Recently Dave Giles linked to an old blog post on his wonderful Econometrics Beat about plotting the data before running regressions. This is a habit drummed into me at an early age but youngsters don’t seem to always do this.

Dave mentions the well-known Edward Tufte books, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information. (I think I have the entire Tufte oeuvre.)

I like Howard Wainer’s books also: Graphic Discovery and Picturing the Uncertain World. I don’t have his latest, Truth or Truthiness: How to Think Like A Data Scientist, and might need to remedy that.

What’s not to like when students of economics are passionate about their subject and engaged in how it should develop? I don’t agree with the authors of The Econocracy and their wider network (Rethinking Economics) about absolutely everything, but heartily applaud their engagement. In fact, I do agree with quite a lot of what they say about the subject and particularly the way it’s taught, which is why I organised a conference on this subject at the Bank of England in early 2012 (here’s the book of the conference papers), and have since been committed to working on the CORE project and its free online textbook The Economy. What’s more, one of the authors of The Econocracy, Cahal Moran, is the TA for my public policy economics course at Manchester. So this is the context for my view of their book.

It starts with a quotation from Albert Camus: “Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.” How much more apposite that seems now than it must have when the book was written.

Many, probably most, economists knew even before the disdain for ‘experts’ set in this year that there was still a legacy of the financial crisis in terms of thinking about the character of our subject and also how it’s taught. This only seems more urgent now, even if you firmly believe – as I do – that there are some nonsense criticisms, and that economic research is in a better state than you would know from either external criticism or the undergraduate curriculum. Some economists need to be more self-critical for sure, and more open to other perspectives. The incentives for the kind of research that is done and published urgently need to change – a problem at least as much to do with the structures of universities and the REF as internal dynamics. Economists need to communicate far, far more, and better, with the public. And, yes, how we teach needs to reflect far better the innovations in recent research (such as behavioural economics, or cross-disciplinary institutional work), as well as reintroducing economic history, methodological questions, and the real world.

The Econocracy isn’t a million miles away from this view. It rightly highlights the influence of economics courses on public policy. Many of today’s influential policy makers were taught their economics in the late 1970s or 1980s, the heyday of the most ludicrous free market/rational expectations version of the subject. It was around then that students stopped being taught even basics such as national income accounting and recent economic history. Even worse, the legacy is a generation or two of policymakers who think the world is something like the textbooks. The first chapter highlights a couple of examples, including cost-benefit analysis. This is a bugbear of mine because it’s a tool for marginal, linear changes, applied indiscriminately. However, I don’t believe the solution is to ditch CBA, because it is always going to be applied implicitly if not made explicit. Better surely to try to improve it by aiming to include non-linear effects, take account of externalities, make judgements explicit (as in the public value framework) – simply, to use it with more humility rather than applying it mechanically.

The book acknowledges the work of CORE and the similarities of diagnosis between the two initiatives. I think the authors are wrong to see CORE as a reformed version of the status quo, and to suggest that we don’t think there’s anything wrong with economics in itself, just with the way it’s taught. They state that CORE only includes methodological individualism, which is incorrect, and that the sense of disputes among economists is confined to the history of thought sections, also not correct.

However, there is a key difference between our approach in CORE and the Rethinking solution to the problems of both the subject and the teaching of it. They call for pluralism, the doing and teaching of economics from a range of different perspectives. This sounds perfectly fine, but they contrast it to:” A narrow, fixed body of knowledge is handed down from one generation to the next leaving little room for debate.” These are false opposites. It is possible to combine a wide and evolving body of knowledge with the quest to establish, well, knowledge and not opinions. I am not interested in an economics of competing theories and world views; we do better work as economists when we listen to these, confront them with evidence and careful statistical or logical reasoning, and try to establish a bit of knowledge – context-dependent and historically contingent as it might be.

In the latter addendum to his famous Two Cultures essay, C.P Snow described the social sciences as a third culture, in between the sciences and the humanities. This is an uncomfortable but essential position. I really don’t see economics – as The Econocracy suggests – as just another strand of the liberal arts. (I’m not sure pluralist economists really think that either – isn’t a Marxist economist just as convinced on average as a neoclassical economist that she is right?) Still, I’m certainly prepared to try and be open minded about any specific ‘pluralist’ economics, as long as they’re prepared to specifiy logically-consistent theories and do careful econometrics to test their hypotheses.

Despite this pretty important difference, I very much agree with a lot of the book. Any economist involved in teaching would do well to read it and reflect. It makes interesting observations about the modern university, although without (I think) solving the key dilemma about how to make university education (and assessment) work well for students in an era of mass access to HE. Many university teachers (me & many others!) truly want to deliver the best possible education – lively, interesting, horizon-expanding, promoting critical thinking, delivering important life and work skills – and all this is labour-intensive and (as the book observes) not valued in promotion decisions or professional rewards.

I particularly agree with the conclusion: “We believe that economics must be brought back into the spotlight of democratic scrutiny. Economic decisions must be taken as part of a public discussion.” Always true; truer than ever post-2008 and post-2016.

One of my Christmas presents was this wonderful book by David Hockney and Martin Gaysford, A HIstory of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen. It’s about changes over the millennia in the way artists have represented a four dimensional world in a two-dimensional snapshot. The book ranges from cave paintings to photography and film, and although mainly about western art it does discuss eastern art too, in the context of the distinctiveness of perspective in the western tradition.

Then I moved on to another present, Teju Cole’s collection of essays, Known and Strange Things, which has a section about photography and perspective, and about the way technology is changing photographic art. And then, with the news of John Berger’s death, I started watching his TV series Ways of Seeing (and there’s an accompanying book). Early in the first programme, he emphasises this point: “Perspective centres everything on the eye of the beholder.” Interesting to look back at the series and see its debt to Walter Benjamin.

A while ago David Hockney wrote a really interesting FT article about technology and perspective (in its widest sense). I even wrote to him asking him to write a little book extending the idea but got a polite reply saying he was to busy. But I think it’s really intriguing.

Here is my annual round up of titles that look interesting from the various spring catalogues (I’ve noted a few of these in separate posts before but it’s always handy to gather them together).

There are quite a few enticing titles in the Princeton University Press one (my own publisher). Cass Sunstein has #republic, about democracy in the social media age, Jean Tirole’s Economics for the Common Good will be out in English, and Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler looks intriguing – it seems to take the Piketty-esque line that violent episodes are needed to equalise society, looking at the long sweep of history since the stone age. I also like the look of Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped The Modern World (and I thought it was cotton…..)

Speaking of Piketty, Harvard University Press has After Piketty edited by Heather Boushey, Brad DeLong and Marshall Steinbaum. Philosopher Pascal Bruckner has a book called The Wisdom of Money, somewhat contrarian in our anti-capitalist times. Mark Granovetter’s Society and Economy looks like a must-read. I’m intrigued by Barak Rishman’s Stateless Commerce: The Diamond Network and the Persistence of Relational Exchange – an exploration of a surviving ethnic trading network.

From MIT Press the highlights include Peter Temin’s The Vanishing Middle Class, which I blogged about after seeing him present on it in September; and alongside that Vaclav Smil’s latest, Energy and Civilisation: A History. Other titles of interest include Tap: Unlocking the Mobile Economy by Anindya Ghose; Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff, edited by Bill Maurer and Lana Swart; Information and Society by Michael Buckland; The Death of Public Knowledge edited by Aaron Davis; and Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing by Marie Hicks.

There’s also what looks like a lovely book, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds.” The blurb says, “In our era of synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and climate engineering, this edition of Frankenstein
will resonate forcefully for readers with a background or interest in science and engineering, and anyone intrigued by the fundamental questions of creativity and responsibility. This edition of Frankenstein pairs the original 1818 version of the manuscript—meticulously line-edited and amended by Charles E. Robinson, one of the world’s preeminent authorities on the text—with annotations and essays by leading scholars exploring the social and ethical aspects of scientific creativity raised by this remarkable story.”

Over at Yale University Press, there’s Niall Kishtainy’s A Little History of Economics; Zeynep Tufecki’s Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest; Stephen King’s Grave New World: The End of Globalization and the Return of Economic Conflict; Dieter Helm’s Burn Out: The End Game for Fossil Fuels; and Tom Hazlett’s  (about wireless technology).

Oxford University Press offers by editors Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson The Spread of Modern Industry to the Periphery since 1871. There’s one I definitely want to read, Paul de Grauwe’s The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market. I have a chapter myself in National Wealth: What is Missing and Why it Matters, edited by Kirk Hamilton and Cameron Hepburn, which is out later in the year. Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock are the authors of Building State Capability.

One that looks very timely from Cambridge University Press is Escape from Democracy: The role of experts and the public in economic policy, by David Levy and Sandra Peart. In memory of the much-missed Suzanne Scotchmer is On The Shoulders of Giants, edited by Stephen Maurer.

Columbia University Press has an intersting mix. One that jumps out for me is Paul Milgrom’s DIscovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints. Also Vera Zamagni’s An Economic History of Europe Since 1700. Josh Lauer’s Creditworthy is intriguing for its subtitle: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America.

One of the new titles from Polity Press will be a must-read for me, Lorenzo Fioramonti’s The World After GDP. Steve Keen has Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? (The blurb doesn’t tell me the answer.) There’s also The Ascendancy of FInance from Joseph Vogl, and Another Economy is Possible by Manuel Castells and others. I’m also quite taken by The Invention of Celebrity by Antoine Lilti – in the Enlightenment, apparently.

Moving on from the university presses…

From Norton’s Spring catalogue comes the latest from Andrew McAfee and Erik Bryjolfosson, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing the Digital Revolution.

Profile Books has There and Back Again: The world of things and the end of globalisation by Finbarr Livesey (which appears to have alternative titles); and, with The Economist, Bill Emmott’s The Fate of the West and Dan Franklin’s Megatech: Technology in 2050. From Little, Brown I like the look of Rebel Cities: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution by Michael Rapport.

In its various imprints, Penguin has Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger; William Cohan’s Why Wall Street Matters; Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back; Chris Renwick’s Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State; Klaus Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution; Daniel Levitin’s A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics: A Neuroscientist on How to Make Sense of a Complex World; and by Adam Lashinski, Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for World Domination.

From Verso, The Production of Money by Ann Pettifor and In the Long Run We Are All Daed: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution  by Geoff P Mann. Anything by Tyler Cowen is a must-read. He has a book called The Complacent Class (St Martin’s Press) out next month. Other impending titles are: David Kynaston’s Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England; and Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane (Zed Books). We’re promised Niall Ferguson (a Marmite-effect author), The Square and the Tower: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Networks from Allen Lane later in the year.