Thoughts on Books Q1'25

Following the last post in this series, I was actually told by someone that they would like to see the series continue. So, here I am again. Reading is one of things I have been able to do quite a bit in the past few months, as I have been travelling extensively for various things. Equally, those various things have eaten into my time, including time I would have liked to spend reading. There have been several ocassions, often when say on a train, that I have wished to read but have been condemned to do something else. As such, I've perhaps read less than I would have liked. Though, so far this year's reading has consisted of books I have generally liked. My 'to read' list has, unfortunately, not really gotten any shorter, and I have various 'baskets' of books waiting for me to press 'buy.' I am not really getting on top of the problem of having too much to read and too little time, though I am spoilt for excellent books to read, and--I suppose--flush with the raw materials for these kind of posts.

A different reader has asked me, a few times, to make my reading list available for their interest. Well, the exact discussion was that they wanted more opportunities to hear what I thought about ongoing events, not necessarily about books. Yet: I do not want to comment on ongoing events unless I believe I can tie such ideas into longer trends and deeper thoughts I have had; and those trends and thoughts cannot emerge for anybody without reading. To this end, the 'to read' list I post each time should be taken as a snapshot of what I am thinking about, even though I have yet to read the books. The books I plan to read reflect the thoughts and observations I want to explore. If someone is interested in what I am thinking about, I can only advise picking a book from the below list and reading it. (I write this now having written most of the 'reviews'; I am not sure this time around I am reviewing anything so much as commenting on where these books fit into my own thoughts about various topics right now)

Finally, my lack of time has contributed to my lack of blogging. I have not felt able to justify writing for the blog when so many other things go unfinished. I have partly justified writing this because the first quarter has passed. Partly, also, because I have now managed to finish some things (though others remain, annoyingly, unfinished). I want to write a lot over summer, in various ways and on various things. I want an element of that to be on this blog, and so I hope in the next few months to have more things to post. I am also interested in how I can post thoughts without having to write terribly long essays. So, I might experiment with some shorter stuff. I will probably not succeed.

To Read
1. How the World Ran Out of Everything, Peter Goodman
2. The Price is Wrong, Brett Christophers
3. For a New West, Karl Polanyi
4. Newspeak, Slava Gerovitch
5. When China Rules the World, Martin Jacques
6. The World According to China, Elizabeth Economy
7. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders
8. How the World Made the Wesr, Josephine Quinn
9. The New Makers of Modern Strategy, Hal Brands (editor)
10. The Cult of the Irrelevent, Michael Desch
11. Affluence and Freedom, Pierre Charbonnier

How Much is Enough?, Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky

I have stated before that I am a big fan of Robert Skidelsky's work. Though, I have also been critical of it in terms of its detail and elaboration. What I like about Skidelsky's work is the ever present sense of confidence in the writing, coupled with an outlook on matters which often challenges the big picture. I suppose that, in challenging big pictures, Skidelsky does not need to worry so much about elaborating on the small details.

How Much is Enough? fits into this category of challenging the big picture. Written with his son, Edward--an academic philosopher in his own right--Skidelsky broadly argues that society has forgotten the idea of enoughness, and that in seeking to always gain more, we do not only destory our planet, but rob ourselves of the leisure time needed to become our full selves. They start by invoking the idea of capitalism being a Faustian bargain, a deal with the devil, before arguing that humanity has pretty much exhausted that deal, now. To be sure, Skidelsky and Skidelsky are not strictly advocating something post-capitalist, and they are hardly on the degrowther's side of the debate. But they recognise--going back to Keynes--that capitalism has largely done its job, and now humanity is suffering more than it is benefiting from continued work, production, and ultimately, production. It is a provocative argument--one I happen to agree with. Though, my agreement does not mean I didn't get much out of it. Here are a few reflections.

I think the characterisation of happiness and degrowth both miss the mark, but for different reasons. A major point Skidelsky and Skidelsky argue is for the importance of philosophy in everyday life, for thinking about what one wants to do with one's life, and for advocating one's philosophy as a way of living (without, they stress, demanding others adhere to it). This is an interesting argument, and one which forms part of their criticism of happiness studies (putting the pieces together myself, one of the most interesting critiques the authors raise is the question: how often do we actually ask ourselves what makes us happy? I posed this question to some behavioural science students studying happiness, and they seemed initially surprised by the question, then curious. It seems that this question evades happiness discussions sometimes). The discussion of degrowth--or, more accurately, environmentalism--reads in quite a dated way. Skidelsky and Skidelsky often attack a straw man environmentalist who wants to 'undo' all the 'progress' society has made, and return to nature. This, of course, is not the modern environmentalist movement. It is not even the degrowth position, as I understand it, and indeed, I think Skidelsky and Skidelsky are actually quite aligned with some elements of, say, Hickelian degrowth.

Another interesting argument comes in their criticism of how we define goodness and progress and so on. They note, for instance, that the idea of health has been twisted, with 'healthy' now meaning 'perfect health' rather than 'generally healthy.' While I do not think the authors would associate themselves with Illich, I do think they would agree with Illich, who argues very similar things and comes to similar conclusions about critical thinking around consumption. As an aside, I think an important piece of future work (which I guess I might pursue) is to chart how the rationalism of science has transformed social life into a rationalist domain, too. Health doesn't become a maximalist pursuit by accident--once someone measures something and studies it, health becomes the subject of 'science' and thus optimisation. The exact same trick has happened with human intelligence, leading to morons talking about IQ and whether computers are smarter than people, etc.

In sum, I liked How Much is Enough?, though I think it would be very different if it were written today, rather than in 2012. That does not feel like a long period of time, but the conversation has moved on in many ways, and the links between social problems prompt more than the speculative philosophy of this book (which, I reiterate, contains interesting ideas and remains quite radical in its propositions given mainstream debates, even today).

Administrative Behaviour, Herbert Simon

This one was a reread, though a long reread. The purpose of doing so was to go through in exacting, perhaps painful detail. I really wanted to understand this book. So, I've been reading bits and pieces of it for the past year or so, writing copious notes which have now doubled the thickness of my 1997 copy. Anyone who knows me knows Herbert Simon is my intellectual starting point for many questions. I generally begin any thinking from the perspective of bounded rationality, and build out from there. I am also a contrarian, and I have noticed that essentially no behavioural scientist seems to have actually read this book, the book, on bounded rationality. Even the Gigerenzer guys do not seem to dive too much into Simon (though certainly more than anyone of the 'nudgian' tradition).

Here's the thing about Administrative Behaviour. It is not an easy book, certainly not if you became a behavioural scientist through reading popular science books. Neither is all of it relevant. It is, after all, a book about organisations and government, and includes many comments which modern behavioural science does not really care about (I will come back to this). But, and I cannot stress this enough--it is all in here. Pretty much everything behavioural scientists have subsequently 'discovered' can be found as a wayward comment, or even a much longer elaboration, in the pages of this book. My 1997 copy is the last edition Simon wrote, and it is full of comments about information management and clarifications around bounded rationality which I think are still relevant today.

Behavioural science is currently very stagnant, in my opinion. I know many behavioural scientists will disagree with me. Many who do so depend on behavioural science to pay their rent, so I'm not going to begrudge them being defensive. But behavioural science has now fully graduated into the realm of 'normal science' to use Kuhn's language, and has in the past few years learnt some painful lessons about the limits of the conceptual tools currently available. I see, pretty much daily, someone posting something about 'going beyond biases' or using behavioural science in a more 'systemic' way and so on. I also see arguments that behavioural science has been absorped, as if by osmosis, into the best practice of government and private organisations. In either case, the condition is fatal--behavioural science must either become so broad as to struggle to have an identity, or it has become so ubiquitous it no longer makes sense to talk of 'behavioural science' as distinct from 'standard practice.'

I am terribly suspicious of pretty much all pronouncements around behavioural science right now. I want to find new things, and things which might reflect deep thought rather than knee-jerk (re)branding. Hence why I have looked to the book on bounded rationality seems a sensible place to start (it is counterintuitive to find newness in old stuff, but frequently I find it to also be a successful strategy). Firstly, because bounded rationality is much broader than just 'cognitive limits.' This will be, I hope, the subject of a future project. Recognising this, one can (I think) gain such a deeper, more critical grasp of behavioural science today (particularly of the nudgian variety). Secondly, because Administrative Behaviour is about lots of different things. For instance, I think there's huge potential for behavioural science to synthesise decades of organisational studies literature, or cybernetic literature, or even just to develop a critical theory of information. It is all in Simon, and all kind of irrelevant to the current behavioural science project. But, I stress, within these 'irrelevancies' are seeds for something more. I am not confident people will leap to read Administrative Behavior, despite my advocacy. But I think most behavioural scientists should.

Now, the above isn't really a review, is it? So, let me do that quickly. I think this is a really informative book for someone in the field, and a dry, not especially interesting read for the general interest reader. As a friend in the pub once said to me, even the cover is offensively boring. But if you are in the field, like me, every page has insights and observations to think about. There is a reason Simon won the Nobel Prize for this book. Of course, the book was first written in 1947, and academic standards have evolved. Simon cites relatively little literature and uses essentially no empirical data (things improve slightly in March and Simon's book Organizations, from 1958, but not that much). Therefore, one must not treat Simon's work as evidential but as conceptual--as a scaffolding to organise one's ideas.

Science Fiction, Sherryl Vint

I read this book for a paper I have been working on, and hope to have out as a working paper sometime this summer. I picked it up from reading some of the work of my friend Henrik Saetra. I know relatively little about 'serious science fiction' or 'science fiction studies', but I am given to understand that Vint is an authority in this space. Science Fiction is part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, so I was quite confident of the quality. I read the book very quickly, and generally found it informative.

The most interesting areas of the book are those which engage with the history of science fiction, and the often quite unsavoury racism/misogyny which permeates early science fiction. Related to this, I really enjoyed Vint's multiple discussions of how science fiction is increasingly the genre through which minorities and oppressed people's communicate their experiences, and how modern science fiction stands, increasingly, in contrast to the monolithic works of a few white men, writing about world and universes which would be called fascist when not framed in such imaginary light. I read the book not to learn any of this, but it was interesting nevertheless. What I wanted to know was how science fiction could be used in everyday life--how science fiction can be a tool for thinking about technology and social change. I am not sure Vint does as great a job here. There are discussions of how 'serious science fiction' is becoming more established, and Vint frequently emphasises how science fiction is a lens through which to view our own world. But I think I was looking for something more methodological or developed, and I didn't get that from this book.

Though, this book did prompt me to think about something which is kind of an inversion of the 'serious science fiction' discussion, as far as I am aware. Often, the argument is that science fiction can help us think about the future, and that it can bolster things like scenario planning and war gaming (this is what Henrik's paper is about). But I have found myself wondering whether, at a cultural level, the reverse is true. This is to say, science fiction is used to mask or hide the technological realities/brutalities of today. Elon Musk asks us to think about going to Mars, all while Tesla violates labour laws. Sam Altman asks us to imagine superintelligence and AGI, while right now, today, people have their intellectual property stolen and communities go without water, while data centre carbon pours into the atmosphere. We are asked to imagine robots and cyborgs as something like the Terminator; meanwhile my voice is amplified through my cognitive and physical connection to a computer, and a factory worker works at the pace of an automated assembly line. Vint demands that we see the reality in science fiction, and suggests that science fiction reveals this reality. But those who suffer the effects of technology today do not need fiction to reveal their plight; it is those who do not suffer who might lean on fiction to distract them from the plight they hate, but must permit. (Incidentally, this is why I hate Black Mirror--it fictionalises stories which, in many instances, could just be documentaries somewhere in the world)

Rationality and Freedom, Amartya Sen

I've never really read Sen, which seems like a crime for an economist. I chose Rationality and Freedom to start because Dhami and Sunstein discussed it a bit in their book Bounded Rationality, which I read last year. I have mixed feelings on Rationality and Freedom.

Let me start with the negatives. I find social choice theory to be extremely boring. I appreciate that the problem of aggregating social preferences is an important problem in society, but a) it comes across as a much more abstract problem when one sidelines the role of power and influence in the exercise of collective action, and b) Sen does not really do anything to make the discussion any more engaging. On point b), I know this is a collection of essays and academic papers, and academic papers tend to be dry. But it is also a book, one which is meant to be read as a separate body of work, and I don't think the social choice stuff is very engaging. I am sure it is academically brilliant--Sen won the Nobel Prize for it, after all--but I learnt that this is one area of economics for which I have essentially zero interest.

He's what I liked about Rationality and Freedom, or at least what I found interesting. Firstly, Sen talks a lot about the transitivity of preferences, and proposes various thought experiments which suggest that intransitive preferences are a bit silly. This should not be surprising to any behavioural economist. What is surprising, though, is that such a critique does not pop up that often on the behaviouralist's radar, though perhaps I need a better radar. Yes, Dhami and Sunstein mention Sen, but they do so in passing and kind of as a nod to a wider set of economic thinkers. They don't engage with Sen, in the same way that they don't really engage with Simon (in a book call Bounded Rationality no less... you can read my review here). Speaking of Simon, here's something else I've never really come across before. Sen engages a lot with Simon. Sen doesn't make a huge deal out of it, but in my opinion Sen essentially agrees with Simon's characterisation of rationality. For instance, Sen talks about maximising behaviour, and argues that people do maximise when they decide. They simply decide through a realistic set of criteria, compared to economic rationality. In this sense, Sen argues that people do try to maximise, but they do not optimise. Sen explicitly links this argument to Simon's idea of satisficing, and essentially says these are the same thing. When Simon says people choose a good enough option out of all the options available to them, Sen says people choose the best option out of all the options noticeable (for lack of a better word) to them. Hence, Sen can talk about what we might call 'local' maximisation in the same breath as he talks of Simon's ideas.

I was not aware of this link (or others between Sen and Simon) before reading this book, and having spoken to colleagues, they too seem surprised when I put these two in relation with one another. It is not that no one ever noticed Sen's work--he's one of the most prolific living economists. Rather, I don't think behavioural people have really noticed Sen's work (though, as above, I think be wrong and just ignorant). As above, if one is interested in pursuing new intellectual tracks for behavioural economics and behavioural science, there might be something here. Maybe not. But, also, maybe.

Shaping for Mediocrity, Various

Shaping for Mediocrity is one of those books I have thought about quite a bit in the past few weeks. I was given a copy by a friend to read, and I wasn't entirely why. Nevertheless, I typically prioritise reading that is recommended to me, as I trust the judgement of others. To say I enjoyed this book would be the wrong word, but that I found it informative is certainly the case.

The book is written by a group of academics and ex-academics who were fired from the University of Leicester in 2021. They note that the book is part a retelling of the events that took place, from their perspective, and part a critique of the strategy which ultimately meant they were unable to resist their sacking. It is most interesting because it is written by academics with organisational studies and political economy backgrounds--the kind of people who try to understand organisations and the role of power and politics in how those organisations work. They deploy these skills to dissect what happened at Leicester; why they were made redundant; and how a better university could be achieved. In doing so, they do weave a genuinely interesting narrative.

I cannot deny I read this book with great interest in part because I see the parallels. I work within a UK business school, as a political economist (with a growing interest in organisational studies) within a department that is expressedly heterodox and critical in outlook. To hear the authors of Shaping for Mediocrity tell it, I would be wise to hold a realistic assessment of my professional position in my head. They seem to believe that their academic backgrounds made them a threat to senior management, while their principles (which in no doubt intersect with their academic backgrounds) made them oppose and challenge the homogenisation of Leicester and the offensive banality (my stylisation, but I think their sentiment) of much of what Leicester was doing. It is also hard to not look around, and see the increasingly dire financial state of UK universities; or to read a newspaper, and see the constant vitriol levied at academics, who are despised in Britain. This is despite, in my opinion, often not seeking enemies and often actually delivering exceptional outcomes. Reading Shaping for Mediocrity left me with the sense of the walls closing in. It is something I will continue to reflect upon.

I explained this to the friend who lent me the book. They, I think, understood my assessment--that Shaping for Mediocrity is a warning that you (as in me) could be next. But they tried to alleviate some of my concerns. Perhaps this was just a kindness, but I will include their counterargument anyway. Essentially, Shaping for Mediocrity comes from the perspective of those who lost their jobs, after resisting a management restructuring. It is natural that this group of academics will be more inclined to chalk up their suffering to systematic, structual failing rather than their personal actions and aggravations. Furthermore--and this I do agree with--it is dangerous to make 'academic' your personality. Being an academic is first and foremost a job, and when one forgets this, one risks seeing malice, personal malice, in any action which disrupts the equilibrium. Having said this, though, the authors cite various statements and documents which I think could support an interpretation of malice on the part of Leicester, and certainly this is how the authors take it. I also think that anyone who is critically minded could not fail to see that modern liberal management practices often hide an unsettling authoritarian tendency, and that society as a whole is deeply anti-intellectual (as above, people in the UK hate academics).

So I don't really know what I think of Shaping for Mediocrity. It is interesting and informative for someone in my position; it was terribly depressing in places, and I wish the authors well. As a book, it was fine--I would have liked more academic analysis and less of a tell-all memoir style.

Administrative Burden, Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan

Speaking of depressing, Administrative Burden was a bit depressing, but for a very different reason. I spend a lot of time--not all of it by choice--thinking about behavioural sludge and administrative burden. I do not especially enjoy the topic but I know a lot about it and get asked about it a lot, and I can see how scholarship in this area could make a positive change in the world. So, I spend some time in this space where I can.

Having said this, I'd never really sat down with Herd and Moynihan's book (mostly because administrative burden is a bit separate from sludge in terms of the literature, but I'll get back to this). However, I've been mulling over a paper idea on 'technological disintermediation' for some time and felt I needed to really engage with this work. I am glad I did. I think for anyone interested in this topic, Administrative Burden should be seen as the go-to. It is really well written and full of examples. But besides that, it is remarkably thorough in its conceptual outlook--more than I had previously appreciated. And herein lies the point of depression for me: I'm not sure what else there is for me to say in this literature. Herd and Moynihan recognise that burdens come through how people experience systems--sludge, the thing behavioural scientists focus on--as well as organisational resource limits and political incentives to either help or hinder. And I think to myself, what more is there to say?

Maybe what is needed is to build up a critical mass of studies examining different burdens. It might be interesting, as a political economist, to take my political economy hat to the study of why people can't get access to the benefits they are entitled to, and so on. But then what happens with this critical mass? Alternatively, one might turn to critique. For instance, I'm not convinced the term 'sludge' is especially useful any more. Sludge is contained within the broader scheme of administrative burden, and I think focusing just on sludge actually encourages us to overlook things like organisational capabilities and political incentives. This is bad, in my opinion, because while sludgebusting might achieve some quick wins, I suspect the most substantial and long-lasting wins will come through attacking the political causes of burdens. For instance, anyone who studies sludge should be advocating for single-payer healthcare in America. I see that patterns of Nudge repeating with Sludge. Lastly, maybe the focus should be on translating administrative burden into something both politically actionable and motivating. Estimating the economic costs of burdens, for instance, is probably worthwhile to support advocacy (something I am interested in). Understanding the contextual factors which influence experiences of burden, too, would be worthwhile. I think this is the stuff that Herd and Moynihan are interested in when they talk about the field being young and much work being necessary.

Still, I think Herd and Moynihan already have done a massive amount of the requisite work. As above, I am now questioning where I can contribute value, and indeed, whether the term 'sludge' contributes anything. Maybe I am panicking in the way a PhD student panics when they discover a similar paper to their project. But in my head it is not like this. It is much more practical. I am interested in where I can contribute value and original insights, and further, if others are doing the same. Right now, Administrative Burdens leaves me impressed but kind of blank in terms of what I can do next.

Bounded Rationality, Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten

Having read Dhami and Sunstein's book, also called Bounded Rationality, I thought I ought to give Gigerenzer and co.'s contribution a go. These two books are very different. Dhami and Sunstein sought to write a textbook which, while interesting, I think missed the mark in places. Gigerenzer and Selten have edited a volume of papers and workshop discussions which is decidely less of a textbook and more of a manifesto of the fast and frugal heuristics programme. Dhami and Sunstein's book is from 2023; Gigerenzer and Selten's volume is from 2001. Insofar as I am quite interested in also writing something substantial on bounded rationality, I am encouraged--though surprised--at both the difference between these books and the gaps that both books leave.

The word 'gap' is maybe unkind. But it is interesting to me how even the FFH tribe don't spend that much time with Simon's work. As above, Simon's work is rarely empirical, and so maybe I am wrong to place so much weight on it. But I think by placing less weight on it, the discussion becomes unmoored, and bounded rationality becomes an even vaguer term, stretched by the competition and interpretation of sporadic empirical results. Gigerenzer and Selten give substantially more credit and discussion to Simon than Dhami and Sunstein do, and as this is a collection, state that the book is meant to disseminate discussion rather than discuss a topic (bounded rationality) especially holistically. So, what for me is a 'gap' (holistic discussion of Simon) probably is not actually a gap for many other readers.

As above, the book focuses on the FFH perspective, which one would expect. I do not begrudge Gigerenzer and co. advocating their views when Dhami and Sunstein clearly bias themselves towards the HB side of this debate. It is to be expected. Though, having read other things written by Gigerenzer since this book came out (2001), it is interesting that the same kind of heuristics keep coming up as examples--e.g., the gaze heuristic, the recognition heurstic. Above, I have criticised 'nudgian' behavioural science for being a bit stagnant and unsure of what it wishes to become. I might levy the same criticism at 'Gigerenzian' behavioural science. Though this is perhaps unkind--I am, after all, much more ignorant of FFH than HB.

In my ignorance, I might also pose some questions which, maybe, FFH scholars have answered. For instance, Bounded Rationality discusses how the recognition heuristic works by essentially supplementing a complex information synthesise into a simple one which levers a correlation between a key piece of information (have you heard of X?) and the answer. For instance, choosing the most recognisable city when asked to choose the most populous city works because there is a correlation between the recognisability of the city and its population (more people, more chatter about the city, more opportunity for things to happen which one might hear about, etc). When understood this way, one could make a prediction(!): recognition will not work well when task success does not correlate with recognition. This is to say (to use FFH language), when the heuristic is not ecologically rational. This is a very basic observation, one which FFH people will be screaming at me about. The subtitle of the book is, after all, The Adaptive Toolbox, with heuristics understood as tools to be deployed as and when they are suuitable for a task (personally, I think this is quite a nice notion). The reason I emphasise prediction, though, is that the disjointed, maybe ad hoc, style of the FFH perspective is directly attacked by Dhami and Sunstein. Maybe this is unkind of them; maybe they, as with me, are more ignorant of FFH than they should be? But framing things in terms of prediction might help the FFH guys counteract some of these accusations.

Lastly, and I will concede I don't really know how to phrase what I am about to describe, I think the arguments in this book are interesting from the perspective of information management. Take the gaze heuristic--you fix the angle of your gaze towards a falling object, and then run backwards or forwards to maintain that angle. This is an often successful means of catching a tossed ball. It is much more effective than using calculus to estimate the trajectory of the ball at minute intervals. The heuristic is informationally frugal, using only the fixed angle and two parameters (backwards or forwards); the calculation is informationally expensive, requiring many different datapoints. To this end, as an observation, the FFH group have often emphasised the fast element of heuristics; but the frugal part has so much more utility today, especially as people talk about big data and hyperscaling AI systems, etc. Here's the bit I don't know how to phrase: the fixed angle essentially proxies for thousands of datapoints, in kind of the same way that a good explanatory variable in a regression will explain essentially all of the variance of a regression model using thousands of kind-of-irrelevant variables. And that's really interesting! The problem we have today is that theory is being abandoned for big data correlations and unexplanable patterns, and that's because it's easier to throw everything into the model than to think about the underlying causal mechanisms. That we might interpret heuristics as essentially deploying good statistical proxies to achieve a parsimmonious (read frugal) 'algorithm' (read heuristic) is interesting, and something I want to think more about (obviously because there are links to Simon's thinking about information and AI. I am also aware Gigerenzer has, in recent years, written some stuff about data and AI which I've not read, but might make an effort to get around to).

The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies

So far this year, this is the only book I have recommended to someone. It is also a book which, the more I think about it, the less I think of it. This is not to call this book bad. But I do think the enthusiasm I had for it upon for reading it has waned as I have thought about it more. I'm not quite sure what Davies set out to do with The Unaccountability Machine, but based on the writing, I'd infer something like this happened. Davies pitched to his editors the idea of writing a book around why nothing works in the UK anymore. That's a pretty topical, spicy thing to write about. This began with a review of things that are broken, and the key idea of the book, which is the accountability sink (systems which erode accountability for decisions). But then, after writing up all these examples which would reinforce to the liberal FT reader readership of this book that nothing works, Davies was faced with the problem of explaining why. And--as Davies describes it in the book--the answer came through stumbling across Stafford Beer--I great addition, but one which does not feel wholly planned.

All the Stafford Beer stuff is what I love about this book. I genuinely think Davies' explanation of Beer's ideas are the most accessible I have come across, and I am excited that more people are thinking about management cybernetics (it's a small group, but growing). The trouble is, as above, I don't think this book was ever meant to be about Stafford Beer. If that were the case, I think the book would have been called something like The Man Who Could Have Run the World, stealing from the title of Open Democracy's obituary to Beer in 2002. So, after an entertaining introduction and an informative middle section, the book has to return to the motivating question of why nothing works. And here, I don't think the book does as good of a job. And it is from here that my gripes with the book begin to grow. The book is written in an accessible, journalistic style (which, as above, is great for discussing inaccessible ideas like Beer's management cybernetics). In several instances, this leaves the writing to feel a touch shallow. For instance, a key part of Davies' argument for why nothing works is that changes in management ethos around the 1980s prevented frontline workers from reporting issues up the chain of command, or acting autonomously to deal with those issues (which is the opposite of how Beer thought workers should be managed). But the chapters which deal with these changes in management could be read just as bog standard complaining chapters which frequently adorn the pages of left- and centre-left popular books.

I want to reiterate that I like this book. I am glad this book exists and that it is, maybe, contributing to an important conversation about different approaches to management and organisation. But this book doesn't do much more than that. It does not try to hang one discussion upon the coatpeg of any idea or field; does not try to situate ideas within a wider historical context; does not really engage with questions of politics and power as much as it must (much of Beer's writing after Chile reflect him having to tackle the politics of his ideas, and if Davies' was trying to influence minds and change practices, I think he would be more candid about how Beer's ideas entail a conflict with managerial power and capitalist ownership structures). Though, I must confess, I think part of my souring on this book is because of what I read immediately after it, Graeber's The Utopia of Rules.

(I have added this note in the editing phase because I forgot to include it when writing, and now do not know how to weave it in. Another reason why I think Davies stumbled across Stafford Beer is that so much of what Davies discusses can also be found in the pages of a much more famous, but more accessible, scholar: Herbert Simon. I was constantly surprised at how absent Simon was, and I have to conclude Davies just is not familiar with much of Simon's work. This sense of grasping for a thinker is why I think Davies came up with the problem before the solution, and why, in my opinion, the book reads the way it does. To be clear, Simon is referenced, but across two pages and in a surface-level kind of way. For those who know, the absence of any comment on Simon or that whole tradition of management theory is a big oversight. Again, though--I like this book!)

The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber

Maybe it is because I had just read The Unaccountability Machine, but it is weird how close these two books are, beat for beat. At least the first half of Graeber's book. Now, Graeber does not discuss management cybernetics. But he does essentially ask the same question as Davies: why does nothing work anymore? And, unlike Davies, Graeber is more than happy to go into stupid detail, to place things in an extended historical context, and to be bold in his questioning of politics and power. To finally move on from Davies--though, I must stress, there is scope to do a comparative analysis of these two books, so thematically similar as they are--I do wonder whether Graeber and Davies disliked each other. Davies bizarrely mentions an interaction with Graeber over his review of Graeber's book Debt. It seemed to imply Graeber did not appreciate what Davies had to say (David Graeber is not beyond criticism, and I personally think something like Bullshit Jobs is quite a shoddy piece of work, compared to other bits of Graeber's writing). Then, Davies writes The Unaccountability Machine, which could liberally reference The Utopia of Rules's the first hundred pages or so, and it does not. It leads me to hypothesise there was some tension between the two, but maybe I'm just seeing links which aren't there.

Getting onto The Utopia of Rules itself, I think this is Graeber's best book (of those I have read). Bullshit Jobs is his worst book but the one you recommend to get people reading Graeber. Debt is his most accomplished and famous book, and the one you encourage the bookworm to read. But The Utopia of Rules--a collection of essays on bureaucracies and the politics of bureaucracy, feels the most like Graeber speaking to you through the page. That can be a bit intense, at times, and I would not casually recommend this book. There are parts where Graeber goes very methodological, as if explaining anthropological approaches to a lecture theatre full of students. The discussion can meander from the main point, can dip in and out of popular culture or an obscure academic text or a personal anecdote. For all the reasons The Unaccountability Machine is great, The Utopia of Rules is not. Graeber does not want it to be easy for the reader. But, as above, I think that's because the topics being discussed are not easy ones. As Graeber emphasises, any bureaucracy is a system built on violence--that you must fill in this form, visit this building, wear this uniform, etc. Graeber will not allow this reality to settle; he demands the reader face it, and that boldness of analysis is really appealing. It would have been fascinating to hear what Graeber thought of Stafford Beer, or better yet, to have them talk to one another. Because, as above, one gets the sense in reading about Beer's later life that he was stuck, grappling with the serious and dangerous politics of the ideas upon which he had built a career. And in The Utopia of Rules, those some forces are that which animate Graeber's desire for the left to rediscover a critique of bureaucracy.

This meandering does not necessarily lead anywhere. Graeber offers critique, rather than a proposal for what to build next. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the more practically minded person will probably look at Davies' discussion of Stafford Beer and think there are more explicit recommendations there than they'd find in The Utopia of Rules. But for me, who is determinably anti-practicality, I think The Utopia of Rules is a wonderful collection.

Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant

Lastly, I read Brian Merchant's wonderful book Blood in the Machine, which focuses on the Luddite rebellion in 1810s England. Merchant sets up the book as a historical comparison piece. He proposes to first discuss the Luddite rebellion, and then show the links between it and the modern technology industry. Merchant doesn't actually do this very well, but it's something I can forgive. The thing that's great about this book is the depth into which the story of the Luddite's is told. I confess I know relatively little about the Luddites, so Merchant might be making characters out of insignificant people, or else personifying events which were more nebulous and group driven. Still, Blood in the Machine has such a compelling narrative, and Merchant shows himself to be an excellent writer in this regard.

It is partly why I can forgive Merchant's rather surface-level comparison sections; because he makes the reader want to follow the Luddites and ensuing drama of 1810s England, rather than ruminate on the absurd evil of Uber or Amazon. I get the feeling this was a problem Merchant faced, too. I feel like he, too, fell in love with the history and choose to make this book overwhelmingly about that and the people involved. It was a good decision; it is definitely the strength of the book. But, more so, I do not think we need another tomb decrying the evils of Silicon Valley. As above, we all know the tech industry is bad, and if you don't, you're not paying attention. What is more important is to ground that knowledge, to give it a foundation from which to build a response and a resistance. This is where Merchant's comparison is actually alright. He reflects on the strategies the Luddites used, where they were successful, and why they ultimately failed. A truly historical work would have provided much more context around the Luddites than Merchant does--I am hesitant to extrapolate the notion of General Ludd to the fights faced by tech workers today. But neither does Merchant, to his credit.

Reading Blood in the Machine reminded me quite a bit of John Rees' The Leveller Revolution, about the radical politics of the English civil war. What I disliked about Rees' book was how dense it was, and how I never really felt like I had momentum as I worked my way through it. Merchant's book does not suffer from this issue, while also not compromising too much on some good historical detail. But while I wish Rees wrote more like Merchant, this is not why the book came to mind. The Leveller Revolution came to mind because it, like Blood in the Machine, documents the hidden history of Britain, once rife with radicalism and rebellion. Neither of these books are how-to guides, and it would be dangerous to remove their subjects from a historical context. One must oppose violence and tyranny with the tools available now, not those one would ideally like to have (Marx said it better, but you know what I mean). But I cannot shake the feeling that these works are important animating instruments; reminders of the ideas, ambitions, and beliefs of real people.