What I'm Reading Now

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	Daniel Cohen, Our Modern Times: The New Nature of Capitalism in the Information Age. The MIT Press, 2003. Everything changed with the student riots in 1968. If you tend to see the world this way you must, like Daniel Cohen, be French, and you define yourself by your disillusionment with the the modern age. The student rioters of '68 rejected the bourgeois values of the 20th Century's Modern Times (think of the Charlie Chaplin film) -- consumption, technology, and mass production. The spirit of '68 rejects dominance by capital and rule by rigid structure in favor of the individual autonomy.
	The new information technology empowers the individual, which ought to appeal to those students, now middle-aged. But this has come at a high cost in terms of unresolved tension between financial capital and human capital, between rich and poor, and between individual desires and social needs. No wonder the 68ers are so tense. This new capitalism is a powder keg of contradictions, Cohen seems to say, just like the old capitalism. And no one wants a repeat of what happened when that powder keg exploded in the 1930s. For the most part this slim volume is a reflection on and response to one of my favorite books, Joseph Schumpeter's 1942 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which was itself a reaction to the extremes of the 1930s. In CSD Schumpeter famously asked whether capitalism could survive and answered No. The key to capitalism's success is the heroic risk-taking entrepreneur, and capitalism's method of rational calculation would eventually make this figure an endangered species. Capitalism was doomed not by its failures, á la Marx, but by its success. Cohen also asks if capitalism can survive. His answer is a bit harder to pin down, however. It might explode, he suggests, due to its fundamental contradictions and inequities. But it might persist, he seems to say in the conclusion, because of the continuing need of individuals to try to resolve those tensions. Not a good book for anyone looking for definitive answers, but an interesting one if you like to ponder the questions.
	Meghan L. O'Sullivan, Shrewd Sanctions: Statecraft and State Sponsors of Terrorism. Brookings, 2003. I have read a lot of books about economic sanctions over the years. And they keep coming. Whenever I get a new one I always ask the question, does the world really need another book about economic sanctions? Haven't we learned all that we can about this tool of economic statecraft? Apparently the world does need another sanctions book: this book! This may be the best book yet published on the political economy of economic sanctions. It deserves special attention both because of the depth and focus of its research and because its topic is so timely.
	Meghan O'Sullivan goes well beyond the usual analysis of positive versus negative sanctions and unilateral versus multilateral sanction regimes. Her specific focus is how sanctions have been and should be employed with respect to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Her specific case studies, reported in considerable detail, are Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Sudan. Her criteria in evaluation sanctions are their political and economic impact, ability to achieve specific goals, political and economic cost, and relative effectiveness compared with other foreign policy tools. In a final chapter O'Sullivan turns specifically to "ways to strengthen the performance of sanctions in an age of American preeminence and globalization" … and an age of global terrorism. Relevant? Obviously. Churchill famously said that it was better to "talk talk" than to "war war." Smart sanctions, as outlined here, may be an increasingly useful and desirable third choice.
	Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. Knopf, 2002. What have European intellectuals had to say about the markets and capitalism from Voltaire through Hayek? It is an interesting question to anyone who is interested in the history of ideas, but the idea of actually answering it takes your breath away. Who can imagine mastering such a vast literature and then distilling from it a coherent analysis?
	It may ultimately be an impossible task, but Jerry Z. Muller, a professor of history at the Catholic University in Washington DC, has done a very credible job of it. The key to this book is its surprising relevance to contemporary debates about globalization and consumerism. I suspect that this relevance is not accidental -- Muller may have intentionally placed contemporary relevance above other factors in his choice of which authors to examine and which themes in their works to stress. Thus, for example, Muller's treatment of Lukacs highlights only certain elements of the Hungarian polymath's work that are relevant to the current globalization debate, but does not attempt anything like a systematic discussion of his ideas in general (for that, the footnotes say, see Arpad Kadarkay's classic biography). Well, choices must be made in writing a book, and I think this is a good choice. It creates a certain type of very useful book -- one that is more useful to the layman if not to the already knowledgeable expert. Muller weaves a very interesting tapestry using the "usual suspects" as his warp and weft: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek. These writers establish the structure. But some of the most interesting chapters are devoted to other thinkers, especially Voltaire, Moser, Burke, Hegel, Matthew Arnold, Lukacs, and Marcuse. What results, especially when you read much of the book in one sitting as I did on a recent transcontinental flight, is a fascinating dialogue that extends over several centuries, with a dynamic ebb and flow. For me, it all comes together in Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy -- which I see as the culmination of European thought on the market -- but you might disagree, looking instead to Marcuse's radical vision of the One-Dimensional Man or Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. In any case, you will certainly gain a greater appreciation of the intellectual heritage of both the defenders of market society and those who oppose it. Didn't Keynes write that every new thought is in some way the slave of some academic scribbler of a previous generation. Read Muller both to discover who you owe your ideas to -- and to sharpen them.
	Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: American and Europe in the New World Order. Knopf, 2003. Based upon an article in Policy Review, Summer 2002. Do you want to understand why the U.S. and Europe disagree about so many areas of international relations? It's simple, says Robert Kagan, in this 103-page extension of his controversial Summer 2002 Policy Review article. America is from Mars. Its worldview is Hobbesian. Its currency is power, hard power. Its mission is to make the world a safer place by overcoming opposition through use of power. America's famous tendency towards isolationism is a myth, nothing more. George W. Bush's isolationist campaign platform of 2000 never happened, didn't exist. America cannot help itself, it must be this way, act this way, and everyone else just needs to get over it.
	Especially Europe. Europe is from Venus. Its worldview is Kantian. Its currency is diplomacy in the form of cooperation, compromise, or both (but not appeasement, f course). Its mission is to escape its own Hobbesian past. In a single generation (if you count from the Treaty of Rome in 1956) or maybe just a half-generation (if you count from the fall of the Berlin Wall) Europe has evolved from Hobbes to Kant. Europeans cannot even remember when they thought power was a good thing or a useful thing. European leaders are all post-modern now. Can Europe balance America? Of course not. Kant can't persuade Hobbes -- how could he? Europe just gets in America's way. Let Mars be Mars. Kagan presents a powerful argument -- it really is exciting to read it. It is the sort of argument that we remember from the Reagan years, when the world seemed to be much simpler. It was just an evil empire then, not a complex triangulated evil axis (Kagan worked in the State Department from 1984-1988). Kagan may in fact be correct (hey, I'm just an economist, what do I know about power politics?), but he sure does seem to pick and choose his way through American and world history. I am always suspicious of arguments that require a selective historical memory. That said, it seems to me that the fundamental tension expressed here, Hobbes versus Kant, is very important and entirely relevant. Kagan may be correct to frame the question as America versus Europe, sidestepping the complexity that history and recent events create, but I doubt it. My own view is that Kant and Hobbes coexist on both sides of the Atlantic. And of the Pacific. And have for decades and will continue to do for decades to come. The tensions within the regions is at least as important as the tension among them. If anything, the international tensions only reflect the domestic dilemmas. By making U.S.-European relations as simple as Mars versus Venus, I worry that Kagan may trivialize both transatlantic relations and their philosophical basis.
	Theodore H. Moran, Beyond Sweatships: Foreign Direct Investment and Globalization in Developing Countries. Brookings Press, 2002. MNCs make profits by investing in less developed countries, setting up sweatshop factories to exploit low wages and poor working conditions, right? For the most part this statement is false. Most MNC investment goes into high wage countries, not low wage LDCs. It is a myth that FDI is mainly North-South in direction and drawn by poor wages and working conditions. Even among LDC host nations, some get stuck with low wage production, but some are able to move up the ladder to higher wages and better conditions.
	Sweatshops are a problem, therefore, but they are a different problem that many people think. How do successsful LDCs move beyond sweatshops? Why don't all LDCs do it? What should we do to regulate firms to prevent sweatshop abuses? These are the questions that Moran addresses and he does a very good job in my view. By looking closely at empirical studies of FDI patterns, wage distributions, and so on he is able to explain how LDC governments can attract higher-wage production and escape the sweatshop sink. He also examines several different proposals to regulate firms and prevent sweatshop abuses, including WTO rules, International Labor Organization regulation, and voluntary accountability. Which policy is most effective? You will be surprised at the answer. At the end of this book I had learned a great deal about the problem of low wage labor conditions and MNCs and the reaction to them. Moran moves beyond stereotypes to a more details understanding of the diverse actual conditions and actual responses. This more thorough understanding is necessary, I believe, if we are actually going to take sweatshops seriously as a global problem. And I have a much better idea of the strategies that governments and anti-sweatshop groups can use. Not an easy book, but a very informative one and must reading for anyone who wants to understand these issues.
	Bill Emmott, 20:21: Twentieth-Century Lessons for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Bill Emmott is the editor-in-chief of the Economist. The world faces just two problems in the 21st century, according to Bill Emmott: peace and prosperity and this book is organized around two questions that are relevant to this theme: Will the U.S. continue to lead the world and keep the peace? Will the global capitalism's pluses outweigh its minuses so that it can be an engine of economic growth and prosperity? And answer is ... envelope please .. probably yes. But you already knew that, right? The answer has to be yes (probably, but not certainly), at this point, just because there really isn't a viable Plan B ... yet.
	So why should you read this book if you already know the answers to its questions? Well, Emmott organizes the chapters of this book around the Peace and Prosperity, but in fact each chapter is an extended essay on an important topic tied rather weakly, in my opinion, to the main questions. Don't read it for the big questions, read it for the essays that comprise it. I propose that you think of this book as What do we know about the world today and Why does it matter? Emmott provides interesting essays on the US, China, Japan, the EU and terrorism in the first half of the book that do a good job of summing up what we know about each of these topics and thinking about what might happen in the future. The chapter on China was especially interesting to me for two reasons. First, I was interested that Emmott expanded the usual analysis of the "triad" regions to include China, which I think is both appropriate and analytically useful. And, second, he is able to deflate a number of myths in assessing what we really know about China. Rethinking what we know about China is an important first step in taking China seriously as a world power. The second half of the book looks at what we know about the problems of global capitalism, with special attentions to its instability, to inequality within nations and between nations, and the impact on the environment. Since I have written a lot myself about the instability of international finance, I didn't learn much here, but I did appreciate Emmott's attempt to sum up what we know about inequality. I don't think this is the final word on the subject, but it is helpful. The first step in taking global inequality seriously is to rethink what we really know about it. Emmott ends with a chapter titled "Paranoid Optimism" that sums up his viewpoint, I guess. The argument of this book is rather weak, in my view, although this probably reflects, as Emmott points out, that the world is very uncertain and risk lurks around every corner. A stronger argument might be foolhardy, so I guess my criticism is a bit unfair (although he posed these questions, not me). But the individual essays are very thoughtful, in my view, and worth reading.
	Alex Bellos, Futebol: Soccer, the Brazilian Way. Bloomsbury USA, 2002 and Tim Parks, A Season with Verona: Travels Around Italy in Search of Illusion, National Character, and...Goals! Arcade, 2002. Anyone who thinks that Globalization is really Americanization should stop for a moment and consider football, the most global of all sports. By football, of course, I mean the beautiful game that Americans call soccer. Bellos and Parks, British expatriates based in Brazil and Italy respectively, provide books that are "good reads" and interesting at several different levels. Bellos is interested in the importance of soccer in the Brazilian national identity during the 20th Century -- he believes that soccer teams reflect a nation's character -- while Parks, although he perhaps gets to the same place, follows a particular professional team, Hellas Verona, through a long and trying season.
	I was interested in the ways that the classic global/local interaction played out in both books. Soccer is essentially a collection very local phenomenona (with the exception of a few "global brands" such as Manchester United and Real Madrid) that are connected by a global labor market for players. Brazil is a traditional exporter of football talent, for example, and Italy a notorious importer. The tension this creates is evident throughout, as in the Bellos's first chapter, which looks at the lives of Brazilian players in Iceland, and in the "monkey grunts" made by Verona fans, which nearly causes their team to be lose the right to matches on its home pitch. I was also interested ways that politics and economics are inter- mixed in both books. You can say that soccer is just a game where people kick a ball, I suppose, but it is also a game where money and power are often at stake, where soccer is sometimes just the means to an end. The similarities and differences between Brazil and Italy in this regard are complex and instructive.
	Ultimately, what I liked most about these books was the sense, which both authors worked very hard to provide, that this global game is ultimately rooted in strong and distinct local cultures. When you finally get to the grass roots of the game, the roots are still there, planted in local soil. This conclusion is inescapable as you read about Tim Parks's endless smoky rides on the Zanzibar fan bus or Bellos's account of a huge annual rainforest tournament, where a team's fate on the pitch sometimes depends upon the charms of its designated beauty queen. As much as global markets matter in soccer, and they matter a lot, the real importance of the game remains in its ability to define or reflect local culture. If it is indeed true that, at least in soccer, globalization is not homogenization, then this is cause for celebration.
	Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization. Yale University Press, 2002. This is the first really clear ethical critique of globalization I have read. Singer is a famous philosopher (currently Professor of Bioethics at Princeton). This book is a clear and straightfoward application of ethical norms and moral philosophy principles (especially Rawlsian justice) under the assumption that, as the title says, we live in One World, not a world that is fragmented into seperate nation-states and cultures. If it really is One World, well, it changes a lot of things and Singer is ready to explain what and why.
	For my money, the chapters on the environment and the WTO are the strongest, because it is here where I found the application of principles the clearest and the use of empirical studies and evidence the most direct. Singer presents a fairly harsh critique of the WTO, for example, but his analysis is so clean and sharp that it leads directly to a focused and specific reform agenda. Anyone who really wants to understand the problems with the WTO and free trade should read this chapter and the equivalent section in Douglas Irwin's recent book, Free Trade Under Fire. Singer applies the same sharp analysis to questions of the global environment and the ethics of global poverty. By the end of the book we realize that real globalization requires a very thorough rethinking of human arrangements, not just the economic ones. My one disappointment is that the short final chapter fails to develop any real principles to guide the sort of global governance structure needed to implement his enthical guidelines.
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