An old Jewish joke goes: “How do you make God laugh? Tell Him about your plans.” The joke is as relevant today as it was hundreds of years ago. But in our time, as the world becomes more complex, the harder it seems to predict our future.

This theme is prescient in both Helga Nowotny’s The Cunning of Uncertainty and The Rightful Place of Science: Science on the Verge, co-written by a consortium of eight scientists. Both books show us how we use tools to help manage our expectations for the future. Technology-driven opinion polls predict election results, algorithms assess financial markets and earth system modelling provides insight into scenarios under a warmer climate. But sometimes these predictions get it wrong.

Polls underestimated the likelihood of Trump’s win and the outcome of the Brexit referendum, while few algorithms predicted the 2008 financial crisis. Moreover, the possible future scenarios under a hotter climate are so complex that there is the possibility that some parts of the world will get colder due to altered ocean currents, cloud formations and ecosystem dynamics. The culprit? Uncertainty. But how do we understand it, assess it, and cope with it? Against this backdrop, the books invite us to reflect on one of the most successful tools our civilized world has developed to coexist with uncertainty: science.

Nowotny describes uncertainty as “cunning”, because, like a stealthy fox, it emerges when you least expect it. To her, the cunning of uncertainty is more than the mere realization that the more you learn, the more you realize what you don’t know. These are called known unknowns. Even more cunning are the unknown unknowns – things that we don’t even know we don’t know. Take, for example, climate change. In The Rightful Place of Science: Science on the Verge, Jeroen P. van der Sluijs describes earth system modelling as “terra incognita”. Historic Vostok ice-cores show levels of up to 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere. Currently, we live in a world with levels exceeding 400 ppm – and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that this level could rise to 1,100 ppm. Put simply, it means that “the past is no longer the key to the future”. We do not know how different systems will react under such pressure, and what sort of tipping points and feedback loops will present themselves.

Nowotny takes a philosophical approach to tackling uncertainty. She likens our craving for certainty today to the ancient Chinese practice of reading oracle bones. During the Shang dynasty some 3,000 years ago, diviners would carve questions on the underside of turtle shells or the shoulder blades of oxen and read the answers in cracks that appeared when heat was applied. The diviners could then interpret the answers to determine the fate of harvests, of military campaigns and of the ruling elites.

Today, oracle bones have been replaced by sophisticated algorithms with refined tools and complex simulation models to analyse big data, financial markets and economics, she says. The only difference between then and now is that we no longer rely on gods to decide our future. In a post-deterministic world, we relish the power to shape it ourselves. In this way, Nowotny warns us against placing too much faith in modern science and technology to solve our problems. She reveals the inherent paradox of uncertainty: while we loathe it and crave for certainty, in the end we must embrace it – and she coaxes us to do so, despite our natural inclination to shirk it. Instead of leaving the reader with a sense of despair about the current state of science, she gives us a healthy dose of optimism: the promise of discovering the new and unimaginable is what drives science, she says, and making mistakes is an integral part of that process. And, after all, it’s not always best to know what’s around the corner.

While The Cunning of Uncertainty offers a food-for-thought warning, the eight authors of The Rightful Place of Science: Science on the Verge take things an urgent step further. They collectively argue that science in all its guises – on a practical, institutional, and existential level – is on the verge of crisis. They view science through a post-normal lens (Funtowicz and Ravetz, «Science for the post-normal age», 1993), which casts a critical eye on the use of scientific knowledge for policymaking, linking it to problems in the governance of science itself. They see fault lines forming in scientific bodies, in the reliability of research, and in the capacity of scientists to communicate complex problems with society and, importantly, how scientists interact with policymakers, a frontier known as the “science-policy interface”. They cite controversial issues that have eroded public trust in science such as the dangers of nuclear power, climate change, genetically modified organisms, the impact of pesticides on bees and shale gas fracking, that are “so deeply entangled in webs of barely separable facts, interests and values that the parties concerned cannot find agreement on the nature of the problem, not to speak of the solution.”

One of the most visible dangers in science is the reduction of complex, non-linear and ambiguous phenomena into crisp, easily digestible numbers, both books contend. Van der Sluijs cites a news headline announcing that 7.9% of the world’s species would become extinct as a result of climate change. But how can this be, he asks, when we don’t currently know the number of species on the planet?

But the problem runs deeper than just the simplification of numbers. The authors view the reduction of complex issues as a symptom of an unhealthy relationship between scientists and policymakers, under the paradigm of “evidence-based policy”. They diagnose the problem as a process of “hypocognition” – an excessive simplification and compression of people’s perceptions of issues, explanations and solutions. Hypocognition is linked to the idea of “socially constructed ignorance”, where individuals and institutions develop simplified versions of the world to make sense of its complexity – whilst excluding a great deal of information that might contradict that view. In this light, the authors see an unrealistic expectation within society and among policymakers that scientists are omniscient and can provide all the right answers. “It assumes that we need to produce a quantitative answer, because that is what we believe science is able and supposed to do.”

One example where science may overlook important details is through the IPCC’s consensus procedure, Van der Sluijs explains. Experts from different fields are obliged to reach agreement on the effects of climate change. While this method is effective in delivering the most robust findings, it can omit less likely but nevertheless important scenarios. In the first IPCC report, Van der Sluijs continues, “the policymakers’ summary mentioned neither the possible collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet nor the collapse of thermohaline circulation in the oceans as relevant scenarios for climate policy.” He says that while this literature was included in the detailed chapters of the first IPCC report, it was excluded from the policymakers’ summary because it was impossible to reach consensus on these issues. But, he says, “such scenarios were and still are extremely policy-relevant, because policymakers should be interested in the possibility that a five-metre sea level rise could result if the West Antarctic ice sheet were to collapse. Policymakers and society need to know about these types of scenarios even if scientists cannot reach consensus on them.”

A key lesson of both books here is that we cannot ignore uncertainty and – especially  – that we should not fool ourselves that we have tamed it. On a practical level, this means presenting quantitative information to policymakers in a more responsible way – offering multiple scenarios rather than one simple answer, providing more transparency about how results were generated, and performing quality control such as sensitivity analyses. Rather than suppress any uncertainties, The Rightful Place of Science: Science on the Verge exhorts to “deliberately reintroduce doubts and scruples into the process of deliberation.”

One fundamental way to address doubts is to probe the critical questions: why do we supress uncertainty in the first place, and for whose gain? Science is never an apolitical act. Numbers are never simply numbers. They are always part of a wider frame or narrative which can change based on the distinctive cultural or political context – a point which all the authors adamantly push home. Take the narrative espoused by the Eisenhower administration in 1953 that nuclear power would provide unlimited energy to people and nations, say Alice Benessia and Silvio Funtowicz. “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter [...] will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds,” said Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1954.

Today, Nowotny says, many still pin a large hope on technology and science: “The new redemptive force, championed by governments and industry, is innovation… however vague the concept remains.” Technical solutions are easier to implement than making changes to the fabric of society, she says, especially when they threaten established hierarchies and vested interests. But once we view science as a political medium, it opens up the possibility for a collective discussion, explain Benessia et al. For example, should we accept the assumption that technological advancement is making our lives happier, or is technology bringing with it a raft of more complex problems? Do we want more predictability in a world dictated by computers? Does a loss of uncertainty throw up another contradiction, that in a more routine-oriented and less creative world, we leave ourselves less adaptable to change? In this way, the authors call for more democratic scientific processes that include a range of stakeholder views, normative stances and participation.

While the books run in parallel on core ideas exploring what science means in today’s world – the importance of political framing being a prime example – they offer different angles. Nowotny calls on us to think, with a carefully constructed sequence of paradoxes and philosophical grey areas. The eight authors, on the other hand, call on us to act, providing a manifesto of expert insight and practical measures to improve science as an institution. For a full bird’s-eye view on the state of science and policymaking, both books are essential reading, and offer an important conclusion: rather than trying to predict our future, or worrying that we may not have the right tools to prevent unforeseen disasters, perhaps we should first ask what sort of future we want. 

Childhood is the key period for people’s development. Experiences in the early years of life condition the levels of well- being that are achieved in adult age in all aspects: work, health, social integration, etc. Therefore, fighting against and preventing child poverty is a cornerstone in the fight against inequality, a crucial fight to promote justice and fairness, social cohesion, efficiency and competitiveness, as well as intergenerational solidarity. For decades now, scientists have been paying special attention to the determinants and characteristics of child poverty and inequality. The books we review here offer two perspectives on this problem: a general one and a more specific one.

The essay by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett is easy to read and studies how the consequences associated to inequality are not limited to a lack of material assets, more limiting educational opportunities or a lower probability of climbing the social ladder, but also include other less obvious aspects, such as their effects on physical and mental health.

They start with an analysis of macro factors, for example, inequality based on the distribution of all the income in a country, to explain how this affects the residents of each country in terms of their health and individual well-being. The aim of the book is to show how, right from childhood, social class marks the development of one’s life course and, more importantly, how the greater the inequality, the more this difference is marked.

The authors carry out a detailed study by compiling empirical studies on the anxiety produced by the existence of social hierarchies and the awareness of individuals of falling short and feeling obliged to compete for status. This affects the probability of developing mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, shyness and the lack of friendships derived from this and, in the final instance, loneliness as a disease. It reviews the message of Durkheim’s concept which in the 19th century already spoke of anomie: the feeling of not belonging to your environment.

As far as infancy is concerned, the consequences of inequality on the development of children are permanent. For example, by analysing the plasticity of the brain, they show that stress during pregnancy or complicated family situations influence the child’s cerebral development. These situations are more frequently found in poor families and in countries in which the concern about social status is greater. Under these circumstances, the meritocratic ideal that any child can climb the social ladder if they propose to do so will be hard put to happen, as children who grow up in poor families carry an inevitable burden with them

In particular, the “Pygmalion effect” is important, according to which the qualifications of children are related to the expectations their teachers have of them. Wilkinson and Pickett insist, in this point, on the importance of reinforcement programmes during the early educational stages as a progressive investment in terms of their redistributive consequences, as well as on the training of teaching staff to include the perspective of class when analysing differences in the classroom.

The second book, Children of Austerity, offers a global view of the impact of the Great Recession (2009-2014) on childhood through a selection of 10 developed countries, including Spain. The book shows how, country by country, children have suffered from the consequences of the economic crisis and the cutbacks, enabling us to conclude that this impact was not the same in every country. Each chapter offers the analysis and the diagnosis of each country’s public policies to fight against child poverty. The book, published in 2017, analyses up until 2014, therefore does not include the study of the last four years. In the case of Spain, this final period is a key one, as due to our specific situation, we took longer to get out of the economic crisis, and it was precisely 2017 that was the worst year for children in terms of relative child poverty levels.

In addition, evolution indicators regarding the material aspect of child poverty are given for Spain. The results are alarming in as much as not only do they show a worsening of the situation of children (for example, from 2009 to 2014, the number of children living in families who could not afford to pay for after-school activities doubled), but they also show that the situation of those who suffer from poverty has become worse, with greater increments (in 2014, one out of every four children was unable to go on school trips for economic reasons).

The reading of the various cases shows a general chart of more or less common causes of child poverty in western societies. One of them is obviously unemployment, but not the only one. More important yet is the phenomenon of children who live in families of poor workers, which is related not only to low salaries, but also to low intensity at work: these are the households in which the parents do not work a full day, either due to the precarious nature of the job or the low employment of women. Not working full-time, with frequent comings and goings on the labour market, leads to low salaries and a deficient, if not nonexistent, social protection coverage system, due to low contribution bases.

The book also particularly mentions single parent families, mostly headed by women, in which the incidence of child poverty is systematically greater than the average. Life in these homes is more difficult for the children, as mentioned by Wilkinson and Pickett. To the consequences of the previously mentioned stress (lower cognitive development), the effect of self-stigma in childhood should also be added: being aware that being in an inferior position influences the school performance of adolescents and, as far as friends are concerned, for example, not inviting them home through the shame of “not being presentable”.

Children of Austerity is a catalogue of the existing public policies aimed at vulnerable families and at the fight against child poverty, from direct monetary transfers to alleviate the lack of resources through to providing direct services such as school from 0 to 3 years of age to promote equal opportunities. To this end, the book works as a practical manual as to what has been done in the area of childhood, analysing whether these policies have worked or not. It is a good complement to Igualdad, which, with its more general approach, does not provide specific proposals in the fight against inequality in specific age groups. Nevertheless, its authors do offer proposals to fight against inequality and precariousness in the employment market that could have a positive effect on children’s living conditions.

In short, both texts propose two complementary factors regarding child poverty: one focused on the evolution and the causes of the economic crisis, and the other on the consequences of the economic inequality of a country in diverse areas of its citizens’ lives. Readers can consult Igualdad to understand why it is important for everyone, and not just for the most vulnerable sections, to achieve more equal societies. On the other hand, Children of Austerity is a manual and introductory guide to the problem of child poverty. The barrage of data and bibliography it offers open the door to a very detailed study of the phenomenon in developed countries. The characteristics of inequality and poverty in these countries are the focus of both books, which is why we would have liked at least one chapter dedicated to the specific characteristics of these phenomena in developed countries.

Within a demographic scenario of an ageing population and an increase in longevity, long-term care (LTC) for elderly people poses a series of significant challenges for the Europe of welfare states. These challenges are related with the sustainability of the care system, the dual nature of the physical environment where care is provided (home-based or institutional), the social setting (formal provision by professionals or informal provision by relatives, immigrant carers and volunteers) and the origin of funding (public, private, subsidised). All this ties in with the very definition of LTC, its component elements (fragility, illness, dementia, chronicity, acute episodes, etc.) and the need for adequate coordination between the health services and the social services in the dependent care area. This is the context surrounding the two books reviewed here.

The first of the two, Long-Term Care in Europe (2013), focuses on the search for answers to the challenges of LTC arising from demographic change, from transformations in social and family structures, and from the technological revolution, along with the need to evaluate and, where applicable, guarantee or improve the quality of the care provided. With authors from a wide variety of disciplines the book defines the fundamental principles that characterise LTC. It considers prevention and rehabilitation in LTC as a basic and vital need for elderly people and the importance, within the legislative framework, of adequately tackling issues such as the rights of informal carers, including immigrant workers, and family ethics. Other issues covered in the book are related with the need to deal with the problems that appear in the relationship established between formal and informal care and between health and social care. Finally it assesses the usefulness of reviewing solutions offered based on the progression and improvement of policies designed for this purpose.

The book deals with these issues in cross-cutting and comparative thematic chapters, as a result of approaching the question studied through a work plan based on a research project, funded by the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme, with a consortium formed by 13 EU member states. This work has been possible because both objectives and methods were established in advance, and the outcomes of the practical examples were evaluated following a standard template, all coordinated from an inter-governmental organisation affiliated to the United Nations (The European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, www.euro.centre.org) which is based in Vienna.

In contrast, Long-term Care for the Elderly in Europe (2017) is articulated around a chapters structure that responds to a selection of countries, following the classic welfare state typologies, with examples from the Nordic, Central-European, Liberal and Southern and Eastern European models. Also the product of a multi-disciplinary group of authors, in this book the objective is to analyse the organisation, structure and provision of LTC, and the social investment perspective, for each country. This involves examining how they have tackled the challenges and what type of transformations the states have undergone, above all, following the economic crisis. An increase in the elderly population and in the number of fragile elderly people is reflected as spending pressure on the public sector, so privatisation and commercialisation have been part of the evolution of the welfare state, also in the case of LTC, and one of the explicit objectives of social policies, above all in the Nordic and liberal models. Thus, to date, LTC has not been as highly institutionalised as other social services because, despite differences between countries, it has been shouldered to a large degree by civil society, especially families.

According to the results offered by the book, in all countries analysed the tendency is converging towards civil society’s participation as a supplier of LTC, with the use of new technologies to favour elderly people remaining in their homes. However, despite all the positive implications of civil society’s participation in the system, it is highlighted that this could lead to inequalities in the provision of LTC, especially among the more fragile receiving population. It could also lead to gender inequalities, given that women have a greater life expectancy, therefore it is more likely that they will not have a partner to care for them when they become dependent. Thus, the balance between individual and bespoke solutions and the ability to remain as long as possible in one’s own home and maintain a satisfactory social life without overburdening a relative continue to be the challenges of LTC.

Whereas in Leichsenring et al. (2013) the classical welfare state model typologies are used, in this case (Greve, 2017) an adaptation has been made from five basic  to four, with demand and formal and informal provision for LTC, defining a standard or mixed care type, a second, Nordic care type, a more family-oriented type and finally, a type called “transitionbased”. In the work, following the comparative study, it is recognised that, in addition to not being an exclusive typology and having different degrees of overlap, notable differences also exist according to the degree of implementation of LTC. Thus, it is highlighted that the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands would show significant elements of approaches based on holistic, personfocused care; Central European countries such as German and Austria, would still be in the phase of discussion regarding these approaches; while the countries of Eastern and Southern Europe would still be in the search process for the general development of their LTC systems.

In short, these two interesting books coincide on tackling the LTC challenge, taking into account numerous dimensions as well as the points of view of both receiver and supplier of the service. However, the first (Leichsenring et al., 2013), based on a cross-cutting and comparative approach, offers a more conceptual view, with the idea of planning a European LTC model with evidence-based results from joint research. Meanwhile the second book (Greve, 2017) is geared more towards the characteristics of LTC in each of the countries analysed (Denmark, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland), and follows the classical typology of diverse welfare state models, describing the particularities of LTC in each state, to conclude with a chapter containing reflections on the elements common to all the states.

The fact that there is a gap between the publication dates of the two books, 2013 and 2017 (more significant when one bears in mind that the first is based on a project that ran from 2008-2011), adds interest to following the evolution of this area of knowledge and tackling the challenges that are raised. In the 2013 publication, the impact of the economic crisis is not a core aspect and is barely made explicit, thus meaning that the aim of the research is the overcoming of the challenges presented by LTC. Meanwhile in the 2017 publication, it appears as unquestionable that LTC continues to be a newcomer element in social policy and is often only recognised as an element of social pressure, highlighting the fact that the economic crisis has brought with it austerity measures and recourse to private systems (families, and above all women) or commercialised ones, in order to tackle its funding within a scenario of growing expenditure.

Branko MILANOVIC. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

One often hears that globalisation has brought with it unprecedented levels of inequality. What truth is there in this statement? The answer depends on whether we think about inequality between countries, local inequality (among people within each country) or global inequality (among people from across every country). Branko Milanovic looks at these three perspectives in his latest book, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, in which he presents his research into the changes of the global distribution of income over the last three decades to the general public.

The first point is the change in the distribution of global income. To look at this evolution, Milanovic divides the world population into income groups and matches their position on this distribution with the change in their income since 1988. This enables us to see which income groups have improved over the last few decades and to respond to whether there is greater or lesser equality: if the rich have become richer and those who had less have become poorer, the world will have become less equalitarian.

Milanovic focuses on three groups, which are those that show the greatest differentiation due to the change of their economic situation, calculated in keeping with the annual income per home and per person, which is obtained by dividing the income of the household between the number of people living in it, including any children. For example, a family with one child in which the parents earn $60,000 a year each will have an income per home and per person of $40,000 a year. This operation avoids the children, who do not have any income, from figuring as being artificially poor (despite benefiting from their parents’ income) and the parents from being artificially rich, despite sharing their income with the rest of the household.

First, those who have earned less are the middle classes of industrialised countries. Their income has hardly grown at all. They are people who, from a worldwide perspective, are relatively rich, they earn between $5,000 and $10,000 a year per home and per person. This is approximately the median income in Spain (7,500), more than double that of Mexico (2,900) and three times that of China (1,800). In second place, what we could call the world’s economic elite have improved their income by some 60%. This is the richest 1% and includes oligarchs and millionaires, but it also includes anybody with an income of more than $40,000 a year. The third group is made up of the emerging middle classes, given this name because they are found in the intermediate part of the distribution. This individual is a middle-class person from a country such as China or India, with an income of between $1,000 and $2,000 a year. Although, when compared with people living in industrialised countries, they are relatively poor, their income has improved by up to 80% and, therefore, they are the main winners in the process.

With this data, it is possible to explain the concern about the increase in inequality. Although the group of middle classes in industrialised countries has barely improved, it has not got any worse —neither this group, nor any other group. If we adjust to the world level, global inequality has not increased because the improvement of the emerging middle classes has easily compensated for the earnings of the richest 1%. (As you will see, a different diagnostic can be reached in the case of internal inequality). Thanks to this dramatic change, inequality in worldwide income is now at the lowest level since the Industrial Revolution.

According to Milanovic, the inequality between people can be broken down into two parts: one due to the income of the country in which they live, and another due to the position they occupy in each country. Of all the inequality, approximately a third of it corresponds to interior inequality and the other two thirds to inequality across countries.

Milanovic calls the earnings derived from living in a rich country the citizenship premium, which explains many international phenomena, of which perhaps the most notable is that of international migrations. However, what determines the evolution of the citizenship premium? Why are some countries rich and others not? Has it always been this way? Throughout most of history, the differences between countries were modest. The demographic behaviour of preindustrial societies was such that increases in production were translated into proportional increases in the population. As a result of this, the standard of living hardly increased over time and most of the population lived at barely more than a subsistence level, meaning that most countries had similar income per capita.

International equality broke down with the Industrial Revolution, when the pace of innovation in some countries overtook that of demographic growth and, as a result of this, they became richer and grew apart from the others. This situation has characterised the world until recent times. However, in the last few decades, several countries have moved out of the Third World and have become emerging countries, including some of the most highly populated countries on earth, such as China or India, and have started to converge with industrialised countries.

Frequently, discussions on the growth of countries are parallel to those concerning inequality. Does economic growth lead to a more equalitarian society? Do the rich and the poor benefit from prosperity under the same terms? To observe the connection between equality and growth, Milanovic organises his discussion on inequality around the Kuznets curve.

Simon Kuznets, a Nobel prize winner in economic sciences, suggested that, although in the initial phase of industrialisation inequality would increase, with long-term development, income would flow to the middle classes and the growth would result in greater equality. This seemed to be a reasonable description in the mid-20^th century when Kuznets formulated it, but not today, at least not in view of the last thirty years, because the upper classes have improved their situation notably in an overall way, but this is not the case of the middle classes in developed countries and, therefore, local inequality has increased.

To explain this change in the relationship between growth and inequality, economic literature has mainly focused on two evolutions: technological change and the opening up of the economy (globalisation). Technology generates inequality because it has made automated employment disappear, in other words, jobs that can be replaced by machines or computers. Automated employments include that of secretaries and many industrial jobs. On the other hand, those that involve problem-solving that cannot be specifically anticipated and that require a certain degree of creativity are not automated. Creativity does not mean that these jobs are necessarily of an intellectual nature. Accounting, looking after the elderly, taking animals for walks or serving at table are all creative activities.

At the same time, as the economy has become globalised, it is simpler for companies to import goods instead of manufacturing them locally. Employees who are most protected from external competition are those in the services sector and those for whom there is no skilled labour, a propitious business environment or infrastructure in other countries.

In perspective, both globalisation and technology are heading in the same direction: towards the replacement of jobs with intermediate remuneration, particularly in the industrial sector, by machines or foreign workers. Historically, industry represented an entry ticket to the middle class for low skilled workers and therefore, the disappearance of this kind of job has turned into a polarisation of the occupations and an increase of inequality.

This diagnosis is worrying because, by suggesting that the increase of inequality is a direct effect of forces —technological improvements and the international division of labour— that are associated to economic growth, it indicates that we are at a new section on the Kuznets curve in which growth would not run on a par with greater equality, which leads Milanovic to talk about Kuznets waves: a return to the section in which the relationship between growth and equality is negative.

Not all countries have undergone the same evolution. The previous explanations were developed by focusing on English-speaking countries. In addition, not all countries are exposed to the same forces and if they sometimes are, they have mechanisms to counteract them. The reader may be wondering about the case of Spain. Julio Carabaña recently published what is probably the most comprehensive synthesis available (Carabaña 2016, Ricos y pobres, Ed. Catarata), in which he reaches the conclusion that the inequality found in 2013 is probably very similar to that of the beginning of the 1990s.

Reading the book leaves the way open to some degree of pessimism. Milanovic probably sees that, inasmuch as the forces of technology and globalisation are present, inequality will continue to increase in developed countries, which will result in political instability. This poses a threat to the continuity of the global convergence process and to the very lifestyle of the middle classes in the West.

Nevertheless, the pessimism needs to be qualified. As the author himself says, what the future holds for us will largely depend on the reaction of public policies. From this perspective, we can see the increase in inequalities not just as the result of the impersonal forces of technology and globalisation, but as the reflection of the lack of adaptation of public policies to the new context.

If the effect of these forces has been to polarise labour in keeping with qualification, one promising strategy would be to focus on investing in human capital. If the number of qualified workers were sufficiently high, their salaries would not grow excessively and the inequalities would be contained. Among human capital policies, research has shown that the most effective investment is that carried out between zero and three years of age. (A short, accessible summary of this research, and of the debate around it, can be found in the work of the Nobel prize winner James Heckman (2013) Giving kids a fair chance, MIT Press).

As an example of its practical implementation, the Northern European welfare states are renowned for the generosity of their family policies: direct transfers per child, education from zero to three years of age and policies to reconcile work and family life. These policies have enabled levels of child poverty to be kept low, as well as levels of growth and female employment that assure the sustainability of the system. Therefore, Scandinavians are usually quoted as a successful example as they have managed to conjugate globalisation and social cohesion. Although one always needs to be prudent when learning from the experiences of other countries, these examples indicate that, after all, there is some room for optimism.

Martin Ravallion. The Economics of Poverty. History, Measurement and Policy. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. New York: Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2013.

Analysis of a society’s wealth and income distribution may show how gains from growth are distributed, but does not necessarily offer any coherent explanations regarding the experience of living under extreme scarcity, or which public policies help those who have least.

The books concerning us here attempt to answer these two questions through economic analysis strictly focused on the reality and experience of poverty, but from completely different perspectives. Ravallion’s approach in The Economics of Poverty is to provide a global overview of poverty; his book is a comprehensive manual that offers a journey through the theoretical and empirical knowledge of poverty. In Scarcity, in contrast, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir approach the problem of poverty from the opposite extreme by studying how it affects those who suffer from it.

Ravallion opens his book with a broad review of the role played by poverty analysis in economic theory. Classical economists in the early 19th century usually only considered solutions or strategies for improving the situation of the neediest as tools for promoting social stability, not as an end in themselves. It was not until the end of the same century, firstly with utilitarianism and secondly, above all, with the emergence of the labour movement, that poverty and inequality started to occupy a central role in public debate in the industrialised countries.

Ravallion uses this historical rundown of theoretical debates as an introduction to the complexities involved in analysing, measuring and fighting poverty. Each section of the book combines non-technical information with formal explanations of economic theory.

The Economics of Poverty is exhaustive. Following the theoretical overview, the book’s second part details the problem of the definition of poverty, which varies according to how we measure the access to resources, opportunities, services or financial security of those affected.

The empirical part of the book highlights the relevance of indicators. Ravallion examines the extensive literature on the global evolution of inequality and poverty levels, both overall and for each country, plus theoretical models of inequality and development, and how they adapt to the reality of data. Ravallion closes the book with a run-through of dozens of strategies for fighting poverty, from direct transfers to trade liberalisation, and including universal services and administrative reforms, and shows the empirical evidence of the effects of each.

The principal virtue of The Economics of Poverty is its enormous scale: it examines an extraordinarily complex problem from a wide variety of perspectives. Ravallion is fully aware of the considerable theoretical and practical differences involved when talking about poverty in developing countries and in rich countries. The author focuses above all on the problems of the first group, undoubtedly more compelling, and often sidelines the problems and public debates of the richer countries.

Despite these limitations, The Economics of Poverty is an authentic encyclopaedia of public policies, indicators and strategies used the world over. It is an immensely useful reference work, both for understanding poverty and for thinking about and assessing possible solutions.

When analysing poverty from an aggregate perspective it is easy to miss nuances regarding what is happening behind the statistics, the story behind the data. If Ravallion offers a large-scale view of poverty, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir take the opposite route: Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives revolves precisely around the experience of poverty. Scarcity does not seek to talk about poverty’s causes, but its consequences. It is an almost minimalist book, which focuses on those suffering poverty directly and how it affects their lives.

The starting point for Mullainathan and Shafir is found in behavioural economics, and specifically, in the effect of scarcity on the capacity of those suffering it to take rational decisions. The authors start off with an apparently simple but very powerful idea: the difficulty we all experience when making decisions in situations of stress. Their argument is that poverty brings with it situations of deprivation, which means that those affected by it live in a state of continual tension that prevents them from taking effective action. 

Mullainathan and Shafir combine a dense volume of empirical evidence from both natural and laboratory experiments to develop this idea. Scarcity and deprivation generate a cognitive response that makes us focus on the short term, on trying to find solutions for immediate problems. The authors describe decision-making as a bandwidth problem: in the absence of stress we can evaluate options and prioritise by thinking about the long term, but in situations of scarcity our brain responds on the defensive, trying to fix only what is right before us. This focus on the immediate explains, for example, the difficulty that people on low incomes experience when trying to save money, avoid indebtedness or attend training courses for several months without being distracted by other problems. Our mind is designed to respond to emergencies and focus all our attention on what we have right before us; this can be useful in situations of danger, but is not very operational when trying to find a job or pay the rent. 

The direct implication of this theory is that apparently irrational decisions by poor people are in fact a consequence, not a cause of poverty. The constant tension of not knowing whether you will make it to the end of the month is an extraordinarily tough experience, almost unimaginable for a middle-class person. It can even be a cause of post-traumatic stress; it is no surprise, therefore, that this clouds the decision-making process. 

The result is that families facing poverty often act impulsively, attending immediate needs instead of planning for the medium-term. Scarcity explains why a poor family will spend money on escapist activities, seeking ways to relax in the face of an overwhelming avalanche of emergencies and problems, and how family tension can lead to children performing less well at school or the work performance of parents themselves suffering.

If we want to reduce poverty, therefore, the priority must be to promote public policies that change this vicious circle by simplifying the decision-making process or through programmes designed to reduce the immediate stress levels of families.

According to the authors, a system of public nurseries could be more effective if places are automatically assigned, thus parents do not have to waste time deciding on which nursery they are going to send their children to. A professional training programme will begin with basic general training classes, and will only give options to choose and specialise once the students are comfortable with the system.

One effective intervention would be to make cash transfers directly to people needing them, whether through assistance grants aimed at services (public housing, for example) or direct cash transfers. Any programme that reduces the perception of scarcity in an immediate way will mean that its recipients will be able to face other long-term problems (savings, health, education) more calmly.

The problem of the argument presented in Scarcity, however, is that it responds to a very limited question, the experience of poverty, but without tackling its causes. Although it is a useful answer and necessary for a certain rhetoric that tends to lay blame on victims of poverty for their own situation and to understand why escaping from it is so complicated, this analysis is only valid to explain the persistence of poverty in certain contexts, not the causes. It is very useful for assessing the design of public policies that aim to break with poverty traps and promote social mobility, but not for tackling economic development strategies.

It is here, again, that the monumental volume of Ravallion, with its ambition, complexity and detail, proves itself to be essential. Both books, overall, are a powerful reminder of the complexity of poverty. Ravallion offers us the data and major tendencies; Mullainathan and Shafir, the difficulty of translating public policies into effective interventions. 

Walter MISCHEL, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control, New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2014, [ed. cast.: El test de la golosina: cómo entender y manejar el autocontrol, Barcelona, Debate, 2015]

Robert PUTNAM, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2015.

We all love a good story, especially one with a happy ending. Narratives are the everyday coin of our private and public lives, even in the fields of science themselves. Scientific discovery can be told as a journey with twists, turns and surprises, as scholars struggle towards greater understanding.  Walter Mischel’s book, The Marshmallow Test, is an example of this genre, a story of surprise and discovery that encompasses much of his long research career.  Robert Putnam’s book, Our Kids, tells a story too, about families’ lives and the issues of rising class inequality and its implications for America’s children.  The science narrative in Our Kids is written at a very different level of analysis than the one in The Marshmallow Test, and from a different disciplinary perspective (sociology versus psychology, respectively). Yet reading these two books together proves an interesting exercise in considering social science stories and their interpretive contexts.

First, The Marshmallow Test.  As a young psychologist at Harvard, Mischel began his research studying differences in how preschoolers behaved when given the choice of receiving either an immediate reward (say a marshmallow) or a bigger reward (two marshmallows), but only after waiting through a few minutes delay. Mischel, a clinical psychologist, had not thought of this little study as a “test” to predict later development.  But circumstances led him to follow up his original preschoolers years later, and to his surprise, these early delay patterns proved to be unexpectedly predictive of many facets of their later lives.  The follow-up story to this discovery forms the heart of the book, a story about good self-control in children predicting to later successes in adult life.  These included healthy restraint (marked by lower body mass and less smoking), more satisfaction in close relationships and even better personal savings for retirement. They also included predicting variations in adult brain states, the holy grail of modern neuroscience.

The beginning section of the book tells the story of how this phenomenon of long-term prediction of self-control skills was discovered.  The second part then unpacks how self-control works and the scientific efforts to understand it and its impact, efforts that link to recent theorizing on fast versus slow systems of cognitive processing and how they can be coordinated. Delay largely benefits the slow, “cool” system, located in the prefrontal cortex, and gives this system a better chance to control the fast, “hot” system in the brain that desperately craves that marshmallow right there in front of you. 

These first two sections of the book thus develop the narrative entertainingly and with care.  They knit together the story of Mischel’s widely influential work on this and related topics, such as personality and the impact of situations on social behaviors.  But every story needs an ending, preferably a happy one, where problems are solved and things turn out well. The third part of the book covers implications for public policy and the role of educational programs designed to foster self-control in children. 

An important theme of the book is that many children grow up in stressful settings that make it more difficult, but also more imperative, to achieve effective self control.  Several of the personal stories told in the book are focused on the efforts of individual children in overcoming early limitations in their lives, often socioeconomic ones.  George, for example, from Chapter 8, is now a student at Yale, but was originally from an impoverished area of New York City, with immigrant parents, a terrible local public school and neighborhood, and a lot of bad attitude of his own by age 9.  His subsequent story illustrates how being lucky enough to get into an excellent nearby school through a lottery, where mature self-control and other good things were fostered, turned his life around. The upbeat ending section of Mischel’s book is framed around ideas for individually-focused approaches to work with those, like George, in need of help. 

But stories in science are often more nuanced than the clear, iconic ones we prefer in real life.  Some recent research on physical health by developmental psychologist Gene Brody and colleagues studied impoverished rural African-American youth who were tested for self-control repeatedly from ages 17 to 20.  In a follow-up at age 22, these young adults showed the effects on behavioral and mental health measures that Mischel would predict, better adjustment being linked with better self-control.  But they also showed something else more troubling.  The physical health of these high self-control young adults, particularly cardiovascular functioning, was actually poorer than those lower in self-control, suggesting possible negative effects of exerting self-control while remaining in high stress, difficult environments.  And a recent study with a new sample by this same team showed advanced markers of biological aging in the cells of poor African-American youth high in self-control.  These authors suggested that self-control may work better in some environments than others, and that more needs to be done to understand possible paradoxical health effects of self-control in stressful environments.  

From this perspective, then, we should also aim to change the disadvantaged environments that youth face in achieving self-control, not just shape their own individual skills.  Here’s where Putnam’s recent book, Our Kids, comes in.  It focuses on how opportunities for children in the US have become more unequal by social class in recent decades.  Putnam, an expert on policy research, thoughtfully and thoroughly reviews trends by social class in the U.S. in four separate chapters on family structure, parenting and child development, schooling, and community contexts. In chart after chart of extensive survey data, and in compelling personal stories drawn from a series of interviews he conducted in middle and working class families, Putnam provides overwhelming evidence, not just that class inequality of opportunity is wide, but that this gap between rich and poor families in the U.S. has become much greater over the past few decades, and is harming children and the wider U.S. society itself. 

In Putnam’s last chapter, he discusses the implications of this growing inequality and what to do about it, searching for ways of redeeming this sad recent story. He argues that the wider society needs to commit to a view of responsibility for all “our kids,” not just those in their own families.  This message is surely part of the context in thinking about how to benefit the lives of the next generation, including the poor and those with limited skills in areas such as self-control. Training individual children’s skills can help, but it may be limited (and even risky) without a wider societal commitment to changing social environments. 

Despite this compelling general point regarding societal investment, however, I think that Our Kids’ story-ending policy chapter also disappoints. In it, Putnam briefly reviews a wide range of programs that have been, or might be, directed to expanding equality of opportunity for poor children.  Unfortunately, this comes across as almost a grab-bag (a “menu of complementary approaches,” Putnam calls it) of current possibilities that exist in the marketplace of social policy ideas, with very little in the way of systematic prioritizing.  For example, there is a review of programs to address the problems of single-parenting, still more common in working than middle class families, which Putnam argues in Chapter 2 is a risk factor for poor child outcomes.  The range of proposals mentioned to address this includes programs to strengthen marriages, expand contraceptive availability to limit unwanted pregnancies for single women, reduce incarceration of non-violent offenders so they can remain at home as parents, and others.  All these ideas may be valuable in themselves, but note that here they are directed at the policy goal of maintaining two parent families, as a kind of “stand-in” for the ultimate priority of improving poor children’s later life outcomes. Indeed, these policy goals often aim at making working class families and kids look more middle class.  In fact, though, it makes less sense to target and evaluate change at this family structure level if we cannot show that single parent families are actually causing children’s poorer outcomes.  Putnam himself notes in his chapter on family structure that this has been a difficult claim to sort out. Single parenting is correlated with bad outcomes for children, but evidence that it actually causes such outcomes is still weak. Despite his careful review chapters, then, Putnam inexplicably fails to use these commentaries clearly in setting priorities in his own final policy chapter. 

To prioritize intervention efforts usefully, one key consideration is the clarity of evidence on how broad social policy targets, like supporting two-parent families, directly link to outcomes in children’s later lives, such as the capacity for self-control examined in detail in The Marshmallow Test. Mischel’s book is a good model for tying policy interventions to specific outcomes at the level of children’s own skills, important evidence as we evaluate how to investigate at the policy level how to change poor children’s opportunities.  It seems that Our Kids’ policy review could benefit from more consideration of “the rest of the story” too, in this case a clearer focus on context at the level of family and children’s specific outcomes.  Of course, no single book can be expected to cover all these complex levels of analysis in full.  Nevertheless, there is value in considering how stories from different disciplines illuminate varied perspectives and background assumptions as seen from each.  Ultimately, both research and story-telling in science demand such nuance.  

Dr. Michael Pratt
Psychology Department
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, Ontario

Anthony B. ATKINSON. Inequality: What Can Be Done?, Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 2015

In his Inequality: What Can Be Done? Anthony Atkinson takes issue with the dominant discourse on inequality and launches a masterful effort in politico-economic persuasion. A superficial read of the summary of proposals at the end of the book could lead to the conclusion that we are witnessing a romantic cry from the old left: more taxes, more state presence and regulation in banking and finances, more spending… a utopian re-statement of policies long gone. Yet, as one delves deeper into this normatively driven book, the picture emerging is rather different. Atkinson’s analysis brings to bear a rare combination of attention to the efficiency and distributional implications of policy, a rich knowledge of history, and a sense of pragmatism, both economic and political. The aim, explicitly stated, “is progressive reform rather than transcendental optimality” (p. 236). And that requires changing the conversation about both the drivers of inequality and the strategies to reduce it.

Grounded on decades of world-class research on the subject, the book seeks to address the seemingly unstoppable rise in inequality in income and wealth. The 15 proposals put forward are responses to changes in the drivers of inequality, carefully identified in the first half of the book.  They combine the thoughtful updating of old policy tools to new contexts (minimum wage or progressive taxation of income and wealth) with the introduction of more innovative instruments (minimum inheritance at adulthood, participation income). These proposals, and the careful justification behind them, advance three core messages to change the conversation about inequality and how to deal with it.

First, the case for more equality is both a normative (fairness and equality have value on their own) and a positive (applied) one. The standard objections against pro-equality interventions are that they impose distortions, lead to higher unemployment, and ultimately shrink the size of the cake, creating suboptimal outcomes.  This is an all too familiar tune that, Atkinson shows, has weak theoretical and empirical foundations. Yet, stuck in the academic and public discourse, it has limited the collective understanding of the actual evolution of inequality in the long run and its determinants.

Atkinson leverages new data to study where and when inequality fell in the first place and why it is increasing again. With Piketty, he highlights the decreasing relative importance of labor earnings relative to capital but cautions an important distinction between wealth and the ability to actually draw returns from capital. It is the latter that is really skewed by income despite the fact that capital ownership via housing has become more widespread. As a result, the earlier crossing between the distribution of earnings and the distribution of capital gains has given way to a new world where there is a significant and growing overlap between them. Along the way, the growing earnings gap reflects a relatively new phenomenon: educational gains are no longer a good predictor of economic gains because the latter reflect the concentration of the ability to exploit technological innovations and the management of capital. In addition, the demographic fabric of inequality has also changed (marriage choices have become a match inter pares, thus polarizing the fortunes across households). And, at the same time, the countervailing power of unions and labor market institutions has become weaker, taxes have become less progressive (by virtue of lowering rates and narrowing bases), and benefits have become less generous (by cutting both levels and coverage).

Second, an effective strategy against inequality must sever these links in a comprehensive way. Since the reasons for the rise in inequality are multidimensional, so should be the reforms to curb it. This implies focusing on inequalities in the market place as much, if not more, as on corrections through fiscal redistributive measures; and paying close attention to the interactions between different interventions in the long-run. For instance, the goals to reallocate the benefits of technological innovation and to equalize the ability to access a minimum stock of capital and secure minimum returns require complex institutional, regulatory and fiscal measures.

The state must not only fund innovation but also partake in the distribution of its returns with an explicit concern for the distributional aspects of policy (p#1 p#7), and competition policy must re-balance the interest of all stake-holders (p#2). To increase the pool of stake-holders everyone must receive a minimum stock of capital during adulthood (minimum inheritance, p#6 ) that small holders ought to be able to leverage without incurring risks (national saving bonds, p#5). In turn, for wage earners to share in the returns of innovation, a renewed, incentive compatible, minimum wage is both possible and desirable along with efforts to ensure fair pay and facilitate efficiency wages (p# 4). 

Beyond the labor market, an expanded social security along with new transfers, such as a universal child benefit taxable as income, and basic income based on contributions to the community (participation income) would make compatible the goals of social integration and economic performance. Implemented in coordination, these policies will arguably generate not only a fairer but a more sustainable society in the face of growing demographic pressures. Those concerned with long run prosperity, even the potential winners, will do well in worrying about inequality and be less myopic. Alas, the management of myopic economic and political actors ranks among the toughest challenges in political economy.

This brings us to the third message of the book: inequality is both an economic and, fundamentally, a political problem. The resources necessary to implement the reforms mentioned above require a progressive impetus in the taxation of income and wealth. The former would imply the return of progressive taxation with a new earned income tax discount limited to the first band of earnings (p#8, p#9); the latter, progressive property taxes (p#11) and a progressive lifetime tax on the transmission of wealth (p#10). Such actions in a global economy are not new but require, Atkinson admits, major coordination efforts between domestic economic and political actors within nations and, as importantly, large levels of international cooperation (e.g. the EU).

The last section of the book is devoted to debunking the myth that these reforms would reduce national income and are economically unsustainable. Both charges collapse quickly under empirical scrutiny: cross-national evidence suggests that more equal nations grow as much and better than more unequal ones, and the microsimulation analysis in the context of the UK illustrates how a pro-equality program is economically feasible.  However, economic feasibility does not translate automatically into political feasibility, a problem treated less in depth than other aspects of progressive reform.

The book mentions several examples of domestic and international cooperation as grounds for optimism, but existing evidence from comparative political economy calls for some caution. The coordination among domestic economic and political actors to create efficient and equitable labor markets, once in place in Northern European economies, is now under question. The very diversification of experiences in the labor market complicates the national conversation about fair pay and employment even in those places where it once guided economic policy. To the extent that the political consequences of immigration and the diversification of labor market risks undermines the political feasibility of such coordination initiatives, the effort necessary to implement the ambitious proposals laid out in this book seem beyond the time horizons of office seeking politicians.

The scene in the international arena does not fare much better. The responses by EU members to the sovereign debt crisis reveal little concern for the distributional implications of adjustment policies beyond immediate electoral needs. While the occasional shock, such as Brexit, may trigger some reflection about the roots behind citizens’ disaffection with the current patterns of economic inequality and the political inaction to tackle them, current leaders seem more preoccupied with their domestic constraints than with developing a coordinated initiative to truly tackle the causes of inequality that go beyond national boundaries. Again, this casts a shadow on the political prospects of some of the proposals, regardless of their economic feasibility.

The next hurdle in thinking through a feasible agenda for equality involves bridging the apparatus this book provides with the political economy of cooperation within and between countries, exploring the institutional conditions under which these reforms can be incentive compatible and, therefore, sustainable for both voters/consumers and producers.

By bringing the conversation about inequality thus far, this book provides a rare milestone in our collective ability to aspire to a better world.

Socioeconomic inequality has been ballooning around the world, particularly among industrialized countries. Much concern has been voiced about the consequences of this trend for increases in poverty and risks to political stability, but the books reviewed here teach us that the costs to families are great as well. Instability coming from socioeconomic inequality undermines couple unions, particularly in an era of changing gender roles, and children’s well-being is put at risk. Although these two books could not be more different, they share this theme, and adduce a wealth of evidence to support it, much of it very painful. We suffer with these suffering families.

Philip Cohen’s book, Enduring Bonds, is essentially a compilation of the essays he has written over the past decade for his blog. As such, the material is somewhat scatter-shot, addressing issues of the day, based primarily on the analysis of census and survey data.

Edin and Nelson’s book, Doing the Best I Can, goes far to substantiate Cohen’s argument. While their methods could not be more different (Edin and Nelson carry out in-depth interviews with poor fathers obtained by the authors going to live in the poor neighborhoods being studied), their portrait of how the economic forces unleashed by inequality undermine committed relationships makes clear that just telling people to get married (even if they listened) would do little to stabilize the lives of the families that they observed. Each book, though, brings important insights to the overall challenge of stabilizing incomes (and, incidentally, reducing endemic work-family conflict).

Both books are a delight to read and study. Cohen takes on the widest range of topics. His use of evidence is often fascinating. Historians of the family and interested social scientists have noted that parenthood has recently been transformed, with children becoming valued less for their ability to be useful little workers and more for their uniqueness (cf. Viviana Zelizer’s study of children’s insurance policies, Pricing the Priceless Child). To indicate the continuing power of sexism, Cohen documents the proportions of females among New York Times bylines, showing that men have an easier time getting their stories published, while women are still too often relegated to stories on style and families.

Both books solidly address the problem of racism in the United States (which while not such a prominent problem in European countries, nevertheless appears in many guises). Edin and Nelson’s sample of poor fathers is approximately evenly balanced between white and black men, often living in nearby neighborhoods (despite the fact that the neighborhoods themselves are normally quite racially segregated). Race clearly makes a difference: young impoverished white fathers normally have access to a stronger network of stably employed relatives who can provide more opportunities for jobs, housing, and the like than otherwise comparable black fathers, whose relatives are often even more impoverished, addicted, and imprisoned than they are (if they haven’t already been killed).

As a likely result, the white fathers cling more closely to a traditional view of fatherhood (founded on male incomes) and more distant father-child relationships. In contrast, the young black fathers in the study have collectively created a new vision of fatherhood, given their repeated failures at being ‘good providers’, that essentially entails maintaining close social and emotional bonds with their children, what traditionalists might even call a ‘mother-child’ type of bond. This is apparent in their prominently displayed joy at impending fatherhood and in their far stronger efforts at maintaining visitation rights than white fathers in the same situation, when the children’s mothers have given up on them as useful partners.

Race is also a major theme of Cohen’s. He delights in showing whites’ fear of blacks, which has the unfortunate result that black men are all too often killed by police in the United States. More centrally, he reviews concerns about the black family, which has led whites in the growth of births outside marital unions and created the problem of fatherhood that Edin and Nelson’s poor black fathers confront.

While neither book pretends to be a policy study, it is clear that two issues are central in contributing to the pain these families, fathers, mothers, and children, experience. One is rooted in the gender changes at work. The other is the instabilities that unbridled capitalism tends to produce.

The gender challenge took root with changes in men’s and women’s productive roles that emerged with the industrial revolution and the demographic changes it impelled. Not that long ago, men and women shared a common ‘sphere’ of household production, the essence of subsistence agriculture. The emergence of new industrial and commercial jobs increasingly spurred men to leave the household to take such jobs. However, with many fewer children and longer lives, domestic women became underemployed, so that when jobs emerged that called for ‘female’ labor (requiring less strength over shorter hours), women joined men in their public sphere, taking paid employment for much the same reasons men had, to better support their families.

This change stressed families, as women added support obligations, creating the ‘second shift’ for them. This led some countries (particularly in Scandinavia) to develop family policies that reduced women’s work-family conflict. They enacted and gradually expanded programs of family leave, and even more centrally, of subsidized, high-quality childcare.

But even the Scandinavian countries have found that this is not enough. The additional burden of the ‘second shift’ for women disadvantages women in the workplace, as employers and supervisors assume (normally correctly) that female employees will put their family’s needs ahead of those of the workplace. They need to leave to pick up children from childcare centers or make dinner for their families, while men are freer to work longer hours, travel more for work, and generally feel that their major obligation to their families remains simply to provide. Hence, the emergence of policies providing “daddy days” of family leave.

Further, their large public sectors allow and even encourage workers to take family leave. (particularly men, who increasingly have access to wage subsidies they would lose if they did not take it) Their robust private sectors, however, are less enthusiastic, preferring workers who are willing to change their work schedules with little notice. But what families need is stability, not just of earnings but also of time.

Here is where unbridled capitalism becomes so problematic, as both books testify for the United States. It provides no state-subsidized childcare, so families must juggle constantly to provide coverage for their children, particularly those in the low-wage sectors of the economy. Too many children end up at risk, alone at home, or even unsupervised in cars or parks. Providing substantial notice before work hours are changed is rare, but it is as important as providing stable incomes. Countries wishing to obtain the benefits of the free market need to tame it, at least to the extent that the costs to families (like those to the environment) are assessed as part of the cost of doing business, or some combination of state support and protective regulations is put in place.

Is there a relationship between art and economics? At one level the response to this question seems obvious – even though works of art may be produced for purely aesthetic reasons, they are bought and sold on markets, they have a price, and in many other ways there is an economic dimension to their existence. But interactions between the economy and the world of the arts can have far wider implications, derived particularly from notions of value. Can the cultural significance of the arts for society be rationalised against their undoubted commercial value? And how does the practice of the arts, with its unique engagement of creativity and imagination, generate innovation that can in turn lead to economic growth?

The subtitles of these two books indicate how both occupy some part of this wide-ranging territory. The question explored in Patrick Kabanda’s book is “Can the arts advance development?”, whilst Michael Hutter’s volume is subtitled “Artistic invention and economic growth”. Both books are concerned with the ways in which the work of artists contributes to the advancement of the economy and society, and both deal with people’s experience of the arts as consumers in their everyday lives. But they approach these issues from very different standpoints. Kabanda’s agenda is the contribution that art and culture can make to economic development, particularly in the global South. Hutter, on the other hand, constructs a comprehensive theoretical framework for interpreting how artistic ideas have, throughout history, generated commercial production, and how the opposite may occur when economic growth has an impact on artistic invention.

The Creative Wealth of Nations is located within the extensive debate of recent years surrounding the role of culture in sustainable development, a debate which has paid particular attention to the creative and/or cultural industries as the arena in which the practice of culture is transformed into economic benefit. Indeed, the cultural industries have been portrayed as a potential driver of development in their own right, with the economic payoff they generate being complemented by social impacts in communities and by increased recognition of the importance of arts and culture in everyday life. In a more general sense it can be argued that culture is the context in which development occurs, such that any development strategy that ignores culture is bound to fall short. These propositions are strongly supported by Amartya Sen in his Foreword to the book, and repeated in endorsements of Kabanda’s work by two other Nobel Laureates in Economics (George Akerlof and the late Kenneth Arrow) that are reprinted on the back cover.

Over the last 40 years or so, economists have broadened the concept of ‘development’, taking it beyond mere economic growth to include measures of education, nutritional status, health, and environmental amenities. An important argument put forward in the book is that the concept should be widened further to embrace people’s experience and practice of their culture, most immediately reflected in the arts. An appeal to the development community to expand its world view in this way is not new, but it is put forward here with vigour and originality, tied very closely to a grass-roots sense of how art contributes to human welfare.

The author is an accomplished musician; his career began in his childhood in Uganda and led to a range of professional activities and qualifications in the United States. His personal background in the arts gives his writing a sense of freshness and immediacy; he argues his case from a strongly-felt personal conviction about the importance of art and culture in human affairs, both generally and specifically in the developing world. He cites a wide range of illustrative examples to support his view, drawn from many countries around the world, especially in Africa. Much of this evidence is of anecdotal value, and many of the sources quoted are located in media, journalism and the grey literature, i.e.,  materials and research produced by organisations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. The exposition is polemical rather than scholarly – the book is written in a colloquial style that is readily accessible and indeed entertaining to the general reader. At the same time, it must be noted that the book has the potential to make a genuine contribution to the academic discourse – it can be seen as an extended practical case-study to complement more formal scholarly and policy discussion of a number of issues in the field.

In a charming nod towards his musical practice, Kabanda labels his chapters with titles such as “overture”, “suite”, “variations on a theme”, “rondo” and “finale”. He deals with a wide range of topics, including discussions of sustainability, economic and cultural value, environmental stewardship, trade in culture, artists’ exchanges, cultural tourism, issues of gender and disability, and the challenges of data collection. In one especially significant chapter he discusses the importance of the arts in education, or “cultivating creative minds for development”. With a wealth of illustrations, he demonstrates the pervasive impacts on children’s capabilities of exposure to and participation in art from an early age, and he argues persuasively for the allocation of increased resources to art education at all levels of school and post-school experience.

The title of the book pays homage to Adam Smith’s seminal work The Wealth of Nations of 1776. A similar reference to a great book of the past is contained in Michael Hutter’s title, which is an ironic reference to Tibor Scitovsky’s The Joyless Economy, published in 1976. But whereas Scitovsky’s book painted a gloomy picture of a population too stupid to devote their increasing amounts of leisure time to enjoying the arts, Hutter interprets the behaviour of consumers somewhat more optimistically. He sees them as deriving joy from consuming experiences in the form of literature, music, performance, images and so on, and from expanding their consumption through learning new tastes and acquiring new products to give themselves fresh surprises and renewed joy. 

In The Rise of the Joyful Economy, Michael Hutter seeks to identify the ways in which artistic innovation has economic impacts, and the reverse process where the economic context influences the nature and content of art. He finds evidence of these two effects in the history of Western art and society over the past six hundred years. In pursuing this ambitious project, he singles out three periods of evolutionary growth during this time that exhibit increasing complexity in the markets for joyful goods. 

The first period began in the 15th century with the discovery of perspective in visual art, allowing artists to generate the effect of spatial illusion, an innovation that had widespread ramifications and provided a stimulus to commercial development, including the growth of trade in art. The second period, which the author labels the “period of exploiting social relations” lasted from the early 18th to the end of the 19th centuries. Over this time the subject matter of paintings changed to living persons and their social environments, influencing tastes and leading in due course to changing consumption habits. Finally, in the third period, which began in the 1920s and continues today, it became possible to exploit “serial variations”, the capacity of artworks to be reproduced in infinite numbers and variety, generating markets for experience goods (i.e., products that can only be evaluated once purchased and experienced) in the visual arts, film, television, popular music, and so on. For each of the three periods, Hutter provides numerous illustrations, drawn primarily from the history of painting, but also including many examples from architecture, urban planning, photography, music and design. There are images of many of the works referred to scattered through these pages, some in black-and-white, and a group handsomely reproduced in colour.

This is not an easy book to read. The exposition is dense and copiously referenced. The analysis throughout interprets behaviour, events, social interaction, artistic creativity and other phenomena as games in which play occurs as an ordered series of moves subject to various rules. Progress occurs through surprises, misunderstandings, accidents and other events that generate increasing complexity. Readers may have some difficulty accepting the relentless re-interpretation of social and cultural history in these terms, but the intellectual breadth and depth of Hutter’s scholarship are undeniable, and the originality of his ideas is impressive. Despite the challenges, there is much in the book to interest the general reader as well as the specialist. 

Taken together, these two books provide contrasting but equally rewarding excursions into the fascinating territory that lies in and between the fields of art and economics. From their different perspectives, both authors present convincing arguments about the importance of creativity and innovation in the arts, and the impact that culture in its broadest sense has on economic life.
 

The books that concern us here are based on two very different approaches to a common problem: the public policy proposals that aim to compensate the failures of the market in housing matters. On the one hand, In Defense of Housing, written by David Madden and Peter Marcuse, addresses the right to housing from a political perspective, within a framework that assumes that ideology plays a fundamental role in public interventions. On the other, Social Housing in Europe, edited by Kathleen Scanlon, Christine Whitehead and Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, with different contributions from experts on social housing, analyses how the residential problem in different European countries has been dealt with to date.

The reading of both books makes it possible to identify some coincidences. The first is the point in history in which they are written, dominated by the havoc wreaked on access to housing by the economic and financial crisis of 2008. Growing academic reflection highlights the severe deficiencies in the system for guaranteeing a roof over people’s heads. Secondly, the problem of access to housing is understood as a global phenomenon that demands that public authorities preserve fundamental human rights. The role of public policy is identified as essential for resolving the failures of a market that, due to the dual functionality of housing (as a basic good and as an investment commodity), generates serious tensions in access to it. Finally, both books use an institutional, political and historical perspective for a better understanding of the complexity of the current situation.  

However, despite the similarities pointed out, the two books analyse greatly disparate historical realities that have led to clearly different housing systems that diverge in their efficacy: on the one hand, the fundamentally liberal path followed by the United States of America, and on the other, that of many European countries, of a social-democratic nature. Basing itself on the situation of the USA, In Defense of Housing criticises the capacities of the capitalist system to tackle the shortage or complete lack of housing. It leads the reader through a reasoning of distrust in the capacities of the system itself to establish mechanisms that guarantee the provision of housing for all. In contrast, Social Housing in Europe analyses, comparatively and in detail, the different models for intervention, identifying how the provision of social housing has been resolved in some European countries and what factors have influenced the resilience of the different systems in the wake of the economic crisis.

The book by Madden and Marcuse questions whether the capitalist system, today globalised and neoliberal to the extreme, has real possibilities of preserving and guaranteeing the right to housing. The authors underline the growing commodification of housing, which ignores its function as a home. This concern leads them to defend housing as a complex good with multiple meanings for people and families, beyond representing a transactional good in the market.

The chapters configure the global treatise but, at the same time, they make sense in isolation and each of them enables definition of the authors’ position. Firstly, they show themselves to be against the commodification of housing. Next, they point out the adverse effects of substandard housing on people. Following this, the authors associate the fight for housing to conflicts of power, resources, autonomy and agency, highlighting in turn numerous negative effects that this fight brings with it on an urban scale such as, for example, gentrification or segregation. They also criticise the conceptualisation of housing policy as an ideological artefact dominated, in their opinion, by the need to preserve the market. The book’s last chapter portrays the case of the movements and activisms in favour of the right to housing in New York.

The conclusion reached by Madden and Marcuse is probably one of the most substantial chapters in the book, since they reveal themselves to be in favour of the radical right to housing. The authors argue their defence of housing as a non-market good, a conviction that has a global reach and that is reflected also in the different scales in which housing participates: the neighbourhood and the community. The authors assert the necessary combination of actors participating in the housing system (from public policy to activism) for a fair and democratic design of the right to it.

As for Social Housing in Europe, it offers a set of comparative tables on social housing in 12 European countries, including Spain, which are very useful for readers avid for indicators and statistics. It offers relevant information on dimension, tenure, schemes for determining rentals and access requirements for each social housing system in these countries. The first part of the book uses the dimension of the social housing sector for structure: large sector (Netherlands, Scotland, Austria), medium sector (Denmark, Sweden, England and France) and small sector (Ireland, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary and Spain). National experts analyse aspects such as the history of the housing system and recent changes, assignment and provision mechanisms, funding, and future outlook. At the end of each contribution, there is a summary (the Country Box) that contains the same parameters for each country.

The second section analyses three major cross-cutting themes: history, finances and legislation, and the social and private Sectors. This part converts the book into a useful piece of analysis for sector actors and academics alike, and is necessary for understanding the policy of social housing provision in Europe since the 1940s. It points out the importance of adaptation by each country to changing contexts, and deals with the funding of social housing and the different legal regimes that regulate it. It also studies the growing diversity of funding modes: the limited possibilities for funding by the public purse mean that part of the funding of social housing in the future will be probably based on private debt. With regard to the legal forms found in social housing, one of the chapters underlines the difficulty of achieving more or less unified European legislation. 

It also analyses, from different perspectives, the reduction of ‘the public’ in different areas of intervention, from processes of urban regeneration to the sale of social housing to its tenants. Within this analysis, it is worth highlighting the emergence of new challenges in the development of urban renewal processes in Europe (migration, population ageing, and climate change). It covers the processes that have met with success (e.g. area-based initiatives) or those gaps that are still unresolved (e.g. the marginalisation of certain neighbourhoods). It points out as a common denominator the concern with the public deficit as a trigger for privatisation and the lack of a ‘sense of duty’ on the part of the political systems analysed with regard to public social housing. The general features of privatisation of public housing in Europe are outlined in order to point out the effects that this has had in the United Kingdom.

Among the common aspects of all the countries analysed, the book highlights the growing participation of the private sector in the provision of social housing, the generalised reduction of subsidies for its supply, and the broad increase in demand for social housing in Europe. The final chapter also tackles the residential issue in relation to vulnerable groups by country, and by the different types of tenure. One prominent conclusion is the growing role being played by the private rental sector, often offering low quality properties in locations distant from the centre, as an alternative instrument to an adequate offering of social housing.

The underlying ideological clamour that can be perceived throughout the book by Madden and Marcuse is different from the non-normative, analytical view of the book by Scanlon et al. The first authors demand the defence of housing and the recognition of new actors in the transformation of housing systems. The second analyse the changes in the provision of social housing in Europe and detect the effects that could follow a drastic reduction in the expenditure on social housing provision. Based on different approaches, in both cases there is an underlying concern regarding the serious consequences that homes could face if the solution for access to housing for all is left in the hands of the market.

Dalton Conley: Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know about the Science of Raising Children But Were Too Exhausted to Ask (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

Amy Chua: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin, 2011).

How should we raise our children? How can we make them the most successful, happiest, best adjusted citizens possible? In 1948, two children of American time-and-motion experts Lilian and Frank Gilbreth wrote an account of their extraordinary childhood, raised in a family of 12 children.  The Gilbreth’s parenting was rationalised to maximise outputs and minimise effort. The memoir, Cheaper by the Dozen, captures something of the spirit of American society in the 1920s, celebrating efficiency, entrepreneurialism, and maximisation. 

The Gilbreth experiments in using process and work charts to track the personal hygiene of their children now seems perversely Fordist and regimented. But how much has changed? The parenting guides of the twenty-first century seem eerily similar. In Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know about the Science of Raising Children But Were Too Exhausted to Ask, Dalton Conley attempts to refine and maximise his parenting.  His methods vary from the quirky, progressive and child-centred to the faux-scientific and highly manipulative. 

The author of Parentology, Dean and University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University, eclectically cites studies in sociology, economics and psychology in explaining how best to raise children.  Though sometimes tongue in cheek, Conley nonetheless genuinely aims to mould his children to achieve at the highest levels. Desired achievements include both the obvious external successes of school grades, entry into the best universities and mastering social etiquette, as well as less tangible achievements – to self-motivate and to postpone pleasure seem to be the Protestant work ethic values Conley most desires in his offspring.  Their bizarre names – daughter E and son Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley – were chosen after reading the latest psychology studies on the effects of naming.  Unusual names hopefully enhance their bearers’ impulse control, as they have to endure being made fun of by other children. 

Not unlike the 12 children of the Gilbreths, E and Yo inhabit a production line of intensive training. Every pleasure is offset by work or renunciation, in a complex economy of sweets, treats and dollar bribes.  The results are often hilarious.  Every minute of television or computer time is earned by completing mathematics problems. And if the screen time is postponed, the minutes are increased, in order to expunge all childish tendencies to live for the moment.  Yet despite being coached into adult vocabulary and precocious literary or mathematical achievements, Conley’s children are subversive, creative and, in very different ways, resistant to his strategies to mould them.  

Ultimately, Conley relies on being physically affectionate and available to his children – hardly parenting rocket science. But set against other parenting bestsellers, these simple assertions might be still worth making. The ‘tiger mother'  Amy Chua, John M. Duff Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School, in her best-selling 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which reached international success, ultimately being translated into 30 languages, reveals herself to be just as obsessed with external social approval as Conley – her two daughters are obliged to achieve the top rank place in highly conventional areas – academic (Ivy League), musical (violin and piano only) and sporting (tennis) success is achieved by the strictest of regimes. When her children are to perform in a music recital, she drills them into the small hours.  Anything short of first place in any status hierarchy brings withdrawal of loving affirmation and substitution of shame.  Like Conley, Chua has mixed success in attaining her goals – but she is even less willing than Conley to allow her children to define their own life course.

To his credit, Dalton remains clear that his children are individuals with different needs and preferences, and ultimately, concludes that whatever his efforts, their lives are as much or more a result of their genetic inheritance as of nurture.  There are few lessons here that any parent could usefully take away, even if they had the resources to do so.  These are the memoirs of the uber-privileged.  They are parents who have high paying, flexible jobs that allow them to pay for the best tutors, private schools, and world travel.  They can interrupt their working days to meet their children after school, supervise their music practices and help ensure professional success.  Those with fewer resources to lavish on their offspring must look elsewhere. 

Each chapter in Dalton's book offers a similar structure – cite research on a parenting theme, parade his own attempts to gain the best outcomes, and then, in the face of the radical complexity of our social world, withdraw the research claims already made. Do the social sciences offer answers that parents can put into practice? Not too many, it seems.

What has changed between the 1920s childhoods of the Gilbreths and twenty first century hyper-cultivated childhoods? All depict an environment of competitive self-improvement premised on entrepreneurial values. Conley’s children, like those of the Galbreths, are saving their money, cutting deals, playing the market, and learning to spend judiciously.  The market has become the subtext of our intimate lives, and parenting is no exception.  But what has perhaps altered over the twentieth century is the intensity of pressure on children. Conley notes that his son, diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, needs medication in order to be able to get through his intense schedule.

Tiger mothering and ‘parentology’ seem quintessentially American modes of child raising.  Yet both reject America as a land intrinsically bereft of the cultural traditions that should underpin parenting.  For Conley, Americans ‘have no common culture or history’; this explains his turn to the social sciences for his children’s ‘concerted cultivation’. Yet he is apparently more proud of what he terms an Italian-American style of physical rough-housing, backtalk and affection. Conley also identifies a French mode (‘natural growth’), which lets children grow up ‘free range’ (or more judgementally, ‘feral’), as recently celebrated in Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing up Bébé (2012).  Amy Chua, in contrast, embraces ‘Chinese parenting’, which she sees as more disciplined and respectful than American versions. Clearly, parenting norms do diverge in different cultural settings – yet both American and East Asian societies seem to lean towards competitive, status-driven visions of childhood.

Cheaper by the Dozen, written from a child’s perspective, does not portray the parent as the chief influence in family life.  What sociologist Leonore Davidoff described as the ‘lattice’ of complex families – siblings, aunts, uncles - diluted parental pressure.  The 12 children of the Gilbreths were as much raised by the other children as by their parents. In contrast, sibling relationships are barely discussed by Conley and Chua. 

Contemporary families – smaller and more mobile - have lost the richness of the lattice.  This allows for intense vertical pressures from parent to child, intended to help them navigate the social and educational hoops they must jump through. Conley argues in Parentology that no child will ever complain that they got too much attention. Yet this may be the conceit of our age. Do children benefit from constant, intrusive, goal oriented parental attention? As Bringing up Bébé argued, they are likely to be better off discovering the world and themselves on their own.

Lucy Delap

Lecturer in modern British History

University of Cambridge, Murray Edwards College

Jie-Qi CHEN, Seana MORAN and Howard GARDNER (eds.): Multiple Intelligences Around the World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009)

Angela DUCKWORTH: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016)

How can teaching formulas be found that definitively leave behind the pedagogical limitations of recent years? What new pathways does the current literature offer us for tackling the educational needs and demands of the future? All over the world, in parallel with the proliferation of quantitative indicators of results and comparative evaluations between countries, there has been a blossoming of theoretical endeavours that seek to lay down the bases for a different kind of education that is broader in its reach, methods and scope, as well as to unravel the secrets of academic success. The first current provides the context for psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, explained in the book Multiple Intelligences Around the World, co-edited with Jie-Qi Chen and Seana Moran. Belonging to the second current is the book by psychologist and researcher Angela Duckworth Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Although these are two contributions to the subject with very different focuses, reading them together can be an enriching and highly gratifying experience for anyone interested in the subject of education and especially in reducing social inequality from childhood. In this sense, the central theses of the two books mutually reinforce and complement each other, while offering inspiration and possible keys for a more inclusive education.

In Multiple Intelligences Around the World the reader is introduced to the theory of multiple intelligences, which distinguishes between nine types of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and existential. The central contribution of this work is the illustration of how this theory allows us to go beyond traditional methodologies and techniques for assessment – based on linguistic and logical-mathematical skills – in very diverse contexts. With this in mind it describes how the theory has been applied in different schools, social spheres and educational phases across several continents. The fundamental lesson to be learned from this work is that making the effort to cater for the multiplicity of capabilities of students reaps a dual benefit. Firstly, better attention and educational integration of students is achieved, as the range of intelligences contemplated is sufficiently broad for all of them to have some kind of capability in which they excel, and which may be identified, strengthened or used as a starting point for stimulating others. Secondly, the entire educational process is enriched, as expanding the range of skills that are assessed and encouraged requires a greater range of teaching and learning tools and of fields for the practical application of the knowledge learned. Simultaneously, the dedication and creativity of teachers is given continual impetus, as they find themselves forced to search for techniques that effectively cater for all this variety and for the different skills and needs of students.

However, the book lacks a critical dimension: it barely touches on the difficulties that may be found along the way. The examples offered are success stories and some of the problems raised by applying the theory are only mentioned or discussed superficially. For example, there is no explanation of how application of the theory demands a considerable investment in terms of resources, if the aim really is to properly identify each student’s skills and strengthen them to the maximum, while avoiding any risk of pigeonholing or excessive compartmentalisation of knowledge. Nor does it question the fact that the method seems to work particularly well in small schools, with middle or middle-upper class students, and at early educational phases, where the intensity of teachers’ dedication and even of family involvement are key to obtaining good results, more than the educational method in itself. Even so, the book has an evident strong point: it centres the debate on the possibilities that are opened up by catering for a diversity of aptitudes and spheres of knowledge and personal development. The theory of multiple intelligences, as presented in this volume, would simplify in practice the process of individualisation of education, as it offers simple pathways to access the multiple capabilities of each student and, once identified, tries to stimulate them. This favours the self-esteem, self-confidence and learning process of those children who do not grasp conventional learning and assessment methodologies and who, generally, do not receive the recognition of many of their capabilities nor of their potential.

This final point connects in a particularly interesting way with book by Angela Duckworth, who, through systematic analysis of different types of data and scientific studies in the spheres of psychology, aims to identify the keys to excellence in diverse contexts, with a special emphasis on academic performance. Duckworth begins by explaining how sustained effort has been revealed to be essential for acquiring and perfecting skills. Over the course of the book she makes deeper inroads into what this persevering effort means, examining its relationship with what is habitually known as talent. Finally, she identifies its defining characteristics: high, well-defined targets, as well as the interest in the activity in question and the pleasure obtained from it. The author’s fundamental conclusion is that innate aptitudes and IQ are less important than perseverance in practice and in study, above all when faced with the difficulties that emerge from the passion for what one does. These skills, far from being something that is given and static, are highly malleable and sensitive to development and stimulation.

According to Duckworth, the passion that leads to resistance, constancy, personal self-improvement and success – i.e., learning – can be encouraged in different ways. Two of the most important are the cultivation of own interests and stimulation from teachers, mentors and other significant reference people. It is precisely this question that enables the two books to enter into a dialogue from which we can obtain inspiration and practical teachings. On an individual level, Duckworth’s book offers very diverse examples in this respect. One particularly illustrative example is the story of a scientific researcher considered from a very early age to have learning difficulties, to the point that he ended up re-taking whole academic years at a special education centre. His future changed radically when one particular teacher was able to identify his capabilities, show confidence in them and thus awaken in him a motivation to learn. This process of transformation began in a musical area in which the child showed a certain talent, and subsequently that talent expanded to other fields, moved by the boy’s growing self-confidence, his progressive interest in learning new things and his desire to show that he could outdo himself. And the work edited by Chen, Moran and Gardner offers interesting demonstrations of very similar processes on a collective level, illustrating how, at schools characterised by their low performance, special education centres or even in specific programmes for high-ability children, learning can substantially improve after making the necessary adjustments for detecting, recognising and developing the diversity of skills of each student.

The theory of multiple intelligences, applied as recommended in this latter book, by expanding the range of disciplines and skills that must be within the sights of teaching staff, would precisely make it easier for all students to have the opportunity to find out what their real passion is and devote themselves to it. Simultaneously, it would encourage teachers to really observe each student and their capabilities and talents, beyond the narrow confines of conventional indicators and also opening up the door to the necessary stimulus for acquiring interest and perseverance to students who without this attention would end up outside the system. This inclusive potential, ultimately a catalyst for reducing many inequalities, is present as a cross-cutting theme in both books and this is one of the aspects connecting them. Taking this as a starting point for a reflection on current education systems could provide a new angle for their reform, leading to an education that is not only broader, richer and better adapted to the new times, but also truly a promoter of equal opportunities for all. 

K. Wiest (ed.) (2016): Women and migration in rural Europe, Houndmills (Basingstoke, Hampshire) and New York: Palgrave Macmillan

A. Corrado, C. de Castro y D. Perrotta (eds.) (2017): Migration and agriculture: mobility and change in the Mediterranean area, Abingdon (Oxfordshire) and New York: Routledge

Economic globalisation and processes of urbanisation of ways of living have had a major impact on agrarian economies and rural communities all over the world. The pre-capitalist cultures still existing in agrarian societies until the mid-20th century have been transformed by an economic system that has placed industry and cities at the heart of economic activity, relegating agriculture and rural areas to a marginal position. Societies have gradually incorporated the logic of industrial and post-industrial capitalism at different points during the 20th and 21st centuries, and the most immediate consequence of this process has been the activation of human mobility. Such phenomena are widely studied by the social sciences and political economics: the implementation of the capitalist system demands the integration of the capital markets, of workers and of goods. More euphemistically, today we use the expression global chains, which connect and mobilise financial resources, workers and products all around the world.

The migratory realities of the different ruralities that exist in the developed world often remained outside the purview of scientists, a situation that in recent years has started to be remedied. This is what two very recently published books do by tackling the subject of migration to the rural and agrarian areas of Europe and the Mediterranean from two different and complementary perspectives. The first, edited by Alessandra Corrado, Carlos de Castro and Domenico Perrotta, Migration and Agriculture. Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean Area, analyses the transformations of the agri-food system in the Mediterranean. It features 19 contributions, based on local research studies, and that interpret the immigration of foreign workers as playing a key role in the process of adaptation of agrarian farming operations in the Mediterranean area to the economic conditions of the global agri-food markets. The second book, compiled by Karin Wiest, Women and Migration in Rural Europe. Labour, Markets, Representations and Policies, features 12 contributions that present – from the dual perspective of rural studies and gender studies – European rural zones as spaces of emigration, especially by young women who, from diverse personal and local circumstances, take the migratory decision of staying or leaving.

The two studies offer us a close-up of the mobilities caused by the globalised economy, which influence rural and agrarian society from two viewpoints of the migratory phenomenon: the flight of women from European rural areas due to their lack of life opportunities, and the arrival of foreign labourers who find work in a Mediterranean agricultural sector that takes advantage of their vulnerability. The structural conditions imposed by the market system and that give impetus to mobility are the same worldwide; only the study of local realities – of which both books offer a splendid close-up – allows us to grasp the complexity of the combination of structures and systems of social representation with which we must approach investigation, of both ruralities and mobilities in the world today.

The book by Corrado et al. is based around the argument that changes in the system of food production, distribution and consumption are closely linked to internal and transnational mobility. Neoliberal policies and globalised markets have impoverished peasant farmers the world over and have favoured their emigration to become temporary labourers on small- and medium-scale farms, which exploit them in order to resist the conditions imposed by the very same system that caused the foreign workers to emigrate. According to the authors, under the current “food regime”, the global supermarket chains exercise absolute control over the circuit of food production, distribution and consumption. Small-scale agricultural producers, widespread across southern Europe, solve the profitability of their farms by reducing labour costs and employing migrant labourers. Products destined for export and produced at different points around the Mediterranean – strawberries from Huelva and the Peloponnese, citrus fruits from Valencia and Calabria, tomatoes from the north and south of Italy, wines from Provence, cheeses from the Po Valley or vegetables from Murcia and Almería – are harvested by Moroccan, Punjabi, Ecuadorian, Algerian, Polish and Rumanian immigrants, who make up a labour force that makes the cycles of food production and processing possible.

The arrival of migrant workers to rural areas again highlights social inequalities, especially in the case of women, because they are accessing a labour market that is viewed poorly, with tough conditions and bad pay and that has been abandoned by the weaker segments of the local population: women and labourers. The book compiled by Wiest reminds us that women were among the first to abandon rural areas and they continue leaving them today due to the scarce opportunities for work and social advancement that they offer, and because the patriarchal models that subordinate them to men are still in force. Meanwhile, foreign immigrants are arriving in these rural areas, particularly places with the productivist agricultural activities that can provide them with work. However, deagrarianised or economically disadvantaged areas continue to suffer from problems of depopulation and masculinisation due to abandonment by the local population, especially by women.

The rural areas of Europe need to stabilise their populations and attract new settlers. Both Corrado et al. and Wiest devote their attention to analysing the impact of public policies on the migratory flows in rural zones: migration, rural development and equality policies. With regard to foreign immigration, local research conducted in the Mediterranean area – a region extremely sensitive to the passage of migrants and refugees – are evidence that the migration policies of European states are at the service of the needs of the labour markets. Labour intermediation systems and hiring workers in their country of origin are examples of this, along with policies aimed at obstructing access to full citizenship, because such barriers perpetuate the vulnerability of the foreign workers. Migrants are the weakest link and for that reason they end up in a labour market that is segmented from the perspectives of ethnicity, gender and citizen rights. In the words of Gadea, Pedreño and De Castro, authors of one of the chapters in the book by Corrado, the aim is to make up a reserve army of idle and docile workers who are always available.

Foreign immigration policies contribute to the existence of a segmented agrarian labour market and, therefore, to the arrival of foreign people in rural areas to be employed in agriculture. How do rural development policies and equality policies contribute to the migratory regulation of rural communities? Both policies have been deployed by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy in disadvantaged rural areas, which are areas that have not developed intensive farming like that described by the authors of Corrado’s book.

In the more disadvantaged environments of European rural areas – the authors of the book edited by Wiest argue – the aforementioned development policies have been unable to slow down population losses. Why do women continue to abandon rural life? To interpret the migratory decisions of women, the authors take into consideration both the political and structural contexts (public policies, labour markets, etc.) in which women live their lives as representation systems that construct cultural imaginaries on rurality and the power relations established between rural masculinities and femininities. The most important conclusion is that to put an end to the cultural models of gender inequality that still subordinate women today and prevent them from living their lives under conditions of equal opportunities with respect to men, it is vital that equality policies have a strong presence in rural areas. The researchers alert that, despite the emancipatory discourse, even women with higher qualifications reproduce gender roles and ideas of submission and sacrifice.

The authors agree that it is necessary to continue advancing in public policies on equality and reposition them as true development policies for rural areas. Therefore they propose to guarantee transport to equate the mobility conditions of men and women, decentralise higher education, create infrastructures for attention to the dependent population in order to free women from caregiving tasks and invest in the development of services with the aim of improving employability among women and stimulating entrepreneurship among them.

It would have been interesting if the contributions in Wiest’s book had also tackled the study of the situation of foreign women that have arrived in the rural village communities, because they have even fewer opportunities than local people due to their accumulation of more factors for discrimination (rural women who are immigrants and employed in precarious jobs). The book by Alessandra Corrado et al. does tackle the situation of inequality suffered by immigrant women, often hired in their countries of origin, who work in the countryside and in the agro-industrial sector of Mediterranean countries. These are rural women affected by foreign immigration policies and that are unlikely to be favoured by initiatives that promote gender equality.

Rich and diverse rural areas attract the foreign immigrant population and favour the permanence of women in rural village communities, but nationality, gender and citizen rights continue to segment these communities. These rural areas are attractive because they offer quality of life, but the same should be true of working conditions and the resources and services that they offer to the resident population. Women will remain in them and foreign immigrants will be attracted to settle in them, beyond pure need, only if they find decent working conditions and can access employment under conditions of equal opportunities.

Victoria M. ATECA-AMESTOY, Victor GINSBURGH, Isidro MAZZA, John O’HAGAN and Juan PRIETO-RODRIGUEZ (eds.): Enhancing Participation in the Arts in the EU. Challenges and Methods. Berlin: Springer, 2017.

The aim of this extensive book is not only to measure participation in cultural activities in the European area, but also to promote these in order to contribute to social inclusion and active citizenship. It offers the results of a research project funded by the European Commission’s Culture 2007-2013 programme, with wide-ranging participation of academics, managers and experts from different countries. Its content is in keeping with the concerns and objectives of the Commission, which understands cultural participation as a relevant tool for consolidating democracy and the welfare state through cultural democratisation, but also as an instrument for economic development thanks to the expansion of the creative industries and of the cultural market. 

This work follows on from a long tradition of research that, since the 1970s, has used surveys regarding preferences and practices as a tool for measuring the population’s expectations and demands. At the same time it proposes an evaluation of these instruments and the incorporation of other new ones in order to better understand cultural participation. 

Three major questions guide the research: how participation is evolving; what happens if a broad sector of the population does not take part in cultural activities (in fact, distribution is highly uneven not only by artistic sectors but also according to the main sociodemographic variables); and how it is possible to help identify factors that make a higher participation possible in such a way that policies take into account the corresponding findings. 

The book’s twenty-five chapters are structured within five parts of unequal length: the first presents instruments for measurement and assesses them, taking into account an international comparative perspective; the second is concerned with the analysis of various sectors: music, theatre, museums and cultural heritage; the third focuses on tourism; the fourth deals with the impact of new technologies; and the fifth is devoted to articles on funding and innovation respectively. 

The different chapters offer an explicit or implicit approach to the fundamental problems affecting this field: what is understood by culture or how far the cultural field extends; what is understood by participation; how to measure it and what difficulties must be overcome to do so and to make comparisons; and finally, what results of significance are obtained from this entire process. 

According to the book’s title, its content should be limited to the English-speaking concept of the arts, but in reality it is concerned with the usual repertoire of cultural activities that are included in European surveys (classical music, theatre, museums, etc.), although the range opens up significantly to include three other important areas, namely sport (the case of Ireland), videogames and tourism (in various cities, including Hong Kong), which are not always included in national questionnaires because they are usually the subject of specific surveys. We thus find ourselves facing one of the most important problems today: what is the extension of the cultural field that must be tackled by research into cultural participation, consumption and habits? 

The term participation, which comes from political studies, has consistently caused difficulties when applied to culture. Usually two focuses are identified: the French, which distinguishes between practices in the home and outside the home, plus those related with promoting cultural identity; and the English, which uses participation as a synonym of attendance and frequency (attendances, visits and readings) and which enables differentiation between attitudes that are more active or more receptive.  

The book covers other more complex distinctions of a qualitative nature that take into account barriers to participation, as well as motivations and cognitive competencies and experience. For example, one of the authors, Pierre-Michel Menger, in an analysis of contemporary music audiences within the context of the historical transformation of spaces or possibilities of choice, distinguishes three types of audience depending on their experience: newcomers, occasional and committed. And Víctor Fernandez-Blanco et al. identify 12 types of music consumers, using classical music consumption as a guiding criterion and taking into account diverse sociodemographic variables. Of these 12 types, four are considered “omnivorous”, while the rest are characterised by a low level of classical music consumption and, in certain cases, by a lack of interest in any type of music. 

Other articles direct attention to the changes that are proposed from the perspective of the supply in order to attract certain audiences, those from the communication and digital societies, who have more complex expectations than audiences in previous eras. In participation outside the home, audiences are no longer happy to settle for attendance at specific functions or events, but need involvement in meaningful experiences. For this reason, those in charge of programming have to adopt multiproduct strategies (diverse goods and services are offered) or multifunction strategies (urban regeneration, promotion of creativity, education, social inclusion). These aspects are dealt with in the articles by Tiziana Cuccia et al., by Michel Hambersin and by Roberto Cellini et al. 

The same occurs with cultural tourism, as the committed consumer will not settle for a visit to heritage sites, but requires the integration of the different components of the heritage-territory, environment, material culture, etc. For example, Calogero Guccio et al. describe and analyse the supply in the Orta lake, Italy. Imma Fondevila studies the transformations in Spanish museums, that not only pursue an increase in audiences in absolute number terms, but also aim to open them up to the variety of types of visitors, reflect on the function that public facilities must perform and achieve a qualitative change in visitor involvement through guided tours, education proposals, mediation and interpretation as well as the creation of experiences with the use of new technologies, among others. 

One of the transformations being played out with new audiences is the combination of the classical aim of personal development or self-realisation with the growing need for entertainment or distraction. Francesco Mannino and Anna Mignosa introduce the hybrid concept of edutainment to approach this problem. And Michel Hambersin also points out the need to pay attention to the expectations of new audiences in his article on classical music.

The political objective of relating participation with social inclusion and, therefore, reaching new audiences, especially vulnerable social groups (excluded minorities, immigrant population), is made patent in two of the chapters: one by Mannino and Mignosa on the Benedictine Monastery of Catania and one by Marco Ferdinando Martorana et al. on participation in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. These sustain that the arts and culture contribute to the accumulation of social capital, reduce exclusion and, therefore, improve the development of depressed urban environments, but prolonged public action is required for them to be successful.

In the introductory chapter great attention is paid to this dimension of politics and cultural participation. The discussion makes mention of both the individual benefits (differentiating between child and adult population) and social and public benefits. Undoubtedly artistic participation generates new forms of learning and new languages for interpreting the world that are key in the education process, but it also enables the generation of a sense of community and identity, promoting integration and social cohesion thanks to its symbolic efficiency. This is a question that, in the future, must not only be proclaimed but also researched with breadth and empirical rigour, without avoiding the conflicts and tensions that symbolic forms generate in constitutively plural societies. 

In the part that deals with the impact of new technologies, Hasan Bakhshi defends the need to fund innovation in the cultural field, while simultaneously showing how audiences can be expanded using different applications and techniques. In this regard, he recounts the experience of the National Theatre in London with the play Phèdre, which was screened at digital cinemas, reaching both a broad and a new audience. Noam Shoval and Bob McKercher show the efficiency of digital trackers for finding out not only the patterns followed by tourists at heritage spaces but also across the whole of the city of Hong Kong. Christian Handke et al. analyse the impact of digitalisations. In all these cases, there is much talk of information and communication technologies, but the fact is overlooked that they are also technologies of organisation and, therefore, of new forms of participation. Not only do they “alter” previous ways of consuming or expand access (such as the Gutemberg and Europeana projects), they also generate new practices and this is their most relevant dimension.  

One of the book’s most interesting aspects lies in its inclusion of the neuroscience of music. In her article, Sylvie Nozaradan asks how the human brain interacts with musical rhythm, recalling that the musical experience is an activity involving full commitment rather than merely listening. Research into the perception of the musical rhythm constitutes an opportunity to shed light on the interaction processes between biological and cultural determinations. 

The question of sources and the opportunities and limitations that they present has been deliberately left until the end of this review. In the first part of the book, four chapters analyse the most important instruments for the measurement of cultural activities. The first article is concerned with international comparability; the second, third and fifth focus respectively on Spain, Italy and Ireland. All the authors conclude that statistics are needed and that they must be adequate. 

What fundamental problems are recorded and analysed? In the case of national surveys, there are differences in the study objectives, in the variables used (for example in Spain it is impossible to know a respondent’s social class), the design of the questions, the population surveyed and the size of the sample or period of observation of the activities; poor taxonomies are used when studying genres (for example in the case of music) and the periodicity of conducting surveys varies.

In surveys of European scope on living conditions (Statistics on Income and Living Conditions), on values (European Social Survey), on adult education (Adult Education Survey) or in the Eurobarometers, different procedures are used to collect the data and difficulties arise in standardisation due to questions of linguistic diversities and identity. 

Overall, three fundamental contributions can be identified in this book, independently of those offered by each chapter: the need to generate reliable information and prudence in the use of that which currently exists; its criticism of the infra-utilisation of that same information for the design of public policies; the confirmation that the expansion of audiences does not depend so much on reducing prices as on eliminating barriers, the main one of which lies in weakness of educational capital. To address this, decisive action is required in primary school learning.

The book will be of great interest to people with responsibility for designing public policies, but also for public and private programmers; obviously for academics specialising in this area and for a broad audience of people who perform professional roles in cultural creation, dissemination and programming.

In summary, this is an essential text for the debate on the role of arts and of culture in our societies.  

Edmund PHELPS. Mass Flourishing. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2013

Mariana MAZZUCATO. The Entrepreneurial State. London: Anthem Press, 2013

Innovation has been a source of fascination for economists for decades. Seen as the engine of economic growth ever since Schumpeter’s work in the mid-20th century, the economic downturn following the 2008 financial crisis has shone the spotlight even more strongly on the potential of innovation to drive growth and create jobs. Mass Flourishing by Edmund Phelps and The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato – and the attention they have received – are two good examples of this post-crash interest in innovation. Both published in 2013, they set out to answer the question of what can be done to encourage innovation. Nevertheless, interestingly, each author comes up with a very different analysis of the problem and set of solutions. 

From Schumpeter onwards, the prevailing wisdom amongst economists and innovation experts alike has been that the most important role of the state with regard to innovation is to inject cash into the risky research phase and then to step out of the way for the private sector to do its magic. In line with this idea then, much work in innovation studies has looked at the details of how ideas are generated, how the transfer of ideas from the research phase to the innovation phase takes place, and the factors governing the survival and growth of startups.

Phelps’s Mass Flourishing follows very much in this vein, but sets out to ask a much wider question about innovation within our economy – why are some countries and time periods good at creating innovation and wealth while others are not? More specifically, he asks what has happened to the great periods of ‘mass flourishing’ that were seen in Europe and the US in the past, when people produced new ideas, products and wealth, but also had meaningful work and lives. And this latter point is key – in his mind, the kinds of economy that are innovative and wealthy also offer more fulfilling lives. The answer he suggests is that today’s economies lack dynamism, or the willingness and capacity necessary for innovation, as a result of a number of institutional, political and societal moves.

Rich in economic facts and figures throughout, the book is split into three parts: In part one, he takes a historical view to describe what he means by modern economies and how they achieved the dynamism that led them to mass flourishing in the past. He describes the birth of capitalism in the US and Europe in the early 19th century and argues that modernist values – such as thinking and working for yourself, self-expression, eagerness to work with others, take initiative, be intellectually challenged and engaged and the readiness to accept change caused or desired by others – were as important as the availability of new scientific knowledge or the institutional structures that allowed companies to be set up, trade and profit. 

In part two, he looks at the factors that, in his view, have destroyed such dynamism. In particular he points the finger at socialism’s attempts to own markets and ‘corporatism’ (the term he uses to describe the 20th century European model of social democracy) in intervening in the market to shield citizens from the anxieties around economic change. He argues that rather than developing indigenous innovation and dynamism of its own, any economic success seen in Europe in the post-war period was largely the result of ‘free-riding’ on the US’s dynamism.

Finally, in part three, Phelps turns back to the US to ask what has been the cause of the post-1960s economic decline. He points to three causes for this drop in dynamism – oversized government, institutional changes that encourage short-termism in investment and the rise of traditional, rather than modern, values. To solve this problem, he suggests a smaller state, the reform of institutions such as trade unions but also company structures to encourage CEOs to ‘care more about building companies than building their dream homes’ and cultural changes so that young people aspire to adventure, challenge and passion from their work rather than working to have nice things, enjoy financial security and build a family.

In contrast to Phelps’s plea for a shrinking state, Mariana Mazzucato in The Entrepreneurial State makes the case for a more active state. She argues that, historically, the vital role of the state has been misrepresented in stories of how innovation happens. Rather than seeing the role of the state as being limited to a passive financer of public research or intervening when markets go wrong – or even in some instances stifling innovation – Mazzucato uses a series of case studies to explain why the state should also be seen as an entrepreneur and a risk-taker – and often the biggest risk-taker in the innovation process. Some of the biggest innovations in 20th century technology have been developed as the result of industrial policy, rather than free markets.

Like Phelps, Mazzucato is an eminent professor of economics and The Entrepreneurial State draws on an array of economic facts and figures. They are, however, focused around a series of case studies that range from the development of the iPhone in the US to renewable energy technologies in China, making the book an engaging read.

The book begins with an introduction that makes a direct and explicit challenge to the mainstream economic wisdom and practice of encouraging the state to withdraw in order to make the economy more dynamic, innovative and competitive. Mazzucato argues that this presentation of the state as bureaucratic, inert and heavy-handed is ideological. While it has been effective in paving the way to wider political moves to attack and dismantle the state in favour of the free market, it is not accurate.

In Chapter 2, she paints the backdrop to this discussion, explaining the two frameworks that economists commonly use for understanding the role of the state in innovation-led economy growth: First, market failure, where the state steps in to fix the gap between private and social returns; Second, systems of innovation in which R&D spend is seen within a system in which knowledge is produced but also diffused throughout an economy. While both these frameworks have justified increased government spend on innovation, they nevertheless force the state into the role of facilitator of innovation with responsibility simply to create the conditions for innovation.

The book then goes on to develop the evidence to back up her claims that this is a misunderstanding and misrepresentation, in the form of a series of case studies showing how effective the state has been in offering direction and taking risks where others will not go. In Chapter 3 she describes how the UK Government’s Medical Research Council in the 1970s led the way to developing monoclonal antibodies, which today make up to one third of new drug treatments. In contrast, the venture capitalists – traditionally portrayed as the innovation chain risk-takers – only stepped in once the risks were clear. This, she argues, shows how the public (rather than private) sector sometimes leads the way and bears the risk.

In Chapter 5 she describes how, while Steve Jobs was successful in creating a powerful story about how individual genius, play and a focus on design led to the origin and success of Apple products, none of this would have been possible without a massive amount of public sector investment into the computer and Internet revolutions; Chapters 6 and 7 take the examples of wind and solar power industries to illustrate how important the role of the state is – not just in enabling technological developments but in promoting their uptake too. Rather than simply offering tax credits and stepping out of the way, in these examples the state has become and stayed involved in every aspect of the business.

Bringing the arguments to a conclusion in Chapter 10, Mazzucato makes one final point – the state’s ability to fulfil its role in directing and pushing innovation is dependent upon the talent and skills it can draw on. Yet access to such expertise is more difficult in nations where the state takes a back seat. She concludes that challenging the myths of the role of the state in economic development is essential if we are to produce the economic and technological change we need for long-term sustainable growth in the 21st century.

At a time when politicians are looking for new ways to boost innovation and economic growth, Mazzucato’s book has made waves across governments of various complexions. Indeed it is widely considered to be one of the most challenging and influential books on innovation for a decade or more. Phelps’s Mass Flourishing however also offers a challenging perspective for policymakers – most notably around his suggestions for reforming finance and company structure. While these might appear to  be ‘tweaks’ to the system, encouraging a move towards more ‘patient capital’ – a move called for from many corners of the economic literature – could be transformational.

Perhaps as a reflection of the way in which the world has moved on since the publication of these books in 2013, what is now missing in both books is a deep consideration of the kind of economies that we are building with innovation. Phelps alludes to this with his discussion of ‘the good life’ and Mazzacato touches upon it when she raises the question of whether US taxpayers have benefitted in terms of jobs and tax receipts from the investments made and risks taken with their tax dollars. But at a time when the effects of innovations such as the Internet are being felt in a dramatic drop in corporate tax receipts, stateless profits and low wages, and with these phenomena set to accelerate with the rapid advent of Artificial Intelligence, making sure that the innovations we create in turn create the kind – not just the size – of economy we want must be a key issue for innovation policy now. 

These two books by well-known academics are written in a popular and accessible style, each endorsing the other on their respective back covers. In both cases, the subtitle alerts the reader to the main story. The two authors are professors – Cass Sunstein of Law and Tyler Cowen of Economics – and they share concerns about the decline of the USA, each warning of problems that lie ahead for the country.

The books each reflect on the state of the economy and society in the USA over the last two decades. In their endnotes, both authors refer to a considerable body of academic research in law, sociology and economics, as well as articles from the popular press. Both books focus almost entirely on the USA with only the very occasional mention of the world outside. They both deal with different aspects of the perceived degeneration of American public life: the decline of public fora for free speech is denounced by Sunstein, whereas the decline of economic progress and the resulting brake on the growth and redistribution of income is thoroughly described by Cowen. Via these different routes, the two ultimately share the same prognosis: that American society is deeply divided and democracy is at risk.

#Republic: Divided Democracy consists of 11 chapters, dealing with different aspects of what Sunstein sees as the danger posed to American democracy and way of life, namely the pernicious effect of what he calls ‘echo chambers’ resulting from the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that enable people to cocoon themselves from unwelcome and unsolicited information and interaction. The hashtag in the title already alerts the reader to the social media context. The ‘Republic’ part of the title refers to the republican ideals of the framers of the US Constitution, who stood up for pluralism of views, and to the 1st Amendment that guarantees the rights of freedom of speech that are universally regarded as fundamental to democracy. For Sunstein, quoting John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy on the value of ‘perpetually comparing [human beings'] own notions and customs with the experience and example of persons in different circumstances from themselves’, the tragedy is that the technologies that enable us to find out about almost anything also enable us to protect ourselves from what he calls ‘happenstance’ – chance encounters with other views and cultures.

Sunstein starts with a disquisition on the ‘Daily Me’, the daily dose of self-selected and/or algorithm-generated news, blogs, social media sites, sport, culture et cetera that greets people when they start up their IT devices for the day. Evidence is provided in chapter 2 that most people now obtain news filtered to them via Facebook or (less likely) by another such platform. The result is that everything becomes self-reinforcing: you get to hear what you want to hear and fail to hear opposing views. In a wider sense, there is a culture of safe and unchallenging homogeneity, and Sunstein believes this is a matter of great concern for democratic society and government. He laments the loss of serendipitous experiences and encounters and of the public fora on which they may be, and should be, conducted.

The next chapters,‘Polarization’ and ‘Cybercascades’, delve into Sunstein's thesis that the Internet offers massive opportunities for people to insulate themselves from having to confront opposing opinion and instead leads to discussion only among like-minded people. With cybercascades, the selected information and opinion, whether true or false news or terrorist propaganda, spreads uncontrollably to others who have cut themselves off from offsetting views. The following chapters then develop his thoughts on the resulting risks of social fragmentation. In ‘What’s Regulation? A Plea’, Sunstein introduces another of his main concerns: ‘There are profound differences between those who emphasize consumer sovereignty and those who stress the democratic roots of the free speech principle’. It is his belief that elision of the two lies behind the question of regulating the Internet; freedom of choice, favoured in the economic sphere, is a very different thing from the democratic necessity of free speech.

Chapter 8 on freedom of speech discusses the constitutional position on the regulation of free speech, pointing out that there are no absolutes: aspects of speech have always been forbidden by one type of law or another, such as those on sedition and advocacy of violence. Later on, Sunstein puts forward remedies to strengthen the ‘law on speech’ as mandated by the constitution, while recognising that all that can be done in effect is to encourage democratic deliberation. Chapter 10 ‘Terrorism.com’ discusses the ‘clear and present danger’ rule in assessing free speech in the face of the threats from terrorism and computer viruses, and Sunstein argues that we cannot simply leave things as they are. The final chapter, ‘#Republic’, emphasises the need to strengthen public discourse to rescue US democratic ideals from the effects of insulating and insular ‘echo chambers’.

Tyler Cowen’s focus is on complacency in economic life, a concern that as the book develops proves to be close to those of Sunstein. The ‘complacent class’ of the title refers to those in the upper percentiles of income distribution; not necessarily the governing elite, though they, too, fail to understand the deep divisions in US society. The elements of complacency are described first: to start with, ‘The Complacent Class and Its Dangers’ spells them out – the loss of entrepreneurial drive, excessive concern with calm (through medication) and safety (especially of children), lack of geographical mobility and ‘matching’ so that, for example, people choose partners who belong to their class and locate in similar parts of the city. The following chapters then ask ‘Why Have Americans Stopped Moving, Or Is Your Hometown So Special?’ and discuss the related issue of the reemergence of segregation’ as bothersome causes of social divisiveness. 

In chapter 4, ‘Why Americans Stopped Creating’, Cowen worries about the implications of the stagnation of the US economy over recent years, which include greater economic, social and racial differences than in the previous generation. Productivity has fallen resulting in the death of the American dream of rags to riches, or at least of upward social and economic mobility. He believes that Silicon Valley and the ICT revolution are exceptional in their dynamism and drive; the ‘supercompanies’ innovate and pay their workers well but they are ‘embedded in a sleepier culture overall’. This leaves the poor with little hope of improving their situation and that poses a potential threat to the wider society that the complacent class has ignored. ‘The Respite of the Well-ordered Match: Love Music and Even Your Dog’ spells out the reasons for both complacency and the increasing divisions in US society. Chapter 6, ‘Why Americans Stopped Rioting and Legalized Marijuana’, argues that even the poor and Afro-Americans seem relatively complacent despite their worsening economic situation. Next, the book turns momentarily to China and its economic dynamism and high mobility, once the prerogative of the USA, as the opposition to present-day stasis in America.  

In chapter 8 ‘Political Stagnation, the Dwindling of True Democracy, and Alexis de Toqueville as Prophet of Our Time’, Cowen refers to the foresight of the 19th-century French observer of the USA in predicting the difficulty of sustaining capitalism over the long term. Moreover, as Cowen avers, ‘Static America has a static government’. He now turns to his main prediction: given that the Federal government has half its budget tied down in statutory spending on social programmes and its own bills, it has little flexibility to deal with any impending crisis without raising taxes or making cutbacks, which the complacent class would not tolerate. Yet the problems associated with the stasis outlined earlier could blow up or implode into crises, which is why in the final chapter, ‘The Return of Chaos and Why the Complacent Class Cannot Hold’, Cowen looks at possible crises – the decline in Americans’ trust in their own government, the threat of greater chaos from the outside world and the return of the business cycle.

Why is the quest for the American dream self-defeating according to Cowen? Because, having obtained what they desired, better-off Americans have stopped striving so hard for greater wealth and are now content to enjoy it in the comfort of their homes and, despite the resulting greater economic and social divisions, the disadvantaged do not protest. As Sunstein argues, the compulsive habit of choosing personalised and filtered social media also leads to cultural and political segregation and complacency – the connection between these two books and their authors. These books deal with the USA, but it is surely the case that both authors’ concerns can be applied to economic stability and democracy in Europe too.

Andrew J. HOFFMAN. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015

George MARSHALL. Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. Nueva York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2015

Why are some groups in confrontation over climate change while the majority of the population is paying scant attention to the problem? It might appear that the debate boils down to a question of gases with a greenhouse effect and models of circulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but this perception changes upon reading these two books by Andrew Hoffman and George Marshall respectively.

Climate change is, as the Americans say, a “wicked problem”, one that it is difficult or even impossible to solve, in which any intervention can generate new problems and whose solution requires, for example, that a large number of people change their behaviour. There are no (scientific) doubts regarding the causal mechanisms that link the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels with the increase in the global temperature. Nor regarding the origins of the depletion of the ozone layer or acid rain. But tackling the causes of climate change, minimising global warming or adapting to its consequences are challenges of major complexity. We are faced with a complicated problem and, consequently, the solutions to it are not usually a case of true or false, but of better or worse. It is here that the debate on climate change becomes even more controversial.      

As with any other environmental or technological risk, as soon as a problem abandons the “laboratory” and enters the public sphere, the debate regarding the problem ceases to be a technical-rational question to become one of values and lifestyles, of cultural orientations, of political identity and emotion. The initial controversy on climate change, related with our values and views of the world (What must be done to fight climate change? Is it our fault? Should we do something about it?), and tackling its causes and its solutions involves recognising practices and intervening in social institutions, taking into account the values and beliefs of individuals, cultural groups, organisations, communities and societies. The debate about how nature functions is transformed into a debate about how we must manage our relationship with nature.

In How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate, Andrew Hoffman, business and sustainability professor at the University of Michigan, summarises the knowledge accumulated by the social sciences regarding the reactions of individuals faced with the threat of climate change: what perception do they have of the risk of climate change? What attitudes do they have towards it? What do they feel? What do they believe they can do? What conducts do they deploy to mitigate or adapt to the problem? Hoffman starts out with a precise question: Why do some individuals accept the existence of climate change while others reject it? Why does polarisation arise in the public debate around climate change? The answer, as we will see, is not simple and far different from the type “people are ignorant of the facts” and is related to the deep functioning of our brain, our mind and our social life. 

In Hoffman’s judgement, there are four elements that polarise people’s reaction to climate change. Firstly, the existence of cognitive biases in our perception of risk. Our perception of the natural, interpersonal and social reality is mediated by cognitive risks or distortions. Our everyday reasoning resorts to the evidence, but it is rather a motivated reasoning: we use reasoning as a medium to achieve a goal, motivated beforehand by our ideological and self-defining positions and our cultural values. As affirmed by University of New York social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as individuals we believe in something and then we think: “can I believe in this?”, which forces us to seek elements of proof that support our belief.

Secondly, identity has an important weight in the formation of our attitudes towards any risk. Identity usually implies the defence of a set of values and lifestyles by an individual against different identities, perceived, on occasions, as enemy identities. It is not that we are purely tribal and irrational, but it is true that rationality is limited and it is conditioned by our emotions and our surroundings. Combating climate change implies, for certain cultural groups, an attack on certain values that should be protected (such as individual freedom and market freedom or, alternatively, equality and care of the ecosystem), something similar to what is occurring with the controversy regarding genetically modified foods. Scientific consensus indicates that consuming such foods is safe. However, there is great polarisation in the public debate. The cultural group that rejects the science related with climate change defends, in this case, the science of the safety of GMO (genetically modified organisms). And the groups that question the safety of GMO products support the science of climate change.

Thirdly, what happens is that information does not always reduce the weight of cultural identity in our decisions. To the contrary of what we usually think, information alone is insufficient to change the attitudes of individuals. On occasions, even, having new and varied information on climate change, such as that usually provided by the media, can produce greater polarisation of attitudes, as the information is processed asymmetrically by those who believe that climate change is the responsibility of human beings and those who do not believe in the science of climate change, as shown by the recent study by Cass Sunstein et al, titled «How People Update Beliefs about Climate Change: Good News and Bad News».

Finally, the polarisation is reinforced by the existence of groups and organisations with an interest in confounding and radicalising the debate around climate change. The actions necessary to mitigate climate change imply that the interests of certain organisations and collective actors may be affected. Thus these actors tend to amplify and polarise the debate, and to attenuate the risk of climate change to protect their interests, producing changes in the cover by the media, in the attitudes of the general public, in the consumer markets and in the policies of governments. 

Therefore, contrary to what may appear to be the case, the debate on climate change is more a question of cultural “tribes” and clashing political identities than of any public understanding of science.

However, although polarisation in the debate on climate change is a serious problem in the United States, where we find bands, lobbies and part of the population in confrontation, the majority is situated between these two radicalised views of the problem, and is barely worried about climate change. This is where our perception of risk enters into play. Climate change is a complex, global and interpersonal problem. It is a risk that is different to any that we have tackled previously and it may be that our psychological tools are not completely appropriate for assessing it, as affirmed by some researchers interviewed by George Marshall in Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.

To look in depth at these psychological tools, both authors devote several sections to research into risk perception. As we know from dozens of studies, our intuitive perception is not derived from expert probabilistic models, but it is determined by numerous factors related with the qualitative characteristics of risk (such as familiarity, voluntariness or its catastrophic potential), our emotions and affects, the processes of amplification and social attenuation of risk, confidence in the organisations that manage risk or our pre-existing cultural orientations.

For this reason, as George Marshall exemplifies, it is not surprising that hundreds of residents stage an indignant protest against the installation of a mobile telephone antenna in their neighbourhood yet have barely discussed climate change with a family member at any time in their lives. It is not a case of individuals lacking the necessary scientific knowledge, but of how our emotional intelligence works. Those risks that are personal, specific, immediate and indisputable tend to generate a strong perception of risk and indignation. And climate change is not one of these.

Researchers interviewed by Marshall such as Paul Slovic, Daniel Gilbert, Dan Kahan and Daniel Kahneman conclude that climate change, unlike certain technological risks, does not generate an emotion of imminent threat among a significant part of the population. Only individuals with an inclination towards seeing climate change as something that is dangerous, due to their pre-existing values, or their political or cultural identity, really do perceive it as a danger. Whether we like it or not, this is how we tend to perceive risk. We donate more money in the face of a catastrophe when we identify with a single victim than when we are aware of the statistic of thousands of deaths. The possible impact of an asteroid or the potential harm caused by a food preservative can generate greater anxiety among us than global warming. 

And the fact is that climate change seems to combine various factors that reduce the possibility of us as individuals moving to take action: the fact that it is considered an inevitable condition, the uncertainty over its future evolution (which may be used as an excuse not to act), the fact that it is not a personal risk; or the fact that it is not a risk with one specific, concrete origin (since it is a consequence of the very functioning of society itself). The issue is that it is not easy to involve our emotional intelligence in climate change in an effective way. And given that people’s capacity to worry is limited and therefore we ration it (we possess, in the words of researchers Linville and Fischer, “a finite pool of worry”), those risks that are not an immediate concern for us, such as climate change, tend to produce indifference.  

The polarisation of the debate over climate change is, for the authors, another element that hinders individual and collective action. Climate change activism is monopolised, as affirmed by one of the authors, by ecologists and their view of the world, which cuts off a part of the public. Messages of fear and the language of urgency do not help to favour the implication of all kinds of public (classified in the book as alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful and dismissive). A lack of trust in the organisations and people promoting action against climate change also hinders action. This is further delayed by our low perception of self-efficacy, the moral licence that leads us to undertake a pro-environmental action and then continue with our lifestyle, fatalist messages, individuals and governments reluctant to incur costs in the present in exchange for higher costs in the future or the defence of the status quo by organisations with interests in the energy industry. In short, due to all these factors we have not managed to convert the prevention of climate change into a social norm, into a visible standard practice, or into a habit of our societies.

Are we, therefore, destined to inaction against climate change? It doesn’t have to be that way. As both authors highlight, there is evidence of significant changes in the attitudes and practices of individuals and organisations in our societies in the recent past. During the summer of 2011, for example, after the Fukushima nuclear accident, the Japanese reduced their electricity consumption at peak times by 20%. The combination of a disaster, a call to collective identity and an informed solution (reduce personal electricity consumption) converted into an active and effective social standard, led the Japanese population to pursue the collective good as opposed to personal interests. We know that after a disaster, as individuals we become more cooperative and pro-social. But also that, once the stress peak has passed, we tend to return to our routines and inertias. Will we be capable of converting climate change into a trigger for social change?

Climate change appears to be designed to put to the test the capacity for response of any modern society. Andrew Hoffman concludes that, unlike less convoluted problems such as the depletion of the ozone layer, climate change poses a challenge as complex for society as the abolition of slavery was. Stabilising the global climate implies transforming our economic system, our infrastructures, our consumption and transport patterns, and our attitudes. As the authors remind us, our present and future answers to the risk of climate change maintain a closer relationship with the politics of identity that characterise our social life than with the probabilistic models and the circulation of gases in the atmosphere. Understanding the psychological and social dynamics of the risk can help us to tackle the challenge of climate change. Both books offer a good introduction to all these issues.