Seven More

Five years ago I posted about “Future Politics” by James Susskind to which I now return Future Politics - living together in a world transformed by tech (2018)

Politics in the twentieth century was dominated by a central question: how much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society? For the generation now approaching political maturity, the debate will be different: to what extent should our lives be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems—and on what terms? This question is at the heart of Future Politics.

In the next few decades, it is predicted, we’ll develop computing systems of astonishing capability, some of which will rival and surpass humans across a wide range of functions, even without achieving an ‘intelligence’ like ours. Before long, these systems will cease to resemble computers. They’ll be embedded in the physical world, hidden in structures and objects that we never used to regard as technology. More and more information about human beings—what we do, where we go, what we think, what we say, how we feel—will be captured and recorded as data, then sorted, stored, and processed digitally. In the long run, the distinctions between human and machine, online and offline, virtual and real, will fade into the background. This transformation will bring some great benefits for civilization.

Our lives will be enriched by new ways of playing, working, travelling, shopping, learning, creating, expressing ourselves, staying in touch, meeting strangers, coordinating action, keeping fit, and finding meaning. In the long run, we may be able to augment our minds and bodies beyond recognition, freeing ourselves from the limitations of our human biology.

At the same time, however, some technologies will come to hold great power over us. Some will be able to force us to behave a certain way, like (to take a basic example) self-driving vehicles that simply refuse to drive over the speed limit. Others will be powerful because of the information they gather about us. Merely knowing we are being watched makes us less likely to do things perceived as shameful, sinful, or wrong. Still other technologies will filter what we see of the world, prescribing what we know, shaping the way we think, influencing how we feel, and thereby determining how we act.

Those who control these technologies will increasingly control the rest of us. They’ll have power, meaning they’ll have a stable and wideranging capacity to get us to do things of significance that we wouldn’t otherwise do. Increasingly, they’ll set the limits of our liberty, decreeing what may be done and what is forbidden. They’ll determine the future of democracy, causing it to flourish or decay. And their algorithms will decide vital questions of social justice, allocating social goods and sorting us into hierarchies of status and esteem.

The upshot is that political authorities—generally states—will have more instruments of control at their disposal than ever before, and big tech firms will also come to enjoy power on a scale that dwarfs any other economic entity in modern times. To cope with these new challenges, we’ll need a radical upgrade of our political ideas. The great English philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in his Autobiography of 1873 that, ‘no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.’ It is time for the next great change.

Stealing Horses to Great Applause – the origins of the first world war 
reconsidered Paul Schroeder (2025)

With a preface by the great Perry Anderson, this text promises much

The Decisionist Imagination – sovereignty, social science and democracy in the 
20th Century ed Daniel Bessner and Nicholas Guilhot (2018)
An unusual take on the making of decisionsYesterday – the UK from Thatcher to Covid Brian Harrison (2026) 1100 pp

Some Afterthoughts How far, then, was the UK in decline between 1990 and 2020?
 We must first summarize the conclusions so far reached, in roughly their order of 
discussion in the previous subsection (Current Realities). Because the Church of 
England was never disestablished, it had long been integral to the UK’s stability. 
With the loss of faith since the 1960s, however, its political role slowly became 
primarily ceremonial, declining only to the extent that the state declined. 
Opposition to birth control was among the controversial interwar religious 
standpoints, but thereafter other issues seemed more important, the controversy 
cooled and both standpoints succumbed before sexuality’s secularization. 
The UK’s relative economic decline was inevitable to the extent that less developed 
societies were bound to catch up, but it is absolute decline that brings trouble, 
and in the nation as a whole, this was averted. Not everywhere, though: 
economic growth was very patchy, both by region and by type of manufacture 
or service. Science-based industries flourished in several parts of the UK, 
and the North Sea witnessed remarkable advances in turbine manufacture, 
wind power and extraction of oil and gas; there were also simultaneous and 
related advances in environmental consciousness.

In education there was expansion and innovation at every level, spurred on by international comparison, and led by world-beating schools and universities. Although computerization in the UK was early and widespread, its record in computer manufacture was disappointing. In its media aspects, however, the UK was notably resourceful and recreation boomed and diversified after 1990, as never before. Behind all this lay a party-political situation whose stability required controversy to be publicly aired—political stability being in itself an economic asset. By 1990 the Wall’s fall had dampened Marxian fires: riots thereafter were mostly consumerist, and were contained. Containment was not cost free if only because of the UK’s relative enthusiasm for removing delinquents from the workforce into imprisoned work-free idleness. Helpful to the economy, however, was the move of both Labour and Conservatives after 1979 towards the centre, while the adversarial party system maximized opportunities for public debate. The worldwide credit crunch of 2007 was serious, however, and the UK was relatively slow to recover from it.

In international relations the UK’s world influence was probably at its peak in the 1880s, rather than in 1918 when the empire’s land-mass was at its peak. Henceforth the UK was a ‘satisfied power’ in need of alliances, and despite being on the winning side in 1945, diminishingly convincing as a ‘great power’. There followed decades of unsuccessful face-saving formulae and more frequent attempts to deny failure. By the 1970s the UK’s former international status was beyond recall, and it was a sign of the UK’s ongoing decline that so much was made of the Falklands victory in 1982. Having joined the EEC in 1973 in the hope that membership would revive the UK’s status, British governments seemed determined to minimize the benefits of joining, and on leaving the EU in 2020 the UK seemed only to sink further.

As for the empire/Commonwealth, it had originated in a powerful combination of idealism, commercial energy and wishful thinking. The twentieth-century prevalence of the third and waning of the first and second help to explain the empire/Commonwealth’s decline. Missionaries, in their idealistic and moralistic fervour, had helped to advance colonial frontiers, but their denominational diversity, with each component fervently held, could only erode faith by fostering irreligious relativism.

In 1989 K. O. Morgan’s preface to the first edition of his The People’s Peace (1990) saw the period 1945–90 as possessing ‘a unity of its own’. Not a situation prevailing between 1990 and 2020. In domestic politics these years include the long middle period (1997–2010) of Labour government, bounded at each end by periods of Conservative-dominated government, so no integrating theme there. Alternatively these years co ld be identified as a period of reflection and digestion, whereby the long-term implications of Thatcherism, especially within the British labour movement, were at last grasped. The difficulty in choosing this uniting theme, however, is that Thatcher’s impact has not yet ended. Or the period could be seen as a peaceful interval between two periods of ‘cold war’, beginning with the fall of the wall and ending with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; but again, the end of Putin is not yet in sight. Some will complain, however, that there is more to life than politics. Besides, independent nations do not need to be fixated upon arbitrary international rankings—still less did it depend upon rankings based on military or power-political criteria. The decades between 1990 and 2020 have not acquired any distinct label, nor should they: a decade, or even three decades, are arbitrary periods, and if they have any distinctive feature, the label can be detected or confected only in retrospect.

Politicians at any level tend to make exaggerated claims for what they can achieve—claims that are pumped up during general elections, and even verge on chauvinism. ‘I want Britain to be seen as the best’, Major told Conservatives in March 1992, ‘not only in our eyes, but in the eyes of others. First and first again—a world leader—that is where I want us to be, and to stay’. On 30 September 1997 Blair described ‘our goal’ as being ‘to make Britain the best educated and skilled country in the world, a nation, not of a few talents, but of all the talents’. The two-party system carries with it the drawback of encouraging rebuttal rather than empathy. Wise politicians, however, do not exaggerate their powers and still less do they take national setbacks personally. Foreign Secretary Hague was portrayed in 2012 as ‘intoxicated by the aroma of office’: finding some regime ‘unacceptable’, he is ignored, stamps his foot on the world stage, but ‘only stubs his toe’. Not even Palmerston in his Victorian prime could get away with such conduct, and was at least accountable to an evangelical and nonconformist conscience, whereas in present-day UK politics there is no such conscience, nor have we a Cobden to rise up from the back benches to offer the necessary corrective. The UK today in the international arena may, however, see merits in Cobden’s mid-Victorian hallmark: combining empathy with example-setting. Heath, assuming a decidedly Cobdenite stance, reminded parliament in 1993 of the link between success at home and influence abroad: when the UK tells other countries what to do, ‘people politely ask, “What about Northern Ireland?”’ and specify recent terrorist incidents ‘on our own doorstep’. Ashdown in 1998 thought that what became the Good Friday agreement would make Blair more credible in pursuing his wider diplomatic ambitions.

Governments must always make national security their first priority, but intelligently mobilizing soft power and collective security can in the long term outmanoeuvre populist sabre-rattling. In 1960 the sociologist Michael Young saw ‘no necessary connection between power and greatness’: nations could be ranked in possession of weapons, he wrote, but also in art, intellect and social concern. Young would have gone further, favouring a stouter British backing for the UN: ‘we could find a pride and purpose, not as the smallest of the Great Powers but as the greatest of the Small Powers, in helping to lead the world towards the renunciation of national sovereignty’. Self-advertisement is difficult to reconcile with an allegedly British modesty and understatement, but the UK with its world-beating universities and its world-pervasive language has potentially strong foundations. Hugh Seton-Watson in 1977 held up France as a model: lacking after 1815 ‘the military, industrial or manpower resources of a firstrate power’, the worldwide cultural missions of the French made their language ‘the instrument of civilized men all over the world’. Here, too, the UK is in a strong position.

When Joseph Chamberlain was seeking in 1903 to overturn Cobden’s achievement by promoting protection through tariff reform, he claimed that ‘the day of small kingdoms with their petty jealousies has passed. The future is with the great empires, and there is no greater empire than the British Empire’. Twenty-first century perspectives beg to differ. Among the few benefits of possessing nuclear weapons is their capacity to ‘freeze’ the status of declining countries, thus causing small countries to proliferate. ‘The hydrogen bomb is a great leveller’, said Julian Amery: ‘It cancels out the disparity between population and big areas of territory and smaller ones’.

The histories of Switzerland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia show that significant world influence requires neither the bomb, nor even a large landmass. The UK’s world influence reached its height well before preoccupation with the empire’s land-mass attained its ultimate extent, and we—more readily than many Victorians—acknowledge that formal annexation carries many burdens in its train, and that collective self-defence can be more effective than grandiose patriotic pretension. Smallness does have its advantages.

Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times Alison McQueen (2018)

A consideration of how sound this concept is – with amazing documentation

The Return of the Great Powers Brendan Simms (2026)

Futures of Socialism Colm Murphy (2023)
Murphy starts in iconoclastic form by tracing the origins of left discourse about 
globalisation to the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) developed by the 
Labour left in the 1970s and early 1980s (this explains the unusual starting year 
of 1973 in the book’s date range – when Labour’s annual conference famously 
first adopted a programme heavily influenced by the AES). As Murphy points out
, a key premise of the AES, based on bitter reflection on the 1960s Labour 
government, was that the rise of multinational corporations and international 
finance had hollowed out the power of individual states to secure full employment, 
narrow inequality and boost economic growth. The remedies that the left 
prescribed for this malaise were obviously very different from what became 
New Labour’s economic strategy. Roughly speaking, the left sought to increase 
the state’s power to control the British economy through measures such as 
increased public ownership (especially of financial institutions), planning 
agreements with private enterprise and import controls. 
But the underlying economic analysis – that the post-1945 model of economic 
management was no longer viable amid a globalising capitalism – was essentially 
very similar to the rhetoric rolled out by Blair and Gordon Brown much later. 
Murphy demonstrates that one wing of the Labour left, led by Stuart Holland 
(the key theorist of the AES), did eventually lose confidence in a strategy 
based on socialism in one country. Instead, Holland and his colleagues invested 
considerable intellectual energy during the 1980s in arguing for a more 
interventionist economic strategy at a European level. 
This too flowed into the formation of a modernised Labour vision that firmly 
distanced itself from the Euroscepticism that was common currency on the 
British left in the 1970s. Murphy is clear that the Labour leadership’s 
entanglement with the discourse of globalisation after c.1994 drew on 
influences besides the AES (he mentions the writings of figures such as 
Anthony Giddens and David Held as one alternative source). 
But he argues that an important reason that internal critics found it hard 
to push back against the Blair/Brown account of globalisation was that 
they had already signed up to the idea that a traditional social-democratic 
economic strategy had been ruled out by the rise of giant corporations and 
fleet-footed global capital flows. A wide cross-section of the party had been 
primed by the preceding twenty years of internal debate to accept that 
‘globalisation’ required Labour to retool its economic policy. 
Murphy makes a similar observation with respect to ideas about the 
decentralisation of economic and political power. During the 1970s and 
1980s a very large number of political actors on the left and centre of British 
politics became convinced that the model of centralised state-driven socialism 
associated with Labour’s heyday in power in the 1940s was out of step with 
modern Britain. Political formations as various as the New Left, leading trade 
unionists, disillusioned Labour revisionists, left-led Labour councils, 
Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the Liberal Party and the emergent SDP 
all agreed that there needed to be greater economic and political empowerment 
below the level of the UK state. Initially this was often framed in socialist terms 
as the extension of economic democracy through worker participation in 
industrial decisionmaking and trade unionists taking seats on company boards. 
But these ideas quickly widened (or perhaps moderated) to include passing 
power on to consumer and community groups, local councils (with Ken 
Livingstone’s Greater London Council as a model) and co-operatives. 
At a theoretical level, these decentralising tendencies were forged into what 
Murphy dubs the ‘neo-corporatism’ advocated by David Marquand and Paul Hirst. 
Marquand and Hirst envisaged a British economy that looked a lot more like the 
West German social-market model, by combining federal constitutionalism with 
a more collaborative and long-term industrial culture. All of this was premised 
on the assumption that Labour’s traditional political vision was too top-down 
and statist and thus out of step with a less deferential, more individualist society. 
This was said to be the vulnerability in Labour’s earlier model of socialism that 
Thatcherism had exploited, by offering a right-wing vision of individual economic 
empowerment that widened private property ownership and increased disposable 
incomes through direct tax cuts (a point that had been presciently made by 
Stuart Hall even before the Thatcher government was elected in his 
famous 1979 Marxism Today essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’). 
But it was ultimately constitutional rather than economic decentralisation 
that achieved more traction within the Labour leadership in the 1990s. 
John Smith’s victory over Bryan Gould in the 1993 Labour leadership election 
was one important moment here. Murphy shows that Gould had been a key 
advocate of a form of economic modernisation that drew on ideas about 
diffusing economic power, whereas Smith was more engaged by 
modernising Britain’s democracy. 
A second key moment was Blair’s dalliance with the ideas of Will Hutton in 1996. 
Hutton’s The State We’re In (1995) was a brilliant popularisation of the 
neo-corporatism espoused by Marquand and Hirst, which caught the political 
zeitgeist as the Conservatives imploded, ultimately selling a remarkable 
250,000 copies. But the small circle that controlled Labour’s economic policy 
was reluctant to sign up to Hutton’s wide-ranging economic vision, 
which Brown and Ed Balls regarded as a dangerous hostage to electoral 
fortune (and an attempt by Blair to loosen their control over economic strategy). 
Murphy shows that, instead, a discourse of constitutional reform, somewhat 
influenced by the work of Charter 88, emerged to fill the space where debates 
about economic democracy and corporate governance might otherwise have 
gone. Murphy’s point is not to downplay the significance of constitutional reform. 
On the contrary, he (rightly) thinks that we should view this period of debate 
on the constitution within Labour, and the watered-down version of reform 
that was enacted after 1997, as a historic episode of political reform. 
Thanks to the massed ranks of the leftist intelligentsia mobilised through 
Charter 88; the Scottish Constitutional Convention; and a generic left-wing 
rhetoric that disparaged the Thatcher government for pushing through radical 
reforms ‘undemocratically’, Labour’s account of modernisation encompassed 
constitutional changes such as devolution, incorporation of the ECHR into 
domestic law, freedom of information and (limited) House of Lords reform. 
This was despite the lack of enthusiasm for these measures among Blair 
and other key figures in the PLP. As Murphy notes, this demonstrates both 
the success of Charter 88 and others in forcing the Labour leadership to 
adopt a set of measures that they were fundamentally ambivalent about, 
but also shows why, in the end, there was little appetite in Labour high 
command to go any further in deepening and rationalising these individual 
reforms into one overall coherent package of constitutional change.   
In that case, we might ask, how should we characterise Labour’s 
economic strategy by 1997? Surely that was neoliberal? 
Again, Murphy complicates the picture. He points out that Labour had long 
thought of its economic policy as aimed at modernising the British economy 
through state intervention on the supply side. This was, after all, the 
central political pitch of Harold Wilson in the 1960s and again of Neil 
Kinnock in the 1980s: that a Labour government was better suited than 
the Conservatives to drive investment into British science and industry
 and to use the state to adapt Britain’s economy to new technologies 
and methods of production. The real innovation in Labour’s economic 
worldview, Murphy shows, was that during the 1990s supply side 
modernisation was conceptualised as less about revitalising the 
manufacturing sector and more about increasing investment in education, 
training and infrastructure. This was the rise of ideas about a 
‘knowledge-based economy’ or ‘human capital’, influenced by American 
New Keynesian economists such as Robert Reich (in his earlier, New 
Democrat guise) and Lawrence Summers (who had taught Ed Balls at 
Harvard). These ideas – which legitimised public investment in education 
and training as a means of boosting economic growth – intersected with 
the growing awareness among Labour policy-makers that the British 
economy was now increasingly dominated by service-sector employment 
and thus had become ‘deindustrialised’.
 For one group within the party, it was essentially the greatest peacetime 
government in history (or perhaps should be ranked equal with the 1945 
government), led by one (or perhaps two) of the best politicians Labour 
ever produced. For another group, it was a moral disgrace that sold out 
Labour’s basic principles, led by a shifty opportunist with only the 
shallowest connection to Labour’s traditions. 
Futures of Socialism makes a powerful intervention in this discussion 
because it shows that Labour needs a more rational debate about what 
the party got right after 1997 and what it got wrong, not to mention a 
more detailed appreciation of how the social and economic context has 
changed since 2010. It is arguable that a discussion along those lines 
took place among Democrats in the US, for example, after 2016. 
Shocked by the victory of Trump, the Biden administration came into 
office determined to build on the Obama years but also to take some 
more strongly left-leaning stances on economic and social policy. 
Labour should follow suit. There is no better starting point for politicians, 
commentators and academics who want to contribute to the debate on 
Labour’s past and future than Colm Murphy’s book.  Ben Jackson

Three More

 This is the day I celebrate 2 million clicks! 

And it’s still only 18th June, showing 295,000 clicks compared with 258,000
 last month! So onwards and upwards!

Waves of War – nationalism, state formation and ethnic exclusion in the 
modern world Andreas Wimmer (2013) 

The Making of Modern Economics Mark Skousen (4th ed 2022)

The history of modern economics is a cunning plot that can match the best of historical novels. The running story line is man’s search for wealth and pros-perity and the economic model that best serves the needs of the common man.

The main character is Adam Smith, a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the philosophy he represents, the self-regulating system of natural liberty and competition. Our hero has gone through untold triumphs and tragedies in the unfolding of over 200 years of economic history. Sometimes he appears lifeless following the blows of his opponents. But he always recovers.

A QUICK OVERVIEW

The plot begins in dramatic fashion in 1776, when a London publisher printed Adam Smith’s monumental work, The Wealth of Nations, the intellectual shot heard around the world. Smith’s captivating philosophy of natural liberty and the invisible hand rapidly became the central character of modern economics as the Industrial Revolution and political liberty exploded on the scene, and created a new era of wealth and economic growth over the next two centuries. The enlightened Scottish model of prosperity quickly spread to France (via J.-B. Say and Bastiat), America (via Thomas Jefferson), and the rest of the Western world. Yet the optimistic world of Adam Smith was almost immediately chal-lenged by Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, two serious scholars who propound the gloomy doctrine of the iron law of subsistence wages and the permanent misery of the working class. These pessimistic forecasts were fol-lowed by the appearance of John Stuart Mill, who vacillated between liberty and socialism as utopian communitarianism reached its zenith of popularity.

Introduction.

Then, in the middle of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx suddenly strode onto the scene with talk of exploitation and alienation among the industrial workers, and plunged economics into a new dark age. The rise of socialism would be the biggest challenge Smithian capitalism would face over the next century.

THE MARGINAL REVOLUTION

Fortunately, a new light appeared to counter the dark forces of social engi-neering. This “marginal” revolution gave new life to our main character, the invisible-hand model of Adam Smith. It came from three sources in the early 1870s—from Carl Menger in Austria, Léon Walras in Switzerland, and Wil-liam Stanley Jevons in England. Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, a colleague of Menger, was the frst economist to take on Marx with a devastating critique of his labor theory of value and exploitation. Through the textbooks of Alfred Marshall in England, and Frank Taussig and Irving Fisher in the United States, the Smi-thian model of modern economics was rebuilt. Thus resuscitated, it made an effective counterattack on the growing socialist movement. Scientifc econom-ics had come of age.

Nevertheless, the late nineteenth century was the era of big business and the giant trusts of Carnegie and Rockefeller. Institutionalists like Thorstein Veblen swayed the crowds of cynics with their warnings of conspicuous con-sumption and monopoly power, while German sociologist Max Weber wrote of the religious underpinnings and the “iron cage” of capitalism.

KEYNES AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION

But the biggest blow to Adam Smith’s world of free-market capitalism came with the 1929 crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Neoclassical econo-mists comprehended the nuances of supply and demand, but failed to grasp the mysteries of the “money nexus,” the vital connection between the micro economy and the macro economy. The great Yale professor Irving Fisher made bold attempts at solving the missing link between micro and macro in the early twentieth century, and the Austrian Ludwig von Mises, relying on the pro-found work of the Swede Knut Wicksell, fnally bridged the gap in his Theory of Money and Credit. But the Mises—Wicksell theories didn’t take hold in aca-demia or the halls of government, and by the early 1930s, banks collapsed, businesses failed, and millions of workers begged for a living wage as gov-ernments around the globe struggled to overcome the decade-long fnancial nightmare.

Who would save capitalism? The battle lines were drawn between the classical economists who defended the policies of laissez faire, and the Marxists and socialists who demanded a revolutionary overthrow of the old order. Amid the global intellectual confict appeared John Maynard Keynes, the economist as savior. This Cambridge don proposed a new, sophisticated model based on a “fnancial instability hypothesis” inherent to the capitalist system. This “new economics” required government intervention in the monetary and fiscal arena to stabilize the market economy. Yet, unlike its chief Introduction rival, Marxism, the Keynesian model did not require nationalization or micro control of supply and demand. The classical model of thrift, balanced budgets, low taxes, and the gold standard was relegated to periods of full employment, while the Keynesian prescription of consumer demand, deficit financing, progressive taxation, and fat money played out during periods of economic recession and unemployment. It was viewed as the ideal compromise and soon college instructors, their heads buried in a popular new textbook by MIT wunderkind Paul Samuelson, were teaching students strange new tools—the multiplier, the marginal propensity to consume, the paradox of thrift, aggregate demand, and C + I + G. Keynesian economics reflected the high tide of macroeconomic theorizing and mathematical modeling.

THE RETURN TO MARKET ECONOMICS

The final chapter in our story begins after World War II. Through the monetarist counterrevolution, led by Chicago’s Milton Friedman, economists began to focus more on the instability of government macro policies. Fried-man, relying on empirical work more than abstract model building, demonstrated how the Federal Reserve, a government creation, was the principal culprit in causing the Great Depression. By adopting a stable monetary policy, the self-regulating market economy of Adam Smith could once again flourish. The Chicago School became the driving force behind the return to classical economics and the need for empirical evidence to support theory. Soon other schools of free-market economics—supply side, rational expectations, and Austrian—challenged the Keynesian monolith.

The triumph of the market reached its zenith of success with the collapse of the Soviet economic system in the early 1990s. The Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek had predicted the demise of socialistic central planning for years, and now their prediction was finally fulfilled. The failure of the socialist paradigm ushered in a new era of free trade, denationalization, and privatization throughout the developing world. Our story of modern economics ends here on an optimistic note, even as battles are still being fought over the right kind of economic policies to pursue in the face of fnancial crises, war, uncertainty, and globalization. In many ways, this final ichapter of modern economics foreshadows the continuing battle between two paradigms, laissez faire versus socialist interventionism, and Adam Smith’s world of imperfect capitalism appears to be challenged again.

STRANGE AND TORRID LIVES 

Yet our story is not just an account of conflicting ideas. It is also an amazing tale of idle dreamers, academic scribblers, occasional quacks, and madmen in authority. The lives of economists are often just as exciting and unusual (even bizarre) as those of most famous people. In these pages, you will fnd the story of:

• A professor of moral philosophy who burned his clothes, then burned his papers before dying; Introduction

• A Cambridge economist who may have been a secret agent for the Soviet Union during World War II;

• A revolutionary who, though his income was in the top 5 percent in Europe, constantly begged for money and speculated wildly in the stock market;

• A government advisor who was so fascinated with people’s palms that he had casts made of his friends’ hands;

• A multimillionaire who lost everything during the stock market crash of 1929;

• A wealthy economist who was murdered by his housekeeper;

• A utilitarian thinker who demanded that his preserved body remain on display at the University College of London;

• A free-market advocate who invented income tax withholding to help fnance World War II;

• A multimillionaire broker who gave all his wealth to his three sons;

• An economist who spent two months in jail, charged with blasphemy against the Virgin Mary;

• A philosopher who learned Greek at age three and suffered a mental breakdown at age twenty;

• An economist who fancied himself as an informal consultant to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini;

• A famous minister of fnance who paraded around the streets of Vienna with two prostitutes and later became president of the American Eco-nomic Association;

• An American economist who refused to use a telephone, make his bed, do the dishes, or clean his clothes, and gave all his students the same grade, regardless of their work;

• A European professor who was determined not to use charts or graphs of any kind in his voluminous writings, and who was a confirmed bachelor until age fifty-seven.

Welcome to the bizarre world of academic economists!

Why study the lives of the economists, and not just their ideas? It would be unfair to dismiss a philosopher’s theories simply because he may have been a bad husband or a drunk. We may fnd Karl Marx’s life reproachful, but does that mean his theories of alienation and exploitation are wrong? Ideas must stand on their own merit, not on the basis of who invented them. Yet we study and judge the actions of our heroes and villains, not just to prove or disprove their philosophies, but to better understand them, and why they said what they said.

The history of economic thought is not normally taught this way, but then this book is not a normal history. It is, candidly, an irreverent, passion-ate, sometimes humorous, and often highly opinionated account of the lives and theories of famous economists, from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman.

To enhance the readers’ interest in the book, I’ve added a variety of side-lights, including photographs, diagrams, boxed commentaries, and even classical music selections appropriate to the different chapters.

The Big Three in Economics – Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes 
Mark Skousen (2007)
The stories and ideas of these Big Three economists are told in context of a larger 
history I have described in greater detail in “The Making of Modern Economics”. 
In the introduction to that work, I describe two possible approaches to writing about 
the lives and ideas of economists, what I term the spectral versus the hierarchal 
approach. The most popular method of analysis I describe as a pendulum, by 
which historians place each economist somewhere along a political spectrum, 
from extreme left to extreme right. Simple though it is, I see several problems 
with the spectral approach. First, it treats Karl Marx and Adam Smith as coequals

A FEW MORE

2 million clicks – almost and it’s still only half of the month gone, showing 274k clicks compared with quarter of a million last month!

Ivan Illich made a big impact on me at University and I have therefore been 
fascinated to read this book by 2 people who knew him well - Ivan Illich 50 
years later – situating deschooling society in his intellectual and personal
 journey Rosa Bruno-Jofre and Jon Zaldivar (2022)

The book was well received in the early 1970s. There had been other successful books critiquing schooling, in particular those written by Paul Goodman and Jonathan Kozol and the studies of social historians. However, Deschooling Society, in its apocalyptic tone, announced Illich’s view that the end of the era of scholarization had been reached. It was a time of uncertainty and crisis in which the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 had led to the realization of the dependency on oil and to economic uncertainty. In 1972, the impact of The Limits to Growth, commissioned by the Club of Rome, reporting on economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources and the limits of the system, substantiated the idea of change. We needed alternative models on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

It was a time when decolonization and its impact on life and intellectual discourses opened up new questions about education as an intervening tool. The processes of the Latin American countries had been involved in different attempts at social transformation in the 1960s and early 1970s, including looking at education in new, transformative ways. Paulo Freire’s pedagogy was an example of an epistemological rupture in the way to approach adult education and social change. Other publications of Illich’s in the 1970s attracted attention, for example, Celebration of Awareness (Anchor Books, 1971), Tools for Conviviality (Harper & Row, 1973), Energy and Equity (Marion Boyars, 1974), and Medical Némesis (Calder and Boyars, 1975). We would note, for example, that the author of Illich’s obituary published by The Lancet wrote that Medical Némesis had “something of a prophetic quality.”9 However, the successful reception of Deschooling Society did not last very long.

Illich’s ideas of the disestablishment of schooling from the state and his questioning of schooling having the monopoly of education as “The Futility of Schooling in Latin America,” Saturday Review, 20 April 1968, 57–9 and 74–5. Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1960); Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-nineteenth Century Massachusetts (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001; first published in 1968); Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens, The Limits to Growth (New York: Potomac Associates – Universe Books, 1972).  Deschooling Society played a marginal role in the educative debate of the 1980s. Illich himself, as we indicate in chapter 4, became critical of his own approach. The political context of the 1980s was characterized by strong neoliberal policies (sponsored by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Helmut Kohl). It was a time of repression of social and cultural movements, a time of counter-revolutionary wars in Central America sponsored by the United States, and the end of the decade witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc. The shift was dramatic, and critical thinking in education had difficulties in gaining strength and reaccommodating this shift.

ABC – the Alphetization of the popular mind Ivan Illich and Barry Saunders (1988) 

How Change Happens Duncan Green (2nd ed 2024)

The first edition was 2016 and had 287 pages. This newer one has 304 and 
a new final chapter. 
Reading books is hard work. I suspect that fewer and fewer of us have the 
concentration span to read the whole thing from beginning to end, but maybe 
that’s just me – I’ve become a chronic speed reader/skimmer. 
But now you’ve got to the all-important ‘so what?’ bit. 
What do the previous chapters suggest for activists seeking to be more effective in
 their efforts to change the world?

This concluding chapter will try to strike a delicate balance between the complexity of real life and the ‘intentionality’ of those trying to make change happen. When this book came out in 2016, I was very reluctant to provide too much direction—I wanted to explore the importance of power and systems and the limits to our ability to change them, but also to show that by learning to dance with such systems, we can contribute to some of the wonderful changes going on in the world (and help defend against the dark stuff ).

But since the book was published, I have worked with inspirational civil

society organizations around the world, along with hundreds of brilliant

LSE students, researchers, and senior aid sector leaders to discuss and

refine these ideas. What they’ve taught me allows this new edition to be

a bit more propositional. Working with people from around the world trying

to bring about change in the most difficult of circumstances, I think we

have some useful ideas on how to bring about intentional change.

This (final) chapter offers a methodology for how to unpack complex problems; identify points of entry for activism; then use power analysis and stakeholder mapping to better understand the individuals and institutions you are seeking to influence. It cautions against being overly linear, arguing that, in order to flourish in complex systems, activists should cultivate curiosity, humility, self-awareness, and openness to a diversity of viewpoints. It explores the obstacles such an approach faces, in terms of conventional ways of working, thinking, and funding activism. It encourages us to nurture a genuine curiosity about the complex interwoven elements that characterize the systems we are trying to influence, without abandoning our desire to take action. I hope it’s useful, or at least interesting.

Commanding Hope Thomas - Homer-Dixon (2020)   

VALUES AND TEMPERAMENTS

A compelling vision is one that appeals to our shared values as human beings and, also, to our common personality temperaments. I see human values as coming in three main types: utilitarian, moral, and existential. What I call “utilitarian values” reflect our uncomplicated likes or dislikes— for vanilla ice cream over chocolate, for instance. Most economists use this notion of value; in their parlance, our “preference” for one thing over another thing is determined by its greater “utility” to us. But this notion of value reflects an astonishingly impoverished understanding of human beings: it’s based on the assumption that we’re nothing more than decisionmaking machines choosing among options based on how much they satisfy our hedonistic desires. It underpins economists’ common assumption that we’re insatiable consumers of material stuff and that this consumption is key to the good life. To maintain economic growth, mammoth industries of persuasion have arisen to foster mass consumption regardless of its actual importance for our well-being, and a huge apparatus of economic theory has made this consumption morally legitimate purportedly to sustain the “health” of the economy. According to this view, people are little more than walking appetites. Thus the Consumer Society.

Yet we’re obviously so much more! We also have “moral values,” which are emotionally charged rules or principles that we believe ought to govern our conduct, most often with other people, but also with other living creatures. These “oughts” can be specific injunctions, like “we shouldn’t hit each other,” or more general principles like the Golden Rule. Many people believe such “oughts” ultimately come from a higher authority, such as a deity in which they have faith. They consider these injunctions as objective, universal, and absolute, and hold, as part of their belief, that they’ll be punished if the violate them. Others think their moral values arise from their community’s history and culture, or that they simply make sense given the evidence they draw from human interactions. They generally don’t believe these values are objective and universal, and don’t have a clear idea of how or even whether they’ll be punished if they violate them.

Finally, we have what I would call “existential values” (although some might call them “spiritual values”), which help us answer the big questions about why we’re here and what our purpose is. These values concern, most deeply, how we understand our specific role in our larger story about reality— about our relationship to the cosmos, as it were. We typically don’t spend a lot of time talking about these values, and many of us turn to religion for them; but in some ways they’re the most important values of all, because they’re key to our views about what makes our lives meaningful and good.

Very roughly, as we move from the bottom to the top of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs (chapter 9), we start with utilitarian values at the base, shift to moral values in the middle, and ultimately come to existential values at the top. We derive our moral and existential values mainly from the worldviews of the groups that matter to us, and we use them to create our vision of a desirable future and the hero stories and immortality projects we construct for ourselves within that vision. They are fundamental to the meaning of our hope.

I also see three general types of temperament in the human population: exuberant, prudent, and empathetic. I’ve developed this three-part distinction— shown in the table on the next page— through my work on ideologies and worldviews, including the state-space model, and especially after reflecting on contentious public debates over environmental issues. It’s at best a rule of thumb, and it’s not wholly original; but I still find it extraordinarily useful. By temperament I mean a person’s underlying emotional and cognitive predisposition towards the world. People with an exuberant temperament are fundamentally optimistic and happy. They have a strong sense of human agency, so they’re joyous about life’s possibilities to explore, create, and flourish. And they aspire to have the opportunity to change and to grow, which means they’re deeply averse to any kind of constraint. People with a prudent temperament, in contrast, are fundamentally cautious. They have an acute sense of the dangers lurking in the world, so their main aspiration is safety. They tend to be more skeptical about human agency and more motivated by fear, and they’re apt to think recklessness and profligacy tempt fate. But their perspective isn’t necessarily bleak: because they’re sensitive to the fragility of order and to the interdependence of things around them, the world often provokes in these people feelings of awe and reverence.

Finally, those with an empathetic temperament are motivated by both compassion for people (or perhaps for living things generally) and by anger when the people (or living things) they care about aren’t treated well. They’re averse to suffering and, most fundamentally, they aspire to justice and fairness as understood within a framework of strong moral values. Three common temperaments and their key properties - Several of the state-space questions I introduced on this page highlight key differences between the three temperaments. People with an exuberant temperament will tend to see the world as safe, believe in agency, be oriented towards the future, and be inclined to encourage change and resist authority. People with a prudent temperament are more likely to see the world as dangerous and be skeptical about agency. And finally, people with an empathetic temperament will stress the basic generosity of human nature, the fundamental similarity of all human beings, and the importance of caring for others.

Most people’s personalities mix all three temperaments to different degrees. If an apex of a triangle represents the pure form of each, hardly anyone falls exactly at one apex; instead people generally fall somewhere in the space in between the three. And to the extent that most of us have a bit of each temperament available to us, we’re able to emphasize one bit or another, as our circumstances change.

But what has surprised me over the years is how readily people can be sorted into one of these three categories—how much, in other words, people tend to cluster towards the triangle’s corners. That’s partly because the temperaments sometimes don’t combine easily. It’s especially hard to mix the exuberant and prudent temperaments. Exuberant striving for opportunity and self-expression doesn’t easily fit with prudent awareness of danger and constraint, so these two temperaments can be like oil and water. It’s much easier to mix the exuberant and the empathetic or the prudent and the empathetic.

This tripartite distinction isn’t simply another way of labeling the standard left-right ideological spectrum. Sure, people who are exemplars of exuberance, such as capitalist entrepreneurs, are often conservative, but they are neighbors on the ideological right with more prudent conservatives who emphasize restraint, stability, and caution. Similarly, while many empathetic lefties strive for their version of justice, some are exuberant activists while others are cautious and careful. And of course, none of the three temperaments is good or bad in any absolute sense. As human beings, we appear to have evolved these three psychological tendencies because each, depending on context, serves a vital social purpose.

Sometimes our societies need to be warned of danger; other times, we need all the exuberant agency we can marshal to innovate or respond to a crisis; and at yet other times we need to be reminded that our members’ wellbeing is paramount. This categorization of temperaments is simple but, among other benefits, it helps us understand people’s reactions to the issue of economic growth and its possible limits. Most people who are emotionally invested in economic growth— and I’d include in this group most members of Western corporate elites and many technooptimists—have exuberant temperaments, and many of them have built their hero stories around the freedom for agency and personal flourishing that growth provides. Their reaction to the idea of limits to growth often resembles their reaction to the prospect of heavy state regulation of free markets. Both represent a kind of death—in this case, the death of the spirit of agency and opportunity. (Thus the common anti-regulation injunction: “Remove the dead hand of the state from the market!”)

Many people who are critical of economic growth, on the other hand, are environmentalists with prudent temperaments; they see growth as recklessly damaging Earth’s natural systems, and for them, it’s growth, not the absence of it, that represents death. These simple categorizations of temperaments and values can also help us make our vision of the future— and the hero stories we weave within that vision— more powerfully motivating for a broad swath of humanity. Today, our vision and stories must appeal to much more than our hedonistic, utilitarian values, for instance. They need to articulate clear moral and existential principles that position us all in a larger narrative of social purpose, while giving us guidance for what’s right and fair.

Yet today’s dominant economic worldview, which sustains a global monoculture of consumerism in all Western societies— and inspires the development of a like monoculture in new middle classes in non-Western societies as diverse as Brazil, South Africa, India, and China— appeals mainly to utilitarian values and treats us as atomized, purposeless individuals. Its vision of the good life is represented in countless advertising images of personal physical pleasure: lounging on a tropical beach, living in a luxury mansion, vacationing on a cruise liner, driving a fast car along a winding mountain road, and so on. The images signal the high social status of the people enjoying these pleasures; if you’ve “arrived,” if you’re rich enough to be living this way, the images tell us, you must be at the top of the social hierarchy.

Not only is this economic worldview now radically at odds with Earth’s deteriorating material reality, but it also doesn’t remotely meet people’s full range of psychological needs. Once our basic physical needs at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy are met, consumption of further material stuff is far down on just about everyone’s good-life list. Give us happy loved ones, supportive community, a satisfying group identity, rewarding work, moral purpose, some control over our destiny, and reasons for hope, and you’ll give most of us nine-tenths of what we really desire in a good life; at that point, looking down on everyone else from the top of the material-consumption status hierarchy becomes much less psychologically satisfying and important. Still, facing a future that looks treacherous, and without a worldview or a vision of the future built around clear moral and existential values that give our lives meaning, it’s easy to understand why we might try to assuage an amplified death anxiety through further consumption. There’s nothing to beat “shopping therapy” at certain low moments. Research shows that in a world that seems out of control, rather than hunkering down and reducing consumption, people often just buy more stuff, because it’s something they think they can control; and, at the very least, it gives them an immediate burst of utilitarian happiness. The irony is obvious: the worse that problems like climate change become and the more scared we get, the more stuff we’ll consume…another vicious circle.

Late Soviet Britain Abbey Innes (2023) 408 pp

The shattering of the British state over the last forty years was driven by the idea that markets are always more efficient than the state: the private sector morally and functionally superior to the public sector. But as this book shows, this claim was ill-founded, based as it was on the most abstract materialist utopia of the twentieth century. The neoliberal revolution in Great Britain and Northern Ireland – the United Kingdom – has failed accordingly, and we are living with the systemic consequences of that failure.

A COUPLE MORE

This time a couple of anarchist writings. First The Leaderless Revolution – how ordinary people will take power and change politics in the the 21^st century Carne Ross(2011)

There are four simple ideas at the heart of The Leaderless Revolution. Together, they suggest a radically different approach to conducting our affairs.

• The first is that in an increasingly interconnected system, such as the world emerging in the twenty-first century, the action of one individual or a small group can affect the whole system very rapidly. Imagine the world as a sports stadium, where a “wave” can be started by just one person, but quickly involves the whole crowd. Those most powerful are right beside us;and we—in turn—are best placed to influence them. A suicide bomber acts, assaults his enemy and recruits others all in one horrible action: a technique with such effect that it has spread from Sri Lanka to Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, Bali, London and New York within a few short years. But the same lesson is taught, with greater force, by peaceful acts, a truth shown by Mahatma Gandhi as well as the heroic young women, some still unknown, who refused to move to the back of the bus in the 1950s and 1960s American South. Modern network theory shows how one action can rapidly trigger change throughout the whole system. One person becomes a group, then becomes a movement; one act believed in and repeated by others becomes material, dramatic change.

• The second key idea is that it is action that convinces, not words. New research is now demonstrating what good theater directors have always known: Show, don’t tell. The actions of those people closest to us—and not government policy or even expert opinion—are the most influential. This means that Internet petitions are not likely to bring about fundamental change, although they might make the signatory feel better (which may indeed be the purpose). Likewise, social media may help organize and inform larger groups in ways that have never been available before, but unless this organization is used for a purpose—to do something—it is worthless. In contrast to asking for or voting for someone else to do it, action can address the problem directly. There is an education intrinsic to action—you have to learn about the problem to solve it, for most problems are complex. This education reverses the infantilization and ignorance that authority encourages: You need not worry about the details, because we will take care of it. Equally, it demolishes the common notion that ordinary people are somehow incapable of making intelligent decisions about their own circumstances. Again, evidence shows this to be an arrogant fallacy—people know their own circumstances best of all.

• The third key idea is about engagement and discussion. Again it is a simple idea: Decision making is better when it includes the people most affected. In the current Western model of representative democracy, we have become accustomed to the idea that politicians, elected by us, should negotiate among competing interests and make the necessary compromises to produce consensus and policy. In Washington today, it is painfully clear that this is the opposite of what is actually happening, while in Europe political consensus around the social democratic model is breaking down. The far right is emerging once more as a significant political force, in reaction to the largely unpredicted and sometimes violent changes that the world is now experiencing. In times of uncertainty, the false appeal of those who loudly proclaim certainty gains luster. In Brazil, Britain and New Orleans, a better way of deciding our affairs together is emerging (and it is not the Internet, or on the Internet). It resembles democracy in its earliest and purest days—people gathering together, not in chat rooms, to make real decisions for themselves, not voting for others to decide on their behalf, or merely ventilate their frustrated opinions in town hall meetings or on the World Wide Web. When lobbyists fill what used to be called the people’s parliaments and congresses, this alternative “participatory” democracy offers something unfamiliar yet extraordinary.

• When large numbers of people make decisions for themselves, the results are remarkable: Everyone’s views are heard, policies take all interests into account (as all lasting policy must), and are thus fairer. Facts and science are respected over opinion. Decision making becomes transparent (and thus less corrupt), respectful and less partisan—people who participate in decisions tend to stick to them. More responsibility and trust in society can only come about by giving real decision-making responsibility to people. If you do not give people responsibility, they tend to behave irresponsibly, and sometimes violently. Happily, the converse is also true—give people power and responsibility, and they tend to use it more wisely—and peacefully. This hints at the fourth idea that suffuses the argument throughout The Leaderless Revolution: agency—the power to decide matters for ourselves. We have lost agency. We need to take it back. We have become too detached from the decisions most important to us; we are disconnected, alienated, including from each other. This has contributed to a deeper ennui about modern life: What is it all for? Where is the meaning? What is the point? And in the solution to this crisis, which is both personal and political, something profound may be available. If we take back agency, and bring ourselves closer to managing our affairs for ourselves, then something else may also come about: We may find a fulfillment and satisfaction, and perhaps even a meaning, which so often seems elusive in the contemporary circumstance.

These four ideas form the core of the philosophy of The Leaderless Revolution. Adopt these ideas, above all act upon them, and things will change. The book is intended as a guide and not a prescription. It sets out a method of doing things and taking action, and not what the outcome of this method should be. That is for everyone—acting together—to determine, and no single individual can pretend to know it, let alone a writer tapping away on a laptop. No one can claim to know what others truly want. These needs and concerns—and dreams—can only be expressed through action, shared decision-making and discussion with those most affected, including those who might disagree. But this method is the essence of a new form of politics, indeed a new way of living together on our crowded planet.

The Peaceful Revolutionary recently celebrated James C Scott, the famous 
academic anarchist
 

The historian James C. Scott, drawing on archaeological and anthropological evidence across multiple continents, showed that early human communities were far more mobile, flexible, and resistant to fixed hierarchy than we tend to assume. Hunter-gatherer bands moved seasonally, following resources rather than claiming them. When things got scarce, they moved on. When they returned, the land had recovered. This wasn’t accident. It was a practice developed, transmitted, and refined across generations. It was called the commons.

‘Ours’ before ‘mine’

The commons begins, as most things do, with family. Think about how resources move within a household. Nobody invoices their partner for cooking dinner. Nobody charges their child for the use of a bedroom. There’s no market inside a family, because the relationships are organised around need and reciprocity rather than transaction. What’s mine is available to you, what’s yours is available to me, and we’re both better off for it. This logic extended outward, to neighbours, to the village, to the wider community, for most of human history. The commons wasn’t a formal institution imposed from above, it was the natural shape that cooperation takes when people live closely together and depend on the same land.

Scholars used to assume, following Adam Smith, that before money there was barter, that people traded wheat for shoes and meat for pots in a primitive version of the marketplace. The anthropologist David Graeber spent years looking for ancient evidence of this barter economy and couldn’t find any. No society has ever been documented that organised itself primarily through the exchange of goods between individuals. What actually existed, everywhere, were systems of mutual obligation, gift, and reciprocal support. The shoemaker didn’t trade shoes for wheat, the community fed the shoemaker, and the shoemaker kept everyone’s feet dry. Debts were social rather than financial. Memory and relationship did the work that money later claimed to do. This matters because the standard story, that markets are natural and ownership is instinctive and competition is the default, is not history. It’s a story told backwards, projecting the assumptions of the present onto a past that worked very differently.

How the commons worked

In medieval England, most of the land was managed as commons. Villagers held strips of arable land for their own crops, but the woodlands, meadows, and pastures surrounding the village were shared. These weren’t free-for-alls. They were governed by detailed, locally negotiated rules about how many animals each family could graze, when different areas could be used, and how much timber could be taken and for what purpose. The rights had names: pasture (grazing), estovers (collecting wood for fuel and repairs) piscary (fishing), pannage (letting pigs forage in woodland), and turbary (cutting peat). These were customary entitlements, handed down and understood, later enforced by the community through the manorial courts. If someone overgrazed their allocation, neighbours would say so. Social pressure, reputation, and long memory were the mechanisms of governance.