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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

The Future of Capitalism - IV

“Acknowledgements” are normally the least-read section of any book – into which are pored often embarrassingly-excessive expression of thankful debts. Indeed if the book is American, the section will read like an Oscar speech.
But Paul Collier’s “Acknowledgements” (unusually in the end-section) made me think about the whole issue of who an author thinks (s)he is writing for – and how that affects the style and content of a book
He explains that, having started with a review of some books, he realised that what was really needed was

a synthesis of moral philosophy, political economics, finance, economic geography, social psychology and social policy  

and that he then proceeded to identify and work with a small “brains trust” of individuals in these various fields he was able to find within the enclaves of Oxford University

We imagine that an author is writing for us – if not personally, that he has a mental picture  of the sort of person likely to pick the book up…But Collier reveals here that the people whose opinion he sought and  listened to were a small group of specific individuals. This perhaps explains a couple of things - one of which I only noticed when I went back to reread the book. First, as I had signalled last week, I found it curious that he failed to acknowledge the range of others who have explored similar themes – from GDH Cole, through Paul Hirst to the Third Way and beyond. I’m sure Collier is familiar with those strands but perhaps not the specialists he consulted….

It’s rare for me to return to a book for a second, closer reading within a month of the first read. But it’s perhaps something I should do more often since, this time around, I found myself scribbling quite a few question marks and remarks against sections that I simply couldn’t understand. I had the feeling, quite frankly, that one of the experts on his Brain’s Trust had advised him to include something which he didn’t quite feel he could explain properly….
And, as several of the reviewers have noticed, there were too many sections which aere too scrappy and need a lot more thought….particularly in Part II in the chapters on the “ethical company, family and world”

Future of Capitalism - Useful References and follow-up reading
The wide ranging nature of Collier’s book threw up an unusually wide assortment of papers and blogs….
Branko Milanovic honoured it with two separate posts – the first suggesting that it smacked of “nostalgia for a past that never was”; the second exploring what he has to say about healthy families, organisations and worlds

The radical American economist James K Galbraith (son of JF) reviews it along with a new book from Joseph Stiglitz and a forthcoming one from Branko Milanovic

The author of “TheThird Pillar” can be heard discussing his book in transcript and on podcast

The Denmark Lesson; short piece commenting on Collier’s Danish comments

Why the third way failed – economics, morality and the origins of the “big society”; Bill Jordan (2010) is a very thoughtful treatment of the experience…..reviewed here

Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011). An overdue assessment of the relevance of Paul Hirst’s ideas more than a decade after his death


Beyond the Third Way (Geyer 2001)

Can Democracies tackle illiberal and “inward-looking” drives?; Daniel Danaiu (Romanian Jounral of European Affairs June 2019) A broad-ranging overview of recent trends and writing by an ex-Governor of the Romanian National Bank

The Fix – how nations survive and thrive in a world in decline; Jonathan Tepperman (2016) one of the positive analyses selected by Collier

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