Popular economists

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I’m taking part in a panel discussion on “Disseminating Economic Research in the Policy Debate” at the European Economic Association and Econometric Society Congress next month. Starting to think about what I’ll need to think about to prepare, I picked up [amazon_link id=”0262025620″ target=”_blank” ]Lives of the Laureates: Eighteen Nobel economists[/amazon_link] edited by William Breit and Barry Hirsch. I have the 4th (2005) edition of this interesting series.

[amazon_image id=”0262025620″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Lives of the Laureates: Eighteen Nobel Economists[/amazon_image]

The series has got up to 23 Nobel economists now.

[amazon_image id=”0262012766″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Lives of the Laureates: Twenty-Three Nobel Economists[/amazon_image]

Some common themes stand out – the drive to contribute to making it a better world, the sense of being dismissed or disregarded by peers, but also in many cases either the ambition or the actuality of contributing to public debate in an accessible way.

For example, Gary Becker here describes getting a call from Business Week asking him to contribute a regular column, and not turning down the invitation, on the advice of his wife. He says: “It was hard for me to learn how to write a popular column. Writing short requires far more effort than writing long….. I do not know why they asked me, to tell the truth, but the experience has been great for me. It has taught me how to express economic ideas in a simple and non-technical way. I will make the assertion that every single important economic idea can be stated simply. … And when people state that an ideas is too complicated to state simply, it usually means they do not know how to state it simply, sometimes because they do not fully understand it.”

I wholeheartedly agree. Blogging and social media have given all academic economists the opportunity to write for the public, and I applaud the ones who can combine their scholarly work with the important work of communicating important ideas simply. Becker has taken to the online world, with the excellent Becker-Posner blog, always worth a read.

Intellectual fuel for modern feminists

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There is one welcome side-effect of the unspeakable online threats made to Caroline Criado-Perez over her successful campaign to get Jane Austen on the next £10 note. It is the realisation that feminists, male and female, still have a lot of work to do.

Over at the Teen Economists blog today Viva Avasthi has reviewed Virginia Woolf’s [amazon_link id=”0141183535″ target=”_blank” ]A Room of One’s Own[/amazon_link], still a timely essay. The classic feminist text that opened my eyes in the 1970s was Simone de Beauvoir’s [amazon_link id=”009974421X” target=”_blank” ]The Second Sex[/amazon_link].

Recently Sheryl Sandberg’s [amazon_link id=”0753541629″ target=”_blank” ]Lean In: Women, work and the will to lead[/amazon_link] has gained a lot of attention. It’s quite good but puts all the onus for improving women’s economic standing on their individual actions; it omits discussion of the institutional barriers women face to progress at work and in society.

Another fairly recent book, startling in its findings, is [amazon_link id=”069108940X” target=”_blank” ]Women Don’t Ask[/amazon_link] by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. It reports research showing that part of the reason women’s pay is lower than that of comparable men is that, indeed, individual women need to ask for promotions and raises. The trouble is that when they do, they are disliked – it’s unfeminine, aggressive to put yourself forward, and male colleagues and bosses find other ways to punish women who do ask.

[amazon_image id=”069108940X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide[/amazon_image]

Other books include Arlie Hochschild’s [amazon_link id=”0143120336″ target=”_blank” ]The Second Shift [/amazon_link]on the burden of unpaid domestic work, especially childcare, on working women; and Susan Faludi’s [amazon_link id=”009922271X” target=”_blank” ]Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women[/amazon_link] – old now but the backlash seems fiercer still now; and of course other classics of the 70s and earlier such as [amazon_link id=”0007205015″ target=”_blank” ]The Female Eunuch[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”1860492827″ target=”_blank” ]The Women’s Room[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”0860680290″ target=”_blank” ]Sexual Politics[/amazon_link] etc.

There is of course also a large scholarly literature in economics on gender discrimination such as Claudia Goldin’s research, Heather Joshi‘s, Betsey Stevenson’s, and much more. Enough to know that it’s time to act again.

Reading about inequality

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In a post on the Oxfam blog, Nick Galasso has suggested three books about income inequality. They are Branko Milanovic’s [amazon_link id=”1459608151″ target=”_blank” ]The Haves and the Have-Nots[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”1416588701″ target=”_blank” ]Winner-Take-All Politics[/amazon_link] by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and Chrystia Freedland’s [amazon_link id=”1846142520″ target=”_blank” ]Plutocrats[/amazon_link]. These are billed as summer reading.

[amazon_image id=”1846142520″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich[/amazon_image]

For further reading, I’d add an earlier book by Milanovic, [amazon_link id=”0691121109″ target=”_blank” ]Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality[/amazon_link]; Thorstein Veblen’s [amazon_link id=”0199552584″ target=”_blank” ]The Theory of the Leisure Class[/amazon_link] (albeit skimming the denser parts – he wasn’t a good writer); the papers by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty on the historical data; [amazon_link id=”0718197380″ target=”_blank” ]The Price of Inequality[/amazon_link] by Joseph Stiglitz; [amazon_link id=”0805078541″ target=”_blank” ]The Status Syndrome[/amazon_link] by Michael Marmot; and [amazon_link id=”0300089538″ target=”_blank” ]Mind the gap: hierarchies, health and human evolution[/amazon_link] by Richard Wilkinson (but not, for my money, The Spirit Level; I know it has been revised in response to critiques but I was irrevocably put off by the first edition).

Thinking aslant about development economics

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I’m about half way through the biography of Albert Hirschman ([amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link]) now, and despite the arm-ache from holding up the book, am enjoying it more than anything I’ve read recently. My interest was particularly caught by an account of a paper Hirschman delivered at a conference at MIT in 1954, “Economics and Investment Planning: Reflections Based on Experience in Colombia” (sadly it seems to be only available as a mimeo, not published anywhere, but if anybody knows differently, please tell me!)

At this time, Hirschman was working for the World Bank and then as an independent consultant based in Bogotá, having been unable to get a job in Washington because of post-war anti-communist paranoia, even though he was anti-communist himself. His biographer Jerry Adelman reports that Hirschman’s paper went down badly with the audience of top academics, as it criticised the academic methodological orthodoxy, and in particular the claim to universality and abstract thinking – albeit applied to competing models of development. This gave rise, he believed, to a (false) presumption of the superiority of the western expert over the locals who understood what was happening in the economy. Hirschman advocated instead using case studies to try to identify which businesses were thriving or not, and a policy emphasis on experimentation and improvisation. He was also unusual in his focus on private investment rather than government planning.

Reading this biography is making me embarrassed to have read so little else by Hirschman over the years. Still, it has set me thinking about development economics. This field seems to me to be in quite good health these days, after decades of suffering as one of the ideological arenas of economics. There have been lots of terrific books published in recent years, including those such as [amazon_link id=”1611747511″ target=”_blank” ]Poor Economics[/amazon_link] riding the wave of field experiments. Still, it is the mavericks of development economics who until recently provided some of the most interesting perspectives. Think of Mancur Olsen’s [amazon_link id=”0300030797″ target=”_blank” ]The Rise and Decline of Nations[/amazon_link], Peter Bauer eg [amazon_link id=”0674200330″ target=”_blank” ]The Development Frontier[/amazon_link], Deepak Lal’s [amazon_link id=”0262621541″ target=”_blank” ]Unintended Consequences[/amazon_link] or even Hernando de Soto’s [amazon_link id=”0552999237″ target=”_blank” ]The Mystery of Capital[/amazon_link], briefly fashionable but academically dissed.

It is as if some economists are not considered by the orthodoxy to write authentically about development, and I wonder if the identification of these writers with right-of-centre political views means the left-of-centre establishment of development economics rejects them? If so, Hirschman seems to have pulled off the combination of the ‘correct’ political identification with a more or less Hayekian methodological approach and – like my other examples – a strongly multidisciplinary flavour. This isn’t my field so I will defer to people who know more, but will be interested in reactions.

As for Hirschman, Adelman writes: “He was not prepared to abandon his views in favor of more acceptable theories.”

[amazon_image id=”0552999237″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Mystery Of Capital[/amazon_image]

Update: Francisco Mejia has pointed out another review of the biography making a similar point:

http://blogs.iadb.org/desarrolloefectivo_en/2013/06/14/hirschman-or-the-years-of-thinking-differently/

The loneliness of the long-distance whistleblower

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For Tube reading, I turned to Michael Woodford’s [amazon_link id=”0241963613″ target=”_blank” ]Exposure: From President to Whistleblower at Olympus[/amazon_link], his account of his whistleblowing as President of Olympus on the huge fraud perpetrated by some of his colleagues. The blurb compares it to a thriller, and that’s no exaggeration.

To recap the story, he was made the first foreign President of the company he had worked his way up for 30 years. There had been only three foreigners before him to hold similar positions, so his appointment was high profile indeed. Soon after taking the job, he was alerted to reports of nefarious financial dealings published in a small investigative magazine. Woodford soon found the claims seemed to have some substance to them. Some of his senior Japanese colleagues tried to play them down, then freeze him out. Woodford instead went public.

[amazon_image id=”0241963613″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Exposure: From President to Whistleblower at Olympus: Inside the Olympus Scandal: How I Went from CEO to Whistleblower[/amazon_image]

His account of the experience of being a whistleblower is convincing, and gripping. The book is very good on the psychological ups and downs – mainly downs – and on the strains the pressure imposed on his family and friends. The cost of such an act of individual courage is obviously enormous, all the more so as there were through this period hints, never proven, of Yakuza involvement (“Goldman Sachs with guns,” as they’re described here). The book also paints a persuasive and not at all flattering picture of Japanese business culture, at least in a hierarchical company of this kind – Woodford clearly loves the country despite all that happened. In the end, he was wholly vindicated.

It’s a very pacy read, well worth picking up for a flight or the beach.