Monthly Archives: January 2016

What should the well-educated student read?

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My interest was caught by this Quartz article about a new database of the set texts at top US colleges, revealing which texts are the most-frequently set for different universities and subjects. The most often observed are Plato, Hobbes and Machiavelli. Interesting.

It set me thinking about a somewhat different challenge, one that turned out to be much harder than selecting my eight pieces of music for Desert Island Discs (or, my variant, the top ten foods I would have to have on the desert island). What ten books would you absolutely want a young person to read – whatever their subject – to be well-rounded? The idea is a kind of summer reading list for someone about to go to university – what kind of broad mental hinterland should they have before arriving to start a social science degree?

Any selection is bound to reveal cultural bias as well as personal interests, but here is my list for starters, divided into three categories. It’s European rather than American. I’m very disappointed that I couldn’t in all honesty include more female authors.

Needless to say, other lists or additions are welcome.

Understanding how the world is:

On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – David Hume

Thinking Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 – Tony Judt

How the world ought and ought not to be:

The Idea of Justice – Amartya Sen

The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir

L’Etranger – Albert Camus

Making the world better:

Seeing Like A State – James Scott

Reinventing the Bazaar – John McMillan (or maybe Al Roth’s Who Gets What and Why)

Cities and the Wealth of Nations – Jane Jacobs

M Train

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This is off-topic, but I *loved* Patti Smith’s new book, [amazon_link id=”1408867680″ target=”_blank” ]M Train[/amazon_link]. Why?

[amazon_image id=”1408867680″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]M Train[/amazon_image]

Because ‘Horses’. Just because.

Because of the way she travels, steered by ideas and whims, embracing both the interest in other people and places and the combined pleasure and melancholy of being alone in a strange hotel. Reminds me of – in different ways – both [amazon_link id=”1841957453″ target=”_blank” ]Rebecca Solnit[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”009951673X” target=”_blank” ]Geert Mak[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”009951673X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”1841957453″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]A Field Guide To Getting Lost[/amazon_image]

Because surely nobody could drink so much coffee?

Because it is a very moving testament to her love for her husband, far more so than Joan Didion’s much-feted [amazon_link id=”0007216858″ target=”_blank” ]The Year of Magical Thinking[/amazon_link].

Because in my alternative life, I too would have spent much of my time sitting in cafes, writing ideas down in notebooks.

 

Bad habits, hard choices

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They’ve arrived! My copies of [amazon_link id=”1907994505″ target=”_blank” ]David Fell’s new book[/amazon_link] in the Perspectives series on how to design and implement a smarter tax system.

Bad Habits, Hard Choices

Bad Habits, Hard Choices

I wrote about it yesterday, and one comment on the post observed that surely taxing unhealthy foods more and healthy foods less is regressive, because people with not much income have unhealthier diets.

Yes indeed, if you assume people’s behaviour does not change at all in response to either price incentives or other incentives. David argues in the book that the present structure is unfair exactly because it harms the health of people with lower incomes. He draws also on behavioural economics to discuss how being nudged not only by post-tax prices but also by packaging information etc could encourage people to make healthier choices. Koen’s comment also argued that we don’t know which foods are unhealthy and this might not be inherent – as indeed has been said in the context of the sugar tax debate. A little is ok, it’s eating/drinking a lot that’s the problem. The book does also address this in its discussion of implementation, strongly advocating some trial and error.

I have reservations about behavioural economics and paternalism, or rather about the gung-ho enthusiasm with which economists are wielding this new tool in our toybox, but I do think [amazon_link id=”1907994505″ target=”_blank” ]Bad Habits, Hard Choices [/amazon_link]makes a strong case for restructuring VAT. And this is surely a good moment to be thinking seriously about the tax system as a whole and whether it’s helping or harming society.

Taxing for well-being, not ill-being

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Taxation is in the news – and a plug for my colleague Rachel Griffith’s recent RES lecture on the taxation of multinationals is in order given today’s headlines about Google. John Gapper was spot on in his discussion about this in the FT today (£), Alphabet and Apple Spell Global Tax War: “Multinationals, especially US corporations subject to America’s dysfunctional tax laws, stretched rules to the point where the result appals taxpayers.”

Important stuff. But even bigger news is the publication tomorrow of the [amazon_link id=”1907994505″ target=”_blank” ]latest[/amazon_link] in our Perspectives series, Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make us Healthier by David Fell.

[amazon_image id=”1907994505″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier (Perspectives)[/amazon_image]

It’s a highly persuasive argument that the government shouldn’t hesitate to reshape taxation to make good foods cheaper and bad foods dearer. I particularly like this endorsement from David Cadman, Visiting Professor at University College London and the University of Maryland: “The fact that I read, at one sitting, a book on VAT is a tribute to Fell’s ability as a writer.  I liked the book very much – original, informative and well argued.” Of course the recent discussion about a sugar tax is relevant, but David’s case is broader. It isn’t just corporation tax that’s dysfunctional. So is VAT, a large government distortion of market prices contributing to ill-being, not well-being.

Inequality and the seeds of destruction

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I’ve been reading Branko Milanovic’s new book [amazon_link id=”067473713X” target=”_blank” ]Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization[/amazon_link]. I’ll be reviewing it for the journal Democracy, not for here.

[amazon_enhanced asin=”067473713X” /]

It adds to a recent literature on inequality, of which Thomas Piketty’s [amazon_link id=”067443000X” target=”_blank” ]Capital in the 21st Century[/amazon_link] is the best known, but also includes some excellent books with a lower public profile – Anthony Atkinson’s [amazon_link id=”0674504763″ target=”_blank” ]Inequality[/amazon_link] and François Bourguignon’s [amazon_link id=”069116052X” target=”_blank” ]The Globalization of Inequality[/amazon_link]. I liked the Atkinson book especially for its down-to-earth list of supremely practical policy proposals to reduce inequality. About the Milanovic book I’ll just say for the moment that it will be another must-read on the subject, and includes a super-clear overview of the global income inequality data as well as a persuasive analysis of the forces driving inequality trends (far more persuasive than Piketty’s determinism).

 [amazon_image id=”067443000X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Capital in the Twenty-First Century[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”0674504763″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Inequality[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”069116052X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Globalization of Inequality[/amazon_image]

Why now? The answer to that is surely events; a degree of inequality tolerable when the economy was booming is intolerable now there is less growth. Does it matter? Just read Martin Wolf’s sobering column today (£) (The Economic Losers Are in Revolt Against the Elites) to appreciate why it might. These are fragile times, whether you look at migration, climate change, global epidemics, demography, populism – exactly the circumstances when you would want people to be pulling together rather than diverging into separate worlds (Davos-land, middle England or America, refugee camps) due to such big differences in income. Milanovic’s book lends weight to Wolf’s pessimism: “If western elites despise the concerns of the many, the latter will withdraw their consent for the elite’s projects. In the US, elites of the right, having sown the wind, are reaping the whirlwind. But this has happened only because elites of the left have lost the allegiance of swaths of the native middle classes.”