Popularising Economics

Economics is known as "the dismal science" – but is most decidedly NOT a science! It has indeed become the new religion – worshipped by policy-makers throughout the world. I've learned to distrust the breed – but they have such a grip on our minds that the only way to counter their evil influence is by penetrating their myths viz by reading up on the nonsense most of them perpetrate.

So I've prepared two lists – the first, some good introductions to the subject. And the second some well-written and more polemical critiques of the discipline

Good Introductory Texts

- Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics; JK Galbraith and N Salinger (1978) quite inspiring from one of the world's best writers and economists quizzed by a young French woman. I discovered it recently thanks to a great biography of the man by Stephen Dunn.

- Short Circuit – strengthening local economies in an unstable world” - Ronald Douthwaite (1996). Very practical – but also inspirational….almost 30 years on, it hasn’t really been bettered. Full text available at the link

- Debunking Economics – the naked emperor dethroned; Steve Keen (2001 and 2011) Written before the crash. it might be called the first alternative textbook (except it’s much greater fun to read!). Can be read in full.

- Economics for Everyone – a short guide to the economics of capitalism”; Jim Stanford (2006) is a very user-friendly book and has an excellent “further reading” list which was probably the best there was at that time….Once upon a time it was freely available on the internet but now I can find only excerpts…..

- The Economics Book – big ideas simply explained ed Kishtany, Meadway et al 2012 Superbly presented chronogically, with short chapters on every imaginable topic

- Economics – the user’s guide Ha-Joon Chang 2014 probably my favourite - not least because it understands our repugnance about the subject and offers a way of reading the book Also because it accepts that it is not a science; recognises that there are various (very different) perspectives on the subject; and explains each.  

- Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis; Brian Davey (2015) An alternative approach to economics which situates it in its cultural and historical context. It may be long (at 500 pages) but is definitely worth persevering with.…

- Economics for the Common Good; Jean Tirole (2017) A Nobel-prizewinner offers a highly readable text – written in short chunks

- Economics in two lessons; John Quiggin (2019) Quiggin is an Australian economist which means a non-nonsense approach

Less introductory – more polemical

- For the Common Good; Herman Daly and John Cobb (1989). The book which inspired a different approach to economics – written by a theologian (Cobb) and Herman Daley who for 6 years was the principal economist of the World Bank. But, by virtue of being a train blazer, not the easiest of reads

- Zombie Economics - how dead ideas still walk among us; by John Quiggin (2010) is a great read – with a self-explanatory title. He is an Australian author currently completing a book called Economics in Two Lessons…

- 23 Things they didn’t tell you about capitalism; Ha Joon-Chang (2010) superbly-written demolition job on the myths perpetrated on us by economists

- The Economics of Enough; Diane Coyle (2011)

- Austerity – the history of a dangerous ides; Mark Blyth (2013) written by a political scientist/political economist, it shows how old theories still affect the contemporary world profoundly

- Economics of the 1% - how mainstream economics serves the rich, obscures reality and distorts policy; John F Weeks (2014) More of a critique but a text which is a must-read. One of the best introductions to the subject - which can't be faulted for being over-diplomatic!

- Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017) Hardly an introductory text and more of a sociological treatment which earns high points by stating in the very first sentence that it has “stood on the shoulders of so many giants that he is dizzy” and then proves the point by having an extensive bibliography with lots of hyperlinks…

- Doughnut economics – 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist; Kate Raworth (2017). This Oxford economist has made quite an impact with this book

- Good Economics for Hard Times Banerjee and Duflo (2019) common sense from a Nobel-prize winning couple

- What's Wrong with economics – a primer for the perplexed; Robert Skidelsky (2020) Skidelsky is the biographer of Keynes and as much an historian as economist. This is less an introductory text and more a polemic

The Great Transformation

We’re assailed by articles and books which tell us that the world is changing dramatically because of such technology as driverless cars, keyhole surgery, contraception and social media.

But, in a sense, this has been our story for the last century and more – although Karl Polyani may have been the first (in 1944) to analyse this closely in his classic The Great Transformation which analysed the power aspects behind the transition from feudalism to a market economy.

Other writers periodically try to anticipate what they consider to be significant social change but none perhaps greater than Peter Drucker, an Austrian born in 1909, best known for his management writing – indeed the father of management. His initial education was in Vienna but he graduated in Frankfurst (in International and Public Law), practising journalism in Hamburg and London before migrating to the US where he became a US citizen in 1943.

I have a theory that people who experience different worlds (geographical and/or intellectual) are able somehow to see the world differently - and are more creative. The theory is described here. Drucker went on to use his experience of being the first person to research management in General Motors to write first The New Society – anatomy of the industrial order (1950) and then to anticipate Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” (1971) with The Age of Discontinuity – guidelines to our changing society (1968). In both cases he demonstrated amazing sociological insight – somehow sensing a change in the wind’s direction before it even happened. And he was probably the first person to use the phrase “post-capitalist” when he published (in 1993) Post Capitalist Society

Francis Fukuyama may have inherited his mantle when he published The Great Disruption (1999) – although Drucker lived a good age, dying in 2005. I’ve added him to the table you'll find in the 2020 post which I can't reproduce here because the blogpost people seem to have run out of editors and any table now overlaps into the right hand column! This post is best read in conjunction with A Short Note and annotated bibliography on CHANGE

Further Reading

https://asaduzaman.medium.com/summary-of-the-great-transformation-by-polanyi-c329541e8532

https://weapedagogy.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/resources-for-study-of-polanyis-great-transformation/

The Technology Trap C Frey 2019

Our Common Agenda

A few years ago, I argued that authors (and publishers) of non-fiction books needed some self-discipline; that their books’ messages could and should be contained in many fewer pages. More specifically the post suggested that we apply various tests to any book-

- does it have a solid Introduction – or Preface? This is the author’s chance to show (s)he understands how overwhelmed we are by the choices; to offer us a convincing argument about why (s)he has to inflict yet another book on us. And the best way to do that is to give a brief summary of what others have written and identify the missing elements which make a book necessary. I would like to see a summary of each chapter….. When I got hold recently of George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism; (1928) it was to discover that his Table of Contents has no fewer than 33-pages...

- Does it have a (short) list of recommended reading? Ideally with notes explaining the choice. Most books have a long “bibliography” which is more of a “virility test” - demonstrating nothing more than (a barely compressed sense of) superiority. I want instead to see a shorter (and annotated) list for several reasons - partly to smoke out the author’s prejudices; partly to see how honest (s)he is; and partly to see how well (s)he writes

- Is it clearly written? – with suitable use of graphics and tables which are needed to break up and to illustrate the text….

And I also need to be persuaded that the book in question has two other features --

- respects the basic facts about an issue

- tries to be fair to the various sides of the key arguments on the issue

Publishers seem to have dispensed with editors these days and allow authors to inflict books on us which lack these features. Strange because everyone knows that social media breeds in us all a need for brevity

So credit where and when credit is due – the United Nations is one of the few bodies which seems to understand this. It recently published an important 86-page report “Our Common Agenda” which rehearses the issues faced by the world but accompanied the report with a 28 page “Easy Read” with visuals and tables AND an issue for the “visually impaired”

The Blogroll

One of the many reasons for reading this blog is the access it gives to other takes on the world – visual and textual (I’ve been thinking of adding a selection of podcasts). You can find these by scrolling down the right-hand column until you find “insights from other worlds”. I do keep this list updated and I’ve just added a new blog – called Aurelien – Trying to understand the world which comes from somone with my sort of background in government and academia but who has a much better grasp of geopolitics. His latest post is a diatribe against the “Professional and Managerial Class” (PMC) to whom I devoted a couple of posts earlier in the year. My feeling was that his post was a bit too self-indulgent – a bit of a rant – and needed a deeper analysis of both causes and options. But when I looked at some of his previous posts, it was to discover that he had, last year, provided just such a deeper analysis called Into the Waste-Land which included this section -

The risk now is that the political systems of many western states will begin to fall apart, and that nothing will replace them: anarchy in the popular sense of the term. It’s easy enough to see how this could happen. Public interest and trust in existing political systems is reducing all over the western world. In many countries, scarcely half the population bothers to vote, even in national elections. Parties still have differences between them, but these are often relatively minor, and do not correspond to the differences of opinion and interest within societies themselves. Although substantive issues of Left and Right are actually as salient as they ever were, the more important operational distinction in how people feel is between the minority (10-20% depending on the country) that benefits from the current neoliberal dispensation, or hopes to one day, and the rest, who do not benefit or fear no longer doing so.

There is no Excluded Party in any western country, although some parties, often labelled “extreme” of Left and Right do gather up protest votes. Moreover, in most political systems, the Excluded Party is split between several parties with superficially different orientations and objectives. So in France, much of the old Leftist vote has split in two ways: the middle-class has run off to the Greens, whilst the working class has gone to Le Pen’s National Assembly.

Yet in practice, it would be possible to take the working-class and lower-middle class vote among scattered parties of the Left, and the working-class vote now lost to the Right, and make a winning coalition from them.

The irony is that the Leaders of the Left cannot see this or, if they can, choose to do nothing because they find supporters of the Right common, uncouth and bigoted and have no wish to be associated with them.The further irony is that the views of the average RN voter and the views of the average Communist Party voter are actually not that far apart. It’s the leadership that is the problem.

Corruption vanishes from the radar

There used to be tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of researchers on this subject in academic, national and international bodies. Punch "bibliograhies of anti-corruption" into google and you will be amazed at the number you will find.

Here are a couple of recent ones – first one focusing on developing countries and then a 2022 one from the UK Centre for the Study of Corruption

I've had a file on the subject for the past couple of decades – but, in the last few days, I've 

downloaded another hundred papers and a fair number of books. Much of the literature, 

however, suffers from three fundamental problems -

• few in the West considered – until very recently - that this was a problem for their 

societies – it was rather something affecting developing or ex-communsi countries. 

The policy-makers therefore had no real interest in the discussion or outcome – was seen instead as an academic issue

• most of the literature is addressed to academics – not to the general public. As a whole, 

therefore, it doesn’t explore the causes or possible solutions in a manner accessible to 

the citizen  

• most of the literature was based on a false theory -  as usual one influenced by economists 

who have a perverse view of human nature. They assume that we are calculating machines 

– always measuring costs and benefits and making rational decisions. Here is how I traced the approach of various disciplines a few years ago

How Corruption is treated by the various academic disciplines…..

Discipline	Core assumption
Sociology	Struggle for power
Economics	Rational choice
Political science	Rational choice (at least since the 1970s)
Geography	Factors such aș contiguity, latitude, natural barriers and culture affect development
Public management	Mix of economics, politics and sociology
Anthropology	shared meaning, myths
Political economy	draws upon economics, political science, law, history, sociology et al to explain how political factors determine economic outcomes.
Psychology	Self-image, sexual drive, mythology

Anthropology (and sociology) emerge from this as the most useful disciplines. 

And this is demonstrated in their approach to the issue in such books as -

Corruption – anthropological perspectives edited by D Haller and C Shore (2005) 

useful collection of case studies
Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy; Janine R. Wedel 

2009. Another anthropologist’s take
Confronting Corruption, building accountability – lessons from the world of international development 

advising L Dumas, J Wedel and G Callman (2010)

Corruption – a very short introduction L Holmes 2015 a rather disappointing overview

Unaccountable – how anti-corruption watchdogs and lobbyists sabotaged america’s finance, 

freedom and security ; J Wedel (2016) 

Making Sense of Corruption Bo Rothstein (2017) one of the clearest expositions – 

this time by a Scandinavian political scientist

comment from Patrick Cockburn on the corruption of the British political class

And the world seems to have lost interest recently in the issue

A Corruption Resource
How the Council of Europe saw the problem a few years ago 
Readings on corruption and governance – a 2022 annotated bib
Why Corruption Matters (UK government 2015)
working papers from the UK centre for the study of corruption
How the UNDP saw the problem in 2004 
a very curious paper looking at the development of corruption strategies 
comabting corruption in the 21st century  heywood
Rethinking Corruption in an age of ambiguity 
Understanding Corruption and how to curb it 2021 
analysing the AC strategies of the 26 top-ranked countries - 2018

Turning Points

The last post may have confused some readers since it moved too quickly from a focus on 

central and eastern europe to an expose of the western system - the basic argument being 

that it was “out of balance”.  It started by noting that few people had ever imagined that 

communism would collapse; that most writers had been exploring the opposite process - of 

capitalism giving way to socialism. 
The fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communist regimes gave rise to the literature 

of transitology but it was 30 years before we got a full reckoning of its effect on both Eastern 

and Western societies in The Light that Failed – a reckoning by Ivan Krastev and Stephen 

Holmes (2019) – a book which suggested that many of the new entrants to the European Union 

in 2004-07 were inflicted with an inferiority complex and the old members with hubris.

Jared Diamond's Upheaval – turning points for nations in crisis which came out the same year perhaps offers a better explanation in suggesting that countries have a variety of ways to respond to crisis - viz

1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis

2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something

3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be

solved

4. Getting material and financial help from other nations

5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems

6. Building national identity

7. Honest national self-appraisal

8. Historical experience of previous national crises

9. Dealing with national failure

10. Situation-specific national flexibility

11. National core values

12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints

Inasmuch as there's now a deep sense of crisis everywhere, it's helpful to use this framework t

to think about how societies should be responding to the present polycrises.
People shy away these days from prediction – it’s got a bad name for having so many 

failures to its name. The favoured option is scenarios (to which probabilities are attached) 

with four scenarios normally being on offer. So here goes for my scenarios for the future

• “Transhumanism” – being the name given to how AI will be extended to our human 

bodies. Here’s a helpful video about it

• Dystopia?

• Utopia – which is probably be a form of Socialism

• ??

NB

Diamond's book has received mixed reviews – this website collects them all

https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/upheaval-turning-points-for-nations-in-crisis/

Books which ask what individual crises might tell us about national futures are rare. The only other one I know is Life – and how to survive it by Robin Skynner (psychiatrist) and John Cleese (1993)