Tag Archives: review

If/then

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Earlier this year I read Jill Lepore’s These Truths, which made me eager to read her new book, If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future, as soon as possible. It didn’t disappoint – although I had a couple of reservations about it. More on that later.

The book is the story of a company, Simulmatics, formed by a PR man, Ed Greenfield, and an MIT political scientists, Ithiel De Sola Pool. It aimed to apply computers to the prediction of human behaviour: feed the machine enough data and it would be possible to predict election outcomes, among other social phenomena, and more importantly manipulate them. The convergence of data, computational power and Mad Men behaviourist techniques seemed inevitable and unconquerable. The parallel with the same again this time round but more so is striking, and the book ends with the comparison.

Along the way, Lepore tells a rattling good story about American politics in the late 1950s through to the Vietnam War and Nixon, about the first application of computers to social issues (and Madison Avenue was onto the opportunities early), and also about gender politics. Right from the start, there was a culture of computer bros, hostile to women: “Women’s knowledge was not knowledge.” The cast of characters is fantastic. Many of them I’d never heard of – Eugene Burdick, the best-selling author of thrillers and leading political scientist, anyone? Lepore also writes like a novelist, and an excellent one at that.

That is in fact one of my reservations. Among the notes I was taking were notes on craft – this is genuinely a page turner. And yet ….. when the text gets into the interior lives of the wives of the men, I wonder how she knows? Are there really enough letters and diaries, or is this indeed embroidery?

The other is that I hungered for more context about the impact of behaviourism and of cybernetics, and the broader environment of computerised social engineering. For example, Stafford Beer had his own US consultancy applying cybernetics, going to Chile in the early 1970s to assist with Project Cybersyn (the subject of Eden Medina’s wonderful book Cybernetics Revolutionaries). If Then does acknowledge the early use of computers in advertising but Norbert Wiener gets but a passing reference. And even though Simulmatics failed – so many of its projects turning out disastrously – there is surprisingly little scepticism about whether computers can in fact predict and manipulate humans,  whether Simulmatics or their modern day equivalents in Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Having said that, If Then is a wonderful book, highly recommended. Lepore was interviewed by David Runciman in a great episode of Talking Politics for those who’d like another taster – it focuses mainly on those disturbing modern parallels.

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Economics for social animals

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I’ve been reading the latest book by Robert Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work. Although I greatly admire his work, and he has a knack for catching the moment – as with Luxury Fever or The Winner Take All Society –  I must confess I found this one a bit dull. This is nothing to do about disagreeing with the idea, which is to bring together thinking about social norms, altruism, positional goods and behavioural peer effects together to tease out policy implications, or rather policy approaches. This all seems blindingly obvious to me, and indeed one of ten lectures in my public policy economics course (one chapter in my Markets, State and People) covers exactly these social influences. I agree, too, that more economists ought to be more aware of social influence: we are not isolated individuals in making choices.

There are some deep questions for economists, once you accept the seemingly incontrovertible evidence that social norms can change, advertising works to persuade us to buy things, and positional arms races occur. What does it imply for a discipline whose models and welfare analysis are based on the concept of fixed preferences? For example, the way price indices are calculated – used to calculate in turn ‘real’ growth and productivity – assumes fixed preferences; but there are constant innovations and new goods, and there is no settled way of taking these into account in dividing pounds or euros spent into price and ‘real’ components.

Back to the book, though. Yes, of course to ensuring economics and policy advice are consistent with evidenced insights from social psychology or cognitive science or evolutionary theory. Yes, of course context affects how people make economic choices. But ….perhaps it was my frame of mind this week, but Under the Influence didn’t sing to me. It seems very long-winded. In fact, the prologue claims as a virtue the repetition in the book, arguing it will help get the message to stick. Students who are not familiar with the material might really enjoy this and find it sinking in. But not one for me.

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Fictional mobility

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This post is slightly off topic but it is about social mobility. I just devoured Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, having been a total devotee of her bestselling Neapolitan quartet. Like all the best fiction, the novels are all crunchily specific about their context and yet also universal. The new one is also terrific.

One common reaction to her work is that it’s about the lives of girls and women, which of course it is. The new one is the best I’ve read about the relationships between adolescent girls and women, certainly since Margaret Atwood’s Cats Eye not to mention their interior lives. Yet to me – and perhaps the reason I find them so absorbing – is that they are just about the best fiction I’ve ever read about social class. Ferrante captures the textures of working class life, the imperative some young people feel to escape their roots (usually by education), how big a challenge that is (soft skills galore needed as well as intellect) and the price they pay for that deracination in feeling alienated from both old and new cultures.

Anyway, if you liked Ferrante’s previous work, you’ll like The Lying Life of Adults too.

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The joy of statistics

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As it happens, I’ve been reading two very similar books, with the mission of imparting critical thinking about statistics to their readers. One is Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. The other is Tim Harford’s How To Make The World Add Up. Both are excellent – well-written, full of interesting or entertaining examples, absolutely what the world needs now. If only the people who most needed them would actually read them.

The two books do have a different focus. Bergstrom/West concerns statistical methods: how to interpret causal claims; understanding selection bias; good and bad data visualisation; big data bullshit. There is a fantastic quote from Charles Babbage, a propos of the garbage in, garbage out rule in data science: “On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out. … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

Harford’s book is more about the habits of mind we bring to any numerical or statistical claims and is structured as a series of lessons: Pay attention to your emotional reaction – do you really want to believe (or not) a statistical claim? How representative is your personal experience when you think about a figure on social media or in the news? He is concerned to debunk the cynical idea that statistics always aim to manipulate or mislead us – sometimes they do, but statistics are also a vital tool for understanding and improving things, so the cynicism risks being corrosive.

I particularly like his rule “Avoid premature enumeration”, which asks you to consider how data were constructed – something many of us would do well to think about. For example, contrasts often result from different statistical classifications when the underlying realities are rather similar. The US does, for instance, have a higher rate of perinatal mortality than Finland but a large part of the difference between the two countries comes about because American doctors are more likely to classify a foetus of 22-23 weeks as a baby which subsequently died. There are chapters also on big data, and on the importance of transparency and data access.

Both books are really enjoyable reads, clear, great for students, or for 6th form general studies classes essential for journalists. I hope they do really well. If people followed the advice given by these authors, the world would be a better place.

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Fracturing and building

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The Age of Fracture by Daniel Rodgers was strongly recommended by one of my followees, Paul Nightingale, on Twitter and he made it sound like just my cup of tea. Which it is. It’s an intellectual history of late 20th century America, and the way the public sphere of ideas transitioned from a focus on institutions and social relations to an individualist perspective. This was most apparent in economics, which is where the book starts, but spread across many domains of policy and research – the book has chapters on race, class, gender, as well as politics in general. The hinge was the late 1970s/early 1980s, just about the time I spent four years living in the US, so reading this brought back many memories of that first Reagan term, the rise to prominence of Newt Gingrich, and the ‘declinist’ bestsellers published a few years later, Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism.

Age of Fracture is beautifully written, and I was particularly impressed by its scope – the breadth of knowledge of so many different domains is amazing. In the chapter (‘The Rise of the Market’) on the rise of abstract rational expectations economics, divorced from time, place and relationships, Rodgers gives a masterly summary of the evolution of the discipline. “The new intellectual movements in economics pushed to its limits the extent to which society could be analytically dissolved altogether into its individual utility-maximising parts.” As the chapter points out, the victory of this approach was never total, and by the end of the 1990s was moving on to a new focus on institutions, transactions costs, behaviour and networks. Nevertheless, individualism became the leitmotif of the public realm of ideas – and on the British side of the Atlantic too.

The transatlantic traffic was not all one way. The chapters on race and particularly gender emphasise the role of French post-structuralism, which swept over cultural studies and much of the humanities, and still seems to be destroying those departments. In paving the way for a sense of identity as something self-determined, it created a libertarianism of the left alongside the market libertarianism of the right. In both cases, Rodgers writes, “The libertarian vision of society was radically timeless.” Voluntary identities, voluntary transactions, are disembodied from actual history. Whether rational expectations economics or the originalist perspective on the US constitution, time – future or past – is instantly accessible. Both featured the desire to “locate a trap door through which one could reach beyond history and find a simpler place outside of it.”

The book is wisely silent on whether the climate of ideas is changing now, amid the storms of pandemic, authoritarianism rising in the US and elsewhere, social fracture. It reminded me of this comment in Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel lecture (flagged up on Twitter recently by Nicholas Gruen): “Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.”

Quite. But fracturing is easier than building. ‘Building back better’ is harder still.

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