This interesting social history of computer programming, The Computer Boys Take Over by Nathan Ensmenger, is essentially a story of the struggle for power inside corporations. As I noted in my pre-view of the book, programming was initially thought of as a rather lowly support function, and it took some time for the designers of the massive early computers to realise that writing software was going to be a key function. When they did, out went the women programmers who were rather prominent in those early days (although some, such as Admiral Grace Hopper, remained influential), and in came the 'boys'.

From then on, however, the software industry was mainly characterised as being in 'crisis'. In universities, academics established computer science faculties which did what academics do – they were interested in intellectual crunchiness and publishing in learned journals (although computer science majors were established surprisingly recently, mostly from the 1980s on). However, businesses, spending from the late 1950s onwards large sums of money buying computer hardware, were horrified to find they also had to spend large sums on writing software – and what's more, there were not enough people who could do this work, and no standardisation. So upgrading the hardware meant rewriting the software, and nobody could read or adapt the software written by anybody else.

The development of standard languages was one response, Fortran and COBOL being the leading examples – the former preferred by pointy heads, the latter much more widely used in business. Training programmes were established too, and most big employers introduced aptitude tests to hire and train their own programmers (both mechanisms which helped exclude women). Yet the shortage of programmers relative to the demand for software remained such that the mystique of the 'computer boy' developed – the anti-social, unconventional geek who refused to wear the corporate uniform and tended to work at night. One psychological profile of the programmer type read: “Creativity is a major attribute of technically oriented people. Look for those who like intellectual challenge rather than interpersonal relations.”

The scene was set then for a continuing culture clash between managers in hierarchical corporations and the essential, enigmatic priesthood of the computer geeks. One reason so many businesses insisted on COBOL – regarded from the start as technically inferior – was the (incorrect) notion that anybody could read and understand a COBOL programme, so top management would be less at the mercy of the programmers. The upshot is that it is the most widely used computer language ever. For example, 90% of the world's financial transactions are processed by applications written in COBOL, and 70% of Merrill Lynch's applications (p227) – and look how well banks' managements understand what's been going on. I've also heard top bankers bemoan the fact that all their software is written in a language that nobody now studies or wants to work on because it's regarded as inferior and declining.

All in all, this is an interesting read about both the profession of programmer (up to but not including the dot com boom, which has surely changed the sociology dramatically), and about the organisation of the classic big business hierarchies. The book's unduly repetitive, with the same quotes and sentences repeated in two or three places, but that aside I'd recommend it to those interested in both the history of computing and business history.

David Rieff has written an important review (in The New Republic) of what looks to be an important book, Peter Gill's Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. I haven't yet read the book but it is clearly an important contribution to the debate about what kind of interventions by developed world agencies in developing world societies can be effective. Rieff references this literature in his review – this blog has reviewed some recent books such as Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid and Linda Polman's War Games.

The review makes it clear that Gill's book is pessimistic about Ethiopia's prospects, despite the arrival of Chinese investment. It concludes:

“Gill tries hard to be optimistic. He even writes hopefully of the
role that China, now the most transformative player on the African
scene, might play in Ethiopia’s better future. To have gotten Chinese
officials in Africa to speak with candor and in depth is a considerable
journalistic accomplishment, but quoting a Chinese official in Addis
Ababa about China directing “some of their surplus savings to
infrastructural development in Africa” is the thinnest of thin reeds on
which to place one’s hopes. My sense is that Gill knows it.”

Rieff himself has a book on the global food crisis due out next year.

On the train back from Manchester yesterday (where I had the privilege of taking part in a workshop with Thomas Schelling as well as other top economists like Bob Hahn and Partha Dasgupta, at the University's Sustainable Consumption Institute), I started reading The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Progammers and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan Ensmenger. Although just two chapters in, I can tell it's going to be fascinating.

I've already learnt that the earliest computer programmers were all women because the chaps who designed the systems thought that implementing their plans in a way the machines could understand was a trivial matter. Something like knitting or operating a telephone switchboard. Low status work, and therefore ideal for women, the successors to the women clerks who had been the 'human computers' of the pre-war era. It soon became clear that the women who handled the machines all day every day – the ENIAC and EDSAC – were becoming much more adept with computers than the chaps, however. For example, six valves an hour blew, on average, and the women were so familiar with the machines that they could usually tell which one was going next. That would never do, and programming became higher status, better paid, and definitely for men.

The book is also right to say that: “It is the history of computer software and not of the computer itself that is at the heart of the larger story of the computer revolution of the mid- to late-20th century. What makes the modern electrical digital computer so unique in all the history of technology – so powerful, flexible, and capable of being applied to such an extraordinarily diverse range of purposes – is its ability to be reconfigured via software into a seemingly infinite number of devices.”

A full review will follow when I've finished.

Last week ended in civilised manner with tea and cake with an old friend at the wonderful cake shop attached to the London Review of Books book shop, around the corner from that other haven of civilisation, the British Museum. Of course, it's impossible to pass through a bookshop (even on the way to a slice of lemon cake) without buying something, and I picked up from a display table When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson. Not until I searched for it this morning did I realise that this is a cult book recommended by Warren Buffet in his annual speech to shareholders earlier this year. Even without knowledge of this imprimatur, it has been a gripping read.

The subject is the hyperinflation in Germany, Austria and Hungary in the early 1920s. Not only does this account confirm Milton Friedman and Anna Schwarz''s famous dictum (in their Monetary History of the United States) that (hyper)inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, it augments it: inflation is always and everywhere a social phenomenon. The hyperinflations were made possible by the non-stop rolling of banknotes off the printing presses, but the decision to print was a political one and reflected the social fractures of those terrible years within the affected countries, and the international fractures after the First World War. In none of the hyper-inflation countries were governments able to collect enough taxes or reduce spending enough to close large budget deficits. And their budget nightmare was made all the worse by the reparations demands of the victorious allies. Although Keynes (in his famous Economic Consequences of the Peace) predicted that reparations demands would have disastrous effects, the French in particular but the allies as a group insisted on pressing the financial demands – on broken countries – in full.

When Money Dies was first published in 1975 – and the reissue I picked up seems to be already out of print. Its author started out as a journalist and tells this tale forcefully. He covers the economic issues but the human ones too: the desperation of mothers seeking to feed hungry children, whose growth and health were damaged; the hysterical spending of money on champagne and nightclubs before its value evaporated; the purchase of property and antiques as better stores of value; the luxury of rural life compared to the corrosive loss of status and self-esteem amongst urban professionals and intellectuals.

There is a contemporary message in this history too, as in the US and UK the metaphorical printing presses churn through QE, and the exchange rate slides, and the government struggles to close the chasm of a budget deficit. It is that we shouldn't ever relax our vigilance about inflation. Inflation is just as socially corrosive as unemployment – and affects similar groups of people, the economically powerless, those lacking in skill and dynamism. It's an indicator of a weak sense of cohesiveness in a society, and a creator of social disintegration. And, as Fergusson points out, the financial commentators in Germany in 1921 and 1922 refused to see the flooding of rootless money into the economy as a contributor to rising inflation. Today's circumstances are profoundly different but one thing hasn't changed: the combination of deep social or political friction and loose monetary policy as an economic sticking plaster is a very malign one.

Now, I buy far more books than is good for my family finances, and that includes a lot of impulse buys. Amazon, through the combination of one-click and signing up for Prime, makes matters even worse. But my hand hesitated over the keyboard this weekend and then zero-clicked on Robert Skidelsky's The Return of the Master. I didn't read it in hardback and normally buying the new paperback would be a no brainer for me. But the publisher (Penguin) is asking for a penny under £10 for a 256 page paperback. Some academic publishers have long made a habit of extortionate pricing because their market is university libraries, but one of the more notorious, Edward Elgar, seems to have had a change of heart – I've recently noticed some of their texts being published as trade paperback formats priced from £12 to £16. But is the price of wider market paperbacks and trade paperbacks going up?

True, online discounting means you don't need to pay full price. Amazon UK is currently asking for £5.99 for the Skidelsky book, and at that price perhaps I should have clicked. But then £5.99 is my mental pricing point for a slim paperback book anyway, maybe £1 or £2 more for bigger books. I wonder if cover prices are going up in order to ensure that discounted prices offered by retailers like Amazon increase too?

It isn't easy to find a book price index – Nielsen Bookscan charges for its data, and anyway creating an index is complicated by both the extensive discounting and the inability to take account of factors like quality and size of books, not to mention all those '3 for 2' special offers. However, the Publishers Association does print annual revenue and volume figures. These show that unit revenues for book sales in the UK rose 4.4% from £3.83 in 2008 to £4.00 in 2009, and for sales overseas by 18% from £3.39 to £4.01 (although part of that will be an exchange rate effect). The increase in the UK was double 2009's CPI inflation.

Of course, how much a book 'should' cost isn't obvious. In an ideally competitive industry, it would be costs plus normal profit margins. The rapid growth of e-book sales complicates the analysis further. However, costs have certainly been coming down on the production front thanks to technology, although they may well have gone up on the marketing front.

My suspicions about the (lack of) strong competition in publishing were aroused when I was a member of the Competition Commission inquiry group looking at the merger of two high street book store chains, Waterstone's and Ottakar's. One of the publishers who came to urge us to block the merger mused in the hearing that they had started selling books too cheaply, and readers were no longer properly appreciating the value of the product. The UK has a couple of thousand publishers but industry revenues are overwhelmingly dominated by the top four. On the face of it, there is a classic oligopolistic structure of a small number of companies dominating sales with a large competitive fringe.

The industry magazine, The Bookseller, says in the same article that big publishers have been having a tough time. However, its figures are for turnover, although it also reports a decline in their market share. The key test is profit margins, which takes us back to the price question. If competition is so tough, how come book prices have risen in real terms?