Tag Archives: political economy

What works?

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Towards the end of a holiday I always try to read something a bit more work-related to get myself ready for the return to normality. This year I ended with a pair of books which, by coincidence, shed great light on each other. One was Albert Hirschman’s [amazon_link id=”067476868X” target=”_blank” ]Rhetoric of Reaction[/amazon_link], prompted by reading the wonderful biography of him by Jerry Adelman, [amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”067476868X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy[/amazon_image]

In it Hirschman describes three types of argument deployed by those who want to debunk ‘progressive’ or interventionist policies. He calls them the perversity thesis (interventions backfire, they turn out to have perverse effects, often the exact opposite of what was desired); the futility thesis (any attempt at change will fail because it is too hard to accomplish – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose); and the jeopardy thesis (change is desirable but to achieve it will endanger other things that are highly valued, change is too destructive). He notes that the futility thesis does not sit comfortably with the others and tends to be made by different people. But all three are somewhat plausible as soon as you acknowledge, as an honest person must, that the world is a complex place with cause and effect hardly ever clear. So all three rhetorical strategies have great success.

Straight after this I turned to [amazon_link id=”0815793898″ target=”_blank” ]Government Failure versus Market Failure: Microeconomic Policy Research and Government Performance[/amazon_link] by Clifford Winston. This is an interesting survey of the empirical evidence on several areas of government policy in the US, including competition policy. To my surprise, the book cannot find empirical evidence that the consumer benefit of anti-trust enforcement outweighs the enforcement costs – the book’s overall conclusion is that “the welfare cost of government failure may be considerably greater than that of market failure,” and it concludes this is so even for competition policy aimed at enhancing the functioning of markets. I didn’t find this persuasive because I don’t believe comparative statics – the Harberger triangles –  capture the dynamic effects, which can be very much larger. An analogy would be with Robert Vogel’s famous conclusion that the railroads didn’t do much for the US economy if you look at the incremental GDP growth. On other areas of policy such as agricultural support, Winston is very convincing, however.

What particularly struck me though was that the book is a good example of the kind of rhetoric or framing that Hirschman described as the perversity thesis. Winston writes:

“Government failures appear to be explained by the self-correcting nature of some market failures, which makes government intervention unnecessary; by the short-sightedness, inflexibility and conflicting policies of government agencies; and by political forces that allow well-defined interest groups to influence elected and unelected officials to initiate and maintain inefficient policies that enable the interest groups to accrue economic rents.”

[amazon_image id=”0815793898″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Government Failure Vs. Market Failure: Microeconomic Policy Research and Government Performance (AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies)[/amazon_image]

My final read, on the plane, was [amazon_link id=”1849904936″ target=”_blank” ]Parade’s End [/amazon_link]by Ford Madox Ford, a brilliant, epic novel on the way the First World War changed everything. The protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, is a government statistician. He makes the mistake of telling his superiors what he can prove to be true about government policies and actions – an early example of the evidence-based or “what works” approach to policy. Not surprisingly, they take a great dislike to him. An early example of what politicians will make of being told “what works” by experts?

[amazon_image id=”1849904936″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Parade’s End[/amazon_image]

Economics and authoritarianism

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After a two-week reading fest on holiday in the Italian countryside, I’m back with a fistful of reviews. As it was a holiday, the books I took with me were not as directly economics-related as my everyday reading, but of course there’s economics in everything.

The first two I happened to read were [amazon_link id=”0713998687″ target=”_blank” ]Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56[/amazon_link] by Anne Applebaum and [amazon_link id=”0857208861″ target=”_blank” ]The Arab Uprisings: The People Want the Fall of the Regime[/amazon_link] by Jeremy Bowen.

[amazon_image id=”0713998687″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”0857208861″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Arab Uprisings: The People Want the Fall of the Regime[/amazon_image]

The latter is reportage by the BBC’s distinguished Middle East editor, and it combines his clearly extensive knowledge of the region with the edge-of-seat quality of reportage from the extraordinary events that started in Tunisia – it already seems a long time ago. The subtitle is a slogan that has appeared frequently in the countries where uprisings have occurred. However, the hope of the early ‘Arab Spring’ has given way to the horror of civil war in Syria and increasing violence in Egypt; of course, no book can keep up to the minute. I can’t say it left me feeling optimistic.

On the face of it, Anne Applebaum’s detailed and authoritative work on the descent of the Iron Curtain on Europe in the post-World War 2 years is entirely different. But one commonality struck me between the two books, namely the way that apparently endless and powerful authoritarian regimes are hollowed out by economic stagnation, no matter how violent they are. One day, it seems nothing can ever change, and the next day the whole edifice has collapsed. Sometimes, when it’s the secret police versus the economy, the economic forces win. This brought to mind Ben Friedman’s powerful arguments in [amazon_link id=”1400095719″ target=”_blank” ]The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth[/amazon_link].

The main part of Applebaum’s superb book is not, though, the collapse of Soviet-dominated Communism but rather its construction in the first place. It is going to be a standard reference on this time and place in history, a companion volume to Tony Judt’s [amazon_link id=”009954203X” target=”_blank” ]Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945[/amazon_link]. She details the methods by which communist parties –  assisted by Soviet military dominion in the post-war years, and by the collapse of order after the Nazi defeat – systematically destroyed all institutions and aspects of society that were not part of the state apparatus, even extending into family life as the years went by.

The violence and inhumanity documented are simply horrifying. So is the ‘total’ in totalitarianism: “No-one could be apolitical: the system demanded that all citizens sing its praises, however reluctantly. And so the vast majority of East Europeans did not make a pact with the devil or sell their souls to become informers, but rather succumbed to constant, all-encompassing everyday psychological and economic pressure. The Stalinist system excelled at creating large groups of people who felt nevertheless compelled by circumstances to go along with it.” The idea of there being no private space even inside one’s own mind is intolerable.

If I have one complaint about the book, it is that there isn’t more of it: Applebaum has spent years interviewing people around Eastern Europe and I would have liked to hear more from those interviews. Although the book does not cover the post-1956 or post-1989 periods, it is an essential read for anybody interested in the shadows East European history continue to cast.

Worldly Philosopher

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As I’ve already confessed, I’ve read very little by Albert Hirschman. By the time I was learning economics, he and the mainstream of the economics profession had moved quite far along divergent paths. The mainstream was embracing mathematical techniques for modeling and – more significantly – the reductive assumptions about human behaviour and social context that made this approach feasible. Hirschman became increasingly interested in the connection between economic policies and politics. The one book of his I had ever been introduced to was [amazon_link id=”0674276604″ target=”_blank” ]Exit, Voice and Loyalty[/amazon_link], and possibly as part of my politics reading rather than economics.

This means Jeremy Adelman’s superb biography, [amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O Hirschman[/amazon_link], has been a real education. Its 600+ pages never flag; this is a very enjoyable book to read. It also means I’ve got some of Hirschman’s other books on the in-pile now, for the great lesson of recent years is that economists need to stay alert to the politics and the human behaviour that define the possibilities of economic choice; and that political scientists and other social scientists for their part need to pay more attention to economic incentives and to the domain of economic choice. Hirschman emerges as above all a careful observer of actual societies and economies, who therefore was multidisciplinary to the marrow.

[amazon_image id=”0691155674″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman[/amazon_image]

The biography begins with his extraordinary early life in the tumultuous Europe of the 1930s and Second World War. A second chunk concerns his work in and on Latin America and economic development more generally, based in a variety of institutions. The final leg covers Hirschman’s more settled period, mainly at Princeton’s IAS, as a distinguished political economist and author of a number of classic books. The book covers in some detail The Passions and the Interests and also his last book, [amazon_link id=”067476868X” target=”_blank” ]The Rhetoric of Reaction[/amazon_link].

Hirschman’s conclusions about the nature of capitalism and economic growth have real resonance for the current situation. His reading of the classics, including Adam Smith, made him one of the first people to reclaim (from Milton Friedman and other economists) the wiser Smith who understood that “moral sentiments” as well as self-interest determine people’s behaviour. Adelman sums it up: “The rule of passions could lead, without checks, to horrible utopias; the rein of interests to soulless pragmatism.”

Hirschman argued against the kind of theorising that insisted on pre-determined outcomes from given pre-conditions, insisting instead on the number of possible paths depending on happenstance and unintended consequences. I suppose we would call it pervasive path-dependence; it contrasted greatly with both the mainstream and the alternative or heterodox approaches of the time. He also identified the way that beliefs or expectations constrain outcomes – in the context of developing economies, he thought that policymakers and economists fettered themselves by their own perceptions of insurmountable hurdles or cultural inferiority. Latin America in the 1980s, he thought, was imprisoned by clashing intellectual paradigms, the false dichotomy between free market ‘neoliberalism’ (as we call it now) and Marxist revolution. He wrote: “The obstacles to the perception of change thus turn into an important obstacle to change itself.” Many economists point out the importance of expectations for economic outcomes, but usually in a rather abstract way in a model; expectations are what people believe to lie in the realm of possibility, and are shaped by intellectuals and economists and policymakers, among a whole host of others. We live in a world shaped by ideas, both embedded in technologies and embedded in policies and beliefs.

As the years went by, Hirschman turned increasingly to reading the classics of economics and the Enlightenment. As Adelman writes: “The pathway to recasting self-interest in a way that did not make it incompatible with the public good required going back centuries to the founding of its modern meaning.” His final book, [amazon_link id=”067476868X” target=”_blank” ]The Rhetoric of Reaction[/amazon_link], is now at the top of my reading list. Although seen as a response to the politics of the Reagan era, Adelman argues that it should be read in a broader way as concerned with the kind of public discourse that sustains democracy. The rhetorical habits Hirschman describes in the book have not only become pretty pervasive, but are also amplified by online media. The state of civic discourse is a vital question in itself and because it shapes beliefs and therefore economic possibilities.

In these comments, I’ve picked up themes that interest me particularly, including the light cast on the state of economics. [amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link] has a lot for readers with other interests too, particularly development economics (I touched on this in an earlier post). It’s also the well-told life story of a fascinating and obviously charming man. Half way through 2013, I’m sure it’s going to be one of my books of the year.

La trahison des clercs

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I’m about a third through Jeremy Adelman’s superb biography of Albert Hirschman, [amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]The Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link], and thoroughly enjoying it. We’ve got to the end of the second World War, by which time the young Hirschman had already had a lot of History to contend with, in the shape of the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, the Spanish Civil War, running with Varian Fry an escape route for Jews through Marseilles, Spain and Lisbon, and his own flight to the US and re-enlistment in the US army – alongside learning economics, reading widely and speaking several languages fluently, and getting married to a Russian-French-Californian intellectual and beauty.

[amazon_image id=”0691155674″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman[/amazon_image]

Needless to say, I’m particularly interested in reading about Hirschman’s reading. He was a fan of Camus, but not Sartre – definitely the right preference ordering. When fleeing Vichy France as the authorities closed in on his escape route, and able to take only one book with him, he chose Montaigne’s [amazon_link id=”B0081LMNKA” target=”_blank” ]Essais[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”B0081LMNKA” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Montaigne – Les Essais (French Edition)[/amazon_image]

There is an interesting passage about Julian Benda’s attack on the abandonment of Enlightenment reason for nationalism by European intellectuals, [amazon_link id=”224601915X” target=”_blank” ]La Trahison des Clercs[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”3640206096″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Julien Benda – La Trahison Des Clercs[/amazon_image]

Reacting to the argument, Hirschman wrote of the “hybrid position of intellectuals in the modern world: neither masters, nor prosecuted, but technicians.” Most saw their role as working out the most effective means for politicians to achieve the ends they selected, but this meant intellectuals had abdicated the responsibility to study “the thirst for power and domination.” There is no possibility of pure technocracy, he argued – that in itself is a political choice. An interesting reflection given the return of technocracy in Europe post-crisis.

I’ll do a proper review when I’ve finished the book, which is going slowly because it’s too big to carry around. There have been other excellent reviews, such as this by Justin Fox and this by Cass Sunstein.

Meanwhile, I want to honour the name of Hiram Bingham IV. I’d never heard of this State Department official. This rich and well-connected diplomat, based in Marseilles from 1939, had become disillusioned with the Department’s policy of doing little to nothing to help refugees from Europe reach the US, and so embarked on his own freelance mission to issue thousands of US visas, both legal and illegal, to help the Varian Fry and Albert Hirschman rescue operation. The beneficiaries included Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall as well as hundreds of people lacking the protection of fame. The State Department retaliated by posting Bingham to Argentina, where he turned his attention to tracking Nazis. He resigned from the foreign service in 1945 and didn’t speak of his wartime work again.

Political bubbles

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The Adelman biography of Albert Hirschman, [amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link], is great but too big to carry around so I’m reading it at home, and on the tube I’m reading [amazon_link id=”0691145016″ target=”_blank” ]Political Bubbles[/amazon_link] by Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, & have almost finished.

[amazon_image id=”0691145016″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy[/amazon_image]

It’s long been my view that history is over-determined, looked at from today (under-determined of course, if you’re trying to predict events.) These three political scientists have another causal explanation to add to the list of explanatory factors for the Great Crash of 2008. As well as greed and fraud, toxic financial innovation, global imbalances, fiscal irresponsibility, gigantism in banking and all the other contributors, there is the political dimension.

The charge is that a combination of three political factors created the conditions for all those other contributors to financial meltdown to develop. The first is ideology, the pure belief that markets are good and government regulation bad; the second is the array of special interests hoping for an endless boom, especially in housing – the lenders, the realtors, the people getting cheap loans; the third is the American institutional framework, expressly designed to stop things happening rapidly, in the context of ultra-rapid developments in financial markets. The three interact in a pro-cyclical way, the book argues, hence the terminology of the ‘political bubble’.

Nobody in the political elite, on the executive or the legislative side, comes out of this book well. The authors even trace some of the rot as far back as the now-saintly-seeming Jimmy Carter – after all, the savings and loan debacle of the early 1980s had its root in his presidency. The book is equally scathing about the ideologically free market Republicans, Reagan and the two Bushes, and the differently ideologically free market economics team of the Bill Clinton years.

The focus is solely on the United States. This means there is more political detail than many non-American readers will either want or be fully able to interpret.

With that caveat, I found the argument persuasive. After all, there are plenty of other mature democracies that have experienced that combination of housing bubbles, Franken-finance, and political incapacity. The US financial markets have also hugely influenced global markets. It would be interesting to work through the same kind of argument in other countries. One might even add another layer of political sclerosis in the international context, adding a fourth ‘i’ for ‘international incompetence’ to the three ‘i’s making up the book’s hypothesis.