Ferraris for All, the new book by voice of reason Daniel Ben Ami, has arrived on my desk. The message is in the title: growth is good, and it's good for everybody. The first half describes the rise of what he terms 'growth scepticism' and the second provides the counterarguments. The book is worth buying for the fantastic cover image alone – irrepressible human ambition captured in one photo. I'll read it with interest as this seems to overlap a bit with my forthcoming book, The Economics of Enough. However, I'll be reading it by the side of a pool in southern France – the Enlightened Economist is about to go on holiday for a week.

Joel Mokyr is one of our finest economic historians, and his latest book on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, The Enlightened Economy, lives up to the adjective 'magisterial'. I reviewed it here recently. One of our finest economists, Ed Glaeser, has written a wise review of a wise book in The New Republic:

“Mokyr belongs to a group of economists who emphasize the importance
of political institutions that encourage investment by protecting
private property, but he again shows restraint: “Effective property
rights are rightly considered crucial for economic development, but they
were not the entire story.” He also emphasizes the human capital—the
skills and talents—of eighteenth-century Britain,… and …  the technical skills:
clock-making, mining, shipbuilding.

While the reader craves a simple explanation, there is none to be
had. The entire question of why the industrial revolution started in
England will never be definitively answered. The event was sui generis—a
one-off, as the English say—a bolt of lightning; and there are a myriad
of possible explanations for it. Some of those theories can be
rejected, but many of them remain reasonable.”

I commend both the review and the book. Deirdre McCloskey, always worth reading, has also reviewed it.

Prompted by reading Richard Overy's The Morbid Age, one of whose themes is the intense public interest in understanding the gloomy state of the world in the inter-war period, I dusted down an old copy of John A.Hobson's The Science of Wealth. Published in 1911 (by Williams and Norgate in London and Henry Holt in the US), it's a book I picked up when I was at university. Hobson is best known for his analysis of imperialism, which influenced Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin, and for his theory of 'under-consumption' which was cheerfully borrowed by Keynes.

My volume is one of the Home University Library, a series of short, accessible but serious minded analyses of current affairs aimed at the general public – a bit like the famous Left Book Club but without the ideological slant. Pigou wrote a volume about Unemployment, F.W.Hirst, then editor of The Economist one about the Stock Exchange. G.E.Moore contributed the volume on Ethics, Hilaire Belloc the one on the French Revolution, G.K.Chesterton wrote about The Victorian Age in Literature. Not only is the series impressive for this distinguished set of authors, but the book is also a delightful physical artefact – smaller than a modern paperback, easily pocket sized. It's in marvellous shape for a 99 year old item, with its good quality paper and stitched pages. (Once on holiday we rented a cottage from a bookbinder, by then an exotic craft like being a blacksmith or handloom weaver.)

Anyway, Hobson sets out a description of the way the economy as a whole functions. In those pre-macroeconomic times, he describes supply chains and market structures, and talks about the circulation of money and credit with a degree of specificity modern monetary economists would do well to note. The book highlights two industries as being of special importance in sophisticated economies: transport and finance (and I'm sure he'd include communications under the heading of transport were he writing today):

“As industry becomes more complex, materials and labour are drawn from more distant and numerous places to take part in more delicate and complex processes of co-operation, and the commercial working of the system depends more and more upon rapid and reliable information about their movements. For this reason transport is found in every civilized country to play a larger and more imposing part in industry.” Control of transport becomes a critical matter, he goes on, requiring the government to intervene to prevent its power over industry becoming 'despotic'.

As for finance, he describes it as even more 'authoritative' in its general control over industry. “A great banking crisis paralyses all industrial activities as surely and even more completely than a breakdown in the railway system.” Indeed.

Richard Overy's The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization 1919-1939 is a terrific read for anyone interested in the history of the 1920s and 30s. The current economic crisis has revived interest in the era of the Depression, given that so many recent statistics have set records for 'the worst since….' the 30s. Overy describes the widespread sense in the inter-war period that civilization was facing a possibly terminal crisis. The parallels and differences with our own times are fascinating. (He's a terrific writer anyway – I once attended a talk he gave on a previous book, Interrogations, about the preparations for the Nuermberg trials, and have never heard anything as compelling.)

The book explores different facets of the ways in which the sense of foreboding about civilisation manifested itself – attitudes to capitalism and central planning, the obsession with birth rates and eugenics, the development of psychoanalysis and so on. There are some fascinating nuggets. For example, an influential article published in 1935 predicted that the population would more than halve to 23 million by 1990 and plunge to 4.4 million by 2035. It prompted a moral panic about the need for the 'right' sort of people to breed more. What a great example of the folly of extrapolating trends – and a reminder that it only takes 9 months for a nation's birth rate to change dramatically.

The most striking difference between now and the 1920s and 30s is the absence today of such sharp ideological passions. Mark Mazower famously argued a few years ago that modern democracies were characterised by apathy because they are prosperous and peaceful. Thank goodness – nobody should wish to live in interesting times. Yet there is something tantalising about the scope then for passionate belief, and inspiring about the mass participation in lectures, clubs, marches, pamphleteering and collecting for Spain. I recommend The Morbid Age as a reminder about those darkly interesting times.

Another one for my pile – Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains is a book I'm looking forward to reading.

There are interesting reviews by Todd Gitlin and Christopher Caldwell which both make it clear that Carr's book – based on an Atlantic essay title Is Google Making Us Stupid? – is no mere rant. Caldwell says: “It is a patient and rewarding popularisation of some of the research
being done at the frontiers of brain science. Carr has lately found it
harder to concentrate on the serious reading he used to love. He is
taken aback by the number of smart people who no longer read books. He
puts the blame on the mental habits we have all learnt on the internet.” Gitlin calls it 'lucid' but adds: “Unfortunately Carr does not entertain the possibility of unexpected
gifts from the internet. He does not ask whether associational
thinking—thinking that leaps horizontally, connecting dots that
previously were segregated or “siloed”— might actually benefit from the
non-stop multitasking in which one’s center of consciousness is
constantly intruded upon by fragments of periphery.”

Although I'm not yet in a position to make up my own mind, I wonder also whether Carr – like others who decry the effect of new technology on serious thought – also both over-estimates the amount of serious linear thinking that used to go on before the internet and under-estimates the parallel effects of other aspects of technology. For example, Steven Johnson has some very interesting points about the way new software (DevonThink in his case) has allowed him to write his books in different and better ways.

As ever, getting the proper counterfactual is a tricky business.