Stumbling and Mumbling

Happiness policy

The government is planning to measure happiness regularly, delivering on David Cameron’s promise to pay more attention to general well-being.
I welcome this (with a big caveat I‘ll come to), but I’m not sure Tories should, because the sort of policies that would increase happiness are rather radical. Here are four.
1. Full employment. “Unemployment has a huge, negative impact on people‘s well-being“ says Andrew Oswald. A government that wanted to increase overall well-being would pursue full employment. It’s not obvious that this is the coalition policy.
2. Urban planning. Economic research confirms what we know - that commuting long distances makes us miserable. A serious happiness policy would change this, by - for example - locating offices nearer to homes.
3. Promoting marriage and friendship. Good marriages (pdf) and friends (pdf) make us happier, so happiness policy would encourage these. But how? The answer is not (just) tax breaks - as these merely convert couples from long-term cohabitees to marrieds. Instead, what is required are social institutions that improve the matching function between singles. I’m not sure what this entails - less commuting? more leisure? less social mobility?- but the answer might not be business-friendly.
4. Increased autonomy. Professor Oswald points out that well-being “is if anything diminishing through time.” One reason for this, he suggests, is to be found in Francis Green’s work (pdf), which shows that job satisfaction is falling as task discretion declines and effort increases.
This chimes in with work by Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, which shows that “procedural utility” matters. One implication of this is that happiness increases if we have more control over our political affairs and over our working environment.
In these senses, then, happiness policy is leftist policy.
Except for one thing. There’s also good evidence that religious people are happier, which suggests that happiness-enhancing policies would encourage religious belief and church-going.
And herein lies a clue as to what might be wrong with happiness policy. Happiness might be increased by cultivating false beliefs, by encouraging people to take Huxleyesque soma which inoculates them against the world‘s evils. If happiness were all, it would be better to be stupidly content than rationally dissatisfied. Which tells us that happiness should not be all.

Black Mass: a review

Modern politics, says John Gray in Black Mass, "is a chapter in the history of religion." This is true of communism as well as liberalism, revolutionary politics as well as gradualism: "Whether they stress piecemeal change or revolutionary transformation, theories of progress are not scientific hypotheses. They are myths which answer the need for human meaning." The collapse of these secularized myths of utopia - seen, says Gray in the blood-soaked streets of Iraq - has led to the re-emergence of religious politics.
It's a bold premise. And I've five problems with it.
1. He's too keen to intellectualize his readers' prejudices. His long critique of neo-conservatism, with its alleged roots in the Christian right, will play well to north London dinner tables, just as Gray's earlier work in the 1980s intellectualized the "new right." This pandering to dominant opinion leads him to embrace a gloomy version of the climate change proposition, in contradiction to his general scepticism about scientific hypotheses.
2. He fails to address the fact that "liberal interventionism" has sometimes worked - for example in Sierra Leone. It's not wholly hubristic utopianism.   
3. He's too desperate to fit all thinkers into the "utopian" box. To accuse Hayek of having a "delusive vision" and Rawlsian liberalism of being "another utopia" is surely a stretch.
4. He's too dismissive of the possibility of progress. He mocks Trotsky's claim that under communism, "man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler". But he fails to see that this happened even without revolution. Anyone who opened their eyes in a northern town in the 1970s will have seen countless very short old people with bandy legs and hunchbacks - the results of childhood malnutrition that we have largely banished in the west. The Flynn effect says we're getting smarter. And we are, in many ways wiser: no-one now has the optimism about government control that the Fabians, Keynes or Crosland had. And just ask any woman, gay or black Briton whether there's been progress in the last 50-100 years.
5. He's too quick to identify a desire for progress with optimism about human morality:

Human knowledge tends to increase, but humans do not become any more civilized as a result. They remain prone to every kind of barbarism...no theory of politics can be credible that assumes that human impulses are naturally benign.

I agree. But this is why it's so important to build liberal institutions - because these (in particular the market) harness and control men's evil. Hedge fund managers do not cut off people's hands, commit genocide or murder people for having the wrong god. This is not because they are nice people, but because they have better things to do.
Gray's pessimism - which is better expressed in Straw Dogs or Heresies - contains some truth. But dogmatic pessimism can be as much a myth as utopianism.

Don't buy my book

I know I'm sailing with the wind of public opinion here, but can I suggest something? Don't buy my book. It's not worth it. There are (at least) six reasons for this.
1. It's got some facts in it. Facts are bad. They create doubt. This is why so many people like talking about Iraq, Israel and Islamism. They can do so unburdened by evidence.
2. It doesn't corroborate your prejudices, whatever they are. Books and articles are only brilliant if they confirm your beliefs; no-one ever said: "There's a brilliant article by Janet Daley/Polly Toynbee/Matthew Parris, but I disagree with it." By this standard, my book's awful.
3. It can't be summed up in a few words; if it could, I'd have written a few words, wouldn't I? But best-sellers can be so summarized: God doesn't exist and if he does he's a twat; unexpected things happen; Islamists aren't very nice.
4. I don't think it's worth stating the bleedin' obvious. But the success of those books suggests this is what folk want.
5. The book's about politics. But politics is none of our business. Politics is only about what the MSM think about career politicians. Only an imbecile would pretend that real people, with ideas, should concern themselves with it.
6. If my book sells, I'll become a member of the chattering class. I'll have to go to dinner parties in North London. I dunno whether this'll be worse for me or for everyone else.
So, please, please don't buy my book. And to all those of you who haven't done so - thank you.

In praise of bad writing

DK and Belle de Jure write of the need for good writing. However, it's not obvious to me that good writing is better than bad writing.
Certainly, bad writing is no barrier to career success. Polly Toynbee has won a batch of awards - including something called the George Orwin prize - even though her columns are full of cliches. And our future PM's latest book - which I haven't, well, the courage to read - is apparently full of it. "Writes abominably", "turgid yet vapid" says Matthew Parris. "Plodding banality" says Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Having suffered through Moving Britian Forward, I can believe them.
There are at least two benefits of bad writing:
1. It gives an air of profundity. This is a trick Brown learned from many French philosophers (Althusser and Foucault being by no means the worst offenders), English sociologists and (yes) economists. If you write long indecipherable sentences, people will think you're profound and clever rather than muddled and incoherent. If you write clearly, you risk people seeing clearly that you're a fool.
In the City, there's a small army of investment writers who are paid to make the inane twitterings of fund managers seem important. They don't do so by pursuing clarity.
2. It allows readers to see what they want. Clear writing gives us something to disagree with. Ambiguity doesn't. People wanting to avoid controversy - politicians wanting to keep a united party, "distinguished people" wishing to avoid looking foolish - will therefore write badly.
In my case, it's mere stupidity that causes me to write badly. I'm not sure this is true for everyone else.

Shameless self-promotion

Danny Finkelstein writes:

The politics of “but” needs a champion. In an era where politicians lack credibility, why not try something unthinkable? Why not try the whole truth? Why not try saying that a new policy has a cost, that a fresh law may not work, that a reform has some risks?

Well, I'm loath to push myself forward (cough), but here's the blurb to my forthcoming book, due out on April 20:

The book is a plea to remove managerialism, and replace it with genuine politics. We should ditch the idea that a central elite can manage away social problems, and instead debate about conflicting ideals.

Here's the publisher's site. Here it is on Amazon (subtle hints).
Do not, however, search for "Chris Dillow" in Amazon. You'll get directed towards a vile and depraved piece of child abuse. Truly, good and evil dwell side by side. 

Sen's Identity and Violence: a review

The big idea in Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence is simple and true. We all have multiple identities, many different groups with which we identify:

I can be, at the same time, an Asian, a British citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-brahmin...This is just a small sample of diverse categories to each of which I may simultaneously belong.

It is, he says, cruel, tyrannical and stupid to reduce us to single identities. And yet this is what British multi-culturalism - which he re-names called "plural monoculturalism" - does. It reduces people to members of religious communities. He complains:

Must a person's relation to Britain be mediated through the "culture of the family in which he or she has been born?...A nation can hardly be seen as a collection of sequestered segments, with citizens assigned fixed places.

This, like much else in the book - such as the demonstration that "western values" of tolerance and democracy are not truly western - is excellent. But there are four issues which aren't tackled fully.
1. How do some identities become more salient than others? Take Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 7/7 bombers. He was a son, brother, Yorkshireman, Englishman, university graduate, shopworker, Muslim. So why did he choose to identify himself so strongly with just one portion of his identity - Islamism - that he was willing to kill? Sen is excellent on the pathology of the "colonized mind". But is this the whole story?
2. Is my word "choose" here the right one? How far can we choose our identity? Clearly, there are limits.  Sen is right and wise to oppose the two polar opposites - the wholly rational, freely choosing economic man on the one hand and the person fully constituted by a single "culture" on the other. But what happens between these two polar opposites? Do people choose identities? If so, to what cognitive biases are they prone? What rationality do they use to choose?
3. What tricks do rulers use to manipulate us into single boxes? Sen says:

A Hutu labourer from Kigali may be pressured to see himself only as a Hutu and inclined to kill Tutsis, and yet he is not only a Hutu, but also a Kigalian, a Rwandan, an African, a labourer and a human being.

True. But this misses the important point - that it was so easy for this multi-faceted human being to become a mono-identitied murderer. How did this happen? What can we do to stop it? Why is it so easy (apparently) to get people to identify with religion and ethnicity, when Marxists have generally failed for decades to get them to identify with their class?
4. Power. Sen does not fully challenge a key fact - reducing people to single identities is in the interests of our rulers. If people are seen only as Muslims, "community leaders" can get power and influence by claiming to speak for the "community," in a way they could not if being Muslim was seen as only one part of people's identity. And politicians go along with this, becase it's easier to manage people if they are boxed and labeled.
This raises a question. If we are to regard each other as we should - as multi-identitied human beings, rather than carriers of a mono-culture - don't we have to change social structures as well as thought processes? Shouldn't we break down the hiearchies that have an interest in reducing people to mere symbols?

Book meme

I'm in demand. Not, strangely, because Kathy, Gillian, Shania and Sarah have responded as I'd hoped to my picture, but because Marcus and Shuggy have tagged me. So here goes.
1. Name one book that changed your life
Countless have influenced my opinions - most strongly those of MacIntyre, Mill, Elster and Hayek. But for materially changing my life, it's George Sabine's History of Political Theory. In showing me how fascinating political thinking could be - an impression no-one would ever get from listening to politicians - it inspired me to do PPE at Oxford.
2. One book you've read more than once.
Many books of non-fiction. Among fiction, I've read most of Dostoyevsky twice (in translation).
3. One book you'd want on a desert island
How to build a boat and navigate by the stars. Failing, that, the Encyclopedia Britannica.
4. One book that made you laugh.
The Code of the Woosters.
5. One book that made you cry.
The ending of A Hundred Years of Solitude gets me:

...everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

6. One book you wish you'd written.
John Roemer's Theories of Distributive Justice. I wish I was a fraction that clever.
7. One book you wish had never been written.
I can't agree with Marcus's choice of Mein Kampf. Had it not been for Nazism, I wouldn't be here - because if my grandad hadn't joined the RAF, he'd never have met my nan. So I owe my existence to Mein Kampf. For similar reasons, I can't say the Bible.
So, it's a toss-up between the Koran and Middlemarch. We had to read the latter at school. Christ, it was dull.
8. One book you're currently reading.
Russ Barenberg's Bluegrass Guitar is occupying much of my attention. Also, Douglass North's Understanding the Process of Economic Change and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell.
9 One book you've been meaning to read
Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.
10. Now tag five people.
If they're up for it: Tom Hamilton, Matt Murrell, Lisa Rullsenberg (anyone with Gram and Jolie on their iPod must have great taste), Tom Freeman and James Higham.

No hiding place

I’ve been caught by Tim. For what it’s worth, here goes.

Number of books I own: 800ish, excluding journals.

Last book I bought: ABRSM Scales and Arpeggios for Guitar, Grades 6-8.

That’s’ 6 to 8 peeps. 6 to 8 .

Last book I (re)read: Marcus du Sautoy’s Music of the Primes.

Five books that mean a lot to me (apart from these):

1. Kahneman and Tversky: Judgment under Uncertainty. The classic description of how thinking goes wrong.

2. Penguin Essays of George Orwell. Kahneman and Tversky teach us how to think. Orwell teaches us how to write. Who needs more?

3. John Cochrane: Asset Pricing. One for the day job. It reminds me of the enormous gulf between real thinking about stock markets and everything you read in the dead tree business.

4. David Ricardo: Principles of Political Economy. Partly because it reminds me of my college days, but also because Ricardo was a better economist than Smith – just as Kalecki was a better economist than Keynes (a claim I’ll justify one day).

5. Peter Kennedy: Guide to Econometrics. I’d never have gotten through my masters course without it.

People I’m passing the baton to (with apologies to them): Ken, James, Blimpish, Jamie and Shuggy.

The chain

Blimpish has passed the stick to me, so here goes:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?

This is obvious, isn’t it? I need to be a book that’s short enough to be memorized; that will inspire people to overthrow totalitarianism; and that will help them build a new political order.

It can only be Mill’s On Liberty.

I wouldn’t mind if other people wanted to be MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Philippe van Parijs’ Real Freedom for All, Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order, Shiller’s New Financial Order and Bardhan and Roemer’s Market Socialism. I reckon we could cobble together a decent state from that lot.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Nope. There are enough real women I can’t cop off with, without adding fictional ones.

What are you currently reading?

Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos and Roger Scruton’s The West and the Rest.

The last book you bought is:

Those two, and Philip Kitcher’s The Advancement of Science.

The last book you read is:

I’ve just finished James Bartholomew’s The Welfare State We’re In. He knows nothing about football.

Five books you would take to a desert island:

I’ll assume the previous occupant left the complete works of Shakespeare, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopedia Britannica. So I’ll take:

P.G. Wodehouse – The Jeeves Omnibus (vol 1 if I can’t have them all). The funniest books ever written.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky – The Brothers Karamazov. I must have missed a lot when I first read it.

Mark Blaug – Economic Theory in Retrospect. To remind me of what’s so good about being an economist.

George Sabine and Thomas Thorsen – A History of Political Theory. Good for dipping into.

Piers Pughe-Morgan – The Insider. (I'll not link). It’ll make me grateful to be alone on a desert island rather than back in England.

Who are you going to pass this stick to, and why?

Robert Jubb, Jon Barnard and Tom Hamilton. They seem like intelligent well-read chaps, who’ll give much better answers than I have.

Books that changed my life

Ayn Rand’s centenary – celebrated here and here – set me thinking. What books have changed my life?

Like most Englishmen, I don’t number Rand’s work among them. Maybe her dogmatism and enthusiasm for self-improvement jar with English readers more than American ones. And personally, I’m wary of regarding works of fiction as philosophical or political texts. Once we start doing that, we’re on the slippery slope to thinking Harold Pinter is an intellectual.

So, here are five books that have deeply influenced me.

1. George Sabine – History of Political Theory.

I was given this to read during my politics A level; as Oliver Kamm will attest, and often demonstrates, we got an education in Leicester in the early 1980s. And it opened my eyes to the universe of ideas. Politics, I learned, was about something much more interesting than the platitudes and personalities of politicians. The book also inspired me to get to Oxford, which changed my life, though not wholly for the better.

2. Robert Nozick – Anarchy, State and Utopia.

Most of us of a certain age will have read this at the same time as Rawls’ Theory of Justice. What a contrast. Whereas Rawls is dull, ponderous and unimaginative, Nozick is great fun. Whatever else, it’s surely one of the most readable books of philosophy. And Nozick is the acceptable face of libertarianism: whom would you rather have a drink with – him, Rand or Hayek? (In England, this question is important.)

Granted, his attempts to justify property rights are deeply inadequate. But his critique of patterned conceptions of justice – the Wilt Chamberlain story –is powerful, as is his defence of rights.

Personally, though, I got something else from Anarchy, State and Utopia. It led me to Nozick’s The Nature of Rationality and to Newcomb’s problem, which should undermine all our ideas about what rationality is.

3. John Roemer – Free to Lose.

You don’t have to believe in nonsense like the labour theory of value to be a Marxist. And you can combine radicalism with clarity of thought and expression and economic literacy. That’s what I learned. Sometimes I feel like the only one who did.

4. Jon Elster – Solomonic Judgments.

Elster, more than anyone else, introduced me to the importance of bounded rationality as a political issue. He led me to Kahneman and Tversky, and prepared me for Hayek; you need to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate Hayek. He also showed that critiques of rationalism shouldn’t be the monopoly of the right.

5. Alasdair Macintyre – After Virtue.

The incoherence of our moral thinking is rooted in the nature of modern western societies. A critique of modernism and emotivism, this is surely a more reflective and appealing defence of virtue ethics than anything by Rand.

Among the runners-up, I’d put: Mill’s On Liberty, Feyerabend’s Against Method and Shiller’s Macro Markets.

I stress that these aren’t necessarily the best books I’ve read, nor those I’d most recommend, or even those that articulate what passes for my thinking. They’re just those that have influenced me most. It’s a personal choice.

So, what have I missed? What will this list look like in 10 years’ time? What should it look like? Suggestions welcome.