The time has clearly come for those of us who've not yet done so to blow the dust off our copies of the great man's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. As an interesting article by James Pearson points out, the book was much more ambitious in scope than simply setting out some policies to prevent depression. Pearson writes:

Keynes, at a minimum, looked to redefine the relationship between the
state and the market in capitalist societies in order to find a “middle
way” between laissez faire and socialism. His new order required, in
turn, a general reorientation in behavior and outlook such that the
older culture of saving, self-denial, and minimalist government might
be replaced by one more tolerant of consumption, debt, and government
spending.

He sees Keynes as an architect of what Daniel Bell later described as the central “cultural contradiction” of capitalism, the tension between consumerist hedonism and the need for savings to build capital.

Serendipitously, having read this article, I opened this morning's Financial Times to find that historian Niall Ferguson has written a good column blasting Paul Krugman's appropriation of Keynes to justify 'depression economics' policies – mainly massive increases in government spending and debt. Ferguson argues that the recent rise in long bond yields is an inevitable result of massive deficit spending, and what's more a desirable market response. Interestingly, like Pearson, he's challenging the new conventional wisdom that Keynes has the answers to the current crisis – I suppose an anti-Keynes backlash was inevitable.

I'm on the Fergusson side of this particular clash of the titanic celebrity profs, but rather than just surf the columns, I'm going to have to turn back to the original text. If only Keynes had managed to make the General Theory as readable as his other books, which I've returned to much more often. Essays in Persuasion or The Economic Consequences... are stuffed with the best kind of English prose – not so the General Theory. Pearson agrees with me:

The General Theory is notoriously difficult for the layman to
read or understand, containing as it does a bewildering mix of abstract
theory and seemingly unrelated excursions into subjects like stock
market speculation and mercantilism. Even Paul Samuelson, one of
Keynes’s American expositors, found it to be “a badly written book,”
full of “mares’ nests of confusions,” where the reader encountered
flashes of insight interspersed with tedious algebra. Keynes left it
for others, like Samuelson, to work out fully the implications of his
tour de force. The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by
contrast, contained a powerful and lucid argument that no one could
misunderstand or dismiss. Nevertheless, the two works, while vastly
different in these respects, hammered at a common theme—namely, the
obsolescence of the pre-war order in Europe, along with all of its
associated ideas and assumptions.

And there I suppose is the core of what we can all agree on about the current economic situtation: the obsolescence of the old order. How will capitalism reinvent itself this time around?

I've spent the day and much of the evening reading through the draft of a little book I'm co-authoring with a BBC Trust colleague about public value – what it is, how to do it, and what it all means. This is part of the deck-clearing needed before I write my own 'big' book on social welfare, and some of the research overlaps too. But tackling 40,000 words has just reminded me how hard it is to sustain an argument and get a structure right over 80-90,000  words. Probably the hardest thing I've done. It brought to mind a conversation at the LSE a few months ago about the impact of word processing on writing. One of the profs still preferred to write longhand first, but most of the rest of us couldn't imagine writing a book without the ability to restructure electronically. How has this changed our capacity to think and write, I wonder? Are we becoming less able to concentrate on making sustained arguments, just as we seem to be steadily less able to concentrate on reading long passages, our attention spans shortened by the phyical character of the screen? And are we also too prone to ignore things unavailable online when we research our books, as this delightful Chronicle article about historical research illustrates? On balance, I think the technology has improved writing even if it has harmed reading skills – more access to material, not less, overall, and more scope to hone and improve lines of argument. Others will no doubt disagree.

PS the public value book will be out in the autumn.

Recently I re-read a couple of Daniel Bell books – just finished a volume he edited with Irving Kristol called 'Capitalism Today'. The striking think about the essays by economists such as Bob Solow, Robert Gordon and martin Bronfenbrenner is that there are remarkable parallels between the late 70s and today. This struck me to when I first started my re-doing Bell phase with The Post-Industrial Society, a couple of years ago, but has become more striking now the crisis is upon us. The terms in which people wrote then about the turning point in capitalism are very similar to those being used now. There's a lesson for us there but I'm not sure whether it's about the severity of the crisis or the resilience of capitalism.

Last post for a few days as I'm taking a well-deserved break in the Scottish highlands, with Team of Rivals for reading.

Since my first post on Open Book Publishers, a new Cambridge-base academic press, I've had chance to speak to one of its founders, the economist Rupert Gatti, about the publishing and business model. He told me that the decision to found OBP was born of frustration with the path most existing academic publishers are taking to maintain their revenues and profits in the face of the technological and structural changes affecting all of the content industries. He said: “Publishers are backing themselves into the wrong corner. Their pricing policies are tied into big libraries, and they are tying up knowledge. Only people using prestigious US research libraries can read these books – and we wonder why the US is leading in so many areas of knowledge. Academic publishers have stopped seeing themselves as disseminators of knowledge. They're just trying to protect an income stream.”

Here's the story. One of his co-founders (and his wife) Alessandra Tosi had her PhD thesis on Russian history published at a cover price of £60 (having delivered camera ready copy). It sold 350 copies, of which 200 went to US libraries. Not a single Russian library could afford to buy it. Initially the plan was to publish new and revised versions of out-of-print titles, starting with one by William StClair, the third co-founder and author of The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. However, there are now about 25 titles in the pipeline, all new.

OBP is not-for-profit, and Gatti estimates they will need to sell about 300 copies to break even on a title, that is cover staff and running costs. Half of net profits will go to the authors, who retain copyright. Authors will not need to contribute any funding themselves – in contrast, Gatti says, to the growing demand by many publishers that research grants are used to pay for publication. All manuscripts will be properly peer reviewed. In time, the website will build digital links from book titles to other readings, to take readers into a body of research. Gattis says: “Publishers are scampering to find easy income streams. There is a question about how to finance open access, but it's been dominated by a lobby group of established publishers.”

My experience with publishers has been very positive, but I hear many tales similar to Gatti's, and think the OBP experiment is exciting and worthwhile. I'd encourage all readers – and potential authors – to take a look.

This weekend I finished the intriguing The Grid Book by Hannah Higgins. This Univ of Illinois at Chicago art historian interprets human cultural history through the lens of ten grids, from bricks and city layouts to type, boxes and networks including of course the internet. She demonstrates pretty convincingly I think the utility of the grid as an organising principle for human society, the more complex it becomes. The writing style is flawed by the baroque flourishes of cultural theory, although it is at least blessedly free of hermeneutics-type jargon. Still, that's greatly outweighed by the unexpected connections you get from applying the same perspective to such a wide range of activities.

The most interesting chapters to me covered the ledger, the box and the network. In each of these, economists will be familiar with the background material, be it the history of double entry book-keeping or the history of containerisation in Marc Levinson's terrific book The Box (taken up by the BBC in its tracking of a single shipping container around the world). The interest lies in the connections the author makes between this familiar ground and other territory, the arts and society. And there's an afterword which speculates about whether we're moving on from the grid to a mode of organisation based on fractals. Good stuff.