Books and more that influenced me
Responding to my invitation for paid subscribers to suggest a topic, one of my readers (InkyFingers) proposed the top five or ten novels that have influenced me as an economist. I want to go a bit broader than that, looking at both fiction and non-fiction, and at music as well as books.
Starting with novels, my preferred genres are science fiction and the 19th century canon, roughly, from Jane Austen to George Eliot. I also like their love-child, steampunk, though I’m not fanatical about it. A lot of my thinking about class, work and so on was formed by the literary canon. I’ll nominate in particular Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and George Eliot’s Adam Bede. I’ve been influenced a lot in my political thinking about the future by the Scottish club (Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod and Charlie Stross) and also, unsurprisingly, by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.
Turning to non-fiction, I read a lot, but I’ll pick out JS Mill On Liberty, Shonfeld In Defence of the Mixed Economy and Piketty’s, Capital (which refers back to C19 literature for much of its argument). I would like to write a vision of a socialist and democratic utopia - Bregman, Utopia for Realists would be my starting point here.
I spent a lot of time in the folk music scene, and was even, for a while, a writer and performer of satirical songs (here’s a link to some I posted back in the day). As well as traditional songs, I was much influenced by songwriters like Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Leon Rosselson. Too many songs to name, but I’ll pick the Ballad of Accounting for MacColl and Seeger, and The World Turned Upside Down for Rosselson.
I planned to say something about film, but on reflection, I don’t think this medium has influenced my thinking much. I enjoy watching movies, including political movies where the workers triumph, but once I’ve seen them I don’t think much more about it.
Finally, I’ll plug my own books, Zombie Economics, Economics in Two Lessons and (old but still relevant, I think), Work for All.
As I said when I introduced the paid subscriptions offer, all subscribers, paid and unpaid, will get to see and comment on my posts. Paid subscribers mostly get the warm inner glow of knowing they have helped me pay for my own subscriptions to other newsletters. But there are also small privileges like priority in suggesting topics for me to write about.
I was a voracious reader as a child, and nothing influenced me more than Robinson Crusoe, which I read closely at least 3 times. Teenage years, 1984 and Brave New World, and of course Lord of the Rings. Stephen Jay Gould galvanized me in my middle age, with Wonderful Life, The Mismeasure of Man, and Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle. For an understanding of Australia's relatively recent past, Donald Thompson in Arnhem Land... tragic, shocking, uplifting, inspirational writing and photography.
I also have done a line in songwriting (including parody song writing) and performing at my local pub's jam session in 2016-18. In childhood I got a solid diet of Pete Seeger, the Weavers and the early Bob Dylan, and then got into Redgum as a young adult. I liked anything that was anti-war. In terms of my political outlook, Die Gedanken Sind Frei, Solidarity Forever and Banks of Marble stand out.
Works of fiction that have influenced my outlook include 1984 by George Orwell and But The Dead Are Many by Frank Hardy. Among non-fiction books I would list Bertrand Russell's Power, Beyond The Fragments by Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, The Economics of Feasible Socialism by Alec Nove, Piketty's Capital and The Great Transformation by Polanyi. The Bible was also an influence on my values in my very formative years, but I'm not sure which of the two preceding categories it belongs in. ;-)