Call for Podcasts

These days I listen to a lot of podcasts. I cycle to work and the podcasts help to distract me from traffic and make the ride more exciting. I pick up a lot of lectures from the LSE, the University of California TV system, Woodrow Wilson School, and Duke. I listen to some National Public Radio and Bloomberg and get the promo podcasts for a few magazines. I also download some science popularization but find these too hysterical to bare, so they are piling up unattended on my iTunes.

I would like to listen to more interview and roundtable discussion on history. The model I am looking for is Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time on history, or Russ Roberts’s EconTalk on economics. Does any one have suggestions?

Research methods as manipulating actors

Historians of economics are well aware of the non-neutrality of the research methods economists use. Or are they? Sure, we know that also research methods – statistics, experiments, field observation, armchairs, you name it – have their histories. And obviously, that makes them an integral part of how economics developed. However, in this reasoning the research method itself has remained a passive and neutral information producing device. Jan Tinbergen became famous for combining mathematics and statistics in a novel way, in which the resulting econometrics was and is understood as a tool that can be applied by anyone alike. Similarly, Fogel and Engerman applied a whole bunch of empirical methods to the history of slavery, in which their tools might have been inappropriately used or interpreted, but in themselves were have been understood as neutral. Despite being aware that the tools have their own histories, historians of economics have essentially maintained a view of research methods as neutral and passive.

            I want to contest this view. Research methods are not neutral tools, but actors that actively shape economists’ view of the social world. The exact same experiment makes Vernon Smith and Richard Thaler see two different social realities, and makes these two economists develop their own theories in diverging ways. It is not just that economists like Smith and Thaler have different economic views, and in particular it is not the case that their views converge because of the laboratory experiment, data collection, or field experiment. Quite the contrary, the experiment actively diverges Smith and Thaler’s economics. Research methods are not neutral and passive tools, but actively manipulating actors who need to be treated as such.

Tim Leonard on social Darwinism and mythology

The following is a comment sent by Tim Leonard in reaction to a post by Clement published in early June.

————————

Broadly speaking, social Darwinism refers to the use of Darwinian and other ideas about evolution, notably “survival of the fittest,” to explain or to justify aspects of human society. Were the term neutral, the “social” qualifier would be superfluous, since Darwin himself believed that his theory of evolution by natural selection encompassed the human animal too. But “social Darwinism” has, in fact, rarely been a neutral term. Since its first English-language appearance circa 1877, “social Darwinism” has been a term of abuse used by critics to discredit views they opposed.
Darwinism’s reputation has ebbed and flowed in the 150 years since the publication of the Origin of Species, but social Darwinism remains a slur, used only by critics. I know of no one who has ever described his or her own views as social Darwinist. As historians, this tells us something important. We might wish that “social Darwinism” could be made neutral and refer to ideas that Darwin actually endorsed; but concepts are path-dependent, and, if the past is any guide, “social Darwinism” will survive, and will continue to function an epithet.

2.

While “social Darwinism” has always been used to discredit ideas critics dislike, critics have disliked different things (as Bellomy rightly observed). Thus “social Darwinism” has been applied to phenomena as diverse as plutocracy, racism, eugenics, militarism (especially in the name of national superiority), imperialism, and laissez-faire capitalism. That’s a lot of semantic freight, and the set of intellectuals who endorsed all these things is essentially empty.
Today, “social Darwinism” is most commonly associated with an evolutionary defense of free markets, premised on the critic’s view that economic competition is brutish and amoral, just as competition in nature is “red in tooth and claw.”
The identification of social Darwinism with free markets we owe to Richard Hofstadter’s (1944) Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915. It is Hofstadter who gave “social Darwinism” its currency and who made Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner into the arch-social Darwinists. Both Spencer and Sumner defended free markets, and both were, as a result, targets for reform-minded progressives (such as Hofstadter) hostile to individualism and free markets.
(Try this parlor game: ask a scholarly friend to name three social Darwinists. I wager that most (specialists excluded) will not be able to come up with three, but that most will be able to come up with two, and, moreover, that those two will be Spencer and Sumner – a measure of Hofstadter’s success, or, rather the success of a narrow reading of Hofstadter).
Hofstadter’s (or, rather, the narrow reading of Hofstadter’s) mistake was two-fold. First, neither Spencer nor Sumner were especially Darwinian. Spencer was a Lamarckian who preached “bootstraps” self-improvement over natural selection, and who ardently believed in human progress. Sumner’s pro-market arguments were only patchily upholstered with Darwinian sentiments. What is more, Spencer and Sumner were both opponents of imperialism, militarism, plutocracy and other ideas that have been associated with social Darwinism.

Second, Darwin did not see nature as red in tooth and claw. To the contrary, Darwin insisted that the natural competition sometimes called the Struggle for Existence need not involve conflict, much less violence: cooperation could well be the fittest strategy. Darwinian fitness meant far more than mere physical strength, as evidenced by the evolutionary success of a relatively weak species, homo sapiens.
Hofstadter judged the American Gilded-Age economic order a jungle, and therefore judged any defense of it as “Darwinist,” whatever its particulars – “social Darwinism” was simply Hofstadter’s synecdoche for the charge that, as Bannister had it, Spencer and Sumner “wrongly apologized for power and privilege (1979: xvii), where, in the Gilded Age, power and privilege were assumed to reside with the plutocratic captains of industry, and not (yet) with the captains of the ship of state” (Leonard 2009).

3.

None of this is to argue that evolutionary ideas were unimportant to Progressive Era social science. The opposite is true. Ideas drawn from evolutionary science profoundly influenced Progressive Era social science – one could hardly make sense of the eugenic influences upon economics otherwise.
But Darwin was not the only scientific source of evolutionary thought, and laissez-faire economics was not the only corner of social science influenced. This, then, is the [double-sided] myth: that Darwin was the sole source and that Spencer and Sumner (qua paragons of free-market economics) were the sole exegetes.
Progressive Era evolutionary thought was not very Darwinian – indeed, historians of biology refer to the period as the eclipse of Darwinism – natural selection in particular was a minority view until the “Darwinian synthesis” of the 1940s. Progressive Era evolutionary science was protean, fragmented and plural, enabling scholars to enlist evolutionary ideas in support of diverse, even opposed positions in political economy. Many social scientists, including those who cast Spencer and Sumner as bête noirs, were influenced by Darwinian and other evolutionary ideas.
Hofstadter (1944), incidentally, was alert to the latter point – he even had a term for the use of evolutionary ideas by reformers, Darwinist collectivism. (It didn’t catch on). Hofstadter preferred planning to laissez-faire and he preferred cultural to biological explanations in social science. This made for ambivalence with respect to the progressives, who also championed reform, but trafficked heavily in biological explanations.
The burden of Leonard (2009) is two-fold: first, that “there are, in effect, two Hofstadters present in SDAT. The first (call him Hofstadter1) could safely disparage biological justification of laissez-faire, for this was, in his view, doubly wrong . . . .The second Hofstadter (call him Hofstadter2) documented, however incompletely, the [biological] underside of progressive reform: racism, eugenics and imperialism.” Second, in 1944 Hofstadter1’s contempt for free markets was far more developed than Hofstadter2’s still incipient skepticism regarding progressivism, an asymmetry that had consequences for the subsequent fate of ‘social Darwinism’ in social science.
Hofstadter did not make the myth alone – stories are altered in their retelling. But I think it’s fair to say that Hofstadter (as Hoftstadter1) played a leading role in discrediting free-market economics as social Darwinism, and, thereby, wrongly implicating Spencer and Sumner (and sundry plutocrats) as Darwinists and as the social Darwinists. (Geoff Hodgson, incidentally, gives prior credit to Talcott Parsons’ 1930s efforts to purge biology from sociology).
At the same time, however, Hofstadter2 debunked the notion that Darwin influenced only laissez-faire economics. (This is SDAT’s ambiguous legacy). Hofstadter2 showed that some of what looked reactionary to mid-20th century liberal eyes (“collective Darwinism”) had been called progressive forty years earlier. But, perhaps because Hofstadter2’s ideas were undeveloped relative to those of Hofstadter1, it was decades before historians took up the tentative connections Hofstadter2 made between progressivism and eugenics, racism and imperialism.
Debunking the myth of “social Darwinism,” then, does not mean ignoring evolutionary influences on Progressive Era social science. To the contrary, debunking requires documenting evolutionary influences on Progressive Era social science, which were, contrary to myth, plural in origin and diverse in effect.

– Tim Leonard

Worrying about the audience

Considering economists in a wider cultural context, not just as scholars, but as public intellectuals, as politicians, as popularizers, as entertainers, a recurring theme is “audience”. It is said that economists perform differently to different audiences. I react to this idea in the following video:

Reader Meet Author @ HES 2009

You can call it scandalous; you can call it Mickey Mouse; you can even call it fried chicken, if you want. But the session titled “From History of Economics to Histories about Economics” at the last HES meeting in Denver was just a thrilling experience. Let me explain in a few words what its purpose was. The last few years have witnessed the development of a literature about the history of economics outside of our field. Historians of science, economic historians and journalists (among others) have begun to write about the same issues we are (supposed to be) interested in and most of the time, they do not quote historians of economics. How did it happen? It is very simple, actually, and could be summed up in Stanley Fish’s terms: 1) Do your job, 2) Don’t try to do someone else’s job, 3) Don’t let anyone else do your job. Historians of economics have tried to act as economists, using the past to build alternative economic models or criticizing mainstream economics on its own terms. By doing so, they have created a “What If” History of Economics, one that builds parallel stories that can be understood only within the community, but offers virtually no insight on its recent developments, its status as a science or its cultural influence. On the other hand, you have another kind of accounts, such as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. They provide a more caricatural view of the economist as a torturer, mass-murderer and conspirator. Historians of economics may find them shocking (that’s the word, indeed), misinformed, misleading and dangerous, but those accounts have a significant appeal beyond our small community, and by refusing to address them in some ways, considering them as popular rubbish, we choose to remain in self-referentiality.

During this session, Loïc Charles, Harro Maas and Tiago Mata presented a perspective on the future developments of our field, not by restating previous positions, but by looking at possible new ways of doing the history of economics. Looking at recent developments in other fields such as history of science, economic history and political science, Loïc observed that non-disciplinary histories of economics are currently being written, offering a new intellectual space of trade between these various communities. Harro, by resorting to the metaphor of the historian as a curator, showed that we can build new narratives on the history of economics if we try to go beyond the text, arranging economics as a series of objects. For someone like me who studies the place of visual representation in economics, this metaphor has a strong appeal. I look at the large amount of visual materials I collected over the years (books, digital pictures and scans) and realize I use them in a very conservative way in comparison to the vast possibilities that are open if I think of them as pieces of art which would have to be curated in an exhibition. Would it provide a different kind of history? Last but not least, Tiago used Fish’s concept of interpretive communities to construct a picture of the public imagination of economics in recent works, without distinction between works intended for an audience of specialists and those intended for a larger audience. In Tiago’s account, indeed, there is no “audience” understood as this abstract mass of people out there, there are only anonymous individuals, internet users and bloggers, all contributing to create some understanding of economics.

I would not assert that these papers are perfect. They were intended for discussion rather than for immediate publication and I should say that the presentation itself seemed to me better than the actual papers. The presentation, actually, was quite spectacular. It had a kind of restrained violence toward the audience – the violence became less retrained during Tiago’s presentation when spectators were exposed to Klein’s striking rhetorics by way of graphic images – and the tension was palpable. In the same way art history has gradually given way to visual studies and visual culture, these papers may be viewed as an attempt to get rid of the “old” history of economics and to replace it by “economics studies” or “economic culture”. This is not a mere question of wording, it is a deeper transformation of our field. The skepticism of many attendants, explicit or implicit, makes sense.

HES 2009 by the numbers

I took the participant list of the last History of Economics Society (HES) meetings, and classed the participants by nation of affiliation, i.e. nation of home institution. (In the few instances of scholars with two homes, I took as reference the institution of their email account. The “Other” category collapses all countries with only one participant: South Africa, Australia, South Korea, India, Mexico, Denmark and Belgium.) The population was 155.

This exercise says little if one has no term of comparison and I have to look in my files to see if I have lists of participants for earlier HES meetings, or ESHET. What is striking is that North America accounts for less than 50% of participants, with a few institutions heavily represented. France was the second largest at the Denver meetings. 63 Europeans nearly matched the 64 participants from the USA. Is HES still American?

What should we do with Stephen Enke?

If I ever wanted a bad guy to feature in my stories, I had it: Stephen Enke (1916-1974).

Enke is recorded as one of the most prolific writers in top journal in economics around the 1940s, specializing in innocuous topics such as monopolistic competition (Chamberlin was in his PhD committee at Harvard) and international trade.

But around late 1940s, he started writing on subjects with a more charged and dubious moral dimension. One of the first economists hired by the RAND Coporation, he founded the Logistics Department there in 1953. In his researches at Rand, he had no scruple pondering questions of life and death for millions of people in terms of  financial cost and benefits. He was far from being alone, would you immediately reply. I know, but Enke has pushed the cost-benefit logic several steps beyond.

Enke left RAND in 1958, and in 1959 seems to have spent a year in India studying the explosion of demographics. One of his  solutions to the “population problem” was to propose the payment of cash bonus to Indian males accepting sterilization through vasectomy (he estimated for the Review of Economics and Statistics that the rational payment to the sterilized person should amount to 700 rupees).

During the 1960s, Enke visited South Africa and Rhodesia. One of his contributions that I have been able to retrieve was a piece entitled: “Why should we apologize for recent colonialism?”, published in Optima, the journal of a local holding. In my recollection, this article was detailing the great economic benefits brought by colonial countries to Africa, very much in line with Enke’s approach to other social issues.

Then after a 5-year stint as professor of economics at Duke, among many other duties that retained him often in Washington, in 1968 Enke became the manager of economic development programs for Technical Military Planning Operation – TEMPO (General Electric’s  Center for Advanced Studies at Santa Barbara, California). There, he continued to work on “economic effects of slowing population growth” but also on “the economy of South Vietnam”, according to some archives held by the Hoover Institute.

Overall, Enke is an economist that does not figure in the gallery of portrait of my heroes. So I was quite disconcerted to find, in relation to my researches on economists,  McCarthyism and the Owen Lattimore affair (sorry for this bit of self-promotion), that Enke did not stand on the side I expected.

In 1949, he had refused to sign the loyalty oath put in place by the University of California. I don’t have the record at hand, but appearing before some committee of professors, he stated that he had complied to many security checks to join the RAND Corporation, but did not see why he would have to undergo the same kind of scrutiny coming from the Regents of a university. It is not clear whether or not he was ultimately fired from UCLA (Robert Leonard in his “War as a simple problem” 1991 article says he was, but new archival sources would show that Enke finally complied).

In 1953, when solicited by Fritz Machlup to donate some money for the defense of the principal target of McCarthy, Owen Lattimore from the University of Johns Hopkins, Enke’s reply was the following (click on the pic to enlarge it):

Enke to Machlup, Feb 17, 1953. Machlup papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

This facet of Enke does not fit squarely with the cold warrior figure he was in other respects.

So, what should we do with Stephen Enke? I am not calling for a judgment of praise or condemnation (so “out” the bad guy story). I just try to understand this career and positions which taken together, do not make complete sense to me. Having access to his family archives (if any) or the memory of his former colleagues would help, I suppose.

From HISRECO (Antwerp) to HES (Denver) – June 2009

(if the persons pictured would like to see their portrait removed, please send me simply a note).
HISRECO: Annual conference in HIStory of RECent ECOnomic thought, taking place in Europe.
HES: History of Economics Society, gathering in the US or Canada.

First diner in Antwerp

Jose presenting on the history of psychology

Second diner in Antwerp

The organizing committee of the HISRECO conference

Denver’s skyline

A country of contrasts.

Exhibit of wonderful quilts in Denver’s City Hall

A quilt exhibit in Denver’s City Hall

Another item in display in Denver’s City Hall

From inside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver

Steve Medema, organizer of the HES conference, introducing Donald Winch’s distinguished lecture

Donalrd Winch’s distinguished lecture

The same album, but quicker to browse (smaller-sized pictures), is available here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=121531&id=522296095&l=14fd88058c

‘Mickey Mouse History’ @ HES 2009

This generous, albeit unoriginal, assessment met my presentation at the 2009 HES meetings. It came from a prominent member of our profession. We share a profession. We don’t share a craft. We work on similar subjects and materials but we make of them different artifacts. After laborious cutting, assembling, and tinkering, I get an argument on how ideas co-produce society and culture, some of my colleagues conclude on the rightness of economic interpretation.

My folly?

Politeness does not come with seniority and there is no reason why it should. Tenure is after all full dominion over self. However, lack of seminar manners towards an initiate, like me, seems to contradict the rhetoric of “nurturing” young scholars. It may be that contributions of the young are welcomed provided they remain within the fold of the old. It would be a strange reversal of the world if the established had to listen, or even consider, the arguments of the junior staff.

Despite my bitterness, and after all has been said, “Mickey Mouse” is not a bad label for someone trying to make sense of popular culture and economics’ part in it. And, I do have big ears…

Micro-Macro under Historical Scrutiny

Candido Portinari's tile panel ("Boys Swimming", 1955) (Portinari Project Archive, all rights reserved)

“The Integration of Micro and Macroeconomics from a Historical Perspective” is the theme of the Fist International Symposium on the History of Economic Thought (ISHET) to be held at the Department of Economics at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, on August 3-5, 2009. The international speakers include Robert Gordon, Michel De Vroey, Wade Hands, Kevin Hoover, Bruna Ingrao, Robert Leonard, and Philip Mirowski. A host of local scholars will discuss the papers presented at the symposium.

Since many of you will not be able to attend the symposim (shame on you!), the organizers are working on having it streamed live on internet and recorded (in order to make the videos freely available on internet afterwards). For further information on this (to be posted later) and for further details, please check the symposium webpage at:

http://www.usp.br/feaecon/ishet/

Pedro Garcia Duarte & Gilberto Tadeu Lima (organizers)

P.S.: The poster of the symposium and the webpage use the above painting by a famous Brazilian painter, Candido Portinari (1903-1962). How do you see its relationship with the title/topic of the symposium?

How did Lord Keynes die?

The history … I have to tell you [is] this. You can put it on the record or off, whichever you want, it’s kind of amusing and you’ll enjoy it.

I went back in October of ‘46, and the first thing I did when I got back to Washington for any period of time I had been back and forth all the time in between was to get my teeth fixed at the dentist. And the dentist was a great guy. He filled teeth with gold and he believed in the gold standard and these fool economists who wanted to get off the gold standard were silly, because all this meant was the price of gold went up. Anyhow, he’d get me there to fix my teeth and read me a lecture on the gold standard. He said, “Mr. Blaisdell, you know Lord Keynes?”

I said, “Yes, I know him.”

“Well, you know, when he was here last time?”

And I said, “Yes, I know, I know very well.”

He said, “Well, he has trouble with teeth and continuously failed to fix them. I looked at him and I [the dentist] said, ‘Lord Keynes, I think we’d better take this tooth out. It should be extracted. It’s causing you trouble.’ And Keynes said, “No.”

He said, “Well, Lord Keynes, really, it’s infected. It’s a bad abscess, and I would advise you to have it out.”

And Keynes said, “No, please drain it, I will have it taken care of when I get back to London.”

Said the dentist, “I told Lord Keynes, ‘You let that tooth go and in six weeks you’ll be dead.’ “

And, by golly, in six weeks he was dead.

———–

[Oral History Interview with Thomas C. Blaisdell, Jr. , pp.42-44. Retrieved from The Truman Library.]

American exceptionalism

When reading Dorothy Ross’ The Origins of American Social Science, I was surprised to see that she relied on the concept of “American exceptionalism” -which I understood as the belief that the US had a kind of special destiny in this world, a belief which impregnated the social thought of the 19th and 20th century.

This concept put me ill at ease, as it was not clear whether “American exceptionalism” was a belief (among others) held by the intellectuals studied by Ross, or if Ross herself thought that indeed, there is such a thing as a unique and distinctive “Americaness” to be accounted for by historians.  I had forgotten all this, until I read this morning in a history of the labor standards:

The study of the American role in the international labor standards movement also contributes … to an  understanding of general American history and the American policy process. It clarifies the extent and nature of American exceptionalism, that is, the tendency for the United States to follow an especially distinctive or restrained social policy course compared to other industrial democracies.
(Edward C. Lorenz. 2001. Defining Global Justice. The History of U.S. International Labor Standards Policy, Univ. of Notre-Dame Press, p. 8).

I am really not sure of the fruitfulness of this distinction. To be clear, I find it irrelevant and parochial. Of course, nations have their particularities, their traditions, etc. And if the American people see themselves as having a particular destiny in history, then it is a relevant intellectual feature to be taken into account by the historian. But it seems to me that the historians have no use of this concept to characterize their own work. After all, on what ground should a country’s history be declared “exceptional”? I am sure their is an extensive debate in historiography about this, and I would be glad to learn more about it!

Is social Darwinism a myth?

Few recent concepts have as complicated a historiography as “social Darwinism”. To make a long story short:

Geoffrey Hodgson

- Thanks to a beautiful bibliometric study by Geoffrey Hodgson published in the Journal of the History of Sociology, we know for sure that the expression “social Darwinism” was not much in use in Anglo-Saxon academic literature before the 1940s – and why.

Richard Hofstadter

- In 1944, historian Richard Hofstadter’s wrote a study of evolutionary analogies in American social thought during the 1870-1920s, and called it “Social Darwinism in American Thought.” Since then, the term has been ubiquitous. Because of Hofstadter’s book success, most people inferred that “social Darwinism” was indeed widely used in the historical period covered by the book, and that it designated a corresponding intellectual movement, with its representative figures and texts, etc.

- In 1979, Robert Bannister wrote “Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought”. In my opinion, Bannister’s project was ambiguous.

Robert Bannister

One could say that he rightly tried to clear up the misunderstanding that had developed since 1944 and Hofstadter’s book. Social Darwinism was not widely used as an expression in the US of the late 19th century, nor did it represent a coherent body of thought, as a too-quick reading of Hofstadter’s book would have it.

But one could also say that Bannister was defending something stronger than that. He really seemed to imply that social Darwinism was a myth – that in fact, the denomination covered no relevant meaning at all.

- In 1984, Donald Bellomy wrote one of the finest pieces in intellectual history that I came across.  In “Social Darwinism” revisited, Bellomy ponders Bannister’ claims that social Darwinism was really a myth.

Donald Bellomy

The scholarship Bellomy displays is simply *huge*, and his reflection is so very nuanced. Right from the introduction, he clarifies that the “myth question” is simply not the relevant one:

- There is no consensus on what “Social Darwinism” really is? Far from proving that the concept is a myth, it should merely recall us that “confusion over the definition of a term is not itself cause for dispensing with it; virtually any designation of a broad cultural phenomenon can be distressingly malleable, as Arthur O. Lovejoy demonstrated in his dissections of romanticism, primitivism, and pragmatism.”
- No one thought of himself as a “Social Darwinist”? That “needs not trouble us unduly. After all, medieval schoolman, classical republican, and romantic poet were not categories available to individuals at the time but were imposed, with more or less finesse, by later generations.”

After over 100 pages of careful study, Bellomy concludes that “Whether or not “Social Darwinism” was a myth, in the restricted sense by which Bannister interprets myth, every serious thinker had to come to terms with Darwinism and evolution.”

This is were I had left the historiographical debate on social Darwinism. But in 2009, the “myth” interpretation gets a new boost, with a forthcoming article by one of the most prominent members of our profession:

Leonard, T.C., Origins of the myth of social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought. J. Econ. Behav. Organ. (2009), doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2007.11.004

Tim Leonard

Leonard’s article focuses on the Hofstadter episode of this historiographic saga, and endorses Bannister’s revisionist views on social Darwinism – that it should be considered a myth, essentially built by scholars from the Left who distrusted laisser-faire policies. Surely, calling something a myth is not an invitation to further historical investigation of the cultural phenomena it pretends to denominate. And I think more historical investigation is precisely what is needed here, as Bellomy had emphasized in his conclusion:

“Finally, a determination of Darwinism’s influence will emerge only through immersion in the intellectual artifacts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They must be studied in their own terms, not simply as antecedents of contemporary social and political arguments or fields or research, if our goal is to comprehend either the past or present.”

In many previous articles, Leonard contributed a marvelous analysis of the eugenic views of the economists in the Progressive Era. We need more of the same kind of work on the intellectuals and businessmen labelled as social Darwinists.

Note: it is a pity that the article by Bellomy, of the size of a small book, was published in a journal impossible to find in most European libraries (except for the LSE library, as far as I can tell). The reference is:

Donald C. Bellomy, “Social Darwinism’ revisited,” Perspectives in American History 1 (1984): 1-129.

Game over

I’ve been making notes on the media debates about the economic (formerly financial, and credit) crisis. My plan was to write down in notecards: themes, characters, positions, and narratives. Then cover a large table with the color coded cards. Shuffle them. And rearrange them in sequences and distances, taking photographs of each setting. With no pretension of making an art installation. This is my native, Ven diagram, way of thinking through the thematic patterns of popular discourse.

Regrettably I am too slow. My speed impairment is expressed in my street running, my pool swimming, my football striker instincts and my paper writing. Worse still, I don’t usually win games: chess, checkers, Go, Unreal Tournament, Fifa 07. Picking last week’s New Yorker I notice how I lost another race. I feel cheated, my notecards stacked mercilessly into one single paragraph.

Please take a deep breath, and read the following:

This crisis is the culmination of events and trends reaching back, depending on your perspective, four, seven, seventeen, twenty-two, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, sixty-five, or a hundred and two years. (…) The causes are technological, mathematical, cultural, demographic, financial, economic, behavioral, legal, and political. Among the dozens of contributors and culprits, real or perceived, are the personal computer, the abandonment of the gold standard, the abandonment of Glass-Steagall, the end of fixed commissions, the rating agencies, mortgage-backed securities, securitization in general, credit derivatives, credit-default swaps, Wall Street partnerships going public, the League of Nations, Bretton Woods, Basel II, CNBC, the S.E.C., disintermediation, overcompensation, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, Phil Gramm and Jim Leach, Alan Greenspan, black swans, red tape, deregulation, outdated regulation, lax enforcement, government pressure to lower lending standards, predatory lending, mark-to-market accounting, hedge funds, private-equity firms, modern finance theory, risk models, “quants,” corporate boards, the baby boomers, flat-screen televisions, and an indulgent, undereducated populace.

(Friends, family, and fans, worry not, I will pull through and have already a new paper idea: to expose the New Yorker as meta-journalism.)

Self help or science fiction?

Businessmen are steely figures. They hire and fire. They invest and disinvest. They make decisions in the haze of uncertainty. And for all that they calculate, reason, plan.

Yet, in contrast to this materialistic character, they subscribe to mysticism. Executives are known to pay absurd sums to “management experts” to hear a litany of pedestrian commentary on the great business adventure. For instance, Jim Collins‘ new book, making the cover of Business Week, Why the Mighty Fall: And Some Companies Never Give In. The core of the book is identifying the 5 stages of failure:

1. Hubris born of success
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
3. Denial of risk and peril
4. Grasping for salvation
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death

In reading it I had the feeling it was a rip off of the Kubler-Ross model, of the 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) reordered. It is clearly charismatic for some audiences. (He definitely looks good! Like a younger Michael Porter.) It is undoubtedly successful discourse. But what is it? Is it self-help psychology for organizations? Or is it fiction with scientistic claims to spice the imagination?