2023 Books

Edward Biberman, Slow Curve, 1945.

Books I read in 2023. I’m probably forgetting some.

Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money. One of the fundamental divides in thinking about money is whether we start from the commodity or the unit of account. Do we begin, logically and historically, with the idea of exchange and then bring in money, or do we start from an abstract unit of measurement which then, among other things, is used to value commodities? The latter view defines what’s known as chartalism; Ingham offers the most persuasive statement of the chartalist position that I know. The most visible (though, it seems to me, fading) contemporary version of chartalism is the one offered by Modern Mone(tar)y Theory. There’s a clear affinity between Ingham and MMT but also some important differences; taking Mitchell Innes rather than Knapp as its starting point, Ingham’s version emphasizes money as a measure of obligations in general, rather than taxes specifically.

Like the next five books on the list, I read this one in as I worked on Money and Things, and in conjunction with the “Alternative Perspectives on Money” course I taught this fall.

Lev Menand, The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis.  I am a big admirer of Menand’s writing on monetary policy and the Fed. He’s a good example of how many of the most interesting conversations around economics these days are happening in law schools. I am constantly pointing people to his short piece on the “The Fed’s Sole Mandate,” which does a brilliant job reframing debates around monetary policy. I would love to see that argument developed at book length. Unfortunately, this is not really that. The book falls a bit awkwardly between two sets of stools — between a general history of the Fed and a comment on pandemic-era interventions, on the one hand, and between a popularization and original argument on the other. I’m sympathetic – these are both tensions I also struggle with. (Despite some encouragement from me, Lev also has not been quite able to give up the idea of a definite quantity of money.) I will certainly continue to draw on and assign his work in the future, but I think I’ll look more to his law review articles rather than this book. 

David McNally, Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire. I would also put this in the broad category of chartalism, again emphasizing the role of money as an abstract unit of measurement rather than as a specific commodity.  This is a more eclectic and Marx-influenced version, focusing on money as quantification as such rather than of obligations. The most importnat things being reduced to commensurable quantities, in McNally’s telling, are human bodies — for him, money is the obverse of slavery, and of coercive violence more broadly. The book’s title should be taken literally.

The historical material here makes an interesting complement to Ingham. Most chartalist writing, in my experience, draws from a relatively short list of historical parables — ancient Babylon, colonial Madagascar. Ingham mostly sticks to the canon, but McNally ranges more widely. As with many books of this kind (Graeber’s Debt is the notorious example) the analysis starts glitching a bit when the story reaches the modern world. It’s not surprising. When you are writing about a general topic like money or debt, there is nothing wrong with picking whatever particular examples from the vast palette of the past that work best for the picture you’re trying to paint. But when you are writing about recent history, you are stuck with the specific things that actually happened.

Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes. The subject of this book is the question — one which motivates so many debates about money — of how, and to what extent, the form and management of money shapes broader social relations. It’s the question of whether money is, in the broadest sense, neutral, or whether changes in the terms on which money is created can transform politics and relations of production. The book, to be clear, is not framed this way; it’s set up, rather as six distinct essays, on particular thinkers and milieus, from classical Athens through Locke, Fichte, Marx and Keynes to the “political theory of money after Bretton Woods.” As Colin Drumm suggests, the book is best understood (and perhaps read) backward. To make sense of current debates about money, we need to go back to the early 20th century Years of High Theory, and then back to the thinkers that influenced them, and on back to Aristotle. Personally, I learned the most from the Athens and Marx chapters; but the whole thing is very worth reading

Merijn Knibbe, Macroeconomic Measurement Versus Macroeconomic Theory.  This is a book-length struggle with a question dear to my heart, the disconnect  between the categories of economic theory and measurement. Concepts like output, employment, the price level or the capital stock can be defined unambiguously within a formal economic model. But when we use them to describe developments in the real world, their meaning depends on a whole host of specific decisions about what exactly to count, what to impute and where to draw various more or less arbitrary lines. The data we look at is highly sensitive to these choices —  a full third of US consumption, for instance, consists of non cash items like the notional rent paid by homeowners to themselves, services provided gratis by nonprofits and government, and the notional value of financial services provided by low-interest bank accounts. Mainstream economists — and, I’m afraid to say, many heterodox ones — are blissfully unconcerned with these choices. But it is impossible to make any meaningful statements about real economies except in the terms that they are actually observed.

Many economists will acknowledge this problem in principle but Knibbe’s book is a rare attempt to address it head on. It is brilliant, perceptive and original, but also digressive, a bit of a ramble. One of its strengths is the author’s less academic background — he has a deep knowledge of topics, like exactly how milk prices are set in the Netherlands, that are not taught in any economics program. A challenge for any book like this is how much work it takes to explain the intricate fantasies of orthodox theory as a prelude to dismantling them; I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, if one is going to write critically about economics at all.

I provided comments on early chapters of the book, and at one point we discussed coauthoring it. That didn’t happen, obviously, but he did just fine on his own.

Anitra Nelson, Marx on Money: The God of Commodities. The most thorough and convincing account of Marx’s (incomplete and sometimes contradictory) writing on money that I have read. I won’t attempt to summarize Nelson’s arguments here; perhaps I’ll do so in a future post.

Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945. This book presents itself as a history of Europe’s second thirty years war. It is organized not chronologically but thematically, around various concepts that structured what Traverso presents as fundamentally an intra-European rather than international conflict — dual power, the partisan, the trauma of industrial violence, the new legal concept of war crimes, and so on. At its heart is an effort to reclaim anti-fascism as positive political project. Resistance to fascism required, and called forth, a creative fusion of socialist and Enlightenment values. Antifascism, in Traverso’s telling, was not merely a negative reaction to right-wing authoritarianism. It was a “civil religion of humanity, democracy and socialism”; it was “a “shared ethos that, in a historical context that was exceptional and necessarily transitory, made it possible to hold together Christians and atheist Communists, liberals and collectivists.” Traverso amasses a great range of historical, artistic and literary material to flesh out this view of antifascism as a positive political program. Anti-fascism is not just resistance to movement in the fascist direction; it is pressure for movement  away from the status quo in the other direction. It’s a timely reminder that one cannot effectively defend democratic values and practices where they already exist without also fighting to extend them where they currently do not. 

This is very much an intellectual history — personally, I wouldn’t have minded if Traverso had included a few less reproductions of paintings and introduced some quantitative material. Its antagonists are liberal historians — Francois Furet in particular — who see “the West” following a steady path toward liberal democracy as a kind of technical progress, with the violent conflicts between Left and Right as a friction or distraction. Traverso’s argument – not stated in so many words, but the overarching theme of the book — is that there was no technological inevitability to universal suffrage, civil liberties or the rest of it. Human progress, such as it is, is the result of active struggle. The battle against fascism yielded something quite different from a  straight line projection from the years before 1914. 

Luciano Canfora, Democracy in Europe. Another book by an Italian historian, developing many of the same themes as Traverso, though on a broader canvass. The central argument is that if democracy means “rule by the people,” then we should think of this not as an institution but an event, as the rare episodes in which the propertyless majority are able to collectively exercise power against the interests of the rich. Democracy, in his words, means “the temporary ascendancy of the poorer classes in the course of an endless struggle for equality”. Elections with broad suffrage are at best an enabling condition of democracy, not a definition of it. They create an arena in which the mass of people may sometimes be mobilized if the conditions are right. As Friedrich Engels put it, elections are important because they offer “a means to make contact with the masses where they are still distant from us,” not so much as a direct route to power. 

By the late 19th century, Engels believed, democratic politics offered an open road toward socialism. In Canfora’s view, however, he underestimated the ability of elites to mobilize mass support for their own programs. The development of mass political participation in the early 20th century owed as much, he argues, to efforts by conservative government to inoculate the population against socialism, as to any advance of democratic values. Conservatives were nonetheless hostile to universal suffrage right down to World War One. The book quotes the British writer George Cornwall Lewis urging that “the attempt to attain perfect equality in … the powers of government seems … as absurd as the attempt to attain perfect equality in the distribution of property.” Canfora accepts this equivalence but turns it around — sustained equality in government has never been compatible with concentrated property ownership. Historically, expansion of formal democracy was either a step toward broader social equality, or a defense against it.

Like Traverso, Canfora emphasizes how “antifascism was widened from a negative concept — rejection — to a positive one. … the forces that had fought fascism … could by definition transform society in a progressive direction.” He sees a fundamental parallel between developments in eastern and western Europe after war. On both sides, the upheavals of war and and popular mobilizations created new opening for demands from the masses. In the immediate postwar period, governments gave ground to pressure from below both substantively and in terms of public participation; but as they became more established, genuine popular involvement was displaced by self-confirming legality. The relationship of the US to Italy was not fundamentally different from that of the USSR to Poland or Hungary, even if military intervention was only prepared and not carried out. To drive this point home, he notes that it was Churchill, not Stalin, who proposed the division of Europe into spheres of influence; while the latter, for his part, urged an acceptance of liberal norms by communists in Western Europe.

Moving to the present, Canfora firmly rejects the idea that the countries of “the West” are democratic simply by virtue of their electoral arrangements. At the same time he insists that changes to electoral systems are important for either narrowing or widening the possibilities for substantive democracy.  In particular, he sees the shift from proportional representation to single-member districts or hybrid systems (as occurred in both France and Italy in recent decades) as a way of closing off space for democracy. In his view, steps away from proportional representation are no different from outright restrictions of the franchise. They “combine the electoral principle … with the reality of the protected ascendancy of the … upper classes.”

Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History. This is a sympathetic but not uncritical account of Mao’s life and the surrounding history. One of the book’s big virtues — besides providing the basic narrative of events that I knew much less about than I should — is that its perspective is always the situation and context in which Mao himself operated. It tries to understand why he made the choices he did in the circumstances that he faced. This is partly a matter of how the book is written, but it also requires the writer (and reader) to be able to imagine themselves as part of the revolutionary project Mao was engaged in. 

I learned a great deal from this book. Here are a few general points that stand out. First,  Mao’s formative political experiences involved China’s political disintegration and subordination to outside powers and, interestingly, the subordination of women in the traditional Chinese family (the subject of his first significant political writings.) His embrace of class politics and Marxism came afterwards, as a response to the practical problems of national independence and revival. (And to the savage repression by the nationalists.) Second, despite being an early leader of the Communist Party, he was, in Karl’s telling, almost constantly in conflict with it. He never had the unquestioned  authority of a Stalin, and for much of the period after 1960 or so he was effectively excluded from day to day leadership. The cult of personality — the Little Red Book and so on — were real enough, but they reflected relative marginalization rather than dominance; they arose from, on the one side, his efforts to pressure from the outside a government he no longer dominated, and from the other, the Party’s efforts to claim his legacy even while rejecting his positions substantively. Conversely, the “reforms” after his death don’t represent a repudiation of the Revolution so much as a reassertion of tendencies that were there all along. Third, Mao’s worst mistakes were in large part overreactions to correctly perceived problems with the Soviet model. The Great Leap Forward — disastrous as it was — is in no way comparable to the great famines under Stalin. It was the result rather of a search for a form of industrialization that would not favor the cities at the expense of the peasants. The problem was a breakdown in the systems of coordination, communication and transport rather than — as under Stalin — a systematic extraction of grain from the countryside. The Cultural Revolution, meanwhile, came from the conflicts between Mao and the party leadership mentioned earlier — it was intended by Mao as a revolution against the party,  as an effort to prevent the consolidation of a new ruling class or stratum as he believed had happened in the USSR. 

These broad brush summaries don’t do justice to the book, which is much more concrete and historically grounded. One question that it does not answer, however — that it does not even pose, given its choice to write largely from Mao’s own perspective — is, how and to what extent did the Chinese revolution lay the groundwork for China’s astonishing success — maybe the greatest in history — as a late industrializer. (Isabella Weber’s book, while also very good, only addresses a small part of this question.) But I still found it extremely informative and worth reading. One other virtue: it is very short. I would love to see more books in this format. There are a lot of big topics on which I would be happy to read 150 pages, but probably would not manage 700. 

Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.  A charming and very readable first-person account of Ireland since 1960, seamlessly interweaving historical and autobiographic material. When I picked this book up (at The Lofty Pigeon, a lovely new bookstore in my corner of Brooklyn) I knew a bit about the Irish war of independence and of course about the euro-era financial bubble and crisis, but but not much about the period in between. It’s a fascinating  story — 20th century Ireland has to be one of the outstanding cases of cultural transformation in just a generation or two, from a closed semi-theocracy to a fully “modern” country, for better or worse. O’Toole has an appealing ambivalence about this transformation. He is unflinching in his descriptions of the stifling cruelty of mid-century Irish schools and the treatment of women who violated sexual norms; it’s interesting how, in his telling even features of this society that might seem appealing — big multi-generational families with neighbors constantly present — could seem oppressive to those living in it. But neither does he whitewash the Irish modernization project or the politicians who led it. 

Edward Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham. A massive, comprehensive history of New York from the first European arrival to consolidation in 1898. I consumed this as an audiobook intermittently over the past year or so. Its episodic structure works well in that format, though not so much its profusion of names, dates, and places. (Someone should make a geographic concordance from it, if there isn’t one.)  What is there to say about it? If you want to learn about the history of New York City, this is the book. 

Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.  A history of US politics and political repression in the period around and immediately after World War One. As Hochschild makes clear, nothing in Donald Trump’s dreams comes close to the institutionalized racism, nativism and criminalization of dissent under Woodrow Wilson. If you’ve read some labor history, you won’t be shocked at the stories of the violent suppression of the IWW. But what about the movie director sentenced to four years in prison for making a film about the American Revolution that depicted the British in too negative a light? Or the Swiss-born orchestra conductor whose lynching on suspicion of German sympathies was hailed by The Washington Post as a “healthful and wholesome awakening” of patriotic sentiment? Or the mass roundups of young men suspected of evading the draft by vigilante squads? It’s an important reminder that fascism is a long-established and central strand in American politics, not something introduced by Trump or Newt Gingrich. 

Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe, A Short History of Humanity: A New History of Old Europe.  I enjoy books about ancient history and paleantology, especially ones that, like this one, are as much about how we know what we know, as about what we do know. The specific focus here is the new information from the reconstruction of genomes from ancient human remains, something that has only recently become possible; one of the authors is a pioneer in the technique. There is a rather serious problem, which is visible in the juxtaposition of the title and subtitle: Europe and humanity are quite different things. (The authors are hardly the only ones to have trouble remembering this.) Still, it’s fascinating how much detail is now known about ancient population movements. 

Thomas Lin, ed., Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire. Essays from online science magazine Quanta. I enjoy their podcasts, but this collection was underwhelming. This is the one book on this list that I do not recommend.

Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench and Variations of Night and Day. These are the second and third novels in the Cities of Salt trilogy telling the story of a fictional gulf monarchy over the first half of the 20th century. (At least, it’s a trilogy in English; I believe there are further volumes that haven’t been translated.) I wrote a bit about these books at the end of this post.

Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place. A short, beautiful book about the author’s father, about class, education and the the distance between the center and the periphery, and about the irreversible passage of time. It’s one of those in-between-genres books that gets shelved with the novels in France and with memoirs in the United States.

Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile. An allegory of the position of intellectuals under right-wing dictatorships, how you simultaneously know and don’t know what is going on — metaphorically, but in the allegory literally — beneath the floors of your literary get-togethers.  It’s the story of a well-meaning priest, “the most liberal member of Opus Dei in Chile,” who, improbably … well, I won’t spoil it.

Natalie Ginsburg, The Dry Heart; Happiness, as Such; and Voices in the Evening. Sad, occasionally political, and very occasionally violent family conflicts in small-town Italy from the 1940s through the 1960s. They are good.

Previous editions:

2020 books

2019 books

2017 Books

2016 books

2015 books

2013 books

2012 books I

2012 books II

2010 books I

2010 books II

2020 books

(I wrote this list at the beginning of 2021 but for some reason never posted it. I figured it’s worth putting up now – they’re all still good books.)

Books I read in 2020. None of them were life-changing, but several were very good.

Weather, by Jenny Offill. A small graceful novel about middle-class life against the background of climate change. 

The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel. Final installment of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Better than the second, not as good as the first, in my opinion. Gripping as the others as a story, and shifts our perspective on the central character in some interesting ways, but much of the most interesting history of the period (like the Pilgrimage of Grace) happens oddly offstage, and the central conflict between Cromwell and Henry VIII is never properly motivated. Was Archbishop Cranmer’s protege really a true-believing Protestant reformer all along?

Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It, by Morten Jerven. GDP and other national accounts numbers for poor countries (and for the distant past everywhere) are bullshit. Sorry but it’s true. I read this because I was thinking of assigning it; I ultimately didn’t, but it’s a good book.

The Causality Mixtape, by Scott Cunningham. Another one I read in order to use in a class. Good, clear, accessible, but it also reinforced my sense that there’s something fundamentally wrong with econometrics. I think there is a deep reason why so many textbook examples are about how much of pay differences are due to differences in innate ability – that is the kind of question econometrics is designed to answer. Anyway, if you’re teaching (or taking) a class on statistics or econometrics, you might well want to look at this.  Otherwise, not.

The Histories, by Herodotus (Landmark edition). I’m trying to think of a way to not sound like an asshole when I say that I read all this to 8-year old Eli, and that we are now reading Thucydides. Nope, no luck. (ETA: We finished Thucydides and moved on to Xenophon.)

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, by Zach Carter. The first two thirds of this is a quite good and timely biography of Keynes. It benefits from the fact that author is a journalist rather than an economist — his interest is in how Keynes’ various writings were responding to particular political situations, rather than trying to fit them all into one coherent system. And then the last third is random gossip about postwar economists and greatest hits from the wikipedia “macroeconomic policy” page. Oh well. 

Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder, by Christian Parenti. Christian is an old friend and colleague. I read most of this in draft, but I reread it this year after it came out. It’s very good.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, by Stephanie Kelton. I reviewed it in The American Prospect. I also discussed it at more length on the Current Affairs podcast. 

Keynes against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism, by Jim Crotty. Another one I read in draft, years ago in this case. The ideas in this book, and in the articles that preceded it (especially this one), and even more all the conversations with Jim over the 20 years since I first studied macroeconomics with him, have so fundamentally shaped my thinking about Keynes and about economics that honestly it’s hard to evaluate the book as a book. But I think it’s important, and very good. Maybe read the articles first?

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward Baptist. I used this in my economic history class last spring. It works very well in the classroom — reads like a novel, and very effectively connects concrete experiences of slavery to economic logic of the system as a whole. There have been a number of claims that the book misrepresents or distorts the material it draws on in the service of its larger narrative, at least some of which unfortunately seem to be valid. I still haven’t decided whether/to what extent these problems cancel out the book’s merits.

Labor’s War At Home: The CIO In World War II, by Nelson Lichtenstein. This was one that had been sitting on my shelves for years and years, which I finally picked up while working on my articles on WWII economic policy with Andrew Bossie (here and here). In those papers we emphasized the positive lessons from the war, but the book gives a sense of the much more radical direction wartime economic planning might have gone in, but didn’t.

Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, by John Womack. Read this after listening to the Mexican revolution series on the Revolutions podcast, which draws on it heavily. If you’re looking for a genuine hero, someone thoroughly admirable, in the history of radical politics, I don’t know that you can do better than Zapata.

American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, by Edmund Morgan. Another book I read in order to use in my economic history class. A classic for a reason.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider, by Katherine Anne Porter Laura was casting around for fiction dealing with the 1918 flu pandemic, which is surprisingly hard to find, and finally lighted on this. It’s a beautiful set of three linked novellas, wrestling in different ways with the ways in which one’s choices are or should be constrained by one’s personal or family past. (Only  one involves the influenza epidemic.) The middle story (“Noon Wine”) is especially striking for the fully realized interior life granted its rural, working-class characters, which you never find in writing about similar milieus by someone like Faulkner.

Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand, by Mike Konczal. Mike is one of the few people in the world that I agree with about almost everything, so naturally I agreed with everything in this book. Reading it felt like picking up loose ends from numerous conversations over the past five or six years: oh, that’s where that was going. Well, that’s why I liked it, but you would probably like it too. It’s a good book.

 

Previous editions:

2019 books

2017 Books

2016 books

2015 books

2013 books

2012 books I

2012 books II

2010 books I

2010 books II

 

At Jacobin: Review of Beth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist

(This review appeared in the Summer 2022 edition of Jacobin.)

After the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, universal health insurance seemed to be on its way. In 1971, the New York Times observed that “Americans from all strata of society … are swinging over to the idea that good health care, like good education, ought to be a fundamental right of citizenship.” That same year, Ted Kennedy introduced a bill providing universal coverage with no payments at the point of service, on the grounds that “health care for all our people must now be recognized as a right.” The bill didn’t pass, but it laid down a marker for future health care reform.

But when Democratic presidents and congresses took up health care in later years they chose a different path. Rather than pitching health care as a right of citizenship, the goal was better-functioning markets for health care as a commodity. From the “consumer choice health plan” proposed by Alain Enthoven in the Carter administration, though the 1993 Clinton plan down to Obama’s ACA, the goal of reform was no longer the universal provision of health care, but addressing certain specific failures in the market for health insurance.

The intellectual roots of this shift are the subject of Beth Popp Berman’s new book Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equity in U.S. Public Policy. A distinct style of thinking, she argues, reshaped ideas how about how government should work and what it could achieve. This “economic style” of thinking, originating among Democrats rather than on the Right, “centered efficiency and cost-effectiveness, choice and incentives, and competition and the market mechanism… Its implicit theory of politics imagined that disinterested technocrats could make reasonably neutral, apolitical policy decisions.” Rather than see particular domains of public life, like health care or the environment, as embodying their own distinct goals and logics, they were imagined in terms of an idealized market, where the question was what specific market failure, if any, the government should correct.

The book traces this evolution in various policy domains, focusing on the microeconomic questions of regulation, social provision and market governance rather than the higher-profile debates among macroeconomists. Covering mainly the period of the Kennedy through Reagan administrations, with brief discussions of more recent developments, the book documents how the economic style of reasoning displaced alternative ways of thinking about policy questions. The first generation of environmental regulation, for example, favored high, inflexible standards such as simply forbidding emission of certain substances. Workplace and consumer safety laws similarly favored categorical prohibitions and requirements.

But to regulators trained in economics, this made no sense. To an economist, “the optimal level of air pollution, worker illness, or car accidents might be lower than its current level, but it was probably not zero.” As economist Marc Roberts wrote with frustration of the Clean Water Act, “There is no be no case-by-case balancing of costs and benefits, no attempt at ‘fine-tuning’ the process of resource allocation.’”

The book has aroused hostility from economists, who insist that this is an unfairly one-sided portrayal of their profession. I think Berman has the better of the argument here. As anyone who has taken an economics course in college can confirm, there really is such a thing as “thinking like an economist,” even if not every economist thinks that way. Framing every question as a problem of optimization under constraints is a very particular style of reasoning. And, as Berman observes, the most important site of this thinking is not the work of professional economists with their “frontier research,” but undergraduate classes and in schools of public policy where those in government, non-profits, and the press acquire this perspective.

Berman also is right to link this distinctive economic style of reasoning to a narrowing of American political horizons. At the same time, she is appropriately cautious about attributing too much independent influence to it — ideas matter, she suggests, but as tools of power rather than sources of it.

The problem with the book is not that she is unfair to economists; it’s that she concedes too much ground to them. Thinking Like an Economist is attentive to the shifting backgrounds of leaders and staff in federal agencies — if you’re wondering who was the first economics PhD to head the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, this is the book for you. But this institutional history, while important, sometimes crowds out critical engagement with the ideas being discussed.

Take the term efficiency, which seems to occur on almost every page of the book, starting with the cover. The essence of the economic style, says Berman, is that government should make decisions “to promote efficiency.” But what does that mean?

We know what “efficient” means as applied to, say, a refrigerator. It means comparing a measurable input (electricity, in this case) to a well-defined outcome (a given volume maintained at a given temperature). There is nothing distinct to economics in preferring a more energy-efficient to a less energy-efficient appliance. Unions planning organizing campaigns, socialists running in elections, or public housing administrators all similarly face the problem of getting the most out of their scarce resources.

But what if the question is whether you should have a refrigerator in the first place, or if refrigerators ought to be privately owned? What could “efficient” mean here?

To an economist, the answer is the one that maximizes “utility” or “welfare.” These things, of course, are unobservable. So the measurement of inputs and output that defines efficiency in the every day sense is impossible.

Instead, what we do is start with an abstract model in which all choices involve using or trading property claims, and people know and care about only their own private interests. Then we show that in this model, exchange at market prices will satisfy a particular definition of efficiency — either Pareto, where no one can get a better outcome without someone else getting a worse one, or Kaldor-Hicks, where improvements to one person’s situation at the expense of another’s are allowed as long as the winners could, in principle, make the losers whole. Finally, in a sort of argument by homonym, this specialized and near-tautological meaning of “efficiency” is imported back into real-world settings, where it is used interchangeably with the everyday doing-more-with-less one.

When someone steeped in the economic style of thinking says “efficiency,” they mean something quite different from what normal people would. Rather than a favorable ratio of measurable out- puts to inputs, they mean a desirable outcome in terms of unmeasurable welfare or utility, which is simply assumed to be reached via markets. A great part of the power of economics in policy debates comes through the conflation of these two meanings. A common-sensical wish to get better outcomes with less resources gets turned into a universal rule that economic life should be organized around private property and private exchange.

Berman is well aware of the ambiguities of her key term, and the book contains some good discussions of these different meanings. But that understanding seldom makes it into the primary narrative of the book, where economists are allowed to pose as advocates of an undifferentiated “efficiency,” as opposed to non-economic social and political values. This forces Berman into the position of arguing that making government programs work well is in conflict with making them fair, when in reality an ideological preference for markets is often in conflict with both.

To be sure, there are cases where Berman’s frame works. Health care as a right is fundamentally different from a good that should be delivered efficiently, by whatever meaning. But in other cases, it leads her seriously astray. There are many things to criticize in the United States’ thread- bare welfare state. But is one of them really that it focuses too much on raising recipients’ in- comes, as opposed to relieving their “feelings of anomie and alienation”? Or again, there are many reasons to prefer 1960s and ‘70s style environmental regulation, with simple categorical rules, to the more recent focus on incentives and flexibility. But I am not sure that “the sacredness of Mother Earth” is the most convincing one.

That last phrase is Berman’s, from the introduction. It’s noteworthy that in her long and informative chapter on environmental regulation, we never hear the case for strong, inflexible standards being made in such terms. Rather, the first generation of regulators “built ambitious and relatively rigid rules … because they saw inflexibility as a tool for preventing capture” by industry, and because they believed that “setting high, even seemingly unrealistic standards … could drive rapid improvements” in technology. Meanwhile, their economics-influenced opponents like Charles Schultze (a leading economist in the Johnson and Carter administrations, and a central figure in the book) and Carter EPA appointee Bill Drayton, seem to have been motivated less by measurable policy outcomes than by objections on principle to “command and control” regulation. As one colleague described Drayton’s belief that companies should be allowed to offset emissions at one plant with reductions elsewhere, “What was driving Bill was pure intellectual conviction that this was a truly elegant approach — The Right Approach, with a capital ’T’ and ‘R’.” This does not look like a conflict between the values of equity and efficiency. It looks like a conflict between the goal of making regulation effective on one side, versus a preference for markets as such on the other.

On anti-trust regulation, the subject of another chapter in the book, the efficiency-versus-equity frame also obscures more than it reveals. The fundamental shift here was, as Berman says, away from a concern with size or market share, toward a narrower focus on horizontal agreements between competitors. And it is true that this shift was sometimes justified in terms of the supposed greater efficiency of dominant firms. But we shouldn’t take this justification at face value. As critical anti-trust scholars like Sanjukta Paul have shown, courts were not really interested in evidence for (or against) such efficiency. Rather, the guiding principle was a preference for top-down coordination by owners over other forms of economic coordination. This is why centralized price-setting by Amazon is acceptable, but an effort to bargain jointly with it by publishers was unacceptable; or why manufacturers’ prohibitions on resale of their products were accept- able but the American Medical Association’s limits on advertising by physicians was unacceptable. The issue here is not efficiency versus equity, or even centralized versus decentralized economic decision making. It’s about what kind of authority can be exercised in the economic sphere.

Berman ends the book with the suggestion that rebuilding the public sector calls for rethinking the language in which policies are understood and evaluated. On this, I fully agree. Readers who were politically active in the 2000s may recall the enormous mobilizations against George W. Bush’s proposals for Social Security privatization — and the failure, after those were abandoned, to translate this defensive program into a positive case for expanding social insurance. More recently, we’ve seen heroic labor actions by public teachers across the country. But while these have sometimes succeeded in their immediate goals, they haven’t translated into a broader argument for the value of public services and civil service protections.

As Berman says, it’s not enough to make the case for particular public programs; what we need is better language to make the positive case for the public sector in general.

2019 Books

Books I read in 2019. I’m sure I’m forgetting one or two.

Novels and stories

Transit. This is a lovely short novel by the German communist Anna Seghers, which I stumbled across on my parents’ shelves. Set, and written, in World War II France, it tells the story of various refugees waiting in Marseilles to work through the interminable bureaucratic process of acquiring the exit and transit visas they need to leave the country. It’s a beautiful evocation of the mix of unsettledness and bureaucratic stasis that is the life of the refugee, but it’s also got the tight construction of a classic 19th century novel, where the plot unfolds with a retrospective inevitability. There was apparently (and coincidentally) a movie based on it that came out this year.

Jews without Money, by Mike Gold. The classic autobiographical novel of the early 20th century Lower East Side ghetto, which I was shamed into finally reading by my friend Ben. It is, obviously, a socialist realist novel, which walks through, with unconcealed anger, all the deprivations, petty and not-so-petty humiliations, pointless tragedies, and self-defeating compensations of being poor in a rich city. (“It’s better to be dead in this country than not to have money,” says the narrator/author’s father in his final defeat, when he fails even at selling bananas. “Promise me when you’ll be rich when you grow up, Mikey!”) But it’s also and even more a novel of the intense emotions and heightened contrasts of the world seen through a child’s eyes – what it reminded me of most was Bruno Schultz’s magical realist stories of his Polish childhood. 

Overthrow. A novel of Occupy, or more precisely the period immediately after Occupy was shut down, by my Brooklyn neighbor Caleb Crain. It’s the very rare novel of graduate school and radical politics that takes its protagonists seriously. The plot revolves around a post-Occupy working group, and their frictions and collisions with each other and, eventually, with the security apparatus. The working group is focused on something like ESP or telepathy, whose status is never quite resolved – it appears variously as a metaphor for the alternative forms of collective action and decisionmaking that  Zuccotti Park was an experiment in; or a metaphor for sociality itself (as in Ursula LeGuin’s story “Solitude,” where any kind of social relationship is understood as a form of magic); or as a literalization of hacking and surveillance and the various other intercepted signals of our world; or as the kind of shared imaginary object that holds together any community; or at face value, in which sense it functions as the McGuffin that keeps the story moving.

I am very much the target audience for this novel —8 years ago, a very pregnant Laura and I were running away from the cops after a brief reoccupation of Zuccotti Park, and a bit later our now-emerged son’s first political action was a rally in support of striking grocery workers organized by Occupy Kensington, a post Occupy working group not unlike the activists Crain writes about. So take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I liked this book very much.

Cloudburst, Tom McGuane. A greatest-hits collection of stories by the author of Gallatin Canyon and Crow Fair, both of which I liked very much. The stories are mostly set in Montana, among more or less downwardly mobile people. Not having spent any time in that part of the country, I can’t say how realistic they are, but to me they feel true to life. 

Books I read for teaching (do these even count?)

Modern Macroeconomics: Its Origins, Development, and Current State, by Snowdon and Vane. Delivers what it says on the tin. Randy Wray used to use this to teach macroeconomics at UMKC.I tried it for the first time this year, and I thought it worked pretty well. 

Data Visualization, by Kieran Healy, and Quantitative Social Science, by Kosuke Imai. I used these two for my research methods class in the John Jay MA program. They worked ok.

The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl. I would never have made it through this book if I hadn’t assigned it — the early chapters are full of over-the-top auto-hagiography, as if the author were the first person to ever think about how statistical evidence could be used to answer questions of cause and effect. But if you persevere, there’s actually quite a bit of interesting stuff in here on how to think rigorously about causality.

Books I read with Eli, age 7/8 (missing some for sure here)

What If and How To by Randall Munroe, the xkcd guy. These are genuinely good books about applying physics concepts and quantitative reasoning to interesting real-world problems. How To is the better one.

The Hobbit. I’d forgotten how charming and light-hearted and funny this book is. It was wonderful reading it with my son, but it didn’t leave me with any desire to move on to Lord of the Rings.

A Short History of the World, by Enrest Gombrich. This is really nicely done. I highly recommend it to anyone with kids aged six to 12 or so. 

Peter Pan. This is a much weirder book than I had realized – Barrie did have some ideas about mothers. But it kept Eli riveted.

The Pushcart War. On of those wonderful New York books everybody should read.

How to Invent Everything. Another pop science book. The joke ratio is a little high for my tastes – I don’t see why you would write a book about science if you don’t think the science is interesting enough to carry it on its own. But there is a lot of good practical science mixed in with the jokes. before I read it, I didn’t know what coppicing was, or how charcoal is made. Now I do.

Crossing on Time. The latest from the prolific David Macaulay, author of CityCathedralHow Things Work, etc. (We probably read some of those too this year, come to think of it.) This combines a history of passenger steamships with the story of the particular ship he and his family sailed on when they immigrated to the US in the 1950s.

Books read for professional reasons

Austerity: When It Works and When It Doesn’t. See review here.

Open Borders, by Bryan Caplan. Caplan is a right-wing libertarian who I don’t agree with about much. But I do agree with him that there is a clear economic and moral case for unrestricted immigration. I reviewed this book for the publisher, and while I did suggest some changes — some of which were incorporated into the final draft — I had no reservations about recommending it for publication.

Books by friends

Never a Lovely So Real. A biography of perhaps my favorite novelist, Nelson Algren, by my neighbor Colin Asher. (Our kids are in the same karate class. It’s Brooklyn!) It’s a beautifully constructed book — when I’d finished it, I wanted to start it over again, just to see better how the story fit together. I don’t know how much people read Algren today — I used to have the habit, when I went into a bookstore, of looking for Never Come Morning on the shelves, and seldom found it. But in my opinion he should be in the first tier of the American canon, ahead of Updike and Hemingway and whoever else people read in high school. “The son of a Polish baker and mulatto pigsticker crouched across the canvass,” begins the final chapter of Never Come Morning; that’s more of humanity than you’ll find in the collected works of Saul Bellow. The book gets that, and it gets his writing, which combines lyricism and social realism in a way I don’t think anyone else has managed.

It also gets his politics, and how those politics were essential to the art. Like his friend Richard Wright, or like Mike Gold, Algren is someone who never would have become a novelist if it hadn’t been for the Communist Party. A major contribution of the book is to document, based on FBI files among other evidence, how the inexplicable stalling-out of Algren’s career after The Man with a Golden Arm was the country’s best-selling book and a movie starring Frank Sinatra, is fully explained by McCarthyism. Algren’s friends may have thought he was falling into paranoia, but he really was being followed on the street, his house was being surveilled, his mailed opened, his calls listened into. The publishers who rejected his books, and the editors who spiked his essays, were doing so on the advice of the FBI. It’s a huge loss for humanity: As Laura says, the cost of McCarthyism “is not only those imprisoned or deprived of their livelihood: it is the unions never organized, the books never written, and the films never made.” Algren, who knows, might have had a whole shelf. 

The People’s Republic of Wal Mart, by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski. The fact that production under capitalism is organized not by markets but by the conscious plans of corporations, is one of those facts that is completely obvious when you think about it, but still somehow radical and controversial. I don’t, to be clear, mean plans for for world domination, I mean the routine plans of getting input a from the warehouse here via a truck driven by this person, in time for that person to combine it with this other input using those tools. These tasks are all assigned by planners. A huge number of people cooperate in the production in all of the worldly goods around us, and essentially none of this cooperation is organized through markets. (Which doesn’t mean that markets are not an important feature of capitalism, they just don’t coordinate production.) Phillips and Rozworski make this case clearly and pointedly for the world’s largest corporation, and draw the natural conclusion that there’s nothing utopian about a planned economy – the raw materials are all around us. In large part it’s framed around the “calculation debate” of the 1920s. This is possibly not the most direct way of approaching the topic. But it does pass through some interesting territory, like Project Cybersyn, the precursor to the internet developed in Chile under Allende, which I had never heard of before.

Capital City. A short book on the politics of real estate and of urban planning by Sam Stein. Sam is a graduate student in geography at CUNY, and the book is very much written from that social position — animated by an expansive vision of the possibilities of urban planning, and by fresh anger at the ways it instead functions as an adjunct to the landlords’ lobby. Arguably the book’s strengths would have been better communicated if it were presented as a book about city planning, rather than a book about cities. (I don’t imagine it would have gotten nearly as many readers that way, so Sam and Verso probably made the right call.) One of those strengths is his perfect ear for the cant of really existing planning. Here’s Amanda Burden, Bloomberg’s planning director, describing black neighborhoods as effectively uninhabited: “We are making so many more areas of the city livable. Now young people are moving to neighborhoods  like Crown Heights that 10 years ago wouldn’t have been part of the lexicon.” Here’s her successor in the de Blasio administration, Carl Weisbrod, explaining that what’s good for the landlords is good for New York: “There are very few industries where the self-interest of the industry and the fundamental interests of the citizens are so deeply intertwined as the real estate industry.” And here’s Mayor SUV himself, with one of his classic but-what-can-I-do? shrugs: “I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune.” Sure, it would be nice to organize the city to meet human needs, says our progressive mayor, but landlord profits come first and that’s just the way it is. If quotes like this fill you with anger and you’d like to experience more of it, you should definitely pick up this book.

Other nonfiction books

The Racketeer’s Progress, by Andrew Wender Cohen. Nathan Newman has been telling me to read this book since forever and I finally did, mostly on a couple of long plane flights. The subject is the labor movement in Chicago in the early decades of the 20th century. It’s in the service of a very specific argument: that we misunderstand the historical labor movement if we think of it like today’s, as bargaining on behalf of employees of a specific employer. Rather, he argues that turn-of-the-last-century unions saw themselves — and were at least intermittently accepted — as sovereign governments of their crafts or industries. Membership as such didn’t matter, it was about establishing rules that everyone in an industry had to follow. Employers went along, at least sometimes,  partly because the unions enjoyed broad popular legitimacy; partly because they had the power to make their rules stick; and partly because, at least in industries exposed to national competition, workers and businesses had a shared interest in excluding outsiders. There were, for instance, major and successful strikes to enforce the principle that only Illinois milk could be sold in Chicago, and only local electrical components could be installed in Chicago’s skyscrapers.

Why “racketeer”, tho? It’s true that Al Capone got his entree into Chicago labor thanks to this system of craft governance — not, as you might expect, as an enforcer of it, but rather as the publicly-announced guarantor of local employers defying union authority. (It was dry cleaners specifically who enlisted the mob to enforce their property rights against labor.) The term “racketeering” meanwhile, was coined specifically to describe union activities aimed at a form of sovereignty rather than at narrowly-defined economic interests. The term from its beginning, in other words, was intended not describe a legitimate activity corrupted by the presence of organized criminals, but to suggest that unions as they existed were inherently corrupt. The idea that unions historically represented the interests of an industry or occupation as a whole, and not of a particular employer, suggests that the historical model of American unionism may be more, not less, relevant, in the gig economy. 

Turtles as Hopeful Monsters, by Olivier Rieppel. The best book I’ve ever read about evolution is Mary West-Eberhardt’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. This isn’t that, but it’s the best book I’ve read on evolution in a while. And it makes the same basic argument: Evolution, at the macro level, is more than natural selection. It isn’t just differential reproduction of randomly varying organisms, but rather depends on a set of specific mechanisms that generate useful variation in body plans, and that conversely ensures that the random genetic variation generally gives rise to a functional organism. The genes, in other words, are just one input to the developmental process; or to put it another way, the capacity for evolution on a more than bacterial scale is something that itself had to evolve. The specific issue with turtles, in this context, is not just their shell; it’s also the distinct but related fact that their shoulders are inside their ribcage, rather than outside it as in all other vertebrates. Like the double-jointed jaw in a handful of snakes — the original “hopeful monsters” — this is a feature that can’t have developed incrementally but had to arrive all at once.  The question then is what it says about evolution that such leaps are possible, and what it says about the study of evolution that there’s been such reluctance to acknowledge them.

Warfare State, by James Sparrow. A nice history of domestic policy during World War II, or more precisely, how the scope of government in American life expanded during the war and how people reacted to it. The book draws heavily on reports from the Office of War Information, the 1940s-era propaganda and morale agency, and that shows in its choice of topics — there’s a bit more than strictly needed on the PR side of the war effort. But there’s also lots of interesting, well-organized material on policy around labor, housing and so on during the war, as well as on the more radical but unrealized proposals of people like Walter Reuther, which are arguably one of the great roads not traveled in US history. I read this in the course of putting together a Roosevelt paper on the war mobilization as a model for the Green New Deal, which should be coming out soon.

 

Previous editions:

2017 Books

2016 books

2015 books

2013 books

2012 books I

2012 books II

2010 books I

2010 books II

In The American Prospect: The Collapse of Austerity Economics

(This review is coauthored with Arjun Jayadev, and appears in the Fall 2019 issue of the The American Prospect. The version below includes a few passages that were cut from the published version for space reasons.)

Review of Albert Alesina, Carlo Faverro and Francesco Giavazzi,  Austerity: When It Works and When It Doesn’t
With Arjun Jayadev

A decade ago, Alberto Alesina was one of the most influential economists in the world. His theory of ‘expansionary austerity’ – the paradoxical notion that reducing public expenditure would lead to an increase in economic activity — was one of the hottest ideas in macroeconomics. He claimed to have shown that government surpluses could actually boost growth, but only if they were achieved via spending cuts rather than tax increases. At a moment when many governments were seeking Keynesian remedies to a global recession, his work (along with fellow Harvard economist Silvia Ardagna) reassured conservatives that there was no conflict between keeping up demand in a crisis, and the longer-term goal of reining in the public sector.

Not surprisingly, his ideas were taken up by right-wing politicians both in Europe and in the US, where he was widely cited by the Republicans who took control of the House in 2010. Along with the work of Reinhart and Rogoff on the supposed dangers of excessive government debt, Alesina’s work provided one of the key intellectual props for the shift among elite policymakers towards fiscal consolidation and austerity.

 Right from the outset, other economists pointed to serious flaws in the case for expansionary austerity, and challenged virtually aspect of the statistical exercises underlying it. A partial list of criticisms includes: using inappropriate measures of fiscal balance; misapplying lessons from boom times to periods of crisis; misclassifying episodes of fiscal expansion as austerity; and generalizing from the special conditions of small open economies, where exchange rate moves could cushion the effects of austerity. Even the most cherished result— that expenditure based austerity worked better than tax-based austerity — has been convincingly challenged.

In 2009, Alesina suggested that Europe was likely to see faster growth because it was cutting public spending in response to the crisis, while the US had embraced conventional Keynesian stimulus. He was right about the difference in responses to the crisis; about economic growth, not so much. The US recovery was weak by historical standards, but in Europe there was hardly a recovery at all. In the countries that cut public spending the most, such as Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, GDP remained below its 2008 peak four, five, even six years after the crisis. By 2013 the financial journalist Jim Tankersley could offer an unequivocal verdict: “No advanced economy has proved Alesina correct in the wake of the Great Recession.”  

Macroeconomic debates have moved on since then. A large new empirical literature on fiscal policy has emerged over the past decade, the great majority of it confirming the old Keynesian wisdom that in a depressed economy, increased public spending can raise output by perhaps $1.50 for each dollar spent. New questions have been raised about central banks’ ability to stabilize the economy, whether with conventional monetary policy or with new tools like forward guidance and quantitative easing. The seemingly permanent reality of low interest rates has changed the debate over the sustainability of government finances, with prominent mainstream economists suggesting that public debt no longer poses the dangers it was once thought to. The revived idea of secular stagnation has suggested that economic stimulus may not be a problem for occasional downturns, but an ongoing necessity. And the urgency of climate change has created big new tasks for the public sector. 

It’s a very different conversation from a decade ago. Can Alesina’s ideas adapt to this new environment? 

That’s the challenge for his new book, Austerity: When It Works and When It Doesn’t, which offers a summing-up of work on government budgets that goes back now almost three decades. Through the years, Alesina has had a rotating case of co-authors, often from Bocconi University in Italy; this book is co-authored with Carlo Ferro and Francisco Giavazzi, both professors there. Given the way that the book has been advertised and promoted (“towering”, a “counterblast”), one might expect a thorough response to the new arguments that have developed over the past decade about aggregate demand management and the appropriate size of the public sector.

Disappointingly, this is not the case. There has been no marking of beliefs to market. For the most part, the book restates the same arguments that were made a decade ago: countries with high public debt must adopt austerity, and this will not hurt growth if it takes the form spending cuts rather than tax increases. Alesina and his coauthors do make some effort to respond to specific methodological criticisms of the earlier work. But they don’t engage with – or even acknowledge – the larger shifts in the landscape. Tellingly, all the book’s formal analysis and almost all of its text (as well as the online data appendix) stop in 2014. For what is supposed to be a definitive statement, it’s an odd choice. Why ignore everything we might learn about austerity and government budgets from the experiences of the past five years?

The book also operates at an odd mix of registers, which makes it hard to understand who the audience is. Exoteric chapters seemingly intended for a broad readership are interspersed with math-heavy esoteric chapters that will be read only by professional economists. You get the feeling this is mostly material that sat in a drawer for a long time before being fished out and stapled together into a book.

To be fair, there are some advances from the previous iterations. Alesina’s earlier work had been criticized for ignoring problems of causality – when high growth and government surpluses are found together, how do we know which is causing which?  Now, instead of relying on purely statistical measures of association, there is more extensive attention given to what has been called the “narrative” approach, with periods of austerity defined by the stated intentions of policy makers rather than simply by changes in the budget position. This approach– pioneered by Romer and Romer to understand US policy actions and expanded by economists at the IMF — does have advantages over the naive statistical approach. By including only tax increases and spending cuts made for reasons other than current economic conditions, it avoids, in principle at least, the problem of fiscal adjustments resulting from changes in economic activity, rather than causing them. But it is still no substitute for a real historical analysis that considers the whole complex of factors influencing both budget positions and growth. Gesturing towards the need for more substantive narrative, the later chapters include several case studies on various OECD countries which undertook austerity measures. These are rather thin and have a Wikipedia air about them; in any case the great bulk of the argument is still based on statistical exercises.

Those who are not convinced by the econometrics in Alesina’s earlier work will not be convinced here either. Even people who share the authors’ commitment to rolling back the public sector may suspect that they are in the presence of what is politely called motivated reasoning. 

To those who don’t share that commitment, it is clear from the opening pages that we are dealing with ideological fiction, not objective analysis. Per Alesina and co, most austerity episodes reflect countries persistently spending beyond their means, with debt rising until a tipping point is reached. But in Europe – surely ground zero in any discussion of contemporary austerity – this story lacks even superficial plausibility. On the eve of their crises, Ireland, Spain and even Portugal had debt-GDP ratios below that of unscathed France; Spain and Ireland were well below Germany. (The fact that Germany consistently ran large deficits in the decade before the crisis is not mentioned here.) Indeed, until 2011 Ireland, now an austerity poster child, had the lowest debt ratio of any major Western European country.

The book asserts that episodes of austerity triggered by outside pressures – as opposed to a government’s own mismanagement of its finances – are rare exceptions. But in Europe they were the rule. The crisis came first, then the turn to austerity; the rising debt ratios came last, driven mainly by falling GDP; budget deficits were an effect, not a cause. Even Greece, perhaps the one country where public finances were a genuine problem before the crisis, is a case in point: From 2010 to 2015, deep cutbacks in public services successfully reduced public debt by about $15 billion euros, or 5 percent — but the debt-GDP ratio still rose by 30 points, thanks to a collapse in GDP.

It would be easy to debate the book point by point. But it’s more useful to take a step back, and think about the larger argument. While the book shifts erratically in tone and subject, underlying all of its arguments – and the larger pro-austerity case – is a rigid logical skeleton. First, a government’s fiscal balance (surplus or deficit) over time determines its debt-GDP ratio. If a country has a high debt to GDP, that is “almost always … the result of overspending relative to tax revenues.” (2) Second, the debt ratio leads markets to be confident in the government’s debt – private investors do not want to buy the debt of a country that has already issued too much. Third, the state of market confidence determines the interest rate the government faces, or whether it can borrow at all. Fourth, there is a clear line where high debt and high interest rates make debt unsustainable; austerity is the unavoidable requirement once that line is passed. And finally, when austerity restores debt sustainability that contributes – via lower interest rates and “confidence” more broadly – to economic growth, especially if the austerity involves spending cuts. 

Individually, these claims are in keeping with the conventional wisdom of the business press and the maxims of “sound finance.” Together, they make a causal story that’s a one-way track with no side branches: Any problems that a government encounters with debt are the result of its fiscal choices in the past. And any solution must involve a different set of fiscal choices – higher taxes or, better, less public spending. 

If you accept the premises, the conclusions follow logically. Even better, they offer the satisfying spectacle of public-sector hubris meeting its nemesis. 

But real-world debt dynamics don’t run along such well-oiled tracks. At every step, there are forks, sidings and roundabouts, that leave the link from fiscal misconduct to well-deserved austerity much less direct than the book suggests.

First of all, as a historical matter, differences in growth, inflation and interest rates are at least as important as the fiscal position in determining the evolution of the debt ratio over time. Where debt is already high, moderately slower growth or higher interest rates can easily raise the debt ratio faster than even very large surpluses can reduce it – as many countries subject to austerity have discovered.

Conversely, rapid economic growth and low interest rates can lead to very large reductions in the debt ratio without the government ever running surpluses, as in the US and UK after World War II. More recently, Ireland reduced its debt-GDP ratio by 20 points in just five years in the mid-1990s while continuing to run substantial deficits, thanks to very fast growth of the “Celtic tiger” period. In situations like the European crisis, extraordinary actions like public assumptions of private debt or writedowns by creditors (as in Cyprus and Greece) can also produce large changes in the stock of debt, without any changes in spending or taxes. Ireland again is an example: The decision to assume the liabilities of private banks catapulted its debt-GDP ratio from 27 percent to over 100 percent practically overnight. Cases like this make a mockery of the book’s central claim that a country’s debt burden reliably reflects its past fiscal choices.

At the second step, market demand for government clearly is not an “objective” assessment of the fiscal position, but reflects crowd psychology, self-confirming conventional expectations, and all the other pathologies of speculative markets. The claim that the interest rates facing a country are directly and reliably linked to the state of its public finances is critical to the book’s argument; rising interest rates are the channel by which high debt creates pressure for austerity, while falling interest rates are the channel by which austerity supports renewed growth. But the claim that interest rates reflect the soundness or otherwise of public budgets runs up against a glaring problem: The financial markets that recoil from a country’s bonds one day were usually buying them eagerly the day before. The same markets that sent interest rates on Spanish, Portuguese and Greek bonds soaring in 2010 were the ones snapping up their public and private debt at rock-bottom rates in the mid-2000s. And they’re the same markets that are setting interest rates for those countries at historical low levels today (Greece now pays less to borrow than the US!), even as their debt ratios, in many cases, remain extremely high.

The authors get hopelessly tangled on this point. They want to insist both that post-crisis interest rates reflect the true state of public finances, and that the low rates before the crisis were the result of a speculative bubble. But they can’t have it both ways: If low rates in 2005 were not a sign that the state of public finances was sound, then high rates in 2010 can’t be a sign that they were unsound.

If the analysis had extended beyond 2014, this problem would only have gotten worse. What’s really striking about interest rates in Europe in recent years is how uniformly they have declined. Ireland, which has managed to reduce its debt ratio by 50 points since 2010, today borrows at less than 1 percent. But so does Spain, whose debt ratio increased by 40 points over the same period. The claim that interest rates are mainly a function of a country’s fiscal position just doesn’t fit the historical experience. It’s hard to exaggerate how critical this is for the whole argument. Rising interest rates are the only cost Alesina and his coauthors ever mention for high debt, and hence the only reason for austerity; and reducing interest costs is the only intelligible mechanism they offer for the supposed growth-boosting effects of austerity – vague invocations of “confidence” don’t count.

And this brings us to the third step. One of the clearest macroeconomic lessons of the past decade is that market confidence doesn’t matter: A determined central bank can set interest rates on public borrowing at whatever level it chooses. In the years before 2007, there were endless warnings that if the US did not get its fiscal house in order, it would be faced with rising interest rates, a flight from the dollar and eventually the prospect of default. (In 2005, Nouriel Roubini and Brad Setser were bold enough to predict that unsustainable deficits would lead to a collapse in the dollar within the next two years.) Today, with the debt much higher than even the pessimistic forecasts of that period, the federal government borrows more cheaply than ever in history. And there hasn’t been even a hint of the Fed losing control of interest rates.

Similar stories apply around the world. Perhaps the clearest illustration of central banks’ power over financial markets came in 2011-2012, when a series of interventions by the European Central bank – culminating in Mario Draghi’s famous “whatever it takes” — stopped the sharp spike in southern European interest rates in its tracks. With an implicit guarantee from their central banks – which other developed countries like the US and UK also enjoy – governments simply don’t need to worry about losing access to credit. To the extent that governments like Greece remained locked out of the markets after Draghi’s announcement, this was a policy choice by the ECB, not a market outcome. 

If countries can face financial crises even when their debt ratio is low, and can enjoy ultra-low interest rates even when they are high, then it’s hard to see why the debt ratio should be a major object of policy. Alesina and colleagues’ central question – whether expenditure-based or tax-based austerity is better for growth – is irrelevant, since there’s no good reason for austerity at all. 

In a world of chronically low interest rates and active central banks, government debt just isn’t a problem. At one point, this was a fringe position but today it’s been accepted by economists with as impeccable mainstream credentials as Olivier Blanchard, Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman – the former chief economist of the IMF, Treasury Secretary and chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, respectively. But not by Alesina, who just goes on singing the same old songs.

The pro-austerity arguments in this book will therefore face more of a headwind than they did when Alesina made them a decade ago. “Sound finance” is no longer the pillar of elite opinion it once was. As we write this, Christine Lagarde, the new head of the European Central Bank, is calling for European governments to spend more during downturns – something hard to imagine when Alesina’s ideas were in vogue. In the US, meanwhile, concerns about the federal debt seem almost passe.

This is progress, from our point of view. The intellectual case for austerity has collapsed, and this book will do little to rebuild it. But that has not yet led to an expansion of public spending – let alone one large enough to restore genuine full employment and meet the challenge of climate change and other urgent social needs. The austerity machinery of the euro system and IMF still churns away, grinding out misery and unemployment across southern Europe and elsewhere, even if it no longer commands the general assent that it once did. At the level of ideas, Keynesian economists can point to real gains in the decade since the crisis. At the level of concrete policy, the work has barely begun.

V for Varoufakis

I have a long review up at Boston Review of three books by Yanis Varoufakis: The Global Minotaur, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, and Adults in the Room. Here’s the start:

In the spring of 2015, a series of debt negotiations briefly claimed a share of the world’s attention that normally goes only to events where celebrities give each other prizes. Syriza, a scrappy left-wing party, had stormed into office in Greece on a promise to challenge the consortium of international creditors that had effectively ruled the country since its debt crisis broke out in 2010. For years, austerity, deregulation, the rolling back of labor rights and public services, the rule of money over society, had been facts of life. Now suddenly they were live political questions. It was riveting.

Syriza was represented in these negotiations by its finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. With his shaved head, leather jacket, and motorcycle, he was not just a visual contrast to the gray-suited Eurocrats across the table. His radical but rigorous proposals for a different kind of Europe—one based on meeting human needs rather than rigid financial criteria—offered a daily rebuke to the old refrain “there is no alternative.”

The drama was clear, but the stakes were a little obscure. Why did it matter if Greece stayed in the euro? Orthodox economic theory, after all, gives little role for money or finance. What matters are real wants and real resources, for which money is just a convenient yardstick. University of Chicago economist John Cochrane probably spoke for much of the profession when he asked why it made any more sense to talk about Greece leaving the euro than about Greece leaving the metric system.

But money does indeed matter—especially in economic relations between countries, as Varoufakis himself has convincingly shown. In his three books—The Global Minotaur (2011), And the Weak Suffer What They Must (2016), and Adults in the Room (2017)—Varoufakis offers a fascinating lens on the euro system and its masters. While the first two books chart the history of the international monetary system from World War II up to the debt crisis, his last and most recent book is a reflection on his five months as Greek finance minister. Taken together, they read as if Varoufakis is the protagonist in some postmodern fable, in which he is transformed from a critic of the play to one of the main characters in it. …

Read the rest there, and then comment here if you are so inclined.

2017 Books

I didn’t read very many books this past year. Can’t claim this guy as an excuse, he was only present the last month of it.

Here are some I did read; I might be forgetting one or two.

 

Przeworski – Capitalism and Social Democracy. I’m not sure what the author’s political trajectory has been; nothing encouraging, I’m guessing. But I got a lot out of this history of European social democracy as a concrete political phenomenon. He’s asking the right questions: how is it that wage-earners, “workers” in the broader or narrower sense, constitute a constituency for the purposes of electoral politics, and how in practice do avowed socialists govern a capitalist economy? One insight of the book was the importance of Keynesian demand management as an answer to the latter question. For the first generation of electorally successful socialists, there was a seemingly unbridgeable gap between managing an economy based on private ownership, in which maintaining business confidence was critical; and using the state as scaffolding for the construction of the cooperative commonwealth. Until “aggregate demand” became a way of talking about public spending, every step toward the latter tended to undermine the former, so that — it seemed — the gap had to be crossed in one big leap or not at all.

 

Rothermund – The Great Depression in Global Perspective. One of several books I read because I assigned it. (Teaching economic history is great for this purpose.) It does what it says on the tin: describes the depression of the 1930s as a global phenomenon, with as many pages devoted to Latin America or South Asia as to the United States or Western Europe.  It’s a short book and readable — worked fine for my undergrads — but a dense and systematic one. Rothermund is particularly attentive to the ways in which the 1930s collapse in agricultural  prices played out differently in countries specializing in different kinds of commodities – staples versus luxuries, small farm products versus plantations. He also has some interesting things to say about the way in which the impact of the Depression in the colonial world — most of humanity at the time — was shaped by the specific institutions of imperial rule, with for instance regimes based on land taxes, head taxes and excise taxes responding to global deflation in different ways.

 

Grandin – Fordlandia. Did you know that in the early 20th century, Henry Ford bought up a tract of the Amazon bigger than Delaware, built a substantial city there on American lines, and hoped to source all the rubber for his cars from it? This is the book about that. It’s a great piece of history, artfully crafted and readable, on an episode that I (certainly) and you (probably) had never encountered before. I have to say, though, that the whole is a bit less than the sum of the parts. Grandin himself has serious left politics but this book presents itself as almost explicitly anti-Marxist. It insists that we think about Ford’s rainforest outpost not in terms of any objective need for a reliable source of industrial inputs, but some deep-seated desire to recreate an idealized American small town out of virgin material.

I have to say, I’m not happy with this thesis. Economic imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as I understand it, generally involved control of the upstream parts of commodity chains – efforts by both states and firms to substitute direct control over input production for sourcing in open markets. And it involved efforts to gain more direct control over labor – to replace direct producers with control over their own labor time and recognized rights to the land and the its products, with forms of labor somewhere on the wage work-slavery continuum that could be more directly managed. Fordlandia fits both of these patterns perfectly. It’s true, of course, that the effort to create an American-style small town from scratch was not a typical imperial project, which normally would rely more on the coercive powers of local political authorities. (It’s also true that the project failed to generate any significant rubber for Ford’s factories.) But I think Grandin’s preferred story should be seen as overlaying the basic economic logic, rather than an alternative to it.

On the other hand, the book itself does not really support the thesis. It provides plenty of evidence that however sincerely Ford and his lieutenants may have believed in their vision of Normal Rockwell on the Amazon, Fordlandia was fundamentally about managing labor and assuring a stable supply rubber. Perhaps these two criticisms cancel out. In any case, it’s a fascinating story, and the book itself reads like a novel.

 

O’Malley – On Another Man’s Wound. I read this after watching The Wind that Shakes the Barley – a great movie on the Irish war of independence and civil war – and realizing I knew almost nothing about this history. When I was first becoming politically aware, in the 1980s, northern Ireland was still sometimes mentioned alongside South Africa, Palestine and Central America as a frontline in the war against Empire, but in general Irish politics has never been something that one needed to know much about. Anyway, someone online (in a Crooked Timber thread, I think, years ago) had suggested O’Malley as the thing to read on the Irish independence struggle. As it turns out, it’s a wonderful book – from a literary standpoint, the best thing I read this year.

Apart from an opening chapter on O’Malley’s childhood, the book is limited tothe period of fighting against the British from 1917 to 1921. (A sequel, which I’m reading now, covers the Irish civil war, in which O’Malley was a leader of the Republican or anti-Treaty side.) It’s a first-person story of a mid-level leader in the countryside (and, in some late chapters, of British prisons) so it’s better for the texture and day-to-day experience of the war than the big picture questions a historical account would focus on. There are also long lyrical passages on the Irish countryside, which O’Malley travelled through on bicycle while organizing IRA units in various towns and villages. They make a striking contrast with the descriptions of fighting and brutality.  One thing I especially liked about the book was how much attention it gives to the problems of building a political movement – recruiting leaders and activists, establishing reliable forms of collective decision-making; in the book O’Malley is as much an organizer as a soldier. I also appreciated the limited place of actual fighting in the book. There are a couple of brilliant set-piece battle scenes, but many more descriptions of attacks that had to be called off at the last minute, or encounters between Irish and British forces in which somehow no one ended up using their weapons. O’Malley’s last act in the war is typical: the matter-of-fact execution of two British officers who were captured by accident, without a shot fired. I have a feeling this is what most war is like.

 

Mark Wilson – Creative Destruction. Read my review here. My dad says: I liked your review, but I can’t say it made me want to read the book. Which, yeah.

 

Koistinen – Arsenal of World War II. If you’re interested in the subject matter of the Wilson book, this is the book you should read. From my point of view, it has two great virtues that Wilson’s book lacks. First, it talk about conflicts within the federal government – in particular the gradual displacement of New Deal officials by a coalition of military leaders and “dollar a year men” from industry – rather than treating the state as a unitary actor, as Wilson does. Second it gives a comprehensive account of how wartime planning actually worked – what kinds of claims on inputs were assigned, to who, by who, on what principles.

 

Harrison – Economics of World War II. Like the Koistinen, I read most of this in the course of reviewing the Mark Wilson book. Possibly this was overkill. It’s a useful comparative overview of economic management and performance in all the major belligerents.

 

Beckert – The Monied Metropolis. I read this because I was so impressed with Beckert’s magnificent Empire of Cotton. The subject here is how the American bourgeoisie constituted itself as a class, through the lens of New York. Posing this question is I think one of the distinctive strengths of Marxism: People have a variety of material interests that overlap in various criss-crossing ways: Which ones become politically salient depends on political, cultural, or more broadly ideological structures; and the existence of shared interests doesn’t by itself create the capacity to act on the collectively. In the concrete case explored by this book, it wasn’t obvious, in early 19th century New York, that ownership of capital as such defined a politically relevant category of people. Merchants and traders had little in common, socially, culturally or politically, with bankers, and even less with master manufacturers, even if they all showed up as property owners in the census. Beckert’s project is to show how by 1880 these different groups had come to constitute a coherent, self-conscious bourgeoisie. He looks at where they lived; what churches they went to; who they socialized with, who their children married; as well as the more directly political questions of what parties and politicians won their support, on what kind of basis. One striking bit, on that last point, is how much the New York elite embraced an explicitly anti-democratic program — restricting the franchise, limiting the powers of elected bodies — into the 1880s. It’s fascinating stuff, and all carefully organized around the central question.

I do have some criticisms. First, Beckert obviously has awesome files of archival material at his disposal, and understandably, he wants to use it. But in practice this means that he never gives one example when four will do. There’s a section in chapter five on how the post-Civil War New York rich, embracing a new aristocratic identity in place of their old stern republicanism, began to marry their sons and daughters to European nobility. Fine – but I swear he devotes two full pages to listing one of these marriages after another. More substantively, I’m concerned that the before-and-after frame of the book telescopes together longer processes, especially in the post-Civil War decades. Reading the book, you could get the impression that wealthy New Yorkers in 1880 mostly owned stocks and bonds rather than businesses directly; but this wouldn’t be the case for another two decades. Finally, there’s the scope or focus of the book, which is very much the American bourgeoisie in New York, as opposed to the New York bourgeoisie. It’s striking that in Beckert’s typology of capital – finance, trade, and manufacturing – real estate doesn’t appear; and real estate owners hardly make an appearance. Especially in the later section, the interests at play are almost entirely national, in which wealthy New Yorkers have the same stake as wealth-owners anywhere else in the country. There is a great deal on the political interests of capital vis-vis New York city and state government, but almost nothing on the local development and land-use issues that are the overwhelming concern of wealth-owners with respect to local government today. I suppose it’s possible that in the 19th century land was relatively abundant even in New York and real estate didn’t constitute an important category of wealth or material interests; I think it’s much more likely this just wasn’t where Beckert’s interests lay.

Still, it’s a great book. It’s not Empire of Cotton, but what else is?

 

Varoufakis – The Weak Suffer What They Must? I read this in order to write a review essay on Varoufakis three recent books, of which this is the second. The review is now very late but will show up eventually.

 

Goodwyn – The Populist Moment. Another one I read for teaching. (I’d read part of it in college.)  The book is a classic and deservedly so. It is sort of the flipside of Moneyed Metropolis: It asks how a section of small farmers and laborers came to constitute themselves as a class in the late 19th century – a much more fragile and transitory development but in some ways parallel to the one Beckert describes. The central thread of the book is the growth and decline of the People’s, or Populist, party in the Plains and South. It’s worth noting in passing that this is the only historical movement that explicitly used that label – yet with its detailed and explicit program, absence of charismatic leadership, and embrace of black participation, it fits very little of what gets called populism today.

The interest of the book is, first, simply that this movement existed, with institutions, mass membership, and its detailed program for nationalization of key industries, regulation of prices, and redistribution of land, developed from the bottom up. There’s a tendency in looking back at American history to see these sorts of mass movements as either absent, or else as inchoate, reactionary explosions. Second, there’s Goodwyn’s main argument, about the conditions that made this movement possible. For him, the key thing was the concrete experience of exercising political power, the first-hand practice in collective decision-making that came from running cooperative stores, crop marketing arrangements and so on. It was this experience of democratic decisonmaking in meeting immediate needs that laid the foundation for a broader democratic politics. Where electoral programs came first, Goodwyn argues, they were soon taken over by professional politicians or demogogues.

 

Kelley – Hammer and Hoe. Another book about political organization by small farmers and agricultural workers, set a generation after Goodwyn’s story — in this case, the surprising success of the Communist Party among African Americans in Alabama during the 1930s. Like Goodwyn, it’s a useful complement to Beckert — the one serious weakness of Empire of Cotton, in my view, is the almost complete absence of political activity among the direct producers of cotton, except in the form of James Scott-style passive resistance. As these books make clear, there was also organized, radical mass politics in the countryside, even if its successes were limited and temporary. I don’t know anything about Kelley’s other work, but Hammer and Hoe is a magnificent piece of scholarship, about a story that should be better known. A central fact in American history is white supremacy. One group of people, one of the few, who have recognized this, and fought it even at moments when it seemed like an unchangeable fact of nature, were American communists. It’s important not to forget that.

 

O’Brien – Going after Cacciato. Perhaps I’ve forgotten something, but as far as I can tell, this is the only novel I read in the past year. I wouldn’t recommend it over The Things They Carried, but there is something profound and compelling about its overarching metaphor of the war as a permanent fact, with fantasies of escape from it always eroding around the edges as reality seeps back in.

 

Previous editions:

2016 books

2015 books

2013 books

2012 books I

2012 books II

2010 books I

2010 books II

Books You Could Read

Here are some books I’ve read recently.

 

W. Arthur Lewis, The Evolution of the World Economic Order

This little book may have the highest insights-per-page density of any economics book I’ve read. This isn’t an unmixed blessing — what you’re getting here are the distilled conclusions of a lifetime’s work in development economics, without any of the concrete material that led to them. The central theme — among many fascinating side-trips — is a basically Ricardian vision of a three-class society in which conditions in agriculture fundamentally determine the possibilities for capitalist development, and landlords are the great enemies of progress.

Among the book’s many virtues is the way it demonstrates how Ricardo’s theories of trade has much more radical implications than the free-trade-is-good bromides it’s usually deployed in support of. As Lewis points out, the Ricardian model clearly shows that it is in the interests of the rich countries that poor countries develop their capacity to produce goods they are already specialized in (i.e. follow their comparative advantage). But it is in the interest of the poor countries themselves (except for the landlords) to develop their capacity to produce the goods currently produced by the rich countries.

 

Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution

Originally I’d picked up  some other history of the pre-Civil War United States. It referred dismissively to the idea that resistance to wage labor and to production for profit had been important to political and social developments in the early United States, and referenced The Market Revolution as the leading example of this now-discredited view. Ah, I thought, that’s the book I should be reading. I was not disappointed. The transition from use-value production by family units to market production by wage (and slave) labor turns out to be a very effective tool for organizing a general political and social history of the US from the end of the War of 1812 to the 1840s.

 

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale

I’d had this sitting around for ages and for some reason picked it up when I was unpacking a box of books. It’s a history of evolution, told through the conceit of a pilgrimage from modern humans back to the origins of life. Each pilgrim represents the last common ancestor of us and some other group of organisms. It may not be obvious at first but there is a definite number of such meeting points, no more than a few dozen, though obviously there is quite a bit of uncertainty about the more distant ones. It’s a very effective device for telling the story of evolution in an unfamiliar way, and, thankfully, Dawkins’ cranky politics are confined to a few footnotes.

 

Richard Werner, Princes of the Yen

Someone recommend this book to me in comments on this blog. It’s an original retelling of the story of Japan’s long postwar boom and long post-1980s stagnation that puts monetary policy at the center of both.

The basic argument is that the distinctive features of Japanese capitalism are a product of wartime mobilization, not some ancient features of Japanese culture; Werner’s claim that 1920s Japan was as liberal as the US or UK on most economic dimensions is consistent with other things I’ve read. The central feature of wartime planning that was preserved after 1945 was direct allocation of credit by the state — not officially, but via “window guidance” to banks on the desired volume and direction of lending. Initially this was controlled by the Ministry of Finance but in the 1980s, Werner argues, the Bank of Japan became increasing independent, and the key decisionmakers there — the “princes of the yen” of the title — saw their control over credit as a tool to dismantle the distinctive features of postwar Japanese capitalism. His claim that the crisis was deliberately provoke and prolonged in order to push through a broader agenda of liberalization is highly relevant as a precedent for what’s happening in Europe today — though I have to admit that his evidence for it is more suggestive than dispositive.

 

Ray Madoff, Immortality and the Law

I stole this from Mike Konczal when I was visiting him last year; he was using it for a piece in The Nation. It’s a fascinating discussion of a question I’d never thought about much before — the legal status of dead people.

The argument is that the US is an outlier, in that it grants dead people no rights over their bodies — instructions about the disposal of remains have no legal force — but grants wealthowners almost unlimited freedom to dispose of their property however they wish. In most European countries, by contrast, children and other family members are entitled to a substantial share of the estate regardless of the wishes of the deceased. Piketty, incidentally, is critical of these rules, on the grounds that they reinforce inherited wealth, but the US has its own ways of maintaining fortunes across generations. As Madoff points out, the “rule against perpetuities” now exists only in law school classrooms. While at one time it was possible to leave wealth in trust only for named individuals, it is now perfectly possible to set up a trust to benefit your decendents unto the last generation. Even better, you can keep your property itself in the trust, allowing your heirs only an income, or the use of it (as with a house); this protects it from the taxman, your children’s creditors, and their own spendthrift ways. Of course the law is not the whole story here; whether the US has the norms and institutions to actually maintain such perpetual wealth remains to be seen.

 

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction

If you’ve read Kolbert’s pieces on climate change in the New Yorker then you know what this book is like. It’s a good, readable summary of what we know about the mass extinction currently underway. There’s nothing really new here, but one thing I did learn from it is how much of what’s happening is due to factors other than warming per se. Ocean acidification is responsible for the extinction of coral, which may be completely gone by the end of the century; invasive species and the dissemination of pathogens is the main factor in the decline of bats and amphibians. No matter how familiar you think you are with this stuff there’s always something that hits you. I remember my fascination and disgust as a child when I learned there were frogs that swallowed their eggs and hatched the tadpoles in their stomachs. It turns out there aren’t anymore.

 

Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism and Shame

The central claim of Boehm’s previous book is that all the small bands of foragers we know of — the closest analogues to the societies that existed for 99 percent of human history — are strictly egalitarian, with no one (among adult males) allowed to assume authority over anyone else. This contrasts with the modern world of kings, cops and bosses, and even more so with the rigid dominance hierarchies of our nearest primate relatives. And yet there is a striking parallel between the alliances that dominant chimpanzees form to defend their top spot, and the alliances that entire groups of human beings form to prevent anyone from occupying the top spot in the first place.

Boehm’s idea — which I like a lot, though I don’t have any expertise — is that the same basic behavioral patterns, presumably with the same genetic underpinnings, can produce dramatically different kinds of society. An intense dislike of having people above you, plus the ability to form alliances against anyone who tries to move up in the ranks, are the ingredients for a world of chimpanzees, baboons, mafiosos and orcs, where everyone is jealously guarding their spot in the hierarchy and ready to violently retaliate against usurpers who try to cut ahead of them. But the same vigilance against anyone trying to put themselves above you can equally give rise to the absolute democracy of hunter-gatherer bands, or today to political movements like Occupy Wall Street.

The main thing the newer book adds to the story is a more explicit argument that egalitarian norms arose through natural selection, along the same lines as people like Bowles and Gintis. I am not sure this evolutionary turn is a step forward. Like all evolutionary psychology, this consists largely of speculative just-so stories. And it loses one of the most interesting ideas in the earlier work, that the same behavioral building blocks can give rise to both hierarchical and egalitarian forms of society.

 

As for fiction, I’ve recently read:

It’s a Battlefield, by Graham Greene

Q, by Luther Blissett

The First Bad Man, by Miranda July

The Lists of the Past, by Julie Hayden. (See Laura Tanenbaum’s review here.)

The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers

The Progress of Love, by Alice Munro

Going after Caciatto, by Tim O’Brien

The Hunters, by James Salter

Cities of Salt, by Adulrahman Munif

Crow Fair, by Tom McGuane

My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, by Elana Ferrante

I liked all of them a lot, would recommend them all. Maybe I’ll write mini-reviews in an another post. Or maybe not.

2012 Books, Part 1

Some books I read this year:

Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. I didn’t strictly read this, but listened to it, while driving between New York City and western Massachusetts. What a magnificent novel! I don’t feel I have a lot to say about it: It’s brilliant, it’s beautiful, it captures the way one can be committed to one’s life and choices while recognizing that they are ultimately arbitrary and contingent. “No doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Kilman. But not in this world, no.” (And then the alternative, the poor schizophrenic demobbed soldier, the destruction that awaits you if you insist everything happens for a reason.)
Prosperity Without Growth, by Tim Jackson. I used this in the macro class I taught this past spring — I needed to do a unit on the environment and my old teacher Bob Pollin recommended using Jackson. I would use it for that again, and recommend it to anyone looking for a short, accessible overview of the intersections of macroeconomics and environmental issues. Not with great enthusiasm, though, but only because I don’t know of anything better. (On the other hand the students seemed to like it a lot, so maybe I’m being too critical.) It’s not deep, but it has good solid chapters on environmental critiques of national income accounting; climate change and the question of discount rates; decarbonization and limits to growth; and the importance of thinking of wellbeing in terms of capabilities (there’s a lot of Sen) rather than just income. I particularly like that last bit; though he doesn’t use the term, it’s nice to see a strong argument for the progressive decommodification of social life from such a respectable source.
Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, MarriageOpen Secrets; and others, by Alice Munro. Sometime this spring I asked for fiction recommendations on Facebook; Munro was the suggestion of my friend Deidre, who’s from Alberta. Around the same time my mother, visiting Vancouver, happened to read some of the same collections after finding them in the house where she was staying. So it seems that despite all the dozens of Munro stories published in the New Yorker (she’s apparently one of a handful of writers to whom the magazine has committed to print anything she submits), Munro still functions as a Canadian export. It would be hard to overstate how much I admire these stories. They’re not flashy, there’s almost nothing that stands out at the level of the sentence, and the lives they describe are usually (though not always) overtly ordinary. They do the thing that New Yorker stories are traditionally supposed to do, but seldom really achieve — show the emotional depths and high moral stakes in the seemingly small choices of everyday life. The more recent stories I’ve been reading — I don’t know if this is also true of the earlier ones — have a distinct and consistent construction: For the most part they don’t have a narrative moving forward in time, but are static portraits of a particular situation. So you really can’t imagine her writing a novel. Anyway, what’s remarkable is how consistent the artistry is — how thoroughly she works over the same material without its ever becoming less fresh — how she manages to convey such powerful emotions with such careful restraint. When you think that she’s over 80 now and still putting out story after story without ever hitting a wrong note, it’s hard not to feel an almost religious awe.

Chaos and Night, by Henry de Montherlant. This short novel from the 1950s is best known for the line, “I accuse the Americans of being in a continuous state of crime against humanity.” Though it’s spoken by Don Celestino, the book’s central character, it’s almost always attributed to Montherlant himself, which is a little odd since the conservative author hardly shares his protagonist’s curdled leftism. Besides anti-Americanism, Montherlant is also known for — at least it’s where I first encountered him — Simone de Beauvoir’s savage attack on the misogyny of his novels. (“For Montherlant it is first of all the mother who is the great enemy; … it is clearly seen that what he detests in her, is the fact of his own birth.”) It’s true that Celestino’s daughter Pascualita, the novel’s only female character, is vain, superficial and rather stupid. But she comes off much better than the protagonist himself, a delusional, rage-filled and hypocritical Spanish ex-anarchist. Though the book is constantly echoing Don Quixote, Celestino is a rancid parody of Quixote — his fantasies are repulsive as well as unreal. It’s about the least sympathetic portrayal of an old radical I have seen, a brutal travesty of the revolutionary intellectuals of the early 20th century.

So, why read such a thing? Mainly because it’s an very nicely constructed little book, written in a perfect style and with a whole series of brilliant little set pieces. And Don Celestino, vicious and self-pitying, is one of those unignorable personalities who takes over the page, with his rage against the whole world, from America to his few friends down to the pigeons he goes out of his way to drive from their crumbs. Personally, I was hooked from the monologue that opens the book: “To the north, there’s England, an incomprehensible country, and the Scandinavian states, incomprehensible countries. To the south there’s the Vatican. The dome of St. Peter’s is the candle-snuffer of Western thought… To the west there’s the United States. The United States is the canker of the world…”

The American Political Tradition, by Richard Hofstadter. I picked this up after Seth Ackerman — a very smart guy and good comrade, even if I don’t share his political vision — mentioned it here. I can’t believe I hadn’t read it earlier, it should be required reading for any halfway educated USAnian. The central theme is the fundamental conservatism of American political thought: With the partial exception of the abolitionists (represented here by Wendell Phillips), there’s never been a popular anti-systemic politics with any real access to state power. At the highest levels it’s just been a choice of conservatisms. Hofstadter has clear preferences among these. He likes best the reluctant radicals who under the pressure of events are prepared to change everything so that everything can remain the same, like FDR and Lincoln — though as he pointedly notes in the case of Lincoln, this meant that he spent most of the Civil War seeking to restore the conditions that had produced the war in the first place. (This is always the problem for conservative reformers.) Much worse are the principled conservatives like Calhoun — or more unexpectedly Grover Cleveland, who out of pure principle favored business over labor even more than the most venally pro-business Republicans of the Gilded Age. Worst of all are the populist conservatives like Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt. TR’s is the most thoroughly repulsive of the generally unflattering portraits in the book, combining smug thoughtless aristocratic privilege with brutal petty-bourgeois resentment. He frankly said that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, and eagerly hoped that every strike would finally let him haul out the Gatling guns, or at least bring his “cowboys” around to smash some workers’ heads. After reading this, it’s hard to walk through the lobby of the Museum of Natural History without feeling a little queasy.

Not Entitled, by Frank Kermode. The thoroughly charming memoir of the critic and English professor. Somebody said that if we wrote about lives the way we experience them, there’d be a dozen chapters on childhood, two or three on adolescence, and a brief afterword covering the rest. Kermode more or less follows this formula, with almost half the book devoted to his childhood on the Isle of Man, and another third to life in the British navy during World War II; there’s a couple short chapters on his postwar flounderings, and he passes over his long and successful academic career in a rushed handful of pages, as if embarassed by them. Which he probably was: The title of the book refers to what sailors were told on payday when they had incurred enough fines to cancel out their whole salary, but it’s also the attitude Kermode takes toward his whole life. His successes were fortuitous and unearned; more deserving people missed their chance for no good reason. Even writing in his 70s, he describes himself as feeling always like the youngest one in the room, unprepared, the newcomer, off balance and out of place, having arrived late and trying to find his place in a conversation already under way. Traa dy lioaur, “at the heel of the hunt,” in the Manx phrase his mother used to use of him. It’s a long time since I’ve read a book in which I’ve found such a kindred spirit.

What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain. I won’t lie, I picked this up to help me talk about teaching on the academic job market. But it’s really good! It was recommended to me by Prof T., to whom it was recommended, I think, by some other teacher; it seems to be kind of a cult thing that way. Bain’s central point is that we should think of classes in terms of what students do, not what the instructor does. Teaching isn’t a matter of pouring “material” into students and hoping they “retain” it, it’s about creating an environment in which they can actively engage in the same kind of work and critical thought that professionals do. (The same spirit someone like Andrew Lawrence brings to guitar teaching.) It’s an insight I’d been stumbling toward on my own but which is much more fully developed here and backed up with research and case studies. This book goes on the short shelf with other pieces of everyday utopianism — A Pattern Language, Cziksentmihalyi’s Flow. It’s a slighter book than those but the spirit is the same — we don’t have to just carry out our daily activities the way they always have been, but we also don’t have to revolutionize them according to logic of profit. It is possible to think clearly, freely and genuinely about how to do things right on their own terms.

Man Gone Down, by Michael Thomas. A first novel by someone you’ve never heard of; he doesn’t seem to have published even a story before this. It was recommended to me by my father when it came out a couple of years ago; I resisted reading it then because I knew it had a 9/11 subplot, and I’m allergic to WTC sentimentalism. But that’s only a small part of the book, which as it turns out I like very much. It’s a bit hard to say why. After all, it’s an entry in the justly reviled struggling-writer-in-Brooklyn genre. And while I generally prefer a clean austere style, Thomas is a writer of compulsively detailed descriptions — a single golf swing takes half a page. (Think Updike on Doritos.) Now one obvious difference between Thomas and “all the sad young literary men” is that he is African-American. It’s treacherous to think that any work of art can allow you to really understand a subjective experience foreign to your own (but isn’t that always what we hope for from art?) but this feels like a convincing picture of (one kind of) life as a black man in post-civil-rights America. In tone it’s somewhere between Nathan McCall’s memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler and the lovely Medicine for Melancholy. It’s significant that, as a “type,” the unnamed (but clearly autobiographical) protagonist is arguably a black man only second, and a struggling artist first. Why can’t you have all the angst that goes with that just because you’re black?, is one of the main themes of the book. There’s a nice scene about halfway through where he plays a set at an open-mike night and, after doing various old blues songs ends with “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The white hipster running the thing is disappointed: “I thought you were going in a different direction.”

It’s also a book about being broke, about alcoholism, and most distinctly, about blue-collar work. The narrator, who needs to earn money very quickly to preserve his marriage, has set aside his novel and returned to his old work as a carpenter. Thomas’ overflowing, almost compulsive descriptions are so much more interesting when they’re not about golf swings, but about the specific tasks and relationships involved in renovating a building. (So it’s a book about gentrification too.) At one point the narrator finds himself in a nice restaurant, and all he can think about is how superb the dry-walling is. (This goes in the labor-as-man’s-highest-need file, next to the poor hatmaker in Mrs. Dalloway, whose favorite activity in her walks around London is admiring the workmanship of ladies’ hats.) That so much of the loving description is of manual labor rather than middle-class consumption rituals is one important thing that sets this book off from Updike and from the Jonathans. But setting aside all that, it’s just beautifully constructed, it achieves what fiction is there for, it engages you emotionally. When the narrator finally has some bills in his pocket and seems set to squander them, when he seems set to give up in his fight against alcohol, you want to push your head through the page and shout, No.