Review: Orlando Figes, Just Send me Word

The backbone of this book is provided by long extracts from correspondence between Lev Mischenko (1917 - 2008) and Svetlana Ivanov (1917 - 2010) during the eight years (1946 - 1954) when he was a political prisoner in the Soviet Gulag and she a scientific researcher in Moscow. They had met before the War as students and were courting each other when Hitler's invasion of Russia separated them: Lev was captured by the Germans in the summer of 1941 and spent the War in German Dulags, Stalags and concentration camps. For that, he was then sentenced to ten years in the Gulag (Article 58 - I(b)).

He survived and Svetlana waited - from 1941 to 1954, with short annual visits to him (at first, unauthorised) from 1947. After Lev's release in 1954, they married, had two children (Svetlana by then an elderly prima gravida) and lived into their nineties. Their correspondence between 1946 and 1954 comprises 647 letters from him and 599 from her. It is now held in the archives of Memorial in Moscow and "is the biggest known collection of private letters relating to the history of the Gulag" (Irina Ostrovskaya, page 297).

The work of transcribing, translating and making sense of these letters should not be underestimated; it was surely an enormous undertaking. But Figes has also spent some time researching the archives of the Gulag network in the Komi ASSR where Lev spent his imprisonment in the Pechora Wood Combine.

I guess that those archives were also hard to make sense of and in wishing there was more contextualisation in this book, I am aware that it is not something which is delivered to the researcher on a plate. Of course, we have Anne Applebaum's massive book Gulag (2003), but still ...

On the other hand, Lev's letters posted outside the camp to avoid censorship do provide a mass of detail about his daily life - about food shortages, about brutality, about lack of health care, about bribery and corruption. There are even significant photographs, partly thanks to a former Pechora camp inmate, Lev Izrailevich, who after finishing his sentence elected to remain in the area as a free worker and, for prisoners, a valuable link to the outside world (see notably pages 95 - 97 for his biographical details).

The book is highly readable: it's an extraordinary love story and also a story of extraordinary luck. Lev had many talents, and those helped him survive, but he also had strong outside support from able people willing to take risks on his behalf. Even so, at any point, things could have gone wrong and quite often it was a close shave.

Lev's biggest fear was that he might be moved to a camp - say at the Vorkuta mines, just a little to the north of Pechora - where life would be harder, the regime more strict, the opportunities for enlisting the help of free workers to act as couriers much more limited, and so on. In those circumstances, his chances of living out his sentence would have been much reduced. Svetlana, as a Communist Party member and involved in "sensitive" scientific research, ran considerable risks in maintaining a relationship with a "political".

In fact, the main limitation of the book is that it is about people so hugely untypical. The Gulag was a machine for destroying people, either physically or morally. You died, horribly, or you lost your hope or your reason. That was a much more common outcome and those millions to whom that happened leave us no voice.

So though this book can be placed alongside Applebaum's on the shelf, it also belongs with Martin Amis's very well-informed novel House of Meetings (2006) which takes its start from the fact at the end of the 1940s (1950 at Pechora - Figes, page 207) some camps provided facilities ( Dom svidanii) for brief conjugal visits.

The legacy of the Gulag does not end with the deaths of the last of its inmates. Lev and Svetlana had two children. One of them, Nikita, was able and willing to co-operate fully with Figes (page 293). About the other, Anastasia, Figes says only that she "suffered chronically from bipolar depression and was unable to work" (page 284).

Essay: Writers, Intellectuals, Professors

One of the first things by Roland Barthes that I read was, "Ecrivains, Intellectuels, Professeurs" which appeared in Tel Quel (Issue 47, 1971) just as I turned up to enroll as Barthes' student at l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. It came to mind as I was reading Adam Phillips's On Balance (2010) - a book I can't review here because I didn't read it Cover to Cover: I skipped some of the book reviews.

Barthes (at least as I recall) carves up a space which can be occupied by different kinds of individuals (the ones he names in the title) and different kinds of writing (which, as it were, go with the job). Over time, the organisation of the space changes: roles and styles get (partially) interchanged; orders of dominance shift.

Nowadays, the professors and the academic style very much have the upper hand. The fundamental reason is economic.

Imagine. A Prof earns let's say 36 000 a year (dollars, euros, pounds- it doesn't matter) for a working commitment of 240 days (probably a bit less but it makes the arithmetic simple). So it's around 150 a day, before tax. Modest, but it pays the bills. In the United Kingdom, it would not be unusual for a third of those 240 days to be charged as "research". For a Prof in the arts and humanities, this is when he or she can read and write and get paid for it. Eighty days (plus whatever voluntary overtime you put in). And no one says (yet) into how many published words that must convert, though if no words are published then eventually the Prof will lose those 80 days back to teaching and "admin".

In contrast, the writer and the intellectual have to live off Royalties - which depend on number of books sold - and Fees - which usually depend on number of words commissioned. At the beginning of a career when you have no back list of publications generating continuing income, there is absolutely no way to make a living out of being a "writer" or "intellectual". Even many years later, only a few do. That is why you find novelists taking jobs teaching Creative Writing and critics taking jobs as Visiting Professors.

Adam Phillips is a figure to be honoured. Starting out as a working child psychotherapist (in the National Health Service), he has gone on to carve out a space for himself as a writer and (public) intellectual. He showed in his Fontana Modern Master Winnicott that he could do the kind of job only a very good academic could do; he has also done the kind of editorial work academics reckon is their job. But he has now worked for a couple of decades, without footnotes, exploring how we live our lives (or have them lived for us) in a way which is both creative and open-ended but also disciplined by an enduring commitment to a psychoanalytic paradigm - a paradigm which universities, at least in the UK, have never really endowed with salaries.

The pressure must sometimes feel immense.

Academics feel (peer - ) pressured to publish and end up finding outlets in unreadable (and unread) journals for work which is - what? - ninety percent of the time banal or simply repetitive of what they published in another journal last year. Unless they belong to a fraternity or sorority whose members swear to cite each other, the only person who will ever cite these publications is the author, in his or her CV.

Writers and Intellectuals look at their bank balances. The temptation to publish every last jot and tittle, if you can, must be considerable. The temptation to take on too much, ditto. Even in Adam Phillips there are times when I feel he multiplies his trade mark Questions because they provide the words on the page that he needs without consuming the hours it would take to craft considered Answers.

Roland Barthes had more elevated concerns in his essay than my Benjamin Franklin preoccupations, but he wrote as someone who himself made the transition from intellectual (writing newspaper columns even) to (rather uncomfortable) Prof.

In the year I studied with him, he was assigned a real theatre for his popular lectures. He sat modestly enough on the stage behind a small table, with a sign from the current production ("Le Petit Cirque" ) hanging in the background. But he abandoned the theatre for a seminar room the week after someone stood up in the Balcony and denounced his reactionary adherence to theories of Binary Opposition. Someone there was making a Category Mistake.

Review: Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge

There are Econs. There are Humans. And there is America. We need to talk about America before we talk about Nudge theory.

America is in many ways a failed state. It is enormously wealthy but a large part of its population lives in poverty. Ordinary people work longer hours, take fewer holidays, are in more insecure employment, and get paid less than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.

It spends more - publicly and privately - on health care than any other country but gets a lousy return for the money spent.

An ossified Constitution exaggerates the fissures of a deeply divided society where lobbyists and fundamentalists (of whom there are many) can block even the most sensible changes. It is massively indebted, runs a structural deficit and has no Plan A or Plan B to get itself out of the mess. Tacitly, it relies on the goodwill of China to prevent total meltdown.

America professes to value freedom but imprisons people (especially young black men) on a Gulag scale. Like North Korea, it has a truly massive military budget combined with a crumbling infrastructure (think, Hurricane Katrina).

It refuses to check or even acknowledge what economists call Exernalitities: the harms some people do to others. So for over fifty years the conduct of the War on Communism, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror have subverted governments, destroyed law and order, trashed infrastructure, reduced populations to poverty, and created an incalculable toll of human misery. On every occasion, America has walked away - often enough, in demoralised defeat - and has never paid up for the catastrophes it has caused. The calculations alone are terrifying: try Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes: The Three Trillion Dollar War. The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (2008)

What is true for foreign military adventures is true for domestic policy: though China now leads the way, America's tolerance over decades for domestic environmental pollution was simply a refusal to even acknowledge externalities.

Externalities - quantifiable "harm to others" in J.S.Mill's terms - get just a couple of mentions in Thaler and Sunstein's book (page 50, page 194). They limit their attention to fields where, really, since there are few if any externalities everyone can be a winner - and those who don't want to play can simply walk away. This is what they call "libertarian paternalism": the State nudges people towards outcomes which are in their own better (longer-term, rational, sensible) interests but does not punish them or make them incur costs if they choose to opt out. Instead, with the help of clever psychologists, governments set out to create a "choice architecture" which guides (or defaults) people to good choices and away from bad ones. Who could possibly object?

Well, in America, they could and that is part of the problem. Our two Professors of Public Policy are constantly looking over their shoulders for a negative reaction from the fundamentalists. (They don't even mention guns).

So it is really an achievement in the depressing context from which their work emerges that they have things to say which are relevant to public policy choices in countries less blighted than the United States - even if, in the case of the United Kingdom, it is not for want of trying.

All the stuff on Saving for Retirement, for example, relates to a topic of enormous importance and what they have to say is useful and practicable. Ditto for mortgages (and remember that the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the USA triggered the 2008 global financial crisis). But when you hit the chapter on Prescription Drug Insurance Plans à la George W Bush (Medicare Part D) you are into the kind of weird world which makes me think that the USA is the galactic twin of North Korea.

It's an easy read; it has its enthusiasts outside the USA (Mr Cameron, though I am not sure he could tell a Nudge from a Shove); and it is probably the kind of thing that die-hard command-and-control politicians like President Hollande should read, as a corrective to the natural habitus of their thinking.

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Postscript: A while back on my General Blog www.trevorpatemanblog.com for 19 April 2012, I suggested that it would restrain democratic countries from wars of aggression if Campaign costs had to be funded from a separate War Tax imposed every time a country went to war. This would make the costs of war making transparent and remind voters who think of war as free prime time entertainment that it is not paid for from advertising or sponsorship but from their taxes. So I will now re-cycle this idea as an application of Nudge theory.

Review: Michel Houellebecq, La Carte et le territoire

The first two sections of this book, extending over 260 pages, tick all the boxes for a very good novel: the structure is there, the pacing is there, the style is there, the content is there. I read them with pleasure and anticipation.

Then comes a hundred page policier which starts abruptly in quite another place from where the first two parts ended. It casts Houellebecq himself as the murder victim and eventually incorporates the other central character of the novel, Jed Martin, into the plot and then - the story spilling over into the Epilogue - proceeds to a reasonable resolution. We end up with a satisfactory, but not outstanding, detective story.

The Epilogue then prolongs the story into the future. All Epilogues are risky ("Reader, I married him") and I thought this prolongation ill - conceived: it is contrived (it uses a naff Rip van Winkel device) and sentimental ("Reader, he died").
_________

In the first 260 pages Houellebecq crafts a modern artist, Jed Martin, and very carefully charts the development of his artistic work. Just like Houellebecq, Martin is interested in the nuts and bolts of life (literally - his starting point is to photograph quincaillerie) and in the everyday: he photographs Michelin maps and this gives him his artistic breakthrough as well as a love affair. Houellebecq develops all of this patiently, in an undemonstrative style. Along the way he shows he can do knock-about humour (finding a plumber), develops a convincing portrayal of a difficult father-son relationship, and introduces himself as a character - Houellebecq is asked to write the Introduction to the catalogue for Martin's second exhibition. This allows a large number of themes about contemporary art and society to be developed. Houellebecq is no slouch: he is a very well-read, very thoughtful writer who knows how to express himself brutally and to effect.

So I read with pleasure and interest - and despite the fact that it is what I think of as a Metropolitan-Parochial novel: it's the kind of novel in which the chattering classes of Paris can recognise themselves. I am sure this is one reason it got the Prix Goncourt where earlier (and more unconventional and challenging) novels by Houellebecq failed to do so. (Les Particules Elementaires and Plateforme, which I read some years ago [the former in the English translation, Atomised], are surely at least as important as this novel).

Then comes the policier with Houellebecq as victim and Jasselin as the wife-loving and dog-loving flic, who retires with the murder still unsolved. (He asks his subordinate Ferber to call him if ever the case is resolved and the loyal Ferber does just that; it would fit well in the film).

There is quite a lot of sentimentality here, some of it expressed around Jasselin's wife and rather more around his dog. I can't buy into this. I am happy with Paris as a city of romance; I just wish it wasn't a city of romance and dog shit.

Houellebecq closes by following Jed Martin into the future. Like Houellebecq before his murder, he retreats to the countryside but encloses himself behind electrified fences. He exits his estate from a specially constructed road in order to avoid the awful village in which he lives. And then, suddenly, many years later he decides to venture out into the village he has avoided for so many years... and, Lo!, it is completely transformed. This is toe-curlingly bad (where was Houellebecq's editor: cut everything after page 384 and you have a better ending) and it is not retrieved by an account of Martin's artistic work in the final years of his life: this is now too little and too late.

My French is good enough for a novel like this (I just get stuck over acronyms and no doubt miss incestuous allusions), but not so good that I can read any-old 400 pages. A book has to engage my interest and this one did. He deserved his Prize for the first 260 pages.

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Just one thing I cannot develop without re-reading the novel: I don't think the chronology is very secure. Over which period of years does the novel spread? And connected to this, why does it seem to me that Martin and Houellebecq and Jasselin are all characters who prematurely age? They are all old men before their time.

Review: Daniel Kahnemann, Thinking Fast and Slow

There is an awful lot of Experimental Psychology in the world; some of it must be true. Over the decades, the Military has been its biggest sponsor in search of ways to ensure that missiles are launched at the right targets; sometimes they are.

This highly readable, well-paced book is both autobiographical review of Daniel Kahnemann's life work as an experimental psychologist and a survey of the state of the field in which he is a dominant figure. The book gets better as it progresses and we get to the work in what is now called "behavioural economics" and which has undermined the assumptions of orthodox economics about utility, about risk, and about rationality (in the sense of coherence). The later chapters are, in fact, more argumentative than experimental and align with work on transitivity of preference and so on done by other Nobel prize winners like Kenneth Arrow.

Back in the 1970s, I stopped reading Experimental Psychology and turned my attention to Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence and theoretical Linguistics.

I had a number of doubts. In relation to Social Psychology, I got tired of reading tautologies which were independent of their supposed experimental support ("Extroverts are more likely to initiate conversation with strangers") but out of which whole textbooks were constructed.

And in relation to experiments to demonstrate how the mind works, I felt it likely that we were being shown how paid but under-motivated student "Subjects" responded to weird experimental requests and not much more. The experiments would not bear the weight of interpretation placed upon them.

I still felt that working my way through Kahenmann's opening chapters Specifically, I felt that if you brought to bear Relevance Theory (as developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson out of the ideas of H.P.Grice) then you would get a different take on at least some of the key experiments Kahnemann (often in collaboration with Amos Tversky) devised.

Consider the apparently much-discussed Linda experiment (Chapter 15 in the book under review) . The core finding is that large numbers of undergraduates and even postgraduates can be got to say that

"Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement"

is more probably true than

"Linda is a bank teller"

despite the "obvious" set-theoretic logic that the class of feminist bank tellers is wholly included in the class of bank tellers and that therefore membership in the larger class is more probable than membership of the (presumably) smaller class.

However, when you look at the experimental set up, you see that a central element is the provision of information which sets a trap. Though setting traps is very much what Experimental Psychology is about (and we should "know" this by now), innocent students take the information they are given in good faith and proceed very much as Relevance Theory suggests we proceed in all contextualised language processing: we use least effort (Kahnemann's "System 1"), assume the relevance of everything that is said to us and try to maximise the informational yield from what is said paired with the context in which it is said.

So the students are told all this stuff about Linda's biography, they assume it somehow relevant, and they compute "Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement" as the maximally informative conclusion which can be derived from the information which has been ostended to them.

The students' mistake is not a mistake of logic; it is the mistake of assuming that the Experimenters are acting in normal conversational good faith. But they aren't. They are trying to prove that students are idiots and that is about all there is to it.

In support of this, look at two different descriptions which Kahnemann gives of the Tom W experiment, the twin of the Linda experiment. At page 147, Kahnemann gives us the information about Tom W. which was ostended to the student Subjects. It is preceded by the following contextual information, also ostended:

"The following is a personality sketch of Tom W written during Tom's senior year in high school by a psychologist, on the basis of psychological tests of uncertain validity:"

Then at page 153, after showing how the Trap succeeds, Kahnemann reprimands us,

"But you were explicitly told that the description should not be trusted".

"The description should not be trusted" is not synonymous with "tests of uncertain validity". In the Trap which has been set, the Subjects are permitted to accord some validity to the information ostended to them. They were not told to completely disregard it. In that case, what would be the conversational point of ostending the information in the first place? In terms of Relevance Theory, it would be wasted effort which invited more wasted effort.

Put more generally, I want to say that this kind of Experimental Psychology exploits the Trust Bias without which neither social life (N.Luhmann) or cognitive life is possible. It's like a Three Card Trick repeated through endless minor variations.

But as the book progressed, I felt Kahnemann's experimental set-ups increasingly escaped this line of criticism and I was convinced by his arguments about how we (and not just Subjects) approach gambles, risk assessments and choices which affect our wealth and health. It was an Ah Ha! experience to see how things like Nudge Theory ( Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge) developed out of the kind of Experimental Psychology Kahnemann has done in the latter part of his career. And there are moments when Kahnemann rounds off an analysis with a dramatic flourish which really does make you sit up. So he concludes a discussion of preferences and preference ordering with the claim, " framing should not be viewed as an intervention which masks or distorts an underlying preference ... At least in this instance ... there is no underlying preference that is masked or distorted by the frame" (page 370)

I am not really in a position to judge whether, having neglected Experimental Psychology for forty years, I am now up to speed thanks to one book. But there is much of real interest in this book from the pen of a major theorist now at the end of his career and I don't regret the time it took me to work through its 418 pages (498 with all the add-ons).

Review: Owen Jones, Chavs. The Demonization of the Working Class

This is a passionate, highly readable polemic. It makes a forceful case quoting from politicians in reflective mode, from Fleet Street stories and appallingly unreflective Opinion columns, and from informal person-in-the-Ashington-High-Street interviews.

Margaret Thatcher took on trade union power and won. But at enormous cost. She solved the problem of striking workers by closing down the mines and trashing manufacturing industry. Let them eat Benefits! She dealt with the solidarity of working class communities by attacking social housing, setting those able to buy under Right to Buy against those unable or unwilling to. She encouraged Every Man for Himself.

Her successors - Tony Blair included - ended up attacking the workless as shiftless and the inhabitants of the remaining social housing as feckless and feral. Chavs the lot of them.

The rich got richer (as both Thatcher and Blair intended) and the poor got poorer. The financial sector boomed until it (quite recently) busted. In place of manufacturing jobs, casualised, part-time and low paid service sector jobs were all that was on offer. Trade unions had no purchase on this new world of crap employment.

Largely ignored by New Labour, the C2DE classes eventually stopped voting, allowing power to pass to arrogant posh boys who don't know the price of a pint of milk. Some have bought into the argument that the jobs and the houses have been taken by immigrants but few have actually voted BNP.

The solution? A new class politics arguing and fighting for better jobs, affordable housing, a greater equality of income with differentials restored to the levels which prevailed from the 1950s to the 1970s,actual representation of working class people and their interests in Parliament and the media.

It's almost convincing, especially when twinned with something like Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level.

One problem, it may be too late. The long-term damage has been done and cannot be reversed. And even if that is too pessimistic, things can only get better for a new generation in new places not for those still living in the old industrial and mining heartlands.

It is not enough to say that Margaret Thatcher trashed manufacturing industry and that New Labour ignored it. There is a very complicated history which involves much more than "globalisation". For example:

- for long periods, the UK maintained an overvalued currency which made exports uncompetitive and imports the opposite; it also enhanced the role of the City long before New Labour
- education policy never coalesced around any core commitment to maintaining high-quality technical and scientific education surrounding and supporting research, development and innovation in manufacturing industry; in some cases, factories failed because they had become museums of how things used to be done. Compare Germany! is the obvious thought.
- no government succeeded - though Labour in the 1960s tried - to achieve a compact between unions and employers which would ensure both a share in the profits to workers and secure production schedules to employers. Owen Jones does not go back far enough in his history to have to confront the sheer counter-productive disruptiveness of strikes, official or "wildcat". Once again, Compare Germany! is the obvious thought.


Another problem, which the market has strikingly failed to solve, is that people without jobs (Jones interviews several) live where there are no jobs and that people without affordable or decent housing live where there is not enough housing.

Between 1997 and 2010, no less than 2.12 million new jobs were created. That hardly sounds like skid row. Of those jobs, 385 000 were taken by UK-born people and 1.72 million by people born abroad. (pp 238 - 239) BNP vindicated? No.

The migrant workers who arrived in this period, largely from the EU, went to places where there were jobs and not enough people or qualified people to fill them. In practice, London and the south east, though in agriculture they would have spread more widely (Jones never writes about agriculture). The UK-born unemployed were simply living in the wrong places.

In coming to London and the south east, immigrants came to areas where housing was scarce and expensive. Meanwhile, up North, houses were being boarded up and demolished by the thousand.

But what could government had done? It could (let us suppose) have acted directively in one of two ways: it could have told unemployed people up North (where they had housing) to move South where there were jobs (but no housing). Thus Norman Tebbitt and unacceptable.

Alternatively, it could have told employers to move their jobs up North and employ unemployed people. Unfortunately, most of the jobs were not in manufacturing. They were service jobs required by London's economy. You cannot tell someone to move their posh restaurant from Mayfair to Merthyr Tydfil. There ain't going to be any customers.

So much as I admire Owen Jones' defence of people who have been wronged, I think that a new class based politics will have worse than an uphill struggle. It will be a labour of Sysyphus.

The United Kingdom is a country in long-term historical decline. Had it stayed more democratic, with high levels of intelligent popular participation, it might have avoided some of that decline. Had it had a better class of politician, ditto - but now we really are scraping the barrel. And decline is just that: in the end, you can see it all around you as Owen Jones has done.

Review: Daron Acemoglu & James A Robinson, Why Nations Fail

I am not convinced. This book comes with 14 pre-publication product endorsements, five of them from Nobel laureates, so the weight of world opinion is against me. But let me try to make my case.

In a 529 page book, Acemoglu and Robinson (A&R) survey world history - Neolithic to the present - through a score or more of small or medium-sized case studies. They leverage these cases into examples of the thesis they wish to maintain, using just a handful of not very abstruse concepts.

Some of the case studies are thumbnails and, occasionally I had reservations: for example, I think Russia was more industrialised and wealthy before 1914 than they allow, collapsing between 1917 and 1921. It then grew from a much lower base than it had achieved prior to 1914. Some of the more extended cases are well-structured and carefully argued: those of South Africa and Botswana, for instance.

The general idea is that nations can sustain economic development over the long term only if they are open both economically and politically - "inclusive" is the concept A&R use: a useful concept because more inclusive than "free market" or "democratic".

For short periods, nations which are inclusive only at one level - economic or political - can make progress but then they will hit the buffers unless the non-inclusive level opens up. A&R reckon that this will happen to China where the control of the Communist Party will sooner or later come into conflict with the relatively inclusive economy it has unleashed. This thesis is not unfamiliar - I think I read it first in Will Hutton.

A&R use "extractive" as the opposite of "inclusive" and, in effect, write about extractive elites. At the economic level, these operate through guilds and monopolies and general hostility to outsiders and innovation. At the political level, they take the form of absolute monarchies, one party states and common-or-garden dictatorships which extract whatever they can from whatever is going. The two levels inter-connect, as in cases of "resource curse" where a single political elite monopolises the revenues from production and export of a nation's only valuable resource - diamonds, coffee, oil.

Extractive elites get even richer when they find ways of (further)depressing labour costs, whether through slavery, serfdom, land apportionment or other more subtle methods of confining a labour supply to just one kind of employment possibility.

Extractive economies and polities have serious problems accepting technological innovation and the "creative destruction" that implies or accepting independent entrepreneurship. With remarkable consistency, they end up banning them and killing people involved with them. A&R give many telling examples.

Extractive states also have serious problems of control, since the rewards from being the elite are so great that others may try to take over the act. From this, civil war. And the resources being extracted may run out or go out of fashion. Whatever, extractive societies - like the DR Congo for all of its history - generally end up producing mass poverty and political instability.

Whereas inclusive societies manage to get into a virtuous circle where things can only get better, extractive societies generally end up in a vicious circle and things only get worse. Thus Spain over many centuries in the past or North Korea today.

Exactly what happens to a given society depends a lot on contingent events which produce what A&R call "critical junctures". They use the Black Death in Europe as a paradigm example. The thesis they advance here denies historical inevitability and stresses historical contingency - things could have turned out otherwise.

So far so good. Now to what I think is the big problem. A&R paint some rosy pictures of inclusive societies, old and new: England after 1688, the USA, Australia, Botswana. And they paint some terrible pictures of failed extractive nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

They write about colonialism, emphasising the way in which in Latin America and Africa local extractive elites simply took over at Independence the role of colonial elites, doing nothing to enhance the lives of their citizens. But they do not write about the continuing role of former Imperial powers - or the United States - in sustaining these elites.

Yet a large part of world history of the 20th century is the story of cuddly-friendly inclusive Western societies doing their utmost to sustain extractive elites in power in Latin America, Africa and Asia. They did it - and continue to do it - either by direct military intervention against forces seeking more inclusive economic and political institutions, or by selling armaments on an extraordinary scale to the world's worst regimes so that they can keep themselves in power and their people poor. In this, France has played an appalling role in Africa; the USA in Latin America and Asia; and the United Kingdom wherever there is half a chance - Saudi Arabia, for instance.

This kind of vicious interdependency is not discussed by A&R.Developed and followed through, it would greatly alter the outlines of the world history they offer us. It does not mean that their concepts are not helpful, nor does it invalidate their often valuable analyses of the dynamics of development. But societies are not closed. And the Goodies from one perspective often turn out to be Baddies when looked at in a wider perspective.