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Madman Economics

William Davies: What the hell is going on?, 20 October 2022

... From​ the 1920s until the 1990s, as Quinn Slobodian describes in Globalists (2018), his history of neoliberal thought, Austrian and German free-market thinkers had a common ideal of legally ‘encasing’ the market, in order to leave it safe from political harm. Price signals could be compared with an electrical current flowing down copper wires at lightning speed ...

Let’s eat badly

William Davies: Irrationality and its Other, 5 December 2019

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason 
by Justin E.H. Smith.
Princeton, 344 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 0 691 17867 7
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... About​ five years ago, in the course of studying the commercial applications of psychological research, I contacted the agent of Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, to inquire whether Ariely might want to speak at a conference in London. It didn’t come off: I had to explain that my ‘conference budget’ didn’t stretch to the $75,000 speaker fee and first-class return airfare ...

New-Found Tribes

William Davies: In Brexitland, 4 February 2021

Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics 
by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford.
Cambridge, 391 pp., £15.99, October 2020, 978 1 108 46190 0
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... There​ are two types of people: professional social scientists and amateur social scientists. To put that another way, a central problem of social science is that, unlike natural science, your objects of study have their own account of who they are and what they’re doing. The professional demographer may classify someone according to a set of categories widely recognised among experts, but unrecognisable or even offensive to the person being classified ...

Pain, No Gain

William Davies: Inflation Fixation, 13 July 2023

... Britain​ is entering a crisis in mortgage repayments that nobody can ignore, but which nobody in power seems willing to prevent. In May, the average interest rate for a two-year fixed rate mortgage passed 6 per cent, a reflection of market expectations regarding Bank of England rate rises, which are in turn a response to the sustained difficulty of getting inflation down ...

Antimarket

William Davies: Capitalism Decarbonised, 4 April 2024

The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet 
by Brett Christophers.
Verso, 398 pp., £22, February, 978 1 80429 230 3
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... The​ words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’. Yet the two terms can also denote very different sets of institutions and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by the economic historian Fernand Braudel, they may even be opposed to each other ...

The Seductions of Declinism

William Davies: Stagnation Nation, 4 August 2022

... In the month​ leading up to the Chris Pincher scandal, which finally did for Boris Johnson, there was a flurry of bleak news about the state and future of the British economy. Inflation hit a forty-year high of 9.1 per cent, and the Bank of England announced its fifth interest rate rise since December, to 1.25 per cent. At the end of June, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the bank, admitted that inflation in the UK – triggered by a combination of war in Ukraine and supply-chain bottlenecks in the wake of Covid lockdowns – is likely to endure for longer than in the United States or mainland Europe ...

Against Responsibility

William Davies, 8 November 2018

Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism 
by Melinda Cooper.
Zone, 447 pp., £24, March 2017, 978 1 935408 84 0
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... The phrase​ ‘hard-working families’, a staple of New Labour and Conservative rhetoric for about twenty years, fell by the wayside with the political upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on ‘JAMs’ – Just About Managing families – but lost all ideological confidence along with her parliamentary majority in June last year ...

A Dog in the Fight

William Davies: Am I a fan?, 18 May 2023

A Fan’s Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat 
by Paul Campos.
Chicago, 176 pp., £15, September 2022, 978 0 226 82348 5
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... Justice is what love looks like in public,’ Cornel West said some years ago, a slogan now so well-known that you see it on T-shirts and posters, a kind of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ or ‘This House Runs on Love, Laughter and Prosecco’ for the activist left. It’s an engaging claim. But is it true? At first glance, justice and love have entirely different, even contradictory, qualities, and elision flatters both ...

Stay away from politics

William Davies: Why Weber?, 21 September 2023

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber 
by Wendy Brown.
Harvard, 132 pp., £19.95, April, 978 0 674 27938 4
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... There​ are two broad narratives about what has happened to universities in the English-speaking world over the past forty years. They are very different from each other, yet both have some plausibility. The first runs roughly as follows. The rise of the New Right in the 1980s introduced a policy agenda for universities aimed at injecting enterprise and competition into a sector that had previously seen itself as somewhat insulated from the market ...

Destination Unknown

William Davies: Sociology Gone Wrong, 9 June 2022

The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past 
by Mike Savage.
Harvard, 422 pp., £28.95, May 2021, 978 0 674 98807 1
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Colonialism and Modern Social Theory 
by Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood.
Polity, 257 pp., £17.99, July 2021, 978 1 5095 4130 0
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A Brief History of Equality 
by Thomas Piketty.
Harvard, 272 pp., £22.95, April, 978 0 674 27355 9
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... The​ period of human history when European people could confidently characterise themselves as ‘modern’ lasted barely a hundred years, from the upheavals of the 1870s to those of the 1970s. This was the era in which the bureaucratic nation-state appeared to have been secured as the building block of geopolitical power, and the welfare state became essential to the pursuit of social justice ...

The Big Mystique

William Davies: Central Banks and Banking, 2 February 2017

The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath 
by Ben Bernanke.
Norton, 624 pp., £27.99, October 2015, 978 0 393 24721 3
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The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy 
by Mervyn King.
Little Brown, 448 pp., £25, March 2017, 978 0 349 14067 4
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... Early​ in 2014, the Bank of England put out a quarterly bulletin entitled ‘Money Creation in the Modern Economy’ which put to bed one of the most persistent – and false – claims in the history of economics. According to orthodox economists as far back as Adam Smith, money originates in the need to exchange one good for another. I have produced more bread than I need, you have produced more clothing than you need, and we need some simple instrument by means of which to swap one for the other ...

How many words does it take to make a mistake?

William Davies: Education, Education, Algorithm, 24 February 2022

... Perhaps we could start with you telling us what you understand by the term “plagiarism”.’ I don’t know how many times I’ve spoken these words over the last two years. Twenty or thirty perhaps. In my role as chair of the exam board in my department it falls to me to chair plagiarism hearings, and this awkward icebreaker serves as a way of establishing whether or not the student concerned understands the allegation being made ...

The Reaction Economy

William Davies, 2 March 2023

... When I​ deleted my Twitter account in September last year, provoked not by Elon Musk’s imminent takeover but by the suffocating quantity of royal coverage gushing from every media source, I was left feeling bereft, as any addict is when their drug is taken away. How was I supposed to react to the news now? And if I had no way of reacting to the news, what did I want from the news? Am I even interested in the news, if I have no opportunity to react to it? Being in the digital public sphere without any means to react is a bit like being trapped in a shopping mall without any money ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell ...

Don’t join a union, pop a pill

Katrina Forrester: ‘The Happiness Industry’, 22 October 2015

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing 
by William Davies.
Verso, 314 pp., £16.99, May 2015, 978 1 78168 845 8
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... that emotional life is not the stuff of politics, economics or science – is not shared by what William Davies calls the ‘happiness industry’, that constellation of psychologists and economists seeking to maximise happiness; neuroscientists developing increasingly sophisticated tools for measuring it; doctors and psychiatrists prescribing drugs to ...

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