Something Will Turn Up
Britain’s Economy, Past, Present and Future
David Smith (Profile Books, 288pp, £14.99, Oldie price £12.99)
BACK IN THE early Noughties, John Plender published a book called Going Off the Rails: Global Capital and the
Crisis of Legitimacy, which warned that the reckless behaviour of banks and the boom in shadow banking would lead to a credit crunch. A veteran financial journalist, a Financial Times columnist, a pension-fund trustee, and a former company chairman, Plender ‘has written incisively for decades on the excitements, oddities and disasters of financial markets’, wrote the Econo
mist’s anonymous reviewer, and in his latest book, Capitalism, he ‘approaches the quandaries of capitalism with a shrewd eye for detail. The reader discovers, for example, that Voltaire turned up at the court of Frederick the Great as a pet Enlightenment intellectual, only to run a bond-market scam that could have bankrupted the Prussian exchequer.’
Although Plender is ‘wise enough to realise that, for all its faults, capitalism has raised the living standards of billions of people since the 18th century and improved their life expectancy’, nonetheless he continues to be sharply critical of bankers who he considers ‘have undoubtedly done their best to give capitalism a bad name’. His book is ‘a superbly erudite excursion through the theory and practice of market economies down the ages’, declared Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times. ‘This is a book much more of diagnosis than offered treatments,’ he continued, but still Plender argues that ‘the post-creditcrunch reforms to the banking sector are inadequate’, believing that ‘the big banks’ speculative trading in financial derivatives’ should be ‘dramatically reduced’.
For TLS reviewer Paul Collier, ‘Plender’s
account of the modern City is at the core of Capitalism’ but it is ‘considerably enhanced by being placed in the much wider historical context of moralising about markets: in Capital
ism, Aristotle and Marx rub shoulders with the recent bank CEOS. His book is balanced, well written and not selfaggrandising.’
In his review for the Times, Tim Montgomerie suggested that the reason why it is ‘such a delight to read’ is ‘because Plender is as likely to quote Dickens, Goethe and Blake as Greenspan, Carney and Schäuble. His analysis of capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses is rooted in how markets and commerce have been seen throughout history and in great works of literature.’ It attempts to ‘understand why, despite the prosperity it has delivered and its superiority to all other forms of economic organisation, most of us struggle to accept capitalism, let alone admire it’. David Smith, economics editor of the Sunday Times, is another experienced commentator. Something Will Turn Up is ‘his often very personal look at our economic performance over the past 60 years and the issues we now face’, explained Gerard Lyons, economics adviser to the London Mayor, in a review for Smith’s own paper. ‘Despite the setbacks, he retains a positive view, both of the past and our likely future direction.’
Smith ‘peppers the book with recollections of meetings with the country’s most powerful economic politicians and policymakers’ (rating the late Sir Geoffrey Howe as the best chancellor), but ‘for all the battles played out in the past few decades between monetarists and Keynesians’ Smith’s analysis ‘doesn’t fit neatly into any one camp’, and ‘though he gained a good university grounding in economic theory, he remains a pragmatist, his analysis based also on what he observes and what the data shows’.
However, Tim Montgomerie, in his review for the Times, found the book contained ‘few insights’. Buried in it were ‘important issues such as the inaccuracy of government statistics and how they have repeatedly misled policymakers or the dangerously misplaced enthusiasm of the British governing classes for the European project. But Smith never develops these themes. The book’s title is Something Will Turn Up and I kept turning the pages in the hope that some grand new thought would. It didn’t.’