Too Much of a Good Thing

Writing a book about a subject you don’t understand is an activity I’ve recommended for everyone to help dispel the confusions we all have (if we’re honest enough)…

More challenging is when the topic proves to be more amorphous - and changes shape as you work on it.

Such has been my experience with text I started almost 20 years ago – long before the financial crash of 2008…It started with a critique that went as follows -

- Consumerism is killing the planet – and making people miserable.

- The poor are getting poorer

- political culture is getting ever more centralised (notwithstanding Scottish devolution).

- Social democrats like New Labour have sold the state to corporate interests.

- don’t blame individuals such as Tony Blair – it’s in the nature of modern politics. Note the political corruption in Italy, Belgium, Germany, France and even Britain.

- The EU is selfish and lacks vision

The paper then looked at the organisations and people I admired; what they were achieving; where they seemed to be failing and why;and went on to raise the question of how someone of my age, experience and resources might better contribute to society.

Many, of course, will scorn such an aspiration – seeing it as typical of a western “do-gooder”…I readily admit my natural inclination to intervene in social processes (ie my “activist” mode) and that a lot of the recent writing on “chaos theory” and even “systems theory” seems to me to run the risk of encouraging fatalism – one of the four world views Mary Douglas introduced us to and which Chris Hood’s The Art of the State (1999) analyses so brilliantly

The world is getting increasingly complex these days – so it’s hardly surprising that we increasingly hear the argument for “leaving well alone” (or “laisser-faire” as it used to be called). But we do need to look carefully at who makes - and indeed funds - such arguments. They are the right-wing US Foundations funded by such billionaires as the Koch brothers..

One of my favourite writers - AO Hirschmann – actually devoted an entire book (”The Rhetoric of Reaction”; 1991) to examining three arguments conservative writers use for dismissing the hopes of social reformers:

- The futility thesis argues that attempts at social transformation will simply not work

- the perversity thesis holds that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- the jeopardy thesis argues that any proposed change or reform endangers some precious feature.

Have a look at any argument against a proposed reform - you will find it a variant of these three.

But such fatalism offends my sense of what we used to call “free will” (and now “agency theory”). Powerful people exist – whether in corporations, international agencies or governments – who can and do influence events. Our job as citizens is to watch them carefully and protest when we can..

In the 1930s it was not difficult to identify the enemy…Today the enemy is a more voracious and complex system which we variously call “globalisation” or “neoliberalism” and only more recently “capitalism” - whose disastrous consequences the activists of Porto Allegro had exposed……although it took the crash of 2008 to prove the point…

Yanis Varoufakis used the appropriate term “the Global Minotaur” for his brilliant 2011 story of how surplus capital had sought its rewards – with all the (creative) destructiveness that Joseph Schumpeter had first described in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)  

The Minotaur not only survived but managed the amazing trick of transferring bank losses onto state exchequers and bringing on austerity and further vilification of the state…

It was the poisoning of the state I first noticed – thanks to George Monbiot’s The Captive State – the corporate takeover of Britain (2000) - and started to blog about in 2009. But within a few years such a critique of the political class had become commonplace.

I knew I had to put my distaste for economics books aside and take time try to understand not so much the financial crash but rather the true nature of this turbulent system.

And remember, I have an Economics degree and actually taught the subject for a few years in a Polytechnic in the 1970s….But I readily admit my confusions.. and, clearly, globalisation, the new tools of financial engineering and IT have introduced totally new dimensions to the economic world about which I know little.

So, a couple of years ago, I carefully noted both my current and previous reading in this field and produced two rare annotated lists of books. First of the key books written before the 2008 financial crash; then of those I judged worthy of mention which had appeared after the crash. How, you might reasonably ask, did you select these books? Why should we trust your judgement? I try to answer such questions here

One thing I noticed was how differently the various academic disciplines dealt with the subject. Economists seemed the obvious people to start with – but their texts were remarkably dry and clearly oblivious to a lot of important factors. For people who had failed to anticipate the crash, their tone was also a bit too cocky and self-assured.
The sociologists had a more plausible story to tell but generally seemed too ready to lambast everything.

I was most impressed with the smaller numbers of political economists (Blyth, Collier, Stiglitz, Streecken and Varoufakis), economic historians (Tooze) and even a few journalists (Mander)