Cartographical, and ethical, literacy

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I love books about data visualisation – the oeuvre of Edward Tufte especially The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, anything by Howard Wainer eg Picturing the Uncertain World. So I’ve very much enjoyed How to Lie With Maps by Mark Monmonier. This is an update of a classic tetbook and has been an eye-opener. Although I love maps, and althoug software means they are used far more often, I’d never really thought about them in the same mental bucket as other forms of data visualisation. The book covers everything from choice of symbols to use of colour and shade to the influence of culture and politics on maps. It’s fascinating, the interplay between the apparently technical choices made in making a 2D representation of reality and the social/political/cultural context of the mapmaker. The book will make me a far better prepared observer of the way maps are used in the media and online. Surely we could all do with some more cartographical literacy?

615hGVgBWPL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_I also read Welfare, Happiness and Ethics by Wayne Sumner. Its aim is to defend a welfarist approach by constructing a version that addresses previous criticisms – consequentialism is out of fashion except in its everyday use in economics, although economists rearely ponder the philosophical foundations of social welfare. I’m not sure the book succeeds, but then I don’t know the answer to Anderson’s dilemma (in Value in Ethics and Economics) about the realism of ethical pluralism versus the realism of non-pluralist, consequentialist public decision-making: every actual decision implicitly makes a choice between plural values.

41YvT8kR1LL._SY346_The late, great Tony Atkinson (whose posthumous Measuring Poverty Around the World is recently out) published an article in 2001 on the Strange Disappearance of Welfare Economics. We haven’t yet answered his call to reopen welfare economics, but it’s really about time.

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Digital verbiage

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There aren’t many books I give up on because they are literally unreadable. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was one recent example, however. Joining this club is a book I saw recommended somewhere The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World by Laurence Scott. I got three chapters in, and yet still have absolutely no idea what it’s about. Example: “Networked hive life has sensitised us to the many silent silences that this environment contains [which environment??]. We feel them [the silent silences??] when they last longer than we can bear, which is a wildly variable threshold. We understand their many vintages and provenances [?] We can smell them in the air [?? silences??], and sense them pushing against our thighs, or lying limply in our hands [!!]. We stare them in the face and they stare back.” This is after an extended bee hive metaphor so maybe the ‘them’ are bees and not silences, but I’m not sure that helps.Is it something about digital that encourages such verbiage

It was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize and was a Sunday Times ‘thought book of the year’ and described as ‘a nourishing counterpoint to the ephemeraility of the digital gae by the Financial Times. So it’s probably me. Still, not recommended, I’m afraid.

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Trains and other illth

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I thoroughly enjoyed reading Ruskinland: How John Ruskin Shapes Our World by Andrew Hill over the weekend. As the subtitle indicates, it isn’t a biography but rather an exploration of the influence Ruskin has had in a number of domains, from helping establish the National Trust as steward of the countryside – and encouraging the formation of the Sierra Club in the US – to shaping views about art, to influencing views about capitalism and the dignity of labour on the left of the political spectrum.

I’ve never read a biography of Ruskin, and he doesn’t emerge from this book as an obviously likeable character. In fact, pretty weird. The book I have read (bought at Brantwood, Ruskin’s home in the Lake District) is his famous anti-capitalism, anti-industrialism tract, Unto This Last. Ruskinland sent me back to it, and it still seems completely unconvincing and hyperbolic, for all that no sentient being would deny the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, or even modern capitalism.

Count me in on the need to ensure environmental sustainability, decent pay and working conditions, well-crafted homes etc. But it’s vacuous not to recognise the trade-offs involved in machine-enabled growth. Machines, mass production, raised standards of living, increasingly freed women from domestic drudgery. Trains – which Ruskin hated despite using them a lot – enabled people to escape the social constraints of village life and find urban anonimity. Unto This Last seems to me unadulterated romantic conservatism. Sustainability is easier for the rich. As Hill agrees, Ruskin was also an illiberal ultra-Tory. And adds: “Like today’s Twitterati and online opinionistas, he often adopted an extreme stance for effect.” Counterproductively so, in may case.

So Ruskinland hasn’t changed my views, but it’s a great read & the issues it raises are absolutely pertinent today as we survey the ‘illth’ (that handy Ruskinian neologism) being created by modern capitalism.

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The Technology Trap

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Anybody interested in the economic impact of digital and AI, in particular on jobs, will want to read Carl Frey’s new book, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor and Power in the Age of Automation. He is probably best known for his rather gloomy work with Michael Osborne (original pdf version here) highlighting the vulnerability of many jobs – almost half in the US – to automation in the next couple of decades. The book expands on the issues that will determine the actual outcomes, and is – as the title indicates – still quite pessimistic.

The structure of the book is historical, with sections on pre-industrial technologies, the Industrial Revolution (which saw widening inequalities), the mass production era (which reduced inequalities and created an affluent middle class), the recent polarization in the era of globalisation and digital, and future prospects. The key distinction Frey draws in between technologies which substitute for labour and those which complement it. Whereas the 19th century and the present seem to involve the replacement of people with machines, the 20th century innovations needed increasingly skilled labour to work with them.

Although I am probably not as gloomy about future prospects for work and incomes, I really enjoyed reading the book, which covers a wide range of technological applications in addition to the well-known historical examples. It leaves open two questions. One is about the present conjuncture: what explains the combination of seemingly rapid technological change and adoption with – in at least some OECD economies – very low unemployment rates? The answer might just be ‘long and variable lags’ but the question surely needs addressing.

The broader question, or set of questions, is really about the interaction between technology and labour market and other economic institutions. Although automation is likely to have the same general effects everywhere, the outcomes for workers will be refracted through very different national job markets, education systems, tax systems and so on. How much can any individual country lean successfully against the wind? Frey is not (unlike Robert Gordon) US-centric but does not get into these issues.

And beyond the response to technological change, what is it that determines the direction of technical change in the first place? The book treats the labour substitution or complementing as exogenous. But why were electric unit drives in auto plants and internal combustion engines created as complementary and yet automation in today’s car industry seems like it will substitute for labour? It seems to me this must be an institutional story too, but I don’t think it’s been told yet.

51VabazLy7L._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_[easyazon_link identifier=”069117279X” locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]The Technology Trap[/easyazon_link]

 

Economic booms in space, not time

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All economic growth has occured through urbanisation, but modern industrial capitalism dramatically so. Robert Hall once drew a parallel between economic booms in time (business cycles) and space (cities). This is a preamble to saying I’ve always enjoyed books about cities, or perhaps it’s an excuse for my interest. Recently I polished off The Ghosts of Berlin by Brian Ladd, a sort of history through architecture and urban form. This week it was Why Cities Look the Way They Do by Richard Williams. It argues that cities are the result of the interaction of many different processes occuring through time, and the chapters each explore some of these – culture, war, sex – and also money, work and power. In other words, there’s nothing intentional about how cities look, for all the efforts of the planners. Different cities are used as examples; the book’s focus is mainly big global cities but others such as Liverpool and Portland and San Paolo feature too.

I particularly liked the money chapter’s observations on real estate. It points out that some iconic supposedly residential towers such as 432 Park Avenue in New York are only half occupied and that this is intended. For they are not homes but investment assets, whose owners don’t care if they’re never occupied. Money buys space, and the emptiness is a store of value in the context of economic agglomeration. Of course there’s a poignant contrast with a city like Detroit, which is emptying, but whose spaces mark depreciation, not appreciation, of the asset. The chapter about the culture industry and its self-contradictions is nicely spiky, as is the one about the hipsterisation of industrial buildings in the modern world of work. As someone who grew up in an old-fashioned industrial place, I’m happy with the hipsterisation process; Manchester now is a better urban environment for its humans now than it was in the early 80s even though it’s lost the gritty culture/music scene of that era. But I can understand the regrets for lost authenticity.

Why Cities… has loads of pictures, too. The author is an art historian, so reading it prompts one to look. Very enjoyable.

[easyazon_link identifier=”0745691811″ locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]Why Cities Look the Way They Do[/easyazon_link]

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