Tag Archives: review

Use it or lose it – semiconductor version

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I highly recommend Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. It starts with the history of the development of semiconductors, which might be familiar from other Silicon Valley histories (such as Margaret O’Mara’s also excellent The Code). But the book then goes on to less familiar and more recent territory, encompassing the technological changes needed to manufacture ever-more precise chips and the huge scale, complexity and sophistication of their fabrication. This introduces companies that have recently become familiar (AMSL in the Netherlands, making the machines that are needed to do the fabrication, and TSMC in Taiwan, which produces more than 90% of the most advanced chips) – and also others key to the process that are still not very well known in general.

The narrative arc is a steady shift from US leadership in both technology and manufacturing, to Asian leadership in manufacturing and rapid catch-up – especially in China thanks to large-scale subsidies and IP theft – in some slices of the technology. The result is an extraordinarily complex global supply chain with a number of very narrow 1 or 2 firm bottlenecks. The best to hope for seems to be a version of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine: no country can afford disruption. The worst? Massive disruption of all aspects of modern economic life.

That there would be some shift seems inevitable: as East Asian economies developed in the late 20th century they would always try to move up the value chain into more sophisticated sectors. However, the book is quietly but strongly critical of the pro-globalisation philosophy of the US (and rest of the west) that gave up on retaining core manufacturing and engineering competencies at home – their loss didn’t matter until it really did, with the re-emergence of geopolitical strife. As the book puts it, there was a “liberal internationalist ethos that guided officials of both political parties amid America’s unipolar moment.” Yet Andy Grove’s paranoia was valid, when he said in the early 2010s: “Abandoning today’s ‘commodity’ manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.” (One of the best summary articles making eactly this point is Gregory Tassey in JEP in 2014.)

There is a lot of interesting detail. For example, I hadn’t realised how much Darpa focused on educational infrastructure – funding students and workshops, and university computer equipment, as well as futuristic tech research. There are lots of great examples of the difficulty of copying advanced chip technology because of the necessary tacit knowledge: for instance, every AMSL photolithography machine comes with a lifetime supply of AMSL technicians to tend to it. This is either hopeful – China will find it hard to catch up fully –  or not – the US or EU will not be able to catch up with TSMC because of the latter’s vast embedded know-how. Another example is the fact that defence dollars bought 72% of all integrated circuits produced in 1965, but Robert McNamara’s deffence budget cuts led Robert Noyce of Fairchild to bet on the consumer market and slash chip prices from $20 to $2. Annual US computer sales went from 1000 in 1957 to 18,700 a decade later.

All this and much more. The book has no easy policy solutions but is an essential contribution to current debates about industrial policy.

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Times without a rulebook

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“This is a short book on a vast topic.” So starts Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, by Lorraine Dalston. I enjoyed reading it without ever feeling I got to grips with what it’s about, and the vastness of the topic might be the explanation – or the fact that it’s a lecture series in origin. The chapters work roughly chronologically from the ancient world to today, exploring different aspects of rules – rules versus discretion, rules as regulations, rules of art, rules as laws or norms, rules as algorithms. The book is packed with historical nuggets of information, of the kind I very much enjoy. On the other hand, there’s no narrative arc. It’s a pointillist painting of a book at a focal length that doesn’t reveal the big picture.

Perhaps this is a bit unfair. There are some mid-level conclusions. ‘Thin’ rules such as routine algorithms or traffic regulation work well in stable contexts, and require a good deal of pre-existing infrastructure, be it training data or investment in traffic lights and cameras. ‘Thick’ rules are needed for situations requiring flexibility and judgement, and tend to have exceptions to prove them. “Low tolerance for discretion indexes rampant distrust in society,” she writes. Either governments which don’t trust their citizens, and so apply pettifogging rigour, or sometimes citizens who don’t trust authority.

Sometimes explicit rules need implicit ones to support and enforce them; the ideal of sufficient stability and predictability to do without the implicit is perhaps a modernist interlude. But the book’s final conclusion? “In abnormal times, when we are thrown into the breach without a rulebook, we once again become aware that there are no rules to help us reason about rules.”

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Models and Morals

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This has been a busy term so I’m behind on my reading, but have recently finished a fine biography, Jan Tinbergen and the Rise of Economic Expertise by Erwin Dekker. I knew little about Tinbergen so was bound to learn a lot from any biography, and this one is genuinely interesting. It has some personal detail but is much more an intellectual history, locating Tinbergen in his historical context. That was not a happy one: the Depression and the Second World War occurred in his early adulthood. The intellectual currents were, of course, fascinating. I had never realised how much Tinbergen was engaged in policy throughout his career. As well as being the founding director of the CPB (which gave me as a thank you gift for a talk a fine bronze bust of Tinbergen earlier this year now in prominent position on my shelves),  he had previously worked at the League of Nations, and continued throughout his career to be heavily engaged in policy. This followed a youth involved in idealistic progressive political movements.

To the extent economists now know anything about Tinbergen, we think of the econometric models for which his Nobel Prize was awarded. The book prompted me to read the Prize Lecture, which is very interesting: “Models constitute a framework or a skeleton and the flesh and blood will have to be added by a lot of common sense and knowledge of details.” He went on to suggest using models to compare different social orderings – communism and capitalism – on a scientific basis; it seems a forlorn hope now but evidently not in 1969. And think about the literary illustration of the equivalance of perfect markets and perfect planning in Francis Spufford’s wonderful book Red Plenty.

Dekker comments that Tinbergen found it irritating that this work from the 1930s was remembered rather than his later thinking about the institutional framework within which economies operate – the ‘Ordnung’ (the book uses the German word). I found particularly interesting a chapter titled ‘The Expert in the Model, the Economist outside the Model’, portraying Tinbergen’s effort to reconcile the fact that he had put policymakers inside his model of the how the economy operates with his simultaneous view that economists could nevertheless analyse from above  – ‘the view from nowhere’ – how the system then changes and can be controlled. The chapter uses the Lucas critique to analyse this in a macro context. It’s one of the themes of my Cogs & Monsters.

I also greatly enjoyed the chapter ‘Measuring the Unmeasurable: Welfare and Justice’. Dekker writes: “Tinbergen was mostly silent on philosophical matters. …. One of the very few exceptions are his reflections on ‘measurement in the human sciences.” He saw measurements as a vector for changing behaviour, and in addition saw the purpose of economic measurement as measurement of economic welfare. His was not a positivist view, but rather a moral one: economic policy had a deep societal purpose.

The book is quite long but the 400 pages zipped by. Tinbergen was clearly a fascinating person and deserves to be better appreciated by the Anglophone dominated economics profession. This biography serves him well.

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Discord and David Hume

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October has been whizzing past, with travel to conferences (hooray), the start of term, and a new grandson. I’ve been reading a lot of non-economics books on trains and planes, including Ai Weiwei’s compelling memoir 1000 Days of Joys and Sorrows, Red Dust by Ma Jian, and also a chunky hardback, Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, Nights of Plague.

Another chunky hardback has been Paul Tucker’s latest, wide-ranging and erudite, book, Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order. I must admit it took me some time to get into it, perhaps due to my general October distraction, but I’m with the programme: his aim is to bring a mash-up of David Hume and Bernard Williams to the current fraught state of geopolitics and global crises. The book uses the Humean dual of incentives and norms to think about international economic institutions in place of more traditional International Relations perspectives (realism, constructivism…). As long-time readers of this blog will know, I’m a big Hume fan (although confess to not having read Bernard WIlliams since my student days).

The motivating question is whether a legitimate international order can exist in a world transitioning out of the European/Atlantic order and facing complex existential challenges. Specifically, what international economic arrangements can co-exist with current geopolitics and shifts in power? The book starts with a historical overview of how the current arrangements and structures developed and why the growing power of China has challenged them. The second section looks at what form institutions for international co-operation can take and when/whether they can be stable and self-enforcing – Humean norms and conventions as a lens on international relations feature strongly here. Part three focuses on current tensions within and between China and the US – neither seeming particularly stable internally at the moment, never mind in terms of their mutual relations.

Part four is really the heart of the book: what does the Hume-Williams framework – what will be stable and self-enforcing in its norms, and what will be normatively right – imply for how democracies can legitimately delegate to international organisations, and how such organisations can legitimately constrain individual countries and governments? What are the principles for participation and delegation? How can practical problem solving encourage and sustain norms of behaviour (Hume)? What is its moral basis and hence legitimacy particularly in our still liberal(ish) democracies (Williams)?

The final part moves on to how to apply the framework in the current context, in terms of different more and less opti/pessi-mistic scenarios:lingering status quo, superpower struggle,  new Cold War, reshaped world order. Chapters consider different organisations – the IMF, WTO, BIS etc – getting in to how these might evolve. And the book ends with a vote for cautious optimism. (I find it hard to share that view as Brexit continues to destroy British democracy and prosperity, courtesy of the Conservative Party, I must say.)

The breadth of the research (and length of bibliography) across different disciplines is impressive. The book isn’t a light read, but worth while – and there are actually plenty of online events where Paul Tucker himself will give a better summary than I can here. For any day’s news headlines make it clear there could hardly be a more important set of questions to be resolved.

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Why governments get it wrong

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There was some irony in reading Dennis Grube’s Why Governments Get It Wrong: And How They Can Get It Right in the week of the Truss/Kwarteng budget disaster in the UK. If only our PM and Chancellor had read Dennis’s book before they went ahead with their hideously counter-productive policy experiment.

Now, I must warn readers of this blog that I’m not an unbiased reviewer of the book because its author is a dear colleague of mine. Declaration of interest made – this is a must for anyone interested in public policy, and a worthy successor to the classic King and Crewe The Blunders of Our Governments.

It’s wonderfully written and entertaining – somehow government errors provide plenty of material for laughter, perhaps because the alternative is tears. It also provides a very neat framework for analysing policy rights and wrongs. This consists of four ducks: definition of the problem a policy is meant to address; the second is the policy narrative aligned with the problem and connecting with what people care about; the third is the reality, sometimes presented as evidence (but even when that’s inconclusive the world is a certain way); the fourth is the effectiveness of the policy intervention itself, given the problem. Four ducks in a line doesn’t guarantee success but is generally a necessary if not sufficient condition. To make policy-making even harder, the ducks swim, there are turbulent tides, etc.

Policy-making is difficult. The world is full of wicked problems. “It’s complicated,” is an unwelcome message to most politicians (and voters). But reading Dennis’s book & thinking about lining up the ducks is a good place to start: Mr Kwarteng might have realised he only had at best one and a half ducks last week.

718pwt78KDL._AC_UY436_QL65_PS Dennis is doing a book launch at Waterstones in Cambridge on 7th October, in conversation with David Runciman. It will be a very good event.