I’ve been mulling over increasing returns for a while (it will feature in my next book, Cogs and Monsters, in 2021) and returned to the question this morning as I prepare to write something on agglomeration economics for my colleagues Michael Kenny, Anna Alexandrova and Cleo Chassonnery-Zaigouche, for their research project Expertise Under Pressure. The essay question is pretty broad, concerning the influence economics has had on policy debates about cities. The key concept is that of agglomeration economies.

Going to the bookshelves – in imagination to the ones quarantined in my office and grabbing the ones at home off the shelves – I started on the agglomeration journey first with Paul Krugman’s 1991 Geography and Trade: “I have spent my whole professional life as an international economist thinking and writing about economic geography without being aware of it.” My copy is the 1995 paperback edition. The new economic geography was later crystallised in the textbook The Spatial Economy by Fujita, Krugman and Venables.

At about the same time, already intrigued by technology, I discovered Brian Arthur through Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. To my mind the rebirth of economic geography – and economic history – is clearly linked to the spread of digital technologies, a link made so clear by Ed Glaeser in Triumph of the City and in terrific papers such as Non-Market Interactions, Information Technology and the Future of Cities, and Reinventing Boston.

Now for a weekend re-reading some of this good stuff.

Like everyone, doing the normal day job seems to take longer, and then there’s the mad upsurge in corona-related webinars and meetings. With that and the loss of travel time, I seem to have been reading less. However, I have read a few interesting books.

Two were thankyous from Cambridge University Press for some reviewing I did for them. Social Avalanche: Crowds, Cities and Financial Markets by Christian Borch takes a sociological lens to the kind of non-linear dynamics of some areas of economics – including agglomeration, or rational bubbles, say. It was an education for me to read about the ‘crowd theory’ of late 19th century and early 20th century sociology and its decline as the discipline drew away from the implication that people were easily turned from individuals who thought for themselves into an unthinking mob. Borch argues that the earlier theorists in fact saw a tension between individuality and social influence – which of course seems perfectly sensible when you put it like that. The book looks at cities and also at algorithmic financial markets, though I’m not sure the latter adds a lot to Donald Mackenzie’s fascinating work on high-frequency trading. Still, I enjoyed it, once I’d figured out the rhythm of academic sociology writing – hard going at first.

The other was A History of Big Recessions in the Long 20th Century by Andres Solimano. The text here is pretty broad brush so anybody who has read some economic history won’t get much out of the words. The translation was a bit patchy too: it took me a long time to realise that ‘Russian miltary mystic’ actually meant ‘mystique’ rather than a Rasputin-like figure I hadn’t heard of. But the assembly of all this data in one book is terrific, a great resource.

I also read Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, which is a well-written journalistic take on Scott Page‘s marvellous books, including The Difference and The Diversity Bonus. Still, a very readable intro to the importance of cognitive diversity.

In between, a couple of Simenon novels – they are all marvellous and the new Penguin editions very stylish – and Maria Popova’s Figuring, which is hard to summarise but rather enjoyable.

In my recent reminiscences about Peter Sinclair, one of the memories was that he had sent us pre-reading for the summer before we started at Brasenose. The one I could remember was Roy Harrod’s The Life of J.M. Keynes. As I write down in my notebook everything I read, I was able to go back to the summer of 1978 and see what else I had read before starting the course. Peter’s other choice, it turns out, was Economic Philosophy by Joan Robinson.

Our philosophy tutor, the late Michael Woods, recommended Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy. Vernon Bogdanor, presumably mindful of the limitations of the British A level curriculum and the first term’s politics course, suggested: America in the 20th Century, Democracy in France since the 18th century and  20th Century Russia.

It underlines again how lucky I’ve been in the education I received.