WHY DO SO MANY NEW TITLES WASTE OUR TIME?

“Silent Coup”, “The Big Myth”, “Rentier Capitalism”…are titles of some of the books which have hit us in recent years. People keep churning out books which just repeat what most of us already know!

When is someone going to build on these critiques from the past 50 years and do a proper exploration of “what is to be done” to give us a civilized society? One of the best is “The Capitalism Papers - fatal flaws in an obsolete system” published in 2012 by the famous US activist and journalist Jerry Mander. It has everything –

·               the ecological concerns;

·               questioning of the legal basis of the corporation and the inequities and iniquities they cause;

·               recognition that military spending and advertising supports the whole rotten system

·               that democracy is being privatised

·               as is our very consciousness 

Mander draws it all together in a masterful conclusion in some 35 pages starting at page 258 (of the hyperlink given in the title above) which has 4 sub-headings -  

·                Nature Comes First

·                The Primacy of Scale: Not Globalization, Localization

·                Experiments in Corporate Values and Structure.

·                Hybrid Economics . . . 

The only thing it’s light on is an annotated bibliography. It has a 7 page bibliography but would have been useful to have had Mander’s reasons for selecting those particular works (from p296) 

None of the titles with which this post starts have a recommended reading list but all have extensive notes

·       The Big Myth – how American businesses taught us to loathe government and love the market N Oreskes and E Conway 2023

·     Silent Coup – how Corporations overthrew Democracy C Provost and M Kennard 2023

·       Rentier Capitalism – who owns the economy and who pays for it? Brett Christophers 2020

 

The Real Lessons from British Justice

Yet another major miscarriage of justice has surfaced in the UK – to add to those which have plagued the poor suffering Brits, be it Hillsborough, Grenfell or the Birmingham Six, The current issue of the New Statesman expresses it most clearly - 

As a miscarriage of justice, it is perhaps unrivalled in British history. Between 1999 and 2015, at least 3,500 sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting by the Post Office. The fault lay with the defective Horizon IT system, which incorrectly suggested that there were financial shortfalls where none existed.

Trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare, workers protested their innocence, but this did not stop them being trampled upon. More than 700 sub-postmasters received criminal convictions and 236 were imprisoned. Others were forced to pay back tens of thousands of pounds and suffered financial ruin. Family homes were lost and marriages destroyed. At least four victims are thought to have taken their lives as a consequence.

For years, this story has played out in the background of British public life. In 2019, a group of campaigners led by Alan Bates – the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance – won a major legal victory when the High Court found that the Fujitsu-developed Horizon system contained “bugs, errors and defects”, and that there was a “material risk” that financial shortfalls in branches were caused by it. Dozens of Post Office workers subsequently had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal in 2021.

A police investigation and an independent public inquiry into the scandal were also launched during this period.

But it has taken a TV show – “Mr Bates vs The Post Office” – to give the affair the political prominence it deserves. The four-part series, which was broadcast on ITV at the start of this year, is testimony to the power of drama. 

But it was one of my favourite blogs – Stumbling and Mumbling – which put it all in the necessary perspective – 

A well-ordered society has mechanisms which prevent such people getting power or doing much damage if they do get it. The Post office scandal shows that we lack such mechanisms, in at least four respects: 

 - There's good evidence that companies actually select for psychopaths. People who are unusually concerned with status and power are precisely those who aim for the top of hierarchies (whereas many others of us just want to get on with our jobs), and psychopaths' superficial charm and fluency appeals to hirers. As David Allen Green says, "the likes of Paula Vennells are always with us and will always somehow obtain senior positions." This is consistent with a finding by Luigi Zingales and colleagues, that a lot more corporate fraud occurs than is actually detected. What's more, companies also select for over-confidence as they mistake "competence cues" - the right body language or the illusion of knowledge - for actual ability. (All this might also apply to politics).

 - Ministers failed to control or to replace Post Office management, believing - in a remarkable example of not understanding the function of ownership - that it "has the commercial freedom to run its business operations without interference from the shareholder." Ed Davey distinguishes himself from the other ministers merely by being so uncouth as to have blurted this out in public.

 - Police for years did not investigate the likely fraud and perversion of the course of justice by Post Office bosses. The fact that they have begun to do so since the screening of the ITV drama reminds us that the Met is more concerned with PR than with justice. 

 - The courts failed to acquit innocent sub-postmasters, for systemic reasons discussed by David Allen Green. This was not an isolated miscarriage of justice; it occurred over 700 times. 

We should think of our main social institutions - markets, the democratic process, the legal system and so on - as selection devices. What we have here is evidence that these do not operate as you might think they should, not in one or two instances but systematically and persistently.

·      The Post Office board and government ministers did not select honest or competent bosses.

·      The police did not choose to investigate serious crimes.

·      And the courts failed to correctly distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. 

These, however, are by no means the only selection mechanisms which don't work as one might imagine they should. 

·       Politicians are selected for fanaticism rather than competence.

·       Financial markets often do not select the best investment opportunities, which is why we have asset price bubbles and under-performing fund managers.

·       Product and labour markets do not eliminate the "long tail of extremely badly managed firms" described (pdf) by Bloom and Van Reenen. Peer review often does not select the best academic research.

·       And the media does not select for informed expertise. 

Society's main social institutions, then, very often do not select the best or filter out the worst. Often, they do the opposite. What should we make of this fact? One reasonable inference is that it is just really difficult to make good decisions with limited information and so there will always be a great deal of ruin in the nation.

If this were all, though, we'd expect to see political activity and debate focusing upon how we might improve such mechanisms. But it isn't. Instead in recent years politics has been consumed with Brexit and other culture war issues. Which is of course yet another example of a selection mechanism: politics selects to focus on irrelevancies rather than more important matters.

This is part of a pattern. It's normal for people to neglect structural and societal forces and to pay more attention instead to individual humans. Which is why public anger is focussed upon Paula Vennells rather than the mechanisms that recruited and enabled her. People like a witch-hunt and are attacking Vennells in the same way that criminals attack nonces - to remind themselves that they are morally superior to at least somebody.

Even good people can inadvertently reinforce this tendency. In exposing the detail of the Post Office scandal there's a danger of missing the big picture. Both journalism (even when done well) and drama look more at human interest stories than at social structures.

And this suits the ruling class. It has long flattered itself that the system works because "good chaps" will be in charge. The fact that "good chaps" so rarely are - and that the Post Office merely joins a list of systemic injustices such as Hillsborough, Windrush and Grenfell - doesn't seem to undermine this complacency.

Which brings me to a concern. You might have noticed that I've avoided using the word "failure" to describe all these different selection effects. This is because they might not be failures at all. The fact that the powerful can enrich themselves at the expense of the powerless; that markets permit the incompetent wealthy to stay rich; and that politics is a clownish sideshow that avoids substantive issues all suit the elite perfectly well. Prem Sikka is right to say that the Post Office affair "has once again shown the UK to be a hotbed of corruption and cronyism where in pursuit of profits and private gains innocent people are bludgeoned to silence and submission."

It has thus shown what Marxists have long known - that law and justice are veils behind which lay exploitation and cruelty. The question for the establishment is how they might bring these veils back down.

Ways of Seeing

Each of us has a particular lens through which we look when we’re trying to make sense of the world. The International Relations people have it down to a fine art – with their classification of the subject into no fewer than 8 schools – realism, liberalism, marxism, structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism etc. (Chapter 7 of the link gives the lowdown on the various schools)   

In my youth, I was aware of a tripartite division – conservatives, socialists 

and liberals. I didn’t like the Manichean approach of left/right - there was 

always a third way, be it green or ecological. 
It was only in the new millennium, however, that I became aware of the 

four dimensions of grid-group theory which anthropologist Mary Douglas 

introduced - consisting of four very different “world views” (what she calls

 hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist) which came to be known 

as “Cultural Theory”. I first came across Mary Douglas’ theory in 1998, thanks 

to public admin theorist Chris Hood’s “The Art of the State” which uses her 

typology brilliantly to help us understand the strengths, weaknesses and risks 

of these various world views. 

But it appears we have yet another way of understanding the world – viz 

“conjunctural analysis”. I agree it’s a bit of a mouthful but it basically denies 

the bias in the various schools and argues that we need to recognise the complexity 

of the world and to accept there are different levels of explanation for the 

way things are. John Clarke sets out the argument in The Battle for Britain – crises, 

conflicts and the conjunctures which, I have to confess, I found very hard going.

Further Reading about “World Views”

- The Battle for Britain – crises, conflicts and the conjunctures John Clarke 2023

- Theories of International Relations ed R Devetak and J True (6^th ed 2022)

- Foundations of International Relations l ed S McGlinchey et al 2022

- Britain’s Choice – common ground and divisions in 2020s Britain (More in Common 

2020) a detailed picture of the british people and their values these days

- Twelve Ways of Seeing the World M Betti (2019 Eng – original German 2001) 

based on Rudolf Steiner's thinking, this offers a curious typology

- Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world; 

Ronald Inglehart (2018) a political scientist,who has been at the heart of discussion 

about cultural values for the past 50 years – and the book and this article summarises 

that work.
- Grid, group and grade – challenges in operationalising cultural theory for cross-national 

research (2014) is a very academic article although its comparative diagrams are instructive
- “A Cultural Theory of Politics” (2011) a short article which shows how the grid-group 

approach has been used in a range of disciplines
-  Consumer Shift - how changing values are reshaping the consumer landscape Any 

Hines (2011) actually much more about values and world views than it is about consumers….

- Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values (2010) a useful little 

manual for charities
- Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010) ditto
- “Way of life theory – the underlying structure of world views, social relations and

 lifestyles” (2009) – a rather disjointed dissertation by Michael Edward Pepperday 

and introduction to which is here.

- Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions; Keith Grint (2008) a short very useful 

article by an academic

- The Geography of Thought – how westerners and asians think differently and why; 

Richard Nesbitt (2003) An American social psychologist gives a thought-provoking book

- “The Art of the State” Christopher Hood (1998) A brilliant essay on the usefulness 

of grid-group analysis

- Riding the Waves of Culture – understanding cultural diversity in business; Frans 

Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1997) the Dutchman who took on de Hofstede’s 

mantle
-When Cultures Collide – leading across cultures; Richard Lewis (1996) The book which 

introduced us to the field – and gave us marvellous vignettes of the strange habits of 

almost all countries of the world
- Management development through cultural diversity Ronnie Lessem (1995) 

Lessem is a south african who uses the four lens of the compass to show how the 

environment governs our ways of thinking.

WHISTLING IN THE WIND

Rather belatedly I’m uploading this past year’s collection of posts to which I’ve given the title Whistling in the wind. According to the dictionary, “Whistling in the Wind” means trying to change something which cannot be changed. 2023 was certainly a grim year – Russia’s brutal invasion continuing to murder hundreds of thousands and Israel inflicting ethnic cleansing on the Palestinians. 

And the world seems consumed with hatred and bitterness. 
But I certainly don’t want to give succour to those who believe it can never be 

changed. The title of this year’s collection is rather meant to convey the sense 

of being in a select group in fighting against the irrationality and fatalism 

gripping our societies. 
It’s interesting to look at some previous titles of these collections -

This too will Pass – the 2022 posts - a title which perhaps fell into the trap of fatalism

Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts - a title from the famous quote from Keynes when he talked of the unnoticed influence of books on our minds

Peripheral Vision – the 2020 posts. This celebrates the blog’s notion of creativity

To Whom it may Concern – the 2019 posts. Normally written in support of someone’s application

The Search for the Holy Grail – the 2018 posts Something I’ve been guilty of

Common Endeavour – the 2017 posts An important concept for me

The Slaves’ Chorus – the 2016 posts I remember listening to an emotional rendering of this chorus in a Brno theatre in 1990. I hadn’t realised that the full title of this song is actually the Hebrew Slaves’ Chorus

In Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s year (2015) An allusion to the Brecht poem of that title

Let me draw your attention to some important features of the blog -

List of E-books

It took me some time to realise that the blog contained an amazing resource for English-speakers….the top-right corner has the list of E-books which have resulted from a careful selection and editing of the posts. They are, effectively, annotated guides to such subjects as -

• change – in all its aspects

• culture in the broadest sense

• patterns of decline

• The critical writing of the past half century about our economic system

• The literature on administrative reform

• The debate about Scottish independence over the past decade

• Cultural aspects of countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Germany

I can safely say that no such guides exist elsewhere in the English language. But I’m not able to crack the question of their wider dissemination. They’re little use if noone knows of their existence!! This is an issue I have to address. Ironically, however, the “resource” offered by the reading lists which have become such a feature of the blog is not something I seem to avail myself of too frequently! I tend all too often to “skim and save” – and generally fail to return to the link and read it properly. At this time when New Year Resolutions are so popular, there’s a bad habit I need to discipline!!

“Insights into other worlds – good writing and painting”

– aka Blogroll This offers hyperlinks to some 70 sites which I follow. At the end of each year I note the new links I subscribe to and remove those which no longer function. The new entrants are -

https://accidentalgods.life/ wonderful site which mixes environmental concerns with existential and spiritual

https://aurelien2022.substack.com/ one of the most interesting new links which “tries to understand the world” with someone with senior experience in both government and academia

https://areopagus.culturaltutor.com/profile breathtaking insight (and sounds of) to cultural treasures

https://memex.naughtons.org/ an IT journalist’s diary

Those which no longer function and have been removed include

Scottish Review, a great little internet weekly whose superb writing can still be seen here

Public admin Reform – my own site which was suddenly removed

Renegade Inc

4. Search Facility

And if you punch a key phrase into the search facility, chances are it will instantly give you something interesting. Try it. 

LINKS – and what they tell you about someone

My blogroll lists 70 blogs I try to follow – one being an old site of mine which was suddenly removed, without notice. So, be warned, all those precious papers and books could suddenly vanish!!. And buying a web address is not a solution – as this, just as easily, can also vanish via a takeover. Indeed that’s just happened to one of my bank accounts – NatWest International who seem to have taken over the Royal Bank of Scotland - which has intimated that they are closing the account in which I have 5k dollars in late January. They offer no option to allow me to transfer the money to another account. Such are the ways of corporate capitalism.

But revenons aux moutons – to the matter of what links can tell you about a person. The last post led with a link to a file containing a 100 page list of the hyperlinks I had selected this year for their interest. Both the blogroll and this list of hyperlinks tell you a lot about what grabs my interest – for example.

The Journal of Intellectual History is onec of my favourite journals and occasionally has free articles. Two recent were

Neoliberalism – an intellectual history N Mulder review of 3 recent books

one on Anti-fascism which places the literature in the wider context of anti-colonialism

We are not ready - policymaking in the era of era of environmental breakdown

(IPPR 2020) which assesses the UK against 3 criteria

Putting the Gaza ethnic cleansing in context

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/18/chris-hedges-the-death-of-israel/

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/12/patrick-lawrence-gaza-confronting-power/

https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/israeli-apartheid-and-its-apologists/

Human Rights Watch 2021 Report on Israeli use of apartheid

polarisation article

https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ending-stagnation-final-report.pdf

In the Ruins of the Present Vijay Prashad 2018

How to understand a world of unemployment and annihilation, of poverty, climate catastrophe and war? What concepts do we have to grasp these complex realities? The modes of thought that come from North American positivism – game theory, regression analysis, multi-level models, inferential statistics – are at a loss to offer a general theory of our condition. Steeped in common sense understandings of power and naive about the role of elites in our world, these approaches might explain this or that aspect of our world.

https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/politicians-who-respected-kissinger?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

https://www.noemamag.com/what-ai-teaches-us-about-good-writing/

Some recent Development material

Newsletter from “thinking and working politically”

Promoting institutional and organisational development 2003

Fragility, Risk and Resilience UN 2016

understanding institutional analysis

civil servants, social norms and corruption

And the number of downloadable BOOKS is increasing eg

• Tomorrow’s Communities Henry Tam 2022

• The Gutenberg Parenthesis Jeff Jarvis 2023

• The Ecology of Freedom M Bookchin 1982

• Institutions Taking Root - Building State Capacity in Challenging Contexts World Bank 2014

• The Government Analyics Handbook – leveraging data to strengthen public administration D Rogger and C Schuster World Bank Sept 2023

• Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics Gerardo Munck and Richard Snyder 2007

• Globalisation and contestation - the new great counter-movement Ronaldo Munck 2007

• Digital Transformation and public services A Larsson and R Teigland 2020

• Struggle makes us human Vijay Prashad 2022

• Prisoners of Time - prussians, germans and other humans chris clark 2021

• Walter Kempowski’s Familienchronic thesis 1990

• The Language of Politics Adrian Beard 2000

• Faith seeking Conviviality Sam Ewell 2020

SOME RECENT LINKS

My hyperlinks have been piling up – indeed those for the full year already fill more than a hundred pages. I find them very useful as reminders of my daily finds. So time to identify what I have found useful in the last few weeks. It’s not all focused on texts – there have been some useful discussions on both video and podcast. I have huge respect for John Mearsheimer who engages here in discussion with Stephen Pinker about Reason and the Enlightenment

Cornel West is another who commands admiration and has a rather mutual-congratulary discussion here with Gabor Mate

“The Great Unravelling” is a term used increasingly to denote the “polycrises” which seem to be bedevilling the world and is explained in a useful report from the Post-Carbon Institute which is important background for this podcast exploration by David Runciman on whether the “anthropocene” is a useful term or whether “Leviacene” night not be a better term

Duncan Green is an Oxfam blogger I follow who frequently confronts the issue of power which is also the topic American academic Jeff Pfeffer writes about- this being a recent typical piece of his on the subject

Moses Naim wrote The End of Power (2013) about how powerful people in powerful roles are experiencing greater limits on their power. Naim notes how many people with fancy titles had confided in him about the perceived (or claimed) gaps between the power others attributed to them and both what they could get done and their own self-expressed perceptions of their power. When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame launched a book club, he named this book his first selection. I trust you appreciate the irony. As I write this, Zuckerberg is recentralizing his control over Facebook, and of course Facebook, like many of its Silicon Valley peers, has a supermajority voting structure that assures that Zuckerberg cannot be fired regardless of what he does. Some people may face the end of power or limits on their power, but certainly not Zuckerberg; a lot fewer people have tenuous power than claim to.

In this same book, which I often hear about as an example of how theories and realities of power have fundamentally changed, Naim asks what globalization was doing to economic concentration. The presumption was that the globalization of business—and therefore, competition—would disperse economic power. He asked that question in 2013. By now the answer is clear, and it is not what many expected. Not only in the US but around the world, antitrust authorities are girding for battle because globalization has increased the concentration of power and wealth, particularly in technology multinationals but in other industries as well, such as telecommunications and even retail (perhaps you have heard of Amazon?). Following the 2008–2009 financial crisis, banks that were criticized as being too big to fail got—bigger. The story of nonexistent antitrust enforcement and increasing concentration of economic power is one often empirically told.

Then there are Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, authors of New Power (2018) Their thesis is that power wasn’t ending, but that power and its bases and use were being fundamentally transformed by things like the internet, social media, and new communication modalities. The result of this social and technological change was to be greater democratization, a word they use often, as the ideas of new power would make power less concentrated and available to more people. Their basic argument, expressed by numerous others, was that the ability of many individuals to readily acquire a communications platform (think blogs and accounts on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) and to easily access the world’s information (think Google) would lead to a proliferation of innovation and social movements. Much like the oft-discussed but ultimately unsuccessful Arab Spring, there would be, to take a phrase from the 1960s, more power to the people, including those lacking formal positions of power.

Unfortunately, reality intruded, and the most successful users of the new communication methods and social media platforms turned out to be those who already held political and economic power.

More to follow

Just Words

One of the books of which I’m most proud is “Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary” and that’s not just because of the pun in the title - the first word can be read to mean either “mere/only” or “fair/impartial”. Two very different senses.

Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) came to Western notice only after 1995 when his German publisher started to release the Diaries which he had kept since an early age at the start of the 20^th Century; and it was several years later before UK and US audiences were able to read the English versions of I Will Bear Witness 1933-41 and I Will Bear Witness 1942-45 – let alone The Lesser Evil The Diaries of V Klemperer 1945-59. That’s some 40 years after his death!!

He was a philologist who used his experience of listening to passengers on the Dresden trams and buses to publish, in 1947, The Language of the Third Reich. It was 2000 – more than 50 years after his death – before it appeared in English and has now pride of place in the “Roll-call of Honour” which is chapter 4 of “Just Words”.

The book has now 73 pages and can boast

• 25 pages of definitions

• all the key authors – from La Rochefoucauld and Flaubert through Pierce and Klemperer to Susan George and J Ralston Saul

It’s a quite unique compendium - and I thoroughly recommend it.