A long time after its first publication, I used two recent transatlantic flights to read The End of the Party, Andrew Rawnsley's detailed and definitive account of the UK's New Labour government from 2001. It's a 700-plus page tome, including extensive notes about the author's sources. So although some of the material was disputed by this or that protagonist at the time of publication, it convinces me of its accuracy and thoroughness.

That makes two aspects of the book of particular interest for the purposes of this blog. One is the account of the government's response to the onset of the financial crisis. The detail is enticing anyway – who spoke to whom, the delivery of midnight curries to Downing Street, the casual way two of Britain's biggest banks were merged following a cocktail party chat between the PM and the Lloyd's TSB chairman, Victor Blank. Rawnsley shares the universal consensus that the immediate response to the imminent collapse of the banking system, in the UK and globally, was Gordon Brown's finest hour, and that his decisiveness saved the economy from the catastrophic consequences of extensive banking failure.

Also extraordinary is the immediate and incomprehensible reaction of the bankers, namely that none of it was their fault, and by the way it was essential that they continue to pay large bonuses or they wouldn't be able to attract the 'talent' they needed to compete and ensure financial services remained such a  successful, wealth-creating sector. Once the immediate crisis was over, Gordon Brown's notorious indecisiveness kicked in, and the opportunity to blow a large raspberry at the bankers was missed. (p608). We're still waiting for the new government and its Banking Commission to take effective action to curtail the political power of the banking industry, and the longer it takes, the less decisive any action is likely to be.

Which takes me on to a second interesting theme of this book, which is the difficulty of governing in complex modern societies in the context of a rabidly partisan press lacking respect for detail or even truth, and now the ur-populism of online news and comment. It's almost impossible for any government to get anything done. Even if the media shoals are navigated in order to make something politically possible, those affected by any decision will retreat to legal manoeuvres to prevent change. The spin doctors and the lawyers have great power, but they're not in control either.

Given the urgent need to tackle the banking sector, this leads me to conclude that neither legislation nor regulation will be very effective. One much-overlooked weakness of the system is the governance of banks. I'm very taken with the work of Michael Pirson at Fordham and Harvard Universities and Shann Turnbull of HBS and the International Institute for Self-Governance, who have written a number of papers about the failings of unitary boards and the need for supervisory boards to create within the banking system something similar to the checks and balances we think are important in political system. It's an intriguing idea.

Anyway, The End of the Party is a true cautionary tale about the challenges of modern government in general as well as a gripping account of the specific downfall of the New Labour project.

Much of my work in recent years has involved looking at the economic and social impacts of mobile phones in developing countries (much of it for Vodafone – scroll down this page for reports numbers 2, 6 and 9 on Africa, mobile transactions and India). Mobiles have proven an extraordinary appropriate technology for poor countries, have spread breathtakingly quickly, and it has all been a private sector phenomenon with next to no input from the aid community – although donors and agencies are ultra-keen to get involved these days. ICT4D (ICTs for development) is big aid business these days.

And when you think the story can't get better, it does; as the the use of mobiles for financial transactions (with M-Pesa the poster child but many others following suit) and other services, and increasingly for internet access demonstrates. A side-effect of the mobile revolution has been to prompt a reassessment of what other technologies might prove equally useful in aiding development.

The phenomenon is so recent that researchers are only now starting to publish robust assessments of mobile impacts, including useful demolitions of excessive hype. I'm always on the lookout for publications. This month's edition of the ever-excellent Boston Review is part way through a series of essays on the question 'Can Technology End Poverty?' The lead essay in the forum is by Kentaro Toyama, and I wholeheartedly agree with its main argument:

“In every one of our projects, a technology’s effects were wholly
dependent on the intention and capacity of the people handling it. The
success of PC projects in schools hinged on supportive administrators
and dedicated teachers. Microcredit processes with mobile phones worked
because of effective microfinance organizations. Teaching farming
practices through video required capable agriculture-extension officers
and devoted nonprofit staff. In our most successful ICT4D projects, the
partner organizations did the hard work of real development, and our
role was simply to assist, and strengthen, their efforts with
technology.”

Technology is a social phenomenon. No single element of it can be considered in isolation from other parts of the infrastructure, society and culture, or politics.

No doubt the essays will be collected in one of the Boston Review's books in due course, but I highly recommend reading them meanwhile if you're at all interested in ICT4D.

(The Amazon article in this issue looks tantalising but isn't online.)

Most publishers now have online strategies, not only for publishing books, but also using blogs, Twitter, Facebook for marketing. There's certainly no shortage of information about new books. This week I got the first of a new quarterly email newsletter for economics books from Cambridge University Press, which does a nice job of presenting new and topical titles. Quarterly is a good frequency – I always regret signing up for anything which emails me weekly or even daily, as some benighted marketing departments do.

The book of the month in this issue tickled my fancy, too: Scarcity and Frontiers by Ed Barbier. It has praise from one of my favourite economists:

'Edward Barbier's interpretation of the economic history of nations, seen through the lens of natural resource exploitation, is not only bold but brilliantly executed. The scholarship is immense and the analysis is acute. This is a terrific piece of work.'
Sir Partha Dasgupta, University of Cambridge

The development literature has lighted on the 'curse of…' – oil, diamonds, whatever, as a key problem in spurring conflict and inhibiting development; but a treatment of the role of natural resources in the round seems very timely.

The Enlightened Economist is just back from a short holiday, and a post about my holiday reading will follow in due course. But my attention this morning was caught by yesterday's publication of the Mirrlees Review by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It's a worthy successor to the 1978 Meade Review of taxation, also available from the IFS.

The two volumes of the review will be published by OUP but are meanwhile downloadable from the website. The Review is a terrific achievement. Just looking through some of the chapters in the conclusions volume makes it clear that this is the most thorough and clear-sighted assessment of the UK tax system we have seen for decades.

That assessment is not favourable. This won't, perhaps, come as a surprise, but the tax system is byzantine, costly and counter-productive. The headline figure is that tax reform could liberate a deadweight loss equivalent to 1.4% of GDP.

The proposals focus on four areas of reform:
– combine income tax and national insurance, simplify allowances and bands, and structure personal taxation to encourage saving/investment rather than creative remuneration to avoid tax
– extend the coverage of VAT especially to financial services
– eliminate the tax bias in favour of debt financing of investment
– tax 'bads' – carbon and congestion – effectively

These are so clearly sensible ideas that a summary sounds banal, but of course tax reform is difficult. Some people will always object because either they will lose out or will have to restructure their affairs. More fundamentally, moving from complexity to simplicity is itself hugely complicated.

However, the importance of the Mirrlees Review will be in setting out the goals for tax reform. Let's hope that the next few governments will be able to use this magisterial work to move in the right direction.

My eye was caught this morning by a review of Darwin's Conjecture by Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjorn Knudsen. The reviewer, Morgen Witzel in the Financial Times, says it is “a scholarly and profound work of relevance to all the social sciences” and adds:

'Key Darwinian ideas such as mutual aid, sympathy and co-operation have
often been ignored by later writers on business and economics. The
authors remind us of these overlooked theories, and challenge the idea
that Darwinism offers such easy solutions as “survival of the fittest”.'

These truer ideas taken from Darwinism are more aligned to what I would regard as a truer version of economics, one which refers back to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as his Wealth of Nations. Whatever you think about the specifics of 'evolutionary economics' (and Geoffrey Hodgson is the author of many books in this branch of the discipline, including The Evolution of
Institutional Economics and How Economics Forgot History), I firmly believe it must be true that human behaviour in the economic sphere must be consistent with our behaviour as natural beings, and that there are bound to be ties between economics and evolutionary theory. Economic agents are 'selfish' in the same way that genes are 'selfish' – the word isn't in fact an accurate choice, and 'self-interested' might be better, but in any case, there must be a commonality. In fact, economists and evolutionary theorists have long influenced each other – Malthus and Darwin, Darwin, Marx and Veblen, or more recently game theorists and evolutionary biologists such as John Maynard Smith.

There's a chapter in my book The Soulful Science on this, and I'm looking forward to reading this new book by Hodgson and Knudsen.