Tag Archives: review

Politics by numbers

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Limits of the Numerical: the abuses and uses of quantification (editors Christopher Newfield, my dear colleague Anna Alexandrova, and Stephen John) is right up my street. It’s a collection of thoughtful essays exploring exactly what the subtitle says, some general and some relating to specific issues of quantification in education and healthcare, and (by Anna and Ramandeep Singh) the measurement of wellbeing.

The aim of the volume is to move beyind what it characterises as the Original Critique (set out in some classics like Desrosières and Porter). This critique points to the historical context of measurement and quantification, and the use of the presumed authority and objectivity of numbers as an instrument of politics or power. As the introduction points out, the Original Critique assumes this deployment of numerical thinking is successful. Yet in recent years expertise – generally involving evidence and numbers – has been steadily demonized, and independent evidence-based agencies have either been targets for populism or lost legitimacy more broadly.

One sign of the demise of expertise was the New Public Management era of Blair and Clinton, disciplining experts by use of quantitative targets. Subsequently populists have deployed numbers against experts too, but in their case appealing to public opinion or crowd size. Thus, “The numerical idiom became just another part of the degraded rhetoric of politics.” But perhaps the real nail in the coffin of quantified expertise was the financial crisis and its aftermath: whatever the experts were doing, it didn’t deliver: “Against the promise of governance by the numbers, the 2008 meltdown and everyday experience both revealed a regime of incompetence, political interference and elite bias.”

There are interesting dives into the spread and effects of higher education rankings – as the book notes, audit culture here has become performative, bringing into being the measureable phenomena; orphan drugs – featuring the “unholy alliance” between patients and pharma companies seeking to profit from financial incentives to develop drugs for rare diseases; and climate science.

I was particularly interested in the chapter on the measurement of wellbeing as Anna and I are co-authors on this subject, and indeed I attended an excellent conference on wellbeing research last week. The chapter sets out the different definitions and hence methods of quantification of wellbeing and sets out what it calls “Letwin’s dilemma” after the former minister who helped introduce wellbeing measurement to UK official statistics. The dilemma is that most philosophical and psychological approaches recognise separate dimensions of wellbeing, but a political sponsor needs a simple, measurable and comparable concept  to compete with other ‘hard’ metrics in the choices facing givernments. This is a genuine dilemma; but the chapter argues against what has become the single metric in policy debates, a scale-based measure of Life Satisfaction, as too reductive and detached from underlying psychological phenomena. This is exactly the debate I had at the conference with Richard Layard, the UK’s most influential researcher on wellbeing.

I polished off the book in just over a day, and it would interest anybody working on the sociology and politics of measurement and related areas, taking forward the now well-known critique of quantification and linking it persuasively to the political trends of the past decade.

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Profit and time

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Avner Offer’s new, shortish book Understanding the Private-Public Divide: Markets, Governments and Time Horizons is superb. It sets out a persuasive argument for locating the boundary between private and public production in terms of the payback period for investment. The book starts: “In economics… the present is all there is. Past costs are sunk and can be ignored. The future is only what we make of it today.” What if we take seriously the need to invest for the future? As he points out, government accounts for 30-40% of GDP in most rich countries, and when you add in non-profit and household production well under half of economic welfare is produced on a for-profit basis – and that couldn’t happen without government-provided infrastructure or other support such as franchises or patents.

The central point is that for-profit investment needs to pay off in a relatively short period: “The higher the rate, the shorter the wait.” The prevailing interest rate defines a unique break-even period. Private markets can produce efficiently if the pay-off period is shorter. Otherwise, government has to act as the “commitment agent for society.” When it steps back from this, delegating to private agents, corruption is often the result, or else the enrichment of managers and shareholders at the expense of workers and consumers. There are no grounds for expecting efficiency gains – quite the contrary.

Offer writes: “There is no warrant for extending market norms to the rest of social activity, to the family, government, infrastructure, education, healthcare, science and arts, social insurance, old age, defence, protecting the environment and climate. Together, these are the source of most economic welfare.” He adds, for good measure, that much financial sector activity serves no social purpose.

Stirring stuff. The chapters set out the basic economic argument about credit time horizons, and then discuss the ethical and political consequences of governments delegating long-term activities to the private sector. Subsequent chapters discuss specific issues – housing and climate change.

When you add to the mix the well-known Herbert Simon point (in his 1991 Journal of Economic Perspectives article Organizations and Markets: “The economies of modern industrialized society can more appropriately be labeled organizational economies than market economies.”) about the limited scope of the market within private enterprises, it seems hard to understand how we’ve been through the past 40 years of markets-first political philosophy and practice.

Avner Offer has delivered a bracing counterblast to this. His main omission is non-market, non-government economic activity, civil society and the household (hence my book was Markets, State and People). But that would have been a different book. Highly recommended.

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Post-neoliberalism?

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The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by my Cambridge colleague Gary Gerstle has quite rightly been highly praised. It covers a whole century, starting with the New Deal and post-world war 2 era to preface the bulk of the book, its characterisation of the neoliberal turn from the start of the 1980s. It ends with Trump and the turn away – so Gary argues – from neoliberalism to something as yet undefined. Neoliberalism is described as a commitment to free trade and financial flows, to free movement of people and openness to others, and to deregulation and the expanded scope of markets. Interestingly, he frames the point about the expansion of the market domain in terms of characterising people as consumers, instead of workers, and argues that Ralph Nader played a key role in this regard through his influence on Jimmy Carter, as the old order started to give way to the new.

The book gives a twin-tracked account of what drives these transitions from one era to another. One set of drivers consists of events – economic crisis in particular, so the 1970s commodity shocks at the start and the GFC at the end. More surprising is the role attributed to the Soviet Union: the 1917 Revolution as a stimulus for New Deal politics; Cold War contestation paving the way for business and financial interests to reach a modus vivendi with organised labour through the 1960s in order to avert any threat of domestic socialism; and consequently the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 as a destabilising force because it took the brakes off corporate and financial self-restraint.

Another interesting aspect of the argument is the linking of administrations generally seen as being opposed to each others’ policies – the difference between Republican and Democrat being less decisive than that between Eisenhower and Reagan or Kennedy and Clinton. As Gary puts it, the feature of a ‘political order’ is that the opponents of the government also buy into it; it becomes the water in which almost everyone swims.

The FT review described the book as an instant classic. There are lots of talks and pods online for anybody who wants a taster. As the subtitle says, it’s US-focused; an analysis of how the neoliberal order got exported would be interesting. I highly recommend it – I read it in just a couple of days of travel. And it set me thinking about what the next political order might turn out to be…..

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The joy of measurement

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Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement by James Vincent had the good fortune to be published more or less when the Johnson government here decided a good wheeze to distract voters’ attention from – well, everything – would be to launch a consultation on the reintroduction of imperial measures alongside metric. The recent by-election results suggest the wheeze failed; maybe the population just isn’t overwhelmed with excitement by the subject of measurement standards.

I am of course one of the minority who does find measurement an unbelievably exciting subject, and I enjoyed reading the book. It uses a chronological structure to explore different aspects of measurement, starting with the ancient world and the emergence of standard measures for trade, moving on to early modern states, the Scientific Revolution and French Revolution, with a separate chapter on early statistics, and ending up indeed with a chapter subtitled “Metric vs imperial and metrology’s culture war” and finally measurement today (including the concept of the ‘quantified self’.

I quite like this summary of the purpose of measurement: “From the ancient world onwards, measurement has been embraced not only for its practical benefits – for its utility in tasks like construction and trade – but also for its ability to create a zone of shared expectations and rules; to mediate our experience with the world and one another, ensuring that the interactions between two strangers who live under the same set of measures can be validated and trusted.” This purpose of mutual benefit sits alongside the use of measurement by rulers and states – and the book indeed cites classic authors like James Scott and Theodore Porter.

Although books such as the wonderful Seeing Like A State, or more recent ones on specific areas of measurement such as Andrew Whitby’s recent The Sum of The People about the history of the census, obviously have a lot more detail than the chapters here, Beyond Measure delivers on its aim of providing an accessible overview of the history of measurement and many of the issues of meaning. It’s a great starting point for anyone not as immersed (as nerds like me) in the measurement literature.

It’s also an enticing read, with anecdotes aplenty (visiting a nilometer, chatting to Brexiteers about pints and miles) and full of my favourite kind of useful facts. Who knew, for example, that, “In England, measurement disputes in markets were settled by a special tribunal known as the ‘court of piepowder’.” It dates to the 11th century, that is prior to the normal court system, and doled out on the spot justice on market day. Piepowder is apparently a corruption of ‘pieds poudrés’ or dusty feet, characterising travelling merchants.

Perhaps the UK Government will, in its ever-more desperate attempts to show something, anything, for Brexit, re-establish piepowder courts in markets up and down the land, should remoaniac stallholders not want to replace their kilos and metres with pounds and feet. For, as the book illustrates, questions of measurement are not (just) technical, but highly political.

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Decarbonising travel – room for optimism?

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Our new Perspectives title, Good To Go: Decarbonising Travel After the Pandemic by David Metz is out. It looks at how the pandemic has affected pre-existing trends in travel – not as much as optimists might have hoped, is his conclusion, although recognising that it is probably too early to know whether commuting patterns will change permanently. Nevertheless, improved neighbourhood planning and flexible working could capture some of the benefits of the pandemic years even if there is a significant reversion to the old normal.

However, One of David’s points is that people relish mobility, with faster travel always having translated into travel further. That means that tackling the contribution of transport to solving the climate challenge will need technological contributions. The book holds out some hope for electric vehicles and digital tools contributing to decarbonising transport. But as David points out, the system is complex, involving economics, demography, technology, policy and human behaviour. There is a lot of wishful thinking about how easy it will be to change. Complexity means (as so often in policy) there is no easy solution. The book outlines a range of investments and policy interventions that will be needed to decarbonise travel.

Good to Go? is a terrific addition to our Perspectives roster on transport: David’s previous book, Travel Fast or Smart?; Transport for Humans: Are we nearly there yet? by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland; and Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy and  Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere  by Christian Wolmar. They complement each other wonderfully  – a great collection for transport nerds! As a special offer for readers of this blog, all five (£71 if bought individually) are available for £45 plus postage if you email sam@londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk.

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