Saturday, December 16, 2023

One-trick books. Erica Thompson's Escape from Model Land and M. Mazzucato and R. Collington's The Big Con.

 There is nothing wrong with the books, which represent and illustrate one single idea but they are boring. Erica Thompson's "Escape from the Model Land" can be summarized succinctly in two sentences, one probably quoted somewhere in the book: "All models are wrong but some are useful". Another is that all social studies models incorporate value judgements of their creators and thus cannot be considered "objective" in the same sense as models of the physical sciences.

Marianna Mazzucato and Rosie Collington's book "The big con" equally illustrates one idea, namely that the decline of in-house expertise of government agencies and industrial companies led to proliferation of the consulting industry to the detriment of the latter.