Recent and Current Reading

Steven Levitt's Freakonomics was highly entertaining.  It's full of entertaining quirks and Levitt certainly poses some interesting questions that most other economists would not think to ask.  But then the book has little to do with economics, which may be good or bad, depending on your point of view of the economics profession.  Levitt shows that you can measure interesting phenomena with the right data sets and he is imaginative in the way that he finds things to measure.  His suggested causal link between the legalisation of abortion and the reduction in crime two decades later is probably Levitt's most controversial thesis.  Levitt is far more eclectic than most economists are, with his willingness to draw freely on the insights of disciplines like sociology and social psychology and the book shows tells us more about imaginative social science in general rather than economics in particular.  I was disappointed that he didn't expand more on the question of incentives - the one area he could have made a distinct contribution as an economist.  In a sense there's less to this book than meets the eye.
 

I haven't quite finished reading The New Egalitarianism edited by Anthony Giddens and Patrick Diamond.  It tackles one of the most important issues facing the left, in opposition and in government; how does social cohesion and solidarity coexist with individualism, cultural diversity, fragmentation and globalization.  There are  contributions from well known thinkers like Gosta Esping-Andersen, Saskia Sassen, Ulrich Beck and Lord Giddens himself as well as New Labour figures like Ed Miliband and policy experts like Anne Power and Julian Le Grand who have experience of deploying their expertise in government in one way or another.  There is much argument in the book, especially around where a break might have to be made with some core assumptions of traditional social democracy and it is gratifying that such issues are being taken seriously by influential scholar-practitioners.

Some of these themes are given a local flavour by the contributors of  Theorising Irish Social Policy edited by Bryan Fanning et al.  Having just acquired this yesterday, I have only read Anne Coakley's chapter "Poverty and Insecurity" and Gabriel Kiely's contribution called "Individualisation".  Both very worthwhile indeed. 

Finally, I was delighted to find a copy of The Dynamics of the Northern Ireland Conflict by Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd in a second hand bookshop while I was on my lunch break.  It was in pristine condition and cost a mere €8.00.  Having been published in 1996 might make it seem a bit out of date but from my quick scan of the book on the train home this evening it looks a very impressive scholarly and multi-disciplinary approach to the topic.  By the way, I also read the odd novel but I'll deal with fiction some other time.

Comments

[Nadia Aramancam]

I wonder if what you have read recently must coincide with "what I've read recently", and as to whether the second-hand bookshop wants to earn a few bob by way of advertising. I am interested to know if the expression scholar-practitioner is recent/yours as it certainly hits the middle (if not centre) of the (never quite fenceless) ground traditionally poled by the terms 'academic' and 'intellectual' somewhat deflating my old defining adage to corner university apple-lickers(possibly inspired by, and in this order, Chris Murray and Walter Benjamin): An academic is an intellectual with a mortgage.
Finally, and just for the sake of amiable work in progress towards the re(de)fining discourses of political thought, surely the issue of how
social cohesion and solidarity coexist with individualism, cultural diversity, fragmentation and globalization has been challenging us since, at the very least, the American war of Independence, Rousseau and the industrial revolution- not that I find the terms 'solidarity' and 'globalisation' entirely specious within the context of professional argot.