"The Measure of Progress"

New from Princeton University Press: The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters by Diane Coyle.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why do we use eighty-year-old metrics to understand today’s economy?

The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress, Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today’s digital economy? Coyle makes the case for a new framework, one that takes into consideration current economic realities.

Coyle explains why economic statistics matter. They are essential for guiding better economic policies; they involve questions of freedom, justice, life, and death. Governments use statistics that affect people’s lives in ways large and small. The metrics for economic growth were developed when a lack of physical rather than natural capital was the binding constraint on growth, intangible value was less important, and the pressing economic policy challenge was managing demand rather than supply. Today’s challenges are different. Growth in living standards in rich economies has slowed, despite remarkable innovation, particularly in digital technologies. As a result, politics is contentious and democracy strained.

Coyle argues that to understand the current economy, we need different data collected in a different framework of categories and definitions, and she offers some suggestions about what this would entail. Only with a new approach to measurement will we be able to achieve the right kind of growth for the benefit of all.

Visit The Enlightened Economist blog.

The Page 69 Test: Diane Coyle's The Soulful Science.

The Page 99 Test: The Economics of Enough.

The Page 99 Test: Cogs and Monsters.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Painting as a Way of Life"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Painting as a Way of Life: Philosophy and Practice in French Art, 1620–1660 Richard Neer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Neer uncovers a key moment in the history of early modern art, when painting was understood to be a tool for self-transformation and for living a philosophical life.

In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer shows how French painters of the seventeenth century developed radically new ways to connect art, perception, and ethics. Cutting across traditional boundaries of classicism and realism, Neer addresses four case studies: Nicolas Poussin, renowned for marrying ancient philosophy and narrative painting; Louise Moillon, who pioneered French still life in the 1630s; Georges de La Tour, a painter of intense and introspective nocturnes; and the Brothers Le Nain, specialists in genre and portraiture who inspired Courbet, Manet, and other painters of modern life. Setting these artists in dialogue with Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, and others, ranging from the studios of Rome to the streets of Paris, this book provides fresh accounts of essential artworks—some well-known, others neglected—and new ways to approach the relation of art, theory, and daily life.

Visit Richard Neer's website. Neer is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, Cinema & Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago. From 2010 to 2018 he was the Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry, where he continues to serve as co-Editor. He is currently Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What Is a Person?"

New from Oxford University Press: What Is a Person?: Untapped Insights from Africa by Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire.

About the book, from the publisher:

What makes us 'persons' in the moral sense, beings with a certain dignity and worth? Philosophers Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire explore this question by bringing African and Western philosophies into conversation. They start by characterizing the differences in the contemporary scene in Africa and the West, proposing that these differences were not always present, are hardly inevitable, and can and should be bridged. They then introduce the concept of Emergent Personhood, a new philosophy of personhood that combines insights from Africa and the West. It holds that beings with superlative worth emerge through social relational processes involving human beings, yet they are more than the sum of these relationships. Persons have an identity of their own and exhibit superlative moral worth, a remarkable feature not present at the base. Emergent Personhood justifies personhood for all human beings from birth to death. It also gives strong support to personhood for a wide range of animals, soils, rocks, and ecosystems.

Focusing on human personhood, Jecker and Atuire argue that high moral status is stable across the lifespan and reaches a terminus with death's declaration, which ends the human-human associations that enable personhood to arise. They conclude with a turn to nonhuman personhood, considering personhood for artificial intelligence, animals, non-living nature, and extra-terrestrial life and lands.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Revolution Within"

New from Stanford University Press: The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt by Yasmin Moll.

About the book, from the publisher:

The New Preachers of Egypt—so named because of their novel preaching styles, which incorporate everything from melodrama to music to self-help—came to prominence on the world's first Islamic television channel on the cusp of the Arab Spring uprisings. They promoted an innovative and inclusive Islamic piety that millions of young middle-class viewers found radical and compelling—but were scorned as neoliberal by leftists, as stealth Islamists by secularists, and as too Westernized by other Muslim preachers. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with the New Preachers, their producers, and followers in Cairo, Yasmin Moll shows how Islamic media and the social life of theology mattered to contestations over the shape of a New Egypt. These mass-mediated fractures within Islamic Revivalism were happening at a time of both revolutionary possibility and authoritarian entrenchment. The New Preachers' Islamic media inspired a "revolution within" that transcended the country's divisions and anticipated the ethos of creativity, solidarity, and coexistence that soon would mark Tahrir Square, the ethical epicenter of the 2011 uprising. Vividly written and boldly theorized, The Revolution Within challenges conventional accounts of the 2011 revolution and its aftermath as a struggle between secular and religious forces, reconsidering what makes a practice virtuous, a public Islamic, a way of life Godly.

--Marshal Zeringue