The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true
a celebration of intellectual trespassing by a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....
what you get here
Sunday, January 12, 2020
Post-Modernism – an intellectual history
The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true
Friday, January 10, 2020
57 Varieties of Capitalism
And the final distinctive aspect of the table is the identification of so many books – almost 50 covering most of squares…
I have selected the books which appear in the table according to whether they portray a world of “perfect competition” in which, according to the theory, no one has any power or, at the other extreme, a world of large companies and groups exercising power (legal and illegal).
We are prone these days to use ideological labels too easily – so I want to avoid that by using less obvious labels.
Some academic disciplines, of course, like economics, are almost exclusively associated with one school (market) whereas others are more pluralist
The
table is, however, a good example of what post-modernism has done to us
Key Texts about the future of capitalism – by academic discipline and “approach”
Academic Discipline |
1.
Critical-Realist |
2.
Mixed approach |
3.
“market theoreticians” |
Economics |
Debt and Neo-Feudalism; Michael Hudson (2012) Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis; Brian Davey (2015). Davey is not a career or conventional economist!
23 Things they didn’t
tell you about capitalism; Ha Joon-Chang (2010) |
People, Power and Profits
– progressive capitalism for an age of discontent;
Joseph Stiglitz (2019) The Future of Capitalism
– facing new anxieties; Paul Collier (2018) Shifts and Shocks – what
we’ve learned, and still have to, from the financial crisis; Martin Wolf (2014) Conceptualising
Capitalism – institutions, evolution, future; Geoff Hodgson (2015)
|
Why Globalisation Works; Martin Wolf (2004)
most
of the discipline |
Economic history
|
Capitalism and its
Economics – a critical History; Douglas Dowd (2000) Never Let a Good Crisis go to waste; Philip Mirowski (2013)
|
|
Economic
historians by definition have a strong sense of political and other
institutions |
Political economy |
Inside Capitalism – an
intro to political economy; Paul Phillips (2003) Susan
Strange -
States and Markets (1988) -
Casino Capitalism ; (1986) -
The Retreat of the State (1994)
|
Austerity – the history
of a dangerous idea; Mark Blyth (2013)
- And the Weak Suffer what
they must – Europe, austerity and the threat to global stability
(2016) - The Global Minotaur
(2012)
|
The
discipline still rediscovering itself but, again, by definition, has a strong
sense of the importance of institutions |
Political Science
|
Crisis without End - the
unravelling of western prosperity: A Gamble (2014) Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism; Sheldon Wolin (2008) |
Paul
Hirst eg Revisiting Associative
Democracy; ed Westall (2011). The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order; Francis Fukuyama (1999) Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Now; David Marquand (2015) |
Only
a few brave pol scientists trespass into the economic field – although it is
becoming more fashionable |
Policy analysis/Think Tanks |
|
“The
Locust and the Bee – predators and creators in capitalism’s future”; G Mulgan
(2015) |
An Intro to Capitalism (IEA 2018) |
Sociology |
Wolfgang Streeck. -
How will Capitalism End?;
(2016) -
Buying Time – the delayed
crisis of democratic capitalism (2013) End of capitalism? Michael Mann (2013) Capitalism; Geoff Ingham (2008)
|
Vampire Capitalism –
fractured societies and alternative futures;
Paul
Kennedy (2017)
|
The
sociological voice is still inspired by C Wright Mills, Veblen, Weber and
Durkheim |
Geography |
David Harvey -
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014) -
The Enigma of Capital (2010) -
A Brief History of
Neo-Liberalism (2005).
|
Danny Dorling -
A Better Politics – how
government can make us happier (2016 -
Injustice (2014) |
The
geographers are a bolshie lot - with a strong sense of geo-politics |
Environment |
Come On! Capitalism,
short-termism, population and the destruction of the planet;
(Club of Rome 2018).
|
Why we can’t agree about
Climate Change;
Mike Hulme (2009) Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution; Paul Hawken (1999) |
they
pride themselves on their technocracy |
|
|
|
|
Management and man’t studies |
“The
Dictionary of Alternatives – utopianism and organisation”; M Parker (2007) |
Rebalancing Society; Henry Mintzberg (2014) Peter
Senge Charles
Handy |
Most
mant writers are apologists – apart from the critical mant theorists
|
Religious studies |
Laudato-Si – Pope Francis’
Encyclical (2015). Accessible in its entirety here
|
The Crisis of global
capitalism – Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical and the future of
political economy; ed A Pabst (2011)
|
Questions of Business
Life;
Higginson (2002) |
Psychology |
Herbert Marcuse What about me – the
struggle for identity in a market based society?; Paul Verhaeghe (2014) |
|
|
Journalism |
Post
Capitalism – a guide to our Future; Paul Mason (2015) …. The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System; Jerry Mander (2012).
|
How
Good Can we be – ending the mercenary society
Will Hutton (2015) Capitalism 3.0 Peter Barnes (2006) |
They
don’t enjoy the tenure of the academics (altho Hutton is a college Director) |
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Is Organisational Reform really all that sexy?
Post
|
What sparked it
off
|
Why it’s worth
reading
|
|
Oxfam report for Davos
Rereading last year’s draft book
about administrative reform
|
Gives us the encouraging lessons
from the experience of those who have rolled back privatisation
|
Going back to Burnham
|
Explores the question we rarely ask
|
|
How did it happen? part II
|
My 1999 book “In Transit – notes on
Good Governance”
|
Looks at how reform was seen in the
1990s
|
a Rare voice of clarity – part III
|
Gerald Caiden
|
A prescient voice
|
Machiavelli’s Warning – part IV
|
A reminder of the strength of organ
inertia
|
A first stab at an answer to the
question
|
The Managerial Turn - part V
|
Clarifying professionalism
|
First we rubbished the professionals
|
We don’t seem to have learned much
in 40 years……
|
Key lessons are however extracted
|
|
|
Belated acknowledgement of a great
scholar
|
Those who express important truths
in a clear language deserve honour
|
|
“The Puritan Gift” is a rare
critique of how modern management has poisoned us all
|
Has a good summary
|
Peter Drucker’s Deadly
Sins of PA – part VII
|
The Grand Old Man of management says
it better
|
Important proverbs
|
|
Technocracy is the new enemy
|
|
Laloux book
|
Summary of one of the most important
books about organisations in recent years
|
|
Good references
|
||
Workforce management again
|
||
Neoliberalism
|
||
Hilary Cottam’s book
|
Time to take this issue seriously
|
|
|
A rare article about translation should leave us wondering why international
summits are not more conflictual..
|
Monday, January 6, 2020
The Beast – part II
The sociologists had a more plausible story to tell but generally seemed too ready to critique it all. I was most impressed with the smaller numbers of political economists (Blyth, Collier, Stiglitz, Streecken and Varoufakis), economic historians (Tooze) and even a few journalists (Mander)
- The system is voracious, never satisfied
- It’s unstable – boom and then bust
- It leads increasingly to more and more inequality – the 1% have been replaced by some 25 families who control 99% of the wealth
- markets are naturally “oligopolistic” – ie tending to be controlled by a few massive companies which engage in billion dollar marketing and destructive pricing
- markets display none of the characteristics on which economists base their claims about the benefits of markets
Post title
|
What sparked it off
|
Why you should read it
|
Selecting a Brains Trust for the
End Times
|
The best of the authors are invited
to a dinner before the crash
|
All selections are invidious – I’ve
chosen here the individuals who had the ability to write clearly about the
nature of our economic system BEFORE the 2008 crash
|
|
And after the crash
|
Those who helped our understanding
most after 2008
|
|
Erik Olin-Wright
|
Few authors have dealt properly with
utopia
|
|
Searching for the best book to
recommend about “capitalism”
|
An American journalist wins by a
long chalk – with his “The Capitalist Papers”
|
Some promising new perspectives
|
Some great hyperlinks
|
|
|
I realised how rarely I have tried
to define the beast
|
Very rare table which uses 3
different lens to find how 11 different academic disciplines try to define
the beast
|
A book from a global institute for
social progress
|
Most writing on the subject suffers
from being written from a single discipline
|
|
|
Review of 5 books
|
Explains why noone should take
economists seriously these days
|
|
Mount’s “The New Few”
|
A brave right-winger admits exposes
the new oligarchy
|
|
Robert Greene’s latest book
|
An assessment of our frailties which
is superbly written
|
|
Robert Greene again
|
How the 1970s American Democrats
killed a great populist tradition
|
|
Alt history
|
we need to push back more against
social forces which are presented as irresistible..
|
|
David Brooks “The Road to Character”
|
An unfashionable subject these days!
|
Daniel Bell, Richard Sennett,
Fukuyama; Davis “Reckless Opportunists ”
|
Is 1980s’ greed and opportunism; and
social media changing our behaviour?
|
|
|
Zuboff’s trilogy
|
Why I have my doubts about an
overly-hyped book from an author I used to admire
|
David Graeber’s latest
|
Explains the importance of a book
the academics would like to ignore
|