This week’s read has been Adrian Pabst’s Postliberal Politics, with the cheery subtitle The Coming Era of Renewal. It’s hard to believe the past 18 months, on top of the post-2008 real wage stagnation, and the Brexit/Red Wall voting phenomena that there will not be some kind of realignment? This book advocates for a community-centric economic and political model, focusing on family, dignity and local identity. It’s an appealing vision, in the same vein as some other recent books by economists (Mark Carney, Minouche Shafik, Raghuram Rajan, Sam Bowles) but with a focus on the politics rather than the economic policies. I’m suppose I’m enough of an old-fashioned (pre-post) liberal that the communitarian flavour makes me a bit uncomfortable, as does the religious thread, while agreeing intellectually that excessive individualism has been highly problematic.

The book is short (and wonderfully jargon-free) so it doesn’t bother with the always-unsatisfactory bullet point lists about what are the top 10 policies needed to get from here to that future political renewal. Indeed, it concludes: “Building  a new consensus requires more than a political and policy programme. It has to be anchored in a public philosophy to outflank both technocracy and ideological extremes. A public philosophy expresses the shared ends of political action.” Quite. The public philosophy guiding policy and politics since the late 1970s has crumbled yet lives on in zombie form in many arenas of policy-making. This is a thought-provoking building block in an alternative that might take some time to rise out of the rubble. An interesting read.

Speaking of outmoded public philosophies, I also polished off Qiu Xiaolong’s Hold Your Breath China. This series of detective novels isn’t all that well-written; I like them mainly for the flavour of Shanghai life. However, the culprit in this one, whose plot concerns air pollution is clear: GDP. Who would have expected the flaws of GDP to be the central issue in a crime novel?

Almost a decade ago I gave a lecture which opened with this question. I was probing the influence of economists in government, for good or ill. (This discussion is picked up in my forthcoming book, Cogs and Monsters.) Perhaps I’d been influenced more than I realised by having been on the economics reporting beat with Gillian Tett in the 1990s, she for the FT and me for The Independent. We were all very impressed by her PhD in anthropology, as fieldwork in Tajikistan seemed very exciting and adventurous.

Gillian’s new book, Anthro Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life, starts with that fieldwork, including the less thrilling part about being trapped in a hotel room as civil war raged outside. It’s a rattling good read, as one would expect from a top journalist. The book is divided into what she describes as the core principles of anthropology: the need to make the strange familiar, to make the familiar strange and to listen to what is not said. These add up to an effort to develop some objectivity about the group or society under investigation – I was struck for example, by the parallel with the outsiders who foresaw the financial crisis in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short. Gillian’s reputation was totally confirmed by her early warnings about impending crisis.

At the same time, the methods of anthropology, especially ethnography or participant observation, bring the researcher close to the objects of study. The book is adamant that use of data and computers alone fails to deliver important insights. I couldn’t agree more, both in terms of determining economic policy and in terms of research. I love applied economics but one of the joys of my work now is working in interdisciplinary teams using different methods.

The book has loads of interesting vignettes about the use of anthropology, particularly in business, where there seems to be more of it than I had realised. Some that particularly struck me: teenagers seem addicted to their mobile phones because that is the only space left where they are free to roam and hang out, now that their lives are so constrained in the physical world. As Gillian points out, when we were young we wandered around by ourselves, met friends, drifted around the shops. For various reasons, all of these spaces have closed to today’s adolescents.

Another is the account of the engineers of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which oversees technical management of the internet, voting on changes to rules and protocols by – humming. Votes are taken by which group hums the loudest. Lockdown has made decision-making most unsatisfactory.

So to return to my starting point, it seems to me that a Government Chief Anthropologist would be a good innovation. And they should sit in an office with the Government Chief Economist.