Tag Archives: economics

Fracturing and building

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The Age of Fracture by Daniel Rodgers was strongly recommended by one of my followees, Paul Nightingale, on Twitter and he made it sound like just my cup of tea. Which it is. It’s an intellectual history of late 20th century America, and the way the public sphere of ideas transitioned from a focus on institutions and social relations to an individualist perspective. This was most apparent in economics, which is where the book starts, but spread across many domains of policy and research – the book has chapters on race, class, gender, as well as politics in general. The hinge was the late 1970s/early 1980s, just about the time I spent four years living in the US, so reading this brought back many memories of that first Reagan term, the rise to prominence of Newt Gingrich, and the ‘declinist’ bestsellers published a few years later, Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism.

Age of Fracture is beautifully written, and I was particularly impressed by its scope – the breadth of knowledge of so many different domains is amazing. In the chapter (‘The Rise of the Market’) on the rise of abstract rational expectations economics, divorced from time, place and relationships, Rodgers gives a masterly summary of the evolution of the discipline. “The new intellectual movements in economics pushed to its limits the extent to which society could be analytically dissolved altogether into its individual utility-maximising parts.” As the chapter points out, the victory of this approach was never total, and by the end of the 1990s was moving on to a new focus on institutions, transactions costs, behaviour and networks. Nevertheless, individualism became the leitmotif of the public realm of ideas – and on the British side of the Atlantic too.

The transatlantic traffic was not all one way. The chapters on race and particularly gender emphasise the role of French post-structuralism, which swept over cultural studies and much of the humanities, and still seems to be destroying those departments. In paving the way for a sense of identity as something self-determined, it created a libertarianism of the left alongside the market libertarianism of the right. In both cases, Rodgers writes, “The libertarian vision of society was radically timeless.” Voluntary identities, voluntary transactions, are disembodied from actual history. Whether rational expectations economics or the originalist perspective on the US constitution, time – future or past – is instantly accessible. Both featured the desire to “locate a trap door through which one could reach beyond history and find a simpler place outside of it.”

The book is wisely silent on whether the climate of ideas is changing now, amid the storms of pandemic, authoritarianism rising in the US and elsewhere, social fracture. It reminded me of this comment in Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel lecture (flagged up on Twitter recently by Nicholas Gruen): “Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.”

Quite. But fracturing is easier than building. ‘Building back better’ is harder still.

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Top down *and* bottom up

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Charles Stafford’s plea in Economic Life in the Real World: Logic, Emotion and Ethics, is for his fellow anthropologists to take more seriously the methodologies of two other disciplines, economics and psychology. I learned a lot about anthropology from this book, including how much anthropologists disdain economics (I fear we return indifference, on the whole).

Stafford’s argument, in a very interesting and readable book, is that the approaches are complementary: anthropologists focus on the most micro of details, while both economics and psychology are interested in generalisation about human behaviour. Intriguing to see these two bracketed together when psychology has – during the behavioural rvolution – been portrayed as a more realistic version of choice than that (assumed to be) assumed by economists – of course economists have always known that the rational choice version is not ‘realistic’.

He writes: “As a matter of routine, anthropologists accuse economists of being obsessed with ‘individual rational choosers’, but it is surely anthropolgists who are obsessed with detail.” There’s a bit of a paradox here: economics does apply methodological individualism on the whole, and easily overlooks social influences (though not entirely). Yet our concern is with outcomes at aggregate as well as individual levels. Economics is certainly universalist. It was interesting to see psychology being put in the same camp, as a universalist approach.

The plea is therefore for anthropologists to recognise that human psychology is at the heart of economic agency – it isn’t all about historical and cultural context. There is a nice chapter analysing the pros and cons of Robert Lucas’s approach to human capital and economic development, confrinted with the way people in a Taiwanese village think about the education of their children. The book ends too by pointing out that while anthropology resists quantification at all costs, the people whom the author had spent time with during his fieldwork considered numeracy and quantification to be important, not least for their economic lives.

There is surely an interaction between general human characteristics and cultural specificities. Both approaches are needed for a rounded understanding of society. I am particularly interested in the possibility for qualitative methods to inform causal inference, given that empirical identification of statistical relationships in complex systems of economic interactions is pretty much impossible. Identification needs to come from outside the model, rather than by torturing statistical correlations with dubious ‘instruments’.

Anyway, I enjoyed reading this book and welcome the anthropo-econo debate.

51Mcz+Z4MHL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_I’ve also nearly finished Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein, which is terrific.

What’s wrong – and right – with economics

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I didn’t expect to enjoy Robert Skidelsky’s new book, What’s Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed, for he has long been forthright about his low opinion of economics and economists; and so it proved.

He makes some good points, nevertheless. Indeed, some I strongly agree with, as do a lot of other economists. For example, many of us would agree about the importance of studying economic history; even some of the nerdiest econometricians and theorists I know devour the big new econ history books. Likewise about the importance of taking into account psychological realism – behavioural economics, hello! (Though standard rational calculation of self-interest often matches reality better – it’s all about the context.) Institutional economics is everywhere now, in the tradition of Coase, Williamson, et al. Lord Skidelsky approves of it (albeit preferring the old institutionalism to the new transactions-cost based approach); he just seems to be under the misapprehension that it’s a neglected part of the discipline.

In sum, there is indeed much here that I and many other economists of my acquaintance agree with. Big ticks to history, institutions, psychological realism, even to acquaintance with sociology or anthropology.

So why did I not enjoy the book? It talks about “the poverty of neoclassical economics under its carapace of techniques.” This is absurd. While certainly there is some excess ‘mathiness‘, technique is a vital thing in any discipline. Even historians have techniques, and models (‘the causes of the first world war’). Does this carapace consist of too much ‘theory’? As Beatrice Cherrier has blogged, there has been a significant shift to applied work in economics, even though its description as the ’empirical turn’ has been over-stated.

But above all, despite insisting on the importance on both economic history and the history of economic thought, the book is ahistorical in its approach to economics. It attacks an economics it labels as ‘mainstream’ or ‘neoclassical’. Whatever it means by mainstream, this isn’t what most economists do. As ever in such critiques, the book only talks about macroeconomics, doesn’t cite a single piece of applied microeconomics, but above all ignores the fact that economics has changed in the past 10, 20, 30 years.

I do think there are serious methodological issues in the present (‘mainstream’) economic paradigm – my next book, Cogs and Monsters, out around this time next year, will be about this.

Meanwhile, What’s Wrong With Economics is concise, clearly and elegantly written and spends half its length demonstrating that the other half is – well, about what’s right with economics.51FqQfM-ouL._SX325_BO1,204,203,200_

Coffee table economics

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I’ve been enjoying paging through Steven Medema’s The Economics Book: from Xenophon to Cryptocurrency, 250 Milestones in the History of Economics, not least because it has lots of lovely pictures. It’s a history of economic concepts –  that starts in 700 BCE with Hesiod to cryptocurrencies in 2009. Each entry has a beautiful illustration, no mean feat when it comes to illustrating Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (a photo of the ECB), National Income Accounting (women washing dishes at home and hence not contributing to GDP), or Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham’s catalogue of the different sources of pleasure and pain). The pictures make it exactly the kind of book you’d be happy to have on the coffee table but it’s more than that: the selection of concepts and the capsule explanations do make it a useful starting point for people who’ve maybe read the terms or think they ought to know something about economics but have no idea where to start. They can start here without embarrassment (Hicks-Allen consumer theory, the School of Salamanca, the Shapley value….) and follow up elsewhere. It’s also a bargain – get the hardback, not the Kindle version.

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Going to extremes

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Richard Davies obviously made the kind of road trip many of us only dream of to write Extreme Economies: from Akita in Japan to Santiago in Chile, from Glasgow to Kinshasa. The locations he chose illustrate one of three characteristics – survival (refugee camps in Jordan, post-tsunami Aceh, a US prison in Louisiana), failure (Panama’s Darien Gap, Kinshasa in DRC, and post-industrial Glasgow), and the future (ageing Japan, digital Estonia, unequal Chile. As the book sums it up: “The year 2030, for most people on earth, will be a cocktail of these three cities: an urban society that is old, technologically advanced, and economically unequal.”

The book is a great read – I tore through it. An economist who can write so well while at the same time explaining the economic principles so clearly is always a joy. I will admit to being rather envious of the opportunity he had to visit all these places. Getting out and visiting should be required for all economists, whether they are writing about development and progress as Davies is, or about industrial organisation or education. You always learn something not only relevant but also important. One of the things I did love about this book was the painless administering of some substantial chunks of economic research – it’s an ideal read for eager 6th form students or undergraduates. It might encourage them to appreciate that economics is not only important but also exciting.

The book also includes some important threads. One is the environment as an economic as well as intrinsically valuable asset. Darien’s economy depends on extraction from the jungle, living now on its future potential: “The puzzle is why, in a region where everyone knows the environment is being degraded, the people of Darien can’t manage the economy in a way that stops it happening.” This segues into a discussion of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Later, though, it’s Glasgow’s social capital, another overlooked asset, that’s pinpointed as one source of failure: “When an economic force is shared, unseen and hard to measure, you will do too little to protect it.” I couldn’t agree more. Social capital features in all the examples here, either as a source of resilience or a cause of failure. It isn’t a sufficient explanation of economic outcomes – for example, in the chapter on refugee camps in Jordan, one thrives and the other fails because of external forces shaping the structure of the camps and their economic potential – but it is a necessary element.

Davies picks this up in the conclusion: “The biggest gap in economics is the way it completely ignores social capital.” This is why our Bennett Institute Wealth Economy team is exploring the measurement of social capital. Economics doesn’t entirely ignore it – it gets lables such as ‘institutions’ or ‘goodwill’ – but is treated as a black box at best. So I agree with the book that economics will have more to offer the world if we measure and understand better the “subtler and more human aspects of income and wealth.”

Meanwhile, I recommend enjoying the tour through the rebuilt Aceh, refugee camps in Jordan, the market in Kinshasa, Lousiana’s Angola prison and all the other economies featured here. And I hope some TV producer will pick up the book and take its author round the world all over again to film it.

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