Making Sense of the Global Crisis

Earlier this year, I ran a series of ten posts which started with a simple question – why are we so badly served with books about the economic crisis? I bemoaned the fact that authors –

-  seem to have made up their mind up about the explanation before they started to write

- make little attempt to analyse previous efforts at explanation

- generally spend their time on diagnosis

- leaving prescriptions to the last few pages

Of course, there are exceptions – in particular Howard Davies’ The Financial Crisis (2010) which identified and briefly assessed no fewer than 39 different explanations for the crisis. And I have just been reading Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures a book by Paul Kennedy which appeared only a few months ago. 

An academic sociologist, Kennedy earns high points by stating in the very first sentence that he has 

“stood on the shoulders of so many giants that I am dizzy” 

and then proves the point by each chapter of his book having extensive notes (often with hyperlinks) and concluding with a bibliography of 25 pages…

More to the point, the book covers pretty extensively a lot of subjects, such as the ecological crisis and the future of work, which are normally ignored in such texts. You really feel that the guy has made a real effort to track down and summarise for us the most important texts in the field – a quite exceptional approach….which so few others attempt. You can check for yourself since the book can be downloaded in its entirety here.

I suspect that one reason for this feature is that the book is based on a much longer textbook he did a few years back called  Global Sociology – which would perhaps explain the lightness of some of the discussion dealing with the feasibility of “green solutions” to the ecological aspects of the crisis. Surprisingly, there is no reference to Capitalism 3.0 (2006) by Peter Barnes – a very fair-minded entrepreneur sensitive to the evils of unregulated capitalism. Nor to people such Paul Hawkens….whose Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution made such an impact when it came out as far as back as 1999. Hawkens indeed has just released an intensive analysis of 100 “feasible solutions” – assessed by a credible advisory team over the past 3 years…… Drawdown

But I didn ‘t actually mean any takedown with these remarks – because at least the man has been courageous enough to aim high, write clearly and put his stuff out there for us to assess…..I so much wish others would do likewise…….

 

In that spirit, let me return to the effort I made earlier this year to identify, in some ten posts, about 200 of the key books which try to explain the economics of the modern world – you can find them dealt with from pages 35-58 of Common Endeavour

Somewhere I have made the comment that the best books on the subject for me are actually not written by economists - so I thought I would test that throwaway remark and came up with the following table which simply identifies (very subjectively) some seminal titles which are then placed not quite in a left-right spectrum but more in a “tonal” spectrum…..

 Key Texts on the Crisis - by category of writing - and "tone"

Discipline	Critical	Moderate	Apologiae
Economics	Globalisation and its Discontents; Joseph Stiglitz (2002) Debt and Neo-Feudalism; Michael Hudson (2012) Debunking Economics – the naked emperor dethroned; Steve Keen (2011 edition)	Why Globalisation Works; Martin Wolf (2004) Shifts and Shocks – what we’ve learned, and still have to, from the financial crisis; Martin Wolf (2014) – with accompanying power point presentation.	most of the discipline
Political economy	Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea; Mark Blyth (2013)		The discipline still rediscovering itself
Political science	Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism; Sheldon Wolin  (2008) Crisis without End - the unravelling of western prosperity: Andrew Gamble (2014) Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Now; David Marquand (2015)	Paul Hirst (stakeholding) Peter Mair	Few pol scientists trespass into the economic field
Sociology	Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism; Wolfgang Streeck (2013) End of capitalism? Michael Mann (2013) Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)	A lot of sociologists seduced into polling work	The sociological voice is still inspired by C Wright Mills – although divided a  bit by the French school
geography	A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism – David Harvey (2005). Injustice ; Daniel Dorling 2014) A Better Politics – how government can make us happier D Dorling (2016		The geographers are a bolshie lot!
Environment		Why we can’t agree about Climate Change; Mike Hulme (2009) Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution; Paul Hawken (1999)	Although most of this bunch have been geographers, they pride themselves on their technocracy
Journalism	The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System; Jerry Mander (2012). Post Capitalism – a guide to our Future; Paul Mason (2015) ….	How Good Can we be – ending the mercenary society Will Hutton (2015)	They don’t enjoy the tenure of the academics – and therefore have to pay attention to their mealticket
Management and mant studies	Rebalancing Society; Henry Mintzberg (2014)	Peter Senge Charles Handy Capitalism 3.0 Peter Barnes (2006)	Most mant writers are apologists – apart from the critical mant theorists
Religious studies	Laudato-Si – Pope Francis’ Encyclical (2015). Accessible in its entirety here	Questions of Business Life; Higginson (2002)	A more ecumenical bunch!

My apologies to all those who may feel demeaned……but, as I hope my next post will make clear, there is a very serious point I will be trying to make……  

Close Encounters of the…..”bureaucratic” kind

Next year will mark 50 years for me of “close encounters” with “state structures” or (more emotively expressed) with “bureaucracy”. Except that I am a political “scientist” and was trained in the 1960s in the Weberian tradition – to understand that term in a more analytic way as “the exercise of rational-legal authority”. 
Weber – like most classical philosophers and sociologists – was intrigued a hundred years ago by the source of social obedience. Why do people obey the rulers? And he produced the most satisfactory answer – with a famous three-fold classification – traditional, charismatic and rational-legal authority…..

By 1945 the world had had its fill of charismatic authority and settled amicably in the 1950s, for the most part, for “rational-legal” authority – although, in the 1960s, clever people such as JK Galbraith started to mock it and such as Ivan Illich and Paole Freire to critique it. Toffler’s “Future Shock” (1970) was probably the real warning shot that the old certainties were gone – and “change” has been non-stop since then. 

I’ve operated at the community, municipal, Regional and national levels of public management – in some ten countries in Europe and Central Asia and have tried, over this half-century, to keep track of the more important of the texts with which we have been deluged (in the English language) about the efforts of administrative reform.

I do realize that I am a bit naïve in the faith I still pin on the written word – in my continual search for the holy grail. After all, it was as long ago as 1975 – when I wrote my own first little book - when I first realized that few writers of books are seriously in the business of helping the public understand an issue – the motive is generally to make a reputation or sell a particular world view…. 

Still I persist in believing that the next book on the reading list will help the scales fall from my eyes!
So it’s taken me a long time to develop this little table about patterns of writing about admin reform…… 

Communicating administrative reform

Source	Activity	Who they write for	In what format	With what “Tone”
Academics	Too many!	One another – and students	Academic journal articles; and books	Aloof, qualified and opaque
Journalists	Fair number	The public – and professionals	PR handouts generally; more rarely an article	Breathless; More rarely critical
Politicians	A few	The electorate	PR handouts; more rarely a pamphlet	Critical of past; optimistic of the future
Think-Tankers	A lot	Opinion-makers	Booklets; and PR material	Ditto
Consultants	Even more!	Senior civil servants	Confidential reports; very rarely booklets and even a few books	Celebrating their “product”
Officials	Few	One another; OECD wonks	Descriptive papers and reports	Ditto
Global organs (eg World Bank, ADB, WHO	More than we think	A global network inc Cabinet Offices, Ministers, think-tanks; journalists;	well-researched, well-produced reports and websites	Omniscient, dry
Mugwumps – sitting on fences	Very few	The poor middle-ranking official who is expected to achieve the required change	Toolkits; manuals; roadmaps; notebooks	Open, humorous

The fads and fashions of organizational “reform” include “reengineering”, “transformation”……even “revolution” and we no longer know who to believe or trust – let alone obey…..  
From time to time I try to make sense of this avalanche of material eg in the early part of the In Transit – notes on good governance book which I wrote in 1999 for young Central European reformers – or The Long Game – not the log-frame - where I tried to capture a sense of the various organisational models with which consultants were trying to entice central European policy-makers. 

More recently I’ve tried to incorporate such texts with relevant blogposts in a draft book about “Crafting Effective Public Management” – but have had to accept that it didn't read well....too scrappy certainly,,,,but something else too....

But, as I said, a few weeks back, someone with my experience of straddling all these worlds must (and does) have something distinctive to say about all this organisational effort. 

And I think I have perhaps cracked what’s been wrong – I’ve been using the wrong “tone” in those efforts…the text is too abstract – for the most part “writing about writing”!!

In the last few days I've been experimenting with a different approach to my reflections about the experiences of organisational change ....  It consists of -

…..“telling a story”…..of the times when a few of us came together and, through a combination of imagination, discussion, networking and sheer inspiration, were able to raft something (a project) which gave the system a bit of a jolt…..

In fact I had written a lot about these occasions – they were all in various folders. But I have never given the papers the profile and legitimacy I now realize they deserve. I’ll give some examples in the next post

Most of the writing about reform cuts out that human factor – so what you get is a profound sense of inanimate concepts and forces……And to be fair, a lot of changes are like that – a few people at the top think something is a good idea; announce it; and expect to see it implemented and working. Effective change, however, requires not hierarchy and obedience - but open dialogue and negotiation. There was a time when we thought we had learned that ….eg from the Japanese…. But that memory faded and, in these autocratic days, too many people in organisations still act like the couriers in Hans Christian Andersen’s story about the Emperor’s New Clothes …..developing the groupthink and suspension of disbelief to be able to ignore the Emperor’s actual sartorial condition!

But, at my level, all effective changes I have seen have come from a few individuals coming together to explore deeply how they can improve a problematic situation - and then developing a constituency of change around a vision which emerges as consensual. Never by one person at the top imposing a fad or idea!

Perhaps that’s why charlatans like Michael Barber have been able recently to make such a global impact with his “deliverology” – for which Justin Trudeau is the latest to fall prey…..A new central Unit….reporting to the boss….a few simple messages….a few targets…..big data crunching…..sticks and carrots……..and hey presto…we’ve solved the perennial problem of implementation!!

French Letters

The last post suggested it was not easy to find well-written books which gave a true sense of the intellectual styles and trajectories of individual European countries – at least not in the English-language. Perry Anderson is one these rare characters – to whose extensive analyses of contemporary France, Germany and Italy I duly supplied appropriate links – taken from his stunning study The New Old World (2009) which occupies a prominent place in my library. I have just discovered that the book can be read in its entirety HERE (all 560 pages).

I would rate the book easily the best I have ever read on what it is to be European – about a third being a survey of the literature on the “European Project”; another third being insightful and acerbic analyses of the political and intellectual currents of the “Core” European countries (with the noticeable and dismissive exclusion of the UK); and the final section (“The Eastern Question”) devoted largely to Turkey.

 

I reread Anderson’s chapter on France after the last post – and have to say that it gave me a better feel for the contemporary French scene (excluding the last decade) than the book my post was focusing on viz “How the French Think”

And there are other well-written books on France which explore the intellectual as much as the political – with the outstanding La Vie en Bleu – France and the French since 1990; Rod Kedward (2005) due surely for an update?

I bought it quite recently and was immediately gripped by its opening style. But, full confessions, I soon put the book aside – basically because it’s too daunting a read at 700 pages…One review (just double-click the hyperlink in the title) puts it nicely - 

In recent decades, historians have increasingly attempted to uncover the unique combination of attributes that precisely defines France.  They variously study the national “passions”, realms of memory, or socio-political characteristics in order to define that most elusive of elixirs: Frenchness. Some authors champion a specific set of characteristics, arguing that the key can be found in immigration, diverse social traditions, or cultural identity.

All share a common quest to determine what makes France tick, and how its unique path formed the national consciousness and institutions.  This is not merely an antiquarian exercise.  In an age of urban rioting by the children of excluded immigrants, ongoing debates about the legacy of Vichy and Algeria, and strident anti-Americanism, these studies have a striking contemporary relevance. The latest such effort is Rod Kedward’s “France and the French: La Vie en Bleu since 1900”, and it ranks among the most ambitious of its kind.

Already acclaimed for his now-standard studies of collaboration and resistance during the Vichy years, Kedward here offers an examination of “French political cultures and their chequered narratives, in which the meanings of the past reverberate through every action of the present” (p. xiii).  Simply put, he wishes to eliminate the traditional boundaries between modes of historical inquiry, arguing that political history cannot be adequately addressed without the inclusion of society, culture, memory, and even behavioural studies. 

Only a proper examination of these “multiple narratives” offers a genuine aperçu into French history and its contemporary resonances…… Kedward argues that the history of France since 1900 has been dominated by three central themes – the Republic; Ideology; and Identity.  From the turn of the century onwards, the population and government were obsessed with the idea of the Republic, a neo-Jacobin conceptual framework perceived to be universal in its application. 

Kedward contends that this uniformity dissipated after 1930, inaugurating an era of ideological conflict, in which the nation evolved from elitist party politics towards multiple strands that encompassed “the margins, the outsiders, the subjugated and the minorities” (p. 3).  The period culminated in the événements of 1968,pitting Gaullism against a variety of left-wing alternatives.  Yet the experience of that year both confirmed the existence of ideological pluralism and simultaneously denied it, yielding to a third duration in 1970, the age of identity, when notions of gender, race, sexual orientation, region, and even ecological commitment all trumped allegiances to political parties and doctrines.

 Although various tropes re-emerge in each section--the fight between economic modernization and tradition, the proponents and detractors of dirigisme, struggles for gender equality--Kedward deftly demonstrates the evolution of the various arguments, shifting through the paradigms of unity, diversity, and difference that characterize each historical period.

Inspired by Hazareesingh and Anderson, I now want to go back to Kedward and try to do its 700 pages full justice. I know it deserves it – but it’s so much easier to read smaller books!!!

On that subject, let me remind my readers about my ten tricks of fast reading and comprehension. They are very simply expressed -

General

- Read a lot (from an early age!)

- Read widely (outside your discipline)

- Read quickly (skim)

- If the author doesn’t write in clear and simple language, move on to another book asap. Life’s too short……Bad writing is a good indicator of a confused mind

For each book

- Mark extensively (with a pencil) – with question-marks, ticks, underlines, comments and expletives

- Read the reviews (surf)

- Identify questions from these to ensure you’re reading critically

- Write brief notes to remind you of the main themes and arguments

- Identify the main schools of thought about the subject

- Check the bibliography/index at the end – to see what obvious names are missing

And what did I discover when I applied the last test to “How the French Think”?? That it doesn’t have a bibliography or “further reading” list and that Kedward is not even in the index!! Bad blood somewhere???

Other books on French thinking

Melancholy Politics – loss, mourning and memory in late modern France ; Jean Philippe Mathy (2011)
The End of the French Exception?: Decline and Revival of the 'French Model'; edited by T. Chafer, E. Godin (2009)

After the Deluge – new perspectives on the intellectual and cultural history of post-war France ed J Bourg (2004)

The Anthropological turn in French Thought – the 1970s to the present – an academic thesis  Lignes – thesis on a cultural mag; Perry Anderson’s studies are always good for an analysis of journals – here’s an entire thesis devoted to one French mag!!

Styles of Thinking.....and writing

I’ve been quiet these past few weeks largely because of the arrival here in the mountains of a (rare) Amazon package containing a fascinating and diverse collection of titles covering art criticism, capitalism, the European Union, populism, Denmark, the Soviet Union, France, political memoirs and…. reflections on death!! I’ve been going through them – flicking and casting the memoirs aside; and keeping a very interesting The Passage to Europe for later close study 

The pick of the bunch was ” How the French Think – an affectionate portrait of an intellectual people” (the link accesses a great summary of the various issues by the author) and a book which has encouraged me to explore further the issue of “national mentalities” or ”cultural thought patterns” which had been the main focus of some recent posts.

The book resists the temptation of just tracking “cultural traits” (eg that the French are “disputatious”) and chooses instead to focus on the arguments of some of the key French figures (starting with Descartes) and on the wider context of their work. Indeed, if I have a criticism, it is that the author probably resists that temptation too well – I would actually like to have seen more treatment of these supposed cultural traits……

The notion that rationality is the defining quality of humankind was first celebrated by the 17th-century thinker René Descartes, the father of modern French philosophy. His skeptical method of reasoning led him to conclude that the only certainty was the existence of his own mind: hence his ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’).

This French rationalism was also expressed in a fondness for abstract notions and a preference for deductive reasoning, which starts with a general claim or thesis and eventually works its way towards a specific conclusion – thus the consistent French penchant for grand theories. As the essayist Emile Montégut put it in 1858: ‘There is no people among whom abstract ideas have played such a great role, and whose history is rife with such formidable philosophical tendencies.’ The French way of thinking is a matter of substance, but also style. …….

 

Typically French…, is a questioning and adversarial tendency, also arising from Descartes’ skeptical method. The historian Jules Michelet summed up this French trait in the following way: ‘We gossip, we quarrel, we expend our energy in words; we use strong language, and fly into great rages over the smallest of subjects.’ A British Army manual issued before the Normandy landings in 1944 sounded this warning about the cultural habits of the natives: ‘By and large, Frenchmen enjoy intellectual argument more than we do. You will often think that two Frenchmen are having a violent quarrel when they are simply arguing about some abstract point.’ 

 

Yet even this disputatiousness comes in a very tidy form: the habit of dividing issues into two. It is not fortuitous that the division of political space between Left and Right is a French invention, nor that the distinction between presence and absence lies at the heart of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. French public debate has been framed around enduring oppositions such as good and evil, opening and closure, unity and diversity, civilisation and barbarity, progress and decadence, and secularism and religion. 

Underlying this passion for ideas is a belief in the singularity of France’s mission. This is a feature of all exceptionalist nations, but it is rendered here in a particular trope: that France has a duty to think not just for herself, but for the whole world. In the lofty words of the author Jean d’Ormesson, writing in the magazine Le Point in 2011: ‘There is at the heart of Frenchness something which transcends it. France is not only a matter of contradiction and diversity. She also constantly looks over her shoulder, towards others, and towards the world which surrounds her. More than any nation, France is haunted by a yearning towards universality.’ 

The book is so good that I began to realize how few books there are which tell a compelling and reasonably comprehensive story about a country’s intellectual journey. Theodor Zeldin has written brilliantly about French Passions; Perry Anderson has been a fairly solitary English-speaking writer paying serious attention to contemporary debates on the European continent – whether France, Germany, Italy or even Turkey.

Peter Gay wrote amazing books about the Austro-Hungary legacy; Peter Watson’s “German Genius” has the scope but lacks the narrative …it’s just a bit too much of an Encylopaedia. But I am still racking my brains to identify a book which does justice to the UK’s intellectual and political traditions in the gripping style of Hazareesingh (the author of the book on the French). There is a guy called Stefan Collini who has covered some of this ground – but I’ve never read his stuff……        

The other question which Hazareesingh’s book raises for me is why so few other “knowledgeable people” seem able to write clearly….indeed seem to take positive pleasure in hiding their thoughts in impenetrable language…

In recent years I have been trying to gather my disparate thoughts on public sector reform which are currently mainly in the form of papers, blogposts and hyperlinks. Most writers on this subject are academics or consultants (with the latter being in a tiny minority) and I like to think that I have something distinctive to say by virtue of having straddled – at various times – the diverse roles of academic, political leader and consultant (and in 10 different countries). I recently developed a table which divides the huge academic literature on the subject into five schools  

I’m still a firm believer in the adage that if you want to know something about a subject, you write a book about it. It sounds paradoxical but the act of writing forces you to confront your ignorance and helps you to develop the questions to allow you to identify the most appropriate books for you to read.

I may have 200 pages in the present draft but I know they are essentially random notes – there is no “dominant narrative” of the sort you can feel in Hazareesingh’s book. I don’t particularly want to begin at the beginning again but the text needs the discipline of a clear structure and set of questions…..I decided to let my thoughts run free and look at some academic books on the subject

The Sage Handbook of Public Administration was produced in 2003 by Guy Peters and Jon Pierre and is actually quite well written for an edited book – as is The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (2006) but the language of Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research; D Beland and Robert Henry Cox (2011) is quite incoherent despite containing articles by authors such as Mark Blyth, Colin Hay and Vivian Schmidt for whom I have a great deal of respect. 

I got so angry with the language being used that I went back to some points I had written a decade ago for a group of students in Bishkek - and tried to update and extend the argument in the light of what people like Stephen Pinker have been saying recently….

The sociologist C Wright Mills once famously took a turgid 400 page work of Talcott Parsons and reduced it to some 10 pages! And I notice that novelists (such as Benjamin Kunkel, John Lanchester and James Meek) have started to turn their hand to summarising political and economic texts and trends…..

We really do need a lot more writers helping us make sense of social science writing….. 

A Resource

A presentation of “How the French Think”  by the author - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLpHCT8GfYk

“the pessimistic turn in French thought” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izsO2AQ7qk8

Two reviews of the book -

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/french-thought/

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-how-the-french-think-an-affectionate-portrait-of-an-intellectual-people-1-3808527

https://focusderguini.wordpress.com/livres/la-pensee-tiede-interview-de-lauteur-perry-anderson/

the British scene

http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/555

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24209

https://acbookweek.com/the-20-academic-books-that-shaped-modern-britain/

 

"Common Endeavour"

Up at 1,350 metres, the season’s changes are quite noticeable. August 15^th is known as St Mary’s day in this part of the world and as the sign generally for a faint new chill to the morning air - after the heat which has driven people up from the plain for the previous month or so….

Autumn is coming – and I have decided to make available, in book form, the 60 posts which have featured in the blog so far this year and which bears the title - Common Endeavour – the 2017 posts so far  

It’s a bit cheeky, I grant you, to offer a 2017 annual just over half way through the year! The one frustrating thing, however, about a blog is that it gives a reverse image of reality – with the most recent post coming first and the reader then required to scroll down for the earlier contributions……Noone these days has the patience to search for the first posts and scroll UP…..whereas a book format allows you to begin at…….…the beginning.

And regular readers will know that a new Feature was quietly introduced in recent months – a “Further Reading Resource”. With two thirds of my readers not having English as their first language, I have perhaps become more conscious of the need for an inviting start to these posts which also tries to “position” the subject in the wider commentary……Hence the appearance of the “Further Reading” list with which book notes in particular now end… 

Focus

Early posts couldn’’t help touching on the first shocking weeks of bully boy Trump’s occupation of the White House but, thereafter, ignored the idiot – a tactic I’m surprised more have not suggested as an appropriate weapon to use against such a narcissist. Political misbehaviour in Romania caused more of a public backlash here and was duly the subject of some initial posts - which were followed in the summer by some musings about the failure of most post-communist societies to take seriously the task of building institutional capacity.........

For several weeks from mid-March, I ran a series of posts which started with an observation about   how badly served we are by the hundreds of economics books which jostle for our attention. The opening post suggested some tests we might apply to screen books out – with the drawback that we actually need the book in our hands in order to make the call!

Follow-up posts used some diagrams……which also help guide the reader through the maze of books……More than 100 key books were identified, briefly explained - and hyperlinked. And will all be useful in the task which lies ahead – of severe editing of the present draft of Dispatches to the post-capitalist generation

As a bonus I’ve added, as an Annex, my Sceptic’s Glossary – being my definition of some 100 plus terms used in the questionable discourse of our elites. I’ve set this in the context of texts (and images) which I’ve found useful during my life in the puncturing of their pretensions…..