The 2020 posts …..so far

The blog marked its 1,500^th post at the beginning of the month – over eleven years. That’s almost 3 posts a week. To celebrate I’ve uploaded the posts for 2020 (86 so far) into a little E-book of some 200 pages which you can find here

I realise this may be a bit daunting for you – so here is the first instalment of a little series I’m offering to entice you into the riches….. I use that word only half-mockingly since the key feature this blog offers is the depth of the hyperlinks it offers into articles and books on important subjects…. It takes the form of one of the tables which have become one of the blog’s distinguishing features – with

-      the first column being the title of a post - to access, just click

-      the second column, trying to identify the event which was the catalyst to the post

-      the final column ,the basic message I would like to think the post should leave with the reader  

The E-book itself starts with an explanation first of the benefits blogging offers; then of why I, in particular, continue to find it a useful self-discipline for almost every morning; and finally why, for the past year, the blog operates with this particular title….. 

The Posts so Far in 2020…..

Title	What sparked it off	The “takeaway” or basic message
To whom it may concern - the 2019 posts	Pride in my posts of the previous year	Tables have become an important self-discipline
Poetry? Maybe	An Adrian Mitchell poem	“Most people ignore most poetry - Because - Most poetry ignores most people”
The Beast destroying the World	Discovering that posts about capitalism were the 2019 posts‘ second favourite topic	Most interesting narratives are from Collier, Hirschmann, Mander, Varoufakis
The Beast – part II	And that few economists could properly explain the global financial crash	My “Dispatches to the Next Generation” identifies more than 200 key books and then whittles that down to 50 or so key texts
Is public administration really all that sexy?	exploring why my fixation about this issue is actually increasing	Events in 2020 have demonstrated how much we have neglected the importance of “the state” in the past 30 years
57 Varieties of Capitalism	The matrix that resulted from an  “ideological triangulation” of a dozen academic disciplines	We need to be more aware of the ideological lens authors are using (often without their own appreciation)
Postmodernism – what is it and does it have a future?	The further thoughts that led me into	It’s been in the air most of us still alive have breathed; we don’t really think about it – nor care…..
My Best Reads of 2019	A useful January exercise	We like to feel, flick and smell the pages of real books
The perils of leaving economics to experts	A great little book called “The Econocracy” with this warning as a sub-title	Economics is a religion – and needs more pluralism and sceptics
The end of a doomed relationship	The leaving of the EU on Jan 31st – Brexit being this blog’s most frequent topic during 2019	To my horror I find that a “Daily Telegraph” article has read my thoughts
Why the British Masochists did what they did	A Dutch friend’s farewell letter	I didn’t do justice to the LEXIT arguments
Does the EU still warrant the support of progressives?	An episode of “The Crown” takes me back to the 1960s and suspicions about a British PM being a Moscow mole	The continuing post-mortem on the British suicide mission
Neutralising Democracy	A superb satire on the british system	Anthony Jay put it all so well in 1989
In Case You Missed it	Frustration with Dropbox	See the E-books listed in the top-right corner of the blog
Links I liked	many significant hyperlinks never see the light of day	I share my morning routines

 

Crowds in Sofia and Bucharest part I

 Blogging is a pretty solitary affair so it was a real pleasure to get an approach from the man behind Boffy’s Blog and asked if I would be interested in doing the odd guest post on his blog about political events going on in the Balkans. I can, of course, speak only about the 2 countries in which I’ve lived for the past decade and more – Bulgaria and Romania - about which I have occasionally posted. Boffy’s invitation coincided with the start of the street protests in Sofia

In recent weeks, events in Belarus have meant that the world’s attention to the Sofia drama - now into its third month – has slipped down the agenda. Somewhat belatedly, therefore, let me bring my readers up to speed – starting with this introductory summary of my particular interest. My Guest Post will then follow – in two parts….

 

Bulgaria (7 million souls) and Romania (19 million) entered the EU in 2007 - with British stereotypes of the countries covering such images as poisoned umbrellas, cheap plonk, vampires, sea and sand and, more recently, both casual labour and professional skills.

Apart from that, we know little about either country – although some people may have a vague memory of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson arriving in Bucharest in 1941 in the TV series based on Olivia Manning’s brilliant “Fortunes of War - the Balkan Trilogy”. Only a handful of anglo-saxon historians and the occasional writer (such as Kapka Kassabova) offer insights about the two countries

 

Coincidentally, 2007 was the year I returned to a mountain house in the Carpathians after a spell of 8 years in Central Asia – only to go to Sofia to lead a project for training Bulgarian regional officials in the compliance system for EC regulations (in those days the migration was both ways!).

The powers-that-be were obviously sleeping when the bids for the contract were opened that day - because it was an Italian company which slipped through the nets to win the multi-million project. And it was therefore with some difficulty that the team I headed was actually permitted, after some delay, to start its work.

 

But I took both countries so much to my heart that I spent the next decade wintering in Sofia and summering in Romania; and it is from this vantage point that I dare to offer comment on what are actually very complex recent developments in both countries. 

Those interested in knowing more can tap into the two E-books I have written about the countries – 

Bulgarian Realists – getting to know the Bulgarians through their art; and 

Mapping Romania – notes on an unfinished journey

Another Milestone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogger Duncan Green makes another important point that –  

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

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

 

Apologies for the silence

No, I haven't been ill! But at the very end of March something happened inside the old operational laptop I have where I've been self-isolating to block my access to the internet - and hence to posting
The internet I can still use on another laptop whose keyboard, however, creates a jumble of words instead of text.

After the frustration had subsided, I began to see this as more of a blessing in disguise. My regular posting has perhaps distracted me from the serious business of finishing the 2 books which I've been playing around with for the past decade and more...
So, the past 7 weeks has been devoted almost full-time to that task whose results I hope to share with you all shortly.

This post comes to you as a result of a trip to Bucharest to see my partner - which is now allowed, providing we respect the distancing.
Romania relaxed its restrictions a week ago
I hope to get up to the mountain house next week - and will be able to resume blogging there

Visual and other Links I Liked

1. When enforced isolation makes internet text even more seductive, this article reminds us of the painting treasures which are now so easily available a mere click away. Curiously, it makes no mention of my favourite ArtUK - which teamed up some years back with the BBC to put much of the nation’s paintings online. Here’s a wonderful example from my home town of Greenock. The painting which graces this post is John Knox's famous 19th century view of Ben Lomond just across the river.....

Another site offers a selection of art available on the net

And this is a very instructive art almanac – offering vignettes of key dates in the lives of artists

2. Photography is another visual art – practised by such giants as Cartier-Bresson 

Andre Kertesz, Paul Strand and John Parr (who was part of a superb MOMA exhibition on English photography under Thatcher)

My friend Keith (before and after his retirement) has been a keen mountain walker and photographer - and his blog must by now be the richest source of Scottish mountain-scape photography. If I’m the King of hyperlinks, Keith is the King of Scottish mountain vistas photography

He has been blogging as long as I have – more than a decade – and each post records his every scaling of every Scottish peak over 3000 feet (known as Munros – of which there are 282) – replete with superb photographs which give an amazing sense of the wonderful world at that level which most of us simply don’t see and indeed are not even aware of……And this is a good example of the occasional political comment his blog makes

3. Talking of mountains, the Bergahn journal resource which they have just kindly made available to us all – temporarily of course but in the spirit of “Open Access” - revealed this nice article on the UK and Carpathians 1862-1914 in their Journal of Travel and Travel-writing      

4. And still on painting, I began to read a little book about John Berger by one Andy Merrifield and was sufficiently intrigued by the author’s writing style to want to see more of it – and duly discovered this little cache

One of the essays in that little collection is called Searching for Guy Debord -Debord being the author of the famous The society of the spectacle (1967) which railed – rather more philosophically than Jerry Mander and Neil Postman – against the social and political effects of the entertainment industry…..  

The spectacle has now “spread itself to the point where it permeates all reality. It was easy to predict in theory what has been quickly and universally demonstrated by practical experience of economic reason’s relentless accomplishments: that the globalization of the false was also the falsification of the globe.”

Merrifield is so taken with Debord that he seeks out his widow, still living in the house with the special high wall Debord built to keep the world out. I can’t say I share Merrifiels’s enthusiasm for the book – with its 221 theses  and an equivalent number of explanatory notes which an editor has subsequently (and necessarily) added….It’s not my sort of writing

The integrated spectacle, Debord said, has sinister characteristics: incessant technological renewal; integration of the state and economy; generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies; and an eternal present. Gismos proliferate at unprecedented speeds; commodities outdate themselves almost each week; nobody can step down the same supermarket aisle twice. The commodity is beyond criticism; useless junk nobody really needs assumes a vital life force that everybody apparently wants.

The state and economy have congealed into an undistinguishable unity, managed by spin-doctors, spin-doctored by managers. Everyone is at the mercy of the expert or the specialist, and the most useful expert is he who can best lie. Now, for the first time ever, “no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change anything significant.”

For gluttons for punishment Debord added, 21 years later, Comments on the society of the Spectacle

5. Visual Capitalist may not be the best of names but its great use of tables and visual warms my cockles. Here’s a typical example – 24 Cognitive Biases warping Reality

My readers will be bored by my emphasis on the importance of text being visually illustrated….

6. Hold Everything Dear – dispatches on survival and resistance; John Berger (2007)

If you’re looking for an example of the poetic power of John Berger’s writing, read this! It’s a series of short essays sparked off by 9/11. The subtitle brought back memories for me of Albert Camus’ Resistance, rebellion and Death (1960) whose “Letters to a German Friend” moved me greatly when I first read them in the early 60s

7. Last month I posted an updated list of the English-language journals which I had tested with 5 demanding criteria - for having (i) depth of treatment; (ii) breadth of coverage (not just political); (iii) clarity of writing; and being both (iv) cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon); and (v) sceptical in tone. 

The post analysed more than 30 journals - regretting the disappearance in 1990 of Encounter.

This morning an article arrived in my mailbox celebrating that selfsame journal – what it doesn’t tell you is that Encounter’s entire archives can be accessed here – courtesy of the quite amazing UNZ Review – an alternative media selection – “A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media”. 

And if you click “pdf archives” you’ll find a quite wonderful collection of journals inc The New Yorker from the 1930s to 2010!!

Finally, I am no great fan of George Galloway's - but his one saving grace is the clarity of his diction.....and here he is with another great communicator Dr John Campbell 

Peripheral - rather than tunnel - Vision….

My faithful readers know that at the end of each year, I make a collection of the year’s posts and make them available - scroll down the right-hand column of the blog until you see the section "new material" which lists the E-books. 
I offer these collections simply because the lack of topicality means that most posts are still worth reading…..even years later. Brexit was, of course, the one big exception to that rule of mine but, even there, a lot of the posts were treating the UK more as a case-study - and trying to understand what made it distinctive.

Blogging is for me both enjoyable and productive – it focuses my mind and disciplines my writing. I totally agree with the 15 benefits enumerated by this blogger. And its search facility allows instant delivery both of what I could only vaguely remember     and relevant material I had completely forgotten about…

Indeed the blog has only one (very small) drawback….The material is back to front…..with the reader presented with my latest musings while even better material is sunk without a trace.

I’ve been particularly active this new year – 30 posts in the 10 weeks.

Some of my readers may be new – I notice, for example, a lot of new readers from Turkmenistan. Welcome!

Others – like the Italians who are now in lockdown – have been with me for some months but may have missed some posts.

So, for all of you, I offer a short book - “Peripheral Vision – the 2020 posts…. so far

Just click the Pcloud file to download

Explaining the blog's title

The blog was ten years old last autumn – making it one of the longest-running (english-speaking) blogs of its kind.  It first saw the light of day as "Carpathian Musings" because the blogging started in my mountain house in that area but, after a few winters spent in Sofia, I realized that the title was no longer a precise description of its source.

The blog was therefore, for 5 years or so, called “Balkan and Carpathian Musings”.

But neither the word "Balkan" nor "Carpathian" are keywords people use when they are googling on the topics the blog deals with - such as "the global financial crisis", "organisational reform", "social change", "capitalism" - let alone "Romanian culture", "Bulgarian painting", "transitology"etc.... 
So clearly the blog needed a name which better expresses its content and objectives. I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…

Let’s be clear, I’m not interested in raising the profile as an end in itself…..I have no illusions about my significance. But I am confident that my blog (and website) is an almost unique “resource” or, if you prefer, “library”…..Not perhaps so much of my writing – but of the insights of others whose books and papers I’ve taken the time and trouble to seek out and whose significance I’ve both recognized and wanted to pass on……Two crucial but not necessarily connected factors!!

So, let me try to explain why, for the past few months, I’ve been running with the title “Exploring No-Man’s Land”. The images of battlefields this summons up are quite deliberately chosen.

First, an accident of birth had me straddling the borderland of the West and East ends of a shipbuilding town in the West of Scotland – with class, religious and political tensions simmering in those places. 

Then political and academic choices in my late 20s brought me slap into the middle of the no-man’s land between politicians and different sorts of professional and academic disciplines.

Then, when I was almost 50, I became a nomadic consultant, working for the next 25 years in ten different countries

Previous posts have tried to give a sense of how that experience has made me who I am….

I was the son of a Presbyterian Minister (or “son of the manse” as we were known) and received my education in a state school which still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic Tradition……now, sadly, much traduced.

It would have been easier for my parents to send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from our house but, as home was a manse (owned by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End”, that school was fee-paying. And my parents (although no radicals) would never have contemplated taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with modest houses and apartments in the centre and east of the town.

Thus began my familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..And trying to straddle such borders – let alone explore them – can be an uncomfortable experience.

When I became a young councillor in 1968 (for the Catholic-dominated Labour party), I found myself similarly torn I developed loyalties to the local community activists but found myself in conflict with my (older) political colleagues and officials.

And I felt this particularly strongly when I was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and wife-beating……..

The collusion between the police and my legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt” and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was rarely disturbed to sign search warrants!

And, on being elevated a few years later to one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized Departments with massive budgets and manpower.

It was at that stage that I developed a diagram for my students to make sense of the “conflict of loyalties” to what I saw as 4 very different pressures (audiences) to which politicians are subjected – 

- local voters (if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);

- the party (both local and national)

- the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;

- their conscience.

Politicians, I argued, differ according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished – “populist”; “ideologue”, “statesman”,  “maverick”.

The effective politician, however, is the one who resists the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its own important truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership.

And I would make the same point about the different professional and academic disciplines.

Each generates its own way of looking at the world – as you will see from the table below which looks only at seven academic disciplines

The core assumptions of academic subjects

Discipline	Core assumption	Most Famous exponents (not necessarily typical!)
Sociology	Struggle for power	Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, C Wright Mills,Robert Merton,  Herbert Simon, A Etzioni, Ralf Dahrendorf
Economics	Rational choice	Adam Smith, Schumpeter, Keynes, P Samuelson, M Friedmann, J Stiglitz, P Krugman
Political science	Rational choice (at least since the 1970s)	Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, David Easton, S Wolin, Peter Hall, James Q Wilson, Bo Rothstein, Francis Fukuyama
Geography	??	Mackinder, David Harvey, Nigel Thrift, Danny Dorling
Public management	mixed for traditional bodies - rational choice for New PM	Woodrow Wilson, Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt, Guy Peters, G Bouckaert,
anthropology	shared meaning	B Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Shore, David Graeber
Political economy	draws upon economics, political science, law, history, sociology et al to explain how political factors determine economic outcomes.	JK Galbraith, Susan Strange, Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Geoffrey Hodgson, Yanis Varoufakis,

And, of course, each of these seven fields has a variety of sub-fields each of which has its own specific “take” even before you get to the eccentricities of individual practitioners – let me remind you of this table about 10 sub-fields in Economics which I used in a recent post

Pluralism in Economics

Name of “school”	Humans….	Humans act within…	The economy is…..
Old “neo-classical”	optimise narrow self-interest	A vacuum	Stable
New “neo-classical”	can optimise a variety of goals	A market context	Stable in the absence of friction
Post-Keynes	use rules of thumb	A macro-economic context	Naturally volatile
Classical	act in their self-interest	Their class interests	Generally stable
Marxist	do not have predetermined patterns	Their class and historical interests	Volatile and exploitative
Austrian	have subjective knowledge and preferences	A market context	Volatile – but this is generally sign of health
Institutional	have changeable behaviour	Instit envt that sets rules and social norms	Dependent on legal and social structures
Evolutionary	act “sensibly” but not optimally	An evolving, complex system	Both stable and volatile
Feminist	exhibit engendered behaviour	A social context	Ambiguous
Ecological	act ambiguously	Social context	Embedded in the environment

This is an excerpt only – the full table is from Ho-Joon Chang’s “Economics – a User’s Guide” but can be viewed at diagram at p61 of The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017)

Please understand, I’m not trying to confuse – rather the opposite….I’m trying to liberate!

Once we become aware of the very different worlds in which people live, our world suddenly becomes a very richer place – in which we have choices about the particular lens we use to make sense of it all…

I remember the first time I really became aware of this – when I did the Belbin team test. And The Art of Thinking by Bramsall and Harrison (1984) very usefully sets out different types of strategic thinking..

Here’s another example - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/01/framing-capitalism.html