Review of Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans by Simon Head Basic Books, $26.99 1. The entire thesis of Simon Head’s arresting new book is contained in the subtitle. It goes all the way back to Adam Smith’s telling observation that the division of labor in a pin factory, while doing wonders for productivity (output … Continue reading The Programmed Prospect Before Us

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil Council on Foreign Relations/Princeton University Press, 449 p., $29.95 1. Do we need another book on Bretton Woods, the conference in 1944 in New Hampshire that established a new monetary system following World … Continue reading Inventing the World’s Money

By Robert Skidelsky and Felix Martin President Obama is in a bind. He knows that the economic recovery is fragile and dependent on continued fiscal stimulus—hence the bipartisan deal on further tax breaks he brokered in December. But he also knows that the tolerance in Washington for deficits of close to 10 percent of Gross … Continue reading For a National Investment Bank

Fixing Global Finance by Martin Wolf Johns Hopkins University Press, 230 pp., $24.95 1. By common consent, we have been living through the greatest economic downturn since World War II. It originated, as we all know, in a collapse of the banking system, and the first attempts to understand the resulting economic crisis focused on … Continue reading The World Finance Crisis and the American Mission

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 … Continue reading Book Review: Can You Spare a Dime?

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 … Continue reading Gloomy About Globalization

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 … Continue reading Winning a Gamble with Communism

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 … Continue reading Drawing a Dog in Iraq

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 … Continue reading Hot, Cold and Imperial

Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East by Clyde Prestowitz Basic Books, 321 pp., $26.95 China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World by Ted C. Fishman Scribner, 342 pp., $26.00 China's Urban Transition by John Friedmann University of Minnesota Press, 168 … Continue reading The Chinese Shadow II