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What I'm reading ... You are what you read -- or at least I've always thought so. Herewith some thumbnail reviews from my own reading posted to encourage others to read, think, and comment. I don't report on pleasure books (Harry Potter is great, but you won't find it here) or really bad books (with occasional spectacular exceptions). The most recent books are listed first. |
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Albert-Lászlo Barabási, Linked: The New Science of Networks. Perseus Publishing, 2002. Barabási is a professor of physics at Notre Dame who has done a lot of well known scientific work on networks, both their theoretical aspects and their real world forms. I think that network theory is very important so I was really looking forward to reading this book. I found it both fascinating and frustrating. The good parts kept me reading. The frustrations kept me from enjoying it. So I've decided to write two brief reviews rather than mixing the pluses and the minuses. |
| Fascination. The recent interest in network theory is of course largely due to the
advent of the internet and the world wide web, which links millions of people in a huge network. The experience
of the web introduced networks first into the public vocabulary and second into analysis as either a metaphor or
a model. Once we can picture a network, we begin to see them everywhere and we begin to think in terms of networks.
This is a really useful development, especially in my field of International Political Economy, which for a long time seemed to be stuck in a states and markets mode of analysis. Networks are everywhere in IPE -- global terrorist networks, Chinese ethnic networks, global commodity chains. You can even interpret the New Regionalism as a network development. The network metaphor is a useful addition to our mental toolbox, but what would be even more useful is to have this way of thinking informed by solid research into the actual properties of networks. That is, it is good to be able to understand that the movie industry is fundamentally a network that connects actors, producers, directors, etc. (this is the point of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game). But it would be even better to probe into this and other networks to understand how and why then function as they do. Barabási does this and he does it well, which is the real strength of the book. Barabási develops a few principles of network analysis and then applies them to a great many fields, reporting on and interpreting scientific research. The principles include random and scale-free networks, power law distributions, degrees of separation, and hubs versus nodes. These ideas are then applied to real world examples (much of it research by Barabási, his colleagues, and his students. We learn about the network economy, the surprising properties of the internet, the spread of AIDS, fads, social networks, and the evolution of DNA. No wonder this book is getting so much attention! Everyone can find something of interest and use here. Frustration. This is a very annoying book. The author is clearly a leading expert in this field who must have published dozens of scientific papers on these subject. I would tell you the exact number, but there is no bibliography, which is annoying to anyone who wants to follow up on a topic. It seems that the book is written for people who want to know just a little bit about this subject and don't want to go any further. Bibliographies and footnotes are the usual way for authors to lay a trail of bread crumbs for readers who want to learn more about a subject, but this book has no bibliography and only "stealth" footnotes. There is a set of endnotes, but they are listed according to page numbers and the pages don't give any sign that there is a note. So you have to keep flipping back and forth. When you read page 169 you need to flip back to see if there is a note for page 169 and if there is, you need to guess where it fits in. Annoying. But it wouldn't be so annoying if I didn't feel the need for footnotes of something to fill in the gaps in the text. Whenever the author gets into an important theoretical topic, it seems like he tells me just enough to make me want to really understand the idea, but not enough for me to feel that I do. I feel like I have a half-baked understanding, if you know what I mean. If Barabási needed to write this way to gain a large readership (like James Gleick did with his chaos book), I wish he would have included some sort of appendix to fill in the gaps for readers like me who want to know more. Or include a bibliography. Or proper footnotes. Argh. For a book that leans a little bit the other way (in terms of rigor versus accessibility), see Oz Shy's volume on The Economics of Network Industries, which is reviewed here. |
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Beppe Severgnini, Ciao, America! An Italian Discovers the U.S. Broadway Books, 2002. (Originally published in Italian as Un Italiano in America in 1995.) Summer is here, so it is time to read some books that are serious, but fun (unlike the Stiglitz book below, which I am afraid is serious and not fun). The non-fiction best seller lists are littered with "innocents abroad" books -- books about the experiences of British and America writers who choose to rent or buy homes abroad and pay for them by writing about the experience. A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun are the best known books in this genre, but there are tons of others (I like the ones by Tim Parks the best). These books are relevant to this page because they offer a little peek of face-to-face globalization -- how globalization is experienced up close and personal, not through products or media. |
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People read these "innocents abroad" books in order to experience foreign cultures vicariously, but I think this is a mistake. Reading what an American thinks about living in France, for example, really tells you more about America than it does about France in terms of what really matters. Reading Beppe Severgnini's enjoyable new book reinforces this point of view. Severgnini is a best-selling author in Italy, where he is a columnist for the newspaper Corriere della Sera (U.S. readers may recognize him as a frequent contributor to The Economist). He is also the author of a previous "innocents abroad" book, Inglesi, about his experience living in Great Britain. Severgnini, along with his wife and children, lived for a year in "America" -- in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC -- and this book tells his friends back home in Italy all about it. (I put quotes around "America" in the last sentence because I think that most Americans probably think that Washington DC is a foreign country with little in common with the rest of the nation, but how would a foreigner know that?) We don't meet very many Americans in the book and the ones we do meet are encountered mainly through commercial transactions, like the plumber or the real estate agent. The Provence and Tuscan Sun books share this feature and it makes me wonder whether commercial relations are not crowding out other sorts of relations everywhere. Seeing Georgetown through the eyes of an Italian tells us a lot about Italy. Upon renting a townhouse in Georgetown, for example, Severgnini prepared for battle with the inevitable bureaucracies to get the electricity, telephone, cable TV, street parking permits,etc. etc. He was soon frustrated: it was all incredibly quick and easy and he was treated well throughout the process. It was, to use a phrase that he associates with the U.S., comfortable. He missed the arguments and challenges he would have found back home and the sense of victory in finally getting something done. Where is the honor in getting a telephone number if they just give it to you? Towards the end of the book Severgnini tries to sum up what he has learned about America and here are the words he chooses for American obsessions: control, comfort, competition, community, and choreography. You should read what he means by these terms and why he focuses on them. As you can imagine, the book is not an uncritical view of American life, but it is ultimately a sympathetic one. Here's my favorite paragraph (from page 155):
Let me return the compliment. Having lived for just a little while among Italians in Bologna, I think that Americans make the same mistake. So maybe there is more to learn from these "innocents abroad" books that I first thought. |
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Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents. W.W. Norton, 2002. Everyone is reading this book and it isn't hard to figure out why. Joseph Stiglitz is one of the great economists of his generation and this is his first book since he left government (Chairman of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors, chief economist at the World Bank), returned to academia, and promptly won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on information theory. Who wouldn't want to read what Stiglitz has to say, especially now that he is back in the ivory tower and can freely speak his mind. There is good news and bad news here. The good news is that Stiglitz provides two books for the price of one. The first book is about globalization and the second is about discontent. The bad news is that a lot of readers would have been happier to read just the first book and to pass on the second. |
| The globalization book is really about the challenges and failures of global governance. It has been widely observed
that as the Bretton Woods system of state-centered activity has evolved in to market-centered globalization, the
market activities have expanded and adapted much faster and better than have governance structures. The Bretton
Woods system featured national markets and national systems of governance while the globalization system's expanded
markets are not matched by global systems of economic regulation. What about the Bretton Woods institutions: the IMF, World Bank, and WTO? On paper these look like the missing global institutions, but in practice they are not. They are either narrow in jurisdiction (the WTO), uncertain in direction (the World Bank) or misguided and obsolete (the IMF according to Stiglitz). The Globalization book here is a first person account of how global governance failed in the 1990s at precisely the time when the world needed it most. Economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe, the Asian Crisis, and the Russian Crisis are analyzed in various levels of detail as examples of the breakdown of global governance .The book concludes with a sensible agenda for reform, both domestic and global. The Stiglitz Agenda, if it is taken seriously, has enough substance to provide economists and policy makers with creative and constructive work for the next decade. And the sooner we get on this work the better, as the Argentine crisis reminds us. But will the Stiglitz Agenda be taken seriously? Well, I am concerned that it might not be because the Globalization book cannot be fully separated from the Discontents book here. Now you might think that Stiglitz is writing about those who are discontented with globalization -- WTO protesters and the like. Wrong. In the Discontent book we get to learn about Stiglitz's personal discontent. This take the form of frequently and fairly pointed criticisms of (or attacks on?) other giant economists, particularly Jeffrey Sachs, Stanley Fischer, and Larry Summers. Some people will find the Discontents book titillating -- sort of a People Magazine version of the economic crises of the 1990s. That's too bad, because they will probably miss the point of the Globalization book. Others will put the book down because the analysis is so personalized. That's too bad, too. You might not agree with the Globalization book (I certainly don't agree with all of it), but you ought to read it. And if you find that Stiglitz is sharply critical of your position on important issues … and he maybe even suggests that you adopted your position just for reasons fo personal gain ... well, try not to take is personally! (Ken Rogoff, Economic Counsellor and Director of Research at the IMF, did take Stiglitz's attacks personally -- who could blame him? Click here to read his "Open Letter to Joseph Stiglitz," which has been widely quoted in the press.) |
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George Soros, George Soros on Globalization. PublicAffairs, 2002. George Soros has written a nifty little book on globalization that deserves to be widely read. Soros wrote the book, he says in the introduction, because he was unhappy with the solutions that he presented in his earlier book on this subject, "Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (2000). Here he presents an innovative plan to raise vastly greater sums of money to help poor countries move ahead. Hi s plan is based upon targeted new issues of Special Drawing Rights, the IMF "paper gold" that was originally invented to deal with liquidity problems during the 1970s oil crises. |
| For my money, Soros's plans are not nearly to useful
as his analysis. When you read his analysis of problems like the instability of international capital flows, the
logic is just crystal clear and his conclusions are powerful. It is were up to me, Soros would quite trying to
invent plans to safe the world and he would instead work to set out the principles upon which such plans could
be made by others. I think this is Soros's comparative advantage: using cold clear logic, informed by a deep understanding
of politics and economics, to set out a few powerful principles to be used a guide to action. In a way, Soros does well what Keynes did well in a different age. But, like Keynes, he cannot resist the urge to make practical policy out of the abstract ideas he distills. But Soros feels a personal responsibility to draft a plan for global reform and this gets mire mired down in all sorts of details that weaken his analysis. I guess I cannot blame him for this, however, since he spends his own money on the plans he invents to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. In many respects, Soros has the most thoughtfully considered foreign aid program of anyone in the world. Here's a closing point. Why do so many foreign aid, World Bank, and IMF programs fail? The answer, Soros suggests, is because they are based exclusively on government actors. In his own programs, he has the freedom to support useful governments and to undermine useless ones. But the international system is formally constructed on the basis of nation-state sovereignty, which makes this impossible. Soros is strongest in his analysis of international finance and open society programs. He has opinions about international trade, but he doesn't know as much about it (he even admits that the details of the WTO make his eyelids droop). To solve this, he should read the new book by Douglas Irwin (see below). |
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Douglas A. Irwin, Free Trade Under Fire. Princeton University Press, 2002. This is a really excellent book on the controversy over international trade. It is so clear and thorough -- accessible to undergraduates, yet able to teach the professors a lesson or two. I really like Irwin's book and I am going to try to find a way to use it in my International Economics class. Here's how the book is organized. The first few chapters briefly provide information about trade patterns and makes the case for free trade. This section is noteworthy for its clarity. Then, one by one, Irwin takes on the issues that have caused many people to question free trade and sometimes to oppose it: trade and jobs, trade and labor conditions, trade and the environment, etc. These chapters are also clear, but what really stands out is the quality of the analysis and the evidence that is presented to support the conclusions. The devil is in the details, Mark Twain said, and Irwin's mastery of the details in each case allows him to go well beyond other books. His analysis of the real problems with the WTO is masterful. I learned a lot form this book. It is recommended reading for anyone who wants to understand international trade policy today -- and required reading for everyone in the Bush Administration! |
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Douglas A. Irwin, Against the Tide, An Intellectual History of Free Trade. Princeton University Press, 1996. One of the nicest things I can say about Douglas Irwin's new book is that it is as good and useful as he previous book, Against the Tide. This is a wonderful book, full of insights. Irwin traces the intellectual history of the debate over free trade from the early mercantilists through to the proponents of strategic trade. Against the Tide is a guide to understanding international trade theory in the same way that Free Trade Under Fire is a guide to trade policy. I recommend them both. |
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Joseph S. Nye, Jr. The Paradox of American Power: why the world's only superpower can't go it alone. Oxford University Press, 2002. Joseph Nye is dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a former assistant secretary of Defense in the first Clinton administration. He has a book that everyone needs to read to understand the delicate dilemmas of global security. Basically, Nye makes a case for a U.S. policy that is international not isolationist, multilateral not unilateral, multidimensional, and which cautiously attempts to advance U.S. interests without falling defining those interests either too narrowly (the interests of U.S. businesses abroad, for example) or too broadly (the pursuit of human rights and democracy everywhere). |
| The book is full of interesting insights, but there is room here to mention only a few. I find Nye's analysis of
power to be very insightful. He compares the distribution of power in the world today to a three-dimensional chess
game. The top board represents military power and the U.S. is the dominant player - the only one with global reach
in both nuclear and conventional forces. But there are a lot of problems where military power doesn't matter as
much as it used to. The attention shifts down, to the second level, which represents economic power. The U.S. has buckets of economic power, but we are not alone in that respect. This is an oligopolistic game, with a number of big players with potent economies and interdependent strategies. Because the U.S. isn't the big dog on this field, it has to take into account the actions and reactions of others. Cooperation is useful here and multilateral institutions can help achieve U.S. interests better than unilateral actions can. Isolationism, in economic terms, is not an option. On the lower level we see power determined by culture, the media, and information. Power here is much more diffused, resting in a lot of different hands, for good and for evil. Technological globalization works in favor of U.S. interests now, Nye notes, because it increases U.S. "soft power" - and appeal of American values and norms. But as this third-level power becomes more diffused, this advantage will diminish. The bottom line: If you look only at the top level, it appears that the U.S. can afford to act unilaterally on important issues to secure its narrowly defined national interest. But this ignores the complex interdependence on the second level and the effect that this has on the appeal of U.S. culture on the third level. Precisely because the U.S. is so strong at the top, it cannot afford to adopt a unilateral policy, since such policies weaken the game on the second level and lose the game on the third. The final chapter presents a primer for U.S. international policy in a global information age. Required reading, I think, for whoever in the Bush administration drafted the recent steel tariff plan. |
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