Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012, Why Nations Fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty (political economy)

Acemoglu and Robinson are an effective team of economic historians based at MIT with a good appreciation of political, economic and social interactions. Their previous book, 2006, The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, (title from Barrington Moore’s classic, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy) was a re-examination of the interactions of institutions of oppression and the emergence of democracy, and argued that it was all in the incentive structure.  1688 and the Glorious Revolution figured heavily in their analysis, as it did for Barrington Moore. In this book, they have relabeled their central premise, lost the footnotes, shifted the dependent variable to prosperity rather than form of government, but the argument is essentially the same.  Extractive economic and political institutions are mutually reinforcing, and so are the (much rarer) inclusive institutions that include democracy and market economies. In addition to being less systematically sourced (the bibliographic essay is useful, but harder to follow), the book bounces around a lot, giving it the feel of a HAT-WAP-LUFN (have a thought, write a paper, look up a few footnotes - something most grad students have done).  Inclusive and extractive institutions are not well defined or operationalized - too much precision might get in the way of a good argument, well presented. They are convincing in their demolition of geography, culture, and ignorance as explanatory variables.  They leave modernization and aid to the end, but dismiss this argument effectively too, though without mention of Dambiso Moyo, who uses similar arguments. 

Why do inclusive institutions work?  The implicit argument, reinforced by many historic examples, seems to be that people work or invest if they can keep the product of their risk and labour. So the fundamental mechanism is human motivation. But expropriation of value isn’t always purely extractive; clearly there is good and bad taxation, and Acemoglu and Robinson aren’t good at distinguishing between the inclusiveness that creates incentives while engaging in public investment and redistribution and the greed that kills opportunity. They draw no distinction between the Russian Revolution and Mobuto’s kleptocracy, although the former clearly reinvested more than the latter.  The inclusiveness and creative destruction of the industrial revolution in England and America also generated the extractive institutions of exploitative colonialism in the periphery (see Wallerstein). And how is that form of extractive institution different from the wealth that dominates American politics today? (See Michael Ignatieff’s review in NYRB, July, 2014)  I was hoping for a final chapter on the rise of extractive capitalism and government captive to wealth in the US, but no such luck from MIT. 

To explain why some states evolve extractive institutions and others don’t, Acemoglu and Robinson resort to the contingent path of history and the influence of small differences, which sounds a bit like AJP Taylor’s description of history as “one damned thing after another”.  It’s certainly not as satisfying as their clear declaration of interest-based institutional development in their previous book, economic origins. They admit that it’s not much help with prediction. 

One final disappointment, that has begun to strike me repeatedly in economists’ work.  They do not question the assumption that all growth is good, and creative destruction (mentioned often) is always a good thing. Is it? If the rapacious growth of the 19th Century set up the extractive regimes of colonialism, who’s to say that the growth in power of the 20th Century corporations forged in creative destruction aren’t already the new extractive masters of a decaying western world verging on environmental disaster?  

See also the recent blog post by Acemoglu and Robinson, “Democracy, What is it good for?”

David Last, June 3, 2014

Tossell, 2012, The Gift of Ford (Canadian politics)

Ivor Tossell is a culture columnist for the Globe and Mail, which in this post-print media age stills lays tenuous claim to being Canada’s national newspaper.  Like most cultured Torontonians, and in opposition to the presumed louts of the Ford Nation, prepared to sacrifice civility for lower property taxes, Tossell is acutely embarrassed by global notoriety of the drunken crack-smoking, inarticulate Ford, son of a wealthy business family (who knew that printing sticky labels was so profitable?). This little book is a lament for a great little city - small in global scale, but one which used to have a lot going for it. Under Ford, its vision and its self-esteem have suffered, and the soul of the city is torn between the older core and the newer SUV-laden and box-store encrusted suburbs. But Tossell points out that the silver lining to this cloud is a focus on what matters to the city, on what unites the suburbs and the urban neighbourhoods.  The gift of ford is to spark a serious debate and a new urgency to the conversations surrounding urban governance. We’ll see if he’s right, come the municipal elections in October!

David Last, April 28, 2014 

Jensen, 2002, The Culture of Make Believe (political theory, sort of...)

read this about the time that I got cross reading Zizek on Violence (last year), and came back to it because it is such a contrast to the pile of books I’m currently working through. It still doesn’t compare well.  Laughton’s Tainted Source, Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History, Acemoglu and Robinson, Clark, and others I’m just dipping into are all coherent and weighty narratives making serious arguments about serious subjects. Even when they induce high blood pressure, they do so through evidence, not rhetoric, though none of them is rhetorically sloppy.  Jensen is rhetorically punchy, sometimes deviously so, but fundamentally lightweight. With chapter titles like utility, invisibility, contempt, property, power, and philanthropy, Jensen takes on easy targets. It’s easy to be outraged at apartheid’s labour laws, or lynching in the American south, slavery, racism, or economic oppression. The rhetoric is rich, and choir of liberal sophomores or bored suburbanites seeking the outrage of the righteous is easily made uncomfortable - presumably we buy the book to become so.  But look carefully at the footnotes and the sequence of argument.  This has the hallmarks of a HAT-WAP-LAFFN: have a thought, write a paper, look up a few footnotes.  Google makes it too easy.  Despite the footnotes, it is not much more substantial than an op-ed, and it becomes tiresome quickly.

David Last, April 21, 2014 

Cowen, 2010, The Great Stagnation (political economy)

Tyler Cowen is an economic historian, because anyone who didn’t drink the Samuelson Kool-aid of incomprehensibly elegant mathematical economics can’t be an ‘economist’.  After the 2008 economic shock, he started telling people that America wasn’t as brilliantly innovative as it’s dominant ideology suggested, and it was time to get serious about working hard, rather than grabbing for the productivity. His sub-title says most of what he has to contribute in this little book: how America ate all the low-hanging fruit of modern history, got sick, and will (eventually) feel better.  The low-hanging fruit were free (aka stolen) land to fill up, education of a relatively uneducated population, and growth through health, education, and welfare in the public sector.  He doesn’t write about the defence-industrial complex or the role incarceration, policing, and the homeland-security boondoggle, particularly over the last decade. 

It’s a generally convincing (albeit incomplete) argument, that he took on the road with Ted-X talk in 2011. In his chapter on the government of low hanging fruit, he blames government for handing out goodies based on low hanging fruit - basically becoming a government of extraction, including the business of subprime mortgages and give-aways to banking and finance.  He says the financial crisis was a big correction, fundamentally because we are not as rich as we think we are. We have to start saving and investing. He sees eventual salvation in more consumer imports from China and India, internet generation of revenue, and better quality and accountability of education k-12 (compare the 1895 Grade 8 exam to today’s knowledge levels?)  His final exhortation is to raise the status of scientists, but it’s unclear whether this extends to non-Samuelson economists! 

David Last, April 16, 2014 

Clark, 2007, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (political economy)

Gregory Clark is Chair of Economics at UC Davis, and an economic historian rather like Acemoglu and Robinson, but his explanation of why nations fail is at odds with theirs. In a 1999 article co-authored with Susan Wolcott, he compared textile production in Japan and India 1890-1938. Japan grew, but India stagnated. Their explanation prefigures the theme of Farewell to Alms.  Wolcott and Clark argue that it was not management decisions (good in both cases) but the relatively better culture of industry in Japan that made the difference.  The comparative method is similar to the approach by Acemoglu and Robinson, but the conclusion from a long slice of economic history is different. Acemoglu and Robinson (Why Nations Fail) settle on institutions, while Clark opts for culture. Industrial revolution England figures heavily as a reference point in both works, and since it has also been used by Allen (2012) The Institutional Revolution, and by Barrington Moore (1966) The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, along with a lot of other big-picture arguments, we are well placed to triangulate the use of available evidence.  If there’s one thing we can probably agree on, it is that monocausal explanations are inadequate. With that as a starting point, what do the different approaches tell us?

There is a good potted history of world economics in Figure 1.1, marking the sharp increase in income per person that arose with the industrial revolution. The book is then divided in two parts: the Malthusian trap describes the primitive economies before 1800, and part II, the industrial revolution, describes the world after 1800.  Some of this is good history  - fertility, life expectancy, and technological advance are well covered. On the nature of institutions, however, Clark should be read in parallel with Allen, on the institutional revolution, and Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) on the economic origins of dictatorship democracy. Institutions did change both prior to, and with the evolution of the industrial revolution. The idea that cultural evolution was important is not incompatible with the idea that institutions evolved fundamentally with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (Acemoglu and Robinson’s argument) or that measurement and bureacratization played a key role (Allen). But the idea that the British and Japanese were simply more modern and more industrious than Indians or Chinese, absent any influence of institutional incentive structures, doesn’t pass muster. 

This is an excellent summary of the economic history of the world, for the many detailed tables and graphs that describe the time series of economic history: production efficiency by decade, income per person over time, output and capital per worker. It is a rich presentation of data, with technical appendices and equations, but in the end, the Samuelson approach doesn’t provide a convincing answer, because all the data and utility curves can’t explain why the changes occurred. Acemoglu and Robinson, Douglas Allen, and Heilbroner have come much closer to doing so. So if you’re teaching economic history or political economy, borrow Clark’s tables and charts, but rely on Acemoglu and Robinson’s explanation.

David Last, April 7, 2014

Buzan and Hansen, 2009, The Evolution of International Security Studies (security studies)

Barry Buzan is probably the most influential scholar in international security studies (ISS) since the 1980s, with literally scores of seminal books and articles, consistently fresh and readable.  How does he do it?  He explains in the preface of one of his books that the ‘hive mind’ of multi-author efforts is different from the work that he produces by himself, and he has had some productive partnerships with eminent scholars like Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde.  In this text, he partners with Peace researcher and feminist Lene Hansen, and the result is a valuable and balanced history of International Security Studies as a field of enquiry, that should be a first port of call for anyone teaching or studying the subject. Better than an introduction to international relations in general, it puts the realist-liberal-constructivist debate into perspective, with some brilliant flow charts that divide up the streams of thought that have shaped teaching. My personal favourite is the all-in-one crib sheet on the evolution of international security studies, Figure 7.3. (Table 2.2, mapping five ideas of eleven different schools of thought would be my second favourite.) Throw in a few dates and authors on the boxes, and you have a solid answer for a PhD comprehensive exam.  This is real value added for any security scholar. The clarity and precision in the demarkation between schools and thinking is impressive, even when I sometimes wonder about the categories, which may have more academic than practical utility. 

Figure 7.3 is a something of a summation of the book, but it doesn’t convey the depth and breadth of the discussion, and the utility of the distinctions for anyone teaching international security.  Some of these distinctions also have policy and operational relevance, such as the four questions that structure ISS: Is it all about the state?  Should we include internal as well as external threats? Should we extend the concept of security beyond the use of force and the military realm? Finally, is security ultimately only about threat, urgency, and danger?  The broad pattern of the evolution of ISS over time, well documented in the book, has been to expand the meaning of security to include more referent objects (human, national, international) and more domains (economic, environmental, etc). The discussion here goes beyond Buzan’s 1998 book with Waever and de Wilde, the admirably succinct Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Here, Buzan and Hansen describe how other scholars have approached and manipulated the core ideas that have become part of security debates.

What makes this a book for teachers rather than a textbook for undergraduates is the careful dissection of why international security studies has evolved the way it has.  In this respect, it is like Abbott’s Chaos of Disciplines, but focused on my field, so I have a real incentive to understand the nuances of the evolution.

David Last, March 24, 2014 

Boot, 2013, Invisible Armies: an epic history of guerrilla warfare from ancient times to the present (Security studies)

Max Boot is a free-lance military historian and advocate of American power.  If that wasn’t enough to make me cautious, the unabashed ego of the “epic history” in the title is cause for pause. The book is reasonably well done for its genre (populist military history playing to a nationalist American audience) and has some strength in its sweeping summaries of secondary sources. The data appendix, however, makes it clear that there has been some sloppy operationalization of categories (terrorism, insurgency, guerrilla war, counter-insurgency, etc). Ultimately, it is betrayed in the prologue and the conclusion - insurgents are terrorists when they are against us, and freedom-fighters when they are on our side or paid and armed by us. It’s not an attractive analysis. Compare Brogan, 1990, The Fighting Never Stopped for a countervailing anti-CIA view of the 20th century part of this military history. 

The book proceeds in 64 chapters and eight ‘book’ with a preponderance of the material addressing the 19th and 20th centuries - closer to 1000 than 5000 years, but who’s quibbling. The insights about insurgency as a weapon of the weak are confounded by the failure to recognize it as a tool of the strong neighbour, although this is also clear in the details. 

David Last, March 17, 2014