Another Milestone!

 "Peripheral Vision” has just celebrated the 400,000^th click. That’s just under 40,000 a year – about 100 a day. Not great – but I don’t do it for the fan mail…I do it from my own recognition that, until I have struggled to express in writing what I understand about a subject, that understanding will be deficient.

I’m confident I understand an issue but, when I start putting that understanding into words and sentences, I suddenly realise that there are things I didn’t actually understand    

One writer offers no less than 15 justifications for why people should blog. I would go with nine –

1. You’ll become a better thinker. Because the process of writing includes recording thoughts on paper, the blogging process makes you question what you thought you knew. You will delve deeper into the matters of your life and the worldview that shapes them.

 2. You’ll become a better writer.  – once, that is, you start to reread your material or get feedback which shows your text was ambiguous…

 3. You’ll live a more intentional life. Once you start writing about your life and the thoughts that shape it, you’ll begin thinking more intentionally about who you are, who you are becoming, and whether you like what you see or not. And that just may be reason enough to get started.

 4. You’ll develop an eye for meaningful things. By necessity, blogging requires a filter. It’s simply not possible to write about every event, every thought, and every happening in your life. Instead, blogging is a never-ending process of choosing to articulate the most meaningful events and the most important thoughts. This process of choice helps you develop an eye for meaningful things.

 5. It’ll lead to healthier life habits (although my partner doesn’t agree!)! Blogging requires time, devotion, commitment, and discipline. And just to be clear, those are all good things to embrace – they will help you get the most out of your days and life.

 6. You’ll inspire others. Blogging not only changes your life, it also changes the life of the reader. And because blogs are free for the audience and open to the public, on many levels, it is an act of giving. It is a selfless act of service to invest your time, energy, and worldview into a piece of writing and then offer it free to anybody who wants to read it. Others will find inspiration in your writing… and that’s a wonderful feeling.

 7. You’ll become more well-rounded in your mindset. After all, blogging is an exercise in give-and-take. One of the greatest differences between blogging and traditional publishing is the opportunity for readers to offer input. As the blog’s writer, you introduce a topic that you feel is significant and meaningful. You take time to lay out a subject in the minds of your readers and offer your thoughts on the topic. Then, the readers get to respond. And often times, their responses in the comment section challenge us to take a new, fresh look at the very topic we thought was so important in the first place.

 8. It’ll serve as a personal journal. It trains our minds to track life and articulate the changes we are experiencing. Your blog becomes a digital record of your life that is saved “in the cloud.” As a result, it can never be lost, stolen, or destroyed in a fire.

 9. You’ll become more confident. Blogging will help you discover more confidence in your life. You will quickly realize that you do live an important life with a unique view and have something to offer others.

 That puts it rather well – although I would amplify the first point by emphasising the sharpened critical faculty regular blogging also brings to the reading of what others write. Thomas Hardy was spot on when he (apparently) said - “How can I know what I think until I read what I write?" You thought you knew something but, when you read back your own first effort at explanation, you immediately have questions – both of substance and style.

But this also conveys itself very quickly to changes in the way that you read other people’s material – you learn more and faster from a critical dialogue (even with yourself) than from passive reading…..

 That’s why they say that the best way to learn about a subject is to (try to) write a book about it (rather than reading several books). It sounds paradoxical (as well as presumptuous) but it’s actually true – and the reason is simple.

Translating your imagined understanding into a written summary allows a dialogue with the books – which has the added advantage of helping you better remember the issues….  

Blogger Duncan Green makes another important point that –  

regular blogging builds up a handy, time-saving archive. I’ve been blogging daily since 2008. OK, that’s a little excessive, but what that means is that essentially I have a download of my brain activity over the last 7 years – almost every book and papers I’ve read, conversations and debates.

Whenever anyone wants to consult me, I have a set of links I can send (which saves huge amounts of time). And raw material for the next presentation, paper or book.

 

Links I Liked

 1. Heads or Hands?

It’s interesting that we should get 2 new books in a single month challenging one of the basic principles of our times – namely meritocracy.

That they should appear just as we began to notice the paradox of the “essential workers” (nurses, dustbin-men) earning a pittance whilst the “symbolic analysts” (in Reich’s famous phrase) sit on their backsides and rake in millions is nothing short of prescient.  

The Tyranny of Merit – what’s become of the common good? is philosopher Michael Sandel’s attack on the principle which, he argues, has led to hubris amongst the victors and humiliation amongst the losers. In 2009 Sandel delivered the prestigious BBC Reith Lecture for that year – on “Markets and Morals”

 David Goodhart is unlikely to receive such an invitation (although under the present Johnson government anything is possible). His work is too challenging – if not distasteful - for well-endowed liberal cosmopolitans. He does, however, have my respectful attention.   

In his just-published Head, Hand, Heart – the struggle for dignity and status in the 21^st Century, Goodhart dares to question the emphasis on the importance of university education which became such a shibboleth in the 1970s….- unlike the more sensible Germany….who have always prized and honoured practical skills and had a strong vocational training tradition.

 2. Germany as Exemplar?

I have this past week been working on an article about the Sofia street protests for a guest post the first part of which will appear tomorrow (Tuesday) on Boffy’s Blog - and then on this one.

The article asks what progress central and eastern Europe has or has not made in the past 30 years…starting with a quote from a famous little book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” written in 1990 by the anglo-german academic and liberal statesman, Ralf Dahrendorf – to the effect that the development of effective civil society would take 2 generations (viz 50 years)    

 Dahrendorf was a brilliant Anglo-German intellectual who, more than 30 years before his “Revolution in Europe”, had written a revisionist take on “Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society” (1959 Eng trans) with which I was very taken just as I was starting my political sociology course.

A few years later he wrote a highly provocative analysis of his country - Society and Democracy in Germany (1967 Eng trans) – which argued that Germany could only then be called a “modern” society…..Nazism had at last broken the deference to authority which had until then been the country’s defining feature - this a mere 2 decades after Germany’s “Stunde Null”. The book caused quite a controversy both within and outside Germany. Geoffrey Eley was one British historian who disputed the analysis and went on to write an entire book about The Peculiarities of German History (1984)

 I’m reminded of all this by the release of yet another book about Germany - Why the Germans do it better – notes from a grown-up country

In the 1960s it was France and its planning system that many of us admired….it took another decade before we realised that the German Federal and training systems and worker representation on Boards were healthy features worth studying more closely.

It’s difficult to remember that the UK was the object of universal admiration if not envy – whereas it is now seen as a bit of a Banana Republic. Just look at the latest post on Chris Gray’s Brexit Blog – the descent into political insanity

I suppose one lesson is that all fortunes fall and rise – no one should ever give up hope on their country?

 3. Political Hubris – why we need to think seriously of Democracy by Lot

The idea of Citizen Assemblies has always impressed me – this article gives some recent examples.

It was Robert Michels’ Political Parties – a sociological study of the oligarchic tendencies of modern democracy (1911) which had alerted me in the 1960s to the insidious slide of political leadership - and made me so sympathetic to the German Greens attempts to control its leadership.  

 Pat Chalmers is one person with a vision of a different way of doing things. Author of Fraudcast News – how bad journalism supports our bogus democracies he has been campaigning for Democracy by Lot for some years.

After the recent UK and US experience of political leadership – which has allowed so-called leaders to run amok, I am at last persuaded that we do need to look seriously at this idea. We could start with this article….  

So Isst die Welt – und must nicht so sein*

 Warning; this post will appeal only to those with an interest in the strange byways one’s life often takes

I like books which give a sense of the personality behind famous works. My field is that of “social intervention” – which covers people’s efforts to improve social conditions. And books about the lives of key social scientists - such as development economists – are of particular interest.

I do, of course, have a bit of a love-hate relationship to social science but I have a soft spot for the giants of political science - who were few and far between in the first half of the Century but have mushroomed since then…..

Comparative European Politics – the story of a Profession; ed Hans Daalder (1997) is one of my favourite books of this sort. It gives 27 prominent European political scientists the opportunity to sketch the personal choices and friendships they made in the post-war period as they came together in the early days of what has become a strong European network

Learning about Politics - in time and space; Richard Rose (2014) is a superbly-written life memoir by a younger member of that group (still going strong at 87) – covering the choices he made. I remember him well from my Scottish days where he was a bit of a maverick figure with an interest in the North Ireland quagmire - moving on in later years to cover "policy transfer and learning" and Eastern Europe developments. For me it’s a fascinating book - written in the simple (if not elegant) style which characterises all his work - as befits someone who was, in his early life in the US, a journalist.

In that same spirit I want to explore the byways which have led to my current passion (fixation) for public administration…..

“Change” is a word that has had me salivating for half a century. According to poet Philip Larkin, “Sexual intercourse began in 1963…” – at roughly the same time my generation began to chafe under the “tradition” so well described in David Kynaston’s social history series on post-war Britain which started with Austerity Britain and Modernity Britain 1957-1962.

The notion of “modernization” (as set out in a famous series of “What’s wrong with Britain” books published by the Penguin Press in the 60s) was a highly seductive for my generation - ….

I had just graduated from University when a Labour Government came to power in 1964 – after 13 years of Conservative rule and headed to London, initially for a post-graduate course in political sociology but, after a few months, switched to research work with a government “Manpower” unit.

But I had a practical bent and had always been interested in regional development and politics and the writings of Labour and leftist intellectuals such as Tony Crosland and John Mackintosh. The latter had been a tutor of mine whom I met subsequently in parliament to discuss his take on local government reorganisation and devolution – Crosland the author of the definitive The Future of Socialism (1956) whom I had hosted when he visited local party HQ in my home town…..

Fifty years ago, graduates like me didn’t need inviting to get involved in politics – we had role models and change was in the air….The older generation patently needed replacing, we thought, and we were the ones to do it.

The need for reform of our institutions (and the power structures they sustained) became a dominant theme in my life when, in 1968, I found myself representing the east end of a shipbuilding town.

I had eagerly absorbed the writing which was coming from American progressive academics (such as Warren Bennis and Amitai Etzioni) about the new possibilities offered by the social sciences; and listened spellbound on the family radio to the 1970 Reith Lectures on “Change and Industrial Society” by Donald Schon – subsequently issued as the book “Beyond the Stable State”. In it, he coined the phrase “Dynamic conservatism” and went on to talk about government as a learning system and to ask what can we know about social change.

From that moment I was hooked on the importance of organisations (particularly public) and of institutional reform……In those days there was little talk of management (!) and only a few Peter Drucker books…..    

Toffler’s Future Shock came the very next year (1971) by which time I had started to proselytize the “need for change” in papers which bore such titles as “Radical Reform of municipal management” and “From corporate planning to community action”…..

 Having got myself elected, I needed a project – and community action supplied it. I may not have been involved in the student action of 68 but I was affected by the challenge to authority it represented and by the sudden fashion for participation.

The electors of the east end of the town I represented lived and worked next to the shipyards which had supplied the town’s livelihood for the previous century. But employment was increasingly precarious – and the housing conditions poor.

So I was soon leading neighbourhood action and encouraging self-help activities in the education and leisure fields….

And within 3 years I had managerial responsibility (of a sort) – supplying the political leadership for a new Social Work agency which had been set up by the reforming Labour government of 1964-70.  

That’s where I learned about the importance of social interventions and gained a wider reputation - which stood me in good stead when a massive new Regional Council was set up in 1974 covering half of Scotland. I not only became one of the 103 politicians elected to manage it (and its 100,000 teachers, engineers, social workers etc) but one of what was called the “Gang of Four” to lead it….

I still had academic aspirations, however, as is clear from this paper I wrote in 1977 on Community Development – its political and administrative challenge which was indeed reprinted in a UK book "Readings in Community Work” ed by Henderson, Paul and Thomas (1981)

*“This is the how world is (the spelling of the word is a pun denoting “eating”) - and must not be” (Brecht)

Strategies for Governing

The origins of my fixation with public management can be traced back to an odd mix of characters – from RH Tawney, an uncompromising non-conformist English socialist from the early part of the 20^th century and Welsh firebrand Nye Bevan - to smooth-talking academics such as Bernard Crick, John Mackintosh and Chris Hood in the UK; Donald Schoen, P Marris and M Rein and Aaron Wildavsky on the other side of the Atlantic - with a strange mix of Tony Crosland (of “Future of Socialism” fame) and the community activist Saul Alinsky thrown in to give spice and complexity to the brew…. 

Tawney and Bevan supplied the passion; Crosland, Hood, Mackintosh, Marris/Rein, Schoen and Wildavsky the cool reasoning; and Alinsky some of the tools of early activism…

The argument in Bernard Crick’s “In Defence of Politics” (1962) that politics was an important and honourable activity was a fresh and powerful one when I first read his book at University and undoubtedly played a role in my becoming in 1968 a local politician - and occupying a senior, reforming position in the West of Scotland for more than 20 years. For the subsequent 20 years I was a nomadic consultant in something called “institutional development” which my mother, understandably, simply couldn’t understand….

This was the start of what I wanted to be a short intro to, and commentary on, a new book about public admin which has just arrived. I felt I needed to put the book in the wider context of how this important subject has landed up with such a boring reputation with citizens – even if (because?) it inspires tens of thousands of academic devotees. But the text just ran away with me – so I have pushed that question away for the time being and will focus simply for the moment on the book itself

Bear in mind that my library already has a couple of hundred books and thousands of articles on this subject of public admin or public management as we learned to call it from 1990. Why should I need another?

But this one, called “Strategies for Governing; reinventing public administration for a dangerous century”  (2019) by Alasdair Roberts seemed different – its Intro was clearly arguing that something was seriously wrong with the subject

We must recover the capacity to talk about the fundamentals of government, because the fundamentals matter immensely. Right now, there are billions of people on this planet who suffer terribly because governments cannot perform basic functions properly.

People live in fear because governments cannot protect their homes from war and crime. They live in poverty because governments cannot create the conditions for trade and commerce to thrive.

They live in pain because governments cannot stop the spread of disease.

And they live in ignorance because governments do not provide opportunities for education.

The expectations that we hold of our leaders can be stated simply: They should protect us from foreign enemies, maintain internal order, increase prosperity, improve well-being, and provide justice. Even in the twenty-first century, most governments on this planet fail to do this

The leaders of modern-day states have a difficult job.

- They must devise a strategy for leading their countries toward security, order, prosperity, and justice.

- Next, they must design and build institutions that translate their strategy into practice.

- And then they must deal with the vicissitudes of time and chance, adapting strategies and institutions in response to altered circumstances and unexpected events.

To do this well, leaders need advice about the machinery of government—what it is capable of doing, how it should be designed and constructed, how it ought to be run, and how it can be reconstructed.

The book took only a couple of weeks to reach me in my Carpathian mountain house; I raced through it; and am deeply impressed. Let me simply say that the book

- is one of the most important half dozen or so books in the English language on the subject

- is superbly written – and structured (short chapters)

- gives the subject of the state (and its good management) back its central significance in people’s lives

Most people may find public admin boring – but, if they are honest, they will also admit that most economics leaves them mystified. This blog has recently emphasised the huge dangers of leaving the fate of our society so much in the hands of the economists. But the same might be said of the public admin/management scribblers who have succeeded, with a very few exceptions, in making their subject boring and inaccessible.

Of course, it’s not fair to put all the blame on academics – journalists and politicians also bear a heavy responsibility for the strange combination of hype and omission which passes for commentary on public affairs….Only last month I wrote an important post about Covid19 raising profound questions about how differently eastern states were managing the pandemic

“Strategies for Governing” was written before the pandemic but, rightly in my view, reminds us that it is individuals who manage the public sector and that skills of statecraft have been ignored for too long (apart from people like John Bryson and Mark Moore) – with the focus too much instead on issues of micro-management and of ideology. The very word “governing” in its title is so refreshing after all the reified nonsense we’ve had about “governance”

This is the first of what I suspect will be a series of posts…..

David Graeber RIP

I’m devastated to hear that the writer and activist David Graeber has suddenly died – in the prime of his life – at the incredibly early age of 59. He has figured a lot in my posts of the last year – not least the full post I devoted in December to his superb book Bullshit Jobs 

His book The Democracy Project was one of those list in my very recent list of essential reading for social activists – and indeed arrived the very day after I posted this…

He is also on the short list of great writers I drew up a few months ago (and was the subject of only the last post) to advance the argument that authors who straddled different worlds (whether class, country, academic or vocational) experienced themselves as “outsiders” – which gives them originality of insight and communication.  

He was a prolific - as well as an excellent – writer who gave generously of his time as well to activism and to the increasing number of journalists from all over the world who would approach him. I suspect he simply worked himself to death – it has happened to so many of the people I knew in Scotland in the 70s and 80s who were unstinting of their time. Convener Geoff Shaw of Strathclyde Regional Council – whose door, as a community minister, was always open to people when they were in trouble.  Labour MP and Professor John MacIntosh ( who had been my University tutor) in the 1970s; Labour Leader John Smith in the 1990s;Scotland’s First Minister Donald Dewar and ex-Foreign Sec and Leader of the House Robin Cook in the 2000s.

All tragically early deaths from literally working themselves to the bone…..

Salon had a touching tribute - and the Guardian gives the basic facts -

 

Born in New York in 1961 to two politically active parents – his father fought in the Spanish civil war with the International Brigades, while his mother was a member of the international Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union – David Graeber studied anthropology at the State University of New York and the University of Chicago, he won a prestigious Fulbright fellowship and spent two years doing anthropological fieldwork in Madagascar.

In 2005, Yale decided against renewing his contract a year before he would have secured tenure. Graeber suspected it was because of his politics; when more than 4,500 colleagues and students signed petitions supporting him, Yale instead offered him a year’s paid sabbatical, which he accepted and moved to the UK to work at Goldsmiths before joining LSE. “I guess I had two strikes against me,” he told the Guardian in 2015. “One, I seemed to be enjoying my work too much. Plus I’m from the wrong class: I come from a working-class background.”

 

His 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, made him famous. In it, Graeber explored the violence that lies behind all social relations based on money, and called for a wiping out of sovereign and consumer debts. Graeber followed it in 2013 with The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, about his work with Occupy Wall Street, then The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy in 2015, which was inspired by his struggle to settle his mother’s affairs before she died. A 2013 article, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, led to Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, his 2018 book in which he argued that most white-collar jobs were meaningless and that technological advances had led to people working more, not less.

“Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it,” he told the Guardian in 2015 – even admitting that his own work could be meaningless: “There can be no objective measure of social value.”

 

An anarchist since his teens, Graeber was a supporter of the Kurdish freedom movement and the “remarkable democratic experiment” he could see in Rojava, an autonomous region in Syria. 

He became heavily involved in activism and politics in the late 90s. He was a pivotal figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 – though he denied that he had come up with the slogan “We are the 99%”, for which he was frequently credited.

“I did first suggest that we call ourselves the 99%. Then two Spanish indignados and a Greek anarchist added the ‘we’ and later a food-not-bombs veteran put the ‘are’ between them. And they say you can’t create something worthwhile by committee! I’d include their names but considering the way police intelligence has been coming after early OWS organisers, maybe it would be better not to,” he wrote.

 It’s been a sad few days for anarchists since it was only a couple of weeks ago that Stuart Christie died

Graeber Resource

For those who prefer visuals here’s a Youtube session hosted by Baffler with David and PeterThiel (!) debating the pace of innovation. For an academic, Graeber has a very accessible style – as you can see for yourself –

Possibilities – essays on hierarchy, rebellion and desire (2007)

Direct Action – an ethnography (2009)

Revolutions in Reverse – essays on politics, violence, art and imagination (2011?)

The Utopia of Rules – on technology, stupidity and the secret joys of bureaucracy (2015);

Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs – a theory (2018) the full book

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/12/bullshit-jobs.html my overview

https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2018/07/bullshit-about-jobs one of the few academic reviews – but one with a tinge of jealousy about it

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331159223_Book_review_of_Bullshit_jobs_A_Theory_by_David_Graeber/link/5c691c87299bf1e3a5ad4600/download a more positive academic take

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/08/bullshit-jobs; a serious review which does a good summary

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review - a fair review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/27/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-david-graeber-review-laboured-rant - a more critical reviewer who ends  up agreeing with Graeber

https://nonsite.org/review/back-to-work-review-of-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs too clever

https://medium.com/@nouri.pennywhistle/dissecting-two-academic-trolls-review-of-bullshit-jobs-a-theory-e2782559becb turgid nonsense

https://philebersole.wordpress.com/2018/05/23/managerial-feudalism-and-bs-jobs/ blog

http://www.catherinecheek.com/2018/12/10/book-review-bullshit-jobs-a-theory/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/14/bankers-anthropological-study-joris-luyendijk

It was a nice gesture of New York Review of Books to give us another look at the last piece he wrote for them - Against Economics, his very positive review of Robert Skidelsky’s “What’s Wrong with Economics”.

Graeber had also been complimentary about Skidelsky’s previous book - Money and Government – a challenge to mainstream economics

And also these tributes from DG's friends

The most readable Guidebooks to Economics

I have, I readily admit, a certain fixation about the style of social science books – particularly economic ones. I have at least 5 reasons for deep concern –

- the lack of taste shown by publishers - who insist on imposing narrow and badly-written texts on us

- the way continuing academic compartmentalisation into tinier and tinier sub-fields makes it more and more difficult for those who work across disciplinary fields to get a serious hearing

- the obfuscating nature of the prose - which results as they disappear up one another’s arses;

- the dominance and unjustifiable arrogance of the economists; and

- the managerialist grab of the past few decades

I try, occasionally, to explore why specialists write such inferior books compared to those who have resisted groupthink and who approach an issue more creatively…..from a multidisciplinary point of view. I find myself using the metaphor of a bridge, border or network.

But perhaps “outsider” is a better term since it better conveys the sense of not belonging to the group – of being on the periphery…..Indeed the word “periphery” also gives a useful sense of the importance of messages and pressures from diverse sources in helping avoid the dreaded disease of “groupthink”…  “Think “peripheral vision” and “tunnel vision”, focus – which is why my blog currently bears the title it does….

Like the good social scientist I am, I already have a hypothesis – namely that the feeling of being an outsider is a catalyst to identify and challenge “groupthink” and that writing is an effective way of exploring the multiple perspectives which subsequently open up…..

Clearly one can be a great writer without being (or feeling) an outsider - although I suspect that people who lack empathy won’t be great writers. But the weak point in my argument is the connection between creativity and writing. There’s no obvious reason why those with creative insights should be able to express them clearly in writing,,,,……Or is there?    

But I have probably been insufficiently sensitive to the system in which social scientists are trapped…

Academics are now under pressure to publish - with their Departments rewarded financially for those who have high ratings from what’s called “peer-reviews”. Those who accept the “conventional wisdom” in their fields and write in jargon will generally score well in these ratings.

But go off piste and/or write in plain language the (wo)man in the street can understand and you’re in trouble.

One of the concluding chapters of The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts by Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017) explains this very well. And argues, correctly in my view, that the way we allow economists to continue to bamboozle us into believing that the subject is a difficult one is nothing short of criminal!

It was early 2018 when I did the first list for my readers of clearly-written explanatory economics books which I could recommend….   So it’s about time it was updated

All the books until the list reaches 2017 are downloadable in full 

Table 1; Best written books about Economics for the general reader (chronological order)

Title, author and date	Comment
Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics; JK Galbraith and N Salinger (1978)	One of the world’s best non-fiction writers and economists is quizzed by a Frenchwoman. Superb
Short Circuit – strengthening local economies in an unstable world” - Ronald Douthwaite (1996)	Very practical insight into local economic development by an Irishman – but also inspirational….24 years on, it hasn’t really been bettered.
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!). By an Australian
Economics for Everyone  – a short guide to the economics of capitalism”; Jim Stanford (2008)	a very user-friendly book commissioned by Canadian trade unions with excellent graphics and “further reading” list ….for full version see table 2 …..
Zombie Economics - how dead ideas still walk among us; by John Quiggin (2010)	is a great read – with a self-explanatory title. He is also an Australian
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. By a Cambridge economist educated in South Korea
"The End of Progress - how modern economics has failed us"; Graham Maxton (2011)	a highly readable book by an ex-Director-General of the Club of Rome
Austerity – the history of a dangerous ides; Mark Blyth (2013)	written by a Scottish political scientist/political economist (now working at Brown Uni in US) , 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	One of the best introductions to the subject - which can't be faulted for being over-diplomatic!  By a US economist who worked in London from the 2000s
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 Rules – the rights and wrongs of the dismal science; Dani Rodrik (2016)	Rodrik is from Turkey and is one of the few economists prepared to challenge the mainstream. This is a balanced rather than critical analysis
The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017)	This is a highly readable little book from those who took part in the protests about the irrelevance of economic teaching and set out the deficiencies they experienced. This is one of the few which is not freely downloadable
Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)	A sociologist’s 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’s book is advertised as a new perspective on the subject. One of the few not downloadable
Economics for the common good; Jean Tirole (2017) A French Nobel-prize winning economist	A useful review here
Economics in Two Lessons; John Quiggin (2019) Google excerpts only	Quiggin wrote this book on his website, seeking feedback as he went . You may therefore be able to see a fair amount of the content here
“What’s wrong with economics – a primer for the perplexed”; Robert Skidelsky (2020)	Skidelsky is a stylish writer – historian and biographer of Keynes – I’ve long admired. I’ve not had a chance to read the book yet – although Diana Coyle’s not impressed

Further reading

The Delusions of Economics - the Misguided Certainties of a Hazardous Science Gilbert Rist (2010)

429,500 academics are employed in British universities

What are Universities for? Useful briefing paper from 2008