Can the Unwinding be unwound?

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George Packer’s [amazon_link id=”B00C4GT040″ target=”_blank” ]The Unwinding: thirty years of American decline[/amazon_link] is out in paperback so I’ve caught up with it at last on my travels this week. It’s an absolutely wonderful book, evoking that widespread sense – everywhere in fact, not just in the US – that the system has gone awry, things are misaligned, and no individual can do anything about it.

[amazon_image id=”B00C4GT040″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Unwinding[/amazon_image]

The book traces the 30 years through a braid of several individuals’ stories, recounting their ups and downs through the Clinton years, the Bush years and into the Obama years. Some of the characters are well-known – Newt Gingrich features, as does Peter Thiel. The main threads, though, are unknowns whose stories encapsulate important parts of the nation’s story during its ‘unwinding’ – the unwinding of “the coil that held America together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip.”

Although this is not a technocratic analysis, Packer has an ability to drop in sentences that crisply capture a sharp point. The views of a new (and I turned out, one term) Democratic congressman, Tom Perriello, are summed up thus: “the elites in America didn’t have answers for the problems of the working and middle class any more. Elites thought that everyone needed to become a computer programmer or a financial engineer, that there would be no jobs between eight dollars an hour and six figures. Perriello believed that the new ideas for making things in America again would come from unknown people in obscure places.”

One of his other characters, a longtime Democrat functionary who crosses over into lobbying, is enticed back to work for a senator during the Obama administration. Seeing Rubin, Summers, Geithner getting their posts, and all attempts to bring finance to heel failing, he reflects: “The establishment could fail and fail and still survive, even thrive. It was rigged to win, like a casino, and once you were on the inside you had to do something dramatic to lose your standing, like write a scathing op-ed.” A short chapter about Bob Rubin in the book is absolutely devastating.

A lot of this, we know. But this book rekindles one’s outrage by attaching people and their emotions and stories to a clear X-ray vision of the underlying economic and social changes. I thought it was a terrific read. But also depressing. Can the Unwinding be unwound? Obviously not. In optimistic moods, I’m with congressman Perriello in holding out hope for the obscure people weaving a new social fabric. It’s just not always easy to stay optimistic.

Reason on trial

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I’ve been putting off reading [amazon_link id=”1849546223″ target=”_blank” ]Prisonomics[/amazon_link] by Vicky Pryce because I’ve known and liked and admired her for many years, and was absolutely shocked by her getting a prison sentence. In the book she says she had her first good sleep for a long time on her first night in Holloway, after the stress of two trials and the media frenzy, but I spent that night sleepless worrying about what the experience would do to her. The book is her account of her time in prison, and what she learned from both personal experience and subsequent research. I’m very glad to have read it. It’s actually a page turner, well-written, full of information and insight, and a powerful analysis of the extremely poor value the UK gets from the way its criminal justice system treats women. And it turns out Vicky coped well with being in Holloway and then one of the country’s only two open prisons for women, thanks in large part to the support she got from other prisoners.

[amazon_image id=”1849546223″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Prisonomics: Behind bars in Britain’s failing prisons[/amazon_image]

It wasn’t really a surprise to learn that imprisoning women is terrible for their children, has no deterrent effect, and that lots of women in prison have mental health and drug problems. But the figures set out in the book are staggering. The research suggests 40% of women in UK prisons have learning diificulties, and 48% have a reading age of 11 or lower. Nor did I know that prisoners are released with just £46 even if they have no accommodation – many (4 in 10) lose their homes while inside, and the book tells of one woman deemed by her local authority to have made herself ‘intentionally homeless’ (and therefore not meriting housing) by being sent to prison. Ex-prisoners find it hard to get jobs because they have to declare their convictions. Reoffending rates are high after prison sentences at least in part because of sheer desperation.

Very few women prisoners have committed violent crimes, yet the high rate of imprisonment in the UK (compared to other countries) inflicts dreadful emotional violence on their children, contributing to family breakup and children going into care – and thus increasing the likelihood of their lives deteriorating. There is so clearly an overwhelming value for money case for spending public funds on helping women bring order to their lives, getting training and jobs, rather than imprinsoning them at high cost and with adverse effects on the rest of their lives and their children’s. Yet the UK saw a 27% rise in the women’s prison population between 1996 and 2011. We have a public culture that emphasises retribution in criminal justice and that demonises women too.

So Vicky’s book makes a powerful case for change, and her experience has turned her into a ardent campaigner for reform. I do recommend reading it, not only for its inherent merit but also because royalties go to the charity Working Chance. But it’s depressing too. The system is awful. But can you imagine a single high-profile politician campaigning for criminal justice reform rather than competing to appear ‘tough’ on crime? There is truth in the cliche: you can’t reason people out of what they were never reasoned into.

What shall I read next?

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I have a lot of travel this week, and am very indecisive this morning. The options are:

[amazon_link id=”0691162549″ target=”_blank” ]The Son Also Rises[/amazon_link] by Gregory Clark   [amazon_image id=”0691162549″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)[/amazon_image]

[amazon_link id=”1849546223″ target=”_blank” ]Prisonomics[/amazon_link] by Vicky Pryce  [amazon_image id=”1849546223″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Prisonomics: Behind bars in Britain’s failing prisons[/amazon_image]

[amazon_link id=”1137278463″ target=”_blank” ]The Zero Marginal Cost Society[/amazon_link] by Jeremy Rifkin   [amazon_image id=”1137278463″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism[/amazon_image]

or [amazon_link id=”059307047X” target=”_blank” ]The Everything Store[/amazon_link] by Brad Stone   [amazon_image id=”059307047X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon[/amazon_image]

There’s a lot more in the pile but I wouldn’t want to subject readers of this blog to the psychological distress of the paradox of choice…. Please vote soon!

 

Is economics leaving Wonderland?

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Bill Easterly’s [amazon_link id=”0465031250″ target=”_blank” ]The Tyranny of Experts[/amazon_link] and The Idealist, Nina Munk’s book about Jeff Sachs’s Millennium Villages project in Africa, [amazon_link id=”0385525818″ target=”_blank” ]The Idealist[/amazon_link], were reviewed in an interesting article by Andrew Jack in the Financial Times yesterday. The books – neither of which I’ve yet read – seem to be part of the big shift that has occurred in development economics in recent years. That shift reflects a welcome shedding of the belief, at least on the part of many economists, that a single conceptual approach will deliver a ‘silver bullet’ solution or method that can be applied everywhere.

[amazon_image id=”0465031250″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”0385525818″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty[/amazon_image]

This is obviously far from a universal view, or Easterly and Munk would not have written their books. However, a number of the OECD economists I was lunching with on Friday were discussing exactly this subject. One said that he thought the RCTs approached, as so brilliantly described in Duflo and Bannerjee’s [amazon_link id=”1586487981″ target=”_blank” ]Poor Economics[/amazon_link], would turn out to have transformed the field when we look back in a few years’ time. He was keen to see the developed economies scrutinise their own policies as rigorously as some aid interventions are scrutinised now.

[amazon_image id=”1586487981″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty[/amazon_image]

As well as the methodology question, though, there is the tendency so widespread among economists to assume away the importance of historical and geographic specificities. One of the reasons I so loved Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert Hirschman, [amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link], was its emphasis on this aspect of Hirschman’s development work, the crucial importance of the specific context.

The reductive turn in economics that dominated our subject from the 1970s to the 2000s is tenacious, but it seems to be on the retreat. Development economics is one of the straws in the wind. Perhaps I’m overoptimistic, but I do think economics is returning to the real world from its surreal Wonderland.

[amazon_image id=”1853260029″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Alice in Wonderland (Wordsworth Classics)[/amazon_image]

Economists out to lunch?

Freedom and virtue

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On the Eurostar to and from the OECD yesterday, I read [amazon_link id=”B0079EW3ZK” target=”_blank” ]The Needs of Strangers[/amazon_link] by Michael Ignatieff, an old book first published in 1984, with my 2nd hand paperback even more mauled by the fact that the dog got to the post before I did that day.

[amazon_image id=”B0079EW3ZK” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Needs of Strangers[ THE NEEDS OF STRANGERS ] By Ignatieff, Michael ( Author )Sep-05-2000 Paperback[/amazon_image]

I wish I’d read it before attending the recent Christ Church, Oxford symposium on [amazon_link id=”0241953898″ target=”_blank” ]How Much Is Enough?[/amazon_link] by Edward and Robert Skidelsky. It’s on the same territory. Ignatieff makes very clear the possibly irreconcilable tension between freedom to choose and a shared agreement on the constituents of ‘the good life’. The book starts with a reflection on the welfare state. It assumes everyone is equal, and reasonably so, but in uniformity of treatment is unable to respond to individuals’ specific needs. Hence the seeming lack of care in the way welfare is sometimes delivered to people. He writes: “We think of ourselves not as human beings first, but as sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, tribesmen and neighbours. It is this dense web of relations and the meanings which they give to life that satisfies the needs which really matter to us.” Hence the utopian aspect of Rousseau’s writing or Marx’s – freedom and happiness have to be reconciled by everybody making choices anchored in equality and fraternity.

The book goes on to explore the tension between communitarian visions of moral agreement about necessities of the good life and the restlessness of commercial society, as reflected by Smith and Hume. “How is moral virtue possible in a society which is constantly pushing back the limits of need?” The Skidelskys claim that needs were satisfied by 1974, but that seems absurd to me. Since then we’ve had everything digital, vastly improved medical treatments, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, central heating in most homes in the UK, and so on. Rousseau would have been happy to ban machines and trade – virtuous stasis came above freedom in his eyes.

Ignatieff doesn’t answer the dilemma of course, but the book is a very interesting exploration of how it continues to be relevant to modern societies.