Hearing of the death of Benoit Mandelbrot sent me to the bookshelf to pick up The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets (which unfortunately seems to be out of print in the UK) and The Fractal Geometry of Nature (ditto). I can't quite remember when I first read about Mandelbrot's work and discovered the beauty of fractals. Not only does fractal geometry create beautiful images, it also seems obviously true as a mathematical description of nature. Certainly, Thomasina in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia thought so:

“If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?”

I once interviewed Madelbrot for a BBC radio programme, and he had a wonderful phrase: “One hope for regularity but one lives in roughness.” The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets was published in 2004 and was prescient in its criticism of conventional financial economics and efficient markets theory in particular. (Naseem Taleb has long been a huge Mandelbrot fan.) Post-crisis, it repays rediscovery, although you might need to shop around to find a copy. Meanwhile, here is a video of John Authers of the FT interviewing Mandelbrot (aged 85 then) in 2009.

As a Lancashire native, scion of a family of textile workers, I have a general interest in the history of British manufacturing and a particular passion for the cotton industry. We were, after all, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. In one of those serendipitous coincidences, I've just recently come across two things evoking the business history of British textiles.

One was a marvellous BBC 4 programme, All Our Working Lives Revisited (still available on iPlayer for a few days for UK readers, people overseas will have to wait a bit longer for the iPlayer). It's a documentary from the 80s followed by a coda bringing the story up to date. The programme interviews people of my parents' generation who spent their lives in the industry, and tries to explain its decline: an unsurprising tale of relative labour costs in the UK and India, combined with underinvestment by small British companies so relative technological decline and lack of innovation.

Anyway, Courtaulds popped up as a temporary saviour of the Lancashire mills. By chance I then met Sir Geoffrey Owen for coffee. A distinguished business historian (author of From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Manufacturing Since the Second World War), he told me that his new book is also about Courtaulds and British textiles. It's called The Rise and Fall of Great Companies: Courtaulds and the Reshaping of the Manmade Fibres Industry I can't wait to read it given my textiles-obsession, but meanwhile, there's a review in the FT (subscription may be needed). Reviewer David Kynaston says: “It is … a timely study, given the new conventional wisdom that the UK
must seek to rebalance its economy and rebuild its manufacturing base.”

As the BBC4 programme reminded me, bits of British industry have been in decline for as long as anyone can remember. We're rather good at ignoring the other bits that are thriving. It's the Proustian smell of hot grease and cotton fibre that makes nostalgic romantics of us.

I am one of the members of the independent panel which yesterday published the Browne Report on higher education in England.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the comment has focussed on universities raising their charges for tuition, and whether this will discourage young people, especially from low income backgrounds, from going to universities. We think that the financing system we've shaped will be affordable for anyone. Students won't need to pay upfront, won't repay unless earning above median income (£21,000 a year), won't see their interest accumulate if they are only just earning above the threshold. The IFS has confirmed that the lowest paid graduates will pay less under our system than the current one. In addition, financing will be available for the first time for part time study, which will greatly help many 'non-traditional' students.

There is a deeper fairness in asking graduates to pay more, and the taxpayer less. At present graduates are heavily subsidised by all taxpayers, including hairdressers, cab drivers, shop assistants, plumbers, who will all have paid for their own vocational training if they had it. Yet the private return to tertiary education is higher in the UK than in any other OECD country. Higher education generates both social and private returns, and it is proper for public money to support the system, but there must be private investment too.

This principle has long been accepted in England – charging for tuition was introduced in the 1997 Dearing Report. The innovation in the Browne Report is ensuring that higher education will remain accessible to all through a sustainable financing structure built around affordability for graduates.

Less commented on (on day one) are our proposals for a radical reform of the structure of UK universities, moving from a centrally planned economy – funds and places administered and rationed by the HEFCE – to a regulated market. The funding attaches to students, the students will choose universities that teach them well, and universities will have a strong incentive to improve the quality of teaching. Some universities which fear they will fare badly have criticised this aspect of the report, but it won't just help the 'elite' universities. Those which already have a good reputation for teaching will benefit, and we might see more concentrate on teaching. Some might innovate with 2-year and sandwich courses. There could be entry by new providers into higher education. Above all, student numbers can continue to increase, which would not be possible without the reforms we proposed.

Still, the changes are obviously going to be intensely debated, as they should be. I'll post links in a few days to some of the reaction.

Owen Hatherley's Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain is an angry book. This makes it a thumping good read, and I found much to agree with in his critique of the physical 'regeneration' of Britain's provincial cities in the New Labour era – but also things to disagree with too. For like many polemics, it overstates its case.

It was Jane Jacobs' great books, Cities and the Wealth of Nations and The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that first alerted me (like so many others) to the economic and social importance of the way cities are built and organized. Jacobs emphasized the central role of cities in economic growth (a contrast to many economists who until relatively recently ignored the specifics of place and time – although Bob Solow had a marvellous phrase about a city being a boom in space rather than time). She was also an anti-planner, an advocate of organic development rather than the imposition of grand visions by central planners. Hatherley doesn't cite Jacobs at all, but anyone who enjoyed her books will nevertheless enjoy his.

The book takes the form of a series of walks around a number of cities – Southampton, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff and others. Most are former industrial powerhouses whose economic base was torpedoed by the 1970s and early 80s recessions, leaving them with a legacy of long term unemployment and dereliction. Many of these saw something of a revival in their fortunes since 1997, as the economy enjoyed its long boom centred on finance and property. Hatherley has a terrific eye for both the dreariness of the dreary parts of provincial urban Britain and the unexpected architectural beauties. I also learned a lot about the shape of the architectural profession – who built what, how the top dogs operate.

He is a defender of the modernist architecture of the mid-20th century – not completely uncritically, but, contrary to the conventional wisdom, he argues that some of the constructions served their purpose well. For instance, he defends Sheffield's Park Hill estate, a lonely stance. He loathes most of the post-1997 regeneration architecture. This is partly for aesthetic reasons – patronising touches of jolly colour – but mainly because of its intrinsic link to the privatisation of public spaces and the exclusion of poor people from new developments. In short, Hatherley's anger is so fierce because he sees New Labour as betraying the people it should have been defending. The redevelopments made property developers rich through public subsidy and public-private partnerships. But they were almost all enclosed spaces for shopping and the 'cultural industries'. Housing developments such as the typical waterfront flats or inner city lofts were intended as gentrification, homes for executives and professionals.

I think Hatherley is too much of a romantic in his nostalgia for old manufacturing industries. They were dreadful jobs – many of my family worked in mills, for low pay in terrible conditions. Of course there has been a catastrophic failure to ensure people have the skills for jobs in advanced manufacturing and services instead, and we have embedded disconnection from the mainstream economy in whole communities in all these cities, but the economy of the 1970s was no longer viable. Furthermore, his anger makes him unable to see any merits in post-1997 redevelopment. Yet in the city he visits that I know well, Manchester, he underestimates the benefits for all Mancunians of the property developments and reshaping of the economy. That has been less finance and property centred than he imagines. In fact, according to a report in today's Financial Times (sub may be needed), Manchester is the only UK city outside London not to have nosedived down the international property league table. The Manchester of the early and mid 1980s was empty, dreary, riven by far more deprivation and violence than it s now. So I suspect he wears the same blinkers in other cities too – he seems to believe, for instance, that true culture (by which he means pop music!) can only emerge from true desolation.

However, there are two key arguments in the book that are spot on. The first is that the physical form of a city and its social and economic well-being interact with each other in subtle ways. City authorities can't fix the economy with an iconic new building, as so many seem to have believed. The second is that the New Labour government did indeed betray us by losing sight, in their eagerness to revitalise old cities, of the central importance of public space accessible to all. Post-crash, the buildings remain, but the public realm is in sorry need of repair.

There's an interesting interview with author Owen Hatherley in 3am Magazine.

The subtitle of Hamish McDonald's biography of the Ambani family, Mahabharata in Polyester, is:  “The making of the world’s richest brothers and
their feud.” I haven't read it but my interest is aroused by a review of the book in today's Financial Times (subscription needed). Joe Leahy, reviewing it, notes that the book relies heavily on secondary sources, but as he points out, the Reliance dynasty story is a corker of a tale. And he concludes that the book:

“…asks a question that
resonates beyond India’s borders: are business oligarchs responsible for
the country’s ineffectual government and bureaucracy by subverting
politicians and policies to their will? Or have India’s smarter
businesspeople provided leadership and innovation where none would
otherwise have existed? McDonald takes the former line, concluding
that oligarchs are too powerful. “One legacy of Dhirubhai Ambani is a
dangerously suborned state,” he writes.

Yet few figures capture
the brash spirit of modern India as well as Dhirubhai and his sons.
Their materialism has trumped the austere socialism of the country’s
early post-independence era. As McDonald puts it, thanks to the Ambanis,
polyester has triumphed over cotton in India.”

There are few biographies of the figures who have made the modern Indian economy what it is, and is becoming, so this looks like a book worth reading.