We need to talk about ....the state

Governments have long been an easy target for public anger - whether defined as the particular collection of personalities who form a particular political regime OR as the administrative systems which provide our public services. But underlying attitudes to the state  tend to ebb and flow....25 years ago "the State"  was very much out of favour - with the low point being probably the 1997 World Bank annual development report "The State in a changing world" which reflected the neo-liberal critique of the very concept of state provision which had become the default mode.

The new millennium saw the beginnings of a realisation that the pendulum had swung too far toward business and deregulation; and that the state did have important functions to manage The global financial crash of 2008 should have brought us to our senses - but didn't.
It is rather Covid 19  which has brought the whole issue of the role and performance of government back into public debate

Last month Pankaj Mishra had a superb long article in LRB about what the performance of different states on Covid 19 tells us.
And an article in the forthcoming issue of the Political Quarterly - "Covid 19 and the blunders of our governments" - by Gerry Stokes et al is an early example of the sort of academic treatment we can look forward to in the near future (be warned - this may be behind a paywall - but an annual sub for the best UK political journal is under 20 pounds!) The article sets the UK government's performance in the pandemic in the wider context of the political science literature of the past 25 years on "policy blunders" and makes some recommendations which, I have to say, I found very weak.
But first, Mishra

The escalating warning signs – that absolute cultural power provincialises, if not corrupts, by deepening ignorance about both foreign countries and political and economic realities at home – can no longer be avoided as the US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods.
Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ground for the pandemic’. Profit-maximising individuals and businesses, it turns out, can’t be trusted to create a just and efficient healthcare system, or to extend social security to those who need it most. 

East Asian states have displayed far superior decision-making and policy implementation. Some (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) have elected leaders; two (China, Vietnam) are single-party dictatorships that call themselves communist.
They share the assumption that genuine public interest is different from the mere aggregation of private interests, and is best realised through long-term government planning and policy. They also believe that only an educated and socially responsible elite can maintain social, economic and political order. The legitimacy of this ruling class derives not so much from routine elections as from its ability to ensure social cohesion and collective well-being. Its success in alleviating suffering during the pandemic suggests that the idealised view of democracy and free markets prized since the Cold War will not survive much longer.

Few narratives are more edifying, as economies tank and mass unemployment looms, than the account of the ‘social state’ that emerged in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. In "Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age" (1998), Daniel Rodgers showed that many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries returned from stays in Germany with ideas that would inform the New Deal.

‘The state must take the matter into its own hands,’ Bismarck announced in the 1880s as he introduced insurance programmes for accident, sickness, disability and old age. German liberals, a tiny but influential minority, made the usual objections: Bismarck was opening the door to communism, imposing a ‘centralised state bureaucracy’, a ‘state insurance juggernaut’ and a ‘system of state pension’ for idlers and parasites. German socialists saw that their Machiavellian persecutor was determined to drive a wedge between them and the working class. Nevertheless, Bismarck’s social insurance system wasn’t only retained and expanded in Germany as it moved through two world wars, several economic catastrophes and Nazi rule; it also became a model for much of the world. 

Japan was Germany’s most assiduous pupil, and the Japanese, in turn, inspired China’s first generation of modern leaders, many of whom spent years in Tokyo and Osaka. Despite the defeat and devastation of the Second World War and the US occupation, Japan has continued to influence East Asia’s other late-developing nation-states: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam.
What made Germany such a compelling prototype for Japan? It is that Germany was a classic ‘late developer’ – the archetype of all nation-states in Asia and Africa. It unified only in 1871 and began to industrialise nearly a hundred years after Britain. Its leaders had to cope with the simultaneous challenges of rapid mechanisation and urbanisation, the disappearance of traditional livelihoods, the growth of trusts and cartels as well as trade unions, and an intensifying demand, articulated by a vibrant socialist movement, for political participation.

Fascinating stuff - which owes not a little to Francis Fukuyama's brilliant 2 volume study of "The Origins of Political Order - and Decay"
Regular readers will know that I am trying to complete a book with the title "Is Admin Reform really all that sexy?"  I last blogged about my efforts at the beginning of the year  This is clearly the signal to get back to work!

Revised Favourite Blogs

One of this blog's many features is the list of my favourite blogs. It's a long list - some 50 in total which I've accumulated during the past decade and brought up to date today, removing a couple which no longer gave access and adding others - mainly book blogs.
The focus of the blogs is fairly diverse - a fair number deal with political or economic issues as you would expect but several connect to book blogs, collections of art  -  and a couple celebrate photography
It's  now more easily accessible - at the top of the right-hand column.

For my money, the most interesting blogs are -
- Brave New Europe - good open site committed to bring down the neo-liberal thought collective
- Crooked Timber - a collective blog of US and Australian academics with occasional group assessments of non-fiction books. Quite excellent
- Mainly Macro - one of the best-written blogs (by Prof Simon Wren-Lewis) on UK socio-economic matters

- Our Finite World - quite excellent blog by an energy specialist
- Stumbling and mumbling - rigorous application of method to contemporary issues by a UK economist
- The next recession - a rare marxist blog which makes real sense

- The Political Economy of Development - a quite fascinating blog by someone who has some of the same background as me (although younger and without the political experience). But the same dedication to books....
- Understanding society - rigorous blog by a real social scientist - Dan Little of the US

Money Talks - why we need a new Vocabulary of social change

Exactly one hundred years ago. Keynes wrote a famous paragraph about globalisation which started -

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.

Two world wars checked capitalism's dynamism - although the post-war period enjoyed what the French have called "the glorious 30 years". A new phase, however, came into play in 1971 with Nixon's unilateral decision to take the US out of the 1944 Bretton Woods system of global finance. The UK's Big Bang liberalisation of banking and the EU's Single Market 15 years later; and the establishment in 1995 of the World Trade Organisation were further boosts to a new phase of global financialisation.
These past 40 years of increasingly instantaneous financial flows have made a mockery of both democracy and of sovereignty. It is capital markets which now decide the shape and scope of state policy-making - and which have destroyed the model of social democracy. 
When countries borrow, it is the money markets who make the judgements about the risks and therefore the range of interest rates payable.

Whatever the rhetoric of party manifestos, it is money - not politics - which now talks and which should make us take more seriously the question posed more than a decade ago by the veteran US political scientist SM Wolin in Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism (2008) - namely whether capitalism and democracy can continue to coexist. Robert Kuttner's Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? (2018) clearly doubts it

The ideology of "neoliberalism" may well be a useful one for academics but is disastrous as an explanatory tool for social activists - let alone one likely to help persuade others. We do therefore desperately need a proper vocabulary for persuasive conversations with others about the nature of the system which is grinding us asunder. I've taken in recent blogposts to refer to it, variously, as "The Beast" or the Elephant - although Yanis Varoufakis's "Minotaur" is probably the best metaphor.
When I was born, capitalism was something which stood or fell according to its ability to produce real things - now it is more of a psychic process so well described in Adam Curtis' documentaries. The 2011 book Monoculture - how one story is changing everything is one of the few good reads about all this.

Skidelsky's "Money and Government", which was the positive focus of the last post, is an important book in its (sadly all too rare) attempt to make the world of money comprehensible to the average citizen. But it has, these past few weeks, been lying unread in my car - I just didn't have the patience to wade through the economic history it offers.
Something called "Modern Monetary Theory" has suddenly become flavour of the month in leftist circles thanks apparently to one of Bernie Saunders' advisers, one Stephanie Kelton whose book The Deficit Myth  has been attracting feverish reviews - although Michael Roberts, the Marxist economist, needs some convincing 
Such is the level of interest in this new body of work that Real Economics devoted an entire issue to the subject which is well worth reading

update; last year saw the publication of this book which argues against the prevailing view that capitalism is destroying democracy – balancing the 2013 book Managing Democracy; managing dissent – capitalism, democracy and organising consensus.

A Challenge to Conventional Finance

The curious title which the blog has had for the past year or so is a tribute to those who have managed to escape a monoculture (or “tunnel vision”) - generally by having moved from one territory to another; be that intellectual or geographical.

Being an outsider seems to give one’s writing a bit of an edge – as I argued earlier this year with some examples

Robert Skidelksy’s name should probably be added to that list – it’s not just his family background (he lived in China until he was almost 10) but the fact that he is both an historian and an economist.

I’ve been a fan of his ever since I came across his Interests and Obsessions – historical essays (1994) in a second-hand bookshop a couple of years ago. It’s a delightful collection of essays on different aspects of British life in the last century or so – including quite a few profiles. He is the definitive biographer of Keynes – his 3-volumes on the man come in at more than 1000 pages.

So I didn’t need a lot of convincing to buy his Money and Government – a challenge to mainstream economics (2018 – full access by clicking the title) even although several chapters have short appendices of formulae (for me the ideal place for them!)

David Graeber (another excellent writer) has a long and very positive review from which I’ve taken some excerpts at the end of the post

Before I get on to that book, here’s an example of Skidelsky writing – from a book review he did a few years ago for NYRB on the impact of computerised systems

The aim of all control systems is to control human behaviour, including the way we think. Priests and political leaders have long used religion and ideology for this purpose, since it economizes on the use of force and terror. But it is only in the last hundred years or so that the attempt to control behaviour by controlling the mind has achieved scientific status, largely through the explosion of calculating power that computers have made possible. In one of his many fascinating chapters, the author shows how CBS originated in the needs of the military for battlefield control, before they were applied to the needs of business.

Unlike the machine assembly line for Ford cars, the human assembly lines in giant retail organizations like Walmart and Amazon pose special problems. The stacking and retrieving of customers’ orders requires the attention of a “panoptic monitoring regime to pick up on…human waywardness [on the part of the employees] and correct it without delay.” The model is that of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the circular prison he designed with an inspection tower at its centre, where a single watchman could observe the inmates without them being able to tell if they are being watched. Bentham himself thought of the Panopticon as an unprecedented way of obtaining power of mind over mind. What has made computerized business systems universally applicable is the joining of Taylorian scientific management (breaking down jobs into small tasks) with the panoptical control made possible by digital technology.

In 2016 Skidelsky edited a book with the fascinating title Who Runs the Economy? The role of Power in economics from which, I suspect, this text is taken

Adapting Steven Lukes (1974), one may think of ideas as a form of ‘soft power’, which structures our debates about reality. Alternatively, and more comprehensively, they may be seen as shaping our consciousness –the way we interpret our world. But just because ideas are produced in institutions, we cannot ignore questions about the hard power behind the soft power. Who finances the institutions from which ideas spring? Who finances the dissemination of ideas in popular form –media, think tanks? What are the incentives facing the producers, disseminators, and popularisers of ideas even in a society in which discussion is ‘free’? In short, what is the agenda of business? It is reasonable to see business as the hard power behind the soft power of ideas, not because the business community speaks with one voice, or because there are no other centres of hard power (e.g. government) but because it is the main source of the money without which the intellectual estate would wither and die……

Assertion of the independence of ideas is a necessary modification of crude Marxism, which I dare say Marx himself would have accepted. Nevertheless, in the Marxist scheme, the intellectual class, like the state, attains only ‘relative autonomy’; and ideas rarely overturn the perception or promotion of self-interest, however much they may modify its expression. Practical men like nothing better than to have their prejudices dressed up in scientific language. Ultimately the ideas in power serve the interests of the class in power; under capitalism, this is the capitalist class.

Skidelsky is 85 but is extraordinarily prolific – he has just produced What’s wrong with economics – a primer for the perplexed 2020) and was an active member last year of a small advisory group to the OECD Sec-Gen which helped produce an amazing little document Beyond Growth – towards a new economic approach; (OECD Sept 2019) which basically questions the entire raison d’etre of the OECD for most of its existence!

But here’s what David Graeber had to say about Money and Government – a challenge to mainstream economics

What it reveals is an endless war between two broad theoretical perspectives in which the same side always seems to win—for reasons that rarely have anything to do with either theoretical sophistication or greater predictive power. The crux of the argument always seems to turn on the nature of money. Is money best conceived of as a physical commodity, a precious substance used to facilitate exchange, or is it better to see money primarily as a credit, a bookkeeping method or circulating IOU—in any case, a social arrangement?

This is an argument that has been going on in some form for thousands of years.

Technically, this comes down to a choice between what are called exogenous and endogenous theories of money. Should money be treated as an outside factor, like all those Spanish dubloons supposedly sweeping into Antwerp, Dublin, and Genoa in the days of Philip II, or should it be imagined primarily as a product of economic activity itself, mined, minted, and put into circulation, or more often, created as credit instruments such as loans, in order to meet a demand—which would, of course, mean that the roots of inflation lie elsewhere?

To put it bluntly: QTM is obviously wrong. Doubling the amount of gold in a country will have no effect on the price of cheese if you give all the gold to rich people and they just bury it in their yards, or use it to make gold-plated submarines (this is, incidentally, why quantitative easing, the strategy of buying long-term government bonds to put money into circulation, did not work either). What actually matters is spending.

Nonetheless, from Bodin’s time to the present, almost every time there was a major policy debate, the QTM advocates won. In England, the pattern was set in 1696, just after the creation of the Bank of England, with an argument over wartime inflation between Treasury Secretary William Lowndes, Sir Isaac Newton (then warden of the mint), and the philosopher John Locke.

Newton had agreed with the Treasury that silver coins had to be officially devalued to prevent a deflationary collapse; Locke took an extreme monetarist position, arguing that the government should be limited to guaranteeing the value of property (including coins) and that tinkering would confuse investors and defraud creditors. Locke won. The result was deflationary collapse.

According to Skidelsky, the pattern was to repeat itself again and again, in 1797, the 1840s, the 1890s, and, ultimately, the late 1970s and early 1980s, with Thatcher and Reagan’s (in each case brief) adoption of monetarism.

Always we see the same sequence of events:

(1) The government adopts hard-money policies as a matter of principle.

(2) Disaster ensues.

(3) The government quietly abandons hard-money policies.

(4) The economy recovers.

(5) Hard-money philosophy nonetheless becomes, or is reinforced as, simple universal common sense.

How was it possible to justify such a remarkable string of failures? Here a lot of the blame, according to Skidelsky, can be laid at the feet of the Scottish philosopher David Hume.

The one major exception to this pattern was the mid-twentieth century, what has come to be remembered as the Keynesian age. It was a period in which those running capitalist democracies, spooked by the Russian Revolution and the prospect of the mass rebellion of their own working classes, allowed unprecedented levels of redistribution—which, in turn, led to the most generalized material prosperity in human history. The story of the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s, and the neoclassical counterrevolution of the 1970s, has been told innumerable times, but Skidelsky gives the reader a fresh sense of the underlying conflict……

Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say there are no useful insights here, but fundamentally the existing discipline is designed to solve another century’s problems. The problem of how to determine the optimal distribution of work and resources to create high levels of economic growth is simply not the same problem we are now facing: i.e., how to deal with increasing technological productivity, decreasing real demand for labor, and the effective management of care work, without also destroying the Earth. This demands a different science. The “microfoundations” of current economics are precisely what is standing in the way of this.

Any new, viable science will either have to draw on the accumulated knowledge of feminism, behavioral economics, psychology, and even anthropology to come up with theories based on how people actually behave, or once again embrace the notion of emergent levels of complexity—or, most likely, both.

Intellectually, this won’t be easy. Politically, it will be even more difficult. Breaking through neoclassical economics’ lock on major institutions, and its near-theological hold over the media—not to mention all the subtle ways it has come to define our conceptions of human motivations and the horizons of human possibility—is a daunting prospect. Presumably, some kind of shock would be required. What might it take? Another 2008-style collapse? Some radical political shift in a major world government? A global youth rebellion? However it will come about, books like this—and quite possibly this book—will play a crucial part.

Links I liked

Food Supply and tourism have been two of the many flows (of goods and people) badly hit by Covid19. And who better than Michael Pollan and Chris de Bellaigue to give us the lowdown on this – Pollan with a devastating story about the health of the meat-processing industrial workers in the New York Review of Books which has shades of Upton Sinclair about it; and de Bellaigue with an article in The Guardian about the serious consequences for the livelihoods of local people of the silence which has descended on many tourist hot-spots.

The World Economic Forum got into the act with this typically glossy collection of pieces about the pandemic’s “Challenges and Opportunities” 

And TNI did typically better with this little book about the role played by big finance in exacerbating climate breakdown, along with innovative micro and macro level solutions for building a green, just and democratic finance sector fit for the future

Podcasts and Videos     

LRB’s Talking Politics, with David Runciman, has been running podcasts with discussions about what changes Covid19 might cause

And BBC Radio 4 has a series called Rethink which is exploring that same issue. Their first episode had a short session with the Pope but I wasn’t too impressed with the first full episode this morning – which includedTony Blair, Kevin Rudd and other political leaders

The Democracy in Movement by 2025 (Diem25) have also been running a video series (called “Another Now”) on Covid19 which brings much more interesting characters – such as Anthony Barnett who recently produced Out of the Belly of Hell about the stepping stones of the past 50 years.

The episode with Barnett, Rosemary Bechtler and Yanis Varoufakis was one of the best bits of viewing I’ve seen – with Barnett arguing strongly that four of the forces his extended essay refers to could bring a new “humanisation” which has so far been lacking. Varoufakis was more sceptical, maintaining that what was need was a programme on which countries and parties could agree….

Previous posts have referred to the notion of “critical junctures” – a phrase which pops up in these discussions with the question on everyone’s lips being whether in fact we are living through such a turning point which will see significant change in our lifetime.

Humanity at the moment seems more like the famous frogs being slowly boiled in water and not noticing any significant change…..

In the last few days, I’ve been making progress on the book I’ve been trying to put together on “the global crisis” (however defined) – incorporating key points from Barnett’s essay. A crucial question is what we are going to do about the multinational company which, for the past 50 years, has been allowed to fixate only the interests of shareholders – at the expense of the interests of employees and wider society. The prestigious British Academy is currently exploring that issue – under the chairmanship of Colin Mayer who has the gem of a presentation here (text can be read here)

My faithful readers will know that the British Labour Party, having heavily lost the December election, selected a new Leader in April – who was previously the party’s Brexit spokesman. He has just been presented with the result of an internal inquiry which was carried out on the handling of the election. It’s a fairly savage indictment – using phrases such as “toxic atmosphere” – and its 150 pages can be read in full here

The last post contained an updated list of useful journals which included quite a few which hadn’t figured in the previous list of 3 years ago. One was a leftist journal called Soundings whose current issue runs an interesting article about the New Left in Britain

For those who missed the Progressive Governance Conference last week, here’s one of the youtube highlights – Adam Tooze

I generally don’t give the current incumbent of the US Presidency any air time and would reckon that nothing would shock us about his behaviour but an article in NYRB has me very concerned  

The Watergate scandal left many Americans wondering if they could ever trust their government again. In October 1978, hoping to restore public confidence in federal institutions, Congress created new mechanisms for oversight and new agencies to administer them, including the Office of Government Ethics, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

It further established a cadre of inspectors general at large federal agencies. Public servants like me who have worked in these agencies or inspector general offices think of 1978 as the 1776 of our anticorruption work.

Jimmy Carter, who signed the Inspector General Act into law, saw the new inspectors general as a tool to “root out fraud and abuse.” As his chief domestic policy adviser Stuart Eizenstat later put it, “For him, Watergate was not simply the break-in and the cover-up. It was the abuse of power, the misuse of the IRS and the CIA against domestic enemies.”

If Donald Trump’s goal is to abuse power, he may have special cause to fear the seventy-four inspector general offices. They investigate wrongdoing and audit the performance of federal agencies and government programs to detect problems or identify systemic risks that could harm the public. They are supposed to be nonpartisan and independent; as a line of defense against the various forms of corruption that can infect government agencies, they have traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support. But that tradition is being tested as Trump seeks to gain control over these watchdogs.

The article goes on to record the scale of firings there have been

An Update of “Journals worth reading”

As the number of newspaper titles shrinks, the number of weekly, monthly and even quarterly journals seems to increase. It’s 3 years since I last tried to identify quality journals which might be of interest to my readers – so today I will update that.

I started that earlier post by posing the following question - which (English language) journals would pass a test which included such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)

- clarity of writing

- sceptical in tone

That’s a tough test – but my new list has quite a few new titles for your consideration…..

3 Quarks Daily; my daily fix - an amazing site which offers carefully chosen articles which suit my demanding taste perfectly

Aeon; an impressive cultural journal (online since 2012) whose articles are about big issues and have real “zing”

Arts and Letters Daily; the last list missed this great daily internet service which highlights an article and book – even although it’s long been essential viewing for me

Book Forum; has gone downhill – used to offer an amazing daily service which gave links from mainly US academic journals…..

Boston Review; a new mag which I rate very highly for originality

Brain Pickings; a superb personal endeavour from a Bulgarian woman now living in the States which, every week, gives extended excerpts from classic texts about creativity etc. Recently, however, I’ve found it a bit too predictable

Current affairs; a fairly new bi-monthly and slightly anarchistic American mag

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart 

Dublin Review of Books; great crack

Eurozine; a network of some 90 European cultural mags which gives a great sense of the diversity of European writing

Jacobin; a new leftist E-mag with a poor literary style. Indeed, with its large print, different coloured paper and photos, it’s more like a comic!

Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian.

Literary Hub; a great literary site with daily selections and frequent posts
London Review of Books; my favourite for the past 40 years to which I generally subscribe

Los Angeles Review of Books; relatively new and trying too hard to run with the politically correct 

Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; a centrist mag published only 3 times a year

New Humanist; an important monthly strand of UK thought

New Left Review; THE UK leftist journal - running on a quarterly basis since 1960. Always worth a look 

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth centrist UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate

Quillette; a "free-thinking" contrarian and libertarian journal 

Resurgence and Ecologist; dependable UK Green mag

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Scottish Review; a fantastic weekly with humanistic takes on what’s happening

Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste

Soundings; if you want to keep up with UK leftist thought, this is the journal for you – issued only 3 times a year

Spiked; a libertarian net-based journal with challenging articles always guaranteed to be anti-PC

Sydney Review of Books; still can’t make up my mind

The Alternative UK; an excellent new platform aimed at establishing a "friendly revolution" to transform politics - it actually gives  space to interesting new thinkers

The Atlantic; one of the US oldest mags (founded in 1857)

The Baffler; great writing. Apparently founded in 1988, it surfaced for me only recently

The Conversation; a rare venture which uses academics as journalists 

The Nation; America's oldest (1865) weekly, for the "progressive" community

The New Republic; Progressive US monthly which has been publishing for more than a century

The New Yorker; very impressive US writing

The New York Review of Books; simply can’t do without it

The Point;  a quiet mag to which I’ve taken out a trial sub

Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

Words without Borders; a journal of translation which I’m experimenting with

Academic journals

I would not normally deign academic journals with a second glance since theirs is an incestuous breed – with arcane language and specialized focus which breaches at least two of the above five tests. But Political Quarterly stands apart with the superbly written (social democratic) analyses which have been briefing us for almost a century and to which I have recommenced an (internet) sub.

Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics and Governance run it close with more global coverage.

My own regular favourite reading includes The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews, London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books – and the occasional glance at the New Left Review and New Statesman.

This choice betrays a certain “patrician” position – partial but not too “tribal

A concept with unrealized potential, I feel, is that of the “global roundup” ” with selections of representative writing from around the globe. Courrier international is a good, physical, Francophone example – the others being “virtual” or E-journals eg Arts and Letters Daily a good literary, anglo-saxon exemplar; with Eurozine taking the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 90 cultural journals

I found this list of previous posts about journalists when drafting this piece -

The archive on journalism

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/03/investigative-journalism.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/07/british-bread-oz-circus-and-bulgarian.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/03/fighting-big-brother.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/04/suborning-democracy.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/06/getting-under-skin.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/confessionals.html Pat Chalmers

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/is-british-journalism-dead.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/05/journals-worth-reading.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/08/in-praise-of-journalists.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/09/making-sense-of-global-crisis.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/why-we-should-not-be-so-cynical-about.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/brexit-and-reassertion-of-nation-state.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-writers-craft.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/kenneth-roy-voice-to-renew-faith-in.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-stuff-of-journalism.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/in-praise-of-literary-magazines.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/what-does-brexit-tell-us-about-ourselves.html

Learning to Learn

For 17 years I was allowed to call myself a “lecturer” which I could have included in my Sceptic’s Glossary as “someone who spouts words”. It was patently a higher status (and rewarded) job than “teacher” who is expected to work with pupils (with at least a year’s full-time training for that task) and to produce results (however questionably measured).

In the 1970s a Lecturer had a lot of freedom – in terms of both choice and scale of holidays (3 months’ summer vacation for example)

Initially, I enjoyed that freedom…..although not so much with engineering students who took an understandably dubious attitude to the “liberal studies” programme in which I was initially employed - beautifully skewered in the Wilt series of novels by Tom Sharpe.

The work I particularly enjoyed was that with “mature students” - whether at the “adult education” classes of the Workers’ Educational Association; or in the Open University where I was a part-time tutor in its opening period….

In the 1970s, planning students at the famous Glasgow School of Art also proved to be a captive audience for musings about my practical experience as a reforming politician in a bureaucracy. Those were the days of Norman Dennis…..

I may not have helped them in their examinations – but at least I gave them a foretaste (and forewarning) of the games they would face in their future careers.

But my enjoyment faded as the academic Degree Machine cranked up its requirements and I found myself suddenly having to prepare course structures into which lectures and seminars fitted logically and seamlessly – without any special help being on offer. It was simply assumed that, having learned my subject, I would have the relevant skills to design course programmes, deliver lectures and organise seminars to ensure that students would read the relevant material and get through examinations successfully.

It took universities until the 1990s to wake up and make sure that lecturers were properly trained in these skills.

I had been winging my way for too long to be able to submit to the new requirements; got utterly depressed; and, after 3 years of winter misery, resigned in 1985….

Clearly, most teachers know how to teach kids – although I don’t quite know where the balance of argument currently lies between those who advocate “top-down” learning and those who favour a child-centred approach.

But adult learners clearly need a different approach – one that helps them discover things for themselves…as is expressed so well in this video – “10 things polyglots do differently”. 

It was 2005 before I got the opportunity to learn about the very different world of training adults – first in Kyrgyzstan where I was leader for two years of an EC-funded programme of capacity development for local government; and then in Bulgaria where I also led a programme to help prepare regional staff to comply with the requirements of EU membership.

I learned a lot from both experiences – starting with an intensive attempt to understand the needs of those in charge of the new municipalities of the small central Asian state and to provide relevant support. One of the results was this Roadmap for Local Government in Kyrgyzstan which I very much enjoyed preparing – as you will see from the way I pulled out the metaphor in the title (see the diagram at pages 76-77)

And I was able to use that in the very next project – benefitting from the insights of a Polish trainer in my team to produce one of my best papers - Training that works! How do we build training systems which actually improve the performance of state bodies?

So who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks??

My Day

A couple of days ago I enrolled for the “Progressive Governance Digital Summit 2020”  and watched the first few hours of the event which is supported by the usual leftist suspects – the New Statesman, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Heinrish Boll Stiftung, ESP et al .

This is the first such virtual conference in which I have taken part – its Zoom facility (which is new for me) gives the opportunity not only of viewing but of fixing chats. It’s very much the younger generation on show - starting with a guy for whom I have a very healthy dislike Yasha Mounk, ex-Director of the Tony Blair Foundation and author of the very slick “The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how to save it” (2018)

The Conference strategy paper was sent only in the first hour after some confusing references to it by the introductory speaker - and is actually a very good read. It focuses on the present pandemic and explores six different scenarios – named as  

1. New Golden Age

2. Varieties of Localism

3. Radical Individualism

4. Welfare Technocracy

5. National Populism

6. School Trip (by which is meant a minor irritant)

But the subsequent presentations annoyed for their superficiality and for the sheer impertinence of youngsters barely out of their nappies daring to lecture us all. There was not even a pretence of putting up a token wrinklie.

Jeremy Cliffe of New Statesman was a typical example – with a wiste of a moustache and using Robert Unger to impress us with talk of “high-energy politics”.
With that one exception so far, the speakers are mostly academics - exuding the confidence that comes from being tenured and speaking mainly to students  - and clearly fail to understand how counterproductive they are. 
They turn the rest of us into proponents of defunding university social science!! (see update below)

Apart from that, my day was occupied in taking an axe to the text I have been labouring on for the past few weeks and coming up with a different structure for what is effectively a taster for the full version of “Dispatches for the Next Generation – a bibliograph’s notes on the past half-century”. I was helped in this by this table I found myself doodling…..

Thrust of chapter arguments	Why do I feel strongly about this?	Supporting theories
1.Trespassing encouraged	Most senior execs are in the grip of groupthink	AO Hirschman Chas Handy’s “The Second Curve”
2. Critical junctures identified	History is written by the victors. Events were often finely balanced. There’s too much fatalism around	Covid 19 as a Critical Juncture
3. Economics relegated	Basic model is badly flawed and needs urgent reinvention	Daly, Raworth,
4. The Elephant probed	Talk of capitalism and post-capitalism is too loose. Are we really clear what the core and marginal aspects of the system are – and can the beast be reformed?	Ronald Douthwaite, Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis
5. A new social goal is sought for the commercial company	Shareholder value ignores other dimensions Cooperative and social enterprises employ more people than we think – but have to struggle for legitimacy	Paul Hirst Ed Mayo
6. Lessons of change explored	So much protest fails and few social enterprises have a multiplier effect. How do we ensure that there is real learning?	Robert Quinn
7. Change agents and coalitions sought	Progressives are good at sounding off – and bad at seeking common ground	??
8. Conclusion

update on Progressive Governance virtual conference; in fact things improved from Wednesday evening with the arrival of Germany's ex-Green Minister J Fischer - and Thursday's discussion were quite excellent with the Leader of the Netherland's Labour party, Adam Tooze, Dani Rodrik and Paul Mason.