Mood Music - how the intellectuals have made sense of our system

In the decade after the 1929 Great Crash, capitalism had been in such deep trouble that its very legitimacy was being questioned. Almost 90 years on, we seem back in the same place….

The destruction wrought by the Second World War, however, supplied a huge boost to European economies - supplemented by the distributive effort of Marshall Aid and the new role of global agencies such as The World Bank and the IMF – let alone the role of American Capital… ….

In Europe, Governments replaced key private monopolies with public ownership and regulation; and earned legitimacy with social provision and full employment. The “mixed economy” that resulted brought the power of unions and citizens into a sort of balance with that of capital.

By the mid 50s, therefore, Labour politician CAR Crosland’s seminal The Future of Socialism could argue to some effect that managerial power was more important than ownership – an analysis with which economic journalist Andrew Shonfield’s original and detailed exploration of European Modern Capitalism – the changing balance of public and private power (1966) concurred. And which was already evident in the 1959 German SDP’s Bad Godesburg programme.

And. by 1964, the British PM Harold McMillan expressed the ebullient European mood when he used the phrase “you’ve never had it so good” – the growth of the core European economic countries being one of the factors which encouraged the UK’s membership of the Common Market in 1973 – although even then there were voices such as that of EJ Mishan warning of The Costs of Economic Growth (1967) and of…. The Limits to Growth (Club of Rome 1972).

Daniel Bell was another important voice questioning the brash confidence of the post-war period – with his Coming of Post-industrial Society (1971) and Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

But most people by then were convinced that governments, science and big business had found the answers to the problems which had plagued the 20^th century. The ending of American dollar convertibility (to gold) and the first oil crisis of the early 1970s may have raised questions about the “overload” of state capacity - but privatization seemed to give the economy new energy if not a new era of greed. James Robertson’s The Sane Alternative – a choice of futures (1978) may have been the last voice of sanity before Thatcher took over……

There’s a nice little video here of Charles Handy reminding us of the discussions in which he participated in the 1970s about the purpose of the company - and the casual way people such as Milton Friedmann and his acolytes introduced the idea of senior managers being given “share options” as incentives. Handy regrets the failure of people then to challenge what has now become the biggest element of the scandal of the gross inequalities which disfigure our societies in the 21^st century.

The 1980s and 1990s was – despite that - a celebration of a new spirit with even social critics apparently conceding the irresistibility of the social and technical change taking place - Charles Handy’s “The Future of Work” (1984); James Robertson’s Future Work – jobs, self-employment and measure after the industrial age (1985); Casino Capitalism  by International Relations scholar, Susan Strange (1986); The End of Organised Capitalism by sociologists Scott Lash, John Ury (1987) and the columns of Marxism Today – the journal expressed the mood.

One of the latter’s contributors, Andrew Gamble (a Politics Professor), wrote the most clear and prescient analyses of the key forces - The Free Economy and the Strong State – the politics of Thatcherism (1988). 

It’s taken 25 years for the power of that analysis to be properly appreciated….

For the Common Good; Herman Daly and John Cobb (1989) gave us a sense of how things could be organized differently, Herman Daly being one of the few economists in those days willing to break ranks against the conventional wisdom….. 

Then came the fall of communism – and triumphalism. Hayek (and Popper) were wheeled out to inspire central European intellectuals – I encountered so many well-thumbed copies of the former’s (translated) Road to Serfdom (written during the second world war) as I travelled around Central Europe in the 1990s on my various projects …..

But, by then, western academics were getting wise… .. and a deluge not only of critiques but of alternative visions began to hit us….. I can’t pretend this is exhaustive – but these are some of the titles which caught my eye over the next decade….

- The State We’re In; Will Hutton (1995); after Michel Albert’s book on different sorts of capitalism, this was the book which showed us Brits what we were missing in the Seine-Rheinish variant

- The Future of Capitalism – how today’s economic forces shape tomorrow’s world; Lester Thurow (1996). Always ahead of himself, it’s significant that this book never got a serious review

- Political Economy of Modern Capitalism – mapping convergence and diversity; ed C Crouch and W Streeck (1996). Gives the Hutton thesis a much more technical gloss

- “Everything for Sale – the virtues and limits of markets” – Robert Kuttner (1996). The first majot blast across the bows of neo-liberalism

- Short Circuit – strengthening local economies in an unstable world” - Ronald Douthwaite (1996). Very practical – but also inspirational….21 years on, it hasn’t really been bettered

- Making Sense of a Changing Economy – technology, markets and morals; Edward J Nell (1996) delightfully-written and unforgivably neglected book – since it went against the grain of the celebratory claims for economics at the time

-  The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) – a feminist critique of political economy (1996) 
very much ahead of its time – not least in its title

-  From Statism to Pluralism - democracy, civil society and global politics; Paul Hirst (1997)

argues the case for “associational democracy” in both the public and private sectors. It has a powerful beginning – The brutalities of actually existing socialism have fatally crippled the power of socialist ideas of any kind to motivate and inspire. The collapse of communism and the decline of wars between the major industrial states have removed the major justifications of social democracy for established elites – that it could prevent the worse evil of communism and that it could harness organized labour in the national war effort. Those elites have not just turned against social democracy, but they almost seem to have convinced significant sections of the population that a regulated economy and comprehensive social welfare are either unattainable or undesirable

- Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution; Paul Hawken (1999). A persuasive vision of how green technology could revitalize capitalism….

- The cancer stages of capitalism; John Mc Murtry (1999). A much darker vision….. 

- “The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century” – Susan George (1999). A satirical piece which forces us to think where present forces are taking us….

- The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order; Francis Fukuyama (1999) An important book which passed me by until 2017 – it is a critique of the loosening of our social fabric since 1965…..

- Economics and Utopia – why the learning economy is not the end of history; Geoff Hodgson (1999) a clear and tough analysis by a top-class economic historian of why socialism lost its way – and exploration of what it will take for it to restore its energies. If you want to get a sense of the range of arguments which have convulsed economists and activists over the past century, this is the book for you – despite the dreadful academic habit of supporting every statement with brackets containing 3-4 names of academics).     

- CyberMarx – cyles and circuits of struggle in high technology capitalism; Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999). It may be a PhD thesis – but it’s a great read…..

- The New Spirit of Capitalism; L Boltanski and E Chiapello (1999). Surprising that others have not attempted this critical analysis of managerial texts since they tell us so much about the Zeitgeist…..these are mainly French (and a bit turgid)….The only similar analyses I know are a couple of treatments of managerial gurus by Brits (one with a Polish name!)….

- Capitalism and its Economics – a critical History; Douglas Dowd (2000) Very readable

- Anti-capitalism – theory and practice; Chris Harman (2000) A Trotskyist take….

- Globalisation and its Discontents; Joseph Stiglitz (2002) is probably the best on the subject - exposing the emptiness of economics orthodoxy….

- “We are Everywhere – a celebration of community enterprise” (2003) 

- Another world is possible Susan George (2004) – one of the great critical analysts of global capitalism

- Why Globalisation Works; Martin Wolf (2004) – one of its most powerful defenders

- A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism – David Harvey (2005). One of the world’s experts in Marxist economics – so a bit heavy going…..

- Knowing Capitalism; Nigel Thrift (2005) A geographer turned turgid post-structuralist, this book requires considerable perseverance!   

- Models of Capitalism; Colin Crouch (2005)…. It was in the 1990s when the variety of different types of capitalism were properly appreciated 

- Capitalism 3.0 (2006) by Peter Barnes - an entrepreneur repulsed by "free-market" ideologues 

- Global Capitalism – its fall and rise in the twentieth century; Jeffry A Frieden (2006)…an exceptionally well-written account of a subject which, at the time it was being written, was not a popular one!!

- The Culture of the new capitalism; Richard Sennett (2006) - who remains one of the few intellectuals capable of matching Bell in the lucidity of their exposition (and breadth of reading) about social trends…..

- Theorising Neoliberalism; Chris Harman (2007) How a Trotskyite sees things

- Globalisation and Contestation – the new great counter-movement; Ronaldo Munck (2007). An interesting description and analysis of social reactions to economic power over the past century – using a Polanyi perspective

- New Capitalism? – the transformation of work; K Doogan (2009) A sound academic treatment of key issues...

And that’s all before the crash – the next post will try to give you a sense of the post-crash writing… 

Economics - a rare example of good writing....

We’re so overwhelmed by the mountain of books and blogs available about economic issues that I’ve sought to give readers some tests they can use on material they come across - to help them more easily select the material worth spending time on……

One of the five things I look for is clarity of writing – from the simple argument that confused writing is a sign of a confused mind. Authors who rely on abstract language have allowed the language to take over their thinking.

A second thing I look for are signs that the author is able and willing to classify other specialists according to the different perspectives they bring – and generous in his attributions…      

I’ve just come across an excellent example of what I mean – from the Michael Robert’s blog The Next Recession who starts his latest post with a great name-check on the Keynesian economists who dominate leftist discussions there days - 

Keynes is the economic hero of those wanting to change the world; to end poverty, inequality and continual losses of incomes and jobs in recurrent crises.  And yet anybody who has read the posts on my blog knows that Keynesian economic analysis is faulty, empirically doubtful and its policy prescriptions to right the wrongs of capitalism have proved to be failures.
In the US, the great gurus of opposition to the neoliberal theories of Chicago school of economics and the policies of Republican politicians are Keynesians Paul Krugman, Larry Summers and Joseph Stiglitz or slightly more radical Dean Baker or James Galbraith. In the UK, the leftish leaders of the Labour party around Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, self-proclaimed socialists, look to Keynesian economists like Martin Wolf, Ann Pettifor or Simon Wren Lewis for their policy ideas and analysis.  They bring them onto their advisory councils and seminars.  In Europe, the likes of Thomas Piketty rule.

 Those graduate students and lecturers involved in Rethinking Economics, an international attempt to change the teaching and ideas away from neoclassical theory, are led by Keynesian authors like James Kwak or post-Keynesians like Steve Keen, or Victoria Chick or Frances Coppola.  Kwak, for example, has a new book called Economism, which argues that the economic faultline in capitalism is rising inequality and the failure of mainstream economics is in not recognising this.  Again the idea that inequality is the enemy, not capitalism as such, exudes from the Keynesians and post-Keynesians like Stiglitz, Kwak, Piketty or Stockhammer, and dominates the media and the labour movement.  This is not to deny the ugly importance of rising inequality, but to show that a Marxist view of this does not circulate.

Indeed, when the media wants to be daring and radical, publicity is heaped on new books from Keynesians or post-Keynesian authors, but not Marxists. For example, Ann Pettifor of Prime Economics has written a new book, The Production of Money, in which she tells us that “money is nothing more than a promise to pay” and that as “we’re creating money all the time by making these promises”, money is infinite and not limited in its production, so society can print as much of its as it likes in order to invest in its social choices without any detrimental economic consequences.  And through the Keynesian multiplier effect, incomes and jobs can expand.  And “it makes no difference where the government invests its money, if doing so creates employment”.  The only issue is to keep the cost of money, interest rates as low as possible, to ensure the expansion of money (or is it credit?) to drive the capitalist economy forward.  Thus there is no need for any change in the mode of production for profit, just take control of the money machine to ensure an infinite flow of money and all will be well.

 Ironically, at the same time, leading post-Keynesian Steve Keen gets ready to deliver a new book advocating the control of debt or credit as the way to avoid crises.  Take your pick: more credit money or less credit.  Either way, the Keynesians drive the economic narrative with an analysis that reckons only the finance sector is the causal force in disrupting capitalism.

So why, Roberts asks, do Keynesian ideas continue to dominate? Here he brings in Geoff Mann - director of the Centre for Global Political Economy at Simon Fraser University, Canada and his new book, entitled In the Long Run We are all Dead which argues that Keynes rules .  

…….because he offers a third way between socialist revolution and barbarism, i.e. the end of civilisation as we (actually the bourgeois like Keynes) know it.  In the 1920s and 1930s, Keynes feared that the ‘civilised world’ faced Marxist revolution or fascist dictatorship.  But socialism as an alternative to the capitalism of the Great Depression could well bring down ‘civilisation’, delivering instead ‘barbarism’  – the end of a better world, the collapse of technology and the rule of law, more wars etc.

So he aimed to offer the hope that, through some modest fixing of ‘liberal capitalism’, it would be possible to make capitalism work without the need for socialist revolution.  There would no need to go where the angels of ‘civilisation’ fear to tread.  That was the Keynesian narrative. This appealed (and still appeals) to the leaders of the labour movement and ‘liberals’ wanting change.  Revolution was risky and we could all go down with it.  Mann: “the Left wants democracy without populism, it wants transformational politics without the risks of transformation; it wants revolution without revolutionaries”. (p21).

Those wanting more detail can read this well-written paper (20 pp) by Mann entitled “Keynes Resurrected?” (2013) as well as his critique of Thomas Pikety

Exemplary Critics

I’m a great fan of diagrams – apart from giving us a breathing space from text, they show that the writer is aware that we all operate with very different types of understanding. 
hAnd - even more than the act of writing itself - the process of designing a diagram will quickly throw up the flaws in your thinking…….

Six categories form the heart of the two diagrams from the Commons Transition people I referred to yesterday - I liked the selection of the worlds of “work”, “citizens” and “conscience” as key categories – we all behave differently in these spheres……and I understood the “politics” and “economy” labels – we have various assumptions and expectations in those fields….

It was the sixth category however – of “consumption/production” which utterly confused me. What exactly is it – and how does it differ from “economy” and “work”?? And why are “workers’ cooperatives” not included in the “economy” category (and “social enterprise” included not there but in “work”??)

There were actually two diagrams – one purporting to illustrate the “present capitalist paradigm”, the second “Beyond Capitalism” and containing illustrative names……

The first diagram, however, was also bereft of such illustrations and I therefore offered a simpler version of the diagram which included the names of writers I considered offered useful examples of the schools indicated (with appropriate hyperlinks)….

I readily concede that the names selected probably said more about the world of an ageing (male) Brit than anything else – even so, of the 23 names selected, only five are actually English.

I do, however, have to confess that all but two are male (although I generally quote people like Susan Strange and Susan George).

Let me introduce this exemplary group – in future posts I hope to say more about those who have written critically in the past 50 odd years about the economic and political system which has us in its grip…… I start at the top left corner of the diagram with some key names in the increasingly critical debate about the health of our democracies........

Sheldon Wolin was one of America’s most distinguished political scientists – producing in 1960 one of the most lucid and inviting political textbooks “Politics and Vision” (700pp). As a student of politics between 1960-64, it was his book (and Bernard Crick’s “In Defence of Politics”) which inspired me to pursue politics as a vocation……
He died in 2015 at the grand age of 93, having produced seven years earlier a withering critique of the American political system - Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism

 Peter Mair was a highly respected Irish political scientist who died at the height of his powers at the age of 60 and is renowned for Ruling the Void – the hollowing of Western Democracy (2013) which encapsulated the increasing despair of serious political scientists about the post 2000 trajectory of democracy.

 Robert Michels started the critique a hundred years earlier with his “ Political Parties – a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy” first produced in German in 1911.

 Jeremy Gilbert is a British academic whose  Reclaim Modernity – beyond markets; beyond machines (2014) was a contribution to the ongoing debate about the future of the British Labour party 

David Graeber is an American anthropologist who has written powerfully about the history of debt; about anarchism; and more recently about aspects of modern work…..

Mark Blyth is a Scottish-American political economist whose Austerity – history of a dangerous idea made a big impact when it first appeared in 2013 and even more so in his subsequent lectures…

Yanis Varfoukis is a Greek-American economist whose The Global Minotaur – America, the true origins of the financial crisis; and the future of the world economy (2011) ……

Wolfgang Streeck is a German sociologist who has produced a series of powerfully-written critiques of the modern economy, culminating in How will Capitalism End?

David Harvey is an English Marxist geographer who has been based in the States for the past few decades; and become famous for his courses on Marxism and capitalism. One of his most powerful books is A Brief History of Neo Liberalism (2005)

Guy Standing’s claim to fame is The Precariat – the new dangerous class (2011)

New Capitalism? The End of Work (2009) by Kevin Doogan is a surprisingly critical assessment of the writing which from the mid 1980s has warned of the increasing job insecurity which lies ahead. It’s worth reading for its summary of writing of this important field.

Barbara Ehrenreich is an American journalist who has famously worked undercover to bring to readers her experiences of just how grim working life can be eg “Nickel and Dimed”

Joseph Stiglitz was the World Bank’s Chief Economist until his challenges of its Orthodoxy proved too much for them to bear. Globalisation and its Discontents (2002) is one of the many trenchant books he has written to expose the emptiness of economics orthodoxy….

John Michael Greer is an American writer and one of the most prominent of what might be called the apocalypicists – who consider that the western world is on a “Long (if slow) Descent” to a simpler world…I’m using the word in a respectful way since a lot of their arguments are convincing – and Greer’s analysis of American politics is the most profound I’ve seen.

Dmitry Orlov is another such apocalypticist – a Russian engineer who came to the States in 1974 (when 12) and, on home visits, having seen the USSR collapse at first hand, has been suggesting since his     Reinventing Collapse; the Soviet Experience and American Prospects (2005) that a similar fate awaits the States… 

Michael Pollan is a Professor of English in the States who became famous for his writing on agro-business

Naomi Klein is a radical Canadian journalist who made an impact with her “No Logo” (1999) and “The Shock Doctrine” (2007) books about capitalism. This Changes Everything (2014)

Oliver James is a British psychologist whose various books (such as “Affluenza” 2001) reflect the concerns of a lot of people….

Pope Francis has become the remaining hope of a lot of progressives. On Care of our Common Home (2015) is an encyclical which lambasts the present economic system and doctrines… 

Christopher Lasch was an American cultural analyst whose The Culture of Narcissism (1979) caught well the self-centredness of America in the post 60s period. His penetrating critiques continued with The True and Only Heaven – progress and its critics (1991) and his posthumous The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995)

Edward Snowden is the whistle-blower par excellence – working for a CIA sub-contractor he unearthed and spilled the story of the scale of American hacking of private accounts…

Julian Assange is an Australian computer expert, publisher and activist who has been holed up in London’s Ecuador Embassy since 2102 for fear of extradition to the US for “trumped-up” charges by the Swedish authorities…. 

Danny Dorling is a British geographer whose Injustice (2014) rivals the moral power of RH Tawney‘s writing and whose A Better Politics – how government can make us happier (2016) is one of the clearest invitations to a better society

Understanding the mess we're in

The left-right scale has a long history – the left label coming in the 20th century to designate people on the basis of their attitude to the economic role which the state should play in society. Since, however, the late 50s and the arrival of a more “self-expressive” spirit, an additional dimension was needed to indicate attitudes to the hierarchy/participation dimension (ie political power). 
The political compass website – which allows you to take your own test – labels these additional dimensions “left authoritarian” and “left libertarian”

Last year I came across a couple of diagrams from the Commons Transition people which I found very useful correctives to the normal simplifications we get about what is going in the world….  

It uses six dimensions – which it labels “politics”, “the economy”, “work”, “citizens”, “conscience” and “consumption” to identify a dozen key concerns which have surfaced about recent global trends. We can certainly quibble about the logic of the dimensions - and the labels used for the trends - but the diagrams are thought-provoking and worthy of more discussion than they seem to have obtained in the couple of years they have been available.

The first of the diagrams details the “Current Capitalist Paradigm” but, for my money, could be improved by adding some names of illustrative writers. 
I have therefore taken the liberty of producing a simpler version of the diagram which includes about 20 names – with hyperlinks in each case to key texts. Readers who are frustrated by the tiny lettering of the names around the perimeter should therefore simply click on the link (NOT the diagram above) and then click the particular name whose material they want to access.

The second diagram is entitled Beyond Capitalism and does include illustrative names. This too could, in my view, do with some additions (and deletions) and I hope to include an amended version in a future post. For example, it is a bit light on robotisation…..

For the moment, however, let me simply offer my readers the diagrams as a better way of mapping the literature to which we should be paying attention…..  

NOTE - this is the first part of what will be a series of posts focusing on these diagrams

Memorable Messages

I’ve set myself a rather challenging task – to sift through the 200 plus books which have popped up on my blogposts over the past eight years which relate to what we, rather egocentrically, call “the global crisis”; and to identify those which I would recommend to those members of the younger generation struggling tomake sense of the mess….

It’s challenging because I’m finding that I was too hasty in my reading the first time round – or, if I’m totally frank, that I was too lazy or distracted to do much more than flick the pages….But a trawl like this offers the great advantage of ……."compare and contrast"…

Plus .....I now know (or think I know!) what I’m looking for. A previous post set out some of the prerequisites I now look for in any book and, the more I skim the material I’ve collected, the more ruthless I feel about exploring the question of whether a book has the qualities required to change the way the reader looks at the world…..  

Bear in mind that I bring to the task no fewer than 60 years of quite intensive reading while trying to make sense of (those bits of) the world (I feel I should be making an effort to understand)…..When we do these lists of the century’s “key books”, I often wonder how many the compilers have included from a sense of duty – rather than from a sense of its felt impact…..
And so I did a little test – I asked myself which books had actually so impressed me that I had given them as presents to others or used in my project work of the past 25 years …..The common factor in the resulting list was "typologies" - the books all had a way of simplifying the complexity which faces us...

The typology	Author; source	Further detail
3 incentive types	Etzioni (1971)	Carrots, sticks, norm compliance
8 Roles in any effective team	Belbin (1981) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Role_Inventories	Plant, resource investigator, coordinator, shaper, monitor, teamworker, implementer, finisher, specialist
10 Rules to stifle innovation	Rosabeth Kantor (in her 1983 book “The Change Masters” http://nomadron.blogspot.bg/2010/04/lists.html	See later
7 Habits of Effective People	Stephen Covey (1989) http://www.ignaciodarnaude.com/espiritualismo/Covey,Habits%20of%20highly%20effective%20people.pdf	See later Full book available on internet
4 Gods of Management	Charles Handy/Roger Harrison in Gods of Management (1984)	Zeus (boss culture); Appollo ((hierarchy - role culture); Athena (task culture); Dionysus (individual professional)
4 basic interpretive stances	Mary Douglas grid-group theory (1970s); Chris Hood’s “The State of the State”  (2000)	Hierarchical, individualist, egalitarian, fatalist
48 ways to gain power	Robert Greene in “The 48 Laws of Power” (1998)	Link gives access to entire book
6 global threats to capitalism	Susan George in “The Lugano Report – on preserving capitalism in the 21st century” (1999) – a powerful critique in the form of a spoof report produced by consultants for the global elite	Strongly recommend the new Introduction she wrote – accessible on the googlebook link

When I was working in Central Europe in the 1990s I used to buy multiple copies of the Covey book in the local language - Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian – since it was one of the few books I knew in English which was also available in the local language and was useful as a means of professional conversation. I know that the book is rather frowned upon in intellectual circles but I still think it's got something.....including the famous sketch of a woman which demonstrates so powerfully our disparate perceptions.....
The principles were/are -
- be proactive
- begin with the end in mind
- put first things first
- think win/win
- seek first to understand : then to be understood
- synergise
- "sharpen the saw" - ie keep mentally and physically fit

When I moved to Central Asia and Caucasus in 1999, I found that presentation of Rosabeth Kanter’s “Ten rules for stifling innovation” was a marvellous way to liven up a workshop with middle-ranking officials. She had concocted this prescription as a satiric comment on the way she discovered from her research that senior executives in US commercial giants like IBM, General Motors were continuing to act in the old centralised ways despite changed structures and rhetoric.

1. regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it's new, and it's from below
2. insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures
3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other's proposals (That saves you the job of deciding : you just pick the survivor)
4. Express your criticisms freely - and withhold your praise (that keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time
5. Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage people from letting you know when something in their area is not working
6. Control everything carefully. Make sure people count anything that can be counted, frequently.
7. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret, and spring them on people unexpectedly (that also keeps them on their toes)
8. Make sure that requests for information are fully justified, and make sure that it is not given to managers freely
9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move around, or otherwise implement threatening decisions you have made. And get them to do it quickly.
10. And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

“Any of this strike you as similar?” I would cheekily ask my Uzbek and Azeri officials.

Robert Greene’s 24 ways to seduce; 33 ways to conduct war; and 48 Laws of power are, also, tongue in cheek. The first to hit the market was the 48 Laws of power and I enjoyed partly because it so thoroughly challenged in its spirit the gung-ho (and unrealistic) naivety of the preaching which characterised so many of the management books of the time – and partly for the way historical examples are woven into the text. I’ve selected a few to give the reader a sense of the spirit of the book
• Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies
• Conceal your intentions
• always say less than necessary
• Guard your reputation with your life
• Court attention at all costs
• Get others to do the work, but always take the credit
• Make other people come to you
• Win through your actions, never through argument
• Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victims

I found a Russian translation of the book in Baku and gave it as a leaving gift to the Azeri lawyer in the Presidential Office with whom I had worked closely for 2 years on the project to help implement the Civil Service Law. He obviouly made good use of it as 3 months later he was appointed as Head(Ministerial level)of the new Civil Service Agency my work had helped inspire!

Luther’s 95 theses on the wall of the Wittenberg church may seem excessive – but, given the success of his mission, perhaps contain a lesson for the media advisers who tell us that the public can absorb a limited number of messages only!

Sarah Bakewell suggests in How to Live – or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty attempts at an Answer that Montaigne’s life can usefully be encapsulated in 20 injunctions –
• Don’t worry about death
• Read a lot, forget most of it – and be slow-witted
• Survive love and loss
• Use little tricks
• Question everything
• Keep a private room behind the shop
• Be convivial; live with others
• Wake from the sleep of habit
• Do something no one has done before
• Do a good job – but not too good a job
• Reflect on everything; regret nothing
• Give up control

At the very least, when I see such lists, it suggests we're in for some fun! 

The End of Work?

Every now and then in my everyday life, I’ve had the sudden feeling that I was being granted a flash of insight into the future. In the late 1960s I had access to the writings of Americans such as Donald Schon and Warren Bennis who were beginning to sketch the flexible organization of the future - the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1971 book caught the spirit of the age to come – “Future Shock”.

Personally I was rather excited by the new organizational possibilities - exemplified in Charles Handy’s 1978 book Gods of Management which contrasted the familiar hierarchic or “Zeus” (club) culture with the Appollonian (role), Athenian (task/matrixh) and Dionysian (existential) ones.

Roger Harrison was a great organizational consultant who actually beat Handy to the idea of organizational cultures but Handy packaged it better. Harrison left us a superb set of “parting thoughts”

I had established a pioneer matrix structure a few years earlier in a very large organization -. Strathclyde Region – and our Member-officer groups broke from the conventions of municipal decision-making in various ways -

· its members (middle-level officials and councillors) were equal in status

· noone was assumed to have a monopoly of truth - by virtue of ideological or professional status

· the officers nominated to the groups were generally not from Headquarters - but from the field

· evidence was invited from staff and the outside world, in many cases from clients themselves

· they represented a political statement that certain issues had been neglected in the past

· the process invited external bodies (eg voluntary organisations) to give evidence

· the reports were written in frank terms : and concerned more with how existing resources were being used than with demands for more money.

· the reports were seen as the start of a process - rather than the end - with monitoring groups established once decisions had been made.

I had another flash of insight when I read an article in the early 1980s from an American economist(Alan Schick?) about the prospects for the privatization of the National Health Service – so much so that I sent the opposition spokesman for Health a warning note……..And it was Charles Handy’s 1984 book “The Future of Work” which convinced me that the familiar contours of our world were moving under our feet – it was this book which warned us that the notion of life-long jobs was gone for ever and which introduced us to the term “portfolio life”…

There’s a nice little video here of Handy presenting his (more recent) idea of the “second curve” during which he reminds us of the discussions he had in the 1970s about the purpose of the company - and the casual way people such as Milton Friedmann and his acolytes then introduced the idea of senior managers being given “share options” as incentives. Handy regrets the failure of people to challenge what has now become the biggest element of the scandal of the gross inequalities which disfigure our societies…..

A few years after Handy’s Future of Work, I vividly remember the impact on me of Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988) - which drew on the evidence of the new information technology industries to underline the threat the future held to our notion of a normal working life….(she’s just producing another fascinating book on Surveillance Capitalism)

We have all subsequently taken advantage of the speed, choice and capacity with which we have been richly endowed by the new information facilities - but perhaps been a bit slow to recognize the scale of its consequences. Google's driver-less car and the speed with which companies such as Uber and Airbnb have scaled up brought it all home to us….But people like Frithjof Bergmann and Jeremy Rifkin – the latter with his “the End of Work (1995) were amongst a few at the time who appreciated what Handy was onto……Since then there have been quite a few books with the title “The Future of Work” – Thomas Malone (2004), David Bollier (2011),  Jacob Morgan (2014) to which I should have been paying more attention…..

But, very suddenly it seems, the scale of the impact of IT and robots on jobs previously thought safe from automation has hit people and the prospect of the majority of people living without paid work is now beginning to both excite and frighten….Race against the machine (2011) is perhaps the most famous of the books about this....

The air is thick with talk, for example, of the necessity of a Basic Income; and of the writings of both Keynes and Marx on this subject…..

Inventing the Future – Postcapitalism and a world without work is typical of the titles which are now appearing. You can read it for yourself in full here

It’s a book which has attracted a lot of attention and I shall give some excerpts and comments in future posts….

Update; a nice overview here of what modern work now offers far too many people......

A great diagram – as well as content from an important Conference on the Digital Revolution
and an important ILO report I missed in 2015

the concerned citizen is very badly served

You would think that, after the last decade of the global crisis, it would not be difficult to find a few impartial books clearly written by those familiar with the huge literature and which help the concerned citizen understand how exactly the crash happened; and whether any measures could realistically rekindle hope….  

We have thousands of books about the causes of the global economic crisis of 2007/08 which pin blame, variously, on banks, speculators and a score of other explanations - but few have actually been written which satisfy the five preconditions which the previous paragraph specifies - in relation to impartiality, clarity, knowledge, audience and prescription ……

Almost all are rather produced to argue an existing (partial) viewpoint; are written for students (to pass exams) or for other academics – rather than for the concerned citizen; and cover only those parts of the literature which the author’s job and/or inclinations require him/her to pay attention to…. (the last therefore excludes, for example, work which comes from the political economy (eg Susan Strange; Mark Blyth); or sociology (Wolfgang Streeck) fields…

I have a simple test for whether a book on the crisis is worth buying - go the Preface/Introduction and check how many of the key points are covered (award one point for each)–

- Does it say why yet another book is needed to add to the huge pile we already have?

- Does it argue that the book has something distinctive to say?

- is anything said about the audience the author is aiming at?

- Does it hint that there are different schools of thinking about the issue?

- No book can be comprehensive – does the author list what subjects (s)he has excluded?

- Is there an annotated further reading list in an annex?

I can’t say I was greatly helped when I googled phrases such as “best sellers in the global crisis” - I got a list of 100 books – but nothing to help me make a selection. 
I did, however, find this annotated list of 12 from someone who was writing his own book and recounted how difficult it was to get past the book buyers of the major companies, 
And there was a rare annotated list of 25 “must read” (mostly American) books on the crisis on an interesting website Planning beyond Capitalism - but its selection was understandably a bit light on books from other ideological stables…
Economics for Everyone in a very friendly-looking book which can actually be downloaded in full (all 360 pages!!) and has an excellent “further reading” list. Zombie Economics - how dead ides still walk among us; by John Quiggin (2010) is a great read    

And here's an introductory course on economics whose 11 sections have some good reading (and viewing) material - with hyperlinks.....

I’m currently sifting all the references I’ve made in my thousand plus blogposts about the issue – to see if I can come up with a commentary which might help others in my position…The names which figure are the following (in no particular order) – Michael Lewis, Michael Hudson, Martin Wolff, David Korten, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Mason, Will Hutton, Paul Hirst, Andrew Gamble, Herman Daly, Susan George, Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, David Harvey, Michel Albert, Colin Crouch, David Marquand…

If asked to make a single recommendation, I would plump fairly confidently for Mark Blyth’s Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea But I’m sure there is another book out there which I could recommend to the concerned citizen?  

At least, people are now prepared to call the system by its name – “capitalism” – before the crisis, this was a word which rarely passed people’s lips. Now the talk everywhere is not only of capitalism but “post-capitalism”…….And an encouraging American initiative The Next System had an initial report – The Next System Report – political possibilities for the 21st Century (2015) which contains extensive references to writing I had not so far encountered and to good community practice in various parts of the world.  It has since followed up with a series of worthwhile papers.

Update; there's a useful bibliography here - if a bit outdated and American. And I've also just uploaded  Economics for Everyone  – a short guide to the economics of capitalism” by Jim Stanford (2008 - all 360 pages) which I would strongly recommend