Bad Samaritans

This book, by distinguished Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang (also author of this and this), is a superb exposition of how various aspects of the global economy are basically rigged in the favour of the rich, and covered up with a wide variety of pseudo-economic lies. I started reading it last week, powered through most of the rest of it on the far-too-long Megabus journey from Sheffield to London to Amsterdam, and have just now finished the last chapter while sat atop my suitcase in the train station while I wait for my friends to get here from the airport. I am very sleep deprived, it is busy here, I am writing this on my phone on borrowed Dutch wifi, and me and my housemates are about to go to a techno festival in the nearby forest this afternoon, so I am quite distracted - I don't even know when they're arriving here, but the general gist is that I don't have an awful lot of time to write things about this book, even though it was great.

   Chang's style is friendly, accessible and readable - see my other posts about his other books for further discussion of that. His academic approach of demystifying economics to the general reader deserves applause, especially since he does so with such calm aplomb, and splits apart 'common knowledge' assertions about the way international economic systems work, then showing us in detail how and why certain presumptions aren't warranted, or how some things can't be properly understood yet, and how better explanations may lie just round the corner, if only we can be convinced to drop our unrelenting trust in the innate beneficent tendencies of rich people, large multinational corporations, rich countries' governments, and the hosts of apologists and aides to these three. Basically, we should drop our trust in these, because they're making life extremely hard for developing countries and the poor generally.

   Throughout the course of the book, Ha-Joon dissects myths about globalisation, especially from a developmental perspective (looking at how rich countries became so, and are now depriving poor countries from using the same means as they did in order to develop), whether free trade is always the best option in a globalised world of varyingly-developed players, likewise whether foreign investment should be regulated, why public sector initiatives are demonised comparative to private sector ones and whether these suspicions are warranted, the complexities of copyright law and ownership on an international stage, likewise for financial prudence and how far we should consider regulation of monetary systems to be sensible, where corrupt and undemocratic countries stand in all of this, and whether some poor countries are simply that way because of an economically unhelpful culture.

   Every chapter is rigorously researched and argued, but made clear for the non-economists who I hope will read this: we are shown a glimpse of a world which is truly unfair, where the orthodox preconceptions about these issues of justice from the science which is meant to impartially discern socioeconomic problems has been co-opted into perpetuating fictions about how people and countries develop so that the rich can stay rich and the poor can get poorer as the rich increasingly exploit them. We need more economists like Ha-Joon Chang; not an ideological leftist, but a common-sense whistleblower on the nonsenses and deceptions of his own subject. The book opens and closes with fictional near-future accounts of global business activity (I found these far too exciting, I love potted economic histories and these were basically one utopian and one dystopian track along the possibilities for our current world); these show just as clearly as the implications of his core chapters the sheer range of possibilities that exist for our world, if only we can properly adopt, nationally and internationally, policies conducive to equitable sustainable development.

   Ha-Joon Chang's other two books (thus far blogged about), I would recommend to literally everyone - Economics: The User's Guide is an indispensable tool for general public education in the most important subject that they know probably not much about, and 23 Thing they don't tell you about Capitalism is a good book to flesh out that framework with a few added extra mythbusters to undo what may have been misled by the plutocratic media. Bad Samaritans is a bit more specialist but still a general readers' book; anyone with a broad interest in international economic justice, globalisation, and development; especially students studying something similar to this; should absolutely read it.

That was good timing, I can see my housemates meandering through the station. It is time for me to go have my eardrums burst by waves of raw delight amid happy Europeans and beautiful trees. I'm on a family holiday in rural Holland straight afterwards, on which I'll be doing a lot of reading, so (if there's wifi), see you soon.

the Economy of the Word

This book, by Keith Tribe, explores themes and topics in the linguistic history of economics. I'm barely gonna write anything here as I already wrote a full review of it for the Rethinking Economics opinion blog (link below). It was a pretty sloggish read, but interesting in an academic sort of way; if you like economics, historical methodology, and the complexities of changeable language use in century-spanning contexts, then this book is right up your street.

HERE'S THE FULL REVIEW I DID

[Edit November 2016: it appears that during a recent re-vamp of Rethinking Economics' website, the entire blog has been lost into the Error 404 ether - so pasted below is my review's text.]

History is the art of constructing causal narratives between past events and holding them up for analysis. The history of economics – how it has been gradually built up and developed as a field of study over centuries – follows the same rule: historians studying the history of economics have to throw themselves fully into the heads of long-dead economists to try to perceive who or what influenced them, how, why, and to what effect on other deceased thinkers.

   Unfortunately, since both normal historical events and the economists studied by one studying the history of economics are, by definition, history – we run into the usual gamut of difficulties ascertaining exactly how a particular event happened, or exactly what a particular economist thought and why. The historiographical issues of correctly sourcing and interpreting texts are predictably smaller for tracing the history of an academic discipline than they are for tracing actual history, but by no means has this seen historians of economics refrain entirely from making unwarranted leaps of assertion.

   Keith Tribe’s book has this complex criticism running throughout. He takes a philological approach; closely scrutinising the language used in canonical texts of economic history to determine exactly what they originally meant. With immensely wide scholarship, he lays out the academic biographies, cultural contexts, and influencing factors on each writer he tackles, to lay the outputs of his philological analysis in an intelligible framework.

   The book’s content is in three parts. Firstly, a discussion of the word ‘economy’. It does not mean the same thing to us as it would have meant to an Ancient Greek or Adam Smith, and thus any historian of economics peering at older uses must revise what they understand the writer to mean. In this opening chapter, he draws out the evolution of the word’s definition from Aristotle to the 20th century, followed by an overview of how rough measures for this final concept of ‘economy’ (i.e. national income, or GDP) came to be numerically constructed. Secondly, he turns to Adam Smith, dissecting with indefatigable precision the historical influences and writings of the Scottish original economist, to show an internal consistency in Smithian arguments about trade in The Wealth of Nations; he also tackles ‘das Adam Smith problem’, the disjoint between selfishness-driven markets apparently espoused by Smith in his economic work, and the altruism-driven social harmonies at the heart of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, his prior treatise in moral philosophy. In the third section, he analyses the work of Karl Marx and Léon Walras, economists whose ideas seem almost wildly opposing given that aspects of their influence have led on the one hand to Communism and on the other to neoclassical apologists for free-market capitalism; but under close historical scrutiny, both of them derive their core understanding of society in a very similar way, from French political economists in an emergent industrial context.

   This content, separated from the main motor of the book which is the philological approach discussed above, would be exceedingly dry and there probably wouldn’t be much point reading it. But because Tribe has so effectively cracked open our awareness of how texts, economists, and language, are situated in historical circumstance, each section proves thoroughly insightful. As a book more about the historiography of economics than about its history, it serves as a refreshing and probably-much-needed rebuke to lazy modern historians who might see the word ‘labour’ in an 1848 article and read into it all their own 2015 assumptions and connotations about what that word implies and derives from. We need instead, when reading old texts, to make the effort of learning historical contexts, following linguistic usage roots back far enough to see where they split, understanding the processes of individual thought enough to recognise and respect them in a figure who we can only access by reading their writings. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Léon Walras, and the dozens of other significant economists discussed in this book, did not produce their ideas in a vacuum alone with only a rough sketch of modern economic theories. That’s not how intellectual progress works. Thinkers’ contemporary settings, things that they read and people they spoke to and socio-political events that befell them, are of enormous importance and it is crucial that we have an acute sensitivity to these when attempting to do history of any kind, including economics. Likewise, the ability to properly grapple with words as historical entities is vital; and this entails sometimes making the imaginative leap into obsolete definitions so that we and whoever we’re reading are on the same page. Language is not constant, nor is economic theory, and the failure to appreciate this pair of stark facts will make a bad historian embarrass himself. Keith Tribe has done great work here in showing how essential to understanding the history of economics a philological approach is. He sheds small patches of light on several topics, but more importantly, demonstrates how hard it actually is to pin down definite knowledge if one is being sloppy. It is truly masterful scholarship.

   The book’s point is also, I think, an important one for the Rethinking Economics movement. Philological analysis of texts yields dense crossovers of influence and discipline – if there is solid historical evidence that Marxian and Walrasian economics derive from the same set of sources, then no conflicting theories should be beyond critical discussion of where they may both be overlappingly right. Also, the methodological approach to language and texts would be a useful one for economics students to learn; admittedly, it’s one that ends up with us being less easily able to know things, but much surer that we’re right when we do. Economics degrees seldom encourage strong verbal reasoning or perceptive reading, but these are skills we do need.

   For any reader interested in the history of economics, I would recommend this; compared to most other texts in the field it treats less of theoretical developments and individual economists’ projects, but for its overall point, widening the scope of how we do (or should do) history, it is an indispensable addition.

the Radical Disciple

This book, the last written by John Stott before he passed away in 2011, is a distillation of some of his key realised wisdoms. His life was one of relentless ministry, having a profound influence on global evangelical movements through his writing and speaking, and always noted by those who met him* as having cultivated a set of characteristics that made him arrestingly Christian. Here was a man who truly understood the gospel's power and what it should mean for the way we are as persons, and this book is an explanation of how some of those characteristics should work themselves out, from their roots in the Bible to practice in our lives.

   These characteristics are: non-conformity (we should eschew worldly socio-cultural pressures to be like other people), Christlikeness (we should instead create and realise a spiritual pressure to be like Jesus), maturity (being individually secure in our living faith so we can grow, plant and spread it better), creation care (concern for environmental justice should be a big part of Christian thinking and lifestyles), simplicity (we should reject consumerist drives for more and better and be content with lifestyles that look comparatively spartan, for our joy is in Christ; this is not puritanical but allows us to free up resources to better serve the poor and the lost), balance (there are many facets to a Christian identity and we should seek to emulate them all in a way that doesn't unhealthily prioritise or neglect some aspects), dependence (we should be fully trusting ourselves and the world to Christ's good will), and death (and how the gospel completely upends our perspective on it in our own lives, hopes and service).

   Stott's decades of wisdom and trust in God show through in his elucidation of each of these, as do a strong moral compass that I think is wholly complementary, if not indispensable, to the consistency of a Christian life such as espoused by these. His points about lifestyle particularly I find very powerful; they strike right to the heart of contemporary western materialism, which has deep footholds even in the church, and he makes excellent points in rooting out and rejecting it. I strongly admire his perspective on creation care as well; humanity's rampant abuse of the biosphere has left us teetering on the brink of various social and ecological catastrophes, and it is depressing that more Christians are being strongly outspoken about this - because if one believes that according to the Bible, humans were put on earth to work and keep it well - we are not doing that, and so creation care is a vital part of returning to a clearer vision of God's intent.

   As the title suggests, this is an outline of Christian lifestyle and character that cuts right to the bone, but it does so with the full weight of the Bible behind it, and in a consistently readable and humble tone, never smacking of superiority or moralism but of brotherly recommendations given in love. 'Radical' means rejecting huge swathes of status quo norms because of one's convictions; 'disciple' means a loyal follower learning from their leader; this combination of things a Christian should be, called to walk in the way of Jesus, a way that fundamentally challenged the expectations of his contemporary world and of ours too. A challenging but encouraging book that I would recommend anyone read to lay out some guidelines on your Christian life.

* The following mild anecdote from my church leader Tim Chester serves to show Stott's automatic inclusive humility. At an evangelical conference several decades ago, where Stott was the main speaker and Tim but a self-describedly nerdy young Christian excited to finally see in the flesh this legend of Christendom of whom he had read so many books and articles. While waiting for a friend outside the toilets, Tim was approached by an elderly gentleman who engaged him in conversation - a wholesome, encouraging, interesting conversation that was largely about Tim and his faith and his enjoyment of the conference - at no point did the gentleman make any claims about himself, until eventually apologetically looking at his watch, thanking Tim for the chat, and saying that he needed to head off as he was speaking shortly, at which point a starstruck and embarassed Tim realised that he'd been talking to John Stott.

The Way We Are

This book, one I picked up out of vague random interest from the bargain bin at a charity shop, was, I'm sorry to say, Margaret Visser, the least memorable reading experience I've had in years. It wasn't quite boring but it was by no means interesting either. It was like reading an enormous compilation of those inane little thinkpieces written by contributors to the Readers' Digest. It's the kind of book that retired accountants probably keep in the toilet for a colourful treat - albeit under the book of crossword puzzles, which they do prefer as at least then they get to engage their brain somewhat.

   I'm being harsh. (I think part of my not-entirely-warranted disparagement of this book stems from the absurd foreword, in which John Fraser coins the term 'visserism'*.) Margaret Visser's collection of sixty four(ish)-page mini-essays on a range of topics did actually make me say "hmm" in a passively interested way at least two dozen times, but then, it did also make me say "this book is so dull oh my goodness" in an amusedly stupefied way at least seven times. She claims to be an 'anthropologist of everyday life', taking relatively benign topics (of a some-horribly-vague yet some-horribly-specific width of variety) and dissecting them, historically, sociologically, psychologically, economically, through culture and tradition and observation and mostly just facts that she's read about something somewhere, to reveal something unusual or interesting about their origin and practice. Apart from she largely doesn't. To be fair to her it looks like a lot of thought and reading went into each one, but in the way that it goes into a year 8 assignment for which one is aiming for a B at best. There are no overarching themes, no profoundly interesting or insightful points (she comes tantalisingly close to making some, then leaves off to spew out another random nugget of thought or information on topic X), and although there are plenty, a great deal in fact, of moments where she strikes upon something in such a way or with such a fact as to mildly realign one's perspective on it, she does so with so little aplomb, and the topics are so random anyway, as to have little effect on the reader. I still quite enjoyed reading it, and will be keeping it for a future next-to-lavatory-bookcase. It amused me in much the same way that watching Qi occasionally amuses me, through sheer persistent banality.

   With basically nothing left to say about this book, I will proceed to list the topics of her short essays; after an introduction (on the general unnoticed interestingness of everyday objects, practices, or concepts, which she promises to explore), Margaret Visser discusses:

• air hostesses
• initiations
• offal
• sunbathing
• conspicuous competence
• Thanksgiving turkey
• Santa
• high heels
• baked beans
• lobster blushing
• Spoonerisms
• greetings
• beards
• avocados
• tipping
• vacations
• English spelling
• umbrellas
• street parades
• physical reactions to embarassment
• bells
• Valentines
• caviar
• professionals
• the left hand
• wedding cake
• showering
• crossword puzzles
• sitting down on things
• gloves
• fireplaces
• spitting
• wigs
• knitting
• the unpopularity of wine in America
• swimsuits
• menus
• wearing blue
• pumpkins
• Christmas trees
• stripes
• the Easter Bunny
• filler words
• vinegar
• mahogany
• jelly
• synaesthesia
• stockings
• Christmas pudding
• hearts
• fasting
• looking emotionless
• eating squirrels
• tap-dancing
• broad beans
• chewing gum
• forgetting people's names
• uses of the colour red
• Eskimo words for snow
• soup

* I jest not. "n. 1. a concise socio-anthropological insight arrived at by comparing current human behaviour with various alternative models... 2. an entertainment in which points are made by identifying and skewering absurdities. 3. any observation, esp. on contemporary manners, that provokes shocked laughter; a sly dig. 4. Archaic or literary. the doctrine that all scholarship, e.g., food chemistry, etymology, particle physics, etc., exists to prove that life is rich, funny, and meaningful." Like, making up a verb to describe the decidedly not unique activities of a writer is bad enough, but four!? I don't know. Having now finished the book I remember it quite fondly. I gained several partially-interesting vaguely-insightful tidbits from it, and didn't actually die of boredom, so maybe it's an alright book after all.