1. So my @five_books interview on the politics of information is up - fivebooks.com/best-books/pol… (conducted in February, and in what feels like a different world). It builds a sort of curriculum for @EconoScribe essay in the Economist Christmas special - economist.com/christmas-spec….
2. The books covered are Spufford's Red Plenty, Lindblom's Market System, Simon's Sciences of the Artificial, Weyl and Posner's Radical Markets and Wiener's Uncanny Valley. Argument is that to understand politics we need to understand how economy is being remade by algorithms.
3. And (again building on @econoscribe ) that the best way to do this is to start from the old back and forths of the socialist calculation debate, and figure out where things have changed, and where we are recapitulating the terms of a much older argument.
4. Or put differently - if you want to understand both the excitement and the limitations of Silicon Valley today, you could do far worse than to look at the excitement and limitations of Soviet Union efforts to plan the economy post WW II. "Comrades, let's optimize!"
5. The interview is book-ended, as I think it should be, by Spufford and Wiener's books, with all the social science between. As Francis says - crookedtimber.org/2012/06/11/res… - "Storytelling lets you bring negative capability into economics." Both Red Plenty and Uncanny Valley do this.
6. The history of efforts to turn the world, with all its sorry, lovely mess and ambiguity, into something mathematical, clean and beautiful - how that redounds on the world and how the world redounds in turn is better described by novelists and biographers than social scientists
7. Finis.
