I was giving a talk (on zoom, of course) on the Green New Deal last night and was discussing just how long I have been concerned about issues relating to sustainability. I leant back to my bookshelf and pulled out this:
That's a 1973 print of E J Mishan's book. I reckon I bought it in 1974 or 75, when a sixth former. It's influenced my thinking ever since. I've been around this issue for a long, long time.
But it gives rise to a curious question. what are the books that helped shape our thinking on this and other economic issues?
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Who is the “we” implied in the word “our”? I can tell you which books influenced me… Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens – the Limits to Economic Growth 1972 (and the update books) ; Douthwaite – The Growth Illusion; Daly and Farley – Ecological Economics; D’Alisa and Kallis “Degrowth Vocabulary for a New Era”; Jackson T “Prosperity without Growth”…and a few more including many by non economists like “Affluenza” by Oliver James which are often frankly more valuable than the stuff written by utilitarians.
I think it notable that mainstream economists claimed that the Limits to Economic Growth had been disproved but the projections made in the early 1970s predicted that the problems would turn up early in the 21st century and…fancy that…here we are….but most mainstream economists are still unable to see what is right in front of their noses. I recently wrote a brief critique of mainstream economics to circulate to the department (now school) of economics where I was once a research student and teaching assistant in the 1970s. I circulated it around the Uniiversity of Nottingham School of Economics and was totally ignored. (It’s on the Feasta website – http://www.feasta.org/2019/10/03/the-school-of-economics-as-a-suicide-academy/ ) The only person to respond was Martin Wolf of the FT. As I always say – mainstream economists have a secret weapons to use against their critics – they ignore them.
Many books in there that I know
Richard Douthwaite was under-rated
And you are right about mainstream economists
My economic views follow directly from my views on social justice….. and those views do not come from a book but round the dinner table. However, if you want a book I will give you one – “The Valleys shall be exalted” by (my great uncle) Cyril Gwyther. It is his memoir of his time as Methodist Minister in Tonypandy in the 30s and during the war. I did not read it until I was about 40 …… but all the ideas and stories were already known to me.
How does that sit with my career as a Government Bond Trader?…. I am still not sure.
🙂
I read Schumacher’s “Small us Beautiful” at the same point (having read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and a few other important environmental books earlier).
So did I….
For me, it probably started with Silent Spring, Limits to Growth, and Small is Beautiful.
More recently, I loved Katrine Marçal’s “Who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner?’ (2015) – a devastating critique of ‘economic man’ and how we are seduced by him.
I’m not familiar with the last
I do like Saving Adam Smith which sounds to have similar objectives
As a student at the LSE I was obliged to attended Mishan’s lectures. Never been so bored in my entire life!
Among a very long list here are a select few from earlier days:
E F Schumacher – ‘Small is Beautiful : A Study of Economics As If People Mattered’ (1973)
Leopold Kohr – ‘The Breakdown of Nations’ (1957)
Frances Moore Lappé – ‘Diet for a Small Planet’ (1971)
Herman Daly – ‘Toward a Steady-state Economy’ (1973)
Dennis & Donella Meadows – ‘The Limits to Growth’ (1972)
I unsuccessfully tried to get my head around Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s – ‘The Entropy Law and the Economic Process’ (1971). Maybe a work to be revisited in my dotage.
Read half of them…
I heard Mishan was really boring…
He never made it to Prof I believe
This journey of mine – including my time spent here on and off – started after I had been made redundant for the third time at the age of 24. It did not matter that I was hardly ever sick or that I worked 50+ hours a week – none of my efforts seemed to make me secure career wise.
I’d gone into a depression (even prescribed anti-depressants ) thinking that I was just a failure when I noticed a free pamphlet on offer in the Guardian containing a speech by Galbraith Junior to the Cardiff Law School about neo-liberal economic problems in the mid-90’s (I still have that pamphlet somewhere – it saved my life). That pamphlet helped me to stop blaming myself, I chucked the tablets in the bin and set out to keep learning more about what is really going on. It led me to going back to Uni’ at 29.
Douthwaite – definitely – also his book on local economics ‘Short Circuit’ and his ‘Ecology of Money’ where he too asserts that money is a promise to pay which was an astounding idea to me at the time before I discovered this blog.
Then there is Green & Nore’s ‘Economics: An Anti-Text’ which helped me to understand the codified language of ‘positive economics’ amongst other things, such as Marxism’s self contradictions.
Will Hutton’s ‘The State We’re In’ opened up what was happening in the finance and business world, a journey that would lead me to Satyajit Das (‘Traders, Guns & Money’ and ‘Extreme Money’) and Tom Brown’s ‘Tragedy & Challenge’.)
But the K2 or Mount Everest of my reading was Steve Keen’s ‘Debunking Economics’ – wow! – what a shellacking that was of Neo-liberalism!
Honourable mentions must also go to the visual arts – Adam Curtis in my view has done more than anyone to bring forth the hidden histories of Britain’s economic woes since the post war times. What an asset he is.
And then post 2008 we have brave films like ‘Inside Job’ and ‘The Flaw’ – made in America – that crucible of capitalism (The Four Horsemen is also good).
I could go on.
And I will – I still think that Richard’s ‘The Courageous State’ is the first book that tries to pull it all together although Paul Spicker’s ‘The Welfare State: a General Theory’ also attempted to redefine and re-state the value state support in 2000 as New Labour’s ‘something for something’ approach borrowed from Clinton was getting into gear.
Thanks
I agree re Steve Keen – that was a revelatory book for me
My wife sometimes says I should buy a leather jacket, like him
She’s right, as I biker I have to say you can never have too much leather 🙂
I disagree….
No Richard – leave the leather jackets to Keen and Varoufakis – people do not like mavericks in this country.
Don’t even think about a snake skin one either like Nicholas Cage. I’m afraid its tweed or corduroy for you.
But watch the hair – I’m convinced that if you develop a visual persona of everyone’s favourite uncle having a fireside chat about MMT, GND etc.,, you might reach more people with your ideas. If you hair’s too long they might think that you’re mad professor and you’ll blow it.
Now where’s that bowl for your hair cut? Let’s get it done.
Soon enough….but my sons are not having a go
Not directly related but I thought you might like to address this
https://novaramedia.com/2020/06/04/the-government-is-showing-its-economic-hand-and-the-left-will-need-a-smart-response/
Interesting re the GND
Vovaramedia have ignored my mails by the way, which people here asked me to send
Did Novara Media reply at all?
Keep knocking on the door.
No hint of a reply…
I have, somewhere, a copy of Mishan, inherited from my late father, who acquired it during his two years of scholarship studies at Ruskin College, c.1970.
I come from a strong Labour and trade union family, and education was always regarded as important.
Early in my career as a secondary music teacher, I bought the book that really kicked off my strong interest in politics, economics and trying to make sense of an increasingly difficult world.
William Keegan’s 1984 book “Mrs Thatcher’s Economic Experiment” really opened my eyes, and I have been a fact-based critic of Conservatism ever since. I never make a point, in “discussion”, that cannot be illustrated without example, and I have just given up on the idea of finding a Tory-supporting opponent who does not rely on ultimately facile, plausible-sounding assertions.
From one book, over the years, my library of progressive politics and economics would definitely prove fatal if dropped on an unwitting social regressive!
Interestingly, Paul Mason and I both did Music degrees, but at different universities. We did, however train as teachers at the same place, the London Institute of Education, him a couple of years behind me. I stuck to the teaching, but he didn’t. Wynn Godley trained as a professional oboist at the Paris Conservatoire after PPE at New College, and Alan Greenspan did two years at the Julliard in 1943/44, playing with Stan Getz and Woody Herman.
Where did I go wrong?
Most amused
I suppose other than reading Will Hutton, then writing in the Monday Guardian, JK Galbraith; probably The Affluent Society ….and something else, but I don’t recall the title.
I have read most of Galbraith, including his novel The Tenured Professor, which is most amusing
I think ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman’ by John Perkins was a real eye opener for me.
It was good
As an undergraduate at the Department of Political Economy at UCL in the early 70s, my instincts were that the pursuit of economic growth at all costs was wrong. However, I was unable to counter the arguments of my tutor, Wilfred Beckerman, who went on to write ‘In Defence of Economic Growth’, and who was scathing in his comments about Ed Mishan, and environmentalists in general. Professor Beckerman’s intellectual power was out of my league, yet my instincts that the economy must serve not only mankind but our planet were not crushed and have never died.
The logic and expertise now being provided by enlightened economists has the potential to benefit us all. Your work and that of many economists, such as Kate Raworth, that take a more holistic and enlightened view, make me feel that my views formed so long ago, however ill-expressed at the time, were not so wide of the mark. Additionally, MMT, and your excellent work to explode dangerous ‘econo-myths’, are rapidly narrowing the gap between Economics and the real world.
I am so grateful to you for transforming the subject of economics, by releasing it from the grip of neo-liberalism, and by making it accessible. When I was a student it was still possible to treat the subject as Political Economy; however, the trend that led to mathematics becoming the driving force, instead of a very useful tool to use in appropriate circumstances, could be seen. Funnily enough, clarity and concise arguments were exactly what rigorous economists like Beckerman recommended; it is ironic that those who are now communicating in this way are doing so to counter his views, at least those about growth. Keep up the good work!
Many thanks
I find it so frustrating that I cannot do more
I need 36 hours a day
I have no qualifications or professional/career links with the subjects discussed on this blog, which I follow with great interest but without having anything worthwhile of my own to add. However, this thread hit on something at the back of my mind. Some time ago, probably in the mid-seventies, I bought a second-hand book with the title “Growth – the Price We Pay”. I’m not sure I actually read it, though it’s quite short, so I may well have done. But even if I didn’t read it, the title has stuck in my mind ever since, and I think that the title alone has somehow influenced my worldview. I had a hunt round the shelves today, and lo and behold! It was written by the same Mr Mishan who wrote the first book in this thread, but whose name meant nothing to me.
You say that Mishan was boring, but perhaps he was just a boring speaker, because looking through the book, I find the writing excellent. And his chapter on the baleful effects of the motor car sums things up superbly well in not much space – and I decided in my early twenties that I didn’t like cars and have never learnt to drive. Was it because of reading this book? Probably not, I’d probably already come to that view, but it certainly would have helped cement the idea in my mind.
Scarily prophetic too. Because in order to get over the message of the hopelessness of adapting cities to cars rather than the other way round, he expounds an analogy with the situation in an imaginary country “on the other side of the Atlantic perhaps”, where the traditional right to bear arms is never questioned. He follows this imagined scenario through to an eventual situation where the most peace-loving man would be foolish to venture forth unarmed. In order to deal with resultant problems, a politician suggests that towns and cities have to be radically remodelled to reduce the probability of being shot dead but without infringing anyone’s right to go heavily armed (and manufacturers’ right to sell weapons). Every progressive journalist pays tribute to the politician who came up with this “pistol architecture” solution to urban planning. But it never happens because it would involve taxing people, so the deaths just continue. (In this scenario the entire economy is based around pistol production, and the only economic disbenefit is seen to be the occasional bit of “corpse congestion”.)
Reminds me of Trump’s line that schools would be safer if teachers and pupils were all armed.
Thanks Basil
And fascinating