Explaining the blog's title

The blog was ten years old last autumn – making it one of the longest-running (english-speaking) blogs of its kind.  It first saw the light of day as "Carpathian Musings" because the blogging started in my mountain house in that area but, after a few winters spent in Sofia, I realized that the title was no longer a precise description of its source.

The blog was therefore, for 5 years or so, called “Balkan and Carpathian Musings”.

But neither the word "Balkan" nor "Carpathian" are keywords people use when they are googling on the topics the blog deals with - such as "the global financial crisis", "organisational reform", "social change", "capitalism" - let alone "Romanian culture", "Bulgarian painting", "transitology"etc.... 
So clearly the blog needed a name which better expresses its content and objectives. I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…

Let’s be clear, I’m not interested in raising the profile as an end in itself…..I have no illusions about my significance. But I am confident that my blog (and website) is an almost unique “resource” or, if you prefer, “library”…..Not perhaps so much of my writing – but of the insights of others whose books and papers I’ve taken the time and trouble to seek out and whose significance I’ve both recognized and wanted to pass on……Two crucial but not necessarily connected factors!!

So, let me try to explain why, for the past few months, I’ve been running with the title “Exploring No-Man’s Land”. The images of battlefields this summons up are quite deliberately chosen.

First, an accident of birth had me straddling the borderland of the West and East ends of a shipbuilding town in the West of Scotland – with class, religious and political tensions simmering in those places. 

Then political and academic choices in my late 20s brought me slap into the middle of the no-man’s land between politicians and different sorts of professional and academic disciplines.

Then, when I was almost 50, I became a nomadic consultant, working for the next 25 years in ten different countries

Previous posts have tried to give a sense of how that experience has made me who I am….

I was the son of a Presbyterian Minister (or “son of the manse” as we were known) and received my education in a state school which still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic Tradition……now, sadly, much traduced.

It would have been easier for my parents to send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from our house but, as home was a manse (owned by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End”, that school was fee-paying. And my parents (although no radicals) would never have contemplated taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with modest houses and apartments in the centre and east of the town.

Thus began my familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..And trying to straddle such borders – let alone explore them – can be an uncomfortable experience.

When I became a young councillor in 1968 (for the Catholic-dominated Labour party), I found myself similarly torn I developed loyalties to the local community activists but found myself in conflict with my (older) political colleagues and officials.

And I felt this particularly strongly when I was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and wife-beating……..

The collusion between the police and my legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt” and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was rarely disturbed to sign search warrants!

And, on being elevated a few years later to one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized Departments with massive budgets and manpower.

It was at that stage that I developed a diagram for my students to make sense of the “conflict of loyalties” to what I saw as 4 very different pressures (audiences) to which politicians are subjected – 

- local voters (if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);

- the party (both local and national)

- the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;

- their conscience.

Politicians, I argued, differ according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished – “populist”; “ideologue”, “statesman”,  “maverick”.

The effective politician, however, is the one who resists the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its own important truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership.

And I would make the same point about the different professional and academic disciplines.

Each generates its own way of looking at the world – as you will see from the table below which looks only at seven academic disciplines

The core assumptions of academic subjects

Discipline	Core assumption	Most Famous exponents (not necessarily typical!)
Sociology	Struggle for power	Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, C Wright Mills,Robert Merton,  Herbert Simon, A Etzioni, Ralf Dahrendorf
Economics	Rational choice	Adam Smith, Schumpeter, Keynes, P Samuelson, M Friedmann, J Stiglitz, P Krugman
Political science	Rational choice (at least since the 1970s)	Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, David Easton, S Wolin, Peter Hall, James Q Wilson, Bo Rothstein, Francis Fukuyama
Geography	??	Mackinder, David Harvey, Nigel Thrift, Danny Dorling
Public management	mixed for traditional bodies - rational choice for New PM	Woodrow Wilson, Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt, Guy Peters, G Bouckaert,
anthropology	shared meaning	B Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Shore, David Graeber
Political economy	draws upon economics, political science, law, history, sociology et al to explain how political factors determine economic outcomes.	JK Galbraith, Susan Strange, Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Geoffrey Hodgson, Yanis Varoufakis,

And, of course, each of these seven fields has a variety of sub-fields each of which has its own specific “take” even before you get to the eccentricities of individual practitioners – let me remind you of this table about 10 sub-fields in Economics which I used in a recent post

Pluralism in Economics

Name of “school”	Humans….	Humans act within…	The economy is…..
Old “neo-classical”	optimise narrow self-interest	A vacuum	Stable
New “neo-classical”	can optimise a variety of goals	A market context	Stable in the absence of friction
Post-Keynes	use rules of thumb	A macro-economic context	Naturally volatile
Classical	act in their self-interest	Their class interests	Generally stable
Marxist	do not have predetermined patterns	Their class and historical interests	Volatile and exploitative
Austrian	have subjective knowledge and preferences	A market context	Volatile – but this is generally sign of health
Institutional	have changeable behaviour	Instit envt that sets rules and social norms	Dependent on legal and social structures
Evolutionary	act “sensibly” but not optimally	An evolving, complex system	Both stable and volatile
Feminist	exhibit engendered behaviour	A social context	Ambiguous
Ecological	act ambiguously	Social context	Embedded in the environment

This is an excerpt only – the full table is from Ho-Joon Chang’s “Economics – a User’s Guide” but can be viewed at diagram at p61 of The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017)

Please understand, I’m not trying to confuse – rather the opposite….I’m trying to liberate!

Once we become aware of the very different worlds in which people live, our world suddenly becomes a very richer place – in which we have choices about the particular lens we use to make sense of it all…

I remember the first time I really became aware of this – when I did the Belbin team test. And The Art of Thinking by Bramsall and Harrison (1984) very usefully sets out different types of strategic thinking..

Here’s another example - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/01/framing-capitalism.html

57 Varieties of Capitalism

Last October I developed a table in what was probably the most important post of the year – one in a series about capitalism. The table listed 11 academic disciplines; showed how 3 “schools” of thinking could be discerned in each discipline; and how they tended to treat the subject.

The key variable distinguishing these schools was the extent to which they recognised the realities of power. I named them “market theoreticians”; “mixed” and “critical-realist” respectively.

The subsequent matrix produced 33 different “lens” with which to try to understand the system which rules over us with Minotaur-like voraciousness. I was proud of the result – I had never seen it done before. Of course there was a school of political economists which developed in the 1980s and 90s called the Varieties of Capitalism approach – but this focused on essentially two basic models. 

My matrix is distinctive in 3 ways – first that so many academic fields are listed. At best people will mention economics, sociology and political science – with little recognition that economics has several very different sub-fields. And I might have added “complexity science” which has rapidly developed its own specialism.

The second original aspect of the table is the recognition of three very different “schools” or approaches…Most economists, of course, still adhere to highly theoretical and unrealistic assumptions which were explored (and exploded) in this recent post

But political and behavioural economists – let alone the sociologists, geographers and even psychologists have been muscling in….Indeed I have had to add the psychologists to the table…giving 36 "lens" or squares

And the final distinctive aspect of the table is the identification of so many books – almost 50 covering most of squares…
I have selected the books which appear in the table according to whether they portray a world of “perfect competition” in which, according to the theory, no one has any power or, at the other extreme, a world of large companies and groups exercising power (legal and illegal). 

We are prone these days to use ideological labels too easily – so I want to avoid that by using less obvious labels.

- “Market theoreticians” (column 3) are those whose writing is based on the totally unrealistic assumptions of perfect competition

“Mixed economy” therefore covers those who clearly argue for what used to be called “the mixed economy” and are quite clear that they wish a better, more balanced capitalism;

- The “critical-realist” label covers those who go further in their critical approach, extending their analysis to the role exercised by dubious and illegitimate power players who try to buy democracy and whose activities threaten the planet’s very survival.

Some academic disciplines, of course, like economics, are almost exclusively associated with one school (market) whereas others are more pluralist 

Needless to say, the allocation to one particular column is arbitrary and could be disputed – as can the choice of illustrative authors and books (not all of which I have actually read)

The table is, however, a rather superb example of what post-modernism has done to us – which I will explore in a subsequent post   

The table is, however, a good example of what post-modernism has done to us

 Key Texts about the future of capitalism – by academic discipline and “approach”

 

Academic Discipline	1. Critical-Realist	2. Mixed approach	3. “market theoreticians”
Economics	Debt and Neo-Feudalism; Michael Hudson (2012)  Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis; Brian Davey (2015). Davey is not a career or conventional economist!   23 Things they didn’t tell you about capitalism; Ha Joon-Chang (2010)	People, Power and Profits – progressive capitalism for an age of discontent; Joseph Stiglitz (2019) The Future of Capitalism – facing new anxieties; Paul Collier (2018) Shifts and Shocks – what we’ve learned, and still have to, from the financial crisis; Martin Wolf (2014) Conceptualising Capitalism – institutions, evolution, future; Geoff Hodgson (2015)	Why Globalisation Works; Martin Wolf (2004)     most of the discipline
Economic history	Capitalism and its Economics – a critical History; Douglas Dowd (2000) Never Let a Good Crisis go to waste; Philip Mirowski  (2013)	Crashed – how a decade of financial crises changed the world Adam Tooze (2018)	Economic historians by definition have a strong sense of political and other institutions
Political economy	Inside Capitalism – an intro to political economy; Paul Phillips (2003) Susan Strange - States and Markets (1988) - Casino Capitalism ; (1986) - The Retreat of the State (1994)	Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea; Mark Blyth (2013) Yanis Varoufakis - And the Weak Suffer what they must – Europe, austerity and the threat to global stability (2016) - The Global Minotaur (2012)	The discipline still rediscovering itself but, again, by definition, has a strong sense of the importance of institutions
Political Science	Crisis without End - the unravelling of western prosperity: A Gamble (2014)  Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism; Sheldon Wolin (2008)	Paul Hirst eg Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011).  The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order; Francis Fukuyama (1999)  Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Now; David Marquand (2015)	Only a few brave pol scientists trespass into the economic field – although it is becoming more fashionable
Policy analysis/Think Tanks		“The Locust and the Bee – predators and creators in capitalism’s future”; G Mulgan (2015)	An Intro to Capitalism (IEA 2018)
Sociology	Wolfgang Streeck. - How will Capitalism End?; (2016) - Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (2013) End of capitalism? Michael Mann (2013) Capitalism; Geoff Ingham (2008)	Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)	The sociological voice is still inspired by C Wright Mills, Veblen, Weber and Durkheim
Geography	David Harvey - Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014) - The Enigma of Capital (2010) - A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism (2005).	Danny Dorling - A Better Politics – how government can make us happier (2016 - Injustice (2014)	The geographers are a bolshie lot - with a strong sense of geo-politics
Environment	Come On! Capitalism, short-termism, population and the destruction of the planet; (Club of Rome 2018).	Why we can’t agree about Climate Change; Mike Hulme (2009) Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution; Paul Hawken (1999)	they pride themselves on their technocracy
Management and man’t studies	“The Dictionary of Alternatives – utopianism and organisation”; M Parker (2007)	Rebalancing Society; Henry Mintzberg (2014) Peter Senge Charles Handy	Most mant writers are apologists – apart from the critical mant theorists
Religious studies	Laudato-Si – Pope Francis’ Encyclical (2015). Accessible in its entirety here	The Crisis of global capitalism – Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical and the future of political economy; ed A Pabst (2011)	Questions of Business Life; Higginson (2002)
Psychology	Herbert Marcuse What about me – the struggle for identity in a market based society?; Paul Verhaeghe (2014)
Journalism	Post Capitalism – a guide to our Future; Paul Mason (2015) ….  The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System; Jerry Mander (2012).	How Good Can we be – ending the mercenary society Will Hutton (2015)  Capitalism 3.0 Peter Barnes (2006)	They don’t enjoy the tenure of the academics (altho Hutton is a college Director)

The Beast Destroying the World

 “Capitalism”…I started, but the barman hopped out of a pipkin

“Capitalism”, he countered…”That’s a flat and frothless word

I’m a good Labour man, but if I mentioned capitalism

My clientele would chew off their own ears

And spit them down the barmaid’s publicised cleavage”

“All right” I obliged “Don’t call it capitalism

Let’s call it Mattiboko the Mighty

……..

The poem finishes…

This was my fearless statement

“The Horror World can only be changed by the destruction of

Mattiboko the Mighty,

The Massimataxis Incoporated Supplement

And Gumbo Jumbo the Homely Obblestrog Spectacular”

Audience Reaction was quite encouraging

Adrian Mitchell “Come on Everybody Poems” 1953-2008

 Almost a quarter of my blogposts last year wrestled with various aspects of the economic system which now looks set to destroy the planet.

In my youth, the nuclear threat was what kept us awake at night – and that was particularly the case for those of us who lived a mere couple of kilometres from the US nuclear submarine base on the Clyde. Many thought that the collapse of the Berlin Wall had ended such existential fear - but global warming has now taken its place.

The year started with a couple of posts about important books with “capitalism“ in their title before trying to make amends for the failure of the blog to dealt properly with the ecological issue.

It was, however, Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties” which really got me scribbling last year – initially with a series of posts which reminded me that I had still not managed to complete a book which has occupying me for several years.

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 be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent.”

- 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 the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

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

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.

So, to tempt you into flicking through “To Whom it may Concern” (for which just click the title in the list at the top-right corner of the blog masthead) here is a table with a selection of relevant posts with brief explanations…

Selected Posts about the Beast

Post	What sparked it off	Why it’s worth reading
How will it all end?	Wolfgang Streeck’s “The End of Capitalism?”	Has hyperlinks which cut to the core of the discussion
Why the reluctance to seek consensus?	“Club of Rome” report “Come on! Capitalism”	It’s a definitive report and my post tries to summarise other key texts about the turning point the world seems to have reached
What is wrong with us?	An article in NYRB about the ecological disaster we face	Exhaustive reading list
Populist – and proud of it!	Pelican book sparks off an Old Labourist reflections	The post puts the present concerns in an historical context
The Global Minotaur	Finding an internet version of a political economy book I had read in 2012	The book is one of the best explanations of the financial crash… but now reread as if for the first time
A Better Economics	Finding an internet version of a little-known but superbly-written economics textbook	May have been produced 21 years ago but clearly written by someone very sensitive to readers’ needs
The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties”	Paul Collier’s new book	Explains why the book was so good it inspired 5 posts
Communitarianism, anyone?	Which failed to explore this underlying theme	An agenda is sketched out
Can the genie be put back on the bottle?	Are we no longer masters of our fate?	Some good reviews are summarised
The future of capitalism part IV	Acknowledgements page reminds me how important friends are to drafting process	As well as some critiques
The Beast needs fixed! Part V		A final assessment of Collier – with some suggestions for further reading