Category: Books and culture

Review of Capitalism Unleashed

John Quiggin13 Comments

Several years ago, Andrew Glyn sent me a copy of his new book, Capitalism Unleashed, which I promised to review. But with one thing and another, I didn’t get to it, and then I received the news of his premature death, which set me back still further. I promised myself that I would do the review as a tribute to Andrew’s memory, and now, I’ve finally managed to do it.

Of course the environment now is radically different to the one in which the book was written, and that means the review must be to some extent informed by the wisdom of hindsight. In the introduction, Andrew notes as the first of the big open questions thrown up by the unleashing of capitalism

Will the ever more complex financial system implode in a major financial crisis and bring prolonged recession

We all know the answer now.

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Charles Stross seminar at Crooked Timber

John Quiggin11 Comments

Among other things, I’ve been busy over the last few months putting together a Crooked Timber book event discussing the work of Scottish science fiction writer Charles Stross. The idea is that members of the CT group, and some invited guests write posts on the book(s) in question, the author responds and the whole thing is thrown open to comments. Our guest line-up this time is stellar, including Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman and Ken MacLeod. If you’re interested in SF, the literature of ideas in general or the future of book reviewing, go and have a look.

Diminishing publication lags

John Quiggin7 Comments

Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve been very interested in the relationship between technical and cultural innovation. Among other things, I make the point that this is now a two-way street: the development of the Internet is driven as much by cultural innovations, like the manifold uses of blogs, as by technical innovation, and in many cases it’s hard to distinguish between the two.

I gave a presentation on this at the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) Conference a few months ago, and was invited to turn it into a paper for a special issue of a new journal, Cultural Science.

I was very favorably impressed by the issue when it came out, and also by the interval between submission and publication, which was quite a bit shorter than I’ve experienced in the past. To be precise …

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Suppressed viewpoints on climate change

John Quiggin56 Comments

There’s a lot of complaints about how some viewpoints in the climate change debate are being suppressed. As Tim Dunlop notes, most of them come from a group which gets lots of press attention (in fact, far more than its support among the public, let alone among climate scientists, would justify). But there is one viewpoint that seems almost completely suppressed. Like other Australians, the vast majority of supporters of the Coalition parties accept the scientific evidence and support action to mitigate climate change but I can’t think of a single member of the rightwing commentariat who does so with any enthusiasm. (The closest in the print media is John Hewson, who has a fortnightly column in the Fin. He’s good on climate change, but I wouldn’t regard him as a full-time member fo the commentariat). Among rightwing bloggers, the orthodoxy is similarly monolithic. The only exceptions of whom I’m aware are Harry Clarke and Opinion Dominion.

(Note: I’ve changed some terminology in response to comments)/

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin51 Comments

Climate Code Red by David Spratt and Philip Sutton (more details here). This is a book that will doubtless be welcomed by those with a sceptical attitude towards the mainstream discussion represented by the IPCC, and makes many points that will be familiar from debates here – there’s more uncertainty in the IPCC models than is commonly recognised, important factors have been omitted, the intergovernmental process is subject to political constraints, emissions projections are problematic and so on. On a first reading, Spratt and Sutton make a pretty convincing case that the apparent scientific consensus position is well off the mark.

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New book on uncertainty

John Quiggin5 Comments

Sorry for putting up a second plug in a few days, but it seems as if, after the usual delays, quite a few things of mine are coming out that might be of broader interest than most of my academic work. I’m a contributor to a new book, Uncertainty and Risk: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Gabrielle Bammer and Mike Smithson. It’s discussed in this piece on the ABC website, which talks about Rumsfeld and ‘unknown unknowns’, a topic I’ve talked about before (here at Crooked Timber and here on this blog).

There’s lots of interesting views of uncertainty, in all sorts of fields, from statistics to jazz. You can watch a slowTV video (parts 1 and 2) or hear a more complete podcast of the book launch, with a public lecture on uncertainty and intelligence (in the CIA sense) by Michael Wesley.

One thing that is, unfortunately, certain is that the price of the book will be far too high for all but the keenest readers, so you’ll probably have to wait for it to reach the library if you want to read it – there’s not even “Search Inside” on Amazon.


"Uncertainty and Risk: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (The Earthscan Risk in Society Series)" (Earthscan Publications Ltd.)

You can, however, get 15 per cent off the UK price (save ten quid!) with this flyer

updateHere’s an extended ‘teaser‘ (4.4 Mb) with TOC and one chapter. More to come at the website of the book.

Looking back at the Club of Rome

John Quiggin61 Comments

A point discussed on the blog recently is whether Limits to Growth actually predicted rapid exhaustion of critical natural resources, or whether this was a misrepresentation by much later critics. The text itself isn’t definitive, since it contains some projections showing rapid exhaustion and others (in which discoveries boost stocks by a factor of five) in which exhaustion takes place over a century or so, and also because the projections were revised in later editions. However, my memory is that both supporters and critics focused on the more extreme projections.

I have a couple of pieces of evidence to support this claim. First, I’ve put over the fold a piece by Matthew Simmons defending the Club of Rome and saying

Nowhere in the book was there any mention about running out of anything by 2000. Instead the book’s concern was entirely focused on what the world might look like 100 years later.

But Simmons’ case is undermined by the dust jacket at the beginning of his article which sells the book as ‘The headline-making report on the imminent global disaster facing humanity’. I think most readers buying a book that was sold like this would focus on the worst-case scenarios.

To support this interpretation, here’s a para from a 1979 book, Economics, environmental policy and the quality of life, by Baumol and Oates who begin their Chapter 7 with a reference to Limits to Growth

Certain recent studies have raised the spectre of complete exhaustion of some of the worlds critical resources. they tell us that in the absence of drastic countermeasures, within a matter of decades mankind is likely to run out of petroleum, natural gas and other vital fuels, to deplete virtually all the sources of various minerals such as mercury, copper and silver and to have cultivated essentially all remaining and still usable land. In brief, the world economy will be brought to the brink of catastrophe by hte exhaustion of natural resources.

Baumol and Oates also present in Chapter 9 a “Standard Run” from the World Model showing catastrophic collapse a little over halfway between 1900 and 2100, that is, right about now. Baumol and Oates, like most economists, are critical of Limits to Growth, but they aren’t rightwing anti-environmentalists by any stretch of the imagination. I think it’s fair to say that most readers at the time, whether they agreed with the Club of Rome or not, focused on predictions of imminent resource exhaustion, and not on what might happen in 2070

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Verbing the adjectivised abstraction

John Quiggin7 Comments

I’ve been reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: Fall of a Dynasty about the Indian Rebellion of 1857 with great interest. The complacent reports of the British commanders as they went about destroying the last remnants of independent Indian power are startlingly reminiscent of the “Good News from Iraq” we got so much of in 2003, and which was briefly revived during the now collapsing surge/awakening/truce. More generally, Dalrymple gives an evocative account of the Mughal court on the eve of destruction.

But I was, perhaps unfairly, amused by Dalrymple’s introduction where he extols the merits of archival research, as against the kind of “subaltern history” that pads out existing secondary sources with large dollops of theory to produce more or less interchangeable articles with titles of the general form “Othering the Imagined Construct” (feel free to permute the parts of speech to derive your own). I’ll leave it to others to decide whether this is better or worse than the old standby “Nonsensical Phrase Drawn From Primary Source: Random Word, Random Word, and the Actual Topic of this Book, or the generic economic article of the form “Hot Current Idea, Established Field and Putative Application”.

The other shoe

John Quiggin21 Comments

There’s been a fair bit of discussion of the recent announcement of Volume Two of The Fabrication of Australian History: The “Stolen Generation”.

What doesn’t seem to have been mentioned is that the topic of this book bears no relation to the Volume Two that was announced in 2002, with a projected publication date of 2003, dealing with frontier violence in Queensland. In 2006, it was due out “within the next twelve months”. There was also to be a Volume 3 on Western Australian due out in 2004, of which nothing has been heard for quite a few years. His most recent statement on the subject, in May 2007, suggested that a multi-volume work would be forthcoming “eventually“.

Searching Windschuttle’s site it appears that none of the vast body of material he claims to have amassed on these topics has ever been published. In fact, he barely seems to have mentioned Queensland in recent years, apart from briefly restating his longstanding, and long-refuted attack on Henry Reynolds’ estimates of frontier deaths.

At this point, Windschuttle ought either to put up or shut up.

Hamlet without the Prince

John Quiggin9 Comments

In the February edition of Prospect, William Skidelsky has a piece on the decline of book reviewing. As is standard for any adverse trend in the early 21st century, blogs get a fair bit of the blame. The write-off (lede for US readers) says

the authority of critics is being undermined by a raucous blogging culture and an increasingly commercial publishing industry

and the conclusion is

blogging is best suited to instant reaction; it thus has an edge when it comes to disseminating gossip and news. Good criticism requires lengthy reflection and slow maturation. The blogosphere does not provide the optimal conditions for its flourishing.

As a slow, mature critic, I’m sure Skidelsky is well placed to make authoritative judgements of this kind, based on the kind of lengthy reflection unknown to gossipy bloggers. Still, it would help us instant-reaction types to follow him if he had, you know, cited some actual blogs, perhaps even some that run book reviews.