Tag Archives: review

Enlightened economists

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It’s hard for me to resist a book about the Enlightenment, and I’ve just read [amazon_link id=”0691161453″ target=”_blank” ]The Enlightenment: History of an Idea[/amazon_link] by Vincenzo Ferrone. I have to confess it was quite hard work because it’s written in the scholarly language of another discipline. But the argument is interesting: that the Enlightenment as a set of philosophical ideas and as an historical phenomenon need to be kept separate, and are all too often conflated.

[amazon_image id=”0691161453″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Enlightenment: History of an Idea[/amazon_image]

There is a definition in the introduction of the historical Enlightenment: “A conscious and passionate creative effort aimed at bringing about a fairer and more equitable society, made by man for man [sic], an attempt to put into practice individual rights, giving political space to what was the truly revolutionary discovery of the natural right of man to pursue happiness as the ethical foundation of a new universal morality.” I suppose it’s historically accurate that it was mainly by and about men, but it would have been good if Ferrone had explicitly acknowledged this limitation, as this language is so exclusionary.

He adds: “One can scarcely imagine a greater challenge to the political action and coherence of those European citizens who were working with passion and intellectual honesty to spread the new political language than the deportation of millions of African slaves mostly to the United States of America, the self-styled homeland of rights and freedom.” Economics, or rather political economy, was born of the Enlightenment, and economists were on the side of the angels in the anti-slavery campaign. Carlyle labelled it the ‘dismal science’ because he was pro-slavery and disliked the argument by political economists such as J S Mill and  – I learned from Sydney Padua’s [amazon_link id=”0141981512″ target=”_blank” ]The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage[/amazon_link] – by Charles Babbage. (I’ve now started Babbage’s 1832 book [amazon_link id=”B004TS7610″ target=”_blank” ]On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures[/amazon_link], which is a ripping good read so far.)

[amazon_image id=”0141981512″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”1511434422″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures[/amazon_image]

Back to Ferrone. He wants to preserve a historical understanding of the Enlightenment from those from the post-modernists to [amazon_link id=”0691151725″ target=”_blank” ]Jonathan Israel[/amazon_link] who, he argues, make it too philosophical: “The idea of natural rights is not philosophical in origin. It is an extraordinarily important moral idea …. that in the course of the 18th century became a powerful new political and juridical discourse. … Far from being a project single-mindedly aimed at the goal of modernity, the Enlightenment is more accurately understood as a cultural experience defined first and foremost by the values it has bequeathed us.” As a process or experience, it has no definitive conclusion, he concludes. Of course I understand the importance of the historical context, but I must say I don’t see that Ferrone entirely avoids the same pitfall himself as the scholars he critiques. Aren’t ‘inherited values’ staking a philosophical claim? Luckily I feel no need to reach a firm conclusion about a debate in another discipline.

[amazon_image id=”0691169713″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre[/amazon_image]

Lovelace & Babbage

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I’ve loved reading [amazon_link id=”0141981512″ target=”_blank” ]The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage[/amazon_link] by Sydney Padua.

[amazon_image id=”0141981512″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer[/amazon_image]

It’s funny, and full of nuggets of information. I never knew Babbage had written a book, [amazon_link id=”B004TS7610″ target=”_blank” ]On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures[/amazon_link]. That’s on order now! (Browsing around, he seems to have written quite a bit on economics eg there is also [amazon_link id=”B00X61XRDM” target=”_blank” ]Thoughts on the principles of taxation, with reference to a property tax, and its exceptions[/amazon_link]; and [amazon_link id=”0217545602″ target=”_blank” ]Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives[/amazon_link].) I didn’t know Herschel had originally named Uranus ‘George’. I didn’t know Boole had tried to prove money doesn’t by happiness in a literal utilitarian calculus. I *did* know about W.S.Jevons’ Logic Piano because once I saw it in the Science Museum:

Jevons' Logic Piano

Jevons’ Logic Piano

Doron Swade’s [amazon_link id=”0349112398″ target=”_blank” ]The Cogwheel Brain[/amazon_link], which I read some years ago, is a less amusing intro to Babbage. [amazon_link id=”0571172431″ target=”_blank” ]Cultural Babbage[/amazon_link] edited by Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow is wonderful. Sydney Padua writes that her favourite book on Babbage is [amazon_link id=”0136047297″ target=”_blank” ]Mr Babbage’s Secret: Tale of Cypher and APL[/amazon_link] by  Ole Franksen.

[amazon_image id=”0349112398″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Cogwheel Brain[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0571172431″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention[/amazon_image]

Time for the next techno-enviro-social paradigm?

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On this week’s flights I read [amazon_link id=”0691160392″ target=”_blank” ]Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve[/amazon_link] by Ian Morris. I thoroughly enjoyed Morris’s big book, [amazon_link id=”1846682088″ target=”_blank” ]Why the West Rules (For Now)[/amazon_link], a grand sweep of economic and social history in the vein of ([amazon_link id=”0099302780″ target=”_blank” ]Guns Germs and Steel[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”0241958687″ target=”_blank” ]Collapse[/amazon_link]) Jared Diamond. This new book is a series of essays based on his 2012 Tanner Lectures at Princeton, with comments/criticisms and a response. So it’s much shorter and less detailed than the previous one, although a very good and enjoyable read nonetheless.

[amazon_image id=”0691160392″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (The University Center for Human Values Series)[/amazon_image]

Morris comes across here as a sort of [amazon_link id=”1840226994″ target=”_blank” ]Karl Marx[/amazon_link] meets Jared Diamond. In a nutshell, his argument is that humanity has grown better at using the prevailing energy technology to acquire more kilocalories of energy for use, up to a ceiling. At that ceiling, a new energy basis for society evolves, importantly affecting population density and the size of human social groups, and replaces the previous social/technical paradigm. Domestication of grains and animals enabled farming to replace foraging. The extraction of fossil fuels and their harnessing as steam power led to industrial societies in place of agrarian ones.

Each of these three paradigms involves a different kind of social relations: egalitarian in foraging societies because co-operation is necessary for hunting and gathering, and nobody has a lot of property; hierarchical ones in agrarian societies because some people accumulate property to be defended, and a biological division of labour between the sexes emerges too; and industrial ones more egalitarian with respect to politics and gender but tolerant of wealth inequality. There has been little if any biological evolution among humans – and through the millennia the same basic characteristics (or even values) such as the capacity for love, a sense of fairness etc, exist – but there has been cultural evolution. Specifically, values evolve, being shaped by interaction with the physical, social and intellectual environment. Is it acceptable to treat women as chattels or to have slaves? Do animals have the right to humane treatment? Does marital fidelity matter? These kinds of values have changed significantly.

Although it seems highly plausible that the material and technical basis of a society plays an important part in shaping its higher level values, and that population density and the size of social groups will be important, there is something that feels a bit deterministic about Morris’s argument. It may be that at this short length the arguments become caricatures, with less scope for nuance, because the four critiques of the argument aren’t all that convincing either.

The book has lots of facts, always appealing to me. For instance, did you know the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron had intercepted and freed 150,000 Africans being shipped across the Atlantic to the US between banning slave trading in 1807 and the outbreak of the US Civil War in 1865?

It ends rather gloomily, pointing out that the big transitions he identfies – from foraging to farming to fossil fuels – occurred when successful societies hit the “hard ceiling of what was possible given their stage of energy capture and found themselves taking part in a natural experiment….. More often than not, people failed to revolutionize their energy capture and suffered Malthusian collapses.”

Perhaps, he muses with unseemly cheer, that’s about to happen to us unless we can solve the climate change issues. So that’s our choice: a catastrophic collapse of civilization, or a new techno-enviro-social paradigm.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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[amazon_link id=”0262029189″ target=”_blank” ]Why Are We Waiting: the logic, urgency and promise of tackling climate change[/amazon_link] is Nick Stern’s second book on this subject, the first being [amazon_link id=”1847920373″ target=”_blank” ]A Blueprint for a Safer Planet[/amazon_link]. In the new book he aims to combine fear and hope – fear of the consequences of not taking big steps now, and hope that the need to change is an opportunity for new technologies and growth.

[amazon_image id=”0262029189″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Why are We Waiting?: The Logic, Urgency, and Promise of Tackling Climate Change (Lionel Robbins Lectures)[/amazon_image]

The first part of the book, “A Planet Between Peril and Prosperity,” sets out these two elements. Stern is at the gloomy end of the range of views about the likely rise in mean global temperatures and the consequent economic and social risks. Unless the world acts within a decade or two, the window for limiting the temperature rise to a manageable 2 degrees C will be closed, he says, before proceeding to dangle hope with a chapter about the potential for a “new energy-industrial revolution.”

The second part of the book is an interesting challenge to climate change sceptics (of course) but also to some of the economists who are less pessimistic. Stern challenges the application of economic methods that assess the costs and benefits at the margin – inappropriate he rightly argues when you are discussing big changes. He has a chapter discussing the flaws in the conventional ‘integrated assessment models’ used in the literature. Stern argues: “They have assumed strong underlying growth, plus only modest damages from big increases in temperature, plus very limited risk.” If you disagree as he does with all three assumptions, the consensus forecasts look Panglossian. A final chapter in this section assesses the debate about ethical assumptions and how these are captured in the modeling, a debate first triggered by the Stern Review. His critics argue that he makes an extreme assumption about the right discount rate to use to assess future costs and benefits; but he has not changed his view.

The third and final part is about political economy – why the negotiations are so hard, how to get fast-growing developing economies to sign up to urgent action, why is everything so slow? The book argues that this is the result of the analytical errors he sets right in part 2, and psychological barriers to change, and a communication deficit. But surely it’s much simpler? Nobody – person or country – has an individual incentive to bear the short term cost of change, while the costs of climate change are uncertain, 20 years into the future, and a collective problem. It will take an extraordinary politician to solve the global collective action problem in advance, rather than reacting to events. So the book concludes, “Why are we waiting?” I am not sure the market is waiting – there seems to be a lot of energy innovation under way. As for policy, surely we need individual nation state governments to do what they can through carbon taxes, or plastic bag taxes, or policies to ‘green’ power generation – and not wait for an all-encompassing international agreement?

This is not to say Nick Stern is wrong to be so concerned. The outcome he fears clearly has a non-zero probability even if you don’t agree with him. So I’m all for action. Anybody who is interested in the economics and political economy of climate change policy will want to read this book.

Hope amid the gloom?

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Anybody in the UK who is feeling gloomy about the General Election result could deepen their gloom by reading the new edition of Danny Dorling’s [amazon_link id=”1447320751″ target=”_blank” ]Injustice: why social inequality still persists[/amazon_link]. The book has quite an upbeat conclusion: “Slowly, collectively, with one step back for every two taken forward, we inch onwards to progress; we gradually undo the mistakes of the past, and recognise new forms of injustice arising out of what we once thought were solutions. … Everything it takes to defeat injustice lies in the mind. What matters most is how we think. And how we think is metamorphosing because – everywhere – there are signs of hope.”

[amazon_image id=”1447320751″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists[/amazon_image]

Clearly this new and greatly revised edition of the book was written before the election. What’s more, everything that is new in it ought to make a campaigner for social justice even gloomier. The indicators collected in the book have at best improved only a little since the financial crisis – household indebtedness, income inequality, for instance. Perhaps even more noteworthy is the apparent absence of any change in the zeitgeist, or public philosophy. When the first edition was published in 2010, many commentators thought the scale of the crisis would lead to a significant swing in public opinion away from Big Finance, markets and greed. With the exception of popular disapproval of unseemly bonuses in the socially destructive banking industry, that doesn’t seem to have happened.

Or has it? Dorling presents some evidence – Janet Yellen calling extreme inequality ‘un-American’, international efforts to collect unpaid taxes from rich globocrats, popular dislike of elites. It’s not much, perhaps. One could add a few more examples, like today’s call from the OECD for tech companies to stop their “aggressive tax planning”. Is this enough to justify a belief that the social and economic order will change. Dorling writes, optimistically in the circumstances: “No-one can truly know what will be sufficient to change deeply held and institutionally transmitted beliefs.”

In a terrific book, [amazon_link id=”0691151571″ target=”_blank” ]Masters of the Universe[/amazon_link], Daniel Stedman Jones described the long process of organising, campaigning, debating by many people that paved the way for the triumph of the individualist ‘free market’ philosophy from 1980 and is still our official public philosophy. Who knows how long it will take how many people who dislike this to pave the way for an alternative – but when a system change of this kind happens, it happens relatively quickly (over a decade at most) and is then dramatic.

[amazon_image id=”0691151571″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics[/amazon_image]

[amazon_link id=”1447320751″ target=”_blank” ]Injustice[/amazon_link] replaces Beveridge’s original Five Giants with new ones: elitism, social exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair. The book links these in a vicious circle of social and economic inequality – exactly why single policy measures are drops in the ocean and a broader change is needed, Dorling argues, collecting all the evidence one could need to conclude this. I wouldn’t want to predict whether we’ll get it or not; that will depend on what we all do, and think, next.