A clutch of books to report on. Why Trust Matters: An economist’s guide to the ties that bind us by Benjamin Ho is a nice synoptic view of the economics of trust/social capital. One point that particularly struck me was the link between trust and patience: “co-operative behavior is easier to maintain when people value the future more – which is just another way of saying that they are more patient.” Perhaps it should be obvious but I hadn’t made the link. I also like the idea of a sort of Goldilocks level of the strength of contracts: not too weak or it becomes to risky to engage in the economic relationship; but also not too strong because trust can’t grow if there’s no opportunity to demonstrate trustworthiness. After all, trust is only needed because there is risk. This would be a nice book to introduce students to a wide literature on trust, social capital, game theory and contracting under uncertainty and asymmetric information. It braids bits of the literature together with a light touch.

Causal Inference: The Mixtape by Scott Cunningham is an excellent text book. It joins both the Angrist and Pischke duo of books (Mostly Harmless Econometrics and Mastering Metrics) and Judea Pearl’s Book of Why in the recent mini-wave of excellent introductions to causal inference. ‘Mixtape’ has as much statistical theory as you need and also includes both Stata and R code for student exercises.

And an utterly brilliant non-econ book I just read is Karl Deisseroth’s Connections: A Story of Human Feeling. He is both a neuroscientist running a lab at Stanford, famous for inventing optogenetics (no, me neither) and a practising psychiatrist. The book moves between the scientific insights and the human stories, showing how they illuminate each other. It’s also beautifully written. One of my books of 2021 so far.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Julian Baggini’s The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well. It took me back in a Proustian way to the late 1970s, when I was reading Hume in my PPE course and struggling with the ideas-impressions discussion while relishing his essay on the price-specie flow mechanism. But then I was always much better at the E than either of the Ps. And despite my struggles with philosophy, I’ve always been a Hume fan. The pragmatism, empiricism, moderation all appealed. Of course, Hume like so many of our forebears held views we see as unacceptable – the book discusses them in an early chapter. But I hold to my generally high opinion of him, feeling we could share a motto: Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

The Great Guide takes a chronological approach through Hume’s life, using the pleasing device of visiting the places he lived and including photos by the author. The key ideas are pegged to different chapters as Hume published his books and essays. There’s an excellent discussion of induction, and the role of experience as opposed to a priori reasoning in understanding causality. As Baggini summarises, it logic is algorithmic but, “There is no algorithm for good reaosning.” There is also an interesting section on the social character of reasoning: reasoning needs not to be something that inheres in us as individuals. “Although there is a sense in which we have to be the ultimate judge of what seems most rational to us, in order to reach such a judgement we have to argue with others and hear conrtdictory viewpoints.”

I also liked the discussion of Hume’s idea of personal identity as an aggregate of feelings, perceptions, ideas etc, which Baggini tells me is close to the Buddhist concept of anatta. And thoroughly agree with him that, “Hume shows us that the best writing combines rigor of thought with clarity of expression, difficulty of substance with ease of style.”

Maxims like these are dotted through the book and collected at the end, to live up to the promise of the subtitle. They reinforce Hume’s position as my favourite philosopher.

This week’s read has been Adrian Pabst’s Postliberal Politics, with the cheery subtitle The Coming Era of Renewal. It’s hard to believe the past 18 months, on top of the post-2008 real wage stagnation, and the Brexit/Red Wall voting phenomena that there will not be some kind of realignment? This book advocates for a community-centric economic and political model, focusing on family, dignity and local identity. It’s an appealing vision, in the same vein as some other recent books by economists (Mark Carney, Minouche Shafik, Raghuram Rajan, Sam Bowles) but with a focus on the politics rather than the economic policies. I’m suppose I’m enough of an old-fashioned (pre-post) liberal that the communitarian flavour makes me a bit uncomfortable, as does the religious thread, while agreeing intellectually that excessive individualism has been highly problematic.

The book is short (and wonderfully jargon-free) so it doesn’t bother with the always-unsatisfactory bullet point lists about what are the top 10 policies needed to get from here to that future political renewal. Indeed, it concludes: “Building  a new consensus requires more than a political and policy programme. It has to be anchored in a public philosophy to outflank both technocracy and ideological extremes. A public philosophy expresses the shared ends of political action.” Quite. The public philosophy guiding policy and politics since the late 1970s has crumbled yet lives on in zombie form in many arenas of policy-making. This is a thought-provoking building block in an alternative that might take some time to rise out of the rubble. An interesting read.

Speaking of outmoded public philosophies, I also polished off Qiu Xiaolong’s Hold Your Breath China. This series of detective novels isn’t all that well-written; I like them mainly for the flavour of Shanghai life. However, the culprit in this one, whose plot concerns air pollution is clear: GDP. Who would have expected the flaws of GDP to be the central issue in a crime novel?