Tag Archives: political economy

Existential times

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In my teenage years, a serious-minded and rather eccentric girl seemingly dropped by aliens in a small Lancashire mill town, I was determined to be an existentialist philosopher when I grew up. I could imagine nothing more glamorous than spending my working life writing in a notebook in a Parisian cafe (I’d never been abroad). This despite having been tortured by a French syllabus that included Sartre’s [amazon_link id=”2070368076″ target=”_blank” ]Huis Clos[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”2070384411″ target=”_blank” ]Les Mains Sales[/amazon_link]. The fact that he was neither a good philosopher nor a good writer didn’t put me off. For there was Simone De Beauvoir, whose novels like [amazon_link id=”207036769X” target=”_blank” ]Les Mandarins[/amazon_link] are ok, and whose [amazon_link id=”009974421X” target=”_blank” ]The Second Sex[/amazon_link] is a seriously important book.

[amazon_image id=”207036769X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Les Mandarins 1: 001[/amazon_image]

And above all, Albert Camus, the archetype of the honourable man in a dishonourable world, and a great novelist. I read [amazon_link id=”B006E3KCT6″ target=”_blank” ]La Peste[/amazon_link] tucked up in bed with an old fashioned metal hot water bottle that my mother had covered with a sock so it wouldn’t burn me. The sock had a hole and the bottle raise some small blisters on my arm. I was so wrapped up in the book that I didn’t notice the burn, but when I spotted the blisters later, ran downstairs to my bemused mum, shouting that I had caught the plague.

[amazon_image id=”B006E3KCT6″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]La peste[/amazon_image]

So reading about Camus on the occasion of what would have been his 100th birthday this week – a brilliant essay by Claire Messud in the NYRB and Michael Azar in Glanta – I bought the new book of Camus essays, [amazon_link id=”0674072588″ target=”_blank” ]Algerian Chronicles[/amazon_link], edited by Alice Kaplan and translated by Arthur Goldhammer. I set aside Jonathan Fenby’s (so far) excellent [amazon_link id=”1847394116″ target=”_blank” ]Tiger Head, Snake Tails[/amazon_link] about modern China and plunged instead into Algeria at the tail end of France’s colonial occupation. Alastair Horne’s [amazon_link id=”1590172183″ target=”_blank” ]A Savage War of Peace[/amazon_link] is still as far as I know the best single book on the conflict.

[amazon_image id=”0674072588″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Algerian Chronicles[/amazon_image]

What these essays by Camus – appearing for the first time in English – add to the history is that same sense as from Camus’ wartime years of the near-impossibility of morality in polarized times. The pressures to say one side or the other is all right, the opposing side all wrong, to justify any means in terms of ends, are almost irresistible. It is very interesting to read Camus on terrorism and counter-terrorism – there is an obvious parallel with our own times. More generally, the polarization of politics away from the centre ground in the context of slow economic growth and the extreme tone encouraged by online discussion, make it interesting to look once again at existentialism. For decades it has seemed hopelessly retro (only an ignorant teen in a provincial backwater could have found it glamorous even as long ago as the 1970s); but maybe the times have circled back and ‘authenticity’ is having another moment.

A blank slate on political economy

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A question: what would you put in a hypothetical brand new public policy/political economy course for undergraduates (mainly studying economics, mainly with a good maths A level)? What are the essential readings? Are there any examples of existing courses you would recommend?

My first thoughts – and this is very much off the top of my head – are: a bit of James Scott’s [amazon_link id=”0300078153″ target=”_blank” ]Seeing Like A State[/amazon_link]; [amazon_link id=”0141047976″ target=”_blank” ]23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism[/amazon_link], Ha-Joon Chang and/or Joe Studwell’s [amazon_link id=”1846682428″ target=”_blank” ]How Asia Works[/amazon_link] (reviewed here); definitely some Hume, always wise about the messiness of the world – maybe ‘Of A Particular Providence and A Future State’ from [amazon_link id=”002353110X” target=”_blank” ]An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding[/amazon_link]; Hirschman on possibilism (from [amazon_link id=”0691159904″ target=”_blank” ]The Essential Hirschman[/amazon_link] which I reviewed here yesterday);

[amazon_image id=”0300078153″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale Agrarian Studies)[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”1846682428″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region[/amazon_image]

Case studies, from competition, immigration, education, energy policy, areas where economics and politics so often appear to conflict – it’s papers rather than books that come to mind, such as the excellent paper by Rufus Pollock on the liberalisation of directory enquiries. But also Daniel Bell in [amazon_link id=”0465097138″ target=”_blank” ]The Coming of Post Industrial Society[/amazon_link] on the conflict between technocratic decisions in a complex society and popular/populist democracy.

But there are many possibilities. Other suggestions?

Essays by the worldly philosopher

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[amazon_link id=”0691159904″ target=”_blank” ]The Essential Hirschman[/amazon_link] edited by his prize-winning biographer Jeremy Adelman ([amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher)[/amazon_link] is a collection of essays well worth reading by anbody who, like me, was not very familiar with Hirschman’s work. The book is divided into three sections covering Hirschman’s work on development economics, essays on market societies, and essays on democracy including his thinking on political rhetoric.

[amazon_image id=”0691159904″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Essential Hirschman[/amazon_image]

I particularly like the combination of economic analysis (rarely expressed mathematically, but nonetheless rigorous) with an awareness of the difficulties of implementation, of political constraints, and of the role of the emotions in people’s decisions. For example, the first essay, ‘Political Economics and Possibilism’, looks specifically at the role of optimism and political leadership in bringing about change, and the scope for the same economic policies to have vastly different outcomes depending on political characteristics of the society in which they are introduced. For example, trade-offs that are possible in a relatively homogeneous society may not be feasible in one divided on religious or ethnic grounds, of might even lead to civil war. As Adelman puts it in his excellent introduction, “It is rare to find a writer in our times so at ease with the modern tools of the social scientist and yet so concerned with the complexity of the human condition that he or she can bring to life the frictions and tensions that come from looking at our world at the junctions of political, economic and emotional life.”

Hirschman, it is evident from this book and Adelman’s superb biography, Worldly Philosopher, was increasingly out of tune with the economics of his times. The subject became increasingly abstract and generalised, and inclined to require mathematical rigour everywhere. Hirschman was focused on the specifics of each situation. In ‘Search for Paradigms’, he argues that the highly analytical, paradigm-seeking frame of mind led either to undue conservatism about the prospects for things to improve, or its opposite, a revolutionary bias. In the essay on possibilism, he wrote: “Most social scientists conceive it as their exclusive task to discover and stress regularities, stable relationships and uniform sequences. This is obviously an essential search, one in which no thinking person can refrain from participating. But in social sciences there is a special room for the opposite type of endeavour: to underline the multiplicity and creative disorder of the human adventure, to bring out the uniqueness of a certain occurrence, and to perceive a new way of turning a historical corner.” And it is this last that makes him such an optimistic, encouraging thinker too.

I least enjoyed, however, a couple of the essays on development, which may well be because I am entirely unfamiliar with his theory of linkages – these essays didn’t mean much to me out of context. Still, even in those, the emphasis on tensions and conflicts as motors of change, and the inevitable messiness of the process, is clear.

The book also has a nice evaluation of Hirschman by Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen as an afterword. They say his work cannot be neatly mapped onto any of the normal distinctions we tend to make, between orthodox and heterodox, between theoretical and empirical, between state and market – “he aspired to both and embraced the conflict between them,” they conclude. It is well worth reading some of Hirschman’s classic books such as [amazon_link id=”0674276604″ target=”_blank” ]Exit, Voice and Loyalty[/amazon_link] of course, but this book of essays is a terrific overview of his work.

 

Integration of the social sciences

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Yesterday I quoted the 1827 UCL prospectus definition of economics, with its emphasis on “accurate observation and precise language,” and capsule definition of ‘the science of political economy’ as, “the production, distribution and consumption of wealth, or the outward things obtained by labour, and needed or desired by man.”

I was mulling over the difference between this and Lionel Robbins’ famous 1932 definition of economics (in [amazon_link id=”B002ZZ0U8A” target=”_blank” ]An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science[/amazon_link]): “The science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” The greater abstraction compared with the ‘political economy’ of a century earlier is all too apparent.

In his 1948 Newmarch Lectures, [amazon_link id=”1107673860″ target=”_blank” ]The Role of Measurement in Economics[/amazon_link], Richard Stone added this gloss to the Robbins definition:

“While many situations in actual life have an economic aspect, few if any can be analysed wholly in economic terms. Taken literally, however, it would bring the applied economist practically to a full stop since he cannot in general estimate the importance of economic factors unless he is prepared to make assumptions about…certain non-economic factors, such as changes in tastes. In fact he can frequently do this for himself in a rough and ready way, although undoubtedly it would be a gain if he could fall back on other branches of the social sciences for help in such matters. The moral of Robbins’ definition is that in applied work much more integration of the social sciences is needed.”

Hear, hear!

Future democracy

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Later today I’m speaking at Nesta’s FutureFest about future economic institutions, in what looks to be a terrific session, compered by Mark Stevenson, author of the excellent [amazon_link id=”1846683572″ target=”_blank” ]An Optimist’s Tour of the Future[/amazon_link]. Yesterday I popped in and heard Cambridge political scientist David Runciman give a thought-provoking talk on the future of democracy. I heard him speak on democracy in the 2011 Princeton University Press lecture, and his book [amazon_link id=”0691148686″ target=”_blank” ]The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy from World War I to the Present[/amazon_link] is out soon.

[amazon_image id=”0691148686″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present[/amazon_image]

The quick summary (based on my tweets of a 15 minute talk) is that political institutions have not kept pace with technological change – indeed, they’ve hardly moved at all in the 25 years of dramatic advance in information and communications technologies. (Indeed, the mismatch between the pace of technological and social change is a commonplace.) However, he continued by saying that technology has in fact become the way political change has happened, to the extent it has. This manifests itself as technocracy – either the Chinese type, run by engineers, or the western type, run by economists and financiers. Technocracy is unsustainable, however. Democracy needs a reboot, by changing its scale of application, to the city level and to the supra-national, continental level.

It sounds intriguing enough to make the book a wanna-read.

David Runciman at FutureFest