Wising up with old age

Earlier this month I tried to do a post on what I had learned about power – but it rather petered out when I realised how many of the books to which I had given hyperlinks I had actually gone on to read. And I then compounded the felony by adding a few more relevant book titles I had come across. My only excuse, as I mentioned in the last post, is that publishers deluge us with too many books and that authors lack discipline and are too long-winded.   

In fact I have learned more than I let on – as this short video clip about the core theories of International Relations reminded me. The academic, one Steve Smith, makes the useful point that such theories are like coloured lens through which we look at and make sense of the world. He mentions four such perspectives -

School	explanation
Realism	Struggle for power
Liberalism	Belief in consensus, in rules and norms
Marxism	Economic interests, class position
Postmodernism	Socially determined – depending on how we look at the world

Of course this is too cryptic and Smith and other authors have explained this further in their big book on the subject.

I readily confess that, for much of my life, I was a typical social democrat/liberal too hypnotised by ideas - and it is only fairly recently that my eyes have been opened to the scale of economic interests ruling the world. It was probably J Michael Greer who helpd awake me from my dreamworld – you can still find his blogs archived here

I owe the references in the early part of the post to one of the most original books I have come across in the past few years Change and the politics of certainty (2019). The author, Jenny Edkins , was a physicist but then changed, after her children grew up, to the world of social science and is now a Professor of Political Science. Her book is an amazing mixture of memoir and provocative analysis which very clarly sides with the opressed – as was evident in her 2004 book Sovereign Lives – power in global politics. One quotation conveys the thrust of the book's argument

We need to consider the possibility that famines happen because the social and political system in which they are embedded is working all too well rather than because it has failed.

Bonus Video; I loved this commencement speech about the idiocy and cruelty around these days and the need for empathy

The Fundamental Flaw in the Economists’ view of the world

I once called myself an economist – it was something graduates of 1960’s British Universities did then. It was sufficiently unusual to be worn as a mark of distinction. However I can remember only the following lessons from my four years engrossed in economics books -

- the strictness of the various preconditions which governed the idea of (perfect) competition – making it a highly improbable occurrence;

- the questionable nature of the of notion of “profit-maximisation”;

- the belief (thanks to the writings of James Burnham and Tony Crosland) that management (not ownership) was the all- important factor

- trust (thanks to Keynes whose work was dinned into me) in the ability of government to deal with such things as “exuberant expectations”

- the realization (through the report of the 1959 Radcliffe Commission) that cash was but a small part of money supply. Financial economics was in its infancy then and debt - household and country – had not become the problem it now is.

By the mid 1970s I had seen the error of my ways and moved, somewhat unsuccesfully, into the field of “political science” (the penis envy of real science was already evident). By the 1980s we had all fallen - hook, line and sinker - for the new economic religion. When I first came to Romania in the early 90s, I was amazed at the number of “economists” I came across – for them it meant no more than an “accountant”!

This blog has been very critical of the economic profession – only economists like Steve Keen, Mark Blyth, Yanis Varoufakis and Dani Rodrik have managed to escape its ire, although it has recognised the stirrings in the new millenium of remorse for its erstwhile arrogance. What most economists have a temperamental disinclination to discuss is...POWER – which even this little overview ignores. 

This fantastic article offers a very useful discussion of the sort of criticism economics has received in the past decade or so - setting it against some alternative models.

A couple of economists have just come out into the open about the subject - “Power and Progress – our struggle over technology and prosperity” by Daren Acemoglu and Simon Johnson comes in at a whopping 550 pages. Acemoglu is a developmental economist from Turkey who has published, with political scientist James Robinson, “Why Nations Fail” (570 pp 2012) and “The Narrow Corridor – states, societies and the state of liberty” (800pp 2019)

I mention the number of pages simply because I have an ongoing campaign against long-winded authors and have appealed to publishers and writers alike to exercise more discipline before they inflict yet another title on the poor reader. The reviews are interesting although I think Acemoglu would have been better advised to continue his partnership with a political scientist. I think I will wait for a graphic version.

Reviews and interviews

• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/07/power-and-progress-daron-acemoglu-simon-johnson-review-formidable-demolition-of-the-technology-equals-progress-myth

• https://economics.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Markus-Academy-Daron-Acemoglu-June-14-2023.pdf

• https://cepr.org/system/files/2023-06/Power_and_progress.pdf interview

• https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/RichmondFedOrg/publications/research/econ_focus/2023/q2/interview.pdf

• Institutions and Growth Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2004

Political Culture makes a Comeback

“Heaven is where the police are English, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.”

Countries have become ultra sensitive these days - attributing such national characteristics has become unacceptable, politically incorrect. But regular readers will know that my experience since 1990 of living and working in a dozen different countries has given me a fascination with national traits and their effects on institutional behaviour. I’ve spent most of my life trying to improve the way government bodies interact with citizens from which I’ve tried to draw the lessons analysed in Change for the Better? a Life in reform

All this has given me a certain fatalism about the prospects for real democracy in central and eastern Europe - where I presently live. The transitologists (and sociologists) made frequent use of the term “path-dependency” by which they meant that institutions tended to be stuck in historical and cultural behaviour – viz it wasn’t just the experience of communism which governs Bulgarian and Romanian mentalities, it was the centuries of Ottoman influence.

My thoughts about all that are gathered in a short piece - Puzzling Cultural Values -which I published last year but which will need updating in the light of material I have just come across. The article tried to analyse some 50 books and concluded with a quotation from one of the most accessible Howard Wiarda’s Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance in 2014

1. Political-cultural explanations often have a number of weaknesses: vagueness, imprecision, stereotyping, and lack of clear definition or methodology. They also tend to ignore both class/structural factors and outside, international, or globalization factors.

2. But political culture also has its strengths. It gets you at first causes, the essence of things, the basics. And in Almond and Verba’s or Inglehart’s work, it gets you closer to an empirical, scientific explanation.

3. Studying political culture is both hard work and fun to do. It enables you to travel, go abroad, and learn about other countries and cultures.

4. While political culture is important, it is not, in my view, the only explanation. Other factors, as above, are also important. So political culture should not be reified or elevated into an exclusive or single-causal explanation. Political culture explains a lot but not everything. My own preference is for a more complex, multi-causal explanation. Culture should thus be used in combination with other explanations: geography, social structure, resources, and institutions. These factors can now best be weighed and evaluated through correlations and multi-variate analysis. Such analysis can give us the explanatory weight of each factor or variable.

5. At the same time, we must recognize that cultures do change. They are not deterministic or fixed for all time. They adjust, adapt, get altered, even undergo at times revolutionary transformations. Societies change; modernization and globalization go forward; and culture change both drives and is a product of these other changes. After all, culture is mainly a human and a societal construct; it has not yet been proven that it is genetic, inherited, and organic. As cultures change, so also will societies and political systems.

The new material includes stuff from highly respected Daron Acemoglu, Paul Collier, Ben Fine, Joseph Stiglitz and Sydney Tarrow and has me questioning my erstwhile fatalism. Perhaps there is indeed still hope for central Europe and the Balkans!

But, first, I have to read and absorb that new material – the table below lists the material and indicates my feelings after a quick scan

Article	Initial response
Sydney Tarrow on Robert Putnam 1996	A superb eample of a truly honest and professional review – of Putman’s analysis in “Making Democracy Work” of the reasons for the huge differences in institutional strengths of south and north Italian Regions
social capital and civic culture (Fukuyama IMF 2000)	A cool assessment by one of the world’s foremost political thinkers of the explanatory power of the concept which has grabbed the attention of the World Bank
Theories of Social Capital – researchers behaving badly; Ben Fine 2010	An excoriating analysis – as you might expect from the subtitle. A Click on the title will give you the full book
Culture, Politics and economic development Paul Collier 2010	Paul Collier is one of the best developmental conomists and explores in this article the role of culture in explaining economic development
Italian Political Culture at 50 2010	Edward Banfield’s use of “amoral familiasm” in his 1950s book has profoundly affected our perception of Italy. An Italian sociologist assese the damage
Italy’s Divide 2017	A rather academic treatment of the issue
Particularism thro the looking glass 2019	This is one of the terms used for “alien” cultures
A comment on Banfield 2020	One historian’s view
The Wicked problems of Social Capital 2021	A useful overview of the literature
The Long Shadow of History Stiglitz 2022	A chapter of a book called “The Other Invisible Hand: The Power of Culture to Promote or Stymie Progress” he and some others will produce next year. Not very original
Culture and Institutions Daron Acemoglu 2023	Acemoglu is a developmental economist who has published “Why Nations Fail” (2012) “The Narrow Corridor” (2019) and “Power and Pogress – our struggle over technology and prosperity” (2023) This long article looks to be a definitive piece on the subject – although it is a bit academic

Snippets

Whenever an item on the internet catches my eye, I copy its url and transfer it to a special file which has now grown to 40 pages. Time therefore to share some of these treasures with my readers - I've grouped them thematically – thus

• Good Writing

• Central and Eastern European

• The Nordic Model

• Social Scientists

Good Writing

• First a confession – I’m not familiar with the novels of Cormac McCarthy who died last week but he was, apparently, a great word artist and his obituaries certainly tempt me to check that out. The only connection I have with his work is the Ridley Scott film The Counselor which I watched a decade ago in a Sofia film theatre and which impressed me.

• At another level, I was excited to download Edward Said's "Reflections on Exile and other Essays" which shows a completely different side of the man than the earnest enemy of the West shown in "Orientalism" - with its 46 vignettes of figures ranging from Foucault to Hobsbawm.

• C Wright Mill’s “Intellectual Craftmanship” is a favourite of mine for the pedagogical insights it contains and this is a great commentary from one of the most wonderful of sociological sources

• and finally this Romanian who recently edited a fascinating journal (called DoR) has been developing a profile with his blog which takes me nicely on to

Central and Eastern European

I write from Romania about whose political culture I often comment. But the country is simply one of many which are subsumed under a label which is, apparently, losing its meaning

• "The Idea of Central Europe – geopolitics, culture and regional identity" by Otilia Dhand 2018 is an interesting recent book which explores the history of the concept
• From Peoples to Nations - a history of East Europe by John Connelly (2020) is a long-overdue treatment of the region. But be warned! It's 967 pages long
• "Central Europe – imaginary geographies, geopolitics and security" is an article which emphasises how the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 spread disillusionment with the EU in countries such as Poland and Romania. 
• "The Curse of the Margin – central europe before and after communism" is another effort by a central european to make sense of events. 
• Anticipations of the failure of communism is an extended essay from 1994 by the famous american sociologist SM Lipset as he attempts to answer the question why social scientists failed to anticipate its collapse

The NORDIC MODEL moves the geographical focus north to Scandinavia and tries to explore whether the Nordic Model is managing to live up to its myths. The Nordic model is a 2007 publication from economists from the region. This article from Jacobin suggests that Norway was, in 2021, still on track but other reports paint a darker picture.

Social Scientists Look Ahead. In 2019 I paid tribute to clutch of social scientists who had got together to form the International Panel for Social Progress. I have since discovered a whole range of other work they have done

https://www.ipsp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IPSP-Executive-Summary.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GSJ9_Summit-2023-Edition.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Global-Solutions-Journal-Issue-8.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Global-Solutions-Journal-7-Summit-2021-Edition.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/GFRE-Noble-B-Economics-Society-and-the-Pre-eminent-Role-of-Values-2023_05_24_DN_GE.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Long-Shadow-of-History_DRAFT.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/A-long-shadow-of-History_Karla-Hoff-11-Oct.pdf

https://www.ipsp.org/download/chapter-13 communications

https://www.academia.edu/37311829/Chapter_20_Belonging_Pp_779_812_in_Rethinking_Society_for_the_21st_Century_Report_of_the_International_Panel_on_Social_Progress

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg8mu2-mJj4

The multiple directions of social progress https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/161102602.pdf EO Wright et al

What’s Left of the Left?

I do understand that many readers dislike wading through chunks of text and like to get to the “bottom line”. That’s why, a couple of years ago, I started these famous TABLES - which try to extract the core messages from a dozen or so books. Today’s post starts positively – moves into more critical vein but ends with extolling a book which seems to strike all the notes this child of the 60s has been desperately looking for

The last post ended with an excerpt from Jacobin’s review of Thomas Pikety’s “Time for 

Socialism” which had me returning to the future of the British and, indeed, European Left

- on which so many anguished columns have been devoted in recent decades. 
This article from 2013 I found very thought-provoking  Labour – left and right; party positioning and policy reasoning

 - in that it made me realise that we needed to explore the links between different levels -

• the working class/precariat – whose interests left-wing parties are supposed to further 

• parliamentary representatives – who have to balance considerations of feasibility, legitimacy and support

• party programmes – which need to appeal to the floating voter

• public perceptions – very profoundly affected by mainstream media (controlled by corporate power) 

Liam Byrne (a Labour MP) has an article in (Political Quarterly - a famous Social Democrat journal establised a century ago) which, in so many ways, indicates the impotence of the breed. His piece -

• repudiates nationalisation

• prioritises educational opportunity

• and aspiration

• wants more punitive welfarism

• supports (ill-defined) “de-inflationary measures”

and continues -

The conservative response to the pandemic was in many ways extraordinary, but confined within the bounds of what was deemed acceptable in the post-GFC fiscal and monetary framework. But, there is little evidence that social democrats would have acted in a manner that was drastically different.

Since the end of the Third Way era, little has been done by the party family to develop a new political economy—a way of comprehending the world and the possibilities for rupture—specific to the creed. Social democrats have differentiated themselves by proposing specific progressive policies, but when it comes to broader ideas about the economic and political framework, they tend to replicate the core tenets of the governing orthodoxy, formed as it is through the institutional networks of power that shape established social relations. But more generally, the stark reality is that social democratic politicians are often indistinguishable from progressive technocrats

Centre-left parties have sought to distinguish themselves by their probity, loyalty to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy and fidelity to correct parliamentary process. They have done so while the ‘political centre of gravity [h]as shifted leftwards’, with a greater general acceptance that higher rates of government debt are acceptable if it is being used to create ‘the industries and jobs of the future.’24

Social democrats who pledged too far-reaching a vision of social reform routinely found themselves disciplined by the merciless mainstream media conglomerations, leading policy experts and the markets themselves. Now, in a period of tightened economic and fiscal constraints, jumpy markets and endemic low growth across the developed world, social democrats have again raised adherence to the orthodoxy to a principle. The bounds of the politically possible are being policed not by their opponents, but by social democrats themselves.

The social democratic project needs to be more than the reallocation of budgetary expenditures; it needs to be about the rebalancing of social power. To do this, the creed must develop a consistent and coherent alternative political economy—one that reflects the interests of a social constituency of labouring people as they exist today. It is insufficient to retrofit an economic agenda suited for a class structure that existed forty years ago.

The political cynicism that has become endemic in the neoliberal era poses challenges for all democratic parties, but is particularly potent for social democrats. Social democracy is the political force of social transformation—albeit within constitutional and electoral bounds. A generalised belief that democracy is failing, that politicians constitute an alien and self-protecting class, and that change is not possible—all rebound significantly on the left’s political prospects.

The challenge for social democracy is to utilise government to undercut this disillusionment through practical and immediate changes that can be identified in local communities and individual workplaces, but which also compose a larger picture on social change for general betterment. Through this, social democrats can create social constituencies for their policies and construct long-term governments. This is a transformative project that can only be pursued with a coherent and distinctive vision of the type of society the creed seeks to create, but one that is perceived as realisable. As British Labour discovered to its detriment in 2019, it is not sufficient to present a bundle of individually popular polices.

Somewhere beyond both Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair there is a social democratic means to comprehend the political economy of modern capitalism, and a strategy to change it. The challenge is to find it.

And I think I’ve found it!! It’s by an Italian sociologist now living in London and it’s called 

The Great Recoil Paolo Gerbaudo 2021

Recent Assessment of the Left
What’s Left of the Left – democrats and social democrats in challenging times ed James Cronin, George Ross, and James Shoch 2011
Endgame for the Centre-Left?  Patrick Diamond 2016

The Socialist Ideas of the British Left's Alternative Economic Strategy Baris Tufekci 2020

The Great Recoil Paolo Gerbaudo 2021
Toward a Social Democracy Century? ed K Hofman de Moura, A Skrzypek, R Wilson 2022

Can Economics change its Spots?

I’ve written fairly savagely about economists in the past – so it’s about time I recognised there are some in the new generation who are thinking differently. And I’m not talking about the behavioural economists who, for me, have little to offer – they’e just making minor adjustments to what remains a thoroughly complacent, arrogant and selfish view of human nature. The table which follows doesn’t do justice to the new wave of iconoclasts who are clamouring for our attention – but it’s a start

	Famous for	Key Books
Kate Rawarth	The concept of planetary limits	“Doughnut Economics”
Isabella Weber,	Questioning prevailing wisdom about inflation	“How China Escaped Shock Therapy”
Mariana Mazzacato	Exploding myths about corporations and the State	“The Entrepreneurial State” “The Vaklue of Everything” “Mission Economy”
Thomas Pikety	Exposing the scale of inequality	“The Economics of Inequality” “Capital” “Capital and Ideology”
Mark Blyth	Ruthless dissection of the politics behind the economics	“Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea” “Angronomics”
Yanis Varoufakis	Being the bad boy of the eurozone – but a great story-teller!	A textbook an autobiography “The Global Minotaur” “And the Weak Suffer What They Must?”

 
And, because I’m impatient to get this post – with all its usual hyperlinks – to my readers, 

let me finish with a great review of Thomas Pikety’s latest book “Time for Socialism” from 

what is rapidly becoming a never-to be-missed journal - Jacobin
 

The fact that a thinker with Piketty’s intellectual influence has embraced socialism is significant in itself, paving the way for greater numbers of people to begin envisioning a world beyond capitalism. But what should we make of his vision of socialist transformation?

Talk of a relatively gradual and already underway shift toward socialism will no doubt raise eyebrows among radicals trained to expect that a break with capitalism will necessarily require some form of revolutionary rupture in the state and economy. Yet this gradualist vision should not be dismissed out of hand.

The truth is that we have no way yet to precisely predict the form that a transition to socialism will take in an advanced capitalist democracy. Piketty’s insistence that the radical reforms he envisions will be won through struggle against (rather than accommodation to) corporate power is likely sufficient as a strategic horizon for the foreseeable future. Though a more rapid and less peaceful revolutionary break may eventually be put on the agenda in the face of minoritarian employer reaction, there’s no need nor any political benefit to project immediate revolution as the only possible path forward.

Some radicals may similarly frown upon Piketty’s insistence that the transition to socialism is already underway, as seen in the growth of the welfare state and related declines in economic inequality. Yet here too the author is onto something: the reforms won by socialists, organized labor, and social movements over the past century have made significant incursions into market relations.

Despite neoliberalism’s ravages, the welfare state has not been dismantled even in places like the United States and the UK — current and future struggles for decommodification are thus being waged on a significantly higher social baseline than they were in, say, the 1930s. As such, the most pertinent criticism of social democrats — one shared by Piketty — is not that they were gradualists, but rather that they eventually proved incapable of being effective gradualists. Instead of continuing to shift power and control toward working people, social democratic parties largely abandoned this project in the face of economic crisis, globalization, and employer resistance from the 1980s onward.

Nor does it make sense to criticize Piketty for omitting calls for the nationalization of the economy’s commanding heights. There’s a strong argument to be made that markets for private goods are fully compatible with (and arguably necessary for) a thriving socialist society — provided that the state radically undermines capitalist power and wealth, that firm-based economic democracy is expanded, and that robust welfare policies provide everybody with the essential services they need to survive. That said, Piketty’s case would have been strengthened had he engaged more with proposals for a complete democratization of firms, as famously envisioned by Sweden’s “Meidner plan.”

A more significant limitation is that Piketty says little in the book about the importance of rebuilding the power of organized labor. This question gets passing mentions in his admonitions to “rethink institutions and policies including public services, and in particular, education, labor law, and organizations and the tax system” and to “stop denigrating the role of trade unions, the minimum wage, and salary scales.” Yet the author’s relative inattention to organized labor today is somewhat surprising given his commendable focus on the urgency of bringing back working-class politics and his consistent acknowledgement of the historical importance of trade unions in reducing inequality.

Perhaps Piketty, with his expertise in leveraging data to identify historical trends and policy solutions, felt that it was best to leave it to others to flesh out the strategic lines of march necessary to win his proposed vision. But without a revitalized labor movement to change the balance of class power, the author’s most ambitious policy solutions are unlikely to pass — and some of his other proposals might not have their intended consequences. Employee comanagement, for example, generally can serve as a tool for increasing workers’ influence when paired with robust trade unions. But in the absence of the relatively favorable relationship of forces created by strong working-class organization and the credible threat of disruptive workplace action, comanagement plans risk becoming toothless at best and mechanisms of employer control at worst, pushing workers to rubber stamp bosses’ prerogatives.