I had a delightful weekend at the Pordenonelegge book festival, speaking about the new Italian edition of [amazon_link id=”0691145180″ target=”_blank” ]The Economics of Enough[/amazon_link]. The life of an author is indeed tough.

Reading in Pordenone

As my reading matter, I took a book (recommended by Brett Christophers, whose Banking Across Boundaries is out next year) that might be tough to get through in everyday life. It’s [amazon_link id=”0226675335″ target=”_blank” ]Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in 18th and 19th century Britain[/amazon_link] by Mary Poovey. The author is an English and Humanities professor at NYU, so this isn’t a natural title for me to have picked up. But, a bit over half way through, I’m finding it fascinating.

[amazon_image id=”0226675335″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain[/amazon_image]

The book traces the creation of a distinction between writing about value that became money – bills of exchange and bank notes – writing about value that became formal, ‘expert’ economic writing, and writing about value that became literary writing. What we now understand to be totally distinct genres were created so by the development of the credit-based economy in 18th and 19th century Britain and the sociological evolution of the economics profession on the one hand and literary writers on the other. A split between ‘factual’ writing about monetary or market value based on the forms of writing about natural science and ‘fictional’ writing about non-market value in literary fiction and poetry now seems natural and inevitable, but it was not always so. Once one sees this, it becomes immediately obvious that some ‘factual’ forms of writing about markets are entirely ‘fictional’. Without even going to the metaphorical character of many economic models, this statement obviously applies to the multi-hundred pages long prospectuses issued for complex securities in the run up to the Crisis (and for that matter still being issued). Nobody could possibly have read and understood these. Not that this mattered – they might as well have been tales of unicorns and dragons, containing less insight about value and values than, say, my next read, which will be [amazon_link id=”1849904936″ target=”_blank” ]Parade’s End[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”1849904936″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Parade’s End[/amazon_image]

Meanwhile I’ll write a full review of Prof Poovey’s book when I’ve finished tit.

Oh dear. Oh dear. I’m going to have to say unkind things about a book I’d been rather looking forward to reading. The book is [amazon_link id=”0199658412″ target=”_blank” ]Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis[/amazon_link], edited by Manuel Castells, Joao Caraca and Gustavo Cardoso.

[amazon_image id=”0199658412″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis[/amazon_image]

When they first came out, I read eagerly Castells’ three books in The Information Age trilogy and found them enlightening (if quite heavy-going)  – my copies still have lots of bookmarks sticking out of the pages. I’ve also been keen to find some good sociological analysis of the financial markets. Gillian Tett, an anthropologist by training, wrote the terrific [amazon_link id=”0349121893″ target=”_blank” ]Fool’s Gold[/amazon_link]. John Lanchester, a novelist, gave us [amazon_link id=”014104571X” target=”_blank” ]Whoops! [/amazon_link] But (like Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian) I’ve been wondering about the absence of careful sociological study of the markets (in fact, Mark Granovetter was asking long before the crisis why sociologists left important domains of study to economists).

[amazon_image id=”1405196866″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Rise of the Network Society: Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture v. 1 (Information Age Series): The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I[/amazon_image]

So, I was pleased when Aftermath arrived. But I’ve given up part way through. The introduction is just a summary of the main events since 2008. The first chapter is about budget cutting and protests at Berkeley, mildly interesting but a touch navel-gazing. Subsequent chapters are unexpectedly abstract. This is a typical passage:

“The key analytical observation is that the current crisis has produced strong resistance identities against not only the measures used to treat the crisis but more deeply against the development model that led to the crisis and from which the current attempts to rectify the situation derive. Therefore, there is an explicit tension between identity and the global network society as it is expressed in its currently dominating form. …. We can make a further argument: the root of the current crisis is the fact that the generally dominant model for development has been based on systematic debt-taking.” (p159)

In other words, a statement of the the unintelligible followed by a statement of the obvious. Now, I do know that every discipline has its own jargon so ‘resistance identities’ may well be a piece of it. But I don’t know what the first bit of the quotation means.

To be fair, a couple of later chapters (on Catalonia, on China) look more empirical so I’ll give them a go. But what I’d really hoped for was some insight into questions like: Why did it become normal for so many people to take on debts they would never repay to buy cars and clothes and houses? What was it about our societies and governments that mean the only way many people could find a home of acceptable standard by lying about their incomes to a dodgy mortgage broker? Why or how did people working in the financial markets lose all their sense of everyday ethics, their connections to the rest of society? Who are the people who went into flogging sub-prime mortgages?  How did it come about that regulators were content to take hundreds of pages of complicated and unread documentation as proof of adequate risk-management? And many more.

Now, I certainly am not going to get on my high horse about how wonderful economics is – having written so much about economists’ need to acknowledge its flaws and fix them (see eg [amazon_link id=”1907994041″ target=”_blank” ]What’s The Use of Economics[/amazon_link]) – and as sociology is not my discipline, maybe there are new pieces of research into such questions by sociologists and other social scientists, and I’d be grateful for the references. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it isn’t the kind of work sociologists have been doing.