Just Living

This book by Ruth Valerio is a brilliant resource for furnishing a Christianity-shaped thought train about social, economic and environmental justice. Its ideas are presented with ample but not suffocating explanation, and plenty of pragmatic but not exhaustive pointers for further consideration or praxis.

   The first third of the book explores the fields of the issues at hand; the nature and complexities of both globalisation and consumerism, and then the specific economic-cultural context the modern Church finds itself in when relating to these - hegemonic as they are.

   The middle third is the meaty theory section, where we really dig into theological and philosophical groundings for the origin and trajectory of applicable ethics: Valerio first looks at how simply neglecting the Church's relationship to socioeconomic justice leads to a Christianity that is merely therapeutic and basically capitulates to consumer capitalism; next we consider how the Church should relate to money and property, with a look at the ascetic monastic traditions (with St Benedict and St Francis especially focused on); then finally how Aristotle conceived and Thomas Aquinas developed notions of the interrelation of justice and temperance as virtues, and how these uphold human flourishing when rightly understood and practiced.

   The final third of the book is given over to practical exhortation - prompting the reader to think of what they can do to put these ideas into practice, and making the case for doing so. This includes: reorienting our perspectives to be more cognizant of socioeconomic and environmental injustice; aligning our attitudes toward money and material goods to Biblical ethics, and following on from that seeking to consume as ethically as we plausibly can; engaging fruitfully with our local communities; stepping into activism to provoke change in unsustainable & unjust structures; and lastly making prayerful & fruitful use of the time that is given to us.

   I have to say, as someone who has already put a great deal of thought into the nature & necessity of Christian work for ethical, justice-oriented living, I didn't personally learn a lot from this book. However I did find it edifying & encouraging, and it helped strengthen & deepen my understanding of the shared space my faith & my social/political inclinations occupy. Valerio's credentials as a theologian are just as valid as her credentials as an activist and from reading this book you will be left with an indelible sense of engaging with the wisdom & insight of someone who really does their best to walk the walk they talk. It is also highly readable, and though dealing with some relatively complex topics (especially in chapter six) it skilfully explains everything with minimal jargon, of both the theological & the socio-political kinds. I'd highly recommend this as a book to give to Christians who take following Jesus seriously but don't seem all that fussed about justice; it might serve to tip them over the fence.

Dethroning Mammon

This book by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is one of those that so well brings together and consolidates differing major strands of my emergent (striving to be holistic) system of general thought that the best way to do a blog post about it entails buttloads of links to other books I've read, so settle in for a final paragraph more or less entirely comprised of these.
   First though - the book itself: it's a very straightforward critique, from what should be a pretty uncontroversial mainstream Christian perspective, of the idolisation of money and power and materialistic status (i.e. 'Mammon') in contemporary Western society. Welby walks us, in engaging, readable and non-complicated terms, through the central knots of what is spiritually problematic about the way most people in our socioeconomic setting live: valuing only what we can materially quantify, becoming controlled by it, insisting on primacy of individual ownership, enshrining it in our hearts and minds and value-driven behaviours, losing out on the eternal and moral gains to be made from being selfless and quick to share - and so losing out on joy as we become cogs in worldly schemes designed for short-term profit without respect for people's intrinsic worth. It's a book that I think is extremely timely, and should be as widely-read among Christians (especially Conservative ones) as any book can be - Mammon is the world's most pervasive, most collective, most insidious, and most successful idol, having risen to hegemonic dominance over more or less the entire global political economy - and the fact this is so un-discussed by the Church is a matter of extreme spiritual as well as sociopolitical concern. We have a duty as servants of Christ to, in seeking and working for his glory, not only evangelise and serve others, but also to stand and testify against idols running rampant through our cultures, and while there are many of these, Mammon is one so big and dominant and unchallenged (at least in spiritual terms from mainstream Christianity) that we absolutely must reject and fight it, and work to open people's eyes.
   Why is this important?
   Well, let's start with God, who being in absolute and ultimate a community of love, made us to emulate this love in the way we live. This is human nature as told by the biblical narrative, and that sets Christians in a radical light in a world that is not, by and large, shaped along these lines. We live in a world where billions are left to suffer and die in poverty, ignored by the rich, who have secured so completely their grasp on power that economic 'wisdom' itself is determined by their interests, enabling richer nations to bully and exploit poor ones as they strive for global dominance, even to the degree that our short-term economic endeavours threaten to dangerously destabilise the self-regulating biosphere. And for what? This materialistic striving doesn't make us happier, it just makes us competitive and angsty - allowing our individual and communal spiritual lives to wither, neglected, as we're all too busy chasing the gravy train, all the while finding our societies' ills perpetuated by the socioeconomic insecurities internalised by those living in highly unequal systems. In the Bible, we repeatedly see idolatry and injustice entwined together - and the same is true today. To be truly loving requires that we engage people spiritually and pragmatically: our pursuit of cohesive justice and our witness of gospel truth to others must go hand in hand. People forget that economics originated from moral philosophy - the social systems of production, distribution and exchange today are so complex, interdependent and verging on incomprehensible that trying to take a moral or religious perspective on them seems almost absurd - yet this we must do. But first we must disentangle ourselves from the web of apathy, misconception, and unquestioning conformity that surround Mammon: as salt and light in the world, we must not allow ourselves to be reshaped by the values of our idol-saturated culture but only by that which we know to be developing us as we help build each other up in the likeness of Christ - and having been socialised into accepting as natural and inevitable the machinations of a social order that glorifies affluence and marginalised those who do not, or cannot, attain it, that means first sharpening our critical thinking. Question things; question each particular usage of political or economic power as they are often neither moral nor legitimate, and do not be afraid of open reasonable discussion - as this is the life-support soil of civil society in which much intellectual Christian evangelism takes place and in which the seeds of progressive change are sown. Consider the impact and optimisation of your work for the service of these ends; educate yourself about the yes-complex-but-oh-so-important fields in which change needs to occur; open your eyes to actual circumstances of less-well-off communities; as an individual and through your influence on political decision-makers (am assuming most readers of this blog are lucky enough, like me, to live in democratic societies) try to promote the pursuit of an agenda that is inclusive and abundant rather than focused on hierarchy and scarcity - reframe your moral priorities around helping and empowering those most in need, rather than enabling those least in need to continue helping themselves. Oh, and if voting for this doesn't work, there are lots of other ways of making a robust point...

the Lexus and the Olive Tree

This book by Thomas Friedman, despite my having been working my way through it for literally nineteen months,* will not be treated with a long post, because it really annoyed me.
   It is a book seeking to provide a clear, objective, accessible overview of globalisation - but anyone reading it with a modicum of awareness of the actualities of neoliberal capitalism or America's hegemonic distortion of political-economic foreign policy to its own ends will be struck by how utterly blinkered it is. Bordering on propaganda for the corporate empire; it is full of oversimplification, ham-fisted analysis disguised in colourful (and often quite apt) metaphors that nonetheless wash over the true complexity and nuances of the issues he discusses,** highly reliant on anecdotal and conversational stuff to support his points instead of actual assessments of reality,*** resorting with alarming regularity to even making his case by walking us through entirely hypothetical imaginary scenarios,**** barely any hard data or robust models of how any of this actually works, and all of this sickery in buckets. It wouldn't be so bad if he were merely spouting the glories of American-hegemony-led global capitalism - he does also take care to point out some of the shortfalls and flaws in its current mode and pace - only to shortly after, each time he brings these up, discard them as "we'll be alright the market will soon adjust" or "this is something people are starting to notice and so there'll probably be a political solution soon." His picture of the global political economy is one of resigned delight in the grand impenetrable inevitability of American consumer capitalism spreading itself ever further and entrenching itself ever deeper.
   Please, for the sake of your own self-respect as a thinking individual,***** do not read this book - and I ask this not because I don't see the value of reading viewpoints with which you disagree, that was literally the reason why I read it - but there must be better advocates for global neoliberal capitalism than this shoddy compendium of travel-writing extracts peppered with weird clunky metaphors and made-up situations all blended together with relatively reasonable explanations of how global capitalism works. One simply cannot, in this book, easily separate fact from sort-of-fact from ideological propaganda from outright fiction.

Just to feel more constructive, I'm also now going to include a list of books that deal well with many topics relevant to the book's content that Thomas Friedman entirely neglected:

• the entirety of practical economic theory
• the co-opting of mainstream economic theory by plutocratic interests
• common misconceptions about capitalism
• the fact that American hegemony isn't actually 100%
• how the global north messes up development in the global south
• the role played by gender in political economy
• the fact that aiming for infinite growth on a finite planet is dumb/dangerous
• any properly contextualised discussion of anti-capitalist movements

Remember, kids - they'll always tell you it's just the way things are and always will be if they have vested interests in it remaining so.

* Two of the chapters in it were key readings on liberalism for my core module last year, and I decided for the sake of understanding more in-depth the case for a view of the global political economy much at odds with my own it was worth reading the whole thing. Boy was I wrong (see above). Anyway, I'd got about three quarters of the way through, but have just finished it in a don't-really-care-anymore speed-reading spurt, because I need to get loads of books out of the university library for my dissertation but apparently I've hit my maximum amount of loaned items - so this one's going back to the returns bin after a year and a half in my 'currently reading, sort of' pile.

** For example, the 'electronic herd' being the global flow of money to wherever financial and investment opportunities seem liable to spring up; or the 'golden straitjacket' as the set of deregulatory allowances a society much make for free market operations so as to not get left in the dust-wake of our rapidly globalising world economy.

*** The most damning criticism of this book, I think, is that it is 475 pages long, purports to be a well-researched highly reliable account of the way the world ticks, and has not got a bibliography or any references. This isn't academic snobbery - this is the simple principle that arguments, especially about large highly-contested convoluted things like, oh I don't know, the world economy, should be supported by evidence that the person arguing has tried to get to grips with the subject in a way somewhat more accountable than just flying round the world asking people what they think and cherry-picking quotes and stories to suit the paragraph's topic. There isn't even an index! Of course, this doesn't matter to his target market, which is presumably Americans who just know that capitalism is all fine and America is awesome and who needs to understand what's going on in critical depth, this guy's talked to lots of important people, he clearly knows what he's on about (and I believe he does, he's just very dedicated to his role as Laymans'-Intellectual Defender of Pure American Neoliberal Hegemony).

**** I shit you not, chapter twelve concludes with a full four pages of entirely fabricated conversation between Warren Christopher and Hafez al-Assad... in what school of writing robust non-fiction has he been told this is acceptable!? The man has a Pulitzer Prize for goodness sake!

***** I mean, I assume you are, if you're reading this blog. Who are you people? Please leave an indignant comment if you think I'm a ridiculous nutter whose concerns about global capitalism are entirely overblown. I've never had an indignant comment before but would love one, in part to feel like I'm provoking debate, but mostly just to confirm that actual human people are reading these posts. Pfft.

Just Give Money to the Poor

This book by Joseph Hanlon, David Hulme and Armando Barrientos is an extremely well-balanced between scholarly and readable overview of a 'new' means of tackling poverty, the nature of which you may be able to guess from the title.

   Conventional aid and development strategies,* especially those led by Western academia propping up entire industries of Western people whose jobs it is to find ways to help the poor, are pretty wasteful and inefficient - in the context of a single simple misapprehension being pointed out: however effective an organisation seeking to alleviate poverty is, would the money it takes to pay their (probably Western) staff or fund their (probably paternalistic) projects be more effective at actually alleviating poverty if, instead of paying those staff or funding those projects, it was simply given to the poor? The authors of this book answer: probably, yes, with a few large caveats. Central to their argument is a very reasonable faith in the non-idiocy of poor people - i.e. if you give money to a family in poverty, they are likely to use to it for productive and worthwhile ends, so any expensive NGO scheme seeking to tell them what might help them be less poor is redundant; moreover, such schemes assume that poor people remain poor because of ignorance or particular personal failures to act in certain ways, rather than that poor people remain poor because they do not have enough money. It almost seems too obvious. Giving poor people money helps break the poverty trap - pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is impossible if you're too hungry to bend down and you can't afford any boots anyway - thus improving basic living standards and empowering people to engage with healthcare, education, small-scale investment, and so on, stimulating their local economies and nurturing upward spirals of development. These schemes, called cash transfers, come in a wide array of forms, and are emerging across increasing numbers of developing countries in the global south in response to the abject failure of Western development strategies to alleviate poverty, and (subject to the caveats, which I'll come to) are proving incredibly successful almost everywhere, such that they attracted the attention of skeptical Western academic economists** who promptly conducted a flurry of skeptical studies into these cash transfer schemes and were even more surprised to find their own studies supporting what the governments, academics, and straight-up socioeconomic evidence from the global south was suggesting was true - giving money to poor people helps them be less poor! Wow!

   Anyway, the caveats. Basically there are just loads of problems with deciding who gets the cash transfers - everyone, or only old people, or families with children, or the poorest 10% or 20% or 50% of the population (and how do you means test for this?), or people living within particularly poor areas? There are also extensive problems with ensuring that the people receiving cash transfers get lifted out of poverty; some schemes require work or participation in programmes to qualify; a larger issue is that for poor people to be able to engage with education or healthcare or entrepreneurship or markets or whatever those facilities need to be in place and adequate - yes, paying Pedro's family $7 a month might enable them to afford enough food that he can quit shining shoes and go to school, but if there are sixty kids in his class and no effort is put in to bring him up to speed, the future benefits for Pedro are dampened.

   So this book provides an excellent overview of 'just giving money to the poor' as a poverty alleviation strategy, key debates and problems with the idea, outlines of schemes currently in action and how they're faring, and summative pointers about what makes such a scheme effective and how practicalities can be approached. Worthwhile reading for anyone interested in understanding the global political economic struggle to end poverty, especially for those supportive of bottom-up common sense solutions.****

* Microfinance, while not in quite the same league of paternalistic resource-intensive aid strategies broadly described above, has been super popular among liberal progressives and is often heard touted as a key means of alleviating poverty. However, it has problems which I can't be arsed to write so google it if you're interested, and the core concept of this book was the nail in the coffin of my thinking it was worthwhile. What's the point loaning money to someone who's in a poverty trap? Just give them money instead. On that note, I've withdrawn all my outstanding Kiva funds after five years of recycling loans of questionable helpfulness. Ah well.

** I mean, trust an economist to be confused at the notion that giving money to poor people helps them be less poor. The mind boggles.

[this book was the first of an enormous*** pile of university library books, mostly about global political and economic issues, that I'm using as practice for speed reading. partly because the nature of these books' content means I'm unlikely to have particularly interesting thoughts or reflections on them (instead just drinking in large quantities of information to flesh out or refine my views on pretty niche topics) and partly because I've had some of them out for over two years and there are quite a few of them and I've only got ten months left with a valid student card. also partly because it'll mean I'll get to do lots of blog posts, as compensation for how relatively few books I read this summer and (so far) this autumn. one final also - because speed reading is a skill someone who blogs about books they've read should probably have, but it takes lots of practice to get high-speed high-comprehension. anyway. hope that's cool.]

*** Just counted - there were fourteen including this one, so now thirteen.

**** It also slots nicely into my ever-growing personal-opinion-critique of global capitalism and conceptualisation of systemic change: somewhere in the overlaps between grace-led economic structures and radical redistribution from the global north to the global south.

the Economy of Grace

This book by Kathryn Tanner is a veritable nuclear submarine of well-argued scholarship. I won't say much about it, partly because the content of the book is more the fruitful-and-thorough cross-pollination of ideas I've already read other books about and so can easily just dump loads of relevant links (see final paragraph) into this post, partly because I'm rushing so as to join my brother for a game of giant backyard chess (yes I'm still on holiday), and partly because if this post piques your interest even in the slightest I think you should just read this book.

   Tanner seeks to explore 'theological economy' - how religious truth might yield any implications for systems of material resource distribution. She argues that such a link is undeniable if we look at Christian theology with any degree of serious application, especially when regarding worldly structures such as capitalism which literally thrive on collective selfishness - the opposite of the rightly-aligned heart-motives called to by Christianity - in competition that inevitably leaves winners and losers, and more often than not the former feel exempt from any responsibility to extensively care for the latter. She goes on to explore philosophical and theological conceptions of property, of ownership, of gift-giving, of interdependence; and chiefly asks where grace, the central component of Christian ethical reality, fits into our understanding of economic systems - she concludes the grace sits at considerable odds to the atomised individualistic competitiveness that characterises capitalism. An 'economy of grace' is not one of everyone-for-themselves-competition nor one of purely-reciprocal gift-giving - it is one of plenty and prosperity, because people understanding the nature (in a Christian worldview) of their existence as an individual human among the wider human society/community have a radically different attitude to other beings, to resources, to their own time, to their own needs and wants and those of others; one that completely upturns basic presumptions about how markets work, how welfare works, and more. Toward the end of the book she tentatively explores some structural changes that could take place to bring us toward this model of economy, alongside a hefty prayerful caveat about how lost and broken the world is and the need for such economic change to be known to be unsustainable unless supported by genuine heart change.

   It is an extremely interesting and thought-provoking book, and I would challenge any Christian who takes social justice seriously and has an interest in critical understanding of our global economic system so as to work for what is good and right to read it.

   I promised a final paragraph full of link-dumpage, so here you are: for excellent explorations of how non-competitiveness in global systems can complement and accelerate many aspects of social, political, economic, and environmental justice, from a non-theological approach, check out Tim Jackson and several scholars from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. For a general further reading on Christian views on social justice, check out Tim Keller - but for a much more in-depth nuanced reading on grace, God's love, and the nature of rightly-oriented human preference in ethical decision-making, check out Robert Adams. Finally, if you're up for something quite dense but incredibly encouraging, challenging, and enlightening on the topic of 'love' as something that God does and that we should do, I cannot recommend better than Søren Kierkegaard (obviously ties directly into Kathryn Tanner's discussions of grace).

Prosperity Without Growth

This book, an explosive and compelling case for the possibility, nay, necessity, of post-growth economic development by Tim Jackson, should be compulsory reading for every Western economic policymaker. Along with this book on de-growth, it was one of my core texts for an incredibly bleak essay I just finished writing yesterday. My last essay of the year, probably the best and also the most depressing thing I've ever written. In light of this, disproportionately to how excellent this book is, this post will be really short (actually, this time).
   Tim argues that global capitalism has been historically given free rein by an economics that's sorely out-of-touch with real life on a physical planet to the extent that our world economy now threatens natural boundaries and limits. Some of these are obvious depletion issues - we're using up non-renewable resources without establishing sustainable replacements for when they run out, and we're exploiting renewable flows of energy and resources at a pace that far outweighs nature's capacity to regenerate them. In short, a crunch is coming, and the best hope we have of meeting this challenge is to abandon our structural enslavement to consumerism, which only perpetuates inequality and injustice and doesn't even substantively improve subjective human wellbeing in these prosperity-by-growth societies. Instead, we must look to localism, environmentalism, egalitarianism, and contentment with a life less dependent on material attainments, as pillars of a new direction for the world's political and economic systems. Obviously this is an enormous shift, but Tim outlines along with the arguments in favour of such a huge redirection various policies that could help accelerate changes toward such a transition being possible.
   Overall - an absolutely superb and essential book, if you're interested in or have even a scrap of influence in the realms of politics, economics, ecology, human society's future stability, and individual wellbeing, (and especially the tight nexus where all these topics overlap at ideas about post-growth development), give this a read.

Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era

This book, a collection of fifty-one short essays (written by fifty-six different people) edited by Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis (who as a threesome also wrote a longish introduction and shortish epilogue), is way overdue at the library and I've just finished it in a mad reading-rush and am going to bash out this post as quickly as my conscience will allow before returning it. 'Degrowth' as an idea is a radical response to the fact that our economies have, in the richer nations at least, attained a state of affluence far beyond what is necessary to sustain human wellbeing at an equitable and sustainable and satisfactory level, but persist in pursuing growth, further widening social inequalities, deepening structural problems, and putting enormous strain on the global ecosystem (which fortunately our economy has nothing to do with).* Economic growth, despite the obviousness of its posing a serious range of problems to global human/natural welfare, is simply not questioned by the vast majority of thinkers and policymakers! However, some people do question it, and these ideas are rapidly gaining traction in the left, as the explanatory frameworks employed by 'degrowthers' are nicely congruent with several others on the left, so issues and policy solutions broadly supported in a plethora of progressive groups are represented where they all converge - upon the need for degrowth.

   The essays are split into four chunks, and in lieu of wanting to go through properly summarising themes I'm basically just going to list them.** The first section looks at lines of thought by which arguments for degrowth can be made: anti-utilitarianism, bioeconomics (a.k.a. ecological economics), critiques of development, social-environmental justice, currents of environmentalism, societal metabolism, political ecology, and steady-state economics.

   The second section looks at core concepts needed to be understood widely in a degrown society (or, more pressingly, in order to transition to one): autonomy, capitalism, care, commodification, commodity frontiers, the commons, conviviality, dematerialisation, dépense, depoliticisation, pedagogy of disaster, entropy, emergy, GDP, growth, happiness, decolonisation of the imaginary, Jevons' paradox, neo-Malthusianism, peak oil (etc), social limits to growth, and simplicity.

   The third section looks at grassroots- and policy-level actions (or spheres of action) that may help spur degrowth and hence the transition to a sustainable economy: going back-to-the-land, eco-communities, urban gardening, 'nowtopianism', basic income & maximum income, job guarantees, work-sharing, unions, co-operatives, community currencies, debt audits, the digital commons, public money creation, post-normal science, and civil disobedience (with another chapter specifically looking at how Spanish indignados and the Occupy movement were good in this respect). Also in this section is a frankly disappointingly vague chapter by Tim Jackson about the 'New Economy', but given how specific and well-aimed all the other chapters were, and given that Tim Jackson's book Prosperity Without Growth is a landmark work in this field (which I'm also reading for the same essay for which I devoured this one, so -) it's only fair that his chapter could be a general-summary-kind-of-useless one.

   The fourth section looks at socio-cultural, philosophical and political ideas that have arisen around the world that overlap considerably with the aims of degrowthers: from feminist economics, to South America's buen vivir, to Gandhi-inspired economics of permanence, to the Bantu peoples' traditional worldview of Ubuntu.

   Anyway. I'm dropping this book in the Returns tub and leaving the library. This book is extremely interesting: anyone concerned about economic and/or environmental justice would find a lot of thought-provoking stuff in here, presented in an easily accessible bitesize chapter format, which is actually a really nice way of navigating through a large pile of smaller issues gathered around a holistic polemic.

   Reduce, reuse, recycle! And break neoliberal hegemony's stranglehold on economic institutions and political society, where it is redirecting all social efforts to the maximisation of productivity which in turn perpetuates gross inequalities and injustices and perilous damage to ecological systems - break it, and restructure almost everything about our world in a way that promotes sustainability, equity, community, and human flourishing!***

* Irony. Everything that happens in the global economy is 100% dependent, in so many ways that I couldn't even start listing them because I'm not a scientist but you can probably think of a few yourself, on the biosphere functioning healthily.

** Some of these concepts are extremely interesting, but there are fifty-one of them and no way am I going to try to briefly describe each, so if your curiosity has been piqued... you're a citizen of the internet, you should know what to do.

*** This is the problem with progressivism; the more holistic and system-based your analysis of problems gets, yes, the more you can claim to see the bigger picture and thus you can more accurately propose individual-, community-, and government-level solutions, but past a certain stage it gets very hard to reduce to a catchy mantra. Perhaps the best I've ever heard was at the COP21 protests in Paris last December, where there was a crowd of over fifty Spaniards carrying huge red banners shouting "¡AAA- AH! ANTI! ¡ANTICAPITALISTA!" over & over again, as we marched down the main streets from the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower - where a procession of several thousand peaceful protesters formed a Spoon Chain under a giant long red carpetcloth/rope. (Needless sentimental fact - I had this in my jacket pocket at the time).

Economics of the 1%

This book, an eclectic polemical skewering of everybody's least favourite social science, is another that I'm writing a proper review for on the Rethinking Economics blog. I've just finished reading it in a mad splurge, having realised that this review was due about three weeks ago (fortunately they haven't noticed its absence yet). John Weeks, the author, is unsurprisingly a big fan of the student movement to 'rethink economics' (oh hey yeh that's why it's called that) - hence his bestowing upon us this copy for free. He's scrawled "CHANGE THE PROFESSION!" inside the front cover, which I love; it's lent the book purpose in the context of my involvement with leftyism generally and RE specifically. Anyway, I'm currently away on RE's nation-wide campaign planning weekend in Edale - everyone else is arriving in a couple of hours but I had nothing to do all day so I got an early train with the intent of going for a walk in the hills but it's been chucking it down, so I slinked off to a pub where I read the last few chapters of this punchy little book, begged for the wifi code, and am now writing up a rudimentary explanatory post on my phone over a pint. Don't worry, I'll write up a proper review for the RE blog when I get back to Sheffield, and will insert the address into
THIS LINK TO THE FULL REVIEW

[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.]

Mainstream economics, as communicated to the masses by private media, is a series of pseudo-scientific explanations for neoclassical theory that prop up a status quo in which the rich prosper at the expense of everyone else. If this sounds like quite a hard-core Marxian take on the dismal science’s place in modern capitalist society – well, it is. This is John Weeks’ central point. If this review comes across as aggressively leftist, I assure you it’s only because I’m emulating the book.

   Unabashedly polemical, Weeks writes with an indefatigable fire (sometimes even spilling over into sardonic jokes about ‘fakeconomists’ or our corporate overlords) that would get quickly tiresome were it not for the sheer quantity and quality of compelling arguments he makes for his case. With a Ha-Joon Chang-like humour and clarity, he applies real-world pluralism and common-sense against the abstract tenets of neoclassical ‘fakeconomics’. It’s readable, it’s illuminating, and if you’re a generally-left-wing reader you may find yourself (as I did) swept into a deeper critical suspicion of mainstream economics than you ever thought possible.

   In the majority of the book’s chapters, he tackles a major myth propagated by the mainstream, exposes its flaws and fallacies, and deconstructs it to show how these ideas are constructed as ‘truths’ because of how they benefit the rich and powerful. He thus engages the finance sector, free trade, resource scarcity, unemployment and competition, government intervention, deficits and debt, inflation, and more. At the core of making all these chapters work are his ongoing threads elucidating upon the facts that all markets have socio-political origins and structures, and that some people have more power within these structures than others. That is; firstly that everything a capitalist society flourishes upon from its economic activity is dependent on structures being in place to allow fair and free market activity; and secondly that some individuals may be better placed to privilege from these structures in ways that others aren’t. These arguments seem so vaguely agreeable that they are hard to deny – sure, we can define ‘fair’ or ‘free’ or ‘better placed to privilege’ in a variety of ways, but ultimately, if we accept these reasonable points, then vast swathes of plutocratic propaganda (i.e. mainstream economics) go out the window. We reopen arguments within economic theory to political critiques, which have always been more sympathetic to the real world than economic theory itself.

   These chapters are bookended well. The first chapter lays out an idea of what good (or at least realistic) economics is, as opposed to the ‘fakeconomics’ purported by the mainstream, and which is far more susceptible to hijacking by vested interests. The penultimate chapter, following the thrust of the book as discussed above, is a focused study of austerity – a perfect example of policy that makes the poor poorer, the rich richer, and has almost no grounding in sensible well-thought-out economic theory. Once one understands the basic Keynesian principle of managing aggregate demand, then the rationale for the slow painful ‘paths to recovery’ via cuts to public services and the sale of public assets completely dissolves and these policies are seen for what they are: barely-concealed power-grabs by wealthy corporate actors. Western austerity is a bleak testament to the relentless grip the 1% holds and moulds their populations’ opinions in.

   In the final chapter, Weeks lays out some rough ideas about what an economics for the 99% would look like. His propositions are grounded in an approach that, while broadly pluralistic, bears its primarily-Marxian heritage proudly, and I think constitute some familiar and important pointers for where economics as a subject needs to be taken – chiefly, democratised, politicised, and opened to plurality and interdisciplinarity of debate. Robert Cox, a political economist, wrote “theory is always for someone and for some purpose”: in any social science we should maintain a somewhat-critical lens, as the theories we seek to apply can’t be neatly abstracted away from the social phenomena we’re applying them to, nor from the moral or normative implications of engaging with real people’s issues. Cox argued for political economy as Weeks does for economics that we should strive to reform the disciplines into emancipatory efforts, not explaining away structures that support those with wealth and power but constantly intellectually challenging the status quo so as to yield pragmatic outcomes that benefit, rather than exploit, as many people as possible.

   One of the key next-steps for economics then is to widen public understanding and participation in the subject. Neoliberal hegemony was able to take root, and maintain its legitimacy, by providing ‘economic explanations’ for its actions, which Weeks has argued are in large part patently false, but democratic society allowed these a free pass because they were also clad in the impenetrable mathematical jargon of neoclassical economic theory. We need to challenge the preconception that because something is widely-taught and respected by journals it is right: we need to push for critical discussion and pluralism within economics. And more importantly, we need to dismantle the ‘far-too-difficult-for-normal-people’ label attached to understanding of socioeconomic topics, to produce and disseminate accessible resources to empower non-economists to engage in these debates. Self-education is not just something Post-Crash societies do – it’s something everyone needs to do, to understand how the society we’re part of works so we can best act as political individuals within it. Just as Weeks highlights in his introduction, erasing public ignorance of economic reality is crucial if we want democratic societies to be steered by the educated masses rather than a manipulative handful.

   Hopefully the relevance of this book to the Rethinking Economics movement will be evident. Our aims are to demystify, diversify and reinvigorate economics: politicising the subject as much as John Weeks proposes will certainly do the third; the implied necessities of public understanding and pluralism tick off the first and second too. While this book is altogether more radical than RE (which I should restate is non-political), if you’re curious I would argue that a reasonable and realistic economics would find itself far more closely aligned to such strong-left positions than it would to the current neoliberal orthodoxy. And I’m not going to argue this point here, because John’s written a whole book full of brilliant points as to why.

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?

This book, by Swedish columnist Katrine Marçal, actually took me quite by surprise - first in a bad way, but turning into a good way the further along I read. I was introduced to the book by a seminar on feminist economics that my friend Olivia ran for our campaigning group (I've definitely mentioned this before in other posts I think), which was extremely interesting and important, well attended, and had a brilliant title - the latter she admitted to having borrowed from this book.
   We are brought by this book to question everything that conventional economic wisdom tell us, and fails to tell us. Maybe there are a few theoretical kinks that could be ironed out, maybe there are a few presumptions that need reassessing in the face of actual data, maybe there are a few differences between schools of thought that could, in critical conversation, learn from each others' overlaps. But the main problem of economics is this: its central unshakeable dependence on Economic Man (let's call him Johnson), a hyper-rational utility-maximising agent who knows exactly what to want and do and how. All neoclassical theory is derived from the application of Johnson's character to aggregated decision-making throughout micro and macro systems. The problem? Oh, there are several. Johnson is not trustworthy (because why would he be? there is no room for normative fields like trust, moral obligation, social loyalty, and such, if one's core drive is utility maximisation), and he also, ostensibly, is not female. This second point may sound trivial but listen: our presumptions of economic possibility depend on individual agents being able to conduct their optimal lives with complete autonomy, but in real human history and society, the brute fact is that we don't - people do unpaid work for huge amounts of unseen unrecorded time just to help keep our daily functions ticking over. Hordes of invisible women support the 'autonomous' agency of their Johnsons by keeping their houses and families in order. Even the 'first economist' Adam Smith, who despite being a world-eminent moral philosopher for his theories of sentimental empathy and the importance of helping and caring, was waited on by his mother for his whole life before her death (if you were only reading this out of intrigue at the title, sorry for the spoiler).
   The book lays out pictures of Johnson (note: it does not call him this), and the implications for society and economics on presuming his presence in all persons, and then begins attacking both the unrealistic picture of humanity that Johnson is, both in terms of psychological behaviour and binding to social norms, roles, expectations, and relationships. I came to the book expecting a rigorous blow-by-blow exposé of where economics lacked feminism and how it could be patched up, hence my puzzled disappointment with the first few chapters - but then I realised what Marçal was doing, and it's a work far broader, deeper, more punchy and great. She has got right to the heart of what's wrong with neoclassical economics and in turn its apologism for neoliberal politics; they lack recognition of real human nature, which is not pure utility-maximisation but has many aspects including the need for love, care, and people; and they lack recognition of real human society, which is not composed of autonomous agents (with necessarily invisible women) but is complex and interdependent, with people relying on each other in relationships and bonds that arise from far more than an agreed you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours. I believe in this book, Marçal has shown us the ugliness of presumed selfishness, and how poorly this results in economic theory and policy. She has not written a book about feminist economics, rather it is a feminist means of crawling to the heart of economics so as to plant a bomb that destroys all our conventional understanding of the dismal science; feminism is a crucial part of the wider normative struggle for socioeconomic justice, and she does a superlative job in showing us why these aspects of human reality (especially including, given ongoing inequality, gender) matter to it.
   Her writing style I found it hard to adjust to liking. Though it is very lively and talkative, being aimed at quite a general readership, it seems very clunky and weirdly mismatched in tone - though I think, given how similar this complaint is to another that I had a while ago, maybe it's just hard to translate informal Swedish into comparably-nice English. Like I said, it is written accessibly, with her central narrative of deconstructing Johnson rendering all economic concepts easily intelligible (although don't make the same mistake I did; you should know that this is what she's doing, as a result she writes in ongoing metaphors quite extensively so some academic readers may have to step back a bit from how typical-non-fiction-ish this is).
   If you're looking for a book on feminist economics, this isn't it. But if you're interested in social justice generally, whether from a gender angle or an economic angle, or wherever, this book will help you develop a much closer understanding of the relationship between those issues, and how it all hinges on Johnson; that imaginary friend of economists and policymakers who has, without ever existing, bent their ideas to suit his ends - which, unsurprisingly, turn out to be those of the rich, the well-educated, the heterosexual, the healthy, the white, the unscrupulous, the male. We need to make the world run better for those who are not Johnson, which is in fact basically all of us, and a big part of starting to do this is changing economics by demonstrating that he, unlike Adam Smith's mum, is a fiction.

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.

23 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism

This book, by Cambridge professor of economics Ha-Joon Chang, is just excellent. I acquired it during a spate of book-buying during the early days of my economics A-level, when the subject was still academically (rather than just generally) exciting to me. Then - what, four years ago now, yikes - I breezed through it quite carelessly, but having read his more recent book (which was brilliant) and heard him speak at a Manchester conference for student societies campaigning for reform of economics education last month (which was also brilliant), I decided to give it a proper attempt. Also, my own branch of the student campaign for reform of economics education is hosting a talk by him (this Wednesday, actually), so I finished it considerably quicker than I usually do non-fiction books.

   It's a fantastic book. High depth of research, socially and pragmatically grounded, well-argued and critically thought, taking a pluralistic interdisciplinary approach to economic issues; he handles the subject as it should be handled.* He also writes extremely readably and accessibly, amusingly even (he does pepper his paragraphs with brief anecdotes or pop culture references, not to an annoying or distracting extent, but they are sometimes clumsy, but on the whole he writes with clarity, wit, and a vivacious charm), digesting fairly hefty socioeconomic issues into laypersons' terms without dumbing them down or misrepresenting their complexity. Like his other book (see *), it's great for those who are interested in economics but feel alienated by its impenetrable elitism and jargon - though while his other book is an introduction/manual, this (as its title may suggest) is out-and-out mythbusting. Ha-Joon, in a deft ten-pages or so each, outlines the surprisingly straightforward cases for 23 things about our current system of freemarket capitalism which if were widely known would radically alter political and corporate activity. They are:

1. There is no such thing as a free market
2. Companies should not be run in the interests of their owners
3. Most people in rich countries are paid more than they should be
4. The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has
5. Assume the worst about people and you get the worst
6. Greater macroeconomic stability has not made the world economy more stable
7. Freemarket policies rarely make poor countries rich
8. Capital has a nationality
9. We do not live in a post-industrial age
10. The US does not have the highest living standard in the world
11. Africa is not destined for underdevelopment
12. Governments can pick winners
13. Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer
14. US managers are over-priced
15. People in poor countries are more entrepreneurial than people in rich countries
16. We are not smart enough to leave things to the market
17. More education in itself is not going to make a country richer
18. What is good for General Motors is not necessarily good for the United States
19. Despite the fall of communism, we are still living in planned economies
20. Equality of opportunity may not be fair
21. Big government makes people more open to change
22. Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient
23. Good economic policy does not require good economists

   Sound interesting? Oh of course.

   Sound like the exact opposite of what most mainstream pro-establishment-remora-fish economists tend to say on these matters? Why, yes.

   Sound plausible, having weighed up evidence, theory, and arguments from economics, politics, sociology, psychology, history, ethics, and the various other fields one must draw from and think in to make proper judgements about these issues? Yes. All of them do.

   The 23rd thing is an excellent critique of current vested interests in economic policy-making and education. The reason he can make such cogent points in direct contrast to the myths he busts is because 'economics' as a discipline has lost its way, has become enslaved as an apologist for the status quo, enforcing its dogma by mathematics and abstract diagrams, ignoring any inconvenient misalignment of theory and reality. He does economics properly by recognising its limitations and uses, and complementing it with other tools of thought to tell better truths about economic issues. Though politically controversial topics, these are not opinions he's voicing; these are calmly-assessed analyses and presentations of facts, more often than not weighted with ethical implications. It'd be a great book to give to someone with right-wing socioeconomic views (assuming they were open-minded enough to properly engage true stuff) as a challenge. These assertions that sound like leftist spoutings are actually just statements about economic reality. It reminds me of the simple brilliance of evidence-based policymaking, which I discussed in my post about The Spirit Level.

   Anyone with but a newswatcher's understanding of the economy has, most probably, been deceived about how quite a lot of it works. There's a two-fold effect to this misinformation; established elites propagate myths about the world economy that aid their positions of wealth and power, and mainstream academic economics (doubtless aided by funding from the aforementioned top-class citizens) has become narrowed and corrupt in the way it approaches any issue, leading to often radically ineffectual and often arguably unethical conclusions about them. Because of this, not even economists are much help.** Ha-Joon makes an excellent case for our need to take a critical stand toward the conventional wisdom of pseudo-economists, as in the dismal science if we are better informed and better able to understand the issues we have a much clearer means of making ethically right sociopolitical choices.
   If you think you understand economic issues because you've seen a Robert Peston documentary or two, read this book. If you don't even have a layperson's understanding of economics, I still recommend you read it, but would advise first checking out his other book (see *) as a helpful clear-headed overview of the subject and how to think in it.

   

* For more on proper approaches to economics, especially public understanding of it, check out my post about his other book, Economics: the User's Guide. There are also relevant resources from the international network of campaigners, Rethinking Economics.

** Our lecturer for a module called The International Economy asked the class (third-year economics students, mind you) earlier this year who could explain, even superficially, how the financial crisis happened. Less than a fifth raised their hand. Have we learned nothing?

   Imagine if psychology were dominated by a single school of thought (fortunately, it isn't). Then, imagine tens of millions of people around the world go insane in ways that no mainstream psychologist can properly rationalise given their existing theories of the human mind. Would those theories and models continue to have as much worth? Demonstrably not, as they failed to predict and even fail to satisfactorily explain an enormous series of catastrophic psychological events. Handfuls of heterodox psychologists, though disreputed in academic circles for espousing 'implausible' or 'outdated' theories about mental activity, had (weirdly enough) predicted the 'Insanity Crisis' decades earlier, and using their alternative schools of thought and models are able to form a variety of coherent, overlapping explanations for what caused it and how it might be prevented from reoccurring. However, seven years after the Insanity Crisis, psychology students are taught the exact same mainstream models, policymakers are informed using those exact same mainstream theories, and psychologists all over the world despair that their noble and important science has become the object of so much public distrust and disillusionment.
   Economics's reaction to the 2008 crash was, cheesy thought experiment aside, pretty much this absurd.

The Spirit Level

This book, the groundbreaking culmination of over fifty person-years of statistical study and research into social issues and inequality by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, was worth all the hype it threw up in political discussion when it came out a couple of years ago. I'd intended to acquire and read it for a while until, back in my first year of uni, a friend from the flat above had finished reading it and bequeathed his copy unto me (thanks Mike), but somehow it took me over fifteen months to even start reading it, which I did over summer, and have been progressing through it slowly since. I finished it today, which was rather foolish given that I am halfway through exam season, and with apologies to readers for the unthought-out nature of this post as this evening holds other excellent plans and I don't want to risk delay by putting too much time into this blog. However it's an excellent and important book so prepare yourself to read the output of a rushed burst of mental effort.

   Anyway. The gist: they seek to set out a comprehensive spread of evidence for better income equality being conclusively better for the social, psychological, physical and communal wellbeing of all citizens in an economy. Using indisputably reliable data on OECD countries and US states and testing them in fair, accurate regressions,* they demonstrate significant correlations between worse income inequality and worse rates of community social relations, mental health, drug abuse, physical health, obesity, life expectancy, educational performance, teenage pregnancies, violence, crime, imprisonment, social mobility and developmental opportunities. In each case, other variables that may affect the data are accounted for, so they are clearly showing relationships between inequality and these other undesirable societal phenomena.

   This forms the main bulk of the book; cold, hard evidence that egalitarian economies are simply better for human societies in a plethora of meaningful ways. Linking each correlation to causation, enormous task though it is, they also undertake to some extent. One key explanatory factor for most of the problems they find can be put down to insufficient resources at the lower end of the income distribution to keep up (e.g. McDonald's is cheaper than Waitrose, working class people get fat). Another one, grounded in social psychology and with huge implications for the way our modern world is structured, is that of status anxiety. Humans are relational beings, and if large disparities open up between individuals within the same anthropological structure, the delicate web of trust is skewed. Those with the advantage will start acting more selfishly and those at the bottom in a variety of ways, broadly characterised by defensiveness and hopelessness.** This second aspect, deeply ingrained in and by norms, is exacerbated by a hyper-competitive consumer culture and the pervasive 'everything is for sale including you' philosophy of neoliberalism.

   This second aspect I found engrossing: how humanity's sociobiological nature, our unobserved philosophical groundworks and politico-economic structures all interweave to drop us in a world in which we see entire nations powered by discontent, with ensuing problems left largely among the poor. The last four chapters are a marvellously insightful overview of how these fields overlap and give each other meaning for what we should do with the knowledge that inequality is bad - going on to discuss how global environmental sustainability must entail moves towards much better intra-national and international equality. But this is not the main point of the book, as I will explain.

   Wilkinson and Pickett's main aim in this book is not to push specific policies, as they do not give much discussion to this; nor is it even to stimulate an enthusiasm or agreement with equality, because (they assume this, perhaps wrongly) most people generally have an ethical preference for economic equality anyway. What this book primarily is, rather than a manifesto, a critique, a diagnosis, a call to mobilisation, is a compilation of statistical evidence. The boringness of that is superb - even though large parts of the book are more typically argumentative explorations of equality's betterness, the core chunk is explanations of data analysis. They say in the introduction that they want to spark political discussion into becoming 'evidence-based' - an endeavour that would be far better, were it to take hold, than any one ideological pursuit.

   I love the idea of evidence-based policy. I also love abstract argument, but that's because so much of what is important is normative or not quantifiable or testable; in these (many) cases argument is a rational process of uncovering and understanding truth. Empirical discovery is also an excellent means of uncovering and understanding truth, and arguably a much more reliable one; if we can delegate large portions of political decision-making to doing what best fits the evidence for any value judgements we want to make, that cannot be a bad thing in my thought. Climate scientists unequivocally say global warming is bad? Policies are reshaped accordingly. Psychoactive drugs found to be less harmful than tobacco? Reconsider policy accordingly. Income inequality found to be a key determinant in worsening crime, underachievement, teenage pregnancies, obesity, life expectancy, mental illness, job mobility, community trust, and various other factors which we're going to presume you think are bad because we presume you don't have sociopathic tendencies? Work to reduce income inequality.

   That's my main take-home from this book: we need to start making politics evidence-based where it can be, which, as the authors expertly show, includes socioeconomic trends in health and wellbeing. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone with a political opinion; if you're a lefty it will provide vast ammunition in arguing for egalitarianism, if you're further to the right it will challenge your economic assumptions considerably but in a way that you would be dumb to ignore.*** Income inequality was already something I was well-convinced of as a thing to be tackled and overcome, but evidence-based politics is an exciting and huge idea and I hope that this book helps make it a more serious current of influence in policymaking. Now, if you'll excuse me, without proofreading back through this, I am off to a joyously dingy warehouse to listen to a church pastor play some incredible techno.

* Given that their book is, for the most part, a presentation of statistical evidence, not a polemic, they back this up admirably, with extensive appendices of their data sources (all very objective and reputable), as well as an explanation of their regression compilation methods and how they interpret the results. There's even an intro chapter about how to read diagrams. It made the econometrician within me, tiny and weak though he is, sing.

** It's hard to summarise. Read the book.

*** What? You would. If you feel like complaining then do a better statistical study proving Wilkinson and Pickett wrong. Take huge data samples and test specified regressions and show that income inequality is actually not all that bad and isn't causally linked to any of these social problems, and then you can dispute the book without just being thick. Or you could dispute that they're problems at all and that thus we shouldn't worry about inequality, but that would make you a bit of an arse.