has been a strong inspiration for certain economists – notably Malthus and Marx – and is proving so again with the interest in epidemiology and network models. Biology returns the favour, too. Darwin was famously inspired in turn by Malthus, John Maynard Smith by game theory – and, as I wrote up here, an economic model of constrained optimisation would seem the ideal model for which neurons in our brains bring what perceptual signals to our conscious attention. In fact, the interest in behavioural psychology means there is a lot of exchange between the cognitive sciences and economics right now. As for Mirowski’s basic point, that economics will always be inspired by natural science, that for me is inherently true in the claim to be scientific, and the closer economics gets to all of the natural sciences, the stronger it will be.

[amazon_image id=”0521775264″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science[/amazon_image]

I really want to read this book

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‘This book’ is Mark Mazower’s latest, [amazon_link id=”0713996838″ target=”_blank” ]Governing the World: The History of an Idea[/amazon_link]. There’s an extract in the current issue of The Nation that gives a good flavour of its themes in discussing the international (dis)order and what replacement for it might stagger out of the mists of the current crisis.

It will be interesting to compare it to Philip Bobbitt’s [amazon_link id=”0141007559″ target=”_blank” ]The Shield of Achilles[/amazon_link], which also looked at the clash between nation state-based organisation and globalized financial markets, but in far happier times. And to Tony Judt’s amazing [amazon_link id=”009954203X” target=”_blank” ]Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945[/amazon_link].

I loved Mazower’s book [amazon_link id=”0007120222″ target=”_blank” ]Salonica, City of Ghosts[/amazon_link], and his [amazon_link id=”0140241590″ target=”_blank” ]Dark Continent: Europe’s 20th Century[/amazon_link]. He also wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times recently, and the new book was reviewed positively by Paul Kennedy in the FT, and negatively in Standpoint.

[amazon_image id=”0713996838″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Governing the World: The History of an Idea (Allen Lane History)[/amazon_image]

You chose my next book

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Last week I asked for suggestions about which book from my pile I should read next. I was distracted by Bo Xilai, and finished Genres of the Credit Economy during the week. Opinion about the next one was reasonably evenly divided.

Actually, one person on Twitter – @theJeremyVine – nominated his own new book, [amazon_link id=”1849837767″ target=”_blank” ]It’s All News To Me: How I got locked inside the BBC for 25 years.[/amazon_link] As my husband has been locked inside the BBC for 32 years, he has found this a total page-turner and been laughing, distractingly, as he reads.

[amazon_image id=”1849837767″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]It’s All News to Me[/amazon_image]

Anyway, the ‘winner’ was [amazon_link id=”184467617X” target=”_blank” ]Envisioning Real Utopias [/amazon_link]by Erik Olin Wright – I’ve agreed to write something about it, so will crack on.

[amazon_image id=”184467617X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Envisioning Real Utopias[/amazon_image]