Title: Jam Tomorrow? WHY TIME REALLY MATTERS IN ECONOMICS
Author: Charles Crowson
Pages: 280 including bibliography and index
Publisher: Whitefox
Price: £16.99
ISBN 9781915635624
“If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, then you don't understand it yourself.”
The first full chapter of this book about the importance of time in economics begins with this quote, generally attributed to Albert Einstein, someone who surely needs no introduction as one of the most talked about theoretical physicists of his generation.
I'm afraid that much of what follows would surely not pass that test.
For example, from page 124: “The nature of money as a thing which has various roles to play but whose roles are often incongruent, if not outright contradictory, only really becomes clear if one admits the centrality of time to the economic decision-making process. The economic experience is essentially indexical. In economic terms this means that economic activity has a point of view and that it acquires its significance from the context in which it happens. For economic value judgements, this indexicality is a temporal one. The economic agent decides and acts from his or her position in the now of the present, and this now stands in relation to the past and the future.”
Do you know any six-year-old who would understand that? At the time of writing (December 11 2023) I am 11 times that age and have spent my entire adult professional working life in and around banking and finance. I had to read most of the sentences twice, often three times, to even begin to have a smidgeon of a grasp of what the author was saying. To say it is a challenge is an understatement. I had never even thought of money as having tenses.
What I can say without fear of personal contradiction is that I have not read so much about and understood so little about the theory and practice of money since I began studying Applied Economics for my Institute of Banker banking exams back in September 1979.
The timing of my being asked if I would like to review the book arguably could not have been better. The book arrived on the doorstep just before the final instalment of the BBC's transmission of three hour-long 'specials' to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the rogue Time Lord broadly known as Doctor Who.
I have followed this programme on its rollercoaster journey ever since I watched the first episode on a flickering black and white as it was broadcast on the evening of November 23 1963, the day after the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
To be scrupulously fair to the author, the publisher and the public relations company charged with securing media coverage, I devoted as much time time as I could to reading the book on the day after the airing of the third of the Doctor Who hours. I'm not sure I could tell you with certainty which experience I enjoyed most or which is more likely to wake me up in the night screaming for mercy.
One of the joys of being older is the ability to contextualise more confidently based on personal experience. Reading Charles Crowson's opus brought to mind a quote often attributed to journalist-turned-diplomat Peter Jay, in response to a suggestion that one of his articles in The Times newspaper was difficult to follow.
Jay (according to Wikipaedia) replied: “I only wrote this piece for three people - the editor of The Times, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
Charles Crowson might be following the same path.
