"try to analogise these great matters of state to your daily life"

March 12, 2024 12:58 PM

Daniel Davies is a finance expert, journalist, and former investment banker whose writing I've been reading for over 20 years on Crooked Timber and on his own blog as well as elsewhere. Sometimes he writes analogies, games, or flights of fancy to help readers think about complex issues more clearly.

Davies has written for The Guardian (example), The New Yorker (example), the Financial Times ("Towards a theory of co-headship: A detailed taxonomy of management company rationales for this weird Wall Street anomaly", this month), the Washington Post (example), and several other venues. And he's been prolific as well on his Substack newsletter, on Medium, on Twitter, on Bluesky, and probably elsewhere. And he's written multiple books; I particularly recommend his Lying for Money, a history of fraud.

As far as I know, there isn't one comprehensive bibliography of his work anywhere, and I was thinking of curating one, but he's written so much in so many places that it would have taken even more time than I took compiling similar finding aids for work by Jon Bois and Sarah Taber. So, instead, I want to share a few perhaps-representative tastes and starting points. I thought this would be one big post but instead I'm planning to make a few different front page posts, on different themes, as I compile stuff.


Choose Your Own Policy Adventure

One interesting thing he's done a couple times is write a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style interactive fiction experience to put you in the shoes of an expert trying to save a country's economy from a crash.

"So, what would your plan for Greece be?" (2012) (previously):

Reading the media and blogs, it seems to me that left and right are united in the view that the Greek default is being handled appallingly, that the current attempts at a solution are childishly obviously wrong and that everything is the fault of someone, probably the Germans. My own view – that it is not at all clear what the direction of policy is, and that although I don’t agree with the troika plan, it’s recognizable as a good-faith plan made by conscientious international civil servants working under unimaginably difficult political constraints in an economic context that was irreparably broken before they got there – is, as always, unpopular.

I don’t have a solution myself – the more I end up discussing this with people, the more I am reminded of the London Business School proverb taught on some of the gnarlier case studies, which is “Not All Business Problems Have Solutions”. So, CT hivemind, what do you think the best outcome is? Below the fold, I note some talking points, aimed at preventing our commentariat from falling into some of the pitfalls and mistakes which appear to be dominating debate at present. Because the whole issue is a twisty turny maze which at times seems to consist of nothing but false moves, I am presenting it in the form of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. I would note at this stage that I could probably have presented it in a funky HTML way rather than making you scroll up and down, but I have convinced myself that this is a feature rather than a bug – the medium matches the message here, because international debt negotiations are cumbersome, inconvenient and irritating too. Also, it is probably easier than it needs to be for readers to end up at the wrong paragraph and get a confusing jumbled narrative which bears little resemblance to the decisions they thought they’d made. Again, this is a crucial part of giving you the authentic international financial diplomacy experience.

Followup/writer's commentary: "'Who’s In Charge Here' by Alan Beattie – A Field Guide To Maynards":

I will now review that book in the 'London Review of Books style' – ie, by writing an essay on a tangential subject of interest to myself, and then tacking on a paragraph or so about the book at the end....

One of the motivations for the post was a discussion I had with @PabloK on twitter about the Greek negotiations, in which he said, rather succinctly, that the purpose of protest was to change the space of what was politically possible. I think this is a crucial point; although it is important to make a good faith attempt to understand the constraints that people work under (which is why I wrote the post), it is equally important not to regard those constraints as necessarily being imposed by Ultimate Reality.

His followup game, "What would you do: Part 2, the Island of Surpyc" (2013): "Once more, I’m trying to help people understand how policies get made from the inside, and how something that looks like a dumb idea can often be the best choice out of a bad decision set, in the context of the ongoing Euro crisis."


"Christmas sermons"

Davies used to regularly post in December with allusive narratives or philosophical digressions on more evergreen topics.


"The future is a shoe being thrown at a human face – forever!" (2008), on statistics and the "difference between a historical and a statistical mode of thinking":

As you can see above, in order to get to my table of dangerous jobs, I had to make a lot of very arguable coding decisions which had a material effect on the relative positions (as far as I can see, no matter how I cut the numbers, I couldn’t have got the political and spiritual leaders down to the level of Pacific Northwest crab fishermen, but by making different judgement calls, I could certainly have made “Pope” look a lot safer).

"I don’t mind who writes the laws of the future, if I can write and sing the theme tune" (2009): "...the whole point about postmodernism is not that all interpretations are as good as any others, it’s about recognising that the choice of 'mood music' is at least as important as the physical facts of what happened..."

"The Great Homeopathic Cocktail Bar" (2010): "is there an important point to be made here about the nature of risk and reward? Probably not, but there’s a sort of semi-attached one."

“On Not Believing In Canada” (2012): "on evidence, disagreement, knowledge and related matters"

"The biggest game in town (2013): "I thought I might have a go at explaining one of the phenomena of online political debate which is as persistent as it is puzzling – that is to say, why does everything end up turning into a flamewar about Israel?"

Other analogies

"Oranges and lemons – fairness intuitions and 'best execution'" (2014): "Your customer is waiting back at your gate. He gives you your ten pence, and asks 'How much did my oranges cost?' What do you tell him?"

And an old favorite, "Vans-O-Doom" (2003), on "the fact that the 25,000 litres of anthrax we were promised have proved so elusive":

For reference, I went on holiday to France last year, staying in a rented villa outside Biarritz that was roughly the size of three Routemaster buses. Based on "intelligence reports" established by phoning the proprietor ahead of time, I managed to find it in a mere six hours despite the fact that my key "source" was unreliable on a number of important points, such as which exit from the fucking autoroute he was near..... after a mere four of these six hours, Mrs. Digest was loudly denouncing my abilities and, specifically, strongly suggesting that I'd never actually phoned the bloke like I said I was going to and was making it up as I went along. If I'd raised the objection that "you can't expect me to find such a comparatively small and easily concealed object immediately in a country the size of France", I daresay I might not be alive today.

If it was six weeks later and we were still motoring round the Pyrenees aimlessly keeping an eye out for anything looking likely and all we'd turned up was a recently disinfected public toilet that sort of looked like it might have been rented out to foreigners once, I think any divorce court in the land would have taken it as read that my claim to have "solid information" about our holiday home was an outright lie. As I've said before, if you try to analogise these great matters of state to your daily life, it makes it a lot easier to work out whether what you're being asked to believe is credible or not..... It was a specific claim and it has to be backed up specifically or not at all. In other words, I am unlikely to look favourably on any candidate causus belli which contains fewer actual toxic germs than my breadbin.

posted by brainwane (17 comments total)

I first found his work through the D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA, which I think about every other week, and most recently his newsletter about how the wrong side won at Boeing, which is fascinating.

I've got his book, "Brompton: Engineering for Change" about the growth of the fold-up bike company on my desk right now, and it's good reading.
posted by mhoye at 1:23 PM on March 12 [8 favorites]

Oh MY.

Like many of kliuless's posts, it's going to take me FOREVER to properly dig into these links, but just the first few clicks have led to some delightful writing:

(Ah, never mind - I was going to quote something from "The Great Homeopathic Cocktail Bar" but I kept expanding my quote until it encompassed pretty much the whole thing, so: here.)

I really appreciated your quote above, brainwane:

My own view – that it is not at all clear what the direction of policy is, and that although I don’t agree with the troika plan, it’s recognizable as a good-faith plan made by conscientious international civil servants working under unimaginably difficult political constraints in an economic context that was irreparably broken before they got there – is, as always, unpopular.

... because that's what I often think about MOST political issues - it's easy to criticize, but much, much harder to know what exactly one should do, especially within the constraints of the real world.

I am very much looking forward to reading all of these (well, a bunch of these, anyway, there's a delightfully large quantity of stuff here) ... and I am also reminded yet again that I really should be reading a lot more stuff at Crooked Timber generally.

Thank you so much for posting this excellently curated and extremely intriguing collection of links, brainwane! I appreciate it, very much.
posted by kristi at 1:27 PM on March 12 [3 favorites]

(Oh, whoops, the oranges and lemons piece on MetaFilter previously.)

mhoye, believe you me, that One-Minute MBA piece is in the draft of one of these Daviesbrations:

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.....
Fibbers' forecasts are worthless.....
The Vital Importance of Audit....

and I'm reading that Brompton book too!

kristi, your warm and clear and specific praise, as so often is the case, buoys me as I put these things together. Thank you. Happy reading!

it's easy to criticize, but much, much harder to know what exactly one should do, especially within the constraints of the real world.

YUP. In my stand-up comedy I have a bit about the habitual conversational characteristics of maintainers as opposed to those who haven't ever been responsible for something that strangers depend on, and the division between those who tend to use the adverb "just" (as in, "they should just do [x]") and those who don't.

I bet you'll get a kick out of the cultural commentary links I'll be putting up in a future post.
posted by brainwane at 1:43 PM on March 12 [5 favorites]

Really enjoy Dan's writing and have been following since the d^2 digest days. Thanks for this post!
posted by crocomancer at 1:55 PM on March 12 [1 favorite]

Really enjoy Dan's writing and have been following since the adequacy.org days. Thanks for this post!
posted by ambrosen at 2:04 PM on March 12 [1 favorite]

JUST. brainwane. excellent. yes.
posted by PikeMatchbox at 2:08 PM on March 12 [3 favorites]

Can we get a shorter?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:36 PM on March 12 [1 favorite]

(Sadly, no used the ‘shorter’ meme to make fun of right wing assholes, which Davies reportedly invented)
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:37 PM on March 12 [1 favorite]

I think one of my favourite turns of phrase of his - one of those times where an big idea is compressed into a crystal of a phrase, my absolute favorite kind of writing - was when he remarked casually that "a modern military is basically a logistics company that specializes in delivering small pieces of metal to people who don't want them."
posted by mhoye at 3:04 PM on March 12 [14 favorites]

I am a huge Davies fan. For readers new to him, a great entry point is his Lying for Money, about the history (and economic-sociological theory) of frauds.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:16 PM on March 12 [3 favorites]

Thank you for this post!
posted by wowenthusiast at 4:47 PM on March 12 [1 favorite]

(Sadly, no used the ‘shorter’ meme to make fun of right wing assholes, which Davies reportedly invented)

He did, specifically to make fun of Steven Den Best.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 4:58 PM on March 12

This bit of conversation is taking me back about 20 years!

"Sadly, No" and its Shorter category

Davies, 2003, possibly starting/naming the "shorter" style of criticism (satirical summaries):

...people don't necessarily want a Smarter Stephen den Beste. Part of the joy is watching a man who knows nothing about anything except the innards of mobile phones trying to understand a complicated world around him with no sources of information other than the Internet. What people want is a Shorter Stephen den Beste; one that doesn't take about ten thousand words to get from A to halfway through the downstroke of B. So I'll be posting one-sentence summaries of posts on the USS Clueless, on a reasonably regular basis, until I get bored.

I still remember an apology Davies made in one of his SSdB posts:

Note: SdB fans who are also engineers will be aware of the problem of "compressing white noise" from Shannon & Wiener's information theory. The point being that (say) a computer file of completely random numbers can't be compressed to a smaller size, because the way that you compress things is by taking advantage of their internal structure to eliminate redundant points. Because a file of completely random data doesn't *have* any internal structure, there is no file that you can create which describes the data fully, which is shorter than the file itself.

That's what writing today's summary was like. Apologies that the two tries above aren't very good; this isn't my fault, it's the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Also the analogy of shipping a mobile phone and starting a pre-emptive war of aggression, and retrospective thoughts on what Davies learned from the exercise, including some ruminations on caffeine and geek culture.
posted by brainwane at 5:18 PM on March 12 [3 favorites]

I don't know who this is or what it's about, but I'm pretty certain it will be excellent just because of who made the post.

I don't know you, brainwane, and I likely never will, but you've put so many good words in front of my eyeballs that I would certainly read anything on your recommendation.

I look forward to learning some new stuff!
posted by Acari at 7:10 PM on March 12 [3 favorites]

Dan Davies is great; been reading him since the early blogosphere. I can vouch for his book on fraud. Pretty sure I pinged it as my favorite non-fiction book of the year when it came out.

He's been talking about corporations and organizations as information eating organisms on his substack for a while, with the point that there is only so much information they can digest. Looked at this way management techniques are a way to ignore information; making something "manageable" is literally a synonym for simplifying it. It's the sort of thing that is obviously true and often ignored.

Since where sharing lines we've liked from his past, he once compared "Don't get into a war" as the international relations equivalent of "Buy an index fund": Smart people always think they can pick the right stock or the right war, but the evidence is there's no reason to think you'll outperform people who follow the dumb rule.
posted by mark k at 9:55 PM on March 12 [3 favorites]

I recently started reading DD again after a long lapse from the den Beste days, and it's been great. I wish the world of finance and economics was as clear to me.
posted by fleacircus at 11:06 PM on March 12 [3 favorites]

I've now made 2 more posts in this series, using the tag "DanielDavies".
posted by brainwane at 9:18 AM on March 25 [2 favorites]