Tag Archives: review

Globalization 1.0 and 2.0

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When I was a moody teenager living in a Lancashire mill town, the nearest bookshop was three bus rides away among the bright lights of Manchester. I’d ready pretty much everything of interest in the local library and school library (and thank heavens for those).

Luckily, the newsagent tucked away – on the bottom shelf in the far corner – some cheap paperback editions of classics. It seemed a more or less random selection but it did mean I devoured almost every novel ever written by Joseph Conrad. So I pounced on the paperback of Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World when I spotted it recently. It’s brilliant. Her basic argument is that Conrad is a novelist of globalisation – his novels: “meditate on how to behave in a globalizing world, where old rulebooks are becoming obsolete not nobody’s yet written new ones.” The term globalization dates from the 1980s but there was a late 19th and early 20th century version.

The Dawn Watch is so well written itself. One example: “History is like therapy for the present: it makes it talk about its parents.” The biographical tale zips along, interspersed with Jasanoff’s own travel adventures in Conrad’s footsteps – her trip to DRC and up the Congo, rereading Heart of Darkness bookends the biography. Jasanoff reflects on Chinua Achebe’s critique of Conrad’s novel as imperialist fiction, agreeing that it is a non-valid window on modern Africa. But she ends by concluding that while indeed the 21st century is not the 19th, the challenges of globalization are fundamentally the same as those Conrad identified: “The heirs of Conrad’s technologically displaced sailors are to be found in the industries disrupted by digitization. The analogues to his anarchists are to be found in Internet chat rooms or terrorist cells.”

I like this observation by Conrad himself, about fiction versus history: “Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents … on second hand impressions.”

As it happened, I’d recently read Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, a quotation of course from Heart of Darkness. That’s an impassioned reflection on the legacy of European imperialism.

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The other book I polished off this week was Peter Frankopan’s The New Silk Roads, the sequel to his best seller. Rather than a history, it’s a very readable account of the current context of the Belt and Road Initiative. Given that every day seems to bring some news about China’s initiative and projection of economic power, this is a timely book. I enjoyed its predecessor, The Silk Roads, more as I knew so little about the history of the region. But even if The New Silk Roads covers more familiar material, its Asian and China centric lens makes it well worth a read.

 

The Human Network

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I’ve been thinking about social capital recently, so was eager to read Matthew Jackson’s The Human Network: How We’re Connected and Why it Matters. This is the version of his terrific work on networks and social capital (for example Social and Economic Networks (2010)) aimed at a general readership. Although the book starts with some of the concepts of network theory, it uses diagrams rather than equations to explain. (Anyone wanting a slightly more technical introduction to network theory needs to go elsewhere. Perhaps Barabasi’s Linked, as a still reasonably accessible read.)

Above all, The Human Network motivates the use of the network lens on economic and social questions, from epidemics to the diffusion of technology to financial crises to social immobility. Why did one long-discredited individual who made up his results for a 1998 article manage to trigger an anti-vaccination movement which is still leading to epidemics of infectious disease? What is the difference between a financial system that diversifies risk and one that concentrates it? Why are social media influencers a thing?

The Human Network is a very engaging and worthwhile read. I was for the most part familiar with the material it covers, but nevertheless enjoyed reading it, and also gained some insights about the different ways information can cascade through a network, either amplifying a single (possibly incorrect) piece of information, or pooling different sources of information for a more accurate picture. Given that our societies are highly interconnected in vast networks, and saturated with sources of information through online media, understanding the way networks function seems essential. One would hope at least public health authorities (to deal with epidemics) and financial regulators (to monitor the risk of systemic crisis) have their network diagrams at the ready. One of the messages I came away with is how easy it is for epidemics, real or metaphorical, to spread in the modern world of six degrees (or fewer) of separation.

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Morals and markets

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I’ve now finished Elizabeth Anderson’s Value in Ethics and Economics, with mixed reactions. The part I really liked is her critique of utilitarianism/consequentialism. She advocates a ‘pluralist-expressive’ approach to value.

Consequentialism “promises to provide a single, simple, precise and determinate procedure of justification that employs objective calculation to overcome disputes about what to do.” Deliberation – be it rational or not – aims to deliver an optimum result on a single dimension. This is inevitably reductionist because all goods need to be made commensurate. This approach has the merit of making decisions easy to explain, and an inherent pragmatism because after all choices are always inevitable.

Anderson’s ‘expressive-pluralist’ alternative requires choices to be guided by norms which refer to ideals or evaluative concepts such as ‘respect’, ‘friendship’, ‘charity’. “Because their constitutive concepts are essentially contestable, the expressive theory cannot provide a procedure for respolving conflicting interpretations.” Confusingly, Anderson also describes this as pragmatic; I think she means realistic. This is, of course, what we do. “No compelling theoretical or practical reasons demand the global maximization of value. Evidence form our actual practice and failures to construct plausible global measures of value suggests there is no single measure of value valid for all contexts.”

The realism here is attractive, the reductionism of the former is not. And yet in public policy contexts where people’s conflicting values have to be considered, consequentialism has great force. This is more than pragmatic, I think. It serves in its own right as a form of evaluative concept to try to build consent for decisions. Having said that, of course one has to wear the pluralist spectacles too.

The weaker part of the book is the second half, applying the philosophy to an analysis of markets and cost benefit analysis. Like many critics of ‘markets’ she treats markets as an abstraction characterised by anonymity and concerned ‘merely’ with ‘use value’, absolutely failing to recognise that they are social institutions taking many forms and embedding social relations. Some economists are equally abstract, many are not. None I know would disagree with the statement that “the market does not provide a sufficient domain for the expression of all our valuations but must leave room for other social spheres to operate on non-market principles.” And while there are certainly major  limitations with cost benefit analysis, some of which I’ve written about here and here, there is a choice when it comes to issues like valuing life (QALYs) or intrinsic environmental or heritage value: either try to do this in a common metric (money), or implicitly value them at zero.

Still, it’s an interesting book. And I’ve just been recommended her Private Government by my esteemed co-author Leonard Nakamura.

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Democracy and injustice

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This week’s train journeys involved two books which looked competely different on the face of it and ended up being about the same thing: race. They were both random bookstore, I-need-a-treat, purchases: How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt and Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist. (Yes, I am weird.)

The former is an analysis of the way democracies turn into authoritarian regimes, from Hitler’s Germany to Fujimori’s Peru – and, the book argues, Donald Trump’s United States. It does not paint an authoritarian US as inevitable, but it’s hard to emerge from reading it feeling confident about the health of American democracy. And the reason is race. US democracy has functioned well, with civility, healthy checks and balances, and strong norms averting damaging partisanship only when it is democracy among white citizens. This is the same message as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power. The politics of the US, both books, suggest, are fundamentally determined by the legacy of slavery.

Lindqvist’s book is an extraordinary reflection through the course of the author’s journey across the Sahara into Congo, and intellectual journey through 19th century authors including Conrad and Darwin, on imperialism. It vibrates with anger at the injustice of what Mike Davis described as Late Victorian Holocausts. Lindqvist also draws the line from imperialist to 20th century holocaust. I would say this is a must-read book for anybody concerned with global justice. For it points forward to the conflict to be expected in a world where – as in the era of Victorian imperialism – technological changes create a superfluous labour force looking for domains to exploit.

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What counts?

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After hating the book of the moment, Shoshan Zuboff’s much-praised Surveillance Capitalism, perhaps it underlines my contrariness if I tell you how much I loved my latest read, a book about classification. It was Sorting Things Out by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Star, quite old now (1999). I can’t remember how I stumbled across it, but it absolutely speaks to my preoccupation with the fact that we see what we count & not the other way around.

The book investigates the confluence of social organisation, ethics and technologies of record-keeping as manifest in the establishment of systems of classification and standards. The examples it uses are medical systems such as diagnostic manuals, but the arguments apply more broadly. The point it makes about the role of record keeping technologies reminded me of a terrific book I read last year, Accounting for Slavery by Caitlin Rosenthal, which explored the role of commercially produced record books in the managerialism of large slave plantations in the US. The argument that a classification system lends the authority of something seemingly tehnocratic to highly political or ethical choices echoes Tom Stapleford’s wonderful book The Cost of Living in America.

As Bowker and Star point out, classification systems shape people’s behaviour. They come to seem like natural rather than constructed objects. They also fix perceptions of social relations, as a classification framework or set of standards, “[M]akes a certain set of discoveries, which validate its own framewor, much more likely than an alternative set outside the framework.” To switch frameworks requires overcoming a bootstrapping problem – you can’t demonstrate that a new one is superior because you don’t yet have the units of data on which it relies. People can’t see what they take for granted until there is an alternative version not taking the same things for granted.

And, although this book was written early in the internet era, the authors note that “Software is frozen organisational and policy discourse” – as we are learning with the burgeoning debate about algorithmic accountability. The essential ambiguity of politics is impossible to embed in code. The big data and AI era will force some of the fudged issues into the open.

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