Shooting star

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I’ve spent a very interesting day talking to economists and others in Oxford today, a holiday as far as I’m concerned after a solid stretch of meetings, and revising the draft of my next book. The sun shone, after a few days so bitterly cold that the chill gets into the gaps between your bones. I spotted – for the first time in all the years I’ve been visiting/living there since my big brother was a student in the late 1960s – this chap:

Pan

On the train to and fro I read a short e-book, [amazon_link id=”B00BBJCUUW” target=”_blank” ]Shooting Star: The Brief and Brilliant Life of Frank Ramsey[/amazon_link] by Karl Sabbagh. It’s an absorbing biography of somebody I knew only because his name is attached to optimal taxation theory. He was evidently an extraordinary characted, who led a colourful life on the edge of the Bloomsbury Group, made profound contributions to mathematics and philosophy as well as, en passant, to economics, and translated Wittgenstein – correcting errors – in his spare time as an undergraduate student. He died at only 26, perhaps due to medical error.

The most telling paragraph describes his first two published papers:

“With ‘Universals’ and ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’, Ramsey had established a pattern of reasonably short, down-to-earth, clearly-written papers which said something fundamentally new. He had written only 16 such papers by the time he died, and each had ideas that were to resonate for the next 80 years.”

Only?!

If you know nothing much about Ramsey either, this book is well worth taking on a train or plane ride.

[amazon_image id=”B00BBJCUUW” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Shooting Star (Kindle Single)[/amazon_image]

Austerity and the barbarian horde

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Here’s a book that does what it says on the cover: [amazon_link id=”019982830X” target=”_blank” ]Austerity: The History of A Dangerous Idea[/amazon_link] by Mark Blyth.

[amazon_image id=”019982830X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea[/amazon_image]

Actually, the first few chapters start with the ‘dangerous idea’ part, with the author’s arguments about why austerity (ie. cutting the government’s budget deficits to reduce the level of its debt) is a bad thing in general, and a particularly bad thing when everyone tries to do so at the same time. This part will be somewhat familiar to readers of Paul Krugman’s blog, or Jonathan Portes on this side of the Atlantic. It overlooks some points I think are important – for example, glossing over the way tax increases and spending cuts will have different distributional implications; or ignoring the effects of inflation on real wages for low earners to focus on the redistribution from savers to borrowers. I also don’t agree with his argument about the specific causes of the financial crisis, which he pins on the securitised mortgages and the US repo market, but that’s not the heart of the book. Besides, Blyth is surely right to say morality tales about lazy Greeks and virtuous Germans, and other similar tropes of public debate about the crisis, do not amount to an economic analysis.

The main section is far more interesting, an account of the history of the idea that austerity is a good policy, that reducing the debt burden only requires reduced borrowing and less government. He traces the idea back to the late 17th century and ranges over the continent as well as the US and UK. Although there’s no mistaking this author’s political perspective, there is plenty of interesting material in this section. The book ends by asking whether or not current austerity policies will work. When the IMF has now said not, and a great majority of economists advocate bringing forward necessary infrastructure investment, Blyth’s answer will come as no surprise, albeit expressed more colourfully: “The deployment of austerity as an economic policy has been as effective in bringing us peace, prosperity and crucially a sustained reduction of debt as the Mongol Horde has been in furthering the development of dressage.”

The book will give opponents of the austerity strategy more ammunition, if they want it. I’m not sure it will change the mind of any proponents of the policy, however, given how obvious the conclusion is from page one. But then, as Blyth argues, this is not a rational economic debate. Austerity has a different kind of hold on its advocates.

 

Digital trivia

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All these courtesy of [amazon_link id=”014101590X” target=”_blank” ]Turing’s Cathedral[/amazon_link]:

1. the physicist Max Born was Olivia Newton John‘s grandfather – her mother Irene married Cambridge prof Brin Newton-John.

2. Dylan Thomas had a night out partying in Princeton with the Hungarian topologist Raoul Bott. (Dylan Thomas partied with countless people, to be fair, although he stood up my husband’s Swansea grandfather when supposed to attend a dinner, albeit apologizing in a [amazon_link id=”0460879995″ target=”_blank” ]beautifully written letter[/amazon_link].)

3. Mathematician Kurt Gödel was married to a Viennese cabaret singer.

4. John Von Neumann met his second wife, Klári, in a Monte Carlo casino.

5. The first professor appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study (in 1932) was Oswald Veblen, nephew of Thorstein Veblen.

[amazon_image id=”014101590X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Penguin Press Science)[/amazon_image]

Apologies for the trivia but I’ve been enjoying them.

What to read next?

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The in-pile of books is totteringly high at the moment and I’m dithering about what to read next, after [amazon_link id=”014101590X” target=”_blank” ]Turing’s Cathedral[/amazon_link] by George Dyson. Given the recent riffs on Luddism here and elsewhere, I think I’ll go for Emma Griffin’s [amazon_link id=”0300151802″ target=”_blank” ]Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0300151802″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution[/amazon_image]

Turing’s Cathedral, remarkable men and even more remarkable women

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I’ve loved this book, [amazon_link id=”014101590X” target=”_blank” ]Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe[/amazon_link] by George Dyson. It’s a history of the days when computers were so new and rare that they had names – ENIAC, MANIAC, JOHNNIAC, Baby – and of the early history of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and of bits of the career of John Von Neumann and other mathematicians and engineers. It’s the story of the days when the world had 53 kilobytes of random access memory altogether, a significant proportion of them in Princeton, New Jersey.

[amazon_image id=”014101590X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Penguin Press Science)[/amazon_image]

It’s also about the relationship between the Second World War, and subsequent military funding for Cold War atomic research, and digital innovation. Military needs so often drive major technological innovations. Part of the story concerns Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, researching how to improve the trajectory of anti-aircraft fire during the war, as London was blitzed. My late mother, as she explains in this video, sat outside the gun emplacements in East London during the Blitz shouting instructions to gunners as they aimed at aircraft overhead – she could have done with the innovation a bit sooner. (It was lovely to have this excuse to watch it again and remember her on UK Mothers’ Day.)

One of the things I love about the story is the sense it gives of the atmosphere of the new research establishment and the personalities, and the way invention rests on both a collection of happenstances and a large number of individuals. Turing’s Cathedral has similarities to some other recent histories of innovation, such as Jenny Uglow’s outstanding [amazon_link id=”0571216102″ target=”_blank” ]The Lunar Men[/amazon_link].

Dyson is very good at describing the people involved, all extraordinary, from John von Neumann down. For example, a paragraph summing up Gödel’s famous incompleteness result (which I sometimes think I understand, if I concentrate hard – after all, I did read Douglas Hofstadter’s [amazon_link id=”0140289208″ target=”_blank” ]Gödel, Escher, Bach[/amazon_link] – twice) is followed by this:

“After retreating to the sanatorium at Purkersdorf, where he was diagnosed with nervous exhaustion, he returned to Princeton in September of 1935, where he fell into an even more severe depression, resigning his position and returning to Austria at the end of November. He readmitted himself to the sanatorium in Rekawinkel, and then recovered sufficiently to spend several weeks with his future wife, Adele Nimbursky (nee Porkert), a Viennese cabaret dancer.”

Whoah! Tell me more about the Viennese cabaret dancer! The IAS website tells me he had met her when he was 21, in the Vienna nightclub ‘The Moth’. It was his second relationship with an unsuitable older woman, to the annoyance of his parents.

I also like Bernetta Miller, an administrator at the IAS in its early days. She was the fifth woman to get a pilot’s licence in the US, received the Croix de Guerre in World War I for assisting the injured Allied troops and visiting the front lines to take cigarettes to the men, and then became bursar of the American School in Istanbul. After the war she settled with her partner Betty Faville, and stood between Albert Einstein and the world until fired by Robert Oppenheimer, who didn’t like her. He goes down in my estimation, I must say. Strong women – like Bernetta Miller and indeed Kathleen Coyle – not only helped win the war, but were vital to the far harder task of building post-war society.

Bernetta Miller

There’s so much more, most of it about the construction of the computers. Do, do read it. I’ve not quite finished yet, but this line from the Introduction sums up the book: “In answering the Entscheidungsproblem [David Hilbert’s ‘Decision problem’], Turing proved that there is no systematic way to tell, by looking at a code, what that code will do. That’s what makes the digital universe so interesting, and that’s what brings us here.” We don’t know where we’re going, but it helps to understand the origins.