Monthly Archives: May 2013

Anthropology and all that jazz

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It’s a salutary experience to read a book in a different discipline, even a neighbouring one, because it’s a reminder of how specialized we become, and how hard it is to communicate across the boundaries. Reading Gregory Bateson’s [amazon_link id=”0226039056″ target=”_blank” ]Steps to an Ecology of Mind[/amazon_link] – hailed as a classic of anthroplogy and psychology – was hard work. This was partly because of the unknown technical language, and partly because the methodology is so very different to how we economists do economics. In addition, there are areas of detail that are just not all that interesting to me, such as Balinese religious customs, say.

[amazon_image id=”0226039056″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology[/amazon_image]

Still, I’ve taken a couple of useful overarching thoughts from the book, mainly about epistemology and methodology in the social sciences. One is that in social science, the game is to discover the rules of the game. Economics, I think, misses this point altogether. To make matters even more difficult, the game is like Alice’s game of croquet with the Red Queen – with mallets that are flamingos and balls that are hedgehogs, or in other words, it consists of wholly unpredictable components.

I liked also his emphasis, citing Margaret Mead, on avoiding the dualism of means and ends, and the instrumentalism that is used to justify. Bateson insists that not only do ends never justify means, but means are in fact ends in themselves. Echoes here of [amazon_link id=”0141037857″ target=”_blank” ]Sen’s theory of justice[/amazon_link]. There is a rejection of dualism threaded through the book, for example the dualism of ‘man’ and ‘nature’ or generally of the living creature and its environment; these co-evolve, Bateson argues. “If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure.” This is similar to the message of a book I greatly admire, [amazon_link id=”0521578493″ target=”_blank” ]Mourning Becomes The Law: Philosophy and Representation[/amazon_link] by the late Gillian Rose.

[amazon_image id=”0521578493″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation[/amazon_image]

The other interesting area is of course his application of cybernetic theory to anthropology and psychology. I found this very hard to follow, however. It seems to concern the well-known warning about reductionism and absence of systems-thinking: Korzybski’s ‘the map is not the territory’. Bateson warns that many problems stem from ignoring the systemic nature of the world in favour of ‘common sense’. John Kay’s[amazon_link id=”1846682894″ target=”_blank” ] Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly[/amazon_link] is an accessible riff on this theme, a warning against social engineering by trying to intervene directly to fix things. Beyond this, I find it hard to summarize Bateson’s final section, although I now have his phrase in my head: “Information is a transform of difference”.

One day, I’ll do more than dabble in the other social sciences, and learn some of it properly. For now, back to economics.

How predictable are you?

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Gregory Bateson’s [amazon_link id=”0226039056″ target=”_blank” ]Steps to An Ecology of Mind[/amazon_link] is tough going for a simple-minded economist, although there’s one insight that’s going to prove very useful for the Pro Bono Economics lecture I’m giving next month, The Economist As Outsider. I’m not yet ready to review the book, but meanwhile was very taken with this comment (in the ‘metalogue’ ‘Why Do Things have Outlines?’):

“It’s just the fact that animals are capable of seeing ahead and learning that makes them the only really unpredictable things in the world. To think that we try to make laws as though people were quite regular and predictable.”

[amazon_image id=”0226039056″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology[/amazon_image]

That seems obviously true, but clashes with another of my favourite insights, which also seems obviously true, from John Seely Brown and Paul Duiguid in [amazon_link id=”1578517087″ target=”_blank” ]The Social Life of Information[/amazon_link]; namely, that while everyone thinks computers are predictable and people are unpredictable, it’s actually the other way round.

[amazon_image id=”0875847625″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Social Life of Information[/amazon_image]

Book prices

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Yesterday I noted the resilience of book sales in the UK, with a big surge in digital sales and a small decline only in physical sales. The figures were for total revenues. Looking at the Publishers Association yearbook (the absence of an apostrophe is theirs, not mine), there are some interesting unit price figures too.

In total, for physical books, average price increased by under 1% in 2011 and 2012, to reach £4.28. But big jumps in 2009 and 2010 mean the average price has climbed 17.2% since 2008. So, more or less matching general inflation in a flat economy, which is good going for items of leisure spending. However, in most categories, the price increase was rather lower, and in fact prices of non-fiction and reference books have declined over the five years. But school book prices have rocketed by 83.9% in four years, rising from £3.08 on average in 2008 to £5.66 in 2012.

Not surprisingly, unit sales have declined (by 13.3%), but at the price elasticity of demand implied by the figures, the profitability of the relevant books – is it all phonics textbooks? – must have been pleasing. Unit sales were down across the board, and by much more in most of the other categories (fiction, non-fiction, children’s, ELT, and by a similar 12.9% for academic books). There isn’t a long enough run of data to be sure but eyeballing the figures, it looks like roughly a unit price elasticity in the other categories.

However, the annual gives no figures on e-book prices. It would be fascinating to know what the pricing patterns, and profit margins, are.

Digital disruption: good news for publishing

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My personal technology correspondent tells me (and all of Twitter) that in the UK, books are flourishing:

ruskin147
Good news from UK publishers – total sales in 2012 up 4% to £3.3bn , digital up 66%, with physical book sales down just 1%
01/05/2013 07:07

As we have a fixed time budget, e-books must be causing people to substitute away from some leisure activities, but it evidently isn’t away from p-books. As TV viewing isn’t declining either, and there are large crowds at every live event, from concerts to dance to pointy-headed public lectures, I’m at a bit of a loss as to what people are not doing so much of.

The genre break-down of the publishing figures is interesting too:

ruskin147
More on those positive publishing figs – 26% of fiction revenues now digital, but just 5% non-fiction and 3% children’s books
01/05/2013 07:31

This must be partly the way books are used – propping a cookbook by the stove, reading to a child cuddled up on your lap – but also surely reflects the fact that much fiction is escapist relief and people know they won’t want to keep the book afterwards? It points to a different kind of pricing point for fiction e-books or even a pure rental model.

Overall, the sums for UK publishers were encouraging for the industry:

ruskin147
.@SheilaB01 66% rise from a small base to £411m + 1% fall from high base to £2.9bn = overall 4% rise to £3.3 bn
01/05/2013 08:10

Roughly flat revenues in real terms in the context of declining real-terms disposable incomes is pretty good. More support for my hypothesis that the digital revolution is fundamentally good news for purveyors of words, and is encouraging tremendous consumer-serving innovation in publishing.