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Book Review: Can You Spare a Dime?
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Friday, December 26, 2008
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Penguin, 442 pp., $29.95
The historian Alan Taylor used to say, mischievously, that the only point of history is history. The idea that one could use it to predict the future, still more to avoid past mistakes, was pure illusion. Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, a history of financial innovation written as a television documentary[1] as well as a book, offers a neat test of Taylor's theory. Ferguson can claim some powers of anticipation. History convinced him in 2006 that the good times could not last "indefinitely." This was an insight to which the Nobel ...
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Gloomy About Globalization
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, April 17, 2008
Making Globalization Work
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Norton, 358 pp., $26.95; $15.95 (paper)
1.
Making Globalization Work is the third of Joseph Stiglitz's popular, and populist, books.[1] Like Jeffrey Sachs, Stiglitz is an economist turned preacher, one of a new breed of secular evangelists produced by the fall of communism. Stiglitz wants to stop rich countries from exploiting poor countries without damaging the springs of wealth-creation. In that sense he is a classic social democrat. His missionary fervor, though, is very American. "Saving the Planet," one of this new book's chapter headings, could have been its title.
Stiglitz is in ...
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Winning a Gamble with Communism
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, May 31, 2007
By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey
by János Kornai
MIT Press, 461 pp., $40.00
The Hungarian János Kornai is the most famous, and certainly the most influential, economist to have emerged from postwar Communist Europe.[1] His reputation is based on three books, Overcentralization, Economics of Shortage, and The Socialist System, which knocked away the intellectual foundations of the publicly owned, bureaucratically planned economy. In one sense, he was in the line of critics of central planning such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, who had argued in the 1930s that it could not be efficient. But ...
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Drawing a Dog in Iraq
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, October 05, 2006
The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
by Rory Stewart
Harcourt, 396 pp., $25.00
1.
The British governed Iraq under a League of Nations mandate, and with some success, between 1920 and 1932. They returned to southern Iraq in 2003 as a junior member of the US-led coalition which invaded and conquered the country. With the second British coming arrived Rory Stewart, a young soldier and diplomat. The book under review is his story of the part he played in governing, successively, two southern provinces in Iraq, Maysan and Dhi Qar, between September 2003 and June 2004. He tells how the attempt to bring ...
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Hot, Cold and Imperial
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, July 13, 2006
1945: The War That Never Ended
by Gregor Dallas
Yale University Press, 739 pp., $40.00
Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors
by Charles S. Maier
Harvard University Press, 373 pp., $27.95
The question of how the world should be run, and America's part in its running, is the subject of much academic and political discussion in Washington these days. The factual questions are: Is the United States on the road to becoming an empire like the Roman and British Empires before it? What are the prospects for such an enterprise in today's world? More speculatively, does globalization require an imperial underpinning? There ...
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