What I'm Reading Now

Return to Veseth home page Index of Book Reviews	What I'm reading now ... 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.
	Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures. Princeton University Press, 2002. Q: Are you in favor of a multicultural society, one that welcomes and celebrates influences from different peoples and different cultures? A: Well, I suppose so. At least I am opposed to a society that suppresses particular cultures, ethnic groups, religions, or ideas. I guess I am in favor of freedom of choice and I suppose that is part of a mulitcultural society. I think it is great to be able to hear music or eat food from all over the world, for example, and to appreciate the societies that created them. Q: So that means that you are in favor of global cultural homogenization? A: Of course not!
	Q: Well, Tyler Cowen has written a book that points out "the paradox of cultural diversity". Individual cultures are becoming more and more diverse in the sense that people like you and me are able to experience a broader range of cultural influences through our access to foreign music, art, and literature. A: Yes, yes, I know that. And I think it is a good thing. Q: Indeed, it is a good thing. Cowen's book shows how important these foreign influences have been to the creative process around the world, using examples from hip hop to Picasso. The creative world positive thrives on these influences. A: Exactly. That's why I am against cultural homogenization. Q: No, that's why you support it. Because the more diverse localities become, in terms of these cultural elements, the less diverse the world becomes. That is, the less isolated local cultures become and the more they come to resemble each other, at least superficially. A: You mean they all come to resemble the United States? Q: No -- and yes. No in the sense that they have many different "looks" and "feels" and some of these are American, if only because the U.S. is such an enormous presence in the world today. But there's no reason to believe that the U.S. image is the dominant one. Indeed, Cowen goes to some lengths to track the Americanization of global culture through motion pictures and he concludes that it is much less complete than you might think. A: Then why is it that foreign places all look so much like the U.S.? It's like I can never leave home behind; it follows me everywhere. Q: Pay attention! As Herbert Verdine has said, globalization is not Americanization. It is just that America in globalization is like a fish in water. The U.S. has so many foreign influences -- it is so diverse -- and these places are becoming just as diverse. We absorb their influences, they absorb each other's. They don't so much come to look like us as we all come to look like one another. Less diversity between nations is a consequence of more diversity within nations. That's the paradox of diverity. A: So nothing gets lost? Nothing is destroyed as this curiously similar but endlessly diverse world expands? Q: Exactly wrong. Cowen's book is called Creative Destruction exactly because some things do get lost in this process. But not necessarily what we would expect and not necessarily in the way that you think, so it pays to study the matter closely. You should read his chapter on The Tragedy of Cultural Loss, which draws heavily upon Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons analysis. Freedom of choice is risky when applied to culture. But, given how important foreign influences seem to be in the creative process, Cowen argues that we should "consider the cautious embrace of a cosmopolitan multiculturalism as a guiding aesthetic principle and as a practical guide to policy." (p. 144)
	Hernando De Soto, The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism. Basic Books, 1989 (reprinted with a new Preface, 2002). Many authors and publishers seem to be trying to cash in on terrorism -- to repackage old ideas with a terrorist twist that makes them marketable again. The Other Path is a refreshing exception in this regard in that the "old" ideas are perhaps even more relevant today than when first published in English in 1989 -- and the terrorist link is absolutely valid. The Other Path was written in response to The Shining Path, a violent terrorist movement in Peru. The new preface updates the story of how De Soto's Instituto Libertad y Democracia waged a war of ideas with The Shining Path that shaped many aspects of Peruvian history and policy in the final years of the 20th century. It is, De Soto's new preface suggests, a war of ideas that is no longer limited to Peru.
	The Other Path is divided into two parts. The first half is an empirical study of the "informal economy" in Peru. This is the part of the economy that exists and thrives just below the government's radar and just outside the reach of authority. I was fascinated by the analysis of how informal housing, trade, and transport worked in Peru. Really, this is seriously interesting stuff. For those of us who are used to established legal systems and property rights structures, it is fascinating to learn about how groups of settlers organize to "invade" unoccupied land and about the extra-legal governance structures they establish. The stories of "invading" merchants and bus drivers are equally interesting. The second half of The Other Path is equally fascinating. De Soto analyzes the political economy of Peru and concludes that it is a redistributive system, but in a mercantilist rather than a socialist one. That is, equality is not in the cards, growth is not in even in the picture, and the corruption, favoritism, and rent-seeking is rampant. No wonder radicals oppose such a system. But the correct response, he tells us, is to create opportunity be empowering the informals, not by waging a false class war. As he says many times in this volume, the class war in Peru was not about the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but about the "insider "mercantilists versus "outsider" but entrepreneurial informals.
	Philippe Legrain, Open World: The Truth about Globalization. Published in Great Britain by Abacus, 2002. Published in the U.S. in 2004 by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. Most of the books that I read about globalization are not very good. They generally promote particular points of view, make little attempt to be objective, and report evidence very selectively. The authors often sacrifice their credibility (and sometimes their integrity) in an attempt to sell their books, sell their ideas, sell their policies, or all three. This is true both of the pro-globalization books and the anti-globalization ones. A plague on both your houses, I am sometimes tempted to say.
	It is especially refreshing, therefore, to read Philippe Legrain's new book about globalization. I put Open World into the smallest pile on my desk: the short stack of books that are critical of globalization but optimistic nonetheless. This is the "Keynesian" stack, I suppose, reflecting Keynes's optimistic view that people can overcome collectively the problems that they are unable to solve individually through institutional change. Legrain tackles most of the classic issues in the globalization literature -- globalization is the triumph of MNCs, it is the death of the state, it is the end of culture, it is a race to the bottom etc. -- and what I like about his analysis is that he looks at the evidence clearly and writes about what he really sees, not what he expects to see or what he wants to see. In doing this he sees both the good and the bad. His style is clear and witty, so it is unsurprising that he used to write for the Economist. Legrain is highly critical of three areas of globalization: agricultural policies, the international patent law regime, and global capital flows. In each case he presents a devastating critique of current policy. These critiques are extremely powerful because they are based upon a relatively even-handed reading of the arguments and evidence generally. I say that his analysis is "relatively" even-handed because it's just impossible to write about globalization in a value-free manner. He does seem to worship former WTO director Mike Moore, for example (he worked for Moore at the WTO). But his biases are pretty modest compared to globalization authors generally, and the book's subtitle ("The Truth about Globalization") is not wholly ironic, as you might suppose it to be. I've put this book on my short list of "recommended" globalization books, which are listed here in ascending order of sophistication. Thomas Friedman: The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Philippe Legrain: Open World. Manfred Steger: Globalism. Dani Rodrik: Has Globalization Gone too Far? Harold James: The End of Globalization.
	Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600. University of California Press, 2002. This is the perfect gift book. It is large format ("coffee table size), beautifully illustrated, seriously interesting, incredibly timely, and just expensive enough ($50 on Amazon.com) to make it a welcome gift -- something you'd really want but would hesitate to buy for yourself. I find Bazaar to Piazza seriously interesting because it traces the changing pattern of trade between Italy and the Islamic world during 1300-1600 time period, with special attention to trade in high quality goods. So it begins as a story about pre-modern globalization and I am interested in globalization stories.
	Initially the pattern of trade was that Italy exported raw materials and primary commodities in return for fine cloth, high quality ceramics, and a host of other items where Arab producers were far more advanced than their European counterparts. So Arab cultural products penetrated and influenced European society through trade in ways that I think will surprise you. Slowly, the Italian and European producers picked up Arab skills and designs and came to compete with Arab artists and craftsmen. By the end of the period the flow of trade had reversed. The Italian designs and products more more advanced than the Arab ones and were imported into the Islamic world. Chapters on trade patterns and commercial factors bracket the main part of the book, which presents individual chapters that carefully (and with gorgeous illustration) trace the ebb and flow of design and craftsmanship in carpets, ceramics, paintings, glass, silks, and other products. Looking at how Arab patterns and designs were passed to Italian products through trade and how they eventually returned to the Islamic world as Italian exports is just fascinating and well worth your attention. This book is especially timely because, of course, we are today very interested in the prospect for cultural flows between the Islam and the West. Here Dr. Mack provides a welcome optimistic note. In the final chapter she explains how craftsmen in Islam and Italy ruthlessly plundered each other's designs and other "intellectual property rights" -- and did so without outward conflict. "This reciprocal copying occurred quite peacefully because it benefited both parties. Italians and Ottomans recognized the economic importance of trade and industrial development and accepted the cultural and artistic exchange required to become and remain competitive. ... Sixteenth-century East-West trade and artistic exchange softened a clash of civilizations, establishing a historical precedent for cultural coexistence and mutual enrichment" (p. 179). Perhaps there is a lesson here?
	Thomas Friedman, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World after September 11. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002. Thomas Friedman spoke here at the University of Puget Sound in September 2002 and so I bought and read this book, which came out at the same time. It is a very interesting book and worth reading, but maybe not for the reasons you might think. The first 2/3 of the book is a collection of New York Times columns by Thomas Friedman -- a few from before September 11, to set the stage, then every column in chronological order until midsummer 2002. Reading these columns one after another has many effects. First, you come to appreciate just how short each column is (700 words) and how hard it must be to try to say something intelligent about a complex issue in such limited space.
	Although reading these columns is interesting, in terms of their content and the issues raised, I actually found them more valuable in a different way. Each column is a window on events in the past year. I could not help reflecting on what was happening in my life and what I was thinking when each first appeared in the Times. I expected that reading the book would be interesting because of Friedman's reflections, but in fact it was the chance to reflect upon my own thoughts and reactions that was the most valuable. So is that all this book is good for? No. Like a lot of reviewers, I think the best writing here comes at the end of the book, where Friedman escapes the constraints of the 700 word column and writes in the more fluid style that readers of The Lexus and the Olive Tree can appreciate. There are several powerful scenes and images reported here. The most interesting, I think, is his encounter with the Saudi Foreign Minister and his conversations with Saudi citizens. This may be Friedman's best work since September 11 in terms of reporting the Arab viewpoint on U.S. policy and world affairs. If you are looking for the one book that will allow you to really understand September 11 and the roots of Arab terrorism -- well, this isn't it. But it is worth reading nonetheless and a useful addition to a thinking person's bookshelf.
	Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century. Public Affairs Books, 2002. Michael Mandelbaum and Thomas Friedman are good friends. One result of this friendship is that Natalie Friedman's National History Day school project on Sputnik appears in both authors' new books. Another is that they have a central argument in common: the notion that free markets and democracy are the key to world peace. Readers of The Lexus and the Olive Tree will remember this argument as the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention. This theory reappears in Latitudes and Attitudes (above) in a somewhat more developed form, with the importance of democracy given greater weight.
	Michael Mandelbaum's book go much farther. He makes a holy trinity sort of argument. Free markets promote democracy. Democracy promotes peace. And peace of course causes the expansion of free markets. These are the ideas that conquered the world. Much of the book is retold history, stressing how we have come to this point in history and how other big ideas (socialism, authoritarian government, bipolar balance) have fallen by the wayside. Mandelbaum traces the holy trinity back to Woodrow Wilson's 14 points (although he conveniently chooses the points that fit is argument and let the others slide by). The most important and most controversial part of the book comes at the end, in the section titled The Liberal Theory of History. This is where Mandelbaum tries to make the holy trinity argument. He is not successful, to my mind, but I give him a lot of credit for trying. Writing Big Idea books is always risky business and he runs into problems familiar to anyone who has read the End of History and Democratic Peace literature. Mandelbaum is probably wrong in terms of a general theory, but that leaves open the interesting question of whether he might be right right now. Maybe U.S. policy really should be to support democracies and free markets everywhere, regardless of whether the countries seem to like us and our policies or not, on the theory that the unholy trinity force will ultimately work to out in our favor. That might be a better long term policy than arming dictators if they support us and trying to undermine democracies if they don't. Just a thought. On the whole, I admire Mandelbaum's bold venture, even thought in the end it is not what I had hoped it would be. I wish, however, that he had not tried to link this book to September 11, as he does at the start of the Introduction. It really isn't about September 11 any more than is Benjamin Barber's Jihad book (see below), which also tries to profit from this link.
	Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy. Ballantine Books, 2002. (First published in 1995 with the subtitle "How the World is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together -- And What This Means for Democracy." Paperback edition published in 1996 with the subtitle "How Globalism and Tribalism are Re-shaping the World.") Benjamin Barber has brought out a new edition of Jihad vs. McWorld, which was first published in 1995, complete with a new introduction and a new subtitle. Both additions take advantage in the surge in interest since September 11 2001 in books that might offer some insights into Islamic terrorism. This book really doesn't, but it does have Jihad in the title, which is enough to get attention.
	How can a book with a title like this not be about Islamic terrorism? Barber goes to great lengths (especially in the new introduction) to explain that his Jihad is a very general concept that has nothing to do with Islam or Islamic issues in particular. Jihad, I guess, is just an attention-getting device (and it sure works). The 1996 edition's subtitle that refers to "Tribalism" is more accurate than the 2002 edition's reference to Terrorism. The 1995 edition's subtitle is the most accurate representation of the book's contents, but lacks marketable buzzwords. Barber doesn't intend to pick on Muslims when talking about "Jihad" and, to be fair, he is very careful in this regard in the text. Unfortunately the regrettable image of an apparently Muslim woman holding a Pepsi on the cover reinforces at every glance the very Islamic connection that Barber ways he wants to avoid. Regardless, anyone seeking specific insights into the Islamic response to globalization will find few insights here. That's not what Barber wants to talk about. McWorld, which is really the main target of the book as I read it, is also a broad idea. It isn't really McDonalds, although that's what comes to everyone's mind. It is a clever term for a broad concept -- "Globalism," like the 1996 subtitle said, or "Coming Together" as the 1995 edition had it. McWorld was an especially catchy term in 1996; ditto Jihad today. I have mixed feelings about this book. I admire Barber's argument, which I think is quite thoughtful and interesting, but I find the book itself distasteful. Herewith, briefly, what I like about the argument but why the book isn't to my taste. The argument is that globalization twists the world in two ways at once. On one side it bends the world towards markets and business, which tend to organize along certain lines, and towards the ideology of globalism. At the same time, however, globalization magnifies ethnic, religious, and racial divisions. Both these forces -- McWorld (Lexus in Thomas Friedman's terms) and Jihad (Friedman's Olive Tree, more or less) are at work; they intertwine and shape the world around us. The point of this observation is that the globalization era is not the McWorld End of History, as Francis Fukayama wrote, or the Jihad Clash of Civilizations, as Samuel P. Huntington argued. It is both (a point that Friedman also makes). So what? Well, this is where Barber's argument goes beyond Friedman. Both Jihad and McWorld are decidedly undemocratic forces, he says, although McWorld at least is not necessarily anti-democratic. So while we may be unsure about how they will shape each other, we can be sure how they will shape democracy: they will undermine it and possibly destroy it.. This is a really interesting argument: thought-provoking, full of follow-up questions, and really relevant to Americans like me who tend to think of democracy as the ultimate virtue, even if we don't always know why. I like an argument that makes me think and forces me to stretch myself. I like this argument (although I still haven't made up my mind about it). The book that packages the argument is another matter. It seems to me that in stretching a tightly-reasoned and focused Atlantic Monthly article to fill up a book, Barber has broadened and diluted his argument to the point where I cannot take it very seriously. Jihad and McWorld both are stretched to include any subject that Barber feels the urge to discuss, so that in the end they lack any real meaning at all. Instead of a tight argument about globalization and democracy, Jihad and McWorld is sort of a general theory of everything. As the argument got stretched out of proportion, the tight logic of the original article became loose and lazy. There are just too many cases where Barber has weakened his case by stretching it. Three brief examples. Because British TV viewers now have the option of watching the NFL Game of the Week, he suggests that the American "infotainment telesector" has undermined fundamentally British sporting culture, British culture, everything. Doesn't this seem like an over-stretched argument? How many British viewers do you suppose watch that NFL show instead of the Manchester United game? Do you think it is a significant influence on British culture? This example might seem to support Barber's argument, if you don't think about it too hard, but I really cannot see where it has any significance at all. There are too many examples like this in the book. A map on pages 106-107 shows all the countries where TV viewers can access MTV videos. This is presented as evidence of McWorld's homogenizing and Americanizing effects. The "infotainment telesector" is corrupting the world's culture. What the map really shows, of course, are all the countries that have cable and satellite TV. Sure, they all get MTV, but they also get Indian cricket, Argentine soccer, Italian cinema and a hundred other channels that include a lot of American content and a lot of non-American programming, too. You can use this map to support Barber's McWorld argument, but you can also use it to support lots of other arguments because, darn it, satellite TV is a complicated communications structure that has lots of different effects, not just the one that Barber wants to make. There are too many examples like this in the book, where the evidence is vague and not tightly linked to a particular conclusion. One last example. On page 74 Barber reports that it has been speculated that video-game players acquire certain physical skills that are important to particular professions, such as fighter pilot and surgeon, for example, and games may shape their social attitudes, too. So what? "There have been no decisive empirical studies of such linkages, but it certainly seems likely that linkages exist and will have important political implications. Those interested in democracy, culture, and civic life cannot afford to leave the discovery of their character to chance." Did you follow this? There's no proof, or even a decisive study, but McWorld in the form of video games is undermining democracy every day. If you think that this is a sound argument, well your taste is different from mine. Stretching Jihad, McWorld, and the argument so far weakens them and, in my opinion, diminishes them enormously. But, honestly, that's not the most important problem I have with the book. The point of the argument, remember, is a statement about globalization and democracy. And I think democracy gets stretched too far here, too. Attempts to link every bit and piece back to democracy has the effect, in my reading, of stretching democracy all out of shape and diminishing the true impact of the argument. BTW: I find the new Introduction in this edition worth reading, even if I don't like the rest of the book. Barber is working out a new argument -- that making both McWorld and Jihad more democratic is a necessary step in the battle against terrorism. Turning the latest subtitle on its head, this suggests that perhaps Democracy is the best challenge to Terrorism! If you find this idea interesting, click here to read my review of Bernard Lewis's book about how western ideas (like democracy) have been received in Islamic cultures.
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