The 2017 posts

Since 2009 I have blogged consistently – on average 2-3 posts a week. But the last 10 weeks have seen only one post. Somehow, inspiration seems to have dried up. For someone whose very identity has, for almost 50 years, been tied up with the act of writing, this is a very serious matter……

I’m not the only blogger whose energies have been fading recently – other writers have drawn attention to an apparent decline. This may or may not be linked with the deep sense of pessimism which has gripped my generation at least in recent years…..

With an effort, I have done a final bit of editing to the collected 2017 posts (all 76 of them) which bears the title Common Endeavour? – the 2017 posts (2018) and runs to 183 pages

The introduction reminds us all of the benefits of blogging and there is a special bonus in the annex in the form of a sceptic’s glossary of about 100 key words used in political and administrative discourse. The year is best summarized as follows -

Readership

- Blog traffic has been increasing here – hitting 10,000 in April for the first time (a 3-fold increase since last year) and, in May, the 200,000 mark for the entire period since 2010. August saw another 10,000 hits….although it dropped thereafter, reflecting what I understand to be a general drop in readership of blogs this year,,,,And, in the final ten weeks, some disenchantment with blogging

     - Native English speakers account for only one third of readers (most from the US) – with Russian and Ukraine readers coming in (in the past year) at a strong 15% share. It’s not idle speculation to feel that part of this latter interest may be a reflection of official Russian oversights of western blogs and accounts – although I don’t get any comments on posts from that source - perhaps because it’s not been my policy to comment on Russian politics and Putin’s intentions? But why the strong interest from Ukrainian readers? After all, recent posts have, if anything been even more “reflective” than usual, trying to put recent events in a fifty-year timescale…..  

·       -  Readers in France, Germany, Bulgaria and Romania account for some 20% in total of the traffic – the latter two for obvious reasons. I’ve blogged quite a bit on Germany (indeed put a little E-book up on the list at the top-right corner of the blog) and am pleased to find readers from that source – and from France.

A new Feature

With two thirds of my readers not having English as their first language, I have perhaps become more conscious of the need for an inviting intro to posts which now try to “position” the subject in the wider commentary……So a new feature is the “Further Reading” resource with which book notes in particular now end… 

Focus

Early posts couldn’t help touching on the first shocking weeks of bully boy Trump’s occupation of the White House but, thereafter, ignored the idiot. Political misbehaviour in Romania caused more of a public backlash there and was duly the subject of a few posts.

For several weeks from mid-March, I ran a series of posts which started with an observation about   how badly served we are by the hundreds of economics books which jostle for our attention. The opening post suggested some tests we might apply to screen books out – with the drawback that we actually need the book in our hands to make the call! Follow-up posts used some diagrams……which also help guide the reader through the maze of books……

More than 100 key books were identified, briefly explained - and hyperlinked. And will all be useful in the task which lies ahead – of severe editing of the present draft of Dispatches to the post-capitalist generation

This May post shows the encouragement I now take from the increasing respect being shown to the concept of “The Commons”

June saw the British electorate join the US electorate in bloodying the nose of pundits and the Establishment…but, in the event, also giving progressives back a little bit of hope…….  Hence a couple of posts on social democracy….

Mid-Summer saw various posts connected with discussions I was having with a young Bulgarian journalist about an interview (which appeared at the end of August) which raised difficult questions about progress here in Bulgaria and Romania since 1991 and the curious silence of the past decade about the subject of “transitology” which so consumed the chattering classes in the 90s. The issues about political and institutional behavior which were first raised in the 50s by Edward Banfield; and then in the early 90s by Robert Putnam; remain.

But the most important series of posts started in September with “Close Encounters with bureaucracy” as I tried yet again to make some sort of sense of the efforts I’ve been making for nigh on 50 years to make state bodies more responsive to citizens….I started as a newly-elected young radical, working with community activists to help make their voice heard by a traditional municipality in the West of Scotland; graduated fairly quickly to positions of authority – not least for 16 years shaping the social strategy for Europe’s largest regional authority. All the time working as a public management academic in a local Polytechnic – and writing profusely and being published in UK journals, 

That was the base from which I sprang in 1990 to reinvent myself as a consultant in institution-building in central Europe and Central Asia – and keeping up with the academic outpourings on public management…..For 25 years I have worked in almost a dozen countries on these issues.
In recent years I have been trying to make sense of all this experience - which culminated last spring with a draft of almost 200 pages bearing the title Crafting Effective Public Management. The book's core consisted of (i) surveys of the literature of admin reform 1975-2000; (ii) my critical assessment of the approach and tools used by international bodies and consultants in the challenge of institutional development in "transition countries"; and (iii) my blogposts on admin reform ....

Early last summer, however, I realised that I had missed some of the more profound learning experiences - the new draft therefore has a very different format and content which still requires further work. Its sections are chronological and try to do justice to the shape and significance of the various projects. It also includes my sceptic's glossary; and the recent series of posts which used a dozen questions to try to capture the best writing on public management. As a result, it's currently heading for the 300 page mark!
Its present title No Man's Land reflects the reminder which the summer interview gave me of the importance of the feeling of "being on the margin" I've always had.....  

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

travelling curiously

Yesterday I mentioned Wilkinson and Picket book on Equality. It’s called The Spirit Level and has caused such a stir that, when I saw it on offer on Amazon for 5 pounds, I decided it was time to buy it. The authors have also set up an Equality Trust website to promote its ideas. From which I take the following snippet. A couple of young guys have been so inspired by the book that they have organised a bike ride to Sweden to explore at a human level what it means to be living in a more equal society. They will chat with people they meet – recording and blogging about the interviews. Their journey has just begun and their blog can be followed at exploring equality
In this idea of combining travel and talk with treatise, they follow an honourable tradition – for example, William Cobbett’s Rural Rides in the 1820s; George Orwell’s 1937 Road to Wigan Pier and, in 1996, Robert Kaplan’s The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy

I have been stuck too long in the laptop and books. The weather has been steadily improving in the last few days here in the mountains and I must now get out, exercise the muscles and breathe the marvellous air into my lungs. But one last snippet – this time a reading list which one of the UK’s new Foreign Ministers apparently has for the summer!

The power of stories

In the past few weeks, I’ve been going through the 500 pages of text and pictures which the blogging of the past 2-3 years has produced – and asking myself where exactly I am (or should be) going with it. The daily process of thinking about a particular aspect of my life’s work of tinkering with government institutions is a useful discipline. Since an early age, I have had the habit of writing critical analyses of policy initiatives – in the naive belief that this was the route to improved performance (I had forgotten that this habit led to Socrates having to drink hemlock!). Many of my reflections about these various efforts – whether at community, municipal, regional or national levels - are available on my website 

And the daily copying of reading references – whether of journals or books – has also helped build up a useful virtual library. As, however, Umberto Eco has remarked – the beauty of a good library is that only a minority of the texts have actually been read!

The question with which I am now wrestling is whether to continue with this process – a bit like the 5- minute Thought of the Day programme which the BBC has been running for decades – or to take time out to read more closely the material in the library and try to write something more focussed and coherent. My blogposts reflect the gadfly which is (and has been) an important part of me – alighting for some time on a flower and then moving on to another.
It is, however, the process of going over my blogs which has made me realise how much value I place on the ideas embodied in books. Most people are sceptical about the power of ideas and assume that baser motives make the world go round. John Maynard Keynes opposed this vew with great elegance in 1935 when he wrote

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas

But we all need to make sense of the world. Some do so with their own, home-built view of the world which, all too often, is two-dimensional if not demented. Most of us, however, seek some external guidance – but there are so many voices today that we require mediators and popularisers to help us make sense of things - whether committed journalists like Will Hutton, Paul Mason and George Monbiot; essayists such as Malcolm Gladwell and serious analytical blogs such as Daniel Little’s Understanding Society. Matthew Taylor is one of the few bloggers who, like me, has straddled the worlds of theory and practice and continues, in his role as Director of the UK Royal Society of Arts to reflect on his reading. He had a good post recently on a seminar which featured Nassim Taleb -

The event was packed out and the chairman was at pains to emphasise the powerful influence of Taleb’s ideas on Government thinking. In essence Taleb’s argument – based on a fascinating, but occasionally somewhat opaque, mixture of philosophy, statistics and metaphors – is that big systems are much more prone to catastrophic failure (or in some cases sensational success) than small devolved ones. From bankers to planners to politicians, a combination of ignorance, complacency and self-interest leads to a systematic underestimation of the inherent risk of large complex systems.

The British Prime Minister is clearly looking for a fig-leaf with which to clothe his moral nakedness and finds Taleb’s arguments a useful cover. The RSA site actually has a video of David Cameron in conversation in 2009 with Taleb when he was Opposition Leader. Taleb has many useful insights to offer. He questions our reliance on the "narrative fallacy", the way past information is used to analyse the causes of events when so much history is actually "silent". It is the silence - the gap - the missing energy in the historical system, which produces the black swan. Imagine, says Taleb, the problem of turkeys:

Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests', as a politician will say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief

Those wanting to find out more about Taleb’s arguments will find a useful paper from him on the Edge site I mentioned yesterday
Matthew Taylor then asks a powerful question on his post about the logic and consistency of the Coalition Government’s use of Taleb’s thinking -

why is a democratically accountable and relatively weak organisation like a local education authority portrayed by ministers as the kind of overbearing power that needs to be broken up while Tesco (to take just one example) is left free to grow even more powerful and major Academy chains, massive welfare to work providers and various other large scale private sector providers are encouraged?

How technology enrages - a great post on the current unrest

Good old BBC! Paul Mason of BBC had yesterday one of the best posts I have ever read on a blog. It put down some random thoughts he had about the possible causes of the unrest which has broken out in the Meditarranean Arab world. For those wanting to assess the European reactions to the unrest, Gavin Hewitt's BBC blog also had a great overview. And another article (from the Economist stable) draws some useful parallels from the 1989 revolutions in my part of the world.
Knowing how lazy my readers are, I reproduce the Mason post in its entirety below -

We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political mood.
What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic?
My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with academics who study this and also the participants themselves. At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for.
In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different situation, here's 20 things I have spotted:

1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future
2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyrrany.
3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable.
4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all forms are rejected.
5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the "archetypal" protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated young woman.
6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton.
7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.
8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.
9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.
10.This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid economic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.
11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.
12.The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history.
13.This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat from. They can "have a day off" from protesting, occupying: whereas twith he old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was determined and they couldn't retreat once things started. You couldn't "have a day off" from the miners' strike if you lived in a pit village.
14.In addition to a day off, you can "mix and match": I have met people who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a flotilla to Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy; then they're writing a book about something completely different. I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square this week.
15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it's not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be more complex because people have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. It's as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics, but in every discipline.
16.There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of control, post Mubarak - as in all the colour revolutons - the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a "meme" that has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong - only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak.
17. It is - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs - possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years in the jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive regimes like Tunisia/Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here - it is for example the things people swap by text message, the music they swap with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art etc which those in authority fail to spot.
18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed.
19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for "autonomy" and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based power-elites.
20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of the individual.
Some complications....

a) all of the above are generalisations: and have to be read as such.

b) are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters.

c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to go online and foment pro-government "memes" to counteract the oppositional ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org says on his website that : "in a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation." But independent journalism is suppressed in many parts of the world.

d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out.

e) - and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also examples in the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the House of Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible "noise" - and this goes wider than just the protesters.
(For example: I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has quickly become a "meme" that crosses political tribal boundaries under the Coalition, yet most professional politicians are deaf to "memes" as the youth are to the contents of Hansard.)

That's it - as I say, these are just my thoughts on it all and not researched other than through experience: there are probably whole PhD theses about some of this so feel free to hit the comments.
Likewise if you think it is all balderdash, and if you are over 40 you may, vent your analog-era spleen here

Praising - not Burying

People writing books on social affairs will usually spend at least a couple of years on their book – only to see it dealt with in a 1,000 word review (if they are lucky) – even in professional journals. That’s why I’m a big fan of the Crooked Timber book seminars which produce at least 50 page overviews of selected books – made up of 6-7 contributions. The last (on Red Plenty) had 135 pages!

I am currently reading Will Hutton’s new book How Good We Can Be (not to be confused with As Good as it Gets!) – an update of the series of books Hutton has been writing on the DNA of Anglo-American capitalism since “The State We’re In” (1995) 

Hutton is that rare character – a British journalist who cares about ideas and shares his wide and deep reading in his books; someone who can and does try to build bridges between the worlds of academia and action which I have been blogging about recently.

But, as I’ve said before here, the trouble with bridges is that, in peacetime, horses shit on them and, in wartime, they are blown up!

A lot of people therefore “have it in” for Hutton - Frederic Mount is a good example. Someone who was at one time Head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit but reengineered himself a few years ago to write a devastating critique of the new British oligarchy. His review of Hutton’s latest book has a fairly typical tone

If a book’s worth writing once, it’s worth writing several times. This homely maxim has often proved a recipe for success. Will Hutton is a case in point. Twenty years ago, he had a runaway hit with The State We’re In. He followed that up with "The State to Come" (1997), then came "TheWorld We’re In "(2002). As Hutton moved from the editor’s chair at the Observer to the Work Foundation and now to the Principal’s lodge at Hertford College, Oxford, he has stayed heroically on his own message. The title’s tweaked, but the melody lingers on.

The continentals are enlightened, the Anglo-Saxons are deluded. Europe is the future and we would be crazy to stay out of the euro. John Maynard Keynes is good, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are no good. The state is the solution, not the problem. It already showers blessings on us and would shower many more if only we could overcome our misguided suspicions. Government regulation and high taxes are the way to make us happy.For painting in black and white there are few like Hutton. There is no hesitation or deviation, although there is quite a bit of repetition, …….. 

Yet, oddly enough, many of Hutton’s proposals will appeal to a wider audience than social liberals and socialists. In fact, they are pretty much the new consensus: the separation between high street banks and the casino banks; a stiffer stewardship code to deter looting in the boardroom; Treasury guarantees for big construction projects; restoring the insurance base of the welfare state; a return to the old sliding scale for capital gains tax, in order to encourage long-term holding of shares; an end to the tax advantages of debt over equity; reforming council tax and giving local authorities back their financial independence.

I warm to all this, and I also like Hutton’s proposals to reinvent the trade unions as co-partners with business, particularly the idea that they might set up mutually-owned service companies to sell their services to employers.

These days we are all in favour of diversifying patterns of ownership beyond the standard plc model, to include more co-operatives and also “public benefit companies,” which guarantee under charter to deliver certain public benefits and enjoy tax advantages in return. Free enterprise used to be more diverse and could be so again.

The awkward truth is, though, that these alluring alternatives are no more risk-free than the old limited company. It is an awkward thought that the best-known alternative corporations of this sort over the past few years have been the Co-op, Railtrack/Network Rail and the BBC—none of them exactly without problems of governance.

But it’s Hutton’s grand narrative that seems the more rickety. We are constantly told that the past 20 or 30 years have been a disaster for the United Kingdom. Yet at the same time we are also told that “Britain has more world-class universities per head of population than any other country,” that “The triangle bounded by the M3 in the south M40 to the north and with Heathrow at its centre boasts the highest concentration of high-tech start-ups outside California and Massachusetts,” that the BBC remains the finest broadcasting service in the world, that the National Health Service is “the cheapest system in the world producing the best health results across a range of key indicators” and “on measures of effectiveness, safety, patient-centredness, co-ordination, quality and access, Britain scores number one.”

I must confess that my eyes did begin to glaze over after the fifth or sixth of the series of injunctions Hutton gets started on later in the book. I longed for a lighter touch - and was therefore quite fascinated to discover this issue touched on in this detailed and very serious treatment of the sort calculated to warm the cockles of all writers - it's called Calling Capitalism to account by Steve New

Writers who want to engage seriously with economic and political reality face a problem. How to pitch the tone of what they say? Every simple story needs goodies and baddies; more complex stories need some sort of moral trajectory. But how explicitly should you tell the story? The vast bulk of serious academic work avoids offence by talking in the abstract, layering oblique evasion upon tactful qualification. Academics settle for the low temperature, formal modality of the learned journals; passion is excluded. Much is made of broad generalisations; no-one is criticised directly. ‘Firms’ and ‘Markets’ feature, as do ‘agents’, but mostly they don’t have names: authors can be pretty sure they’re not going to be sued by anyone, even in the rare event that a normative judgement is explicitly made.

Even academic work which reflects some kind of moral or political purpose (not all does) tends to be scrupulously anodyne, and keen not to offend. You’d really struggle to find explicit criticisms of particular firms or managers in the Academy of Management Review or the Journal of Finance or the Harvard Business Review2.

Politicians and activists can be more specific – we don’t like Shell, we don’t like Nike – but, often deliberately, tend to prioritize effect over accuracy or content3.

Journalists can be more direct, but mostly without the tedious necessity of consistency or depth. Will Hutton – over a prolific career operating in the relatively unpopulated overlap between journalist, academic and (perhaps) politician – has mastered a kind of middle ground. He writes about general ideas, but he also names names; he treads a line between rounded argument and polemical assertion; he tries to be critical

Writing about companies and business people and their ethics is tricky because it is easy to blunder into two equally stupid traps: you can declare them all horrible, beyond sympathy and empathy, or you can end up fawning and cooing in line with corporate propaganda. Nuanced and balanced treatment is hard: that’s part of why academics often stick to the abstract or typical case. If you get specific, you risk being a bombastic Spart or a corporate patsy.

Hutton navigates this carefully; he talks about particular firms, but from one particular angle at a time. So, in HGWCB, Apple is hailed as an example of innovation, with its ‘handsome, well-designed devices’ (26). But the working conditions in the supply chain are not discussed.
On the other hand, INEOS and Sports Direct are bad because of their employment practices; ARM is good because it’s successful and hasn’t been bought up by foreigners. Unilever has a declared purpose (of which more, later) and doesn’t do quarterly reporting (good). Virgin uses tax havens (bad). News International is beyond the pale because of its ‘purpose-free amoral culture’ (87).

Hutton uses specific examples of firms to point out particular virtues and vices, praising for X, damning for Y.