The power of ideas

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Some years ago I read Masters of the Universe by Daniel Stedman-Jones, a history of the Mont Pelerin Society with a focus on how it came to have such a profound influence on policy, first in the UK and US through Thatcher and Reagan, and subsequently on the whole western world. It made a big impression on me, opening my eyes to the Milton Friedman assertion about how important it was to make sure the ‘right’ ideas were around, in the air, when a moment of crisis created political opportunities. The Mont Pelerin economists had kept the free-market faith from 1945 onwards, working at building their institutional network (mainly via Chicago) and seeding their ideas.

I’ve now read The Great Persuasion by Angus Burgin, which covers the same history from a slightly different perspective. Its emphasis is less on the practical politics, more on the evolution of the ideas of the Society’s members (including its internal rifts). One of the same points about Hayek and his colleagues jumps out, though: “In adopting this strategy [avoiding policy engagement], they demonstrated an extraordinary faith in the capacity of abstract ideas to generate substantive political change,” Burgin writes.

Indeed Milton Friedman, a great communicator, was one of the first leading lights to embrace public engagement much more actively – his most influential article was probably a New York Times essay, on maximising shareholder value, still distorting our economies. The book also underlines how much the core ideas of the Society shifted over time, from an initial postwar insistence on the importance of government and rebuttal of ‘Manchester’ laissez faire, with the shift from Europe to Chicago and the growing influence of right wing American donors – and of the dominance of economists as opposed to philosophers.

The two books are good complements, along with Quinn Slobodian’s books on neoliberalism. I haven’t yet read his latest, Hayek’s Bastards, but the earlier Globalists is well worth a read.

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Turn Left

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I’ve been letting these posts about my reading slip recently, for reasons of general busy-ness. The last thing I want to do of an evening or lunchbreak is more sitting at my screen, especially in such lovely sunny weather. Still, time to return with a recommendation for a lovely memoir. It’s Turn Left by Illah Nourbakhsh, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon.

The book isn’t about computers and AI, or very little. It is the story of an immigrant from Iran to the US at a young age, and the book begins with how – interesting – his original nationality makes it to fly in and out of the US (this was written well before Trump). There follows what is in many ways a classic immigrant tale – the navigation between two cultures, striving for and achieving success – and it’s a beautifully written story. Nourbakhsh writes: “Every immigrant who has lived here for decades spends much of their time in a self-constructed bubble, with friends and collagues who almost never bring up the whole immigrant thing. But the boundary moments are an exception, when we operate outside our constructed social networks and suddenly become immigrants again.”

However, the book does end with his work in the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon, whose motivation he describes as follows: “I was constantly troubled by the collision of complex ideas [in this case about autonomous vehicles] and what I saw as the technologists’ Achilles heel: a total lack of reflection regarding systems-level change and unintended consequences.” The CREATE Lab for community robotics was established to counter such techno-optimism; it takes on technology projects co-produced with the community – although as he points out, funders tend to want big and shiny tech projects rather than community-scale ones.

One example is a community project to measure illegal emissions of pollutants from a factory; the data gathered through sensor systems and analysis, linking the plant to local asthma and cardiovascular disease, eventually led to its closure. Nourbakhsh writes: “This is a story of community empowerment – of rebalancing the broken power structures in our society that provide privilege, expertise and believability to corporations and government over the people. It is totally unacceptable that rebalancing such inequity requires years of work and foundation funding for a technology lab in a university; but that is the fight we choose to embrace.”

Cue loud cheers. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I love its author’s philopsophy of life – it ends with the idea of ‘left turns’, the unanticipated changes of direction in career or life; or there’s the imperative to “move at the speed of trust,” without breaking things. I read the book in proof last autumn; it makes for poignant reading now the rich and powerful have tipped the balance back in their own favour in the US. But all the more important to have reminders like this about the right direction.

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Catching up

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It has been a busy term indeed. As well as all the usual, we’re working towards the transformation of the Bennett Institute into the Bennett School of Public Policy, an important initiative for the University of Cambridge. Which is by way of saying I’ve been reading a bit less than usual and am certiainly blogging less. So this is a catch up post.

I enjoyed Wages for Housework by Emily Callaci, a history of this aspect of 1970s feminism. It’s a campaign I wasn’t much aware of as a callow teenager during that decade, although very much into reading classics like The Second Sex, The Female Eunuch and The Women’s Room. The author is US-based and although the book covers activities in Italy and the UK also, my sense is that there was more energy in the campaign in the US. The book does a good job in delicately drawing out the tensions that the slogan Wages for Housework created: did it literally mean paying for the hours of unpaid work every household involves? If so, where would the money come from – and would it even be desirable to bring care for one’s own household into the monetary economy? Or was it rather a way to draw attention to the structural dismissal of the importance of household labour – and if so, why focus on such a restrictive slogan? Of course, I’m all in favour of measuring the value of unpaid work in order that it is valued in policy decisions, and that measurement will typically be monetary; but monetising the home is another matter entirely. The story is told through a biographical approach to the movement’s leaders, and the book is an enjoyable read, capturing well the flavour of 1970s feminism – the energy, the exhilaration, the justified anger.

8186jrMQylL._AC_UY327_QL65_Stefan Zweig’s Journeys was – as was to be expected – a somewhat depressing read, essays about his travels in the 1930s. But it ends with a rather lovely tribute to the calmness of the English, which he attributes to our love of our gardens: “A half hour or an hour spent daily in the company of flours, of trees, of fruits, in the company of the eternal in nature, that hour or half hour during which they are totally detatched from events and matters on the outside, seems to me by its power of relaxing to be at the origin of the marvellous calm the English people, enjoy, which to us remains incomprehensible or at least inaccessible.” (Respect for the length of the sentence btw.) Seems like we’re back in “Keep Calm and Carry On” territory.

71cnZnsmIoL._AC_UY327_QL65_I was looking forward to Worldbuilders: technology and the new geopolitics by Bruno Maçāes as I’d read a couple of intriguing reviews. Sad to say I found it impossible to follow and gave up. What to make of passages like this: “During the Cold War it was still possible to delimit two geographic areas under the control of Washington and Moscow. You could say the natural element was still present. Neutral space made something like the separation between these two spheres logically conceivable. Today, we inhabit a fully developed technological system. Can Washington and Beijing break it apart into two spheres?” After several reads I think I understand this – the claim is that it’s not possible to achieve the same complete separation between systems in the digital (rather than physical) environment. But if this is right, I disagree. In any case, I don’t know whether the difficulty is over-literal translation or an originally challenging writing style but this wasn’t one for me.

41xnYGNt2IL._AC_UY327_QL65_Otherwise, a lot of non-work reading, including through long flights to Stanford and back. I recommend Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, Ian Rankin’s Midnight and Blue, and A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar. As a committed notebook-writer (and stationery fetishist in generaI) I thoroughly enjoyed The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen.

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Leviathan, supersized

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My dear husband gave me a Daunts book subscription for my birthday so I get a lucky dip new paperback each month. A recent one was my colleague David Runciman’s The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs, first published in 2023. As David writes too many books for me to keep up with, I hadn’t already read it. The core argument is that human societies have already ceded many decision-making powers to non-human entities, namely states and corporations.

I read most of the book thinking, ‘Yes, but….’, as it’s a neat argument but not watertight. It starts with Hobbes, and the idea of non-human persons as it developed in different institutional forms. A key difference with decisions made by machine agents seems to lie in their autonomy or lack of openness to change or redress; and changing that requires them to be part of states and corporations rather than separate entities.

The book does, though, sort of acknowledge this towards the end: “If the machine decides what happens next, no matter how intelligent the process by which that choice was arrived at, the possibility of catastrophe is real, because some decisions need direct human input. It is only human beings whose intelligence is attuned to the risk of having asked the wrong question.” He goes on to link this back to the claim that the state is a ‘political machine’ or ‘artificial decision-making machine’ so there is no difference really between states and AIs – but this, again, makes the use of AIs in political domains part of the state machine.

He concludes: “For now the bigger choices is whether the artificial agency of the state is joined with human intelligence or artificial intelligence.” Will AI crowd out the humanity? Looking at the US now, this seems like a question from another era, a gentler era, though. The new regime there has merged state, corporation and AI in a behemoth that dwarves Hobbes’ Leviathan.

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Social machines

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My friend Wendy Hall co-authored a 2019 book The Theory and Practice of Social Machines, which I read only recently. The central idea of a social machine is very interesting – a social network connected by digital devices, a human-machine social entity at scale. These can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in terms of societal outcomes, and most of the book is concerned with this question: “If we take the metaphor of the ‘social machine’ seriously, then we can think of it as doing some computing, and hence processing information, which can be done more or less accurately.” Well, it’s only too obvious how that is going at the moment.

So the book asks how should one analyse social machines and, importantly, try to construct or shape them? When do you get filter bubbles or groupthink, and when robustly diverse engagement towards a common aim? The middle chunk of chapters looks at many examples of social machines in operation, in areas ranging from music to social media to healthcare to open data. It ends, in a somewhat unsatisfactory way, with a list of questions or areas for future research, and with the conclusion: “Social machines should prompt neither optimism nor pessimism; they will enable new types of problem solving and new types of mischief alike.”

I do think the metaphor can be fruitful, but I suppose with the mischief aspect so much more evident 6 years after the book‘s publication I hungered for something a bit more action-oriented.

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