My Brains Trust - part I

I liked the idea of the little “brains trust” Paul Collier gathered round him when he was writing “The Future of Capitalism”. One of the critical remarks I have made about what is otherwise a great book is that it doesn’t mention a lot of writing which essential to the question – a few of which I point to in the first link.

And this has given me the idea of providing my own “Brains Trust” -  ie of individuals and books I would invite to help me understand better the heated debates (taking place throughout the world) about how our present economic system might be brought under control…

These posts frequently comment on this dreadful failure of those who write books on the subject to “stand on the shoulders of giants” ie to reference (let alone properly discuss) the ideas of the thousands of other writers who are contributing to this critical debate    

The best way to deal with this is via what has perhaps become this blog’s most famous feature - its tables.  

My invited guests start with those who were writing “Before the Crash” – a large selection of which I wrote about more than two years ago. I have divided my guests up in this way for several reasons but mainly because our collective memories fade so quickly these days - and some of the younger generation will therefore not even have heard of these authors and books, 

Sadly, quite a few of the authors are now dead – but their spirit and inspiration live on!

BEFORE THE CRASH (in alphabetical order)

Name	Title of relevant book	What they bring to the table
Daniel Bell	Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)	Bell was a sociologist -  with wide-ranging tastes
Hazel Henderson	Creating Alternative Futures (1978)	One of the first critiques of economics – and still going strong
Ronald Douthwaite	Short Circuit – strengthening local economies in an unstable world” (1996)	Very practical – but also inspirational….23 years on, it hasn’t really been bettered
Amitai Etzioni	The Spirit of Community – rights, responsibilities and the communitarian agenda (1995)	Another sociologist whose writings have ranged widely Recent article by the author
Marlyn Ferguson	The Aquarian Conspiracy – personal and social transformation in the 1980s (1981)	An amazing bridge between the 60s and our times
Jeff Gates	The Ownership Solution- toward a shared capitalism for the 21st Century (1998)	This is an important book of almost 400 pages which, sadly, gets forgotten perhaps because its analysis and message is a moderate one.
Susan George	“The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century” 1999	A political scientist gives us a satirical piece which forces us to think where present forces are taking us….
Paul Hawken	Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution;(1999)	A persuasive vision of how green technology could revitalize capitalism
Paul Hirst	“Associative Democracy. New forms of economic and social governance” (1994) Hirst was a political scientist	Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011). An overdue assessment of the relevance of Paul Hirst’s ideas more than a decade after his death
Albert Hirschman	One of the most famous of his many books was called “Trespassing” since that is what he did to other disciplines – particularly political philosophy as you can see here	He was that rare animal - a much appreciated development economist! Two excellent appreciations are Albert Hirschman and the social sciences – a memorial roundtable ; and For a Better World – Albert Hirschman’s Legacy (2017)
David Korten	When Corporations Rule the World (1995) The Post-Corporate World – Life after Capitalism (1999)	Korten was one of the first to embark on serious activism as a result of his early disillusionment
Robert Kuttner	Everything for Sale – the virtues and limits of markets (1996)	An academic/journalist who has written 360 pages about the limits and about 40 on the virtues…Given the celebrationism of the time, this was very courageous
Ernst Schumacher	Small is Beautiful – economics as if people mattered (1973)	He was  an economist – employed in the UK Coal Board in the 1950s and is the inspiration for the Green movement
Richard Sennett	The Culture of the new capitalism (2006)	Sennett remains one of the few intellectuals capable of matching Daniel Bell in the lucidity of their expositions (and breadth of reading) about social trends…..
Susan Strange	Casino Capitalism  (1986)	Strange helped create the discipline of International Political Economy and wrote superbly (another of her books is “Mad Money”
Lester Thurow	The Future of Capitalism – how today’s economic forces shape tomorrow’s world (1996)	Thurow was a remarkable leftist economist who had critiqued  the economics discipline in 1983 (in Dangerous Currents) and shook conventional thinking with this book

An obvious question is what criteria I used to pick less than 20 individuals from the tens of thousands (in the English language) who have written critically about what has been happening in our world. That’s not an easy question – since it begs a more basic one about how I came to remember these particular writers and titles from my reading of the past 40 years. Most of them are in my library here in the Carpathian mountains – with a few also from the internet…So the vagaries of recall are certainly a factor – as well as the selectivity of the unconscious which will push me away from dogmatic stuff…

And clarity of language is always a consideration 

Apart from the prescient books of the 1970s, what amazes me is the number of fascinating books which were appearing just before the millennium. We really seem to have been wasting the past 20 years….

The last few years, of course, have opened the floodgates of critical writing and the

 next post will bring the story up to date with another table…..