1 comments about The Economics of Input-Output Analysis.

1. Last Monday I got the book by Professor Thijs ten Raa (2005) The Economics of Input-Output Analysis. I like it. It's a very nice work, that provides a broad outlook about the Input-Output Analysis, and related issues: multiplier effects, linear programming, changing coefficients, National Accounts, efficiency, production functions, international trade, Environment, productivity and spillovers, dynamic inverse and stochastic IO Analysis. By the way, in this last chapter the work of our colleague of the Spanish Input-Output Group, Jos? Manuel Rueda Cantuche, is quoted. The presentation of the book is excellent. And it is not too expensive.
   
   It is only a suggestion...

No comments about God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy.

1 comments about The Transnational Capitalist Class.

1. This is both a theoretical and empirical masterpiece that formulates the transformation of the dominate form of capitalism (capitalist) from nationally based to transnationally (globally based). Tons of primary source research behind this. The 'Global Capitalism School' really developed out of this work; see William I. Robinson's A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (Themes in Global Social Change) and Jerry Harris' The Dialectics of Globalization: Economic and Political Conflict in a Transnational World. Reading all three of these works together is insightful for understanding how connected social, economic and political change are occurring now worldwide.

No comments about A Corporate Solution to Global Poverty: How Multinationals Can Help the Poor and Invigorate Their Own Legitimacy.

No comments about Equality for Women: Where Do We Stand On Millennium Development Goal 3?.

No comments about The Development Economics Reader.

5 comments about Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History.

1. Really superb! I couldn't put it down!



2. This book is excellent. Through the reading I gained insight from the perspective of the Palestinians who were displaced from their homeland. I have personal friends in Jordan and this book helped me to understand what their families suffered through. Very comprehensive, covering many areas of this subject.



3. I found this book to be an excellent resource for historical, cultural, and economic issues relating to the Palestinians. However, the authors have written with a discernable, pro-Palestinian bias. The bias is definitely anti-Britian, anti-American, and anti-Israeli. The authors' attempt at fairness by criticizing Arafat does not make the book balanced overall. If you can read past the biases, there is some excellent information in this book on the plight of the Palestinian people. The authors could have achieved five stars with me by just presenting the facts about the Palestinians and omitting the frequent condescensions.



4. Palestine and the Palestinians is a unique source of valuable information about the people of Palestine. The authors told a compelling story with a tremendous amount of information. In addition to the usual political and military litany, the book also places special emphasis on the social and economic aspects of the poignant Palestinian existence. It is hard not to develop sympathy for the Palestinian people after reading this exposition of what they have gone through, and how much they have suffered in the 20th century.

   I will also point out that this book presents a decidedly one-sided view. Although the authors pointed out, and documented in considerable detail, the inherent problems within the Palestinian cause: deeply fractured leadership lacking consensus in regard to goals and means, embrace of violence, conflicts with the nationalist Arabic regimes, the incompetent and self-serving acts of their leader Yasser Arafat, etc., they (the authors) nonetheless put the lion's share of the blame on Israel. They insisted on holding Israel to high standards of well-established Western democracies while Palestinian transgressions were given a gentle touch and often with historic and contemporaneous excuses.

   I don't know if it is the Arab people, the Muslim culture, ideology, or just the desert wind, but even as the book's authors are high educated, cool-headed and analytical, they, and most vocal Palestinian supporters, seem to lack a few commonsense elements in their framework of thought and analysis: a) When you are in a position of weakness, you don't hold on to a wish list and demand 100% satisfaction immediately. b) In this time and age, violence, especially terror visited on civilians will arouse anger and contempt rather than sympathy. c) Jews also suffered greatly historically, in fact much more than Palestinians. Israeli leadership will not let stand any development that could jeopardize their security or diminish their ability to defend their country and their people. Consider this:

   In a conversation in between Benjamin Netayahu and Chinese premier Jiang Zemin, they noted that the Chinese, the Indians and the Jews are the three oldest peoples in the world. Netayahu pointed out that there are 1.2 billions Chinese today, 1 billion Indians and only 12 million Jews, and asked the Chinese premier why. The latter had no answer. Netayahu then said, "...but they all boil down to one big thing. You, the Chinese kept China; the Indians kept India. But the Jews lost our land and were dispersed into the four corners of the earth... culminating in our greatest catastrophe in the twentieth century..."

   The similar tragedies of the two peoples (one historic and the other contemporary) suggest that rather than regarding Jews as their mortal enemy, the Palestinians may do well to emulate Jews instead: to educate their young, to build human capital in marketable skills (rather than martyrdom,) to be respectful of other people and cultures, and to work realistically with what you have. Will the Palestinians ever see this kind of leadership vision? The unfortunate fact is that most Middle East Muslims are still not done fighting the Crusaders.

   Back to the book: it is exceedingly informative, but you must also get the other point of view (and their selection of data) to understand the whole picture. I might add that many books on this controversial and emotional subject tend to be unavoidably one-sided or otherwise incomplete. The book is well written with a lucid style, and one of the best in presenting the Palestinian view, and deserves to be read by those who want to go beyond sound-bite politics.




5. A hard to read polemic

3 comments about Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy (Cornell Studies in Political Economy).

1. Pempel convincingly argues in REGIME SHIFT that the major domestic and international changes taking place in Japan during the last decade or more have cumulatively resulted in a fundamental transformation in Japan's political economy. He then traces the consequences for Japan's present and future of this alteration. A major attempt to synthesize what others have seen as disparate, unconnected events and trends at both domestic and international levels into a coherent view of where Japan is and is going. Must reading for anyone interested in Japanese politics and economics, and its place in the world.



2. Although experts on Japan may have some specific academic criticisms, these should not detract from the overall quality of Pempel's book. The book synthesises an extremely wide body of literature (both English and Japanese language) on Japan's modern political economy, especially less well-known or unorthodox ideas overlooked by many Western texts. As such, it deserves to become a standard in bringing students (in the widest sense of the term) up to a graduate, if not higher, level understanding. It would definitely also make enlightening reading to those Western policy makers and commentators on Japan who have yet to grasp the subtleties of Japan's rise and the even more complicated factors behind its current decline.



3. since the 1982, the developmental state, articulated by Chalmers Johson in his infulential book 'MITI', has been the standard approach in the field of North East Asian studies at least in the circle of political economy. but the model of developmental state does not fit into the phenomenon since the 1980s, in SOuth Korea, and the 1973, in Japan. the bureacrats is not that autonoumous like the past, i.e. the rapid growth period, the ruling party proned to be the masters of fork barrel politics, and constituents were not that concensual like the past. there must be some 'shift'. Pempel's work is the attempt to provide a comprehensive framework to explain the shift in systematic and succinct way. his framework is based on the concept of 'regime' which is common in the field of comparative politics. I think he succeeded in that point.
   but the concept of regime has some limitation: for example, it can't expalin why keiretsu or main bank system developed and why it has been disolved since 1980s. sure I know it was not Pempel's intention to include them. but to understand Japan or Korea, we should include big businesses. without them, explanation can't be comprehensive. it's the point of political economy, I think.

2 comments about Poverty Traps.

1. Blame the poor for their own poverty, and we can justify enjoying our own opulent lifestyles without an excess of guilt. Economics teaches us that poverty is a choice, so we can give the poor opportunities, but we cannot force them to take advantage of those opportunities. Thus the moral responsibility for poverty rests with the poor, rather than those who control and consume the majority of resources. This achievement model of income determination places the mechanisms that determine an individual's socioeconomic prospects mostly within his or her control, but it does little to explain the growing disparity in income between and within nations:
   
   "Income inequality in the world as a whole has increased substantially over the past two centuries, with the richest 10 percent receiving over half of world income today, while the poorest 50 percent receive less than 10 percent. In the United States, home of the rags-to-riches tale, the son of a person born to parents in the poorest decile of income earners is twenty-four times more likely to achieve an income in the lowest decile than in the highest decile when he grows up."
   
   Economic competition, liberal democratic institutions, and free trade should result in convergence in economic outcomes, but the persistence of poverty has required new theories to address "both the question of how whole economies may fail to develop, and how subgroups within rich economies may fail to share in overall prosperity." These mechanisms that cause poverty to persist-"poverty traps"-are the subject of the eight articles contained within the present volume of the same name. The editors introduce the volume with a helpful introduction outlining the overall problem and the scope and direction of the articles which they group into three explanatory categories: critical thresholds, dysfunctional institutions, and neighborhood effects.
   
   Part One of the book deals with threshold effects, in which physical and human capital must be developed to a minimal level to enable positive returns on investments and economies of scale. Foreign aid programs that have invested in education and capital development have shown, however, that productive opportunities alone are not sufficient to escape the poverty trap. Economic development also requires mechanisms to create ever-new future opportunities. Parts Two and Three address this issue.
   
   Part Two contains four articles looking at the effect of institutions 1) historically in the Americas, 2) modeled in a predator/producer ecosystem, 3) as products of traditional, kin-based societies, and 4) within a general evolutionary framework in which institutions that perpetuate inequality persist unless upset by large, collective action.
   
   Part Three looks at neighborhood effects with three articles. The first article explains how in the "memberships theory of poverty", "peer effects, role model influences, and other factors that operate at the level of the group" and perpetuate poverty can be counteracted by "associative redistribution" policy measures, including affirmative action and the development of charter and magnet schools. The second article in Part Three looks at the spatial neighborhood effect in a Chicago neighborhood and the relationship between two social process outcomes, "collective efficacy" and "cynicism", and changing levels of poverty from the 1970s onward. The final chapter of the book looks at the "conceptual difficulties in evaluating public policies designed to promote socioeconomic integration of communities" when small public policy experiments moving poorer families to more affluent neighborhoods are used as models for larger-scale relocations.
   
   The editors and authors of this important volume offer empirically argued causal mechanisms for the creation of poverty traps, each of which must be addressed by intelligent policy intervention, some of which are hinted at in this volume. But as the editors readily acknowledge, "So while this volume makes clear that the Horatio Alger view that poverty can always be escaped through hard work and determination really is fiction in many contexts, we have far to go in terms of understanding what is to be done."



2. "Poverty Traps" is a collection of research papers on the subject of, well, poverty traps, edited by Bowles, Durlauf and Hoff. Each of these are known for their use of orthodox methodology against the economic orthodoxy itself in substantial terms, and that is also the approach taken in this book. The book consists of a small number of fairly large essays, more or less thematically organized, which seek to explain how poverty traps come into being and how they are reproduced. In this context, a poverty trap is defined as a less-than-optimal solution which is nonetheless an equilibrium, where there also exists an optimal (or at least better) equilibrium.
   
   By far the best part of the book is Part II, which discusses institutions and how they serve to create and reinforce such poverty traps. Engerman & Sokoloff have a fascinating article on the importance of land policies and the crops produced in different parts of the American continent since colonization as a cause of the strong discrepancies in wealth between the North and the Middle/South. Mehlum, Moene and Torvik use classic orthodox methods to show that in African nations, there can be a poverty trap as a result of organized crime, militias etc. being parasites on productive companies, where they keep each other balanced at a suboptimal level. Hoff & Sen have an excellent essay on the problems with kin systems in Africa and Asia and the way in which they can inhibit modernization. And finally Samuel Bowles himself uses a game theoretical mathematical approach to show how suboptimal social conventions can be very hard to change in circumstances of great inequality, despite the amount of people benefiting from the conventions are very few in proportion to those negatively affected. Also of great interest is the first essay in Part III, by Steven Durlauf, which deals with how group pressure and neighborhood influences can account for the continuing bad situation in very black areas of the United States.
   
   What is frustrating about this book is that the authors are so clearly constrained by the faux 'rigor' of orthodox economics in fully developing their case. Reading between the lines this seems to have been the case for some of the authors themselves as well, but it will certainly strike any reader that about half the book is devoted to mathematically describing and modelling arguments which are perfectly sensible and easily understood in just their regular written form. The added value of making a model with a host of unworldly and absurd assumptions to prove a particular point that could just as easily be proven in terms of "people tend to behave like X under Y circumstances, because of social cause Z" is unclear, and it is one of the many unfortunate products of the academic atmosphere in the field of economics. What passes for 'rigor' is in reality a useless and failed attempt to imitate physics and to impress the noninitiated. It is a pity that this draws smart minds, as the cases of Moene (associated with 'Analytical Marxism') and Bowles (the leader in behavioral economics) show - both are approaches which want to do good social science, uninhibited by liberal dogma, but which are hampered by their own insistence on methodological orthodoxy. This is a good scientific work, but its own methodology hinders it.

2 comments about The Beginning of the Age of Mammals.

1. This is it, the only book you need on the evolution of mammals during the early Cenozoic, and their amazing diversification after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The down side of this book is that it does not continue into the later part of the Cenozoic, but sticks to Dr. Rose's expertise of Paleocene and Eocene mammals. The photographs and illustrations are from various scientific articles and publications, but are nicely brought together, including a number of colored photographs and reconstructions in the center of the book. The biggest drawback, is the high price of the book. Dinosaur books are priced a lot less, and I don't understand why publishers don't do likewise with books about fossil mammals. Hopefully, a cheaper soft cover will become available or you can try and get your local library to purchase the book for you. I would not spend the $120, if I was not really into fossils.



2. A high quality book for paleo-hobbyists. Large number of quality illustrations and a lot of general information.