5 comments about Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures--and Yours.

1. I was assigned to read this book for a MBA class on international competitive strategy. I found this book to be much more interesting to read than a "traditional" textbook, while retaining its academic roots. By the time I finished the book, my understanding of India and China's culture as well as each country's influence on the global economy was much richer than before.
   
   One example:
   A chapter in the book is dedicated to discussing India's and China's use of soft power and hard power. Soft power is defined as "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments." The book is very successful in illustrating how India has mastered soft power by spreading its culture internationally through various channels (for example, Bollywood movies). Conversely, China has become very successful at using its economic and military resources to create desired results. Burma/Myanmar is used as an example due to the fact that this country has felt both India's soft power and China's hard power.
   
   While this book is not inclusive of all apsects of China's and India's international influence, it's a great start. I'd recommend this book to anyone curious about India and China. It's a wide-ranging overview of each country's government and culture, which will be a great asset to anyone given the growing international influence of each country. If you're attending the Beijing Olympics, it'd be a perfect read on the flight to and from China.



2. Before starting the book, I was suspicious of an Indian man (albeit a scholar) writing about India and China. Many authors tend to be overly negative or unrealistically positive about their native countries, especially when comparing to other countries... It was impressive how Khanna acknowledged certain bias tendencies and while reading the book I came to respect his unwavering commitment to objectivity. I thought he always gave both countries a fair and critical look, admiring and questioning when appropriate regardless if it was India or China.
   
   As an entrepreneur myself, it was fascinating to get a glimpse into the human stories and anecdotal evidence of the statistics that are abound in major news stories. Those exact personal encounters are what made this a page-turner for me...I felt like I got a chance to meet people I wouldn't have met otherwise.
   
   Finally, I loved the overall optimism that Khanna has for China, India and the world. In today's atmosphere of doom and gloom it's remarkable to see an academic looking forward with excitement. I appreciated the thorough observations, intelligent and substantiated analysis in the book; I am waiting for a sequel about Russia and Brazil!



3. "Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures -- And Yours" by Tarun Khana is an in-depth look at the cultural, social, historical and economic forces that make India and China both alike and different.
   
   Khana examines these forces using anecdotes, case histories, statistics and personal observations and makes the point that General Electric succeeded in both India and China by avoiding the temptation to treat these two as mirror images of each other.
   
   Khana will make some readers uncomfortable by challenging assumptions often mistaken for truths. Khana argues that good government and private enterprise, if combined to work together, can overcome the shortfalls of both countries.
   
   The author's objective in the book is to bring an end to the ignorance of the great majority of the Western world toward India and China. I am impressed by the author's research and analysis and insight into the multinational corporations and subsidiaries succeeding in both nations. And Khana's descriptive and illuminating case studies are but one more reason to invest time and attention in reading this book.
   
   By Gunjan Bagla
   Author of Doing Business in 21st Century India



4. Good account of history and context. Well researched. Great book for those trying to learn more about India and China. Impressive...
   
   But, one thing dismayed me - it was the number of typos, calculation mistakes and grammatical errors! Poor job of editing.



5. I know nothing about India, but I have lived in China for 5 years and read scores of books on China. I was hoping for a great book comparing/contrasting the two cultures. I am still looking for that book. Based on the book's insights into China, I question whether the author's scholarship on India is useful. His China perspective was lackluster and his knowledge was obviously shallow, as evidenced by the purposeless and cavalier use of pinyin. There are numerous books I would recommend over this one for perspective on China.
   
   In addition to being boring and lacking perspective, this book should have been edited down by at least 50 pages. There were far too many comments that were unrelated to his discussion. There were Chinese phrases spelled wrong, poor grammar, and sentences without capital letters. Is this Harvard scholarship?

5 comments about The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.

1. Greenhouse's focus is to ask "Why, in the world's most affluent nation, are so many corporations intent on squeezing their workers dry?" Corporate profits, economic growth, and worker productivity have grown strongly, while pay has languished. Median income for non-elderly households in 2006 was $2,375 lower in real terms than six years prior. Income inequality now more closely resembles a 3rd-world country than an advanced nation - if it was the same as in 1979, the bottom 80% would receive $8,000 more in yearly income.
   
   Almost one-fourth of the workforce earns less than $10/hour, and generally also lack benefits. Health costs now account for 16% of GDP, up from 5% in 1960. Meanwhile, the proportion covered by pensions (especially defined-benefit - eg. IBM) is declining, and large corporations (eg. United, Delta, and U.S. airlines, LTV and Bethlehem Steel) are defaulting on existing obligations.
   
   Corporations flaunt overtime laws (eg. Wal-Mart, Target), and even fail to pay workers for all their time worked (H-P, Wal-Mart). Circuit City has twice replaced its longer-term workers earning higher salaries with new recruits at lower pay scales, while Microsoft, H-P, and others make the term "temporary" workers an oxymoron in a bid to deny benefits to large numbers of long-term employees.
   
   Three decades ago employer-provided health insurance protected 70% of private-sector workers - now it is down to 55%, and their coverage is no longer as extensive. "Independent contractor" status is extensively exploited (saves Social Security, etc. payments) by eg. FedEx, and their use of the tactic is expanding (to FedEx LTL) despite adverse court rulings.
   
   What fuels these actions? Greenhouse answers - takeover threats, deregulation (airlines, trucking), pressure from jobs lost through automation (also used to create an environment of close supervision), outsourcing, streamlining (eg. delayering, eliminating overheads), increasing costs of employer-funded health care (especially vs. non-coverage by Asian firms), and the "Wal-Mart" effect (low employee pay and benefits; forcing suppliers in the same direction).
   
   There are few heroes in "The Big Squeeze." The most obvious is Costco - higher pay, benefits, sales, and profits/employee than Wal-Mart and Sam's Club, while much lower employee turnover and shrinkage. Greenhouse also suggests Las Vegas casinos (courtesy of strong employee unions) and Timberland shoes - however, both are exempt from strong commodity-like or foreign competition and thus not as impressive as Costco's achievements.
   
   Don't economists agree that globalization to the max is good for us? Not all - Paul Samuelson, Nobel Prize winner in economics, says: "If you don't believe (offshoring) changes the average wages in America, then you believe in the truth fairy."
   
   Unions used to be a strong offsetting force vs. management. However, just 7.5% of private sectors are now in unions - the lowest rate since 1901. Yet, 53% of non-management, non-union workers say they would like to join. What holds them back? Greenhouse suggests that one reason is the 2,000+ "union-avoidance" consultants 9Only 100 in the 1960s).
   
   Greenhouse also suggests a need to improve organizing tactics, and offers the SEIU's approach to organizing janitors in Houston as a good example. They began by getting elected officials who were pension-fund overseers with large real-estate holdings to urge Houston building owners to press cleaning contractors to cooperate. The SEIU also promised not to begin bargaining until at least 55% of the employees' contractors were organized (no "unfair" disadvantages). Finally, they leveraged their strength by picketing opposing janitorial firms with work in other cities.
   
   Greenhouse's Recommendations: Increased Social Security taxes (to ensure its stability), increased income taxes on those with higher incomes (benefited most from globalization), changing health care to a single-payer system (much less overhead), and working to restrain health care costs.
   
   Reading "The Big Squeeze" sometimes hurts as one sees how people are taken advantage of. My only criticism is that Greenhouse does not lay enough blame at the feet of globalization.



2. Book is easy to read. Author presents lots of examples of how our American middle class is being squeezed out, and the increasing differential between the poor and the rich, or upper class. His answers are dissapointing unless you are left wing liberal. He places blame on the awful big/greedy companies. Thinks the era of the 50's/60's was our best because we had big Unions to get benefits for workers. His answer now is basically for the government to contol most everything, and to return to the area of big Union representation. Never mind much of our American industry is crippled in the global economy due to the huge legacy costs to workers brought on by the Unions before we had to compete in a global economy. Yes, we have big problems today, but this is not the answer that will solve things.



3. I imagine that many conservative talk show hosts who have heard of or even read "The Big Squeeze" will dismiss out of hand Steven Greenhouse's new book as just more predictable liberal negativity. After all, according to Sean Hannity on one recent afternoon program it is possible for everyone to become rich in America if they are just willing to work hard enough. This is hogwash, Mr. Hannity. Everyone is not cut out to be an enterpreneur or a stockbroker. The reality is that in America today 10% of the population controls nearly 50% of the wealth. The gap between the richest Americans and the rest of us has been increasing at a alarming rate. Good paying jobs are being shipped to other nations and millions of Americans employed in retail or service industries are being forced to work in miserable conditions just to scrape by. "The Big Squeeze" is about the sobering new realities facing an ever increasing number of American workers today. And for the most part what Steven Greenhouse has discovered is not a pretty picture.
   It would appear that the American worker is under attack from all directions. Over the past two decades the U.S. has been inundated by millions of illegal aliens from places like Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti. The presence of these additional workers helps to depress blue collar wages in this country and places a strain on the public services we all have to pay for like schools and hospitals. Meanwhile, despite that fact that Americans are among the most productive workers in the world U.S. corporations have accelerated the outsourcing of good paying white collar jobs to places like Pakistan and India where workers are happy to work for a fraction of what his American counterpart makes. Greenhouse spotlights a number of instances where American workers were actually forced to suffer the indignity of training their foreign replacements or else risk losing their severance packages. This one hits especially close to home because my wife found herself in just this situation a few years ago.
   As the grip of "The Big Squeeze" gets tighter and tighter, increasing numbers of Americans are forced to accept lower paying positions at outfits like Wal-Mart and Family Dollar. Steven Greenhouse hightlights a whole host of appalling working conditions too numerous to mention here that employees at these retailers are forced to endure. To me the most disturbing one was that in many smaller stores Wal-Mart employees working the overnight shift were actually locked in the store with no manager present and with absolutely no ability to get out in case of an emergency! How can they get away with that?? In the course of "The Big Squeeze" Greenhouse does give kudos to both the discount retailer Costco and the accounting firm Ernst and Young. He praises these companies for the value they place on their employees and cites them as models for other companies to follow. Greenhouse also believes that if the challenges facing American workers today are ever to be reversed then labor unions must play a major role, particularly with those doing lower-paying jobs like janitors and nursing home workers.
   For most Americans, what Steven Greenhouse has to say in "The Big Squeeze" will really come as no surprise. The problems outlined in this book are myriad and the implications for most workers are quite frightening. Steven Greenhouse argues that America should take a second look at globalization and perhaps make some adjustments along the way. "The Big Squeeze" is a highly readable and informative book. Recommended!



4. I read a lot of books on the economy and workers, and unfortunately too many of them are plodding and overstuffed with statistics. That's why the Big Squeeze was such a pleasant surprise. It's a wonderfully big-hearted book, and it's also a terrific read. It's the best book on American workers that I've read in recent decades (or at least it's a tie with Barbara Ehrenreich's wonderful Nickel and Dimed).
   
   The Big Squeeze is unusual because it tells very moving, very human stories about two dozen individual workers -- the software engineer who has to train the worker from India who was to replace her, the "temp" whose company keeps her as a temp for 10 years, the Air Force veteran who works for three retailers in a row that erase hours from employee time cards to save money. Depressing, but very gripping stuff.
   
   What's also impressive about The Big Squeeze is it sees the trees and the forest. Better than any other book that I've read, it explains in detail how American workers are being systematically squeezed--on wages, health insurance, pensions, job security, pressure to work harder and smarter. The book also examines in a intelligent and accessible way the many complex forces that are causing this squeeze, e.g. globalization, Wall Street's push for greater profits. The book deals with some complicated matters, but it moves quickly, never getting bogged down.
   
   Greenhouse tells one eloquent story after another about how Americans are being squeezed at work. With things getting worse for the nation's workers, Barack Obama and John McCain should be required to read this book so they could see what's really happening in the American economy.



5. The many interviews for this book help to engage the reader's interest, and make the reality that we face more real. but the book isn't just interviews. there's also a lot of good factual data to back up his critique of "what is." Employers have been aggressively screwing workers for the past several decades, and often in ways that are illegal, and this does come out here.
   
   The book is a bit limited in what it offers as solutions. He's very much within the political mainstream and does pick up some good reform proposals, such as extending Medicare to cover everyone. Getting rid of the private insurance companies is key to the solution but the author doesn't really lean enough on that point. the main limitation is that he fails to recognize that things aren't going to substantially change unless and until American workers figure out how to engage in large scale organizing and actions to fight back. The "good times" in the decades after World War 2 didn't happen because "enlightened political leaders" saw the light. They happened because of the pitched battles, general strikes, workplace sitdowns and wildcat strikes of the '30s and '40s. The feds and the corporations were forced to make concessions.
   
   The author of this book has some rather misplaced ideas about American unions. He says they need to be more "cooperative" with employers. But the leaders have long preached "cooperation" but the employers have decided they don't want to cooperate. And the old union leader "cooperation" with employers often led to sellouts and the unions getting a black eye in terms of how workers view them. The author proposes all sorts of invasive and paternalistic legislation to micromanage unions by the government -- ignoring the lesson he should have learned from employer domination of the National Labor Relations Board. It would be more relevant to provide info about more grassroots controlled unionism and forms of action and organizing workers can do themselves.

5 comments about Dangerous Business: The Risks of Globalization for America.

1. A good book, though most business people will disagree, but most working people will cheer. Over the last 30 plus years things have gotten so bad that our biggest exports, are jobs. And our leaders say this is good for America. You think? We have trade deficits with just about every trading partner, if they can be so described. But no one in power thinks we need to do anything to change things.
   
   Trade, something of value, in exchange for something of equal value. What do we manufacturer in this nation anymore worth trading? This in turn has contributed to the credit crisis, over burdening credit card dept, (another story) our cities and states cannot meet their obligations in part because revenues are down.
   
   Then there is that nasty word "Globalization," where this nation has become the dumping ground for it seems any and all goods other nations produce. Where we now look the other way because goods are cheap, because they are produced by prisoners, or worse children. No enviromental precautions, no minimum wage, cheap labor, better defined as "SLAVE" labor. Then there is that nasty thing we do called deficit spending, where we spend more than we take in. Living on credit so to speak.
   
   The next President to take office had better have the balls to set this monster straight, or this economic quicksand America now faces will overshadow the great depression of the 1930s. We are pulling up every third world nation, at the expense of American jobs. The jobs an advisor of John McCain says we as Americans are not truly entitled to. Jobs that built this Nation after the depression, and aided in the winning of WW II.
   
   Suggestions are made by the author as to how we can begin to dig ourselves out of this mess, but it will take a great deal of heart. Heart enough to renegoiate our one way trade deals. Pay our way out of dept, and not try to borrow our way out.
   
   This is basic good economics, something like being left with a surplus, instead of dept. This is a major reason we can no longer properly supply our military, too much of what is now needed is produced by other Nations, and how bad is that? Well imangine if before World War 2 this were the case, think we would have won? The Pentagon has little choice but to look to overseas producers, because most of our heavy industry has been exported.
   
   This all relates to our educational system where most high school grad cannot read a simple rule. Not nearly enough revenues to properly educate our children, and a Communist Nation holds a great deal of our dept, as well as Middle Eastern Nations. I thought we were anti Communist. Where do we go from here?
   
   Well too many of us do not vote, and of those who do believe it when they the politicians say globalization is good for America. I hope we read this book, and start to pull our heads out of the sand.



2. By way of full disclosure, the chances of my giving Pat Choate's new book, Dangerous Business a bad review are not very high.
   
   We have been friends and business associates for more years than either of us care to count and our views on the competence of those in our government who masquerade as international trade negotiators are strikingly similar.
   
   That said, Pat's ability to take a subject which is a non narcotic substitute for sleeping aidslike international tradeand make it interesting is rare and a gift which any college student who has a term paper due should appreciate.
   
   In his last book, Hot Property, Pat explained how people in countries like China steal ideas.
   
   This book concentrates on how they directly take our money.
   
   And it is important to note that Pat is not a China-phobe.
   
   In fact, the first thing he points out is that China, Inc. is not some backward, third world country.
   
   Its industries are now owned mostly by the government but controlled by very smart, very efficient and very experienced people who would hold similar jobs in private industry were they here in the United States.
   Worse, they are much better negotiators than anybody we have representing our country. Partially by intellect and partially by national trade doctrine.
   
   In fact, in many cases, with a little help from our own stupidity, they can fake us out of our jockstraps--usually made in China these days and sold at Wal-Mart.
   
   Pat points out that the situation we find ourselves in today is the result of the U.S. policy of free trade as opposed to fair trade which is being espoused by a non-partisan group of multi-national companies which look forward no further than their next quarter's earnings.
   
   The resulting disruption of our economy is simply not accounted for in negotiating today's trade agreements because the results of globalization are instant profits for the multi-nationals at the expense of jobs and the U.S. economy.
   
   Put bluntly to U.S. citizens who lose their jobs to outsourcing: you had a good run and if you live through the pain, maybe you'll do well in the future but you'll have to live through the pain as we pursue global profits.
   
   China, on the other hand, follows a global policy of mercantilism.
   
   Their currency is strong, they run a positive trade balance and they only let foreign investment into China when it suits their interests.
   
   And even when they do allow foreign investment, it is allowed with an eye towards the future so that perhaps they won't need it after they absorb all the knowledge and expertise they can.
   
   The results of both our policies and their policies have been a number of paradigm shifts in the United States.
   
   One example is that many parts we use in our defense industries are now sourced overseas.
   
   We are, even now, being treated, as an example, to the spectacle of an aircraft tanker competition between Boeing and the people who make the Airbus in Europe and Airbus won the initial round.
   
   The future safety of such arrangements, Pat points out, is in doubt.
   
   What can be done?
   
   Well, that's the crux of the book and it can be summed up in two words.
   Better deals.
   
   It's a good read and makes you wonder what a Perot-Choate administration might have done to NAFTA and the WTO had they pulled off the miracle in 1996 and won the Presidency.



3. I couldn't put this book down and read the 205 pages in one sitting. Choate gives great instructions for our government. READ THIS BOOK!



4. The American people need a wake-up call! That seems to be the message that Pat Choate is urgently attempting to convey in his important new book "Dangerous Business: The Risks of Globalization for America". For more than seven decades now both Republican and Democratic administrations have been pursuing economic policies that favor so called "free trade". And with the establishment of the World Trade Organization and the passage of NAFTA back in 1993 the Congress in conjunction with Presidents Clinton and Bush have seemingly colluded with multi-national corporations in accelerating the outflow of capital and good paying jobs from our country. Yes, it seems that people like Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan and Senator Byron Dorgan were right. Globalization has been a disaster for the American worker. But there is a lot more to this story than meets the eye. That is what "Dangerous Business" is all about.
   Would it disturb you to learn that a number of state governments are in the process of leasing our freeways to foreign companies? I had never heard of this one before but in 2005 the State of Indiana awarded a 75 year lease on an extremely busy highway known as the Indiana Toll Road to a Australian/Spanish consortium. Under the terms of this agreement the State of Indiana would receive an up front payment of some $3.15 billion dollars. In return this consortium agrees to operate, maintain and collect tolls on the turnpike. Tolls are expected to increase dramatically in the years ahead and estimates are that this deal will produce more than $121 billion of revenue during the life of this agreement. This is definitely a short-sighted and ill-advised deal for the State of Indiana. Then there is another scheme known as the Trans-Texas Corridor. You might want to check one out at www.corridorwatch.org. It is frightening to discover just how many questionable deals federal and state governments are entering into with virtually no involvement from the legislative branch and with an absolute minimum of publicity. It is instructive to note that both President Clinton and President George W. Bush have attempted to circumvent the normal legislative process by utilizing Executive Orders to accomplish their highly questionable objectives. Such actions makes one wonder just whose side our leaders are really on.
   Those of you who are old enough might recall the classic scene in the 1976 motion picture "Network" where Arthur Jenson, Chairman of the Board of the UBS network (played by Ned Beatty) confronts anchorman Howard Beal in the Board Room. In that scene Mr. Jenson declares in no uncertain terms: "There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today." He goes on to say: "We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime." How apropos to the subject matter at hand! Throughout the pages of "Dangerous Business" Pat Choate points to countless examples where the interests of our nation have been sold down the river by corporations, investors and the elite. One of the most disturbing things that I discovered was just how much of our nations defense work has been outsourced to other nations including China! It seems to me that the very security of this nation has been put at risk by actions like this. Then there is the whole subject of the WTO. Did you know that all 153 member nations of the World Trade Organization have an equal vote in the decisions that are made? Thus, as Choate points out, the vote of the tiny nation of Antigua (population 69,000) carries the same weight as that of the United States. There is clearly something wrong with this picture.
   Time will simply not permit me to even scratch the surface of all of the substantive issues discussed in this book. Suffice to say that "Dangerous Business: The Risks of Globalization for America" is an extremely timely and important book that needs to be read and digested by as many Americans as possible. The American people need to understand what is happening around them and Pat Choate offers a number of thoughtful solutions to the problems he discusses. Extremely well written and exhaustively researched "Dangerous Business" is one book I simply could not put down. Very highly recommended!



5. "The globalization policies of presidents Bush (I and II) and Clinton constitute the worst economic mistake in American history" - says Chaote early in his "Dangerous Business." Readers then learn that the U.S. now imports more food than its exports; similarly more high-tech products.
   
   In the six years since 9/11, food-born pathogens and toxins have killed 10X those killed in the terrorist attack. Our response - reduce the number of FDA inspectors. China, India, and Mexico are prime culprits, and cases have involved deliberate adulteration of food for animals and people with poisons that have killed thousands. U.S.D.A. inspectors analyze less than 1% of food imports; part of our reticence to reject Chinese food imports is their quick retaliation by banning ours.
   
   Over 80% of the bulk active ingredients for U.S. prescription drugs are imported - mostly from China and India.
   
   The Chinese low-cost advantage comes via low labor costs, few environmental/labor safeguards, piracy, export subsidies (tax exemptions, forgiven loans, free rent and land - estimated to contribute 16% of their advantage), industrial clustering (aka Ford's River Rouge Plant near Detroit; contributing another 16% of their advantage).
   
   Foreign corporations may deduct from Chinese income tax an amount equal to 150% of their R&D in China - if this amount increased 10% over the prior year.
   
   China's surplus funds and assets are expected to hit $3 trillion in 2010, vs. an entire value of $15.4 trillion for NYSE U.S. firms.
   
   Finally, Chaote also points out that many key military components are either available in the U.S. now only through a single source, while others not at all. The Pentagon says it's not concerned because wars will be shorter in the future. Meanwhile, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue on, years longer than WWI, WWII, and the Korean War.

5 comments about In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington.

1. Robert Rubin traces his climb up the ladder in Wall Street and Washington DC and explains his role in significant national crises. He describes how he makes tough decisions after pondering the probabilities in the face of bewildering uncertainties. On page 48 he remebers how his grandfather was wiped out by the Florida land bust in the 1920s. A memory like that you would think would be barrier against complacency creeping in. But maybe not, unless there is another expalanation for why Citigroup put so much money into subprimes, while he was there in a position of power, and thus make it possible for the government of Abu Dhabai to come to the rescue and gain influence in such an important American Bank (what about national security?). As a public service Robert Rubin should generated a second edition of this book to bring to light the Tough Choices involved in betting those massive amounts on subprimes.
   
   The author reveals that he leans in the direction of anti-anti-big-government (see page 160). He places more faith in government control than the power of the "invisible hand". Unlike Alan Greenspan's book "The Age of Turbulence" this book does not contain a satisfying broad vision of our capitalistic economic system.



2. An excellent account of the behind the scenes finance world at the Clinton White house but the author who worked there. he reveals all the comings and goings of 'maing things work' from a fiduciary standpoint. Good book



3. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New WorldOn Money and Markets: A Wall Street Memoir
   
   Robert Rubin's book, "In an Uncertain World," is excellent reading for individuals managing their own pensions and other financial assets. This book, Alan Greenspan's book, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," and Henry Kaufman's book, "On Money and Markets," certainly rank among the best in the last few years regarding insight into how the global economies work and interact. This book also addresses insight into properly assessing global risk in general and assessing how to consider risk in marking to market for various fixed income securities.
   
   Rubin's experience and insight in finance at Goldman Sachs and as U. S. Secretary of the Treasury is difficult to match by most financial experts.
   
   All persons managing money would find their time well spent reading, marking, and frequently referring to this excellent and thought provoking book.



4. This book is by former President Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin. Robert Rubin, was previous to his role at Treasury, co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, a position he rose to through the ranks over about twenty years. His specialty was risk arbitrage, involving multimillion decision making on placing bets or investments on whether or not a merger or acquisition would ultimately go through (or close) or not.
   
   No matter what you think of President Clinton or his administration. Robert Rubin was a key decision maker in the economic sphere. He participated and directed policmaking in the Asian financial crisis and financial crisis in Latin America, etc.
   
   The book is about his views on decisionmaking and the process of policymaking and is excellent. He discusses his view about "optionality" and the complexity of decisionmaking under uncertainty.
   
   The book is excellent and I highly recommend it if you are interested in decisionmaking, policmaking, economic policy, Wall Street, and leadership.



5. Now that the emperor has no clothes this will be a useful book for understanding the hubris of men like Rubin that led directly to the Panic of 2008. Self-serving from front to back.

5 comments about Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights.

1. Hartmann calls for a values based USA and less emphasis on big business in this book.He sets out to show how the way things are currently are inimical to economic growth of the ordinary folks of the USA. A must read.
   
   Some other great books: "Fluctuating Life" by Jamaican-Canadian, author, teacher and poet, Joshua Spencer and "Quest for a Dream - A Life Committed to Progress" by Jamaican educator, author, social worker and entrepreneur, Joyce Buchanan.
   
   
   
   Fluctuating Life
   
   Quest for a Dream: A Life Committed to Progress
   
   Let's Talk Africa and More



2. As is the case with all Thom Hartmann's books, a must read for all liberals.



3. Thom starts with the East India Company of the 1500's and its "corporate" charter, and walks you through to today. Then he presents you with several sources and methods or starting a grass-roots movement to change the "Santa Clara" decision, which gave corporations personhood...excellent, excellent.



4. Thom Hartmann has provided a synthesis of history, economics, politics and social issues in a way that is grounded, easy to read, and above all, provides a secure understanding of the path this country has taken to surrendering democracy.
   
   I must emphasize how nicely this information and analysis sticks to your brain, and yet is a comprehensive work that does not dumb down to the reader.
   
   Great Christmas gift for your conservative friends who don't even know why they are conservative!!!!



5. Thom Hartmann is brillant, and every time I hear or read his books he provides me with new information that I would have never gotten anywhere else. He's on Sirius Radio every day, and should be listened to if you want the truth about politics in America

5 comments about Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St).

1. Brad DeLong's featured review is basically correct - Scott is treading ground remarkably similar to Hayek's. But I don't think that Scott is ignorant of Hayek. Rather, Scott is attempting to explore the same territory, but without coming to the same political conclusions. Early in this book, Scott makes clear that he is not advocating libertarianism (I am told that Scott calls himself an anarchist). He is aiming at a deeper critique of planning, one which is not merely about prices or information, but about metaphysics, epistemology and phenomenology. Scott never makes it explicit, but throughout this book, I got the sense that he is doing continental philosophy. This is a Heideggerian critique of planning - one that just happens to cover some of the same ground as Hayek.
   
   Scott's focus is on "seeing" like a (high modernist) state; the question this book asks is: how does such a state see, and what does state-like perception systematically miss? Scott argues the state's vision is limited to the conscious, the rational, and the abstract - it cannot see beyond what Nassim Nicholas Taleb has called "the Platonic fold." This vision is identical to what continental philosophers refer to as the "objective gaze." The unconscious, the organic, the ecological and the folk-wise are invisible to the modernist bureaucracy. To make these invisible elements rationally "legible," the state reaches out and actively reduces them to known quantities. This allows the state some limited control over them, but in the process any emergent systematic properties are destroyed.
   
   It is tempting to conclude that this book is a generalized critique of government. It is not. The mistakes Scott identifies are characteristic only of a certain type of regime, the high modernist state. High modernism, as Scott identifies it, is a sort of irrational confidence in objective rationality. It becomes possible on a large scale only after the Enlightenment, and especially after the advent of "scientific" management. It is epitomized not only by Stalin, but by Robert McNamara's Department of Defense, and the US Bureau of Reclamations. Nor is it limited to states. Systematic flaws exist in the perception of any large hierarchical organization that makes decisions on the basis of abstract calculative rationality. As such, this is ultimately a much more profound critique than Hayek's.
   
   DeLong is right that this book is not as well-written or organized as it could have been, but the synthesis of Hayek and Heidegger is absolute genius. It makes the book a classic in my view.



2. I got this book because it was recommended as background reading for a local debate about CAFOs. I like the meticulous detail in this treatment of social engineering by governments. That is not a liberal/conservative issue, but one which is worth looking at wherever there is a risk of social control that can lead to inequality and injustice.



3. 
   I've found this book useful, breathtakingly so, in so many ways these days; Scott raises a question at the heart of almost all our current civic debates, even in my own micro-field of schooling and education. I find myself saying, time and again, "she's thinking like a state", and it fits and helps me resort out the arguments. Thank you thank you, Prof. Scott.



4. This book is probably best summarized by its moral: The most successful systems are those that exploit the knowledge of all their people, rather than assuming that society can be changed from the top. All the knowledge of how the world actually works, and the actual complexity of getting things done, resides in the people who need to do it, rather than in the minds of planners far from the action. Beware of those who believe that the people's indigenous ways are backwards, pre-scientific and ignorant; in reality, though the people's methods may not have all the rigor of the latest scientific theories, they are likely to be precisely adapted to all the complexity of the world around them.
   
   But Seeing Like A State is much more than that. It is a thoroughly documented attack on high-modernist thinking. This is the mindset of a Le Corbusier, who comes in for a thorough lashing at Scott's hands. Le Corbusier and his disciples decided that modern cities were all wrong: their "chaotic" layout must indicate that they were corrupt and unworkable within. Jane Jacobs most famously tore into that fundamental confusion in The Death and Life of Great American Cities : surface chaos actually conceals remarkable underlying purpose and form. Scott takes a lot from Jacobs. Along with the classical anarchists, she seems to be his biggest inspiration.
   
   The high-modernist ideal is at its worst when it's combined with infinite state power. Combine these two and you get the evils of the former Soviet Union: shift peasants off their plots into "modern" industrial agriculture and force them to adhere to the latest theories of geometric crop planting -- theories like monoculture, identically spaced crops ... all very geometrical and orderly in the mind of someone who's not imaginative enough to see past the surface. And this mindset assumes throughout that the people must just be ignorant: they mustn't want to live in crowded cities; they mustn't know what they're doing when they farm their polycultured, "chaotic" crops. When combined with state power, the expert is the designated local god. That way lies ruin.
   
   In a lot of respects, this is not an argument against experts, though it could be misconstrued that way. For one thing, scientific experts really do have a lot to contribute to, say, peasant agronomy, and they really can contribute a lot to improving (say) rural sanitation. The trouble is when a few threads come together:
   
   1. Ignorance of local conditions.
   2. Confusing the thing being modeled with the model itself.
   3. The desire to make the world look like the laboratory
   4. The power to turn items 1 through 3 into reality.
   
   Item 4 is what makes Seeing Like A State into an argument for anarchism. States get most of Scott's ire, because they do bequeath this power onto dictators. But industry comes in for a spanking, too. In fact chapter 8 of Seeing Like A State is the next logical thing to read after The Omnivore's Dilemma: it explores at a slightly different level the problems with scientific farming as it's practiced in the United States. Rather than adapt farming to local conditions, American agriculture bends the natural world to its particular model of how farming should be done. This includes monoculture, whose predictable consequence is the rise of pests that are adapted to eat that monocultured crop. The next step in the game, if you're an American agricultural conglomerate, is to spray loads of pesticides on your fields. Evolution can play the game too, though, so it responds by building pests who are better adapted to those pesticides. And so the arms race continues. And so the soil erodes, the pesticide runoff blackens, and so forth.
   
   The root of that whole war is the assumption that nature should play the game our way, rather than that we should bend to it. In turn, this monomania is a consequence of straight-ahead economic logic that asks what a profit-maximizing firm (farm) would do, then produces an unambiguous answer: maximize output. When cost and output are the only variables, the model is very clear. It's only clear, of course, if you ignore other things, such as long-term soil degradation. Including these other variables would complicate the model. And, again, if you confuse the model with the thing being modeled, you come to believe that maximizing output is unambiguously and objectively good, rather than being the result of a fixed set of assumptions.
   
   This is a relentlessly powerful and unbelievably sad book: it picks off, one by one, the forces that made the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries look grotesque. It suffers from some verbosity; like Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, though, it always manages to save itself within a few paragraphs of where your patience starts to wear thin. The sections on Russian collectivization, the Tanzanian Ujamaa, Le Corbusier, and the creation of Brasília, in particular, are worth the price of admission on their own. In all these cases, the thing that the experts created was meant -- quite consciously -- to negate the society around it. Brasília was the anti-São Paulo, for instance. Only by relocating to an unoccupied spot in Brazil and starting afresh could the experts create the world as "science" told them it was meant to be made. The consequences were predictable: starvation in Tanzania and in Russia, and a city in Brazil that only survives because people color outside the lines.
   
   Rather than go theoretically very deep, Scott insists on painting the details vividly; I assume this was a stylistic choice, in keeping with the theme that all the intelligence in a system is at the "edge of the network." Don't write like someone positioned at the center, I imagine Scott saying to himself; write like you're at the edge. And so he does. This is where a lot of his verbosity comes from.
   
   I have only two wishes for this book:
   
   1. I wish it gave some more criteria by which to judge modern-day schemes organized by experts. As luck would have it, for instance, my roommate pointed me to a video of William McDonough describing his plans for new Chinese cities -- McDonough being one of the Cradle to Cradle guys. The Chinese government has asked McDonough to apply cradle-to-cradle principles to city design; it looks like he's building a number of 400,000-person cities for them. If you watch the video, and you have the "beware experts with unlimited power" principle in mind, you'll wonder whether McDonough's work is another Brasília. His model city surely has the geometric perfection and cleverness of a Brasília or an Ujamaa village. Should I be scared of it?
   
   Probably the answer is simple, if we're listening to Scott. We need to ask McDonough, "Did you consult with residents to ask how they feel about this city? Or did you impose it from on high, using seemingly perfect principles of architecture and resource conservation?" Like all principles, Scott's are guidelines rather than rules, but it stands to reason that the people who know how to live are the people who'll be doing the living, not their overlords.
   
   2. I'd like more examples of successful scientific interventions. Without them, Scott's book occasionally sounds anti-scientific. Surely it's not that, but the absence of positive examples makes that a sensible interpretation.
   
   The $100-billion development question is: how do we combine expert scientific research with indigenous experimentation? How can the West bring its science to nations that could really use the help, without being scientific imperialists about it? What could Western science bring back from Africa and Asia? The Western model of industrial agriculture is really broken, or so it seems to a lot of knowledgeable folks; it would be really helpful to get a rigorous scientific understanding of sustainability from people who've sustained their agriculture for thousands of years. I would have liked Scott to provide examples of fruitful two-way collaboration.
   
   This book will appeal to a lot of people. It'll appeal to those who have already taken Jane Jacobs's messages about cities to heart. For that matter, it'll remind a lot of people why they love cities. It goes into more depth on Soviet collectivization than many of us will have encountered. And it will make us think twice before we allow experts to reshape communities from on high.



5. Scott's work is a meticulously-detailed analysis of the blinding effects of big-picture macro-economics. There's nothing radically new here - remember the old adage that the "slave sees the master, but the master never sees the slave." And he buttresses his standard, post-Communist negativity toward state-ism with well-chosen examples which it's hard to deny - Stalinist collectivization being a standard of this genre. I'm reminded of the old Estonian Communist who said there were "two ways to build the road to socialism: one is that of a highway that cuts straight ahead, blasting through mountains and draining swamps. The other follows the natural contours of the terrain. It might be a little devious, but it arrives at the same destination." (This man was unsurprisingly purged from the ECP in 1950 for "nationalist deviationism.") I'm reminded also of Rene Dumont's and K. S. Karol's critiques of 1960s Cuba, when Fidel was obsessed with creating a "New Man" marching "not just to socialism but communism."
   
   Yet societies like 1920s Russia, or Cuba, or Tanzania did not have the private capitalization necessary for modern development; without the state they could not possibly have been anything other than colonial appendages of those who did. Stalin said in 1931 that an undeveloped Russia was always "beaten for its backwardness; we must catch up to the developed nations or we will be crushed." This was borne out by WW II. Even if Stalin did much "beating" of his own, the NEP-peasant society of the 1920s could not have possibly stood up to Hitler's invasion. Would a victorious Third Reich in the east have given Scott any better example? The state-minimizing model has worked best only in the Atlantic states, and with good reason: only the trans-Atlantic trade created the concentrated capital that could invest in independent development. This was not a viable path for Russia, or any Third World ex-colony.
   
   Another point not addressed is that the masses oif eastern Europe did not joyously celebrate their alleged "emancipation" from collectivist serfdom in 1989; to the contrary, workers clung to their dinosaur factories and peasants to their collectives because these structures, no matter how resented in the past, had come to provide a social security lacking in the new free order. Even Sheila Fitzpatrick, whom Scott quotes at length, admits as much at the end of her book on "Stalin's Peasants."
   
   One case Scott probably dared not touch in his paradigm is American school consolidation/integration, with its centralization, massive bussing of children, and all-around disruption of community life. This surely is a pointed example of "seeing like a state;" but how to deal with those who resisted such "collectivized education" sympathetically? Looked at objectively, the outraged parent who overturned "invading" buses of black schoolchildren in Boston is morally equivalent to the revolting kulak who took up arms against Bolshevik collectivizers of his land. Scott nicely sidesteps this unprogressive example which by itself pulls much of his moral argument out from under itself. What would be Scott's answer to the general shabbiness and disfunction of the US public school system? To go back to "community education"? - which, public or private, would re-enforce all the old inequities of geography, class, and race.
   
   To Scott's credit, he critiques the trendy neo-liberalism built around von Hayek and Friedman, and warns against private corporate equivalents of blindness. The current craze for "eminent domain" decrees that condemn small property in favor of big investors carries his analysis one step further, where the state - in that exemplary democracy, the United States - becomes as purblind as Julius Nyere when allied with corporate power.

5 comments about Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America.

1. Whether you like Newt or not, one thing you can't take away from him is having the talent of a great communicator! I gave this book to one of my friends who is a Newt fan and he really enjoyed Winning the Future and was happy that I chose one of Newt's books as a gift.



2. Newt makes so much sense in his spoken word as well as here in his book. I only wish more people would read it and get a clue.



3. If you are one of the brain washed masses who live, eat and sleep Republican then help the economy and waste your money on this book. If you actually have a brain and can think rationally then dont waste your money.
   
   This is pretty much a mindless vision of how the Repubs want the world to run.
   
   What is funny is this guy mentioning God. He should write about what God has to say about ADULTERY which he has committed.
   
   This book, like most repub's writings is a joke.



4. After reading this book I am convinced this is the man to follow. I look forward to reading the next, and I hope one day he considers running for president.



5. I just finished reading the book, and I must say that it was impressive. While I would have preferred more details for accomplishing the goals of the new contract, I do believe it is a very good starting point for a Republican platform to retake the Congress in 2010. Newt is 100% correct in his writings that if the private sector can do something better than the government, then why isn't the government making the most effective and efficient use of our tax dollars by using the private company?
   
   Our country has slipped to the point of letting the world lead us, both through secular beliefs, economic policies, and even to the point of foriegn laws having too much influence in the Supreme Court's interpretation of our own Constitution. The world does not lead America, America leads the world!
   
   The bloated bureaucracy and constant stalemates that plague our government must be eliminated as Newt states throughout his book. It made me want to call Capitol Hill and echo the words of the great Ronald Reagan (with one change): "Mrs. Pelosi, tear down this wall!" In this case it's not a wall of oppression, but a wall of ineffectiveness, inefficiency, and an outright laughable view of what this country needs.

3 comments about Mindful Economics: How the US Economy Works, Why it Matters, and How it Could be Different.

1. This book is the perfect counterbalance to mainstream economics. Magnuson provides real world information about the US economy and its history, and suggests ways to begin building real economic alternatives. The book contains much useful information and is accessible to people who have no background in economics. Mindful Economics is very informative and an interesting read.



2. This book is perhaps the best economics book I have ever read. It covers so much, is beautifully written and is just amazing. You'll learn so much from his work.
   
   I am an economics major with a poly sci minor, and, this book is just so much macro/mirco concepts nothing has come close.



3. For decades now, economic history has been deliberately suppressed in colleges and universities by a group of very deluded academics who worship Ayn Rand and her ideology of selfishness. Margaret ("There is no society") Thatcher and Alan (It's not my fault) Greenspan are among her devotees. Also known as the Chicago School, they launched their first major master plan using Pinochet in Chile in 1977 to overthrow the democratically elected socialist Allende (on 9/11 of that year, by the way. It was a disaster but they called it a success. (Mission Accomplished!) Various members of these minions went on to loot national currencies from Wall Street, and indoctrinate our country into a embracing selfish greed and gains at the unjust expense of others.
   
   Then we were hoodwinked into NAFTA and CAFTA. Banks went national and credit was released from it's cage with no training. Extremely important and effective legislation from the 1930's that protected us by keeping separate the various components of financial and insurance worlds were repealed. Crazy hyper-leveraged financial instruments made unsustainable debt levels a game of hot potato. What is worse though is that we are being mentally manipulated and tricked by opposite-speak everywhere we turn. We are being deprived even of unambiguous language to describe economic and political subjects.
   
   "Free Markets" are anything but democratic, or "free" for that matter. When we say we want to bring democracy to a country, we really mean forcing them to sell us their resources at pennies on the dollar and stripping the country of its assets. It doesn't matter, Democrat or Republican, "Wealth Creation" is really "Debt Creation," and both parties will strive to protect financial paper, no matter how inflationary, at the expense of productive capital and the general prosperity of all Americans except a very few. (Ralph Nader is the only candidate who has for 40 years demonstrated that he is capable of resisting the puppet strings of Wall Street, and by the way, he is on the ballot in 45 states, most likely including yours. You have no more excuses!!)
   
   Joel Magnuson's work is one of the greatest steps I have seen toward restoring economic literacy to America. This is a marvelous text that is easy to read and understand without oversimplifying anything. He tears the curtain from the Wizard's booth and reveals the humbug of micro and macro economic mathmatics, among so many other things. He offers lists of questions to ask the Chicago School instructors in class as each subject comes up. If you like making your professors and instructors actually earn their share of the higher education booty, you will love this feature. It is also reasonably priced, unlike most college texts that are obscenely over-priced in their anything-but-free market bookstores.
   
   Buy extra copies of this book. You will want to lend them out and give them away as I do.

5 comments about Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity.

1. I thought that this book was an interesting take on how government policy can promote or hinder economic growth. I like how they combine together developed countries with undeveloped countries (although there is far more focus on the former). Most books on this subject focus exclusively on the one or the other.
   Others have summarized the book well, so I will cover only a few points. I like how they show that there is not one type of capitalism, but many. I would have liked it if they broke down the State-Guided Capitalism a bit more. It seems to me to be a little broad a generalization to lump Japan, Denmark, France, Greece and Poland all into the same category.
   A little more analysis of the Oligarchic capitalism would also be nice. It is not clear to me what metric was used to show that economic wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few and that government policy is only for their benefit. Some people claim that USA and Japan also have that problem, so how do we differentiate.
   And their focus on USA as the form of entrepreneurial capitalism (mixed with big corporation) makes the book a bit lopsided. It is not clear that there are really other nations in that category, so how do you know how much of it is American culture and how much is institutions.
   What I like best about this book is how they offer different perscriptions for different countries based on their category. And they also tailor their advise to reform around the margins and to avoid taking on powerful interests with radical reform.
   Overall, I would recommend this book.



2. Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism offers a very informative and easy to read approach to economics. I have a much broader understanding of economics after reading this book. It was interesting and the authors' are incredibly thorough at describing the various aspects of economics. As a person who had a very minimal understanding of the economic world this book provided the basics. I can now appreciate the issues that are faced in the economic arena. I am able to state my opinion relating to economic issues with confidence now. This book offers a nice transition into the world of economics. It is painless and interesting. I highly recommend it to anyone who needs to learn the basics.



3. This book makes a persuasive argument why "entrepreneurial" capitalism yields faster growth than "big-company" capitalism. For the true believers, it doesn't contribute much to the debate, but if you haven't read a textbook on the economics of growth, it provides a concise summary of the many factors affecting growth.
   
   The core of the book argues that Europe and Japan focused on big-company capitalism after WWII as a logical way to rebuild their war-torn economies and as a result, this form of capital still dominates these economies. It also postulates that cultures can likely be changed over the medium term (ten-ish years, perhaps). This leaves unaddressed the question why then haven't European and Japanese cultures evolved into faster growing "entrepreneurial" capitalism as the US appears to have over the last 15 years. (Prior to that, all three economies were growing at similar growth rates; if anything the US was growing slightly slower as the other economies caught up.)
   
   I suspect the reasons are threefold. First, IT opened up a target rich investment environment. Second, both Europe and Japan face high costs to redeploy workers from old sectors of the economy to new growing sectors. The opportunity cost of leaving resources employed suboptimally (and the productive thinkers who guide them) significantly holds back these economies. Third, more equal income distribution substantially reduces risk taking as the propensity to save and invest grows significantly with income. The first dollars of savings are used primarily for housing (really a consumer good), then safe (big-company) financial investments (to stockpile for retirement) and lastly to underwrite entrepreneurial risk. As a result, the real cost of redistribution is its toll on risk-taking. By and large, only the very rich can afford to underwrite/finance the latter. These factors are given short shift by the book.
   
   In fact, the book argues for more equal distribution while ignoring the very different but critically important causes of unequal distribution - economically misguided oligarchs who misappropriate it vs. successful entrepreneurs who rightly earn it. The book devotes all of 2 pages to taxation.
   
   (My guess is that there are also positive feedback loops at work culturally where success causes others to desire success which in turn leads to a culture that embraces (business) success rather than shunning/criticizing it. And where critical masses of creative cutting-edge thinkers yield real synergies.)
   
   In my opinion then, the book comes up short. It identifies the fact that entrepreneurial capitalism is desirable; but its prescriptions for how to achieve and sustain it are not very profound. Only a comparison to Europe and Japan that reveals why these cultures haven't evolved toward higher growth, like the US, can reveal the truth. Most of the prescriptions, such as protecting intellectual property, enforcing anti-trust laws, reigning in unmeritorious litigation, etc. are largely identical between the 3 societies and hardly "ground breaking."



4. Good Capitalism Bad Capitalism is an excellent book which provided the beginner economic student with an open and informative view of capitalism.
   The body of the book presented the reader with a view of capitalism, which enabled one to better understand what is needed to succeed in the American economy today.
   I would highly recommned this book to anyone interested in learning more about capitalism and economics.



5. This book is a description of the different ways in which advanced and emerging economies include the concepts of capitalism in their policies. There is really nothing new in it, but it is a convenient guide to economic policies in the selected countries. Lacking is a description of Classical capitalism, which would permit the reader to assess the aberrations adopted by each country.

5 comments about The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays.

1. Wow! I am blown away again by Wendell Berry's thoughts and way of seeing the world. His ideas should be shouted from the rooftops. First of all, his writing conveys the strength of friendship. He respects and honors his friend, Wes Jackson, throughout the book and especially in the essay "The Way of Ignorance". I ordered the tape of this talk which he gave at Wes Jackson's Land Institute at the Prairie Festival in 2004.
   
   There is so much of value in this book, but the other essay I would highly recommend is "Renewing Husbandry".
   
   The best way to review Berry's work is to quote him.
   
   "The most forceful context of every habitat now is the industrial economy that is doing damage to all habitats. We can't preserve neighborliness or charity or peaceability or an ecological consciousness, or anything else worth preserving, at the same time that we maintain an earth-destroying economy. Nothing ultimately flourishes in our present economy but selfish aims, and these are often mutually contradictory. We have to have a sort of pity for the CEO of a polluting corporation who desires wealth, healthy children, and a vacation in the restorative purity of nature. And surely we have to extend the same pity to those whio are sure that "it takes a village to raise a child" but who forget that it takes a local culture and a local economy to raise a village."
   
   And.
   "Harmony between our human economy and the natural world-local adaption-is a perfection we will never finally achieve but must continously try for. There is never a finality to it because it involves living creatures who change. The soil has living creatures in it. It has live roots in it, perennial roots if it is lucky. If it is the soil of the right kind of farm, it has a farm family growing out of it."



2. The Way of Ignorance is a plea for humility. Wendell Berry asks the simple question, "Can great power or great wealth be kind to small places?" and knows that the earnest believer-in-what-could-be will have to live with heartbreak. "By living as we do, in our ignorance and our pride, we are diminishing our world and the possibility of life." The purity of Berry's vision enables him to speak with a voice that is radical and simple. He restores us to our forgotten common sense. He opens our eyes to the beauty of small places and calls us to tend to their uncompromising complexities. He bids us hold tight to the irreplaceable.
   
   Berry's plea for humility extends to all, from overly confident scientists and self-assured political leaders to the "many Christians who are exceedingly confident in their understanding of themselves in their faith." "When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly . . . He is talking about a finite world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified `Christians,' but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life . . . To [this offer] we have chosen to respond with the economics of extinction." "Violence, in short, is the norm of our economic life and our national security. The line that connects the bombing of a civilian population to the mountain `removal' by strip-mining to the gullied and poisoned field to the clear-cut watershed to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight."
   
   In a time of arrogance and high-risk miscalculation, technological, economic and military overreaching, Berry is there to call us back - back to our senses. "If we find the consequences of our arrogant ignorance to be humbling, and we are humbled, then we have at hand the first fact of hope: We can change ourselves." I recommend The Way of Ignorance.



3. This collection of essays centers on the concept of accepting humankind's inevitable ignorance, as an antidote to deadly hubris. As Berry says, "Creatures who have armed themselves with the power of limitless destruction" must not pridefully embrace their limited knowledge. Instead, the "way of ignorance ... is to be careful, to know the limits and efficacy of our knowledge. It is to be humble, and to work on an appropriate scale."
   
   Scale is a recurring theme here as Berry returns to the roots of his thinking in the realm of family farming. His essays touch on environmental destruction, factory farming, the weaknesses of the 'save the blank' movement. But also on The Gospels, the future of the Democratic party, and the value of husbandry in a materialistic world.
   
   I always enjoy Berry's thoughts as I find him one of the clear, non-polarized voices out there. He speaks not just as a conservationist but as a working farmer, not just as a liberal but as a Christian. He points out the faults of the liberal movement as readily as he criticizes the corporate culture. I prefer his book-length work as i feel here he can only briefly touch on subjects. The collection also includes essays that feel a bit redundant or not of as much interest. Still his work here is also humble and to scale, and so the 180 pages can be quickly read and the best of the harvest pulled out for closer attention.



4. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays is an anthology of writings by cultural critic Wendell Berry - one of Smithsonian magazine's 35 People Who Made a Difference - about topics ranging from what freedom is really being discussed when one speaks of "free market" or "free enterprise", to the costs of so-called rugged individualism in a democratic commonwealth, to sharp-laced observations on the Kerry campaign, and much more. Written in plain terms, The Way of Ignorance takes a cold, hard look at the doubletalk and doublethink that saturates modern American airwaves, stripping them down to bare conundrums, all with a heavy dose of the author's practical evaluation. An enthusiastically recommended, thought-provoking cross-examination of modern society.



5. Wendell Berry, an otherwise excellent author, has chosen this venue to rail against progress. He seems to want to lock in the 20th, or maybe even the 19th century and stay there.w