The internet of stuff

Andrew Blum’s [amazon_link id=”0670918989″ target=”_blank” ]Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet[/amazon_link] was another holiday book. It was a decent enough on the terrace with a cool drink in between swims, but I was somewhat disappointed in it. The book starts with the author’s home internet connection being lost due to a squirrel chewing through a cable in his yard, and this sets off a quest to track down the physical infrastructure delivering what we all now consider to be more or less a human right, namely broadband internet access.

[amazon_image id=”0670918989″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet[/amazon_image]

This subject fascinates me, at least since I first read about the new tunnel for fibre-optic cable being driven through the Allegheny Mountains to speed the connection between the Chicago and New York financial markets by a few nanoseconds. Also the question of where the internet servers on which ‘the cloud’ sits are located and what that implies for, say, the balance of payments, or privacy for that matter. Not to mention who owns all the cables and infrastructure, how they interconnect, where the value sits in the value chain, and all that jazz.

So Tubes starts out well and has a number of interesting sections in which the author visits various key locations such as the London Internet Exchange, or the Google and Facebook data centres in Oregon, or the seaside spots in Cornwall and Portugal joined by a new undersea cable. Still, I felt he didn’t tell me enough about these places – fantastic access without enough detail or analysis. Maybe that has something to do with the terms on which he was allowed to visit, although that’s never stated.

Interestingly, Facebook emerges as a far more open company than Google when it comes to Blum’s visits to the data centres – he isn’t even allowed in through the door at their data center – which is also obscured on Google Maps. I wonder if Facebook has changed its approach since the visit?

So I would recommend reading Tubes, which is entertaining and well-written. But I’m still looking for something more analytical about the physical reality of the internet and the intangible economy it is creating.

Walking, thinking and writing

One of my holiday reads was Robert Macfarlane’s [amazon_link id=”0141030585″ target=”_blank” ]The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot[/amazon_link], a very enjoyable collection of essays on his various walks, some by sea. Like Rebecca Solnit in her wonderful book [amazon_link id=”1844675580″ target=”_blank” ]Wanderlust: A History of Walking[/amazon_link], Macfarlane says the rhythm of walking helps him think.

[amazon_image id=”0141030585″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot[/amazon_image]

I agree, although often for me it’s my stately (ie. slow) jog around the park with the dog each morning. Perhaps the physical motion actually jiggles one’s brainwaves into a different state? The other mechanism I have for thinking is writing. It’s almost impossible to structure thoughts without getting words onto paper or screen, and sometimes the words seem to bypass consciousness.

The hardest thing of all is just sitting and thinking. Hence the productivity paradox: one is least likely to have good ideas by sitting at a desk trying to have good ideas, and much more likely to do so when in motion.

Not walking but running

Where to start learning about economics?

A Twitter correspondent (thank you @alaninbelfast!) has alerted me to the decision by the Cite des Sciences (@citedessciences) to cover economics in a year-long exhibition. He asks, what are the best introductory books for somebody who knows nothing about economics?

There are lots and lots of introductory books available, so where to start is a good question. I’m a huge fan of Tim Harford’s [amazon_link id=”1408704242″ target=”_blank” ]The Undercover Economist[/amazon_link], which demonstrates how microeconomics (covering individuals, businesses, and specific markets) is used in a range of everyday contexts, not least because it turned my economics-refusnik teenage son into an economist when he grew up. Tim’s new book, [amazon_link id=”1408704242″ target=”_blank” ]The Undercover Economist Strikes Back [/amazon_link]is about macroeconomics (the economy as a whole, GDP, inflation and all that jazz). I’ve not read it yet – I’m sure it’s excellent, but macroeconomics itself is in a less solid state than microeconomics.

[amazon_image id=”1408704242″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run or Ruin an Economy[/amazon_image]

David Smith’s books are all clear and accessible and there is a newish edition of his [amazon_link id=”1781250111″ target=”_blank” ]Free Lunch[/amazon_link]. John Kay looks more at markets and business – [amazon_link id=”0140296727″ target=”_blank” ]The Truth About Markets[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”0954809300″ target=”_blank” ]Everlasting Lightbulbs[/amazon_link] would be good ones to start with. I quite liked too [amazon_link id=”0857081144″ target=”_blank” ]What You Need to Know About Economics[/amazon_link] by George Buckley and Sumeet Desai. I have to recommend my own [amazon_link id=”0691143161″ target=”_blank” ]The Soulful Science[/amazon_link], which is more about the frontiers of economics, the exciting newer developments like behavioural economics.The classic on the history of economic thought is Robert Heilbronner’s [amazon_link id=”068486214X” target=”_blank” ]The Worldly Philosophers[/amazon_link], and it hasn’t yet been bettered for the general or new reader.

[amazon_image id=”0691143161″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters (Revised Edition)[/amazon_image]

Geoff Riley of tutor2u provides a long list of recommendations that range from introductions to economics to recent, accessible books that will reward students and newbies.

My recommendations overlap substantially with others I’ve found online- such as this one from Kingsmead Academy for A/AS students, but it also gives the leading textbook titles for anybody who becomes sufficiently interested. And the great new(ish) (non-book) online resource is MR University, terrific stuff there.

 

Municipal grandeur and balanced growth

One of the inspiring things about Tristram Hunt’s book [amazon_link id=”075381983X” target=”_blank” ]Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City[/amazon_link] is reading about the energy and optimism of leading citizens in the newly industrialising cities.

[amazon_image id=”075381983X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City[/amazon_image]

It was an era when Britain’s cities other than London, for all the misery and squalor of the working classes, had a sense of control over their own destiny. I do agree with Hunt when he says in the Introduction: “[T]he policies of successive British governments have served to castrate civic autonomy. Unintelligible and ideas-free history [of urban growth] has gone hand in hand with rate-capping, surcharging and centralisation to render local government and civic pride a forlorn part of the historical landscape.”

He points out that Lord Palmerston defended the grand designs for a new Foreign Office building in Whitehall on the basis that it could not be less impressive than Leeds Town Hall. The unpleasant John Ruskin criticised the ugliness of the northern cities – as apparently Peter Hall did too – but it would surely require mental blinkers not to appreciate the glory of Manchester Town Hall or St George’s Hall in Liverpool, or the streets of handsome warehouses in any of the Victorian industrial centres. Hunt writes: “Britain was a land of great cities, each one playing a part in the political process and preventing the unstable accumulation of too much power in the capital.” Commentators at the time contrasted Britain’s stability favourably with the continuing upheaval in over-centralised France.

It is a weakness of the British economy now that it runs on only one engine, albeit a super-sized one, in London. Nobody sensible wants to see London weakened, but surely everybody sensible would like to see other cities have the capacity to grow faster than they have for the past 50 years or more. When people talk about the desirability of rebalancing the economy so that manufacturing and exports grow faster than financial and other services, that’s equivalent to hoping for faster growth in the industrial centres outside the south east, because that’s where most of the manufacturing is located. Economies are not abstractions, they consist of people in places.

I was involved in the Manchester Independent Economic Review, looking at how the city could regain some of that Victorian dynamism, which requires regaining a stronger voice over some of the influences on growth, such as transport and other infrastructure links, planning (an area where the issues in south and north are entirely different), and skills.

It’s a slow process achieving these things, though. Not only is the centre naturally unwilling to cede any decision-making territory, there is also the tyranny of the so-called ‘postcode lottery’. Still, the experience of the devolved nations suggest it is possible to come to terms with difference, so I think it is worthwhile looking for inspiration in the Victorian cities.

Victoriana

The quantified (Victorian) life

The next of my holiday reads deserves a couple of posts. It was Tristram Hunt’s [amazon_link id=”075381983X” target=”_blank” ]Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City[/amazon_link]. As someone who believes the UK economy is over-centralised around London, to the detriment of the whole economy including the capital, the era from the early 19th to early 20th centuries when many other major cities were growing rapidly is obviously intriguing. The UK stands out globally now for the extreme degree to which the economy depends on the capital – see for example the maps at the Geographically-based Economic Data website. France used to compete but there has been a significant devolution of both political power and economic growth (they go hand in hand of course) since the 1980s.

[amazon_image id=”075381983X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City[/amazon_image]

Tomorrow’s post will discuss the economics. Today is for philosophy.

Hunt has a fascinating section about the intellectual currents of the 19th century, and in particular the romantic reaction against industrialisation and the growing dominance of what Thomas Carlyle described as the cash nexus. Carlyle wrote: “We call it a Society, and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war named “fair competition” and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash payment is not the sole relation of human beings.” He was one among many – prominent among the other anti-market, anti-economics intellectuals of the day was John Ruskin, whose [amazon_link id=”0140432116″ target=”_blank” ]Unto This Last[/amazon_link] is one of the books I love to hate. And this tradition continues today, the charge led by Michael Sandel’s [amazon_link id=”0241954487″ target=”_blank” ]What Money Can’t Buy.[/amazon_link]

I was interested to read in Hunt’s account that the Utilitarians, particularly Bentham, were held to blame for the spread of market (im)morality. That’s not too surprising – after all, the utilitarian calculus was about counting and calculating, as caricatured by Dickens in the person of Mr Gradgrind in [amazon_link id=”014143967X” target=”_blank” ]Hard Times[/amazon_link]. Sandel is no fan of utilitarianism either, whereas modern economics still rests in principle on the notion of ‘utility curves’.

There is, though, a paradox in the fact that today’s ‘well-being’ or ‘happiness’ economics, which makes much of the idea that money and markets should not be the sole drivers of public policy, is rooted in a version of utilitarianism. Here is Richard Layard in 2009 making this explicit:

“[E]very human being wants to be happy, and everybody counts equally. It follows that progress is measured by the overall scale of human happiness and misery. And the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness in the world and (especially) the least misery.”

This is the utilitarian calculus, measured in quanta of happiness rather than money. For all that its advocates do not believe economic growth is the path to progress, the happiness approach would certainly fall foul of the belief of Carlyle and the other Romantics in the pre-eminence of emotions, institutions and tradition in society.