Clive Ponting's 1940 and its Critics

It seems a common criticism of Clive Ponting's 1940: Myth and Reality that he repeats facts that everyone knows. (Even Angus Calder, whom I would have expected to be more sympathetic, also makes it in his own Myth of the Blitz, a book which has its virtues but which also surprised and disappointed me in forcefully coming out for the myth that, as he himself owns, he once sought to debunk.)

This strikes me as a matter of picking a fight where there is none, since Ponting makes no claims about bringing new facts to light. It also strikes me as unintentional confirmation of Ponting's making a well-founded case. And that it is commonplace gives the impression that people are straining to find support for a negativity coming from other places. (Calder, alas, is a literary critic doing history, and one not wholly unaffected by the fashions of his day, as he shows when in Blitz he cites "death of the author"-flogging postructuralist Roland Barthes, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the book came down on the side not of a reading of the facts, but of myth over fact. Groan.) Often they are pushing a blatant political agenda. (After all, his becoming a public figure as a Falklands War whistleblower did not exactly endear him to many opinionmakers; while then and now debunkers of myth like 1940 can only expect the hostility and contempt of the orthodox.)

Yet, that he is up against such prejudices is proof of how necessary his book has been--and perhaps, even more necessary now as the myth he criticized fills our movie screens once more, shaping the views of credulous moviegoers who get what little history they have from such content and nowhere else.

Review: 1940: Myth and Reality, by Clive Ponting

Reading Clive Ponting's World War II history Armageddon it seemed to me that its value lay not in its bringing new facts to light, but rather in his attentiveness to those facts that do not fit in with the conventional wisdom; in his gathering them together and recognizing that they add up to a quite different picture from the one we normally get--less romantic and less comfortable for many, but where Ponting succeeds, also more nuanced and truthful.

So does it go with his more tightly focused study, 1940: Myth and Reality. The conventional wisdom among Britons (and I suppose, the English-speaking world generally) regarding that fateful year is that, following the final demise of the appeasement-minded and incompetent Chamberlain government, a united Britain, brilliantly led, tough, resolute, singlehandedly holding off the Nazi juggernaut at its seeming peak, and in so doing saving the world.

The image Ponting presents is instead of a Britain that was a shell of its former self in economic terms--its industry too puny and obsolescent after many decades not just of American and German expansion but its own slipping competitiveness to support its war needs, its once fantastic financial might depleted (by failures in other areas, by world war, by Depression). It was also badly overstretched militarily, even before the war. Meanwhile the half-hearted and incompetent leadership did not end with the replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill in the Prime Ministership, let alone the broader elite, which had rather more sympathy for the extreme right-wing government they were facing than is usually admitted, while Winston Churchill's oratory, another myth in itself, fell far short of bringing together a country deeply divided and in some quarters deeply alienated (class mattered, mattered greatly), and contact with the terror of the Luftwaffe (the fight against which was in ways very badly mismanaged) produced defeatism as well as defiance. A far cry from the legend, it was a far narrower thing than people would like to remember, in any event Britain quickly ceased to be able to rely on its own resources (already dependent on imports from, among other places, Germany, for its rearmament in the late '30s, and on the edge of insolvency by 1941, after which only American support let it continue), and it fell to the combined industrial and military might of the United States and the Soviets to not just finish the job, but do most of it in the four and a half long years that followed the end of 1940, as Britain went from great power to client state.

Ponting's argument adds up to a satisfactorily comprehensive, alternate image of 1940, satisfactorily grounded in the indisputable facts of the situation--as I am now even more convinced after grappling with a good deal more of the history in trying to explain Britain's rise and decline as a great power myself.1 And while by the time I came to the book I had already encountered not just the bulk of the facts but most of what he had to say about them, his fluency in his subject, and in conveying it, made it far and away the most striking summing up of what they mean, while being highly accessible. Meanwhile, with the myth of 1940 he tackles perhaps stronger than ever (not only in the fashion for politically convenient historical revisionism, but the way the neverending stream of movies selling the myth has recently overflooded its banks, with Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour and the rest), his debunking of misconceptions that are not only wrong but dangerous remains at least as relevant now as it was when Ponting first published it.

1. This was the subject of my recent paper "Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity," which you can read over at SSRN.

Review: Armored Champion: The Top Tanks of World War II, by Steven J. Zaloga

Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2016, pp. 336.

Armored Champion is Steven J. Zaloga's recent assessment of the "best" tanks of World War II, or more precisely, the 1918-1945 period (since the interwar era gets pretty fair coverage). Still, the volume affords much more than a mere "best of" list. Zaloga opens the book with an extraordinary overview of the key characteristics of tanks from the standpoint of conference in the period with which he is concerned, between 1918 and 1945--the properties that make for the combination of firepower, protection and mobility. He discusses not just the importance of the caliber of a gun, for example, but its length of barrel, the merits and demerits of various kinds of ammunition (with regard not only to individual performance in specific situations, but availability), steel penetration at given ranges, and fire control systems; not just the millimeter thickness of a piece of armor plate, but discussion of its sloping and hardening, and the distribution of such plate around the tank; not just the horsepower ratings of engines, and top road speeds, but details of power trains and suspension systems. He also looks beyond all these to such less noted but still essential matters as communications and layout.

Proceeding beyond the assessment of individual vehicles in the narrow sense he also affords the reader a fair grounding in the realities of tank combat (engagement ranges in different terrain, on the proportion of hits scored to shots fired, on where those hits strike the tank, on the odds of their doing damage); and the ways in which the assessment varies by level (what may seem best to an individual tanker not necessarily so from the standpoint of a whole army forced to compromise between quantity and quality). All of this is supported with numerous concrete examples, diagrams and statistical tables. He gets into the ways in which single tank designs have been inconsistent--the excellent T-34 suffering from qualitative problems amid the chaos of the early, disastrous phase of the Soviet-German war before the tank factories got their house in order, raised their productivity and upgraded the product. And all the way through he is mindful of the way the state of the art continuously changed, the "world-beater" of 1939 hopeless on the battlefield by the war's end.

Impressive as Zaloga's broader discussion is, he carries over the same meticulousness into the period-by-period and theater-by-theater assessments that comprise the bulk of the book, not only in the level and variety of detailing in his discussion of different tanks, but the disparity between the tanker's view and the commander's view according to the swiftly evolving state of the art. Admittedly the coverage of the really fine points of the subject is not equal throughout, some tanks getting deeper coverage than others (with the T-34 an obvious and very understandable example given its lengthy and critical role). Still, let me put it this way: if someone were planning to design a World War II-themed strategy game, and they needed to work out formulas for calculating the results of engagements among different kinds of armored forces, this book would offer an excellent start. Yet, precisely because of his comprehensive yet extremely accessible explanation of so many of the basics, the book is not just a useful resource for those interested in the minutiae of the subject, but an excellent introduction to the subject of tank warfare generally.

Writing on the Post-1945 History of the Royal Navy: A Few Thoughts

Originally posted on RARITANIA on March 8, 2016.

Looking into the subject of British military history, one is quickly struck by how little of it is devoted to the post-1945 period, and this clearly applies to the British Navy. There are books about particular episodes--for instance, quite an outpouring of works on the Falklands War. There are also quite a few studies of smaller subjects, especially in the academic, think tank-type specialist literature, like the development of Britain's sea-based nuclear deterrent.

However, more comprehensive treatments are scarce. In contrast with the norm for other subjects, where authors tend to get more precise and prolific the closer they get to our own time, general histories of British naval power (as with Paul Kennedy's generally excellent The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery) tend to cover the post-war period in just a few broad strokes. And books specifically attempting a comprehensive treatment of the Royal Navy's evolution in this time--its transition from a superpower-level force to something more expected of a mid-sized West European country--are downright rare in contrast with those about the age of sail, the Victorian era, the world wars.

Of course, a familiarity with the biases of the field--such as Jeremy Black has noted--affords one explanation. As he noted, the tendency among historians has been to concentrate on the premier forces, and the biggest and best-known wars.

After 1945, the Royal Navy ceased to be the world's premier force, a distant second to the United States Navy, and then a third to the Soviet Navy--with the two other navies not only larger, more lavishly equipped and more active in world affairs, but setting the pace of technological and tactical developments. And of course, even in writing about those two navies, there has been nothing to compare with the global conflagration of 1939-1945.

Instead there is the Royal Navy enduring round after round of defense reviews and budget cuts and endless retrenchment driven by economic weakness and the declining legitimacy of imperial and martial ideals at home and abroad, while being outsized and outclassed by a growing number of foreign forces; and in the meantime carrying on with innumerable operations of smaller scale and consequence, short on the more conventionally "dramatic" and "exciting" actions (like surface actions), and these apt to be on the fringes of larger events (as in the Yangtze incident), in support of another, leading actor (as in Korea) or even ending in frustration (as in Suez).

Black noted, too, that historians tend to favor operational history and biography--and one might add to this that, dry as many find history, a romanticized view of war and a nationalistic sensibility can and does affect what historians choose to write about. With nothing here quite comparable to a Trafalgar, or even a Cape Matapan; and still less the figure of a Nelson, or even a Jackie Fisher; this leaves it an even less attractive subject. Indeed, the tale of the dismantling of Britain's world power status, with all its controversies and frustrations and humiliations (epitomized by the Suez affair, by Harold Wilson's having to eat his words about Britain being a world power and influence or nothing in the wake of the pound's devaluation), still relatively fresh in the memory, is far less appealing from such a standpoint than the empire's rise--cause for lament rather than triumphalism (out of which Correlli Barnett has made a career).

Additionally, in contrast with earlier periods, like the early twentieth century when the prospect and actuality of war with Germany dominated British strategic thinking, a study of the Royal Navy in the post-war era lacks a convenient center, leaving it all the more diffuse. Decolonization meant numerous separate conflicts, interacting with each other and with the Cold War--with a discussion of these made all the harder by how, for much the same reasons given above, many of the smaller conflicts that need to be taken into account have been only slightly covered. (Despite the salience of the subject given today's politics, how much time has English-language historiography given the war in Aden?)

However, whatever one makes of the cause, the neglect is unfortunate. Whatever else one may say, the Royal Navy was not just the world's second or third-largest navy for the second half of the twentieth century (and West Europe's largest), but globally active in a period that saw the "closing shop" of the biggest colonial empire in history, and the Cold War. The legacies of these actions and events, from the South Atlantic to South Asia, remain very much with us, and just as they are part of the Royal Navy's history, so are they part of its history. Additionally, the story of that navy's accommodation to Britain's reduced circumstances is well worth considering in itself, as precedent and parallel to other developments (for instance, the contraction and recovery of the Russian navy after the Cold War, so much in the news now).

Naturally, while recently giving so much attention to the larger picture of post-war Britain while completing my recent writing on James Bond (whom you will remember is a British naval officer), I had recourse to what has been written. And the most satisfying book on this subject I have encountered so far has been Eric Grove's Vanguard to Trident, reviewed here.

Review: Rigor Mortis, by Richard Harris

Originally posted on RARITANIA on May 24, 2018.

Contemporary fiction is prone to beat us over the head with overdrawn pictures of elite prowess, not least in regard to its depiction of workers in scientific and technological fields. Just as the billionaire is invariably brilliant and hyperarticulate (what a far cry from real life!), the scientist is always superhumanly lucid and meticulous.

Just how superhuman the depictions are, how removed from the human reality they are, is made all too clear by Richard Harris' recent book, Rigor Mortis. The field of medicine, Harris argues, has seen much smoke and no fire in the endless announcement of imminent breakthroughs that somehow never materialize. Where computer science has "Moore's Law," describing the geometric growth and cheapening of computing power, medical science has the reverse--"Eroom's Law," in which progress toward treatments and cures has slowed in equally dramatic fashion in a textbook case of futurehype, even as we remain in a very early phase of the battle against disease. (Harris informs us that of some 7,000 known diseases, only 500 have treatments, and the treatments of many of those "offer just marginal benefits" (3).)

Harris gives us to understand that this is a function of the publication of enormous volumes of intriguing experimental results that, somehow, other scientists are incapable of reproducing--a "crisis of reproducibility" suggestive of the field drowning in low-quality research. Just how bad is it? To take a significant example, John Ioannidis' survey of tens of thousands of papers on genomics reporting genetic links to particular diseases--98.8 percent of those results irreproducible, forcing one to conclude that they are false positives (132).

This problem is, partially, a matter of the maddening complexity of biological systems--the sheer difficulty of controlling for single variables in the way we are all taught in the third grade science is supposed to do. As Harris' ancedotes demonstrate the slightest difference in the choice of experimental apparatus, or lab procedure, can skew the results. (Not only is the gender of the mouse in question relevant, but so is that of the scientist who picked them up, given the stress reactions of mice to male rather than female handlers.)

However, the roots of "Eroom's Law" run a good deal deeper than that. It is partly a matter of educational failures--of medical researchers not getting a proper grounding in the deeper intellectual foundations of science (the scientific epistemology, sheer old-fashioned logic), or the use of statistics. Moreover, rather than lab work being a matter of standardized best practice, it remains a matter of individual craft, acquired by way of apprenticeship. All of this makes the design of experiments and the interpretation of their results sloppier, in ways ranging from inadequate sample sizes to the failure to properly "blind" studies, opening the door to the influence of the results by researchers' biases--with such problems afflicting perhaps three-quarters of the studies examined by the Global Biological Standards Institute.

It is also a matter of institutional failings that worsen the problem. There is the scarcity of genuine, academic research positions, and even for those who can land research positions, funding for the actual research work. (Colleges don't pay for it. "Get a grant, serf!"--to quote recent Nobel laureate Jeffrey Hall--is the prevailing attitude.) One result is the intensification of the competition not just for positions (let alone tenure and promotion) but for grant money far beyond what is good for the field. Scientists might spend half their time writing grant applications--a devotion of time, thought and energy that would be far better utilized in the actual research. The difficulty of raising suitable sums also encourages the cutting of corners to stay within one's budget--among the results of which scientists have not always taken the trouble to properly check their cell lines (an epic of scientific blundering in itself), and become overly reliant on the pool of underemployed, ill-paid "postdocs" left by the scarcity of research positions as cheap but inexperienced scientific labor. Additionally, with the premium on being first rather than on doing it right; on the Next Big Thing; there is a tendency to rush to conclusions, and play those up. (One study found that the use of superlatives like "unprecedented" in the opening sections of scientific papers shot up a staggering 15,000 percent between 1974 and 2014 (191).) Mixed in with all this is an increasing temptation to fudge, if not fabricate and falsify (187), about which no one can be complacent.

Of course, the great virtue of the scientific method is that it has a mechanism for self-correction built in--but the current situation undermines the mechanisms by which this happens. The failure to reproduce experiments does not easily register within the field's collective consciousness. One reason is that journal publishers (a multi-billion dollar business), and unavoidably career-minded scientists, are encouraged by all these circumstances to attend to the next thing (they hope, that Next Big Thing) rather than revisit old work. The journals' editors are uninterested in the repetition of experiments to check old findings, especially when they have negative results. They also make the retraction of invalidated findings difficult (journals charging thousands of dollars for this), while by the time it happens, a good deal of damage might have been done, the work cited hundreds of times already by other researchers in other papers--building on that flawed foundation. Besides, the intensified career pressures exacerbate the resistance to admitting prior research failures, or calling out those of others (who might be in a position to pass judgment on one's next grant proposal). Accordingly, even though it seems that much or most of what is out there ought to be retracted, this happens with just 0.02 percent of papers in a given year. (It might be noted, too, that pharmaceutical manufacturers have "whittled away their own research departments," leaving them without alternatives to the troubled academic system as a source of leads (227).)

The cult of specializaton also feeds into this, by reducing the chance for outside views, fresh thinking and greater perspective. And the problem is not relieved but worsened by the revolutionary changes in scientific tools--the weakness in statistical analysis taking its toll as medical research becomes more quantitative, and increasingly deals with "Big Data" like everything else.

All that said, Harris is optimistic--arguing that the problem is at least better publicized than it was before, and that reformers are taking steps to correct the problem. There is a broader development of "meta-research" (such as that conducted by the aforementioned Ioannidis), examining the difficulties of research itself and searching for solutions to it, and limited but real efforts to create standards where none existed before.

I can only judge Harris' book as an outsider to this world. Still, his case strikes me as a formidable one, lucidly argued, and amply supported by scholarly as well as journalistic research. The bigger problem of low productivity in this area of research is undeniable, and Harris is quite persuasive in his pointing to the factors that are leading to that crisis of reproducibility. Moreover, for all that he presents his argument in a highly accessible fashion--the most general knowledge of biology and academic research sufficient to follow it along.

Still, one could argue that if he points to the problems, the full story is even larger than the one he tells. While Harris does not actually claim anything of the kind, his book can still lead one to think that the only problem is a broken academic research system, when arguably there are a whole host of others--from the more intrinsically difficult nature of the problems on which scientists are now working (admittedly, he does acknowledge the Big Data issue), to the ways in which the patent system frustrates the creation of potentially helpful new drugs. Moreover, where this particular problem is concerned, the book's stress on the scientist in the lab can seem to slight the other factors in the situation. After all, just why is it that scientific education has been weakened in the ways he says? Might the lack of grounding in epistemology and logic that helps lead to those flawed experimental designs not say something else--about the disdain for humanities like philosophy in contemporary culture? For that matter, why is medical research so starved for funding? And might all this be a problem not merely within this field, but across the sciences?

Anyone looking for answers to these parts of a larger story would have to look elsewhere to round it out--while in doing so it would quickly become apparent that not just the problem of maximizing the return on our massive investment in medical research, but the solution to it, is also larger, depending very much on what non-scientists do. Nevertheless, this very worthwhile book deserves a great deal of credit for its account of a key element of the problem.

Review: Listen, Liberal, by Thomas Frank

Originally published on RARITANIA on May 21, 2018.

Thomas Frank's latest book, Listen, Liberal, revisits his longstanding theme of the decline of New Deal liberalism and its implications for the country. However, where previously he concentrated on the rise of "market populism" (One Market Under God), the use of the culture wars as an instrument of right-wing economic policies (What's the Matter with Kansas?), the undermining of the public sector as an effective actor from Reagan on (The Wrecking Crew) and the manner in which, counterintuitively, the right rather than the left made capital out of the very financial crisis that made neoliberal economics appear bankrupt as never before (Pity the Billionaire), here he sets his sights on precisely those whose duty it was to bear liberalism's standard, the Democratic Party. In particular he recounts the turn of the Democratic Party, post-'60s, traced all the way down through the years of Clinton, Bush, Obama to the election of 2016 (when the book first hit print).

According to Frank's history, the party decided circa 1970 that New Dealish, working class politics were passé amid the affluence of the postwar boom, reeling from the working class voters it identified with Archie Bunker and inclined to a countercultural embrace of "cool" urban professionals. By way of figures like Frederick Dutton, the Democratic Leadership Council and the "Atari" Democrats, it allowed itself to be transformed into a party of yuppies who, despite reality being far from the perfect meritocracy that Michael Young once tried to imagine, displayed the worst of the thinking portrayed in that too often overlooked dystopia, epitomized by the self-satisfied meanness of Larry Summers, publicly attributing rising inequality simply to people being "treated closer to the way that they're supposed to be treated"—the withering middle class, the harder-pressed working class, the growing ranks of poor deserving their fates.

As might be expected, Frank's book has its fair share of humor and insight. The book's latter portion is especially strong, eviscerating such buzzwords as "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" (he's not the only one sick of these words thrown about so much and so meaninglessly), and such pieties as micro-finance. More daring still is the book's critique of "woke" neoliberalism (seen in Chapter 11, which has been made available for free on the book's promotional website).

Still, if there is much right with Listen, Liberal, as a larger history the book is not without its weaknesses, alas, not minor ones. Perhaps as a result of Frank's treating the narrative after the '60s, and what precedes it as essentially prologue, his book takes the New Deal—a matter of the extraordinary circumstances of Great Depression, World War, Cold War and post-war boom pushing the center leftward, and that to only a limited degree—as the norm rather than the exception for the Democratic Party. Frank does offer in his opening chapter a forceful and wide-ranging critique of American liberalism's exaltation of expert, technocrat, professional since the Gilded Age, and the elitism and other flaws that have accompanied that exaltation. However, the turn of the liberals from their brief Depression-era flirtation with Marx to psychology, and personal, psychological explanations for large social problems; their hostility to the discussion of power, social class and social alternatives; their haste to declare the Social Question solved, the business cycle tamed and the ills of capitalism cured once and for all by a little social democracy, which stopped far short of the welfare states of Canada or Western Europe; their formal espousal of the "horseshoe theory" which equated the "extremists" of the left with the right, and conduct in line with the "fishhook theory" that had them aligning themselves with the right against the left; all get overlooked here. So does the fact that by the late '30s economic reform had largely run its course, as liberals shifted their attention to other issues, whether the threat from Fascism abroad, or civil rights and civil liberties in the Cold War, concerns which spoke less to the working public than the Wall Street types with whom they aligned themselves (all of which has been very well-covered by those '50s-era social thinkers to which the very title of Frank's book alludes). There was the Great Society in the 1960s, but Vietnam and an overheated economy quickly imposed limits on that. By the 1970s the fading of the memory of the Depression and World War II; the weakening of the left by the militant anti-Communism of the Cold War fishhooking liberals so enthusiastically supported; the economic stagnation that made concessions to working people like the New Deal, or the Great Society, seem less necessary or palatable to those who were better off; freed it to return to its default mode. Indeed, as the Age of Reform gave way to the Age of Neoliberalism, it was not only predictable that the Democrats would lose interest in the lower classes, but that they would go so far in doing so, and in the manner that they did so.

The result is that Frank's book is more effective at chronicling that part of the tale on which it concentrates rather than comprehensively explaining it. However, its strengths at such a chronicle, and still more its vigorous and at times brilliant illumination of parts of what it chronicles, are such that they make it well worth the while, with the response of the Democrats to the book's warnings, and their defeat in 2016, only seeming to confirm his characterization of what has become of American liberalism over this past half century.

Interestingly, I found a work of film criticism picked up for quite different reasons, Peter Biskind's Seeing is Believing, rather helpful in understanding all this. You can read my review of it here.

Review: Vanguard to Trident: British Naval Policy Since World War II, by Eric J. Grove

Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1987, pp. 487.

Originally published on RARITANIA, March 8, 2016.

There is a vast literature on the history of the British navy, but books attempting to offer a broad and detailed treatment of anything to do with that navy since 1945 are a relative rarity. Notable among those rarities is Eric Grove's Vanguard to Trident, which covers the evolution of the institution from the end of World War II to the mid-1980s.

In fairness the book offers little to those looking for coverage of the cultural, social or political aspects of the Royal Navy's history in the life of Britain and the world in this period, and much the same goes for the way larger historical events and trends shaped the Royal Navy. Grove only mentions the external developments from which his story is inseparable--the performance of the British economy, or relations with the U.S., for example (or even developments in the British armed forces more broadly)-- only to the extent to which one cannot avoid mentioning them without rendering the story incomprehensible. The result is that those looking for a history more attentive to that broader context will need to look elsewhere.

Instead the book is primarily concerned with chronicling the changes in the Royal Navy's doctrine and organization, the size, composition and technology of its forces, and its deployment and operation in real-world operations globally from 1945 to the mid-1980s--covering which the book at times seems to bury the reader in data, in part because of its structure. The four hundred rather large and packed pages of the main text are split up into just ten long chapters lacking internal subdivisions that would split them into more digestible pieces; while having few convenient passages previewing what follows or recapitulating and condensing what preceded. Given the sheer range and variety of what those pages cover, which ranges from the aforementioned references to Britain's broader economic stresses and relations with other powers to clashes of personalities within the government, from the modernization of specific weapons systems to isolated incidents and whole campaigns overseas, this makes the chapters often seem cluttered, while coverage of the progress of any one development--the budget, the carrier force, National Service--tends to be highly discontinuous, such that anyone following any one of these matters over an extended period has to do a lot of work putting the picture together from the scattered bits about them.

However, the volume of information collected on these subjects here, based on the use of primary documents, is undeniably impressive. Moreover, after the first three chapters' coverage of the broad reshaping of the Royal Navy from 1945 through the mid-'50s the book becomes more readable, in part because of the subject's narrowing. The blizzard of conflicting visions of the Navy's overall organization, and repeated systematic reviews and modifications amid retrenchment and decolonization; the intricate downsizing of the vast, diverse fleet of the war period; the numerous, oft-modified, oft-delayed procurement programs; and bewildering array of deployments and responsibilities; that characterized the life of the Royal Navy in the 1940s give way to a less diffuse, less complex story afterward. The chapters also become more focused (with Chapter Six offering a robust overview of the submarine force's status, mission and size in the generation after World War II, Chapter Seven the "east of Suez" mission in the 1960s, Chapter Eight the winding up of that mission afterward). Also affording some compensation for the structure's more difficult aspects is the abundance of handy appendices packed with helpfully comprehensive tables (covering force size and composition by ship type and readiness state, tonnage, personnel numbers, and budgets by year and area, in many cases through four whole decades), and biographical profiles of the more prominent figures in this portion of history.

Of course, even granting the book's excellence at what it sets out to do--its bringing together this vast amount of information on its subject for the reader --the fact remains that it is three decades out of date. However, those whose main interest is the transition of the Royal Navy from World War II to the post-imperial era (largely accomplished as of the 1970s) are unlikely to find its having been published in 1987 a problem. Indeed, where the fundamentals of that subject is concerned, this is possibly the best single-volume treatment available today.

Review: The End of Normal, by James K. Galbraith

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014, pp. 304.

One of the principal points of interest (and certainly, the object of his most striking prose) in James K. Galbraith's work is his debunking of the orthodoxies (pretensions?) prevailing among academic economists—as with, for example, his answer to the question of "Just what is a market?" in the view of conservative economic thinkers in The Predator State.1

His 2014 book The End of Normal is no exception. Perhaps its most memorable passage is his retort to Paul Krugman's excuse that economists' obsession with mathematical models that have distorted understanding of their subject was (among other things) a matter of economists having been seduced by "beautiful mathematics":

Economists using mathematical expressions . . . may believe that their work is beautiful. Outsiders see instantly that it isn't . . . no one with a sense of aesthetics would take the clumsy algebra of a typical professional economics article as a work of beauty.

Rather, Galbraith observes, the math is there "not to clarify, or to charm, but to intimidate," for ideas "that would come across as simpleminded in English can be made 'impressive looking' with a sufficient string of Greek symbols," and any critic of the argument dismissed as simply too obtuse to follow all the math. (And indeed, anyone who would doubt that this is the case ought to check on just what exactly wins you a "Nobel Prize" in the field.)

The book's target is larger than the very severe limitations of such modeling, however, or even the multitude of explanations of the source of the crisis of 2008 so far proffered—the mealy-mouthed declarations of "experts" that "No one could have seen this coming," or the narrowly journalistic accounts of exactly who said and did what (Galbraith's round-up of which takes up roughly the first third of the book). Rather than some minor, surface event such as (to use his father's famous phrase) the "conventional wisdom" holds it to be, after which growth might be expected to return to pre-crisis norms, the world economy is experiencing a much more fundamental slowdown. As Galbraith argues, the expectation of rapid economic growth as an eternal norm is largely an outgrowth of the highly unusual experience of the post-World War II boom, and its generation of 4 percent a year expansion of American GDP (while much of the world, catching up from well behind, grew much faster than that)—and indeed, a highly simplistic reading of that experience, which took such hugely important variables as natural resources and technology totally for granted. Finance was taken for granted, too, and so was the effectiveness of military effort as a way of securing desired political (and economic) outcomes—or even stimulating a national economy.

The conditions that permitted such a shallow and intellectually lazy reading of the situation to look passable, however, simply ceased to exist. Resources became scarcer and more expensive, which had a "choke-chain" effect on growth (as demonstrated by the energy crisis of the 1970s). Technology's disruptive effects became harder to ignore—precisely because the most dynamic area of technological change, digital computing and communications, was unprecedentedly oriented toward replacing labor old activities with less labor-intensive new versions of them (the traditional bookstore with Amazon), which arguably contributes less to economic growth than earlier technologies which more clearly opened up fundamentally new lines of product and activity, while undermining it again with its impact on unemployment. The financial sector, which from the 1930s to the 1960s was kept under relatively tight control, along with its capacity for generating crisis, was unleashed—with destabilizing and often disastrous results (epitomized today in the 2008 crisis and the aftermath with which we are still living). At the same time, military power has become less efficacious at everything from regime change to providing economic stimulus (as the costly and frustrating experience of the U.S. in Iraq demonstrated).

So where does this leave us? Instead of enduring ecological, financial, military disaster in the pursuit of growth rates we simply cannot achieve in the foreseeable future, the book argues, we should focus on the slow growth that may be achievable, and at the same time, socially and ecologically sustainable.

The book's strongest points are its critique of the grave weaknesses in the conventional economic wisdom up to our time, and at least in its broad outlines, its reading of what we should do now—a simple return to yesteryear not an option. However, the study has significant limitations as well. Galbraith's discussions of heterodox economic thinking and its presumed failures to account for the present situation were far less impressive than his analysis of orthodox, neoclassical economics' failures. (Ultimately he raises some of the Marxist discussion of how the crisis of 2008 happened—and then does little more than dismiss Marxist analysis altogether. His handling of the Marxist case aside, his references to The Limits to Growth gave me the impression that he knew the study mainly by its detractors' mischaracterizations. For that matter, he also gives the ideas of Robert Gordon less than their due.)

Additionally his explanation of how we got from the easy growth of the World War II period to the present stagnation leaves something to be desired. It seems a grab-bag of ideas about it—hitting many of the key issues to be sure (resources, information technology, finance), but not always handling them as thoroughly, fluidly or comprehensively as he might, often but not always because of his aforementioned weaker use of heterodox ideas. (The discussion of the connection between military spending and growth and how this changed over time seemed to me especially underdeveloped.) Still, his incisive and often witty discussion of the intellectual failures of the past three generations of mainstream economic thinking, the insights he displays into some of the major problems we now face in making economic progress, and the case he ultimately makes for a change in thinking and policy (if less complete or satisfying than it might be) make The End of Normal well worth the read.

1. His answer is that the market is in their characterization "a cosmic and ethereal space, a disembodied decision maker . . . that, somehow and without effort, balances and reflects the preferences of everyone making economic decisions . . . a magic dance hall where Supply meets Demand, flirts and courts; a magic bedroom where the fraternal twins Quantity and Price are conceived." Wildly irrational, fantastic, mystical, this assignment of "marvelous powers to it" is possible because as "the word lacks any observable, regular, consistent meaning," is indeed "nothing at all," they can make it whatever they want it to be. See Galbraith, The Predator State (New York: Free Press, 2008), 19-20.

Review: The National System of Political Economy, by Friedrich List

Originally published on RARITANIA, MAY 21, 2018.

Friedrich List's The National System of Political Economy, like Alexander Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures," is both a classic of heterodox and development economics, and a piece of economic history in its having been penned not merely by a theorist but a practitioner playing a part in one of the great economic success stories of modern times. Just as Hamilton's essay called for the United States to develop a manufacturing base behind a screen of protection from English industrial supremacy, so did List's book call for an emerging Germany to do the same. Along with the fact that List's later book was inspired by Hamilton's ideas, and perhaps more powerfully by its practical legacy (National System does not even mention Hamilton by name, but makes numerous references to American developments), it seems worth contrasting as well as comparing the two works. The most obvious difference is length, List penning a large book in place of a brief essay, and the way in which List uses that larger space, providing a much broader and deeper grounding for his ideas. His book, in fact, opens with a systematic and critical survey of Western economic history—the rise and fall of the great economic powers of the past. Later it proceeds to a survey of the corpus of orthodox economic theory (the work of the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say) in similarly critical fashion.

In the process List identifies numerous weaknesses in the case for free trade—among them the theory's failure to recognize the possibility of differences between what is good for an individual and what is good for society; between what is good in the short term and in the long; between different kinds of goods (agriculture and manufactures), to which the theory might not be equally applicable; between the complex inequalities of economic activity. In particular he takes the free-traders to task for overlooking the fact that wealth is not simply a matter of "value" but of "productive power"; that while the world is in an important sense a single productive unit, day-to-day behavior has to take into account the reality that humanity remains politically divided into nations separated by borders and with differing interests; that the benefits of the "division of labor" accrue not only among individuals or between countries but within countries as well. Indeed, List points out time and again that writers like Adam Smith time and again ignore or distort contradictions in their arguments, and problematic historical facts, in their insistence on their orthodoxy, with their insistence that government can never be helpful, or their dismissal of such concepts as the "balance of trade," tying them up in absurdities.

However, List was not simply a surveyor and debunker, but advancing a positive program. In his view manufacturing has a special role to play within the development of a country. This is not simply the matter of developing a sector directly generating a given quantity of income above and beyond what existed without it, but the way in which it can contribute to its broader economic life. Successful manufacturing requires a changed attitude toward economic life—a premium on enterprise, efficiency and innovation, which can also make other sectors more efficient, turning a stagnant, static rural life toward commercially-oriented, scientific farming and commensurately higher agricultural yields. Manufactured goods, because of their reliance on trade, are a significant boost to and justification for the development of national infrastructure and shipping, while also generating a demand for raw materials that might otherwise be without value, from all of which sectors like farming or mining might benefit. The same goes for its spur to foreign trade, long-distance as well as short (because it has something to trade), while enabling it to pay its way in the world (the balance of trade does matter), and stabilize credit and prices in a way impossible for countries that are mere (he had the concept but not the term) "commodity exporters," again, benefiting not just a few factory owners, but everyone. Indeed, at the end of all this the manufacturer, the shipper apart, a landowner might find the value of his property multiplied ten, even twenty-fold in the process, while his purchasing power rose still more markedly because of how much more cheaply he can acquire manufactured goods (List contrasting England with Poland in this respect). And besides raising incomes and living standards, this more dynamic economic life with its educational and other demands, and this enlarged communication within the country and with other countries, have a host of beneficial cultural and political effects—urban life and new forms of consumption softening barbaric ways and elevating the intellect and the spirit; and enlarging the appetite for liberty, personal and national, while making them more attainable.

Achieving a solid manufacturing sector, and all the benefits that it brings, in List's view justified and required government intervention within a nation's economic life, extending beyond such relatively inoffensive measures as the establishment of modern infrastructure (like railroads) to the more controversial activity of "picking winners" and backing them up with outright protectionism. Where the most undeveloped countries are concerned, he firmly advocates free trade—virtually any trade with more advanced countries beneficial at this stage. Only in the case of countries fitted by geography and other conditions to undertake a program of deep industrial development does he advocate protectionist measures, and even then within clear bounds. He opposes any restriction on the import of raw materials or food, and even where manufactures are concerned, anything so extreme as outright prohibition. Indeed, tariffs are to be restricted to the level necessary to protect an infant industry, with that duty relaxed as the infant industry plausibly becomes competitive within the international market—which competition is essential to keep it from getting stagnant.

Still, if this intervention is selective, it is not a minor task. List is emphatic about how much a strong manufacturing sector is an intricately interconnected system of different kinds of manufacturing business, some of which are particularly foundational (the machinery/capital goods sector he refers to as the "manufactories of manufactories"), all of which are apt to rise and fall together. He is emphatic, too, about how temporary disruptions of business can erase the good accomplished by a lengthy effort to build up such a sector, and how long it might take an industry to become genuinely competitive—English textiles requiring centuries to accomplish the feat, and even in his more rapidly moving age an "infant industry" phase apt to last decades rather than years. Moreover, even where the advanced industrial country is concerned, government can never afford to be passive—that way lying the decline of many of the once-triumphant industrial powers of yesteryear.1 In expounding this idea List was arguing not for the desirability of such programs in general, but for a specific, practical program to be implemented in Germany—what was to become the Zollverein that did so much for German unification and industrialization.

As might be expected in a work not only penned two centuries ago, but so strongly devoted to addressing the immediate situation, there is much that has become dated, not only rhetoric but substantively. Certainly List was a man of the nineteenth century, and even by its standards, far from radical, with all this might be expected to imply for his prejudices. In hindsight, at least, it is surprising that he could more easily imagine that one day a technology based on new energy sources might enable such cheap and easy generation of heat as to free cold countries from the weather's constraint on their agriculture, than the industrial development of the tropical regions, and sees in Asia only Oriental decadence, ripe for the "uplift" of Western colonization, when scarcely a generation later Japan began its ambitious program of industrialization.

Still, the more basic of his arguments about industrialization have withstood the test of time. More recent writers like Ha-Joon Chang and James K. Galbraith present them in more refined form, on the basis of a larger body of observation more exactingly conducted and studied with the aid of new tools and concepts—but the essential argument recognizable the same nonetheless. It is noteworthy, too, that while List was a nationalist selling a "National System," taking imperial competition and "cultural racism" rather for granted, and even inclined toward a line of geopolitical thinking that had some very unhappy consequences in the following century, List saw nations and nationalism as a station along the road toward a genuinely unified world economy and polity.2 Two centuries on we have ample cause to think very hard about that road he took equally for granted, and where we stand on it.

1. Then as now the case of Switzerland as a model of industrial development under free trade was touted by orthodoxy's defenders, and List debunked it lengthily, citing the numerous special circumstances of the case, and the limits of the Swiss achievement.
2. In his casual Pan-Germanism (taking for granted that the Low Countries and Switzerland ought to be part of a unified Germany), his portrait of a united Germany organizing a continental European bloc against Britain, and that bloc's later drawing in Britain for a geopolitical face-off with America, one can see a foreshadowing of thinking that led to two world wars.

A New Cold War?

Last year I argued that the risk of great power war was lower than at any time since the nineteenth century. So it remains, despite the elevation of tensions in the western Pacific these past couple of years, focused on Chinese territorial claims in the East and South China Seas which are causing disputes between that country and its neighbors, most prominent among them Japan, leading to a series of (thus far) non-violent incidents in the vicinity of Diaoyu/Senkaku/Tiaoyutai Islands. Given the U.S. presence in the region, and its alliance arrangements with various nations within it (particularly Japan and the Phillipines), bolstered by the highly publicized "reorientation" of the U.S.'s military posture toward the western Pacific, many have raised the risk of a larger conflict--hot or cold.

Nonetheless, the larger situation should be kept in perspective. The Soviet Union, in spite of its many weaknesses, at least appeared like a global military challenger. China has displayed no serious aspiration to be anything of the kind anytime soon, any dispassionate examination of its forces and posture making its regional orientation clear. China is also valued by the United States as trading partner and financier in a way that the Soviet Union never was, which has had a dampening influence on anti-China propaganda (as seen in the remake of Red Dawn, which lamely has North Korea invading the U.S.). And despite the difference in political systems between the U.S. and China, there is no real ideological clash, China not even pretending to be exporting an alternative, competing model. (Its statist capitalism is, in truth, just what every industrial power, the United States included, practiced in the past, and continue to practice today in varying ways, even as they advocate neoliberalism, and its pragmatism, not its ideology, prized in those developing countries into which its economic influence reaches.)

There is, in short, much more to bind the U.S. and China together, much less to push them apart than was the case with the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, while the significance of the ongoing territorial contests ought not to be overstated. The status of Taiwan is, unlike the status of Germany in the 1940s, a regional issue rather than a plausibly global one. The suspected mineral resources to which ownership of a few uninhabited rocks in the East and South China Seas currently an object of dispute might be a prize for an oil company, but are not so vast as to be crucial to the economic life of either of those nations, the second and third largest economies, and first and third largest industrial powers, on the entire planet (by contrast with the value of Persian Gulf oil fields for states like Iraq and Kuwait).

Yet, it is in the nature of international politics for states to blow minor issues (like possession of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine) up into matters of world-historical consequence. The justification of questionable procurement programs, the distraction of domestic audiences from bread-and-butter issues, the self-defeating obsession of political actors with maintaining their "credibility," and the sheer stupidity and irresponsibility of those who in a neverending refutation of leisure class, meritocratic and Social Darwinist pretensions, find their way to high office, have been more than enough to push the world over the edge of catastrophe.

All of these factors remain operative now, perhaps more than in most times. China faces the uncertainties surrounding a change of leadership in a political system which has long since lost its legitimacy (the name "Communist Party" increasingly seems an anachronism) amid slowing economic growth, a devastated ecosystem, feudal inequality and the unrest all this makes inevitable. Japan has had two decades of economic stagnation, and just witnessed the criminal irresponsibility which caused the Fukushima disaster. More recently, the unveiling of the AirSea doctrine has been such a public relations mess as to appall neoconservative fellow travelers like Jonathan Pollack and Thomas Barnett (Barnett pointedly calling it "The Military-Industrial Complex's Self-Serving Fantasy" in the title of an article he penned for Time magazine), making the questionable decision to "reorient" the U.S. armed forces toward the Pacific (when retrenchment seems called for) appear that much more provocative.

The result is that the repugnant jingoism of the political theater seen in the East China Sea during the past month ought not to be taken as a sign of the inevitability of World War III, or even a New Cold War, in that region--but it is a reminder that the dismissal of such a danger as phantasmic is dangerous.

Was War Impossible? Remembering Ivan Bloch
6/21/12
"Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey": A Short Version
10/23/11
New Review: The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills
8/13/11
Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, by Gabriel Kolko
10/4/09