2 comments about A Guide to Benefit-Cost Analysis.

1. Needed this book for a class. Amazon's prices are better than many other online stores.



2. This is a basic and clear guide to the practices of CBA. It explains the fundamentals of how CBA should be applied and provides concrete examples of the methods. The author has a good grasp of how to explain concepts such as compensating and equivalent variation.
   
   The book is a little dated in that the current controversies about the legal and ethical foundations of CBA are not well addressed. Therfore, while is serves as a strong text at the undergraduate level, instructors will want to augment the treatment with readings from the current literature such as the works of Adler and Posner.

1 comments about Innovation--The Missing Dimension.

1. I work in a business that struggles to be innovative. There's many very smart people who are superb problem solvers. This book explains why a problem solving mindset may actually interfere with listening to customers and stimulating new ideas.
   
   By thinking "who else should I invite into this conversation who might have another perspective," and "how can I get these people together and stimulate a deep conversation," I've begun to see another way to work with my colleagues that may help our organization push the envelope more. The authors offered very specific examples of these kinds of interpretative conversations.
   
   This book has good case studies about garment industry, cell phone industry and biotech. Their economic argument pushing for more public spaces where interpretative conversations can occur was of less interest and I thought weaker than their company examples.

No comments about Delivering on Doha: Farm Trade And the Poor.

2 comments about Agricultural and Food Policy (6th Edition).

1. The 4th edition of this text was a truly outstanding edition. It fit the needs of a wider vairety of courses ranging from the traditional Ag Policy course to courses focusing on the environment and rual development. Unfotunately, this is 5th edtion. If the reader wants a "CLiff-Notes" version then this is the text. It lacks the depth and breadth of a decent college textbook. The authors would have served the academic community much better by giving this watered down fifth edition a totally new title while leaving the 4th edition in print.

   I have taught Agricultural Policy for a number of years. Count me out on adopting this edition.




2. It's a shame that these respected Agricultural Economists would allow such a poor example of a textbook to be published under their names. While there may be some meagre updates, the book is so watered down that it is probably more appropriate to a high school class than college. In addition, at 54 cents a page, its price far exceeds the price of most other quality books dealing with agriculture. A decent faculty member would never, in good conscience, require that students purchase this book.

3 comments about Sweatshop Warriors : Immigrant Women Workers Take On the Global Factory.

1. During my vacation, I've been reading "Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory" by Miriam Ching Yoon Louie. Miriam has a multi-decade organizing history with low income women of color. She is the co-founder of the Women of Color Resource Center in Berkeley, and author of an amazing trainers' manual called WEdGE" Women's Education in the Global Economy."

   "Sweatshop Warriors" is one of my personal top ten books on radical organizing. It looks at transnational sweatshops through the eyes of Korean, Chinese and Mexican women forced to leave their homes of origin to take super exploited labor jobs in the world's sweatshops, ending up in the garment rows of NY, Oakland, LA, El Paso, etc. And there they have stood and fought. Against incredible odds, they've led international campaigns against the sweatshops industries, formed multi-purpose women workers centers, dealt with men in their families who were sometimes less than supportive of their activism, and learned to be world traveling organizers.

   The author mixes political economy, analysis, history, and the herstories of the women organizers she has interviewed. Race/class/gender/nationality -- all come into play in the lives and organizing work of these incredible women.




2. Miriam Ching Yoon Louie has a literary talent in exposing the ill effects of globalization on poor women of color in the American garment industry. Focusing on Chinese, Korean, and Mexican immigrants she documents how their labor is continuously being exploited without regard to their personal well-being. Transnational corporations seek their labor because it is cheap. It is these women who are the backbones of the forces of globalization and their stories need to be told. An added strength of this book is that the author doesn't just focus on the negative structural aspects but she also includes multiple instances of how these workers create social solidarity and fight for social change in their favor, even when up against the odds. Her personal involvement in these social movements is an added benefit. These poor women of color both produce and reproduce globalization on the local and global scale. It leaves one with the belief that there is hope after all for a fair and just world. This book will make you reevaluate the 'promises' of free trade agreements and economic growth. As one group prospers there is surely another group being disadvantaged. Overall, this book is accessible especially in discussions on the feminization of labor and migration that is not cluttered with jargon. Go ahead and take a gamble. I hope that it will alter your social stance on these important issues as it reinforced mine.



3. I teach a course on Women and Work and Miriam Ching Louie's Sweatshop Warriors is the first book I have found that really describes sweatshops from the workers' perspectives, as agents rather than victims. The students really got it. I plan to use the book in this course from now on.

2 comments about Health Economics and Policy with Economic Applications.

1. I had the pleasure of taking this class from the author of this class. Dr. Henderson is not only absolutely excellent teacher, he is an equally good writer. I was not an economics major, and was somewhat fearful about taking "Economics of Medicine" as a class, but this book is thorough, organized, and easy to understand. It is an excellent book for economics majors as well as those majoring in other health care related professions who have an interest in learning more about the current health care system and related policies.



2. 
   The text is quite dated for a 2005 edition. All of the citations are over 5 years old. The material is written at highly advanced economics level and may not be appropriate as a multi-disciplinary text.

5 comments about China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future -- and the Challenge for America.

1. In preparation for a business trip to China, the first book I read was China Shakes the World by James Kynge. Mr. Kynge is a journalist with over twenty years of experience in Asia. The book is an easy read covering a number of current topics: Piracy, Environmental Concerns, Technology, Communism and the China/U.S. Relationship. The book offers a balanced look at China showing both the opportunity and challenges the country faces. No conclusions are drawn about the future, but the book is a good high-level look across the many facets of China.



2. James Kynge, in his book China Shakes the World, states that a key question is whether or not the Western world will be able to "accommodate the manifestations of extreme strengths and profound weaknesses that are emanating from China." This 2006 Financial Times Business Book of the Year is an interesting and informative read. It provides snapshots of some of the effects that China's economic development has had around the world.
   
   Throughout his book Kynge seeks to capture the impact of China's rise by examining its effect on a variety industries in places such as Dortmund, Germany; Prato, Italy; and Rockford, Illinois. He discusses the global evolution of Chinese companies from steel production to high fashion.
   
   In addition to detailing the success stories of industries and rags-to-riches entrepreneurs, Kynge also examines a number of challenges that may impede China's future development. One of these challenges is the cutthroat domestic competition in manufacturing and the piracy associated with it. Kynge also highlights a number of the stark environmental problems facing China as a result of its rapid industrialization. On the whole, China Shakes the World provides a balanced account of many of China's strengths and weaknesses.



3. Writing this in 2008, May, I have to say that I enjoyed the book, it left me with an idea of China's position in the world, but also on how few I know about such a great and big country. It states facts, and very little opinions, and some of the facts are individual stories from which you have to draw your own conclusions.
   
   Anyway, as a big country, I finish the book feeling the need to read and know way more about China, geography, history, different peoples; but if books sizes relate to the country size and history, we may talk thousands of pages!
   
   The book suffer the couple of years since the edition, and one misses more actual stories and references to recent news.



4. Must-read if you want to learn more about China's recent economic growth. Kynge's anecdotal style really brings home the reality of China's economic boom that you only hear in the abstract in the US media.



5. The book is not difficult and it is not complex, but it is dense in the sense it is packed with so much insight and value. I started out putting post-its on the pages I thought I would want to refer to again later, but had to stop when it became clear I was "post-itting" (if that is not a word, it certainly should be) just about every other page.
   
   This book is unsurpassed in analyzing China's impact on the world. Through real world examples, it captures just how different China is in its business conduct just how strange a trading partner China is, and how it resembles no other great power. Kynge beautifully weaves China's contradictions into a tapestry that allows us to understand it, as best as is possible.
   
   Though this book is in many ways a "big-think" book, it is nonetheless absolutely relevant to those doing business in or with China. It provides the best macroeconomic analysis of China I have yet seen and, by doing so, it provides invaluable knowledge of how to adjust/position your business to compete.

5 comments about Planet of Slums.

1. This is an actually frightening book by the provocative Mike Davis. Well written and very well researched, this is essentially a clear summary of the large secondary literature on the emergence of enormous slums throughout the Third World (joined since the fall of the Iron Curtain by large parts of the former Soviet Union and its former satrapies). Davis describes the magnitude and progressive growth of immiserated urban communities throughout the world. Reliable estimates place the inhabitants of these frequently hopeless locales in the 100s of millions and reasonable projections suggest that a large fraction of the world's future population growth will consist of the growth of these incredibly impoverished communities.
   Davis provides a series of devastating accounts of the nature of life in these communities, characterized usually by insecurity of remarkably poor housing, little or absent public services, incredibly poor public health, a lack of economic opportunity, and continuous exploitation. The huge number of desperately poor people are exploited often by people only marginally less poor than themselves, by the local middle classes and elites of their countries, and often by their own governments.
   Many factors contribute to the genesis of this horrible situation. Davis describes the legacy of colonialism, the exploitation of peoples by their own governments and elites, and the actions of international institutions supposedly encouraging development. Davis provides a particularly harsh, though I think substantially correct, critique of the neoliberal approach to development. In Davis' description, neoliberal policies have been accompanied by an exacerbation and expansion of the urban slum problem. Since these slums tend to be self-perpetuating, this is a dangerous legacy.
   Davis doesn't address one possible contributing factor to the relative failure of the neoliberal experiment - the remarkable industrialization of China. The enormous expansion of the Chinese industrial economy had a strong negative effect on the economies of a number of other developing economies such as that of Mexico. This can hardly be considered a success for the neoliberal program as Chinese expansion is a good example of intelligent and fairly ruthless state economic management.
   Davis also doesn't address a major cause of immiseration - population growth. It appears that our present system can produce enough nutrition to maintain fairly high fertility levels and enough control of epidemics to avoid horrible pandemics but providing a reasonable standard of living for all has escaped us.



2. What a tremendous work. I've got two chapters left to go, and thus far it's easily the most informative and scholarly book I've yet to read in 2008.
   
   Planet of Slums is all about how the Third World's major cities are growing at what seems like an almost exponential rate. They're turning into what Davis terms megacities and even hypercities: 20,000,000+ in population! In the next few years the world will have about ten hypercities with over 20,000,000 people. In the book he poses questions about the ecological sustainability of these slums, the sewerage and waste problems, employment and wage outlook, transportation issues, and obvious social ills caused by the maldistribution of wealth and resources. Davis mentions that these megacities and hypercities do not just consist of one or two "ghettos" but often are made up of six to a dozen or so different "slum districts."
   
   What's so key about the book is that this astonishing rush to urbanization is a relatively new phenomenon that's taken off at an extraordinary pace over just the past 20 years. Of course he touches on the structural adjustment programs that have been instituted by the global financial rackets and the export/import crop imbalance. He also addresses the fact that this major swing towards urbanization is in contradiction to standard economic theory which essentially states that folks will flee the countryside if wages are strong in the urban core. Clearly this is not what has been happening over the past few decades as Davis demonstrates in his book: wages and employment prospects in the major cities are grim at best with the vast majority of people relying on the informal sector to get by.
   
   The chapter on 'slum ecology' should be required reading for every citizen of the world. Davis, a MacArthur Fellow, does a stupendous job laying out what in the hell's going on in the world today. All the dreadful statistics and anecdotes he brings to the table come with a pessimistic and almost misanthropic tone.
   
   Another paradigm shifter from Verso Publishing.



3. OK Mike. Slums are bad, there are too many of them & the growth is incredible. I wanted a bit more about life in these places & a little more focus. My attention is demanded in Lima, Kenya, Rio & back again, all in a single page.
   Tremendous & frightening data. May as well have sent a spreadsheet.



4. The book gave a one-sided view which blamed the IMF's structural adjustment programs for the exponential growth of slums around some of the richest cities in the world, while completely ignoring the responsibility of local leadership and corruption in national governments.



5. Mike Davis' "Planet of Slums" is an important, eye-opening look at one of the most important global trends of the past fifty years: the explosive growth of third-world slums and the emmiseration of their inhabitants. Davis provides a lucid general overview, thoroughly grounded in recent scholarship across many disciplines. This is a real achievement.
   
   Davis wears his doctrinaire socialism on his sleeve, for better and for worse. There is no problem that cannot be traced to the IMF, the World Bank, and other evil purveyors of "the Washington consensus." That said, his analysis calls these actors to account for genuine crimes against the world's poor. And he does lambaste corrupt governments and bourgeoise indifferent to their fellow citizens' fate.
   
   The major weakness of "Planet of Slums" is a lack of attention to the demographic causes of slum growth and global poverty. Davis occasionally notes in passing the staggering population growth in most of the countries where slum growth has been greatest. He devotes the better part of a chapter to "informal" employment and underemployment in the slums. But he fails to consider whether population growth, itself, needs to be halted, in order to begin to address the problems he brings to our attention.
   
   Could even the best-intentioned governments, NGO's or enlightened entrepreneurs find useful employment for all the unemployed and underemployed in India? Might not India simply have too many people?

5 comments about The End of Food.

1. Since Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, we've seen a number of attempts to resurrect the dire, zero-sum predictions of Thomas Malthus. And yet the world enjoys more food and less hunger each year as human beings learn to trade and cooperate over greater distances. That old bugbear, "overpopulation" rears its head again in an effort that reveals an author that is, himself, malnourished when it comes to economics.
   
   Readers will find familiar scapegoats in big box stores that in reality increase the availability of food to everyone -- especially the poor. Agricultural subsidies and trade barriers are the real culprits when it comes to price spikes and food shortages. But the "End of Food" is yet another attempt to roll back the gains made by globalization -- gains that have filled more bellies than any nostalgia for local growers and rehashed Malthusianism.
   
   Sadly, books like this are an intellectual drought in the garden of plenty. Reflective and open-minded types will turn their eyes to the works of Julian Simon, the ingenuity of Norman Borlaug, and greater understanding of the ecosystem of prices and incentives that enable food markets adapt and change to meet the demands of a healthier, better-fed global population.
   
   Sorry, Mr. Malthus. No more cause for pessimism, today, than in the 18th Century.



2. THe funny thing about the modern era is how it has consistantly been shaped by the idea of the coming doomsday. The method (nuclear war, overpopulation, climate change) shifts with the wind, but the constant is a belief in the inevitable fall of our "evil" civilization unless we sign up for one political agenda or another.
   
   Paul Roberts is making a career in trading on fear. He was crowned as a genius for writing a book about an energy crisis (the end of oil) shortly before the crisis arrived. As a followup, he is selling on fears about food.
   
   This book is poorly researched, badly organized and doesn't quite understand what point it wants to make. It can't decide if it wants to be whiny book about how walmart for social changes in America because it sells cheap food or if it wants to trade in hysteria about rising food prices and diminishing food resources. He can't decide if he wants to complain about the efficiency of a meat diet or global warming or family social dining habits.
   
   And in the end, the book doesn't lead anywhere. It ends with Roberts putting out a political agenda about food. Ironically (in a sad sense),
   Roberts perscription for fixing his food "crisis" in the end are all the things that the world has been doing for the last 50 years. Bluntly, we need to apply brute force science to food production with a goal of increasing production regardless of consequences or costs.
   
   He pushes genetic modification as one answer. He pushes the elimination of meat production in favor of factory farmed fish as another. And he wants international planning to drive food production.
   
   In summary, he doesn't make his case or lay the groundwork for the changes he is suggesting. He can't construct an argument to save his life and depends on a shotgunning facts out as a substitute.



3. I had read Roberts' earlier "the end of oil" and had forgotten how difficult it was to read through. This book is slightly less interesting despite the more interesting topic, which in theory should be more malthusian than the end of oil, but Roberts treats every issue with a very vacillating, politician-like ambiguity. It's surprising for example that he doesn't make more out of the peaking of fossil fuels in relation to fertilizer for food production. Every time he comes near to making a point he hedges and describes the optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints without really taking a stand.
   Typical of his writing style as well is his tendency to travel all over the globe interviewing random peasants, farmers, executives, etc., as if a travelogue somehow makes the subject more accessible. Presumably this is because he is a journalist, not an expert per se in the issue of agriculture or food. But after so many round the world trips interviewing a farmer in china for ex. and his woes the reader begins to get tired of his peripatetic descriptions.
   In summary I found it hard to really get a grip on any of the issues he presents except in a very vague way and I found it equally hard to get all the way through to the end without giving up. And this is not because I don't find the issue serious-- if anything, I think he is far too optimistic: the lack of freshwater supplies, peaking of fossil fuels, lack of arable land, increasing loss of topsoil, increasing population pressures, will probably result in some kind of malthusian crisis.



4. Robert's "End of Food" includes a lot of good information, but there are probably 200 places where a good editor would've challenged the author to reword or tighten up the manuscript. I wonder whether his editor even read the book carefully, or whether he/she knew enough about the subject to properly edit it. A few examples of the issues I'm talking about:
   
   At the beginning of the book Roberts lays out a ridiculously simplified, linear reductionist theory of the role meat consumption played in man's history (except that he rolls it out as fact rather than no small amount of speculation).
   There are a number of factual inaccuracies that should've been caught or at least reworded. Example: He states that meat is easier to digest than plant foods, which in many cases is simply wrong. Cooked rice, for example, is half-digested before it's even in the stomach.
   
   Three times Roberts refers to soil as dirt. In 45 years I've never heard a farmer (or any agricultural specialist) refer to soil (in a field)as "dirt". This carelessness on Robert's part is enough to make thoughtful readers question whether he's been shoddy in other areas too. There are at least a dozen places where he refers to animal manure as poop, which is just plain silly, and makes Roberts sound like a goofball. Imagine if physicians referred to a laceration as a "Bo-Bo" in a medical report, not once, but 12 times? Could you take him seriously?
   
   Roberts is very very loose with his date references. Sometimes he's wrong. On p. 118 he states "By the late 1960s the U.S. was in deep economic trouble......having lost it manufacturing lead to low-cost rivals like Japan...." But in fact in the late 60s very little U.S. manufacturing had shifted to Japan. Roberts is only about 15 years off there.
   Then, on page 152 he writes, "...by the late 1980s....African output faltered;...The timing couldn't have been worse. Just as Africans were producing fewer bushels [in the late 80s], a new glut of grain , unleashed by Butz's "fence row to fence row" policy, sent prices plummeting". The problem with this is that Butz's fence row policy was implemented in 1971, almost 20 years before the African output faltered, which is many years too much lapsed time to have had a meaningful direct effect.
   
   Finally, what possible reason is there for a 26 page prologue in a general interest book such as this? 26 pages! Where was Robert's editor? If a writer's proposing a 26 page prologue, there's at least a chapter missing in the body of the book.
   
   All in all I enjoyed the book, although it's not nearly as well-written as Pollan's food books.



5. I agree this is among the very best of this century's "Declinist Literature". It's an urgent Cassandra alarm about the looming danger of worldwide famine.
   Those who poo poo Roberts as "Malthusian" should read more carefully the section with Malthus, who was writing his doomsday predictions at a time when the whole New World still lay there rich in topsoil, ripe for takeover by millions of starving European farmers. Sure, Malthus was proven wrong - at that time - but he would've been correct if the New World hadn't been quickly deforested/deprairied and farmed to feed teeming Europe. There is no frontier left, (the Amazon is the last big frontier left on Earth to be cleared and farmed, and we all know about that grim scenario),everywhere soils are massively depleted and threatened by flood, pests and drought from climate change, while our addiction to natural gas derived fertilizer is a recipe for major famines when the pipelines are cut off by war or peak oil. There is little water left in China, India and many other regions, which - as Roberts shows - import water indirectly in the form of grain from those that still have water. But anway, how is it "Malthusian" to point out rationally that fecund soil has peaked all over the Earth?
   Recommended to go with it is Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture
   Perhaps Roberts was hastily edited or not edited(for example, "eighteen hundred years ago" instead of "eighteen thousand years" in the section on Cro Magnon diet. Yet readers should realize that many major publishers no longer use copy editors and sometimes agents without training in editing are now asked to do the job without pay, so get used to errors and typos).

1 comments about International Economics.

1. Pugel is a very smart man, but like most "genius" professors, he lacks the ability to actually translate his genius to text.
   
   
   there are not enough graphs/figures to explain points in the book and there are just too many complicated things that are hard to comprehend without visual explanations....