Tag Archives: review

Places, and not

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By chance, I’ve read a few books about places this week. Two were sent by an academic friend: Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul and Marc Augé’s (1992) Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. The third was a treat to self, Gareth Rees’s Unofficial Britain.

I enjoyed The Global Soul, not least because it travels all over the world and I have so had it with lockdown. I’ll be back on trains and planes as soon as anybody lets me. The book sent me off into pleasant reveries about cities I’ve visited and the best hotel rooms. Although Iyer worries about the delocalisation of his kind of life, my experience is that places are – still – very different. You can always tell when you’re Abroad. That’s why I like it so much. The difference is stimulating.

Non-places is another matter. The only thing I could understand it to be saying is that many people can no longer be identified by being tied to a bounded geographical locality, and there are these deracinated transient spaces like airport lounges and car parks. Either gibberish or banal.

Unofficial Britain was the best antidote to Non-places, being a celebration of exactly such locations – multistory carparks, under motorway flyovers, hospital corridors, travellers’ hotels. As Rees observes, they all have a quite distinctive culture and even inhabitants, and are often places of heightened emotion. We just don’t see them generally. I tore through this book, which took me from hairs rising on the back of my neck (ghosts in suburbia) to howling with laughter (the motorways chapter – it alone makes this book worthwhile). What’s not to like?

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When being fair to others is efficient

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The title had slightly put me off the new book by David Bodanis: The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean. I’m not in the mood for self-improvement, given that (a) it’s January, always the worst month of the year and (b) it’s lockdown – so more in the mood for gin and chocolate. Despite my rather truculent seasonal despondency, though, I really enjoyed reading it.

The title is misleading, I think. The book seemed to me to be really about the power of making sure you get the widest range of information possible, by listening to enough people with respect and treating them well enough that they say what they think – while at the same time retaining enough scepticism about their motives. Not so much ‘do as you would be done by’ fairness, more ‘efficiency wage’ fairness – the way you treat people structures their incentives. There’s also a flavour of Team of Rivals about the argument: if you don’t listen to your opponents, or those who disagree with you, reality will bite you at some stage.

The author has his own views, though, and describes this as fairness, or as decency.  The book is structured into two halves. The first is a series of stories about effective leadership, divided into exemplars of the three skills of listening, giving and defending. Most of these are not well-known people – such as Paul Starrett, who won the contract to build the Empire State Building, or Ursula Bower, a British woman who led a team of hill tribe warriors in the mountainous North of India against the Japanese in the second world war. These tales are told crackingly well, and I raced through these chapters.

The second half works a bit less well, although still a compelling read. It starts by contrasting Goebbels and Roosevelt when young, the experiences that shaped them and how they responded, and broadens out into why Roosevelt’s leadership paved the way for the Allied victory and America’s postwar success. Perhaps it’s inherently hard to get the optimal focal length when so many volumes have been written about both men and about the war.

The book then ends with a very nice section of ‘readings and reflections’, a reading list with notes providing a sort of meta-commentary on the theme of decency, or how to be a good leader (one of Aristotelian virtue) in any context.

All in all, highly recommended. It certainly cheered me through a couple of grim January evenings.41RKfm5a9SL._SY346_

 

Progress, and Greed

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As there’s not much to do this holiday other than go for walks and read, and the dog has her limits in terms of walking now she’s 14, I’ve polished off (as well as Veblen) Robert Nisbet’s (now quite old) HIstory of the Idea of Progress, and a thriller, Greed, by Marc Elsberg.

The Nisbet book is quite interesting – apparently it’s a standard text for certain courses but was published after my time in the lecture hall. The book defines the idea of progress as a threefold phenomenon: a reverence for knowledge or science; a belief that it comes about through humanity’s own efforts; and a sense of incremental gain over time. The movement forward through time is a key aspect: Nisbet argues that the idea of progress had a setback during the Renaissance – contrary to what one learned at school – because of the widespread belief that the Middle Ages had been a regression from ancient Greece and Rome, and the belief in cycles that never moved on rather than forward momentum. Inherent, too, in that momentum is the ability to look forward to things getting better in future.

The read across to economics is obvious. ‘Growth’ is really another word for progress. I’m obviously interested in how we ought to be measuring (and thinking about) changing living standards: if policies are supposed to make things better, then what constitutes better and for whom? The advocacy of well-being or happiness, or degrowth, is in effect a claim for the benefits of stasis rather than forward movement. It’s well-known now that although happiness measured on any finite scale (a stationary time series) will not be correlated with income per head (a non-stationary series) over any length of time; but is correlated with growth in income. I wonder whether that’s a fundamental link and not just a statistical correlation? Or to put it another way, if people in two countries today have the same median income per capita but one has been growing and the other static, what should we expect about their well-being?

Anyway, mulling all this over for a lecture this spring. And good to fill gaps in one’s education anyway.

41yoBakhC+L._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Greed is a page-turner about the murder of a Nobel prize winning economist at an ur-capitalist summit to prevent him giving a speech that would mathematically prove that a communitarian economy will grow faster than an individualist one. The mega-rich hedge fund guy is the murderous villain, and the Berlin anarchists win the day, having defied death many times over. The author has drunk the London Mathematical Laboratory/Ole Peters kool aid, for anyone interested in the character of the proof. Still, it’s set in Berlin, has lots of chases, and chunks of economic discussion too. What’s not to like (whatever you think about Peters’ dismissal of all economic theory prior to his own insights)? A must-read for anyone who hopes that understanding non-ergodic stochastic processes can make them rich.

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From Hobbes to Locke – and back again?

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I’m a fan of Deirdre McCloskey, but accept that her writing style is a bit marmite – it’s always clear but she has a rather arch tone which some readers don’t like. Some of her books are also rather long, and the three in her terrific Bourgeois Era trilogy, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity and Bourgeois Equality, fall into this camp. They repay the time required, drawing as they do on McCloskey’s extensive reading and research (to get a flavour of how extensive, look at some of her posted course syllabi here).

Now, however, anybody unwilling to commit the time to the whole Bourgeois Era trilogy can read instead this new summary version by McCloskey and Art Carden, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World. Where Acemoglu and Robinson’s Narrow Corridor takes inspiration from Hobbes, this book is inspired by Locke, and argues that liberty is the key to the great enrichment of the past two and a half centuries.

At a time when the mood – and reality – of the times is swinging toward state intervention in the economy – and rightly so, given the potentially Hobbesian world to which the combination of market power and pandemic have brought us – it’s all the more important to keep an open mind and take these arguments from economic liberty seriously. Don’t be put off by the blurbs on the back from Stephen Davies of the IEA and Matt Ridley. Besides, the sweep of McCloskey’s historical knowledge is such that the book is just a good read (if you like the tone), and a fraction of the length of the trilogy!

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A brace of Leviathans

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As welcome distraction from the misery of not being able to see any close family at Christmas after all, I’ve read (late, I know) The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.

The basic argument is well known. Inspired by Hobbes’ Leviathan, they argue that nations experience a dynamic whereby there is a sort of saddle path (a narrow corridor) between not enought government (‘absent Leviathan’) and too much (‘despotic Leviathan’). To stay in the corridor (‘shackled Leviathan’), there needs to be a balance of power between government (which has to be strong enough to be effective) and society (which has to be strong enough to prevent government tipping off the path in either direction. Slightly oddly, they call this the Red Queen effect after the on-the-spot race between Alice (in Wonderland) and the Red Queen – odd because it is never made completely explicit that they’re referring to a dynamic process rather than an adequate balance. I infer the former, but it’s implicit in the examples that make up the bulk of the book.

For there is a whistle stop tour of pretty much all of recorded human history. I’m not sure this works well, although at least the book is only a third of the length of Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, which came with its own tote bag. I have to confess I started to read the latter but was not distressed to find it quarantined in my office in the March lockdown. The first section of that is all history. It’s fantastic that top economists have discovered history of course, but it’s difficult to get the right focal length – what’s the right amount of detail to inform readers without it becoming classic economic imperialism? I did enjoy reading the book, but personally, I’d have edited down The Narrow Corridor’s capsule histories.

Other quibbles. The book seems to demonstrate the struggle for stability and absence of conflict at least as much as for liberty, despite the subtitle and blurb emphasising liberty only. Hobbes was more in the territory of order versus anarchy. There’s even a hand grenade on the paperback cover. And, having spent most of the book presenting the three Leviathans as exhausting the possibilities (there’s a neat diagram), the ‘paper Leviathan’ is introduced to deal with countries that govern despotically and at the same time incompetently – think some Latin American or African states. And perhaps some formerly-shackled Leviathan countries heading in that direction…..

Having said all this, well worth a read, as well as a useful reminder that there have been dark times before and yet things go on.

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