Catching up

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It has been a busy term indeed. As well as all the usual, we’re working towards the transformation of the Bennett Institute into the Bennett School of Public Policy, an important initiative for the University of Cambridge. Which is by way of saying I’ve been reading a bit less than usual and am certiainly blogging less. So this is a catch up post.

I enjoyed Wages for Housework by Emily Callaci, a history of this aspect of 1970s feminism. It’s a campaign I wasn’t much aware of as a callow teenager during that decade, although very much into reading classics like The Second Sex, The Female Eunuch and The Women’s Room. The author is US-based and although the book covers activities in Italy and the UK also, my sense is that there was more energy in the campaign in the US. The book does a good job in delicately drawing out the tensions that the slogan Wages for Housework created: did it literally mean paying for the hours of unpaid work every household involves? If so, where would the money come from – and would it even be desirable to bring care for one’s own household into the monetary economy? Or was it rather a way to draw attention to the structural dismissal of the importance of household labour – and if so, why focus on such a restrictive slogan? Of course, I’m all in favour of measuring the value of unpaid work in order that it is valued in policy decisions, and that measurement will typically be monetary; but monetising the home is another matter entirely. The story is told through a biographical approach to the movement’s leaders, and the book is an enjoyable read, capturing well the flavour of 1970s feminism – the energy, the exhilaration, the justified anger.

8186jrMQylL._AC_UY327_QL65_Stefan Zweig’s Journeys was – as was to be expected – a somewhat depressing read, essays about his travels in the 1930s. But it ends with a rather lovely tribute to the calmness of the English, which he attributes to our love of our gardens: “A half hour or an hour spent daily in the company of flours, of trees, of fruits, in the company of the eternal in nature, that hour or half hour during which they are totally detatched from events and matters on the outside, seems to me by its power of relaxing to be at the origin of the marvellous calm the English people, enjoy, which to us remains incomprehensible or at least inaccessible.” (Respect for the length of the sentence btw.) Seems like we’re back in “Keep Calm and Carry On” territory.

71cnZnsmIoL._AC_UY327_QL65_I was looking forward to Worldbuilders: technology and the new geopolitics by Bruno Maçāes as I’d read a couple of intriguing reviews. Sad to say I found it impossible to follow and gave up. What to make of passages like this: “During the Cold War it was still possible to delimit two geographic areas under the control of Washington and Moscow. You could say the natural element was still present. Neutral space made something like the separation between these two spheres logically conceivable. Today, we inhabit a fully developed technological system. Can Washington and Beijing break it apart into two spheres?” After several reads I think I understand this – the claim is that it’s not possible to achieve the same complete separation between systems in the digital (rather than physical) environment. But if this is right, I disagree. In any case, I don’t know whether the difficulty is over-literal translation or an originally challenging writing style but this wasn’t one for me.

41xnYGNt2IL._AC_UY327_QL65_Otherwise, a lot of non-work reading, including through long flights to Stanford and back. I recommend Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, Ian Rankin’s Midnight and Blue, and A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar. As a committed notebook-writer (and stationery fetishist in generaI) I thoroughly enjoyed The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen.

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Leviathan, supersized

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My dear husband gave me a Daunts book subscription for my birthday so I get a lucky dip new paperback each month. A recent one was my colleague David Runciman’s The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs, first published in 2023. As David writes too many books for me to keep up with, I hadn’t already read it. The core argument is that human societies have already ceded many decision-making powers to non-human entities, namely states and corporations.

I read most of the book thinking, ‘Yes, but….’, as it’s a neat argument but not watertight. It starts with Hobbes, and the idea of non-human persons as it developed in different institutional forms. A key difference with decisions made by machine agents seems to lie in their autonomy or lack of openness to change or redress; and changing that requires them to be part of states and corporations rather than separate entities.

The book does, though, sort of acknowledge this towards the end: “If the machine decides what happens next, no matter how intelligent the process by which that choice was arrived at, the possibility of catastrophe is real, because some decisions need direct human input. It is only human beings whose intelligence is attuned to the risk of having asked the wrong question.” He goes on to link this back to the claim that the state is a ‘political machine’ or ‘artificial decision-making machine’ so there is no difference really between states and AIs – but this, again, makes the use of AIs in political domains part of the state machine.

He concludes: “For now the bigger choices is whether the artificial agency of the state is joined with human intelligence or artificial intelligence.” Will AI crowd out the humanity? Looking at the US now, this seems like a question from another era, a gentler era, though. The new regime there has merged state, corporation and AI in a behemoth that dwarves Hobbes’ Leviathan.

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Social machines

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My friend Wendy Hall co-authored a 2019 book The Theory and Practice of Social Machines, which I read only recently. The central idea of a social machine is very interesting – a social network connected by digital devices, a human-machine social entity at scale. These can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in terms of societal outcomes, and most of the book is concerned with this question: “If we take the metaphor of the ‘social machine’ seriously, then we can think of it as doing some computing, and hence processing information, which can be done more or less accurately.” Well, it’s only too obvious how that is going at the moment.

So the book asks how should one analyse social machines and, importantly, try to construct or shape them? When do you get filter bubbles or groupthink, and when robustly diverse engagement towards a common aim? The middle chunk of chapters looks at many examples of social machines in operation, in areas ranging from music to social media to healthcare to open data. It ends, in a somewhat unsatisfactory way, with a list of questions or areas for future research, and with the conclusion: “Social machines should prompt neither optimism nor pessimism; they will enable new types of problem solving and new types of mischief alike.”

I do think the metaphor can be fruitful, but I suppose with the mischief aspect so much more evident 6 years after the book‘s publication I hungered for something a bit more action-oriented.

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The political economy of horses for courses

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It was the fact of a lecture by Dan Breznitz at the University of Manchester for National Productivity Week that alerted me to his book Innovation in Real Places. Sadly I couldn’t get to Manchester for the lecture but I really recommend the book. Its core argument is that the shape of innovative businesses depends on the specifics of their economic context, making the hope to become the next Silicon Valley a forlorn one for most places, and requiring innovation policy to be appropriately tailored.

The aims of innovation policy are common: make sure companies and individuals concerned have the capabilities they need, and support the whole cosystem in which they operate. There are also several policy fundamentals: ensure local firms are plugged into production networks (including internationally); provide the necessary public goods (skills, prototyping production facilities, trade shows…); focus on the whole local ecosystem including whether financing and business models cohere; adjust policy over time as the ecosystem grows.

Given the basics, the book sets out four different pathways with examples about how specific places have followed each. The one that dominates the innovation policy imaginary is the Silicon valley model – frontier innovation, VC finance, star entrepreneurs. (This is looking less good than it did a while ago. And as the book comments in the introduction, “There is nothing like a dosage of competition to shake comfortable oligopolies out of their stranglehold on power.”) Tech startups – like all startups – require extensive social networks, but in this sector they are geographically extended rather than locally-rooted. So even if a Silicon-whatever gets going, the people involved may end up moving to Menlo Park or Mountain View when they succeed – the book gives an example of a tech cluster starting successfully in Atlanta, Georgia, but subsequently moving away. The book argues that the conditions for such clusters are rare in any case, and that the model leads to inequality rather than broad-based prosperity and good jobs in the region.

The second model is the design, prototyping and production engineering stage, with Taiwan being the exaplar. The third is innovation in components and second generation products, “the unsung and despised hero of economic growth,” with examples in Germany and some in China. The final model is production and assembly, so successfully adopted in China’s Pearl River delta region, with extremely successful innovation in modes of production, assembly and also logistics.

Having set out these broad models, the rest of the book is packed with examples of innovation policies both good and bad. As it points out, much policy thinking is lazy. If it gets beyond the aim of being the next Silicon Valley, “one of the most comon ways for regions to fail is to focus on the trendiest complementarity, be it venture capital, university parks, green tech or AI.” Prof Breznitz’s key message is that there is no substitute for detail, and indeed constant willingness to adjust policies as circumstances change. The book identifies a core political challenge: successful innovation policies often succeed by flying below the radar of political attention, but if they do succeed there’s no avoiding that politicization – and rightly so in many ways. Innovation policy is hard enough to get right, but the political economy challenge may be harder still.

Anyway, a wise book, lots of great examples, and hopefully the lecture will go online before long.

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Swings and roundabouts – or slides?

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When you’ve seen as many ups and downs in the ranking of countries’ economic models as I have, it’s no surprise to learn that what was considered a sure-fire recipe for success at one time is portrayed as stagnation or sclerosis a decade or two later. The perceptions amplify relatively small differences in GDP growth, as the western economies tend to exhibit the same broad trends. Still, Wolfgang Munchau’s Kaput: The end of the German miracle was surprising. (although so were my recent experiences with German trains mobile coverage).

The book – which is very well written – argues that German policymakers made some strategic bets some decades ago that have backfired significantly over time: dependence on Russian energy, underinvestment, over-reliance on parts of the manufacturing sector as China has gained ground – in electric vehicle production for example – and a failure to keep up with digital technology. It emphasises the reliance on technologies that the digital and green transitions are simply rendering redundant – the internal combustion engine prominent among them. The effectively mercantilist system of political prioritisation and finance has continued to support the country’s traditional strengths rather than anything innovative that might cannibalise those famous manufacturing companies. In fact, the list of charges is long – out-of-date skills, a labour market that cannot well accommodate expanding sources of labour supply (women, over-60s, immigrants) because of the vocational and apprenticeship structures, a weak digital infrastructure, and of course a disastrous energy policy over many years.

Is this really the end of the German miracle, or another of those episodes when what looks like a fatal weakness one decade will turn out to be just what is needed the next? As the author says in the prologue, “A British journalist and friend of mine warned me not to write this book. He said that the over-arching lesson in his professional life has never been to bet against the German economy.” The 5G is terrible and the trains are worse than ours in the UK, but German towns are still visibly more prosperous than many of their British counterparts. On the other hand, people still generally use cash – the ATM at the airport in Hamburg a while ago gave me a €100 note, which is just unimaginable in other European countries. And people aren’t using the apps so familiar to us to navigate or find a restaurant because they just won’t load over the terrible mobile networks.

So I don’t know whether the German miracle is permanently broken or not but this is an eye-opening read. And of course there’s the message Germany’s voters are about to send the country’s political establishment next month – whatever it turns out to be.

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