The Secret Life of Science: How it Really Works and Why It Matters by Jeremy Baumberg won’t hold many surprises for economists working in academia. The increasing role of publication metrics in career prospects, even though everyone knows them to be counter-productive or even pernicious. The narrowing of scholarly horizons within disciplinary silos partly for this reason and partly (in the UK) because of the REF exercise. The creaking peer review system. The debate about open access and the monopoly power of certain journal publishers. I don’t know whether the same is true in the humanities and other social sciences, but the description of the systemic pressures and the way they make it ever harder to allow intellectual curiosity and boundary-crossing work free rein – for some very good reasons – makes this book a reflection on more than the natural sciences, but rather on the institutional framework for research as a whole, into which citizens pour a good deal of funding.

There are, however, additional issues in the sciences, not least the very high cost of equipment and facilities in some areas, and the failure of the funding system as a whole to be able to reflect on and implement societal priorities. Another difference is the institutional framework, with much scientific research (to varying degrees across countries – there are interesting figures in the book) occurring in the private sector. Baumberg also discusses the ever-rising number of scientific researchers, in what seems to be a sort of winner-takes-all dynamic of funding concentrating in elite groups and no signs of increasing diversity, producing seemingly ever-decreasing returns.

Although the issues may be familiar, the book usefully presents them all as a combined system challenge. It is pretty factual and even handed, but one ends with a strong sense of the need for some system-wide reforms. Baumberg has no silver bullet solution, and quite right too. He makes some suggestions such as introducing other kinds of metrics than citations, finding some ‘anarchic’ ways to fund science, creating better and different career structures for postdocs.

I read the book just after Richard Jones’s and James Wilsdon’s thought-provoking and trenchant report on ‘biomedical bubble’ in the UK. I doubt The Secret Life of Science will appeal to the general audience as it’s much more about the institutional framework than about the scientific research. But although researchers will already know – and live in their daily lives – the issues flagged up in the book, it’s a timely warning that the scientific endeavour that has brought our societies astonishingly greater prosperity and improvements in the quality of life is sclerotic and failing to deliver for the societies funding research. Hard as it may be for a young researcher struggling under all these pressures to regard herself as part of the despised ‘elite’, that’s the big issue facing scientific and other research. Time to tackle it.

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Now that I’m paddling at the edge of the inter-disciplinarity ocean – dangerous waters – I read – on the recommendation of esteemed colleagues – Metaphors We Live By (1980) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I gather it has been highly influential, and it was indeed stimulating read. However, I struggled with parts of the argument, which started brilliantly: we use metaphors, often informed by our bodies, in language and thought. ‘Up’ and ‘forward’ are powerful when incorporated in metaphors, because we stand up and walk forwards. I really enjoyed being prodded to think about the use of language and what it would mean to take metaphors seriously. Why does ‘ your argument has a solid structure’ work but ‘your argument is covered in gargoyles’ not? Why can we have raw facts and half baked ideas but not sautéed or poached data?

However, I struggled with the labelling of some ways of speaking as metaphors at all. I can see ‘argument as war’ is one. But is ‘inflation is an entity’? It’s an analytical construct for sure, but it isn’t exactly not a thing either. So is ‘inflation is lowering our standard of living’ really a metaphorical construction. Are ‘time is a resource’ and ‘labour is a resource’ metaphors at all? The further I got into the book, the less I was persuaded.

Evidently the book played into the objectivism vs relativism debate, and the authors sensibly accept that the ‘real world’ clearly constrains our conceptual system, although they are on the relativism end of the see-saw. As the title of chapter 27 puts it: “How metaphor reveals the limitations of the myth of objectivism.” They argue that the way we use language means objects (out there in the real world, as it were) are entities relative to our interaction with the world, and our projections onto it. Properties of objects are interactional rather than inherent, in their view. No doubt this is philosophically incoherent, but I’m not sure why there can’t be inherent properties as well as those we perceive through our interactions with the world and categorise, metaphorically or not.

The book ends with a paragraph on economics which is half spot on: “Political and economic ideologies are framed in mataphorical terms. Like all other metaphors, political and economic metaphors can hide aspects of reality. But in the area of politics and economics, metaphors matter more because they constrain our lives.” I think Deirdre McCloskey (The Rhetoric of Economics) or Albert Hirschman (The Rhetoric of Reaction) would agree. However, this coda seems half gibberish too, at least to this literal-minded economist: why is ‘labour is a resource’ a metaphor because it fails (as a metaphor) to distinguish meaningful from meaningless labour?

Anyway, among other reading, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel is marvellous. I laughed and I cried (literally, not metaphorically). I only quite enjoyed Cees Nooteboom’s Roads to Santiago. I read Cass Sunstein’s latest, The Cost Benefit Revolution, out in September – when I’ll review it. I’m spoilt for choice for my next one, as the in-pile is teetering at the moment. When I’m super-busy, as these at months have been, acquiring a new book seems to be a purchase of the implicit time to read it. If only!

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And the in-pile:

James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj is a page turner – really informative and well written (as one would expect from the FT’s former Mumbai bureau chief), full of surprises, and above all a fascinating window on India’s super-wealthy. The theme of the book is corruption, and its co-evolution with the Indian economy as the ‘licence raj’ restrictions were progressively removed, and new sectors like telecoms grew dramatically. In this new world, the super-wealthy businessmen and the politicians found they needed each other: the deployment of legislation and contracts helped the former, the opportunity to take part in business helped the latter. As one of the interviewees puts it: “They [the politicians] are saying: ‘We don’t want briefcases full of cash and Swiss bank accounts and all that any more. We want to own businesses ourselves. We want equity stakes.”

The scandals covered in the book – from airlines to cricket – are extraordinary, as are the descriptions of wealth flaunted. It is somewhat cheering to know that some scandals resulted in at least disgrace and sometimes arrest. There are also some thoughtful reflections on whether the practices described are always entirely bad: might they in some phases of development ensure that infrastructure gets built? One example in the book is a half-built steel mill and power station complex, halted by the cancellation of coal mining licences  due to allegations of corruption. Crabtree writes: “Watching him [Naveen Jindal], I was struck by the stress of his position: the billions in loans, the half-finished projects and the thousands of workers who …expected him to find a way to fix them.” The downside of doing business by politica favours is the unpredictability of it all.

There is something of this flavour in David Pilling’s Lunch with the FT with Nigeria’s Aliko Dangote, who recounts how he got his big break:

‘“Obasanjo called me very early in the morning and said, ‘Can we meet today?’ ” says Dangote, recalling the presidential summons. He wanted to know why Nigeria couldn’t produce cement, instead importing it by the boatload. Dangote told him it was more profitable to trade than to produce. Only if imports were restricted would it be worthwhile. Obasanjo agreed. Dangote has never looked back.’

Crabtree also cites Katherine Boo’s book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, (reviewed on this blog), which describes corruption at the bottom of the income scale. Although this clearly acts as a tax on low incomes, she has sympathy for those who earn so little that they can’t afford not to demand bribes.

I ended up not sure whether to be optimistic about India’s dynamism and scale, seeing this Gilded Age as growing pains, or pessimistic because of the debt mountain involved, and the nationalist politics of the present government – the chapters on Narendra Modi do not leave the reader reassured. Either way, this book opens a window on an extraordinary period of change in India, a country too big and important for its future not to affect all of us.

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Here is the author being interviewed about the book on NPR.