More palaces for the people, please

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The titular Palaces for the People in Eric Klinenberg’s latest book are libraries, so described by Andrew Carnegie as he built 2,800 of them in a lasting act of philanthropy. The book is a hymn of praise to libraries in particular but also all the other components of ‘social infrastructure’, places where people meet face to face and form relationships that are the warp and weft of a resilient society. This includes school playgrounds, local sports pitches, some bookshops and cafes, parks – the locations of community. The book starts with Klinenberg’s earlier work, reported in the excellent Heatwave, which explored why certain apparently similar communities experienced very different ‘excess’ death rates in the 1995 Chicago heatwave.

Palaces for the People: How to Build a More Equal and United Society picks up from this, pointing out near the start that having strong social capital in the heatwave was equivalent, in terms of mortality outcomes, to having an airconditioner in every home. One of the aspects of the new book I like is its emphasis on the interactions between different kinds of wealth – not only social but also conventional ‘grey’ infrastructure and the natural too. It’s long been obvious to me that there is no point in investing in concrete if you don’t think about natural capital alongside it, flood defences being the canonical example: green infrastructure such as downstream wetlands can be far more effective. Klinenberg points out they can also be designed as social infrastructure – put a park there, make a feature of the green space for enjoyment and also people’s physical and mental health, and the benefit of community relations.

The book distinguishes the social infrastructure from the social capital it enables to be built on top of it, a distinction I haven’t thought about a lot. Another point is that this lens puts the focus on place-based policies, rather than on individuals. In the heatwave example, all the individual characteristics an economist would typically control for on the right hand side a regression would have led you to predict the same mortality outcomes in all the deprived areas of Chicago, whereas it was the place they lived rather than their level of education or criminal record that affected people’s probability of succumbing to the heat.

As the book concludes, there are two reasons to think seriously about reinvesting in social and natural as well as conventional infrastructure. Climate change is one reason – New York City is going to end up under the sea. Concrete alone won’t prevent that. When a crisis hits, the only thing left to help people cope – is other people. The other is the all-too-evident impact of deindustrialization. The chickens of the 1980s and 90s have come home to roost, and they turn out to be monsters. Yet governments on both sides of the Atlantic are still cutting the facilities that make it possible for people with not much money and little hope for the future to cope: parks, playing fields – and libraries. The book doesn’t actually answer the ‘how’ of it’s subtitle, but it’s well worth a read.

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Look ahead to books out in 2019

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It’s time for what is always one of the most popular posts of the year, my somewhat random round-up of the economics books (and a few others of interest to me) due out in the first part of the year. The randomness is a mixture of the catalogues some publishers send me and my ferreting round publishers’ websites, and a few others drawn to my attention. As ever, I omit technical scholarly books with no appeal for general readers, and textbooks. Finally, this is obviously a partial list although I’m happy to update it if I’ve missed anything important. So here goes.

Starting as always with my own publisher, Princeton University Press, whose economics list is as ever completely tantalising. In no particular order

Not Working: Where Have All The Good Jobs Gone by David Blanchflower

Measuring Poverty Around the World by Anthony Atkinson (much missed – a posthumous publication)

Economics in Two Lessons by John Quiggin

The Technology Trap by Carl Benedikt Frey

Digital Cash by Finn Brunton

Darkness by Design: The Hidden Power of Global Capital Markets by Walter Mattli

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From Yale University Press:

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

Forecasting: An Essential Introduction by David Hendry, Michael Clements, and Jennifer Castle

Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy by Anders Åslund
The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property by Aram Sinnreich
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Oxford University Press:

1931: Debt, Crisis and the Rise of Hitler by Tobias Straumann

Immiserising Growth: When Growth Fails the Poor by Paul Shaffer, Ravi Kanbur, Richard Sandbrook

Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone by Jean Drèze

Why Superman Doesn’t Take over the World: What Superheroes Can Tell Us About Economics by J. Brian O’Roark

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Cambridge University Press

Replacing GDP by 2030 by Rutger Hoekstra

The Political Economy of Defence by Ron Matthews

The Wealth Effect: How the Great Expectations of the Middle Class Have Changed the Politics of Banking Crises by Jeffrey Chwieroth and Andrew Walter

Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the 21st Century By Vernon Smith and Bart Wilson

Markets and Morals: Justifying Kidney Sales and Legalising Prostitution, by Yew-Kwang Ng

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MIT Press:

How Change Happens by Cass Sunstein

Evolution or Revolution? Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy after the Great Recession ed Blanchard and Summers

How to Be Human in the Digital Economy by Nicholas Agar

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Polity Press:

The Joy of Missing Out: The Art of Self-Restraint in an Age of Excess by Svend Brinkmann

The Sex Factor: How Women Made the WestRich by Victoria Bateman

Will the Gig Economy Prevail by Colin Crouch

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social by Steffen Mau

The Case for People’s Quantitative Easing by Frances Coppola

Amartya Sen by Lawrence Hamilton

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Harvard University Press:

The Antitrust Paradigm by Jonathan Baker

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

The Revolution that Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives by Jen Schradie

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From Penguin Press:

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

The Inner Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson

Happy Ever After: Escaping the Myth of the Perfect Life by Paul Dolan

Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies by E O Wilson

Upheaval: How Nations Cope With Crises (or Don’t) by Jared Diamond

Clear Bright Future by Paul Mason (I’m not recommending it btw…)

Licence to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us by Jonathan Aldred  (harrumph – nor this one)

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Profile Books

Gresham’s Law:The Life and World of Queen Elizabeth I’s Banker by John Guy

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The Future of Almost Everything by Patrick Dixon

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Others:

The Globotics Upheaval by Richard Baldwin

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Do let me know of upcoming titles I’ve missed!

Update:

I forgot The Human Network by Matthew Jackson (Atlantic Books):

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And many thanks to Alice Evans for all of these tweeted suggestions, probably doubles the length of the list!

https://twitter.com/_alice_evans/status/1080370938988904448

 

 

Most popular posts of 2018

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This is the first of a couple of regular seasonal posts – the look-ahead to 2019 books will follow at the weekend. Traffic to this blog was up just over 3% in the past 12 months, so a big thank you especially to regular readers, and especially as I posted less frequently than in previous years thanks to my new job.

The most popular posts were:

  1. More Classics (and other novels) for economists, which followed the previous day’s post on Classics for economists).
  2. Review of Exact Thinking in Demented Times
  3. Review of Republic of Beliefs
  4. Review of The New Enclosure
  5. The look-ahead to books being published early in 2018
  6. Review of Unelected Power
  7. Review of Forging Ahead, Falling Behind and Fighting Back
  8. Taking time seriously in economics (I have a working paper with Leonard Nakamura on this out soon)
  9. Economies in space and time
  10. Review of The Moral Economists

An interesting mixture of lists (always popular), reviews and reflections.

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The matter of England

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A few days of quiet reading time, in between seasonal socialising, are more welcome than ever after a busy 2018. Later this week I’ll be doing my two usual seasonal posts: the most popular posts of 2018, and a forward look to books of interest being published in the months ahead (always, indeed, one of the most popular posts of the year).

Meanwhile, I’ve been dipping into a new book co-edited by my colleague Michael Kenny, Governing England: English identity and institutions in a changing United Kingdom, the result of a British Academy research project.

It always used to amuse me that whereas most English people I know described themselves as British, many of the French and Americans I know tended to describe all British people as English, blithely unaware of all the local sensitivities. In my days on the BBC Trust we spent much time debating the right balance between programmes aimed at the whole nation, given the BBC’s role as a national institution with a sense of the responsibility to unify, and those reflecting its constituent parts to relevant audiences. For example, the debate about whether or not Scotland should have a separate main news bulletin with a different editorial agenda went on for years, with the BBC’s management very reluctant (overly reluctant)  to cede the principle. Only certain drama series seemed to manage universality through authentic reflection of a specific time and place – Life on Mars, Last of the Summer Wine, Call the Midwife – although I always thought there was far more scope than the senior managers believed to interest people in other parts of their country. The BBC’s debates paralleled the wider political debates about national identity, of course. Public service in general, and in that context of one of the UK’s most important cultural institutions in particular, makes one super-sensitive to the issues debated in the book.

I’ve dipped into the book & particularly appreciated the two historical chapters, one on the relation between England and Britain, one on English nationalism, and also a chapter by my former Manchester colleagues Rob Ford and Maria Sobolewska on UKIP’s claim to English nationalism. Tony Travers’ chapter on London is interesting too. The essay on Manchester is, unfortunately, rather tendentious and seemingly written without having spoken to anyone involved in its devolution deal (I had a very marginal role in the process). But collections are always a mixed bag.

It’s a pricey book unfortunately (OUP for the British Academy – priced for libraries). Still, I’m sure it will be a must-read for all political scientists preoccupied with our national identity and governance questions, which the Brexit process is bound to affect, however it turns out.

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The invisible privatization

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Brett Christophers’ new book The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Land in Neoliberal Britain is eye-opening. Or perhaps jaw dropping. Its subject is the privatization of publicly-owned land in Britain since the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher. Christophers, a professor of economic geography at the University of Uppsala is a consistently interesting thinker. For instance, he was one of the first people to focus on the absurd way the contribution of the financial sector to total GDP is measured, in his Banking Across Boundaries. This new book demands attention for a remarkably little-debated aspect of the Thatcher revolution, the sale of around half of the land owned by th public sector when she was first elected.

The figures are startling in two ways. One is scale: around half of all land owned in the public sector in 1979 has been sold to private owners – including the land under council houses but much more from MoD and NHS land to school playing fields and parkland. The sum is probably more than £400bn. The other reason to be startled lies in that ‘probably’: there is scant data on what has been sold, to whom, at what price, and what remains. No figures, no debate.

One of the themes that stood out for me is the fact that the process has been a Whitehall (Treasury and Cabinet Office, assisted by the National Audit Office, whose idea of value in value for money excludes public value and public goods) assault on the wealth and power of local authorities. Christophers estimates that around 30% of the 1979 land holdings by central government and national bodies has been sold but 60% of the original holdings of local government. This means allotments, school playing fields, leisure centres, local museums, playcentres, town halls, bowling greens and so on – all formerly part of the fabric of community life. This evisceration of local assets ties in with the extraordinary burden of ‘austerity’ on local government. Surely a large number of local authorities are close to not being able to function, and so unable to deliver the services that are among those closest to people’s lives.

The book assesses the process as wholly ideological, generating none of the private sector efficiency benefits it was supposed to unleash. And, as it points out, the public sector should not be expected to behave like the private sector anyway. Why should its land be expected to generate the same financial return it could get in private hands? The public sector should be using public land to provide public goods.

The move to accrual accounting is pinpointed as a potential turning point: “Different accounting systems represent different ways of seeing: something visible under one system may not be visible under another, something accorded significant value under one system may be valued much less highly under another.” Accrual accounting makes it more likely that the value of public land will be recognised, and so bargain basement sell-offs less likely. For instance, many councils were valuing parks at £1 each. On the other hand, recognising their true worth – say £100m – makes them an even more tempting target for the Treasury to require to be sold.

As the book concludes, there is no evidence the privatization of land has delivered any significant benefits, but equally almost no serious study of the process at all. The lack of data no doubt explains why, so we owe Christophers thanks for assembling all the evidence he has managed to find.

My one quibble is the use of the term ‘neoliberal’. I think it obscures more than it enlightens, not least because those who deploy it often seem to believe all of economics is neoliberal – I still remember being gobsmacked by Wendy Brown’s bracketing of Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Lucas as essentially the same in their ideology. What’s more, the virtue-signalling to many social scientists in universities is likely to put off some other readers who would otherwise be sympathetic to the book’s argument. Michael Sandel managed to explore ‘neoliberalism’ in his bestseller What Money Can’t Buy without ever using the word, and was all the more influential for it.

Having said this, the book doesn’t massively overuse the adjective, and is well worth reading for the light it does shine – perhaps even on why Britain voted for Brexit, looking for somebody to blame for this huge but virtually unnoticed depletion of public wealth.

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