Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

LRB 18.2.2021: Unusually bad, unenjoyable issue.

A few things I've mentioned before, like the bad Thomas Powers and O'Hagan articles.

I don't much like Jenny Turner, but Butler is a major figure who deserves extended treatment. And the article did contain some noteworthy things, like the aphorism:

There’s nothing new
under the sun
but there are new suns.

I think that's quite stimulating. The article also shows (though it could state more clearly) that one of Butler's strengths was to imagine aliens as really other, not just as exotic humanoids.

Friedell on schizophrenia: bleak but at least factual and quite clear.

Lockwood: I read about a page and decided my life would be happier if I didn't read any more.

Nocilla Trilogy: at first this sounded like the kind of contemporary avant-garde thing that Tim eruditely likes. But the more I read, the more it just sounded rubbish.

Even Michael Wood was unusually below par.

Bad, evasive article on cigarettes.

LA, ancient cities and Russian churches: fine (I think I already remarked that the Elvis anecdote in the first was a highlight).

Frank Ramsey: strange hothouse / prodigy Cambridge-centric account of the kind you don't so much see anymore. I didn't generally understand the philosophy.

Hackney Museum: mostly bad.

Lorna Finlayson on schools: partly convincing in that I agree that people don't seem to learn much at school, but unlike her I'm not convinced that they learn obedience either.

After giving that issue away I opened the one (17.12.2020) with the first Perry Anderson EU article. This will all take ages.

I found the schizophrenia article hard work. Clear and factual, as you say, but almost devoid of compassion. A tough read.

I'm so behind, that I'm pretending the a huge chunk of back issues don't exist. I'm enjoying the Pankhurst article in the latest issue (certainly not shy of offering an opinion on the text discussed).

Lorna Finlayson on schools: partly convincing in that I agree that people don't seem to learn much at school, but unlike her I'm not convinced that they learn obedience either.

Sure there are some kids who play truant or don't study or whatever, but how many will end up in the system anyway, doing some 9-5 job or other, compared to how many forget all the world capitals or the causes of the first world war or the pythagorean theorem? Obviously it's not *just* schools indoctrinating people, the whole system is geared to perpetuate itself; still they are a large part of it.

Chinaski: I agree about that article.

"how many will end up in the system anyway, doing some 9-5 job or other, compared to how many forget all the world capitals or the causes of the first world war or the pythagorean theorem"

Aren't these the same people?

I don't think people do a 9 to 5 job because they're obedient, but because they need money to survive.

Started on LRB 17.12.2021, reading Lanchester on Neanderthals. This has been discussed before - perhaps by Fizzles the Neanderthal? - so I will be brief:

Lanchester can communicate. He can inform - including, I suppose, about subjects that are quite technical. I suppose this is a skill.

But I hate his ready recourse to vulgarity and how the LRB lets him get away with this (or, presumably, anything).

And this article heavily includes a bad feature: positing 'what you think you know' and then saying it's wrong, without any evidence that his reader does think it.

There is also a strange contradictory moment near the end when he says, in effect: 'Neanderthals are utterly different from us, so it's *amazing* to think that science shows that we are part-Neanderthal'. But surely this scientific finding would suggest that Neanderthals are *not* entirely different from us, and therefore it becomes less amazing. We need to think of them as part of our make-up rather than a strange 'other' - and if we do that, then it's not strange that they're part of our make-up?

Possibly these points were alreeady made by Fizzles and others.

Lastly, btw, Lanchester's article ends surprisingly badly, with a sentence that doesn't have a main verb. I understand that rhetorically we use such formulations all the time, especially in speech; but one would think that (especially from an ... experienced author) the last sentence of a quite long article would want to end on a resonant note, not an abbreviated one that feels off-key.

I realise LRB 7.12.2021 is old news, but it's turning out pretty well.

Lanchester was at least readable. Julian Bell on art history is serious, conceptual, stimulating; gets too abstract for me, but then ends by appealing away from abstraction.

Rubert Beale on vaccines is the clearest thing on the pandemic and vaccines that I've ever read.

And Perry Anderson, 'The European Coup', Part 1 of the series, the one that Fizzles so admired ... I'm only about 3pp in and it often goes to places whose relevance is hard to see, but it's pure PA in its immense erudition, its love of intellectual history, political thought, its cool exposés of the histories of politicians we've never heard of. Remarkable.

Lots of us have been amused by INVASION OF THE SPACE INVADERS for a long time, but I didn't know that Tom Shippey (much discussed here) had reviewed it along with DICING WITH DRAGONS by Ian Livingstone, a book I've owned for about 35 years.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n24/tom-shippey/vidkids

I watched the film of High Wind in Jamaica recently - had forgotten that a young Martin Amis played the oldest child, who hilariously falls to his death out of a window near the end of the film.

Spoiler!

LRB 17.12.2020, concluded:

Neal Ascherson on the German Revolution: I never much relish reading NA, but I did seem to learn something here, about an important period.

Eric Foner on Lincoln: OK.

Rosemary Hill on Con MPs' wives: utterly dreadful people, shouldn't be covered here.

Alison Light on 1930s poltergeists: for me this raised a familiar issue: when people write about things like mediums or ghosts (especially when they're safely in the past), they don't like to be clear about the status of those alleged phenomena. The reason this book's subject is noteworthy at all is that it's outlandish: we don't believe in poltergeists - do we? If we did, and thought they were quite normal, then we wouldn't need the book. So did the poltergeists exist? Or if they didn't (as most of us presumably intuitively assume), what was really going on? That's the question Light doesn't seriously acknowledge. Saying things like 'the woman who claimed to be a medium was troubled', or even 'the 1930s was an anxious period' (as the book does), is evasive, unless you actually believe that those facts could cause paranormal effects. If they can't, then, again: what was really going on?

David Trotter on Mullan's Dickens: not great: Mullan's book sounds relatively banal, if probably readable, and DT spends half the review in classic LRB fashion autonomously developing theories of his own.

L O Rowlands on Virginie Despentes: informative about an aspect of literature, I suppose, but not my cup of tea.

Raban on Italian landings: I feared that this could be self-indulgent family memoir, but must admit it was a more serious historical account of war than that.

Wood on Dietrich: slim; spread too thin across all those films perhaps.

Celia Paul on being a late painter's one-time gf: unusually dire even by bad LRB standards.

LRB 4.3.2021: promising.

Adam Mars-Jones on HINTON: good review, with AMJ's characteristic factual pedantry, though I will never understand the science.

Susan Pedersen on Sylvia Pankhurst: I'm only halfway through but enjoyably rambunctious and critical attitude to the author's vast (924-pp) tome.

I finished that review. Dreadful!

Someone should tell this reviewer: Not everything is always about you.

Rosemary Hill: London's West End, Oxford Street: OK but perhaps too slanted towards aristocrats and not the amount of ordinary work going on in this supposed 'pleasure district'?

Colin Kidd on Scottish independence: quite informative (and also quite familiar) - though this writer is very parti pris. When nationalists (including dear friends of mine) talk as though nationalism is the only option I am sceptical, but I am also a bit dubious of CK's always venting the same opinion on the other side (albeit that is now 'devo max' or whatever, rather than a conservative Anglophile Unionism). Quite insightful, though, about what unionism and nationalism tend to share.

Colm Toibin on Francis Bacon: is the LRB ever not carrying a long essay by Colm Toibin on Francis Bacon?

Just read the Terry Castle piece on Highsmith in that issue, astonishingly irritating.

This review of an Italian communist children lit writer's life and work was strong.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n06/tim-parks/have-you-seen-my-hand

The LRB seldom tips you onto interesting fiction you haven't heard of before.

Do we have our first mention of shitposting in the LRB's article on Ubuweb?

I finished that review. Dreadful!

cant tell which this review was?

Pedersen on Holmes on Pankhurst.

ah ok, you seemed very positive when you started

someone shd tell the reviewer that everything is about me

You're right, Mark, on both counts.

I finished enough of LRB 4.3.2021.

Terry Castle on Highsmith: I understand James M's irritation but actually this came through for me. TC had done the work of reading the other biographies, knew her stuff, was able to explain what was bad about Richard Bradford's (has any modern biographer been more frequently deplored?). Highsmith is one writer I know I ought to read.

Rupert Beale on viruses vaccines: I failed to comprehend this.

Stephen Sedley on compensation culture: good. I quite like SS's old-school brisk style. He is quite sound.

Tom Stevenson on war in space: outstanding! Astoundingly knowledgeable and well written. The sections on whether satellites are really in space became so thrilling.

Clare Bucknell at National Gallery: like a lot of art writing this seemed just to be talking round the art and struggling for something to say.

Francis Gooding on anthropology: informative, on Boas, Mead, Hurston et al. Actually a good model of a review with clear beginning, middle and end.

Rebecca Armstrong on The Aeneid: didn't love it but at least it cleaves closely to the text.

Thomas Jones on Bill Gates: takes the easy option of jeering at Gates, rather than (like Bastani, Britain's best political commentator) actually taking an interest in the practical solutions he proposes.

Michael Wood on Coe on Wilder: helpfully focused after a vague start. I realised that the good reason that MW reviewed this is that he knows Wilder's cinema better than anyone else at the LRB.

Tessa Hadley on Bette Howland: didn't much convince: some flashes of good writing amid quite tedious stuff, but the late work indeed sounds awful.

John Foot on Italian academic corruption: this slightly chimes with my own experience of Italian academia. It's annoying, though, to see him and later letter writers say that it's just as bad in the UK. It isn't. In my experience patronage actually isn't a big part of the UK academy: it makes for a sharp contrast when you go to Europe and struggle for a minute to understand how they do things.

Susan McKay on the DUP: a good reminder of how nutty they can be, and interesting on the future - I hadn't realised that the old prophecy of Catholic demographic takeover was actually coming closer to reality.

LRB 1.4.2021:

Collini on meritocracy: really excellent.

Neal Ascherson's presence makes me think: is he, in fact, the most frequent contributor of full-length articles to the LRB? Say every 4 or 5 issues?

Rupert Beale on viruses vaccines: I failed to comprehend this.

Me on every piece about the virus that isn't an explainer for dummies. :(

1.4.2021:

Ascherson on Colley is actually strong, and unusual for an LRB essay in being almost entirely a dedicated review of the book in question.

Katherine Harloe on Classics: quite good and informative, and usefully sceptical perhaps about the polemic of the book she's reviewing.

Dani Garavelli on Scotland: I still barely understand what the issues are re: the misconduct of the investigation into Alex Salmond. It's odd how the writer winds up talking as though the cause of independence is receding - only a true believer in it could believe that.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n08/emily-witt/eels-on-cocaine

Emily Witt -- the first v online person that I can remember writing for LRB -- in turn writing about the latest of a batch of v online ppl making waves at the LRB. Nice.

I wrote about the 'satirical' front facing comedy videos https://t.co/5QEGNkUuSs

— Rachel Connolly (@RachelConnoll14) April 16, 2021

I wonder if this is the Alice Spawls influence; I've definitely felt a shift since she took over

The Krugman article was probably even more baffling to me than the covid one was to pinefox. As an economics ignoramus I should perhaps then shut up. Nevertheless: is there any evidence that economics can make anything other than retroactive predictions?

Good question.

so, a couple of things on that krugman article - which was excellent, I thought. first, I guess, a partial defence of economists, then some fizzles-type personal rambling almost certainly tl;dr.

• yes, i think economics as an area of study is useful. put it this way, i probably wouldn't want anyone who was in charge of investing money on a national or international scale not to understand trade and trade constraints, what the likely effect of printing money (monetary policy) would be, or what the effect of raising or reducing taxes (fiscal policy) would be. also someone who knows how best to invest money to benefit a particular sector or cohort of society, or indeed a country. Apologies for the bracketed explanations - I often forget them so i figure other people probably do as well. economists seem to me pretty good at a boring, perhaps obvious level, at saying 'if you print a fuckton of money now, you will get inflation, and that will devalue people's wages, but help pay off debt'.

• i get the feeling much of 'economists' has got conflated with Chicago school ideology, that is to say the friedman, hayek model. One thing I think Tooze's article does well is dramatize the interaction of ideology with economics in a single person in a specific historical context. Even alone explaining why neo-Keynesian is a bit of a misnomer was useful. The Economist is a great example of why economists come across so badly - an angle which can allow phrases like how to optimise human capital (so close to 'cattle' if you slur it!), or create stability (via right wing dictators in developing economies eg), feels utterly disgusting to anyone with any moral sensibility. But you don't get much done without a sense of the movement of capital.

• there is a significant issue, defining the last decade and so far this one, to do with low productivity, stagnant wages, savings and investment, which plays out at a global scale, that economists can't explain. individual economists believe they can, but in the aggregate economists do not have a solid answer or prescription. so it's understandable that there's a frustration with economics, but i'm not sure that you wouldn't want economists to be working at that question. and if someone is working at that question, they are in some way an economist. not sure it's about predictions as such, other than saying 'we believe this behaviour will generate this outcome'. in other words, if we believe this a problem worth working at, then we believe we need economists.

i quite like bataille's definition in the accursed share: the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space wait no wrong page, that economics is 'the *general* problems that are linked to the movement of energy on the globe.'

A movement is produced on the surface of the globe that results from the circulation of energy at this point in the universe. The economic activity of men appropriates this movement, making use of the resulting possibilities for certain ends. But this movement has a pattern and laws with which, as a rule, those who use them and depend on them are unacquainted.

but i would strongly recommend JK Galbraith's excellent book Money for less esoteric coverage.

for myself, i've been struggling since 2008 to try and explore to my own satisfaction the political/economic space that might roughly be defined by the polar scale (social democracy <-> marxism). it was clear from both the causes of and response to the GFC that this represented a clear crisis in social democracy and third way politics, specifically for New Labour in the UK (separately damaged by Iraq), but more widely as a political philosophy. The central crux being, could the principle that maximising business receipts in order to enable widespread social equality (including people not responsible for those business receipts) be sustained as a responsible socialist political approach.

(i have an incredibly facile political philosophy, which is that everyone, no matter what their station, deserves good quality housing (good quality here representing longevity and robustness, as well as quality of life aspects like light and space), good quality education - no one should get a worse education than someone else because of their social background, good quality transport - you should not need a car to get where you're going, any opportunity, whether of leisure or income, at any destination should be available to you at a small, affordable fee - health, you should not have a lower life expectancy or health expectations than someone with more money. i would add to transport a wider sense of communications infrastructure like equality of internet accessibility.)

I see that set of principles as fundamentally socialist, but the question of how you achieve them is not easy in a capitalist society.

Tooze is on record as being a Keynesian, ie fundamentally a social democrat Keynesian, but who has said that he feels the best critique of social democracy, which social democracy and economics more generally needs to accommodate and comprehend, is marxist. again, back to my more simplistic world, i struggle between three views:

*- social democracy, properly delivered, can deliver social equality in a relative space of capitalist freedom. it needs to avoid PPP, and should have a bias towards workers rights and social welfare, but all of these can be managed within a social democratic framework
*- social democracy has a fundamental tendency towards creating business-politics power frameworks, which favour business. ultimately this creates the conditions - when push comes to shove as it were - of austerity, or to Tooze's article's point: where wall street is bailed out, but main street gets insufficient support (the basis of krugman's conversion). this overall logic means that marxist approaches to capitalist and social structures need to be enforced (to quote Benjamin: 'The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics put to its political views as well. It is one reason for the later breakdown.')
*- there is no way, given current democratic expectations and behaviours, that marxism or strong socialism will ever get a look in as things stand, and the route to proper socialism is necessarily via social democracy

the interplay between these views results in me being sometimes a bit melt-y, sometimes a bit guillotine-y, sometimes a bit between: ie Melt Guillotine is the name of my band.

Tooze's article, following Krugman's slo-mo damascene conversion plays out the arguments in that space over the same period of time. for me, it's a very useful exploration of those dynamics.

Tooze himself is interesting, as I'm never *entirely* convinced by him, but he's doing something very interesting. He's trying to do history as it happens and make it not journalism. So he had a real map-territory problem (in the Borgesian sense), where basically his editor had to tell him to STOP WRITING CRASHED FINISH ALREADY as he was trying to incorporate Syria and Turkey. But it seems to me that this struggles with the notion of historical materialism - the critical balancing point where things, for reasons impossible to know in the moment and impossible to recapture later, could go either way - he creates developing historical narratives that explain why the moment could never be any other way.

He seems to me extremely psychologically embarrassed and defensive by left wing critiques of his work, and would like to forestall those by confessing strongly on the left-wing side, without quite being of the Devil's Party (as in the good side, cf Blake's Milton). He is very good at pointing out that the political economy of Hitler's Germany shows why it's ludicrous for neoliberals to claim that anti-racism is intrinsic as a consequence of their approach rather than the reverse. In general he's quite good at standing outside the inherent 'Economist' logics of economists, but he can't help inheriting all of the mechanics of capitalism when he's explaining the mechanics of history - tho much of his intelligence lies in being able to separate the two out. Most evident in this is his commitment to understanding and exploring the economics of climate change and the economic frameworks for delivering climate action.

For the first time for economics climate change is presenting an emergency context which rational actor or incomplete information models or even stochastic general whatevers - the attempt to connect specific economic examples with wider macro principles - are totally insufficient to deal with.

So, Tooze himself, not quite of the angels, but one of the closest things we've got to a public intellectual these days (not really very public, but with a wide-ranging desire to engage with the aesthetics and mechanics of 'the movement of energy across the globe.'

Sorry, not just tl;dr, but barely coherent. have it.

Nevertheless: is there any evidence that economics can make anything other than retroactive predictions?

― Scheming politicians are captivating, and it hurts (ledge), Monday, April 19, 2021 6:36 AM (yesterday) bookmark flag link

typically the goal is to do counterfactual prediction ('what would happen if we did x policy instead of y?') rather than unqualified prediction ('will there be a financial crisis in the next 5 years?'). since you only get to observe the policy that actually gets implemented, the prediction is never really borne out. we don't know what the employment rate would have been in 2015 if the federal reserve hadn't raised rates in 2012, so we can't say what the effect was even retroactively

xp fizzles - i sympathize with your frustration in attempting to square your politics with interest in economics. a main challenge is that a lot of left writers on economics are bad. i haven't read him in a while, but i really enjoy chris dillow whose blog is still active https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/

the Tooze piece is pretty unsatisfying to me, imho the narrative of radicalization is mostly bogus. i've been reading paul krugman semi-regularly for over a decade (and have read all the nineties stuff--despite what the piece might suggest it holds up and is cracking good writing) and there's a steady methodological throughline mixed with an intensifying frustration at republicans. he basically wrote the same column "obama pass another stimulus" twice a week for 6 years

right, interesting on your view on the essay. on chris dillow, yes he’s great - in fact i was bugging his last but one post on the leisured classes and the division of labour just the other day on twitter.

more generally, on an lrb point, they clearly and rightly felt political economics was too important to rely on lanchester for, and tooze is a good consistent addition to their roster.

(perhaps worth noting that it may have been lanchester who had a hand in that - they seem to get on ok and co presented a few things in the post-GFC analysis industry)

just on chris dillow - he’s v much of the third camp: that the route to a society guided by marxist thought is via social democracy.

typically the goal is to do counterfactual prediction ('what would happen if we did x policy instead of y?') rather than unqualified prediction ('will there be a financial crisis in the next 5 years?'). since you only get to observe the policy that actually gets implemented, the prediction is never really borne out.

Counterfactual prediction is pretty much what the hard sciences deal in so I don't have a problem with that. Obviously you can't run randomised double blind controlled trials with a country's economy but you can look at other countries and other historical events, what I was hoping for was some evidence using the available data of whether economists' predictions are ever reliably borne out.

But maybe that's not the whole story, Fizzles you do a great job of explaining why economists are necessary for the broad picture even if they can't make detailed and accurate predictions - unlike this guy I found yesterday (https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/what-economics-can-and-cant-do/ ) who while trying to defend economists more or less admits that their predictions are of little value, they view outcomes through a narrow lens, and their decisions are unavoidably value laden and political.

Re: prediction, meteorology, for example, is surely a legitimate and robust science but it can barely forecast if it will rain tomorrow. Nevertheless it can describe broad trends and offer guarded predictions. The problem there is that the models, though in all likelihood accurate in terms of behaviour, are necessarily incomplete, the climate is a chaotic system and tiny differences in the model will lead to huge differences in outcome. It seems unlikely that the economy is chaotic - could someone spending a Peso in Mexico cause a depression in America? - but either way if economists are still relying on things like rational actor then their models are not just incomplete but wholly inaccurate.

Good work Fizzles. My feeble brane was only able to absorb the gist of Tooze's article via Will Davies' point that the radicalisation of Gary Neville is precisely analogous to that of Krugman.

I think I'm about 4 issues behind Fizzles, so certainly not ready to read his analysis till August.

i quite like bataille's definition in the accursed share: the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space wait no wrong page

Hahahaha.

I think that another point that contributes to people's animus against economics as a discipline is that there's a popular misapprehension of it as a hard science - which a lot of economists take no great pains to dispel. So when predictions fail to come true ppl reasonably feel gipped. But if you view it as more akin to political theory or sociology it starts to make more sense - I mean Francis Fukuyama built an entire reputation around a now totally disproven thesis and that dude somehow still has a career.

Economic experts have historically supported bad or questionable policies in the US. They are regularly trotted out to support cutting taxes (especially taxes on capital gains), reducing regulation, reducing government intervention in the economy in general, opposing minimum wage increases, reducing barriers to free trade, etc. By and large these positions also seem to benefit the class of capitalist business owners, perhaps not coincidentally. Taken to an extreme, these policies have not always been so beneficial. We still have taxes on capital gains for instance that are lower than taxes on income from work. It's not clear that this policy could be maintained for so long without cover from economists. Economists also seemed to be lopsidedly in favor of for example increasing trade with China in the '90s, which due to the scale and pace of its expansion, had some harmful effects on US industry, which were pooh-poohed at the time. There are many such examples.

Good post O. Nate !

Economics is pure pseudoscience and its total domination of the political sphere is 90% of why we're fucked as a species.

Economists that are endorsed by the American political class are horrible yeah, of course, what do you expect?

There's also economists who advocate for everything from a left welfare state model to marxism though, and I see no reason to discount them.

Good point. Also most of these problems are related to macro-economics. My impression is that micro is a more fertile area of research and actually more of what actual economists focus on.

i think o nate’s post is otm to a large extent but imma springboard off it to try to make some points in defence of economics to explain why i like it despite those things and also clarify what i was trying to say about counterfactuals and prediction. extreme tl;dr strictly 4 my lrb homies ilx made me split this up into 3 posts lol

imho what’s relevant isn’t the historical q of whether economists have supported bad/questionable/good policies in the US in past but the potential for economics to provide answers to the question ‘which policies should we support?’ in the present and future

there are economic arguments that favour right wing policies and ones that favour left wing policies. even if you rule out all right wing policies on ethical/ideological grounds, there are a lot of different mutually exclusive policies within the set of left policies to consider that you might want to use economics to compare

take two recently hot utopian leftish policy proposals: the universal basic income and the job guarantee. can we do both, or are they in tension? what are their costs and consequences? how would different groups of the population be affected?

it’s not just that economics is a helpful tool in answering those questions: any answer to those questions is by definition economics. if those questions don’t interest you because you have used first principles ethical introspection to decide that one policy is superior regardless of its costs or consequences, then ok fine, but you’ve defined the problem away. anyone with doubt or curiosity has no choice but to do economics, the trick is to do it “well”

if historically economists were most influential in providing arguments in favour of right wing policies, that’s interesting as a matter of record, but it’s not super relevant if I’m a left wing person who wants to think about the consequences of different left wing policies today. physicists at CERN use the same theory of physics used to build the atomic bomb, not because they want to kill people but because it’s useful for multiple purposes

so the question is: is economics a logical straight jacket that locks you into arguing for right wing policies?

in some sense the answer to that is: yes. classical economic theory is this beautiful mathematical edifice that starts from some pretty innocuous-seeming axioms (‘if someone has the choice between 3 apples and 2 oranges and 2 applies and 3 oranges and they choose the former then they must value a third apple over a third orange’) and then suddenly you’re proving that the optimal tax on capital is zero. the intellectual rigor can be dazzling to young impressionable/budding contrarian-sociopathic minds that experience it. since the response of many non-economists is to make emotional pleas against the conclusions rather than to argue for alternative premises, it tends to cement the perception in the minds of young economists of their tribe as cold logical uncomfortable truth-tellers

but classical economic theory isn’t all right-wing; it’s a weird mix (this ‘weird mix’ is one of my preferred pet definitions of neoliberalism). it contains within it arguments in favour of left wing policies, too. ill give three examples

1. the assumption of marginal decreasing utility implies that taking a dollar from the rich and giving it to the poor increases overall welfare and therefore justifies redistribution. the classical theory of public finance as laid out by economists like Anthony Atkinson in the 1960s treats the problem maximizing egalitarian social welfare using taxes transfers and other instruments as an optimization problem solved by calculus. it’s full of fun results like “you should tax the single richest person in the economy at a rate of 100%” and extremely relevant to any socialist who wants to think about how government ought to go about funding itself

2. theories of firms with increasing returns to scale support antitrust, nationalization or regulation of industry. under increasing returns to scale, small firms can’t enter the market to compete down prices and there is a tendency to monopoly or oligopoly. the work of economists like recent nobel prize winner Jean Tirole (and the entire field of empirical industrial organization) uses more modern models, but the starting point is always from a model where competitive forces are absent and so the governments involvement can at least in theory improve on status quo

3. the same theory which supports free trade in goods (which parts of the left have opposed historically but not consistently) is equally supportive of free migration of labour/open borders. it’s actually exactly the same theory, you just relabel it. for an accessible recent paper arguing for open borders in a mainstream academic outlet, see Michael Clemens’ “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?”

(btw, many libertarians dislike classical economic theory for this very reason. people like hayek or von mises saw these ideas being used in their own time to justify the new deal and the great society and tried to theoretically disarm it using arguments that stressed the impossibility of humans ever understanding economics enough for government interventions to have consequences. I’ve encountered leftists making similar arguments: economics is impossible, so rather than try we should just apply pure socialist principles. my personally take is that this is doomed to incoherence. inevitably at some point the more pragmatic economic arguments will be irresistible to even the most principled comrade)

if there is a reason why historically economists in the United States tend to have been more vocal in their support of the conservative policies that classical economic theory supports, and more quiet on its left wing side, it’s something sociological or perhaps historically-contingent.

indeed you can look to other countries or periods where the opposite dynamic took hold: in Sweden, economists like Gunnar Myrdal, Olof Palme and Rudolph Meidner built unprecedentedly lavish welfare states that nonetheless were exposed to international free trade and encouraged capital investment. (the theory was that international competition would weed out all but the most productive industries in Sweden, who would then grow to take a larger share of the economy, which would provide a larger tax base for the welfare state—this is exactly the answer that you get when you study free trade under models with increasing returns to scale). even the more radical elements of the “Meidner plan” that included worker ownership of firms and a transition path to socialism were heavily influenced by economic theory; the institutions were designed carefully to preserve incentives to produce the means which were distributed. Sweden, like the US, also had a rightward turn in the late 20th century, and as a consequence of not following through with the Meidner plan now has sky high inequality in capital ownership (although it has a relatively a low degree of inequality along other dimensions). but they got to that part by not listening to economists enough. so i think historical extrapolation is of limited use

so far I’ve only mentioned classical economics. in classical economic theory prices are flexible, transactions frictionless, each agent is “atomistic” (and so any one person can’t influence prices) and information is “perfect” or evenly distributed across all agents. modern economics is defined by departures from the classical features. wages and prices are sticky, transactions are the result of costly searching bargaining and contracting, agents are “granular” (think of a systematically important financial institution like Goldman Sachs) and information is asymmetric.

classical economics is a wrapped-up topic, now preserved in textbooks and lapped up by precocious sociopathic teens like your young flopsons. all economics in economic journals in the last 3 decades features departures from classical economics. many papers consider the classical model as a baseline, examine some patterns of economic data it can’t explain, and then discuss various departures that can rationalize them, and try to decide among them

(this is not just lipstick on a pig. the departures can be drastic, and in some cases there are so many of them at once that no resemblance to the original remains. the impression Tooze gives of modern new Keynesian models as being classical models with one or two slight differences was true for a while but no longer so. virtually any economic model can be achieved by applying enough departures and state of the art macro models are Frankenstein’s monsters. (this doesn’t mean they’re good.) also, it is hard. only the brightest people work on it, the rest of us fiddle around with applications and other things. the difference between modern mainstream economists and people like post-keynesians is that the latter don’t write down models. they’re more like a mix of a humanities professors (read long manuscripts and argue about what Keynes or Sraffra really meant) and business journalists who use informal verbal arguments and casual analysis of data (usually eyeballing time series charts). most “post” Keynesian ideas were first written down as actual models by mainstreamers. google Emmanuel Farhi on the Cambridge Capital Controversy or Ivan Werning on Minsky are two recent examples u can watch youtubes of)

modern economics contains even more arguments for left wing policies. in frictional or monopsonistic labour markets, minimum wages can raise both wages and employment. in health insurance markets with asymmetric information, single-payer can reduce premiums and expand access. in economies with rigid prices and wages, countercyclical fiscal policy is effective at stabilizing employment during recessions. the triumph of modern economic theory is mechanism design, which can be interpreted as the study of algorithms for allocation of goods by non-market means. some computer scientists and economists have a conference where they try to use it to allocate things like social housing or slots in good public schools more fairly than the status quo of rationing with lotteries, and some people have semi-seriously joked that it could bring back central planning (although in a much more decentralized way, where the planner “designs” the rules of a game that members of society then play)

however, the arguments of modern economics are much less decisive than their classical counterparts. there are no provocative simplistic bangers like “open all borders, set minimum wages to 0, set capital gains tax to zero, nationalize the steel industry.” theorems feature many more qualifications. minimum wages can raise employment, but only up to a point. up to which point? it’s hard to say. it depends on which model you use, and also on features of the labour market.

for this reason, economics is increasingly empirical. many economists double as statisticians. (btw, there’s a huge internal debate in the profession about whether this process has gone too far, with some people arguing we’ve given up our roots as people who use powerful theories that make stark predictions to be mere bean counters. the “empiricist” side is winning, but its a struggle every graduate student probably has at least 2 committee members on either side of)

we left the “eden” of classical theory and its weird ideological mix of policies endorsed with logical certainty, and are now cast into a fallen plane where no one quite knows which model to use and therefore which policies to pursue. contemporary economists, especially those of younger generations, are more “epistemically humble”. they’re also, cautiously, more left wing

in light of this situation, modern empirical work mostly tries to do counterfactual policy analysis in the hopes of ruling out some models in favour of others. if a model predicts that employment always falls when minimum wages increase, but careful comparison of employment in states that pass minimum wage hikes with neighbouring states that don’t systematically find no subsequent difference in employment, we’d have to reject this model in favour of one that admits the possibility of null effects. for example, an alternative model where after a minimum wage hike firms raise prices, or maybe they contract and their former workers are then hired by larger firms who pay higher wages further from the minimum wage. we could then go further and test those predictions to decide between those models. the ability to test these theories has, perhaps surprisingly, only recently become a possibility due to the advent of data at more granular levels

the role of the empirical analysis here is to get an idea of how employment changes in the counterfactual world where the minimum wage is increased. these kinds of counterfactual predictions are provisionally useful for policy guidance (a majority of respondents in the chicago IGM survey of elite American economists now support raising the minimum wage), but their real purpose is to select among models

as someone said upthread, this is a lot harder to do at the level of a macroeconomy. so the situation there is currently a proliferation of models that give more and more contingent answers but with less empirical tests to rule any out. the problem is not a lack of answers but a multiplicity of answers with no way of deciding amongst them. those are kind of the same thing in practice

in this epistemic world, there is a bias toward the status quo. we kinda know what things look like in the world as it exists and we think we can extrapolate to slightly different worlds (with ie incrementally higher minimum wages) but we have no idea what the world would look like if we radically switched shit up. so we can’t really recommend that responsibly. in this sense, policy leads economics. as the world boldly moves forward and recklessly passes untested policies, we’ll be able to explore their effects and learn more

fin

Booming post. There is something very attractive to me about the idea of building a mathematical model of the actual economy with enough precision that you could make predictions with some degree of accuracy about variables of interest. At the same time, I am skeptical this can ever be achieved. Even when trying to predict very broad aggregates, it seems economists have not made much progress with this dream. I guess its not too surprising. I think the economy of a country must be many orders of magnitude more complex than the atmosphere, yet even with supercomputers the best we can do in weather prediction is about 1-2 weeks in advance. However, I think perhaps the best use of these models is as tools for thought. I know Krugman often extols the value of "toy models" to help clarify one's thinking. However, I'm not sure that even when clarified in such a way intuition can get us as far as we'd like. Perhaps the empiricist and statistical approach is the best we should hope for. There's a lot of value in the work of economists like Gabriel Zucman of Berkeley, who's done a lot of work to map out the web of tax shelters used by the wealthy around the world, and to come up with reasonable estimates of how much wealth is being sheltered in this way. There's lots of value in that kind of research.

1.4.2021:

Hannah Black on Art Club 2000: seems vapid.

Jenny Turner on Sybille Bedford: I couldn't get much from this or see what was interesting about the writer.

Katherine Rundell on storks: makes a change to have one of these articles not end by saying, quite properly, how endangered the animal is.

Donald Mackenzie on digital advertising: I understood and learned a little bit. The odd thing is that Mackenzie is expert in these things (from other articles), but in this one keeps saying things like 'I'd never known what a cookie was till now', as if he were more like me.

Matthew Bevis on Charles Wright: treading water, failing to make the poetry not look like a waste of space.

G. Partington on UbuWeb: I wasn't sure about this topic but I have to hand it to the reviewer, it does get the material across in a well-structured and inclusive way; and is aptly sceptical about Kenneth Goldsmith.

Joe Dunthorne on Kleist: quite impressed that this film-maker character can write this. I suppose I learned something about the mysterious Kleist character.

Harry Strawson on Rave: not my scene.

Michael Wood on French words in English: starts as only Wood can start, with happy analysis of Cole Porter - but then rather devolves into unclarity and arguments that are feinted at rather than directly explained. I think MW is right to cast doubt on the final quotation lamenting English insularity - it looks like fish-in-a-barrel piety.

Owen Bennett Jones (an interesting character?) on Robert Maxwell - interesting topic, good stuff. One thing he doesn't really get into is the fact that Maxwell was an egotistical tycoon ostensibly of the Left - or just, if you prefer, of Labour - which naturally made him seem somewhat different from Murdoch. It's indicated that Maxwell only became a Labour MP because 'the establishment' wouldn't have him. But his paradoxical role still always seemed one of the most notable things about him.

I also recall him owning Derby County and Oxford United; and Brian Clough (and ... Mark Lawrenson?) greatly distrusting him.