The Books that Changed my Life
Duncan Green, Barcelona 23 April 2015
Firstly an enormous thankyou to the organizers for what is perhaps the most self-indulgent
theme I have ever been asked to discuss – talking about myself and the books I have loved –
what heaven!
But in doing so, I am torn between honesty and the desire to lie to impress (‘it was when I
first read Proust as a child.....’). Let’s go with honesty – it’s more fun. My model in this is
Blueprint for Revolution, a wonderful new book by Srdja Popovic, a leader of the protest
movement that overthrew the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Popovic
confesses that his formative influences were The Lord of the Rings and the English satirists
Monty Python, rather than Gramsci and Marx.
First honest point: Books have seldom changed my life – nowhere near as much as people,
life events, or probably even TV and film (Monty Python was pretty big for me too).
Second honest point: The books that have had the most profound impact tended to be the
ones I read in my early years. I suspect this is a general truth – people’s lives are more shaped
by what they read as children. We are entering the Harry Potter epoch of modern history.
So I will briefly cover some of those early influences, before going on discuss the books that
shaped my thinking on social change and international development (which I think is
probably why you invited me).
I grew up in a largely book-free house. We had a small glass cabinet with the Bible, the
collected works of Shakespeare and not much else. So reading was both an escape from the
excruciating boredom of a conventional British childhood, and an act of (very mild) rebellion
– I was going to be an intellectual unlike my parents.
My initial reading was more escapist than formative - children’s adventures and boarding
school fantasies (predecessors of the deeply traditional Harry Potter series).
But moral frameworks were forming too – CS Lewis’ world of Narnia with its moral
crusades and very thinly disguised Christian propaganda, followed by Lord of the Rings: a
world of Manichean simplicity (even the complexities in LOTR are actually pretty simple –
Frodo being torn by lust for the ring v knowledge of what he must do). Like many other shy
teenagers, I became a bit obsessed, learning runes, copying out maps of Middle Earth, I
would even wander the hills around my home town ridiculously clad in a cape and staff,
imagining I was Gandalf (not a great memory – I’m just glad Facebook didn’t exist then!).
As my teenage years progressed, I veered off into Science Fiction: Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation Trilogy, Frank Herbert’s Dune series: they too were full of sense of a greater
mission and purpose to life, so craved by the teenage mind, but boy were the characters
feeble!
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By then, in my late teens, I was drifting towards a rather emotionally barren world – studying
only Maths and Physics, reading SciFi and Fantasy (whose characters made Science Fiction
look positively nuanced).
Luckily it didn’t satisfy. I kept writing execrable poetry (no I’m not going to read you any),
and discovered modern European (in the UK, that means non-British) literature through
Penguin Modern Classics: Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Albert Camus (The Outsider, but
especially The Myth of Sisyphus). At the same time I was studying TS Elliott in my lunch
hours with a wonderful teacher, and became obsessed with James Joyce’s Ulysses.
These books offered a very rocky road back to humanity – rediscovering a genuine interest in
people, love, relationships, but gosh, were they hard, uphill work! Everything had to be
cerebrally, painfully constructed through hard thought – The Wasteland and the Myth of
Sisyphus became a core text for me in University (where I studied theoretical physics, for
reasons which now escape me.)
The opening of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland perfectly captured my emotional landscape at the
time:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
So I emerged from university with my emotional, moral and political framework intact and
reconstructed, somewhat elitist and detached, but ready for whatever awaited me on the other
side of the University gates.
And it was Latin America, which hit me with a thunderclap of struggle, purpose and energy.
And plenty of darkness too – I spent two years after university travelling across the continent,
before I ran out of money and ended up teaching English in Buenos Aires, then under
military rule. My girlfriend’s aunt was one of the Disappeared.
Argentina made me aware of the life or death nature of politics in Latin America, but I had to
wait for my road to Damascus moment until moving on to Peru, where, on the shores of Lake
Titicaca, I stayed for a couple of weeks with a wonderful young lapsed Jesuit activist, Tito
Castro (even his name was wonderful!). Tito showed me the true transformatory power of
books. He ran discussion groups with local indigenous leaders, based on his extensive library
of leftwing classics – Mariategui, Marx, Lenin. In his spare moments, he gave me a political
framework for understanding what I had seen on my travels – from then on I was hooked on
revolutionary social change.
My rebirth in Latin America was accompanied by books, particularly (and predictably)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I taught myself Spanish poring over a battered copy of Hundred
Years of Solitude (I don’t recommend it), but preferred ‘No-one writes to the Colonel’ and
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‘The Autumn of the Patriarch’, which seemed much closer to my Southern Cone experience.
Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende – books full of vigour, light, energy.
After two years, I returned to a Britain that was under Mrs Thatcher (and apparently enjoying
it), so my head remained in Latin America and I tried to make sense of it all, taking an
evening class and (like so many students) discovering Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of
Latin America - a joyous, angry polemic that had all the heroism and purpose of Lord of the
Rings, but applied it to the real world. Well, fairly real: a friend who is a Professor of Latin
American Studies says he spends the first year of the Masters ‘un-teaching Galeano’.
Galeano also marked my transition from fiction to non-fiction – I wonder if this is a general
pattern – novels shape the values and frameworks of the young, and later non-fiction populate
those frameworks with ideas, arguments and information?
I ended up taking over teaching the class, and used it as the basis for writing my first proper
book, Faces of Latin America, an attempt to condense in a single volume some of the grand
narratives of the region – land, economy, religion, culture, social movements, tyranny and
struggle.
By then I was on the other side of the book business, writing and editing for the Latin
America Bureau, a London-based thinktank. More books on Latin America followed, my
favourites being Silent Revolution, on the rise of neoliberalism in the region, and Hidden
Lives, on the lives and views of its children.
Silent Revolution (on the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s and the ‘structural adjustment’ that was
transforming the region) got me reading and thinking about economics, and for a while I
could think of little else. It also acted as a bridge to the world beyond Latin America. Susan
George’s ‘A Fate Worse than Debt’ showed me that similar processes were going on in
Africa and Asia. But there were also differences - East Asia, in particular, was a revelation:
here was a region that was booming, living disproof of the gloomy predictions of dependency
theory (and Galeano) that the ‘Third World’ was condemned to eternal poverty.
Writing Hidden Lives involved interviewing kids in 6 countries – working kids, street kids,
even transvestite prostitutes (a memorable afternoon in Colombia). It probably saved me
from becoming a full time disciple of economics, awakening me to the richness of other
disciplines. In ‘Centuries of Childhood’, medieval historian Philippe Aries charts the social
and historical evolution (and construction) of something we now consider ‘normal’ – the
innocent child in the protected walled garden of childhood. It even changed the way I
understood my own children.
But also Anthropologists: In Death Without Weeping (1993), Nancy Scheper Hughes brought
brilliant human intelligence to understand why, when working as a volunteer in a town in
Northeast Brazil, she had been shocked by women’s apparent indifference to the death of
their babies.
Anthropologists such as Elisabeth Burgos-Debray also brought us ‘testimonial biographies’
such as ‘I Rigoberta Menchú’ (1983), brilliantly bringing to life the nature of grassroots
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struggles in Latin America – I have always tried to include such testimonies in my own work,
even (especially?) on dry issues such as economic reform.
In 1997 I left Latin America Bureau and joined the development world – initially with
CAFOD, then (after a short spell at the government aid agency, DFID) with Oxfam (where I
got to know Gonzalo and the other great people at Intermon).
My trajectory in the development business has been from activist to student – sometimes I
feel like I would like to reverse Marx’s dictum and say ‘campaigners have sought to change
the world; the point, however, is to understand it’. Aid and development are full of activists,
dedicated to action. Sometimes, those actions might be better directed if they spent more time
reading and ‘studying the system’ that they wish to change – so in this final section of the
lecture, I will talk you through ten of the key books that have shaped my views on
development.
I will concentrated on the books that I have loved and agreed with, but with books, as in life,
sometimes you learn more from disagreement and argument. Or from finding nuggets of
insight and wisdom in books that you otherwise find unappealing. William Easterly’s anti-aid
polemic ‘White Man’s Burden’ (2007) brought out the crucial problem that aid and
development have too many ‘planners’, grinding through the project document and too few
‘searchers, spotting and grabbing opportunities as they emerge. While Hernando de Soto’s
‘The Mystery of Capital’ (2003) was a hymn to private property (the first George Bush was a
big fan), it also showed that institutions that work cannot be imposed from outside – they
have to emerge from local history and traditions (US property rights developed out of the
land-grabbing habits of miners in various gold rushes).
But back to my heroes. On Economics, there is nowhere better to start than the collected
works of my good friend Ha-Joon Chang, a dissident Korean economist who teaches at
Cambridge University. Kicking Away the Ladder was published in 2002, just after the Doha
Round of international trade talks began. Developing countries were coming under huge
pressure to open up their economies to trade and investment because, they were told,
everyone would benefit. Kicking Away the Ladder destroyed that argument, showing that all
the rich countries had used protection and industrial policy to protect fledgling industries –
liberalization was the historical outcome of development, not an initial condition. Since then
Ha-Joon has written ever-more popular and successful books challenging economic
orthodoxy – I recommend his latest, Economics: the User’s Guide.
But over the years, I have come to the view that the ‘dismal science’ of economics is far too
dominant in discussions of development, so I want to direct you to books that look at
development in other ways.
First the people: it is astonishing and lamentable how little serious effort (beyond fiction and
film) goes into understanding the lives of the poor women and men who we claim to be
trying to help. A notable exception comes from what may seem an unlikely source – the
World Bank. ‘Crying Out For Change’ (2000), summarizes a massive late 1990s study by the
World Bank called ‘Voices of the Poor’. It delves into the experiences of 60,000 poor women
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and men in 23 countries to reveal the lived reality of being poor – a life in which ignored
subjects such as shame and humiliation are as important as whether you earn $1.25 a day or
$2.50. It transformed the way I think about poverty.
One of the authors of that book, Robert Chambers, is up there with Ha-Joon as a personal
guru. For three decades he has been challenging top-down approaches to development with
books such as ‘Whose Reality Counts: Putting the First Last’ (1997) – scarcely a month goes
by when I do not remember Robert’s arguments about power (we need to identify the
‘uppers’ and ‘lowers’ in any relationship and understand how that shapes behaviour) and that
development practitioners need to ‘hand over the stick’ to poor people (these days it is more
likely to be the powerpoint clicker).
My retreat from an economistic approach to development has also taken me into the world of
politics. Amartya Sen’s book ‘Development as Freedom’ brilliantly redefined development
away from the dead hand of income poverty lines to ‘the freedoms to do and to be’ – once
you think of development in those terms, new worlds open up, filled with the struggle for
rights, agency and human dignity.
In passing, (and as I am speaking in the Faculty of Medicine) I should point out that both
Voices of the Poor and Amartya Sen’s work highlight the essential importance of health – not
just as a way to produce fit, productive workers (which sometimes seems to be the rather dry
message of many aid agencies), but because poor people themselves put good health at the
top of their lists of factors that contribute to well-being.
The struggle for development is more often national than international. When I joined
Oxfam, it along with other international NGOs, was in the middle of an exhilarating global
campaign to ‘Make Poverty History’. This claimed (at least implicitly), that increasing aid
and sorting out international rules on debt and trade would do the job. Another friend,
Matthew Lockwood, got so frustrated with this ahistoric and nonsensical view that he left the
aid business and wrote a book ‘The State They’re In’ (2005), arguing that the key to Africa’s
poverty, and its future prosperity, lies in national politics and struggle. Africans will ‘Make
Poverty History’, not global campaigns (although they can help). Matthew’s work greatly
influenced my subsequent book, ‘From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective
States can Change the World’ (2008).
The remaining books on my list helped shape my current focus on ‘how change happens’ (the
title of my next book). ‘The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development’ (2013), by the
South African political scientist Matt Andrews, shows that the institutions that are both the
symptom and origin of development, emerge from the chaotic sea of local history and
context, and so cannot be imposed from above or from outside. Andrews argues that the role
of outsiders is instead to help clarify problems, and then bring together local actors (states,
civil society, private sector) to seek locally-relevant solutions. We have come a long way
from the cookie-cutter structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank, or the Make
Poverty History certitudes of global campaigners.
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Beyond the shift to politics and power, my current work has changed the way I look at the
underlying workings of society. Echoing some of the more esoteric physics of my university
days, I increasingly see the world as a complex adaptive system, and feel that aid and
development’s failure to understand this lies at the root of many of its problems. Let me
explain.
Eric Beinhocker’s book ‘The Origin of Wealth’ (2005) argues that the discipline of
economics took a wrong turn when it decided to use 19th Century physics as its model, rather
than Darwin’s theory of evolution. In reality the economy is a system in a constant flux of
variation (lots of new firms appearing), selection (most of them go bust) and amplification
(the successful variants become Google or Apple). But the mental model of economics is a
ball in a bowl, always returning to equilibrium. The implications for how we understand
economies and development (and what we do about them) are profound.
To understand what that word ‘system’ means, read ‘Thinking in Systems’ by Donella
Meadows (2008). Meadows, an MIT systems guru, finished the draft of this book in 1993,
and it circulated informally for years, without being published. She died suddenly and
prematurely in 2001, before she could finish it. A friend edited it and it was published in
2008.
Meadows brilliantly explains the nature of complex systems – systems with so many
connections and feedback loops that we cannot possibly predict how they will evolve or will
respond to any given intervention by government or aid agency. She argues that we should
‘learn to embrace the nonlinear, turbulent and dynamic universe…. [even though] there is
something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines, to uniformity and not
diversity, and to certainties and not mystery.’
As she approaches the end of the book, Meadows gets increasingly lyrical, and concludes:
‘Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. Learn its history. Ask
people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened ….. Starting with
history discourages the common and distracting tendency we all have to define a problem not
by the system’s actual behaviour, but by the lack of our favourite solution.’
And that is where I am today – trying to understand how change happens in the complex
systems in which we live, to do justice to that complexity, while still believing there is a story
to be told about how it can be changed for the better.
I suspect that this lecture has been far more interesting (and therapeutic) for me than for you
– looking back over nearly 50 years of book-reading, I see a shape and a path of which I was
previously rather unaware – the construction of a moral framework, that with a transition
from fiction to non-fiction, became populated by people and countries first in Latin America,
then everywhere. That framework moved through a series of lenses – economics, the lived
reality of poor people, the salience of power, politics and systems. I wonder where it will go
next?
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Books Referred to in this Lecture1
Andrews, M. 2013. The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development
Aries, P. 1960. Centuries of Childhood Aries: A Social History of Family Life
Asimov. I. 1951. Foundation Trilogy
Beinhocker. E.D. 2007. The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical
Remaking of Economics
Camus, A. 1955. The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus, A. 1946. The Outsider
Chambers, R. 1997. Whose Reality Counts: Putting the First Last
Chang, H-J. 2014. Economics: User’s Guide
Chang, H-J. 2002. Kicking Away the Ladder
Easterly, W. 2006. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have
Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
Eliot, T.S. 1922. The Wasteland
Galeano. E. 1973. The Open Veins of Latin America
Garcia Márquez, G. 1976. The Autumn of the Patriarch
Garcia Márquez, G. 1968. No-one Writes to the Colonel
Garcia Márquez, G. 1970. One Hundred Years of Solitude
George, S. 1990. A Fate Worse than Debt
Herbert, F. 1965. Dune
Joyce, J. 1922. Ulysses
Lockwood, M. 2005. The State They’re In: An Agenda for International Action on Poverty in
Africa
Meadows, D. 2008. Thinking in Systems
Menchú, R. & E. Burgos-Debray. 1983. I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in
Guatemala
Narayan, D., Chambers, R., Shah, M.K., Petesch, P. 2000. Crying Out For Change
1
Dates are for first publication in English
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Popovic, S. 2015. Blueprint for Revolution: How To Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, And
Other Non-Violent Techniques To Galvanise Communities, Overthrow Dictators, Or Simply
Change The World
Scheper- Hughes, N. 1993. Death Without Weeping : The Violence of Everyday Life in
Brazil
Sen. A. 1999. Development as Freedom
De Soto, H. 2003. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails
Everywhere Else
Tolkien, JRR. 1955. The Lord of the Rings
Books by the Author:
Faces of Latin America. 2011.
From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World
(2012)
Hidden Lives: Voices of Children in Latin America and the Caribbean. 1998.
Silent Revolution: The Rise and Crisis of Market Economics in Latin America. 2003.
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