The Times Higher Education asked me to contribute to their Christmas edition in which a range of people select their books of the year. These were mine:
Richard Murphy, professor of practice in international political economy, City University London
Choosing two books of 2015 proved surprisingly easy. Both stood out for their courage. The first, most closely related to my work, is Paul Mason's Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). I am not an unequivocal fan of the book, but I am certainly a fan of why it was written and what it tries to do. The economic paradigm we live in is failing. Mason is appropriately seeking to find an alternative. The second is Steve Pottinger's 2015 collection of poems more bees, bigger bonnets (Ignite). Pottinger is best known for his poem attacking Starbucks' tax affairs. In this and other work, he seeks to do what poetry often does best, which is to give voice to dissent that demands change. Both books deliver hope. That's enough for me.
Other suggestions are welcome.
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i can’t afford to buy books when new so generally have to wait a year or so before getting one’s I really want.
But a book I would like to buy that has just come out is: A. X. Douglas-The Philosophy of Debt. Douglas has an interesting website here:https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/
and I get the impression he is making a useful contribution to the ‘linguistic framing’ of economics, something that Bill Mitchell talks about and came up on Richards Blog about choosing a word to represent an alternative economics.
Here’s an extract from the blurb:
“This book seeks to accomplish two things. The first is to clarify the concept of debt by examining how the word is used in language. The second is to develop a general, principled account of how debts generate genuine obligations. This allows us to avoid settling each case by a bare appeal to moral intuitions, which is what we seem to currently do. It requires a close examination of many institutions, e.g. money, contract law, profit-driven finance, government fiscal operations, and central banking. To properly understand the moral and political nature of debt, we must understand how these institutions have worked, how they do work, and how they might be made to work.
There have been many excellent anthropological and sociological studies of debt and its related institutions. Philosophy can contribute to the emerging discussion and help us to keep our language precise and to identify the implicit principles contained in our intuitions.”
Worth a read, for sure.
That looks interesting
I had a look at the blog
Thanks
Besides actually getting around to reading your The Joy of Tax, I am looking forward to Satyajit Das’ next book ‘The Age of Stagnation’ to be published early next year.
I have a lot of time for Das and have read both his previous books which really spill the beans on the banking sector in which he worked. He always seems to write with a disapproving sneer about his experiences in the sector.
Other than that I quote again Yanis Varoufakis long read in the Guardian this year ‘ How I became an erratic Marxist’ I think he called it (Feb 2015).
It was the work of sanity from a very intelligent man. I wish I’d been one of his students.
PSR
The only problem with writing in terms of stagnation is it implies an absence of hope
I have that
So does Yanis
R
OK
Well – maybe Das’ title is actually a warning if we do not change – I will let you know after I’ve read it.
Varoufakis- queered his pitch, as far as I’m concerned by succumbing to a bit of personality cult in Paris Match with his ‘attractive’ wife in their nicely appointed Athens appartment. When 3 million of your countrymen can’t even get medical help it doesn’t display the greatest sensitivity-which he DOES demonstrate in that Guardian article.
Das is good on the world of financial engineering, having been in on its birth in the early 80’s. He describes it all very wittily and adopts the ‘onlooker’ but not partaker voice-possible a bit disingenuous in that respect – but worth reading if you want an insight into the dreadful mindset of that world.
Varoufakis is a show man
It’s a strength
And a weakness
Simon
Hmmmm……………
Varoufakis did try to do his bit for the Greek people and paid for it by being purposefully excluded from the next round of talks with the IMF and being ejected from Government. You are surely not advocating him dumping his flat and living in a tent in Athens are you in order to gain ‘credibility’? And the IMF played for time – like they always do – to break the people’s will and the politics behind it too.
In my view we need as many affluent people as possible to advocate social justice as those who do not actually get it.
Varoufakis as showman? Possibly – he talks sense and like Richard does not always get listened too, so I don’t mind that he is a showman since the counter-narrative of economics so often has trouble becoming mainstream anyway – more’s the pity.
As for Das, he is an interesting character who displays evidence of heterodox thinking and not only in his work in derivatives. I sense nothing disingenuous in his work – he has been honest about his role but even he did not expect the sector to use derivatives to such an extent that they actually amplified the risk in the system and created the contagion effect that contributed to the 2008 crash. Derivatives are still a major engine of the financial sector – even though they should not be.
What was exotic financial practice, became standard practice and Das rightly highlights the pure greed and lack of restraint that drove this with a sense of disgust sadly lacking in the writing of Michael Lewis for example (no wonder Lewis’ books apparently boosted recruitment into the financial sector!!).
Das is different – he is more reflective and contemplative than the average ex financial sector burnt out husk tends to be. And bravo for that.
Again it will be interesting to see what he puts forward in his new book.
I will keep my antennae open to his work
Yanis isn’t a showman, he’s a great communicator in my honest opinion. He, or someone like him is exactly what the Labour party needs right now. The PLP has been gutted over the past generation, the vast majority are machine politicians who are stuck in a Blairite timewarp.
It needs a heterodox thinker like Yanis to breathe fresh air into its economic thinking and more than anything to bring *expertise*. God bless Mcdonnell for listening but he can’t help regressing to the mean and parroting neoliberal talking points about balancing the books etc. I think at the core of that is a justified lack of confidence in his own knowledge.
Yanis or someone of his ability would make mincemeat out of Osborne and Cameron.
My book of the year since I discovered it is John Ruskin: Unto this Last (1860) which contained the words – “nothing in history had ever been so disgraceful as the acceptance among us of the common doctrines of political economy as a science” 1860!