Harvard University Press Blog

Trend Watching

One of the best things about being a bookseller (and there are many, many great things) is being able to easily keep tabs on publishing trends.  You get your eyes on everything.  What’s being written about, what’s being read, trends in jacket design, etc.  Whether due to the industry’s collective finger on a singular pulse, or just a healthy reliance on borrowing, things come in clear waves.  When I was a bookseller I’d sometimes be so certain I’d blown the cover off The Big New Trend that I’d have to shout about it.

And now, having moved to the publishing side of the fun, much of the trend watching has gone micro.  Do we have in-house trends?  We do.  Our fall list, for example, is particularly inquisitive, with Richard J. McNally, Sari Nusseibeh, and Kenneth W. Warren all asking serious questions.  

We’ve also been on a bit of an apocalyptic bent, as pointed out by one of our longtime manuscript editors, who noticed that three of the books she’s worked on in the last year have doomsday titles.  The Last Tortoise, The Last Utopia, The End of Arrogance.  There’s also The Decline and Fall of the American Republic.  And we even reached back a couple hundred years to continue the trend, as we’ll publish a John Harvard Library edition of Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans this fall.

Maybe next season we’ll publish on cheer. Stay tuned…

New solutions to entrenched economic problems: A conversation with Edmund S. Phelps

 In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Nobel laureate and Harvard University Press author Edmund S. Phelps argued that the premise that the underlying problem with the US economy is deficient demand is wrong, and that intervention predicated on that premise is doomed to fail.

Instead, he writes, the problems with the economy are more deeply embedded: businesses and their executives, rewarded for short-term profits, are reluctant to plan for the longer term; the US hasn’t yet found the new export and investment activities that will replace the low- and middle-wage manufacturing jobs that have moved overseas, widening the income gap; businesses aren’t investing in innovation and Silicon Valley financing has dried up. Phelps suggests tax credits to encourage the hiring of certain workers and government funding of innovation via a network of “merchant” banks as two of the many needed solutions to these problems.

Phelps agreed to answer a few questions about where we are now, economically, and what a successful way forward might look like.

Q: The first edition of Rewarding Work, where you argued for government subsidization of low-wage work via tax credits to businesses, was published in 1997 (a new edition was published in 2007). How have the issues of pay inequity that you tackled in that book changed in recent years, and especially since the Great Recession?

 Researchers on wage differentials tell me that the pay gap between those near the bottom and those around the middle is no worse than it was in the mid-1990s. But the job picture is alarming. Unemployment rates as well as incarceration rates among the most disadvantaged are way above the levels that we saw in the days of the “old normal,” such as the mid-1990s. I think that when we finally recover to the “new normal”, those unemployment rates—and unemployment generally—will still be much higher than they were in the mid-1990s.

Q: What sort of industries might these tax credits be best designed to subsidize? What kind of wage would you want to reach for low-wage service workers who make up so much of our economy, and why is this the best way to ensure a living wage?

Economic inclusion means not only pay adequate to live a normal life in the community but also adequate chances to find jobs offering such pay. If society pressures or mandates businesses to institute a big pay increase to low-wage employees, there will be no gain of the second kind—no increase in jobs. Not only that: these businesses will be driven to look for and in many cases find ways to get along with fewer such employees or to staff their former jobs with faster or abler workers.

Q: In an article in the January-February 2010 Harvard Business Review, you argue for a First National Bank of Innovation. Why would a network of federally funded “merchant” banks be preferable to the system of venture capital in cultivating dynamism? What sort of projects would you hope to encourage?

Unfortunately, the annual investment made by venture capital firms is less than two-tenths of one percent of the GDP. That investing needs badly to be supplemented by other kinds of financing for a great range of innovators. The big banks, which used to lend to the likes of Edison, have evidently moved to the greener pastures of mortgage backed securities and other derivatives. And the small banks are struggling with their nonperforming loans. I hope that the FNBI would be just one new arrow among many in our quiver.

Q: How do these two interests of yours—increase of low-wage pay via tax subsidies to employers, and governmental underwriting of innovation—mesh? What is the common ground between these approaches?

I am delighted with that question! My thesis is that an economy must be rich in indigenous innovative activity if work in business is to offer a high level of job satisfaction and, for most ordinary people, such job satisfaction is essential to the “good life.” Of course, if jobs were inherently unrewarding, inclusion would come down to money—inclusion could be served just by handing out money to people unable or unwilling to work so that they could share in the national happiness of consuming. If you grant my thesis of the necessity of rewards from work, though, then you will agree that inclusion is not just about money. It would be a terrible failure of inclusion not to make sure that the less advantaged can find jobs in the main activity of society—innovating, investing, and producing. Unfortunately, pay rates near the bottom are so low that many job holders in bottom-rung jobs, even if they appreciate the non-pecuniary rewards, cannot cope with the demands outside their jobs unless they have more money. That is the “common ground,” I think.

Of course, there are other reasons to favor increased pay among the less advantaged—classical reasons of economic justice. John Rawls implied that a society’s economy that did not foster the self-realization of its participants would not be just even if it was shelling out the largest sustainable subsidy for employing the lowest-paid.

Q: As director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, you work to develop economic models that better represent economic realities. Why is this an important project, and what sort of problems has reliance on the standard models created for the US (and global) economy?

All the problems arise from the fact that most of the leading countries have to varying degrees a modern economy (not all countries do), while the standard economic models in the classroom, and in use from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, were inspired by the mercantile economies of the 18th century. A modern economy possesses dynamism—its creativity finds a huge outlet in commercial innovation. In the standard economic models, creativity and indigenous innovation are impossible, since everything is already known. In the modern economy inclusion in the business sector is a good in itself, while today’s standard models cannot find anything of value in an inclusive business sector.

Finally, a modern economy is prone to wide asset price swings, while in the standard models, in which knowledge is complete, the market cannot put a wrong price on a single house. This “disconnect” between model and reality has consequences for how we understand history, how we make policy, and how we view modern capitalism, which is the operating system of the modern economy. The standard modelers now saying that the ailing US economy simply needs an adjustment of “aggregate demand”, or it just needs a correction of its “poorly designed incentives” in order to perform well again are, without knowing, dangerous representatives of the standard models.

Remembering Frank Kermode

Legendary literary critic Frank Kermode, who had a long association with Harvard University Press, passed away on Tuesday. He was 90 years old. Elisabeth Sifton, a former member of the Harvard University Press Board of Directors, shared her memories of Kermode for the Paris Review. Here, Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters remembers the Kermode he knew.

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Frank Kermode gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard for 1977-8, and he published the book based on the lectures, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, very soon thereafter, in 1979. By the time I got to the Harvard Press in 1984, his relationship to the Harvard Press was a sealed deal, thanks in no small part to the efforts and enthusiasm of the now-legendary HUP editorial team of Arthur Rosenthal, Patricia Williams, and Maud Wilcox. In fact, the relationship between HUP and Kermode was so extraordinary that Arthur engineered a project that is the kind of thing no one believes happens in publishing anymore. Frank was teaching at Columbia where he’d sought refuge from Cambridge, England. He’d found a place to live but then needed to move. Frank was a magician, a very Prospero, with words, but he could hardly tie his shoes. He must have called Patricia in desperation to say he could not manage to figure out how to move. In any case Arthur got the message and went down to the business manager and said to him “you have trucks and boxes and people. Help our author move.” It wasn’t magic, but in a few days colleagues from the Press warehouse had moved Frank.

What was cool about making Frank feel at home with the Press was that there was a paradoxical logic at work, that worked spectacularly well then and for all the future years when Frank was publishing with us directly and even more recently when he remained one of my chief advisers on what to publish and big ventures after the others had departed. Even for the last two years or so we were having intense chats about how to develop and who might edit a New Literary History of the British Isles for us, a book in the line of our French, German, and American volumes. At the heart of the paradox is the fact that no one embodied the highest standards of literary criticism and scholarship in English (and American) literary studies better than Frank, and yet he insisted that he was not entitled (to quote the title of his autobiography.) He was not entitled yet he had been the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge before the battle over the Cambridge Structuralist claimed him as its second victim. He was the best, but he kept saying he was not. “Domine, non sum dignus.” He more than Groucho Marx could truly claim that he did not want to belong to any club that would have him. But as soon as Frank gave the Nortons, Arthur Rosenthal wanted him to be in the HUP club, and to be the prize member of the HUP literary studies list. The world of literary studies was exploding in the '70s with new and exciting work, but none of it was appearing on the lists of the big university presses because the College of Cardinals, people like WJ Bate at Harvard, blocked its appearance. This created a credibility problem that Arthur’s adding Frank to the list solved for Harvard.

A different perspective on birthright citizenship

Much been written (and shouted) in recent weeks about birthright citizenship in the US—the right, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, of every child born in the US to American citizenship.

Offering a wholly different perspective on a debate that has generated more heat than light is Ayelet Shachar’s 2009 book The Birthright Lottery. In it, Shachar argues, provocatively, that assigning citizenship by the sheer arbitrariness of where or to whom one is born is a badly outdated and unfair concept. Such reliance on station at birth is discredited in almost all other fields of public life, she writes, while birthright entitlements still dominate our laws and our imagination when it comes to allotting membership in a state. This adherence bequeaths to some a world replete with opportunity and condemns others to a life with little hope. A fairer solution, Shachar contends, would be to consider citizenship a complex form of inherited property, while expanding the definition of membership boundaries to include those who belong to a given nation based on their real and substantive ties to the polity.

Recommending the book, a reviewer for Tikkun wrote: “OK, you were lucky enough to be born in one of the wealthier countries of the world. But what makes you entitled to enjoy the benefits of this accident of birth while others in poorer countries are starving to death through no fault of their own?...[T]he privileges of hereditary entitlement to citizenship may be legitimate, but so too are the claims to citizenship of those born elsewhere who have developed bonds of community involvement...This book is an important jumping-off point not only for the immigrant rights movement, but also for all of us who would like to see the eventual dismantling of restriction on immigration, or even of all national boundaries.”

WikiLeaks as a Culture of the Copy

In October, we’ll publish Marcus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copying. In the book, Boon—also the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (HUP, 2005), and of the introduction to Walter Benjamin’s On Hashish (2006)—makes a deceptively simple but original argument: that copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in.

Boon blogs about “contemporary cultures of the copy” at http://inpraiseofcopying.wordpress.com/. In the post below, originally published at that site, Boon reflects on the recent WikiLeaks publication of US military documents in the context of copyright, copying, and the idea of depropriation.

Plato wanted to keep imitation out of the Republic, even as he copied the words of Socrates to write his text. The WikiLeaks affair reminds us how improbable that dream of a world without imitation remains today. With WikiLeaks’ recent publication of 90,000 secret US military documents describing the day to day operation of the war in Afghanistan over the last six years, we can see familiar claims being made about the danger that the distribution of copies poses to the polis. But it’s equally clear that the way that we make use and share copies forms an essential part of the functioning of a genuinely democratic republic. Intriguingly, WikiLeaks’ logo is itself an image of the world being copied, duplicated: the real world perhaps leaking out of the false, spectacular “original”.

The stories about illegal copying that we’re most familiar with today concern intellectual property law: pirated copies of consumer products that break copyright, trademark or patent law in one way or another. Setting aside those cases where a company’s entire production and distribution system has been copied (see Adrian John’s recent book Piracy on NEC’s corporate doppelgänger), the issue is also usually connected to mass distribution of copies: filesharing of music and video being the most obvious example. With WikiLeaks, the issue is state property and state secrets — just as it was with the event that people are comparing WikiLeaks with: the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 (itself a fascinating episode in the history of copying). Sensitive or classified information is precisely state-owned information whose reproduction and distribution is controlled by law. It would be interesting to compare and contrast intellectual property law and laws governing classified information. The obligations of the state to its citizens are different to those of private property owners to the public, yet in both cases, particular historical notions of property, rights, ownership and copy are key to how things play out.

As Mark Rose tells it in his essential history of the birth of copyright law, Authors and Owners, there’s an intriguing link between laws governing copyright and “sensitive information”. The censorship of the press, established and maintained through an agreement between the Crown and the printers guild known as the Stationers’ Company, broke down during the English Revolution of 1641-1660. When the monarchy was restored, the censorship of the press resumed, and journalist/authors such as Daniel Defoe were imprisoned for seditious writings. The first calls for a copyright law which would give authors the right to claim their work as their property were made at the end of the seventeenth century. One of the arguments made by Defoe, when he was released from Newgate prison in 1703, was that if a writer could be punished for saying something seditious, with the implication that the seditious writing belonged to him/her, then surely he or she should be rewarded for more acceptable writings by being recognized as the legal owner of his/her work. Questions of responsibility were resolved within the emerging capitalist marketplace by being framed in terms of ownership. The Statute of Anne became law in England in the spring of 1710.

What is new in the WikiLeaks situation is the sheer scale of the copying of state secrets, the ease with which the public can access these documents, and the possibility of a highly public debate on the WikiLeaks website that can build on and examine the documentation. The notion of producing a copy of a war is not itself new. As Paul Virilio has shown us, many of the key developments in twentieth century military technology aimed at allowing those conducting war to obtain as detailed a realtime picture as possible of a battlefield that could have many simultaneous geographical fronts. This picture is already a copy, a representation of a war, and forms an archive of data that can be drawn upon in various ways. While for obvious reasons the focus with the Afghan War Diary has been on the content of the revealed documents, it would be interesting to know how exactly these copies were copied: we know that they were often transcripts of radioed reports from the battlefield presumably entered into a database, but how exactly did such data make its way to Wikipedia’s website? How do particular kinds of mediation by “copies” foreclose or enable different political possibilities? Of course, it is precisely this kind of information that WikiLeaks will not be releasing, in order to maintain the anonymity of its sources.

Hypatia: From historical truth to legend to Rachel Weisz (with a stop at Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party)

What can you say about a fifth-century philosopher-mathematician who was (SPOILER ALERT) stoned to death and then torn to pieces by a mob of early Christians? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Plato, Ptolemey, and Apollonius of Perga?

Well, yes. And then you can cast her story—as generations of allegorists, from Voltaire to Gibbon to Charles Kingsley have done—as a battle between the waning light of the ancient pagan world, with its amassed wisdom, and the encroaching darkness of Christian dogmatism.

This is also the approach adopted by the new Rachel Weisz/ Google Earth vehicle and Hypatia biopic Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenábar and now in limited release at Cambridge’s Kendall Square Cinema and elsewhere.

Having sat through the movie, which strings together a number of incidents from Hypatia’s life (although, confusingly, she and her disciples don’t age so much as change clothes as time passes), segueing between them by zooming way out to reveal an incongruously satellite-photo-looking spinning globe and then back in to Alexandria; and which is characterized throughout by lots of show-offy oh-hey-now-we-are-spinning! camerawork reminiscent of that in Elizabeth: The Golden Age—we turned with interest to Maria Dzielska’s Hypatia of Alexandria, translated by F. Lyra, in order to untangle historical truth from legend from celluloid.

And it turns out that lots of the most interesting (and tonally odd) parts of the story told in Agora are true. For example, Hypatia really did rebuke a smitten student by showing him her sanitary napkin, as a reminder that human beings fell short of Platonic ideals of beauty, and are thus not appropriate objects of devotion.

The Patriarch (later Saint) Cyril of Alexandria really does seem to have been threatened by Hypatia’s popularity with the ruling class and by her former disciples’ habit of seeking her guidance even after they had risen to the top ranks of Alexandria’s secular and religious leadership. Though he seems not to have planned her murder, he was almost certainly responsible, Dzielska writes, for her defamation in Alexandria and for her resulting unpopularity among the people, which ultimately resulted in her murder.

And Hypatia did teach both Christians and pagans in increasingly Christianized Alexandria, although Dzielska proves that it’s very unlikely that she and her students were in the Serapeum—the temple to the Hellenistic-Egyptian god Serapis—at the time of its 391 destruction by Christians bent on eliminating pagan monuments and idols.

On the other hand, Hypatia was almost certainly about sixty at the time of her death, rather than in the bloom of youth, as Agora and many posthumous legends have portrayed her.

And there isn’t any evidence to support the movie’s assertion that Hypatia (who would have known Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar system) worked out that we instead live in a heliocentric solar system, with the planets bound on elliptical orbits around the sun. Very little is known of her actual work, though Dzielska believes that she may have edited the text of Ptolemy’s Almagest and Handy Tables, editions which have in the past been ascribed to her less-talented father, Theon. But presumably—and much as those of us in the thrill-a-minute field of academic publishing would beg to differ—the filmmakers considered scholarly editing insufficiently cinematic for their purposes.

Hypatia is known to us mostly by way of letters written to her and by passing mention in historical accounts; it’s difficult, at this remove, to reconstruct her life with any degree of certainty. What we can know, Dzielska writes, is that the real, historical woman should be remembered as a resident of Alexandria, a mathematician, a philosopher, a teacher, and a woman characterized by her sophrosyne—“a model of ethical courage, righteousness, veracity, civic devotion, and intellectual prowess.” And that that the richly suggestive legend of Hypatia “will continue to unfold along its own course, according to tastes and fashions.”