Posts Tagged ‘Economics’

Summer One-liners

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Since I haven’t taken the time to write even brief reviews of the books I’ve read over the last several months,  here’s a list of them in roughly the order they were read.  As, or if, reviews are added, they will link from this page.

Shut Up, I’m Talking – Gregory Levey.   Very funny memoir by a Canadian writer in New York who ends up working briefly as a speech-writer for the Prime Minister of Israel.

The Age of American Unreason – Susan Jacoby.  Sobering look at anti-rationalism in America over the last four decades and its ill effects on our nation.

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid – Jimmy Carter.  June book club selection.  President Carter’s version of the history of the Israeli-Palestine conflict.  Not widely regarded as completely accurate, disturbing nonetheless.

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East – Sandy Tolan.  Fascinating story about two families and one house in Israel/Palestine.  Recommended by a friend at work in Tel Aviv.

Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds – Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini.  Survey of many of the ways we fool ourselves.  Other than some confusing editing in one section, a very interesting look at cognitive science’s understanding of our mental blind spots.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts – Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.   Mostly about confirmation bias, covering the gamut of ways we fool ourselves through self-justification.

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time – Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin. July book club selection.  Poorly written, but very inspirational example of the power of a single human.

Why Evolution Is True – Jerry A. Coyne.  Lucid overview of evolution and natural selection, with very clear explanations of all the types of evidence for both.  Minimal (compared to Prothero) but strong criticisms of creationism.

Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction – Susan Blackmore.  My re-entry into trying to understand consciousness, again.  Accurately sub-titled, good overview with an intriguing nod to Buddhist meditation as a means of understanding.

Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness – Daniel C. Dennett.  Analysis of the main philosophical distractions keeping us from moving forward toward understanding consciousness.

Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance–and Why They Fall – Amy Chua.  Given, via her thesis, that tolerance supported the rise of all hyperpowers and intolerance contributed to their declines, Chua analyzes how this applies to the USA now.  Nice historical review of the power and place of previous hyperpowers too.

Infidel – Ayaan Hirsi Ali.   Amazing story of her journey, and disturbing insight into civil war in Somalia and the manifestations of Islam in eastern Africa.

Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World – Dennis Ross.   August book club selection.  Good review of recent examples of good and bad statecraft, prescriptive lists for successful negotiating and mediating, and analysis of what USA needs to do next in regards to foreign policy actions.

The Mind of the Market: How Biology and Psychology Shape Our Economic Lives – Michael Shermer.   Great refutation of the standard homo economicus explanation.  Goes far beyond just describing our economic behavior.  Shermer would have been better served by a grander, less marketing-driven title.

Buddhism without Beliefs – Stephen Batchelor.  Recommended by Susan Blackmore.  Sincere meditations on Buddhist meditation without religious trappings/distractions.

Zen without Zen Masters – Camden Benares.  Silly book I’ve had for years.  No content or guidance.    May re-read after another twenty years.

Buddhism Plain and Simple – Steve Hagen.  More detailed than Batchelor (but with less impact on me), also free of religious distractions, focuses on awareness.

Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and Its Uses – Thomas W. Clark.  Nice introduction to many of the aspects of naturalism.  There is no such thing as contra-causal free will.

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The World Is Flat

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

Our book club is discussing Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (TWIF) this month.  I read the 2005 edition of the book, so I’m not sure about the contents of the 2.0 and 3.0 updates.  The first half of the book describes ten “flatteners” that have caused this flattened world and defines the effects of the convergence of the most important flatteners.  By the way, the whole flat earth metaphor is derived from the image of a leveled playing field, not from our old understanding of geography.  The third quarter of the book covers the consequences that affect America, the risks that face America, and suggestions on what America can do to thrive in the flattened world.  As energizing as the first half of the book was, this part was terrifying.  The last part of the book covers the responses and challenges of the rest of the world to a flattened world, reviews general business approaches to a flattened world, warns of the danger of the presence of unflattened parts of the world, and closes with recommendations on how to keep peace in a flattening world.

This book and its author are very popular, and there are lots and lots of web resources about them both.  The TWIF‘s Wikipedia page is a nice place to start if you’d like to learn more about the contents and read Friedman’s critics too.  Friedman’s website includes product plugs and links to many NY Times articles.  To jump right into the world of those not enamored with Friedman, see this review of the first edition.   Meanwhile, Fareed  Zakaria’s review is probably much easier to swallow for Flatheads.

It’s nice to finely get around to TWIF, after the digs taken at it and at Friedman by Amy Chua in her World on Fire.   Considering last fall’s discussion of Chua, the enthusiasm of Friedman’s Fan Club, the critical responses to TWIF and the importance of the core issues, we should have a very interesting discussion this month.  My general response to TWIF is similar to my response to Nye’s Soft Power:  I learned something from it, but the greater value probably lies in knowing more about what everyone is talking about and the potential mental stimulation that comes with that.

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The Art of the Long View

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

I read this to learn more about scenario planning.  Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World is a very interesting introduction to this type of preparing for what may come.  Schwartz teaches with examples from his own work with companies large and small.  If I understand it correctly, the main idea is to create a few different scenarios about how things could work out (on any timescale, for any purpose) and then for each of those scenarios identify key indicators so you’ll know if they’re actually happening and, of course, planned courses of action in response to the scenario.

Schwartz takes a lot of care to explain why scenario planning is useful, why it’s not psychologically accepted by many corporations/humans, what can be done to increase the chances of acceptance of scenario planning and how to make the responses to the scenarios effective.   His writing style is pleasing and it’s pretty easy to imagine that you’re listening to him carefully explain all this to you.  I’ll definitely check out some of his more recent works (this book was published in 1991) to see where he’s gone with his thinking/working lately.

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World on Fire

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability is our book club’s fourth title to discuss.   Part One  defines a Market-Dominant Minority  (MDM) and then gives examples of MDM’s in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Russia and Africa.  Part Two describes the three types of political consequences of MDM’s: backlash against markets, backlash against Democracy and backlash against the MDM’s themselves.  This part of the book was pretty horrifying.  Chua has personal experience with some of the horror and she really makes clear the evil backlashes that can occur when a majority feels like an ethnic minority controls all their land and/or national treasure.  Part Three covers the unpleasant backlashes against MDM’s within the Western Free Market Democracies, describes the special case of the Middle East’s responses to MDM’s and closes with an inspection of how the US is a super-MDM (Chua uses a lot of ink clarifying the jump from the Chinese in the Philippines, for example, to the US in the World) to the rest of the world.  The last chapter covers some ways in which we might be able to mitigate the risks of the three backlashes against MDM’s going forward and some ways she is sure we could make things worse.

The book was very easy to read and I’ll keep her concepts in mind in the future.  You can watch or listen to Chua summarize the book here.  She’s not a great speaker, but the content is interesting and directly tracks to the book.  I wish our book club could have read and discussed this right after Friedman’s The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, but it will be fun enough talking about it right after Sachs’ The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time.  Chua disagrees with Friedman about the benefits of a free market and liberal democracy.

One of her main points is that the US never had a completely free market and completely liberal democracy at the same time in our history; so when we force both of them on others as the magic bullet, it creates a lot of problems, including the problem of the reactions against MDM’s.  Chua is very careful to admit that she is not covering all the factors related to the causes of historical events.  She is just pointing out that we have to be careful when we force too much of a good thing on a country all at once.  Other than the main theme, the best thing about the book was reading the refreshing voice of someone who is a bit contrarian and willing to remind us that things may look like great ideas, but we need to remember how they turned out last time and what people’s motives really are.

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The End of Poverty

Monday, August 11th, 2008

Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty was the third title we read in our book club.  The book was easy to read, contained no religion-based arguments, and appeared to have been written for people with very little knowledge of economics and very little knowledge of world history.  Since I am trying to improve my knowledge of both areas, I appreciated the review.  After a few very well organized introductory chapters (the kind that actually preview the structure and contents of the book), Sachs describes several chapters of his life as a globe-trotting economic superstar.  I was not expecting this auto-biographical aspect of the book, but I think it helped me understand why he is so interested in ending extreme poverty in the next 20 years.  And now we’ve arrived at the crux of the book:  the First World has the ability and motivation to do what needs to be done to end extreme poverty in a few decades.  After the history, the primer on macro-economics, the charts and maps, the personal vignettes and the very clear descriptions of extreme poverty and what is needed to eradicate it, Sachs ends the books with multiple different ways of looking at how painless it would be for us (the First World and the United States in particular) to give up the funds required to completely eliminate extreme poverty from Earth.

I found the math quite stunning.  Sachs says the developed world needs to give 0.7% of our GNP to eliminate extreme poverty.  In the United States, we give 0.18% of our GNP (and that is including a bump up for private donations).  The last several chapters contain the fleshed out math related to where and how this money should be used, how we’ve previously committed to giving it…..but have never actually done it, and how ending extreme poverty would make our lives here in the United States much better and much safer.

A reader trying to save time could start at chapter 11 and read to the end of the book.  You would miss some history and some definitions, but you would cover most of the real argument of the book.   Someone in a real hurry could just listen to this lecture by Sachs which is not a complete review of the book but does cover both his auto-biographical interests/background and his main closing argument.

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