Harvard University Press Blog

From British Infrastructure to Net Neutrality

Most of us living in 21st century industrial societies take for granted that our towns and cities are connected by a sprawling network of roads, most of which are reasonably well maintained. But, of course, it wasn’t always thus. In Roads to Power, a book we published a bit earlier this year, Jo Guldi explains when, how, and why Britain invented the system of infrastructure that now crisscrosses modern lands.

In a recent interview with CBC’s Spark, conducted during the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Guldi explained how British infrastructure came to be transformed:

Around 1780 a group of Scottish and Irish landlords started to think hard about what they were reading in this new economist, Adam Smith. And what they realized was that a system of infrastructure on a national level could break down local monopolies, and it could mean that they too could participate in the wealth of the industrial revolution being then experienced in England. And so they set about trying to persuade Parliament to give them sufficient cash to build roads out – an inter-kingdom highway system connecting London with her former colonial capitals of Dublin and Edinburgh. They were successful, and the inter-kingdom highway system was built over the course of thirty years. Thousands of miles of perfectly paved roads: the first expert-built infrastructure system of its kind in the world. Infrastructure on a national scale, connecting all sorts of grids of streets on the local and national level.

It was utopian thinking in 1780. Nobody had ever come up with such an idea. It was a new idea about how capitalism could work, if capitalism were going to defuse the wealth from the few guilds and few metropolises where people were enjoying the industrial revolution to everyone. So, a new idea of capitalism that worked for everybody.

As Guldi explains in the book, the development of this national road system had profound and unexpected ramifications. When travel by road became less challenging, more people became mobile. This led to new groups of people coming into contact, more people from more places roaming the streets of London, and new ways of thinking about the meaning of crowds and about how to interact in a vast world of strangers. Groups realized that they could use the roads to launch political movements or to manage their organizations, with soldiers, Methodists, artisans, theatrical players, and ordinary working people traveling in greater and greater numbers.

But Which Keynes?

During the economic meltdown of 2008, when politicians and pundits were casting about for explanations, it was far from certain that the ideas of John Maynard Keynes would come roaring back into public discourse. Just a few years earlier, Keynes was hardly mentioned in discussions of economic policy. But then down goes Lehman and here comes Keynes, back in the headlines. Then comes government spending, then government debt, then fear of default and aggressive partisan politics, and then it’s back to bye bye for Keynes. ‘Twas but a quick return engagement, a cameo based in caricature, say Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman, authors of Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes. This most recent appearance was only one of many such returns, they argue, each of which seems to have been based on a different version of the multi-faceted economist. From Capitalist Revolutionary:

The Keynes who was recently and so suddenly resurrected is far from being the only Keynes to have appeared in public debate in the last half-century. He is not the same person who was famous in the middle of the twentieth century, during what was widely called “the age of Keynes.” Neither is he the Keynes who was rejected so decisively by economists and politicians in the 1970s. Keynes and Keynesianism have been reinterpreted time and time again, both by those who seek to claim his authority for positions they want to adopt and by those who denounce him, using him as a foil against which they can present their own ideas. This repeated reinterpretation should not be a surprise. We now see the world differently from the way people saw it in the 1940s, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War; in the 1960s, when Kennedy and Johnson were trying to manage the economy; or even in the 1970s, when the current movements against “big government” and the welfare state were first getting under way.

One reason for seeing Keynes differently is that the world has changed. The trends that get swept into the category of “globalization” have transformed the world economy, just as the end of the Cold War and the end of Communism transformed the political climate. Present-day skepticism about whether politicians and businessmen can be trusted to do anything other than line their own pockets contrasts dramatically with the widespread confidence in government and planning found in the thirty years following the Second World War. These changes have had a profound effect on which Keynes people have been able to see. There is, however, another reason for seeing Keynes differently. Keynes and Keynesianism were multidimensional. Unusually, Keynes straddled the worlds of academia, journalism, government, and business, with the result that he cannot (or should not) be pigeonholed only as the designer of economic policies or just as an important economic theorist who sought the fundamental laws governing the operation of capitalist economies. He was both of these, and to leave out one or the other of them distorts our view of the whole. He was, moreover, also a philosopher who offered a moral critique of capitalism.

Keynes and Hayek, Economists and Battle Rappers

What’s the threshold for “internet sensation” these days? Surely 400,000 views in less than a week makes the grade. So, meet your latest internet sensation: “Fight of the Century,” an epic rap battle staged between actors portraying the economists John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. Take a look:

 

Pretty impressive production, and also not a bad primer on some of the differences between two prominent economic schools of thought. It’s clear from the video that its producers’ sympathies lie with Hayek. In the boxing match between the two men, Keynes is nearly knocked out, barely struggles to his feet, and yet, in a surprise for both combatants, is ruled the winner by the judge. The boxing match serves ostensibly to illustrate the verbal combat in the video’s other thread, which also ends with Keynes being embraced by officials (while Hayek is championed by the people).

Be careful with taking too many lessons from this video. There’s more than a little manipulation going on here. Keynes cast as an unfairly-crowned champion? In a context meant to resemble the United States in 2011? That’s gotta make you chuckle. You know who else is chuckling? Milton Friedman.

Sure, the economic collapse led to the development of some renewed appreciation for Keynes. But a glimpse at the tone of the ongoing budget discussions should give the lie to any notion of the triumph of Keynesianism. In 2010 we published a book called The Return to Keynes, which documented the dramatic rebirth of Keynes’ thought as a guiding force for the recovery. And then, not a year later, someone at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting saw the book in our booth and cracked that, with hindsight, it should’ve been called The BRIEF Return to Keynes.

The Crisis of Neoliberalism

Earlier this month we published a new book from Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, both of whom are Directors of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Duménil and Lévy are the authors of an earlier Harvard University Press book, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution, in which they showed that, despite free market platitudes, neoliberalism was a planned effort by financial interests against the postwar Keynesian compromise. In their new book, The Crisis of Neoliberalism, they examine the global economic collapse of 2007-2010 as an inevitable outcome of the rise of neoliberal economics. Unlike much that’s been written on this collapse, Duménil and Lévy focus not on villifying individuals, but on describing the larger forces at work. And, again unlike most other accounts, the authors offer concrete prescriptions for revitalizing our global economy and closing the door on the era of neoliberalism. With accessible language accompanied by well-designed graphs and charts, The Crisis of Neoliberalism is a useful new guide to understanding the world around us.

Gérard Duménil was recently interviewed by the nonprofit news agency The Real News Network. In two segments that you can watch below, Duménil gives a lucid explanation of neoliberalism and its rise before turning to the inherent instabilities that led to this crisis. He also touches here on solutions, which are outlined in far greater detail in the book.

(Note: these videos are loading a little slowly from their host.  If you have any trouble with playback, just press pause and let them load for a minute or two.)

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The Walmart Mom Goes to Washington

Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart, new in paperback this season, is a deeply and creatively researched study of the world’s largest corporation. The book traces how the company’s meteoric rise was enabled by its thorough integration of the values of the Sun Belt communities from which it sprung. By invoking the fundamentalist Christian principles of its workers and customers, Moreton argues, Walmart has created an environment in which its low wages, paltry benefits, and rigidly gender-based hierarchy are readily tolerated, if not embraced. In 2010 the book received both the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book from the Organization of American Historians and the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for best-published book in American Studies from the American Studies Association. Below, Moreton reflects on the role of the “Walmart Mom” in last month’s historic midterm elections.

(Note: Since the publication of To Serve God and Wal-Mart, the company has dropped the hyphen and rechristened itself “Walmart.”)

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Earlier this month the Supreme Court agreed to a limited review of Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., to determine whether the largest class action suit in history can proceed. Named for Betty Dukes, a Walmart greeter in Pittsburg, California, the nine-year-old case asserts only what internal Walmart sources acknowledge: that despite lower turnover rates and better performance evaluations, women within the company were for decades passed over for promotion and paid less than men for the same jobs. A 1995 memo from the company’s own lawyers, reported the New York Times, warned management that “men in salaried jobs [were] earning 19 percent more than women. By one measure, the law firm found, men were five and a half times as likely as women to be promoted into salaried, management positions.” The Supreme Court will not rule on the discrimination itself, but rather will air Walmart’s challenge that the class of 1.5 million women itself is too big to be meaningful. According to the company that determines the temperatures in each of its stores from its Arkansas headquarters, the women should sue their individual managers one by one.

Few legal observers expect much for these Walmart Moms from the Roberts Court: five of these justices, after all, unleashed the flood of corporate campaign cash via Citizens United and protected the Goodyear corporation’s right to discriminate against Lilly Ledbetter as long as it managed to keep her in the dark for more than six months. But the bigger story is a challenge to our national moral imagination, and can be addressed in fora beyond the reach of pro-corporate judicial activists. The simple fact is that the nation’s wealth, like Walmart’s, has all too often been built for some by systematically undervaluing the work of vast classes of people. Putting those constituents at the center of our economic thinking—treating the majority as the majority—is the change of heart that would remake the “kitchen-table conversation.” This case presents another opportunity, then, for the left to listen to the concerns of Walmart Moms, something at which progressives failed miserably in this fall’s midterm elections.

You remember the Walmart Mom: In the 2008 election cycle, she was the swing voter to watch, but her identity changed radically depending on just who was watching. For Democrats, she was one of Obama’s strongest supporters—the white woman without a four-year degree making under $60,000, regardless of where she shopped. But defined as a woman who shopped at Walmart at least once a week, she was typically a religious, conservative, older white woman, struggling in or retired from a Walmart-type job herself. In this latter incarnation, she represented that persistent American political enigma, the Reagan Democrat who promoted conservative positions on so-called social issues like abortion and gay marriage but showed strong support for classic progressive goals like universal health coverage and an increased minimum wage. The Republican ticket ultimately carried Walmart, and the company itself launched an aggressive effort to brand the electorate as broadly as possible. By identifying the multinational with its customers rather than its public subsidies, labor violations, and sex discrimination, Walmart hoped to deflect the criticism that had steadily mounted: who’s going to attack Walmart if by some measures seventeen percent of voters embraced the moniker for themselves?

Ebook Sales - What's in a Number?

The New York Times made a mini-headline of its own this week, when it announced that it would begin to track and report ebook best sellers in 2011. This, says the Times, will also entail a redesign of the section of its Sunday Book Review that currently includes 14 other lists.

The variety of lists currently available gives a nice, sweeping picture of what’s selling (which is different than what’s being read), but it’s important to consider all of the factors involved. Distribution, for one, plays an enormous role in these statistics. A book by an independent press is not going to be available in anywhere near as many outlets as one published by Random House, and if it isn’t available, it can’t sell. The movie business has a way of accounting for this sort of disparity, with the reporting of per-screen or per-theatre revenues, so that one can compare the success of a film on hundreds of screens to that of a film that’s playing on thousands. This could just be my ignorance, but I don’t believe the book business has a similar metric.

The best seller lists also provide a sort of sociological window into American purchasing patterns. The hardcover fiction list, for example, presents us with the 15 best sellers in cloth. But what it means, really, is that these are the 15 books most popular right now with a cross-section of the population that either has the disposable income to drop $25-$30 on whatever they want to read this week, or has a relationship to literature that compels them to get it while it’s hot, regardless of the expense. Bless their hearts, in either case.

The paperback numbers are even more flush with insight, mostly because of the way that the trade fiction and mass-market fiction lists are presented side by side. Ever walk into a bookstore and see two versions of a single paperback book, right next to each other? One has a bigger trim size, but a slimmer profile, and nicer paper, and sells for $13-$16. The other has a smaller trim, meant for spinner racks, but is much thicker, on rougher stock, and probably priced around $6.99. The former is the trade, the latter the mass-market. If you bought both, and set them on your shelf for even just a year, you’d see that one’s meant to last, and one’s basically disposable. They represent different attitudes towards the value of books as objects, each perfectly valid. They also represent different supply channels – mass-market fiction is available at grocery stores and gas stations; trade paperbacks usually are not.

The paperback fiction lists in the NYT Sunday Book Review let us see how different books appeal differently to these different markets. On the list dated November 14th, 2010, for instance, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is #1 on the trade fiction list, but Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is #1 on the mass-market list. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, along with Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire, make the only two titles that appear in the top 20 for both trade fiction and mass-market fiction. What’s not clear from the list, though, is that only a very small selection of books is ever actually available in both formats. Number three on this trade fiction list, for instance, is Howard Jacobson’s Man Book prize-winning The Finkler Question, which is not available as a mass-market paperback.  Publishers decide which books to make available in which formats, and these lists both highlight and inform their decisions.  

Market Mania and Collective Purpose

John Eklund represents Harvard University Press, The MIT Press, and Yale University Press across a great swath of the United States. Here, he gives his take on a few Harvard books coming this fall and his hope that they signal a growing public critique of the free market system. (You can view the original post at Paper Over Board, where John shares his “road reports and musings.”)

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One reason I love university presses is that, at their best, they serve as a kind of coal mine canary for big ideas. They combine extraordinary reserves of editorial patience with an exceptional level of academic brainpower. This makes the university press publishing process an incubation period for ideas that can later make their way into public discourse in a splashier way. 

Hundreds of popular books on evolution over the past couple decades owe their existence to the transformational research of E.O. Wilson and his book Sociobiology. 

Steven Pinker’s crisp, cogent arguments about cognition rely mightily on dozens of books nurtured over many years by the cognitive science masters at The MIT Press and other academic publishers. 

And the John Gray “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” industry rests on a foundation of academic scholarship, much of which originated with university press publishing. Interestingly, this fall Harvard will publish Rebecca Jordan-Young’s book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (September 2010), which calls into question twenty years of received wisdom on the alleged mars/venus gender divide. 

My point is that books published by university presses often signal trends. And this season I’m thrilled to see a cluster of fascinating titles examining our collective hallucination about the so-called free market system coming from Harvard University Press. If history is repeated, these books should presage a broader popular discussion about the system we live under and take for granted.

In a most straight-forward way, eminent Chicago scholar Bernard E. Harcourt takes on what he calls one of the most pernicious myths of the modern era- the idea that the market is self-regulating if left alone. In his sweeping new book The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment & the Myth of Natural Order (January 2011), Harcourt brilliantly links our irrational notions about punishment with our fantasies about the supposedly natural system of market organization. It’s a deeply subversive book in the best sense of the word.

Ten years ago, Harcourt launched a critique of the “broken windows” philosophy of urban law enforcement (the idea that if you harshly punish small property crimes, it will stop the big crimes) with his book Illusion of Order. That strategy had hypnotized policy-makers, and Harcourt’s thoughtful challenge opened a discussion. I’m hopeful that his new book will inspire a similar rethinking of our faith in the market metaphor. 

Moreton wins Frederick Jackson Turner award for To Serve God and Wal-Mart

Great news -- UGA historian Bethany Moreton has won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for her HUP book To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (reviews: Bookforum, NYTBR, The Big Money). The award is given each year by the Organization of American Historians for the best first book on a significant phase of American history. In investigating the complex network that gave rise to the giant we know as Wal-Mart -- on that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists -- Moreton's book uncovers the roots of the "Christian service" ethos that has increasingly powered capitalism at home and abroad. Moreton will accept the award at the 2010 OAH meeting in Washington DC on April 10.

||| Read Bethany Moreton's essay "Culture War on Aisle 5? Wal-Mart, Evangelicals, and 'Extreme Capitalism'" at Powells.com.

Michael Hardt on The Common in Copenhagen

HUP author Michael Hardt, who, along with his co-author Antonio Negri, has transformed over the past ten years our conception of what it means to live in a "globalized" world, has just returned from Copenhagen, where he was able to observe the goings-on around the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference from a different angle than the one usually adopted in news reports that focus on the official wrangling inside the conference center. Below is his report on the power dynamics he witnessed between the various tiers of concerned parties that gathered both inside and outside the event grounds during that hectic and exhilarating week.

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The Common in Copenhagen

By Michael Hardt

The common is quickly becoming the primary terrain of political struggle in the age of globalization. I have just returned from Copenhagen, where during the past two weeks the COP15 UN Climate Summit has been the scene of intense negotiations over the management of the common. Primarily at stake is how and to what extent we will share the common wealth in this world and also how we will counter the destructive forms of the common that threaten our societies and forms of life on earth.

When I say that the common is centrally in play in the processes of globalization I refer on the one hand to the land, the forests, the sea, the atmosphere—in short, something like what was traditionally called the commons. On the other hand, the common also names a range of results of human production and creativity, such as ideas, images, code, knowledges, information, and affects. The question of climate change refers primarily to the first of these but the relation between these two notions of the common was also an important factor in Copenhagen. I will return to this briefly below.

Once we conceive of the Copenhagen summit as a struggle over the management of the common, it is useful to separate this struggle into two relatively separate scenes. One scene took place inside the official meetings at the Bella Conference Center, where admission was strictly limited to government representatives, approved NGOs, some journalists, and other select participants. I spent most of my time, however, at the second scene, outside the official meetings, among social movements and activists, whose presence represented an important encounter between the activist traditions focused on environmentalism and those relating to the various aspects of globalization.

The official meetings were the stage for a series of intense, high-level negotiations about the form and hierarchies of the emerging structures of global governance that Antonio Negri and I refer to as Empire. It is even more clear today than ten years ago, when we starting thinking in these terms, that no single nation-state, like the United States or China, can "go it alone" and rule the global system. Any attempts at unilateralism are now doomed to failure. Instead we saw at Copenhagen an example of how the emerging structures of global governance are being constructed within and among three distinct tiers.

To serve God and Wal-Mart

Bethany Moreton on what makes Wal-Mart unique:

Like the majority of the world’s population, but unlike most other United States citizens, Wal-Mart’s core constituency only left the agrarian economy in the third quarter of the twentieth century. The frames of reference it carried into the age of terabytes therefore sound anomalous to the representatives of industrial modernity. But as the Chicken Patrol suggests, anomaly is in the eye of the beholder. The high-tech redneck, the rustic with a Bible in one hand and a Blackberry in the other, is only paradoxical from the perspective of a stage theory of history. Innovation from the agricultural periphery only shocks if we assume that the industrial North Atlantic leads and everyone else will follow, at their own remedial pace, along the same path.

In fact, however, it is the reputed "antimodernists" who have shown a consistent talent for innovation. The rural South embraced distance commerce back when it meant mail-order catalogues and global cotton markets. Fundamentalist preachers first seized the new technology of radio and then cable television to create a congregation of the air. In the 1970s, the Moral Majority mastered computerized direct mail to remake national politics. And, indeed, one small-town retailer set the technological standard for a global economic empire. Observers who thus mistake style for substance, as the Chicken Patrollers know, reveal more about their own assumptions than about the objects of their interest. To reject Detroit as the universal telos, it turns out, is not to reject progress itself.

That's from the first chapter of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, an eye-opener of a book that goes way beyond the standard journalistic accounts of the company's rise to provide less a history of the company per se than a biography of the world that is Wal-Mart. And it's a different world than those of us on the east coast (particularly its upper geographical reaches) are used to studying. For those of you wondering just where today's service economy actually came from, you can't do much better for an explanation than this -- carefully researched and written with considerable spark.