Danny Dorling

Five years on, it's still a mystery to most of us why the the Brexit referendum was allowed to happen, why it came out as it did, and how the British government managed to convince themselves that, having held it, they were obliged to act on it, even though there was no sane way to disentangle all the things in British life that had EU membership built into them, starting with the Irish border.

Professors Dorling (a social geographer) and Tomlinson (an expert on the complicated relationship of race, ethnicity and education) look into the whole sorry story with a focus on the way it all relates to perceptions of (innate) British "greatness", which of course all turn out to be predicated on distorted folk-memories of colonialism, Trafalgar, and the two world wars.

The book is a bit scattershot in its approach: there is some interesting stuff about how the inertia of the education system kept on teaching us about imperial glory well into the seventies, about who actually voted "leave", and about the relationship between inequality, privilege, wealth, the Tory party and the billionaires who funded the advertising for the "leave" campaign. It's all very topical — including a final chapter added in the second edition that brings the story up to summer 2020 — and wittily presented. But it rarely goes into very much detail, and it doesn't really come up with a single clear explanation for why it all happened. Probably because there isn't one, or if there is it will only start to become clear when the dust has had a bit longer to settle.

As it is, it tells us little more than that there were a few rich people who had a personal interest in leaving the EU, a few ambitious politicians prepared to identify with any cause that would advance their careers, and a very narrow vote that was largely determined by the different level of motivation to go out and vote between "leave" and "remain" supporters. Most of that we almost certainly knew already.

What I did find unexpected was Dorling's analysis of the referendum voting, where he points out that most commentators, trained to reading election results in terms of which areas are red and blue on the map, forgot that this was a vote based on aggregate numbers, not the local outcomes in voting-districts. According to his reasoning, it was not decided by the famous "working-class leave vote" in places like Stoke and Sunderland that so spooked the Labour Party, but by middle-class people in prosperous (Tory) districts in the South and South-West of England, where the population and the turn-out were both much higher. In the North, most working-class people didn't bother to vote at all, but there was generally — as you would expect — a higher level of turn-out among "leave" supporters than among people who supported the status quo, resulting in all those districts changing colour on the map.… (mehr)

An erudite book, covering many topics with a lot of detail, like population, GDP, climate, and so on. The main thesis seems to be that the age of unending growth in coming to an end, as we approach a steady state or even shrinking economy in much of the world. The author discusses the types of accommodation that will be required, but reassures us that the non-expanding world will be better for everyone, with less inequality, less environmental damage, and so on. To illustrate these trends, he uses a different type of diagram to present the time series, which he calls the phase diagram. This has absolute change on the horizontal axis, and absolute levels on the vertical axis. Time is not on the axis, so selected data points are labeled with the year. It is debatable whether this sort of presentation aids the understanding, in fact it may interfere with it for the average reader. However, it is obvious that his heart is in the right place (he is the rare economist who actually calls out the creative destruction theory), and there is much to learn. I would have been happier if he had developed in more detail the consequences of the slowing economy, and how the world is exactly going to manage the de-escalation of the growth curve and the de-carbonisation of the world economy. A glaring blind spot is the lack of any reference to the growing religious intolerance and fanaticism in many parts of the world. Love Kirsten's birds in the graphs!… (mehr)

It's rare that I will give a book I fundamentally agree with such a low rating, but in this case it was necessary. It reads like a first "throw everything down on the page" draft; it could and should have been half the length, with some free and pointed use of the editor's pen. The structure of the book could have worked, with chapter for each additional billion people on earth, but it practice it is a pointless conceit. The chapters and subchapters themselves jump around from topic to topic, with very thin narrative or thematic threads to sustain coherence (and my attention...). This aspect of the book could have done with serious editing.
A related issue is when Dorling refers to areas outside his own area of expertise (which is frequently, given the broader implications that population growth has), he is too often content to resort to ad hominem dismissals on the one hand, and appeals to authority to justify his own - apparently unexamined - assumptions. This is a problem, as I enjoy reading a book where someone ventures outside their speciality, and learn things that surprise them. It's a sign of a curious mind. A topic such as this is profoundly political, which is to say it is contested. Right answers are rarely to be found in such contexts, and more often it's a matter of trade-offs and discussion. There should have been more of this.
As to the evidence referred to in the book, we could do without being subjected to comments from below the line on HuffPo or the Guardian, but it was not to be. Dorling, referencing Hans Rosling, calls himself a practical possibilist, and this is a stance I think a lot of people would be in much agreement with. We may have to wait until Hans Rosling himself writes a book from this perspective.… (mehr)