I had been looking forward to reading The Ordinal Society by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, and it hasn’t disappointed. My copy is covered in sticky notes marking interesting points. What do they mean by the term? It is the world created by Silicon Valley built on the digital traces we all create using its services and that “stratifies individuals through a myriad of differentiated methods of matching, scoring and classification. Those methods have both a practical application and a moral valence. The ordinal society is both a means of social organization and a mode of first person experien ..read more

Money has always seemed mysterious to me, and so I’ve always carefully avoided monetary economics as too difficult (which makes it ironic that when I returned from my US PhD programme to a job in the UK Treasury in 1985 I was assigned to the monetary policy unit – this in the days long before Bank of England independence, when the Treasury and Chancellor made the policy decisions). Still, from time to time I dip in, and found Stefan Eich’s The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes an interesting read. The book is an intellectual history of how certain key ..read more

I read a proof of The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies with a view to blurbing it, and was more than happy to recommend it. This is a fascinating book. The subtitle indicates its scope: “Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions and How the World Lost Its Mind”. The book asks why mistakes and crises never seem to be anybody’s fault – it’s always ‘the system’. Davies uses the concept of the ‘accountability sink’ – a policy or set of rules that prevent individuals from making or changing decisions and thus being accountable for them. He writes: “For an accountability sink to function, it has ..read more

Another book of many out on AI is As If Human: Ethics and Artifical Intelligence by Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson. I found this a very accessible book on AI ethics, possibly because neither author is an academic philosopher (sorry, philosophers….). Generally I’m a bit impatient with AI ethics, partly because it has dominated debate about AI at the expense of thinking about incentives and politics, and partly because of my low tolerance for the kind of bizarre thought experiments that seem to characterise the subject. Nevertheless, I found this book clear and pretty persuasive, with the damn ..read more

Over the holiday weekend I read (among other things*) Digital Design: A History by Steven Eskilson. I enjoy reading design books in general – a window into a more glamorous specialism than economics. This one covers a range of aspects, from the design of gadgets (from the IBM Selectric typewriter to Apple’s dominance in this arena) to fonts to web design to data visualisation to architecture. So it’s quite eclectic, and includes using digital tools to design (as in architecture) as well as the design of digital artefacts. But one theme that emerges across all these areas is the lasting influen ..read more

Code Dependent: Living in the shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia is a gripping read. She’s the FT’s AI Editor, so the book is well-written and benefits from her reporting experience at the FT and previously Wired. It is a book of reportage, collating tales of people’s bad experiences either as part of the low-paid work force in low income countries tagging images or moderating content, or being on the receiving end of algorithmic decision-making. The common thread is the destruction of human agency and the utter absence of accountability or scope for redress when AI systems are created and deplo ..read more

I read Peter Turchin’s (2023) End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration on a long flight yesterday (I’m at Stanford for a couple of workshops). I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s well-written and an engaging read. The basic idea that there is a pendulum in the strength and health of polities, of generation-long good times and bad times, seems valid enough. The idea that one can model these computationally, I find a bit weird – speaking as one who spent some years early in her career modelling the UK and other economies computationally. Predicting outcomes fr ..read more

My in-pile of books is a bit random at the moment. I just finished a posthumously-published set of essays by Richard Rorty, What Can We Hope For? It’s a strikingly passive title (as indeed was Lenin’s What is to be Done? although less so), and the essays have a notably pessimistic tone. Rorty is known for his prescience about the threats to American democracy posed by grotesque inequality, the crumbling of jobs and the fabric of middle America and authoritarian tendencies. He famously warned of the chance of a strongman dictator 20 years before Trump’s 2026 election. Rorty is known also for hi ..read more

Another book about which I can’t claim impartiality: my dear colleague Michael Kenny’s Fractured Union: Politics, Sovereignty and the Fight to Save the UK. As the title suggests, it concerns the territorial constitutional arrangements of the UK: progressive devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales and (in its distinctive context) Northern Ireland, tentative moves toward devolution within England, and the shocks imposed on the governance arrangements caused by Brexit and the pandemic. None of this within the context of a written constitutional or the clarity that might have provided. I’ve had tw ..read more

I’m late to Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0. For all its bestseller status, it didn’t do a lot for me. Probably more to do with me than the book. There’s a large chunk about the distant future and existential risk, which I can’t get interested in. There’s also a lot of physics and evolution, philosophy and cognitive science thrown in to the mix, at a very simplified level. And then there’s the love-in with Elon Musk – including a back cover blurb by the billionaire recently referred to by the Daily Star as a ‘car salesman’. Musk funded Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute. Life 3.0 was published in 2017 ..read more