1 comments about The Invisible Safety Net: Protecting the Nation's Poor Children and Families.

1. This is a very thoughtful review of the literature that helps one understand what really works when it come to social programs. More importantly, careful analysis shows that many programs, while imperfect, do help.

1 comments about Cities in a World Economy (Sociology for a New Century Series).

1. I've read the book due to an examination about "the new city structure - contemporary geography" and it's quite good, she has a global wiew of the new city-status and its new users, the less and less importance the homless has for the city governament and the new power of the corporation, all in all a good compendium if you need to improve your knoledge about the matter.

3 comments about Michael Allen's E-Learning Library: Creating Successful E-Learning : A Rapid System For Getting It Right First Time, Every Time (Michael Allen's E-Library).

1. In my experience, creating eLearning is a very difficult thing (understatement of the century). You have to balance so many factors not the least of which is keeping up with the vast sea of books on learning theory. Don't get me wrong, the learning theory is certainly important, but at some point you have to get to the doing...the practical application. What I needed in a book was to hear from someone with experience. Someone who would be willing to cut through the theory and just write about how to get it done. Dr. Allen has done that with this book. I don't think that the book is perfect, but it is the most referenced book in my work library (needs more examples and more illumination on this whole "bonus babies" idea and how to pull that off).
   
   I hope that his next book in this series (on Instructional Design), is just as practically useful as this one is. How do I think you make a book on Instructional Design practically useful...lots of examples! That's right...just like what Dr Allen did with his first book (Micheal Allen's Guide to e-Learning), I would love to read about the learning theory, but I think that each theory should be backed up with a practical example. Screenshots work, but I would love to actually be able to try the examples. The first book did this well with its accompanying example CD. This book needs the same type of examples, but new stuff. I know that Dr Allen's company (Allen Interactions) has been very busy making award winning learning solutions...so lets open the coffers and see some of the new stuff.
   
   The information in this book is very valuable. Thanks Dr. Allen for being so generous in sharing it.



2. First, let me say that I enjoyed Michael Allen's first eLearning book. It had solid content. My only beef with it was that there weren't enough chapter breaks and that made it tougher to read (some chapters went on for 70 or so pages). That is certainly not the case with this book; many of the chapters are 5-10 pages in length, which to me, feels too short, almost like a bathroom reader. This book is all about white space.
   
   This new book is mostly just a rehash of the first half of Allen's last book. It only contains 180 pages of actual text before you reach the indexes etc. so for $25+ one would assume their would be a lot of content packed into those precious few pages, right? Alas, instead the author uses oversized type, wide line spacing, and 2 inch margins on the outer edges.
   
   The text is in a two column format
   and with so little page space
   actually being alotted for it,
   each line is only about 35 or
   so characters long. This makes
   the whole book hard to read
   because your eyes are always
   having to dip down to the next
   line after only a few words
   (you would think an elearning
   designer would take text line
   length a little more seriously).
   I noticed that the next book in
   this series does the same thing.
   
   Back to the content, very little new information is presented that could not be found in Allen's previous book. Yes, this one does give a few extra pages on each topic covered, but that is about it. Most of the additional information if fluff. I liked the examples of elearning given in Allen's previous book. None are included here, just a fictitous story about a fictitous company trying to implement elearning. A story that is neither engaging, nor insightful (fluff).
   
   I gave this book a 2 star rating only because if you haven't read the first book, it does have some useful information and interesting insights into elearning development...but like I said, it is mainly just rehash.



3. This book provides valuable insight into the most important considerations for developing e-learning. I would say this is more of a prep book that focuses on gathering info, getting input, etc. not so much on production of actual e-learning modules. Good high level process overview, useful in the early stages, including some good checklists like Design Proof Evaluation Checklist.

3 comments about Urban Land Use Planning, Fifth Edition.

1. Arrived in a timely manner and as good as new. Good reading so far too.



2. Needed it for Grad Urban Planning class...Got book, difficult at first with terminology, but than it goes smoothly. It mainly is about draft planning and the creation of...It does a good job outlining all the issues, but making you're own outline of ure notes from the book will help even more...



3. This is a perfect book for those who just entered this field, since the land types, land economy, land whatever will no longer be difficult to tackle with.

4 comments about India: The Emerging Giant.

1. For anyone interested in economic development this book is a useful read. Detailing modern India, with all its tribulations and promises. In recent years, it appears that India has [finally] brought about a secular increase in its growth rate. No longer the parlous "Hindu rate of growth" of the 1980s and 90s, which caused it to lag far behind China.
   
   The author explains the complexities of Indian society. How, with its chaotic democracy and the myriad pressure groups, development can often get stunted or delayed for years. The contrast to China is stark. The Chinese system has been able to deliver consistently faster growth for almost 30 years.
   
   But the prospects for India seem brighter than its record. The book suggests that a rough consensus amongst its politicians might enable more reforms. For the sake of hundreds of millions of Indians who still live in stark poverty, and how deserve better from their betters, let us hope so.



2. Among all the books on India written by economists (recently there have been quite a few) this book has perhaps received the most favorable press. Reading this book one can easily discover the factors determining this disposition of the media. The book is a detailed work that does the delicate job of arriving at measured and researched judgments on India strikingly well. In effect the book dismisses the thick line distinction between optimists and pessimists on India's economic prospects. Arriving at measured judgments on India's prospects that are neither overtly pessimistic nor overtly optimistic required an in depth study of India's economic history in the post independence period. Seemingly straightforward this work had not been done. The reason is that to implement such a work required not one but several economists with their different specializations and also the expertise of social scientists from several other disciplines to handle the social and political complexity of India. Alternatively an individual author had to take upon himself/herself the extremely difficult task of wearing these different hats and more importantly in a way that the hats conformed to each other. This could be difficult but not impossible as the book demonstrates (by virtue of being written by a single author). In fact this is the essence of the book's thesis statement about India: difficult but not impossible.
   The book does a great job of compiling several important facts about India's economic performance. The most exciting aspects of the book come where it debunks several of the orthodoxies that fail to stand the test of hard numbers. An earlier book Freakanomics by Steven Levitt demonstrated the power of hard numbers. Those hard numbers led to determination of causality between events/issues that casual observation would never detect or guess, for example between abortion laws and reduction in crime. The hard numbers in this book do not discover new causality as much as they demolish some prevalent myths which are either not based on numbers or ex post can be thought of to be based on "soft" numbers. Thus, issues like when did poverty decline in India and what determined the changes in poverty levels have been challenged with some real hard numbers. Poverty, an issue of great economic and political importance in India has attracted several data engineers and data reverse engineers. The book presents numbers coupled with an easy and exciting tutorial on how to read the numbers correctly that is likely to cause some unemployment among these resources. At the same time, the critical analysis of numbers in the book is likely to generate new employment for social scientists.
   Generations of social scientists working on India for example have thought of Nehru (India's first prime minister) as the ultimate Fabian socialist who aspired for total government control and suppressed private enterprise. It is a different matter that no one sat down to check what the numbers could say on this. The book rigorously demonstrates that perceptions on this have been so far from truth. For those working on India's economic history, the book thus offers new employment indeed.
   This book is in fact a natural sequel to the epic "Economic History of India" by Dharma Kumar. If Economic History of India is the right book for the pre-independence India, this book is the right one for post independence India. The tenor of the book is definitely different written by stalwarts in different disciplines, the former by an economic historian and the latter by a trade economist. That these two books could combine in a seamless fashion exemplifies that rigorous research by masters always produces masterpieces independent of time.



3. This book is a must read for anybody wishing to dig deeper into India's recent impressive economic performance and undeniable presence in the world. It offers an outstanding analysis of post independent India's growth experience in the form of four distinct phases--relating it meticulously to the content and pace of economic reforms--and convincingly addresses key issues such as why did growth stall in post independent India, and why it took off again, how the process was affected by the country's complex political process, and where are the promises and challenges for the future. It also provides a very thorough account of the role of government in the macro and structural reform process. Finally, it raises several timely questions in light of the recent economic and financial strains confronting the world economy: is the government's fiscal policy sustainable or would it result in runaway inflation and/or economic crises? How urgent is the need for fiscal consolidation? What is the state of the financial system and does it need to be fixed? What are the risks of a balance of payments crisis--akin to that experienced in the early 1990s?
   
   Notwithstanding its very comprehensive analysis, the book reaches out to a wide spectrum of readers--its careful data analysis with a rich dose of charts and tables will definitely appeal the thorough academician who expects statements to be backed by adequate statistics; at the same time, the issues are close to the heart of any pragmatic policymaker, not just in India but in other emerging market economy. While this is not the only book on India I have read, it is among the very few that I will keep going back to for the timeless nature of its analysis.



4. Arvind Panagariya's "India: The Emerging Giant" is hands-down the most comprehensive and detailed study of post-independence Indian political economy written to date. There have been a number of excellent books on India written by economists on the post-reform period (A few notable examples: Suresh Tendulkar and T.A. Bhavani's "Understanding Reforms: Post-1991 India" (2007); T.N. Srinivasan and Suresh Tendulkar's "Reintigrating India into the World Economy" (2003); and Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen's "India: Development and Participation" (2002)). While each of the works just mentioned is insightful and detailed - respectively focusing on domestic political economy, international integration, and human development impacts - Panagariya's work successfully incorporates the insight and debates of fifty years of scholarship on India is a comprehensive, careful, balanced, and detailed manner. While I do take issue with a few nuances of Panagariya's conclusions, I cannot deny that they are well-founded and impeccably supported.
   
   The broad outline of the work is as follows. The first hundred pages provide an overview of the political economy of four phases in Indian economic policy - from the relatively mild control and heavy investment under Nehru, through industrial strangulation under Mrs. Gandhi, the piecemeal but sustained deregulation of the 1980s, and finally the phase-shift in Indian economic regulation that began with the 1991 crisis. The remaining 350 pages provide incisive and thorough analysis of the post-reform period - including policy proposals on everything from trade and finance, to agriculture, to health and education reform.
   
   I am currently polishing off my Master's thesis on Indian development, and this book is a stunner. I wish I had it as a source when I began writing - it is nothing short of epic. It is hands-down the best book on the Indian economy since Bhagwati and Desai's 1970 masterpiece "India: Planning for Industrialization." Highly recommended for students of India.

5 comments about PowerNomics : The National Plan to Empower Black America.

1. I have been a self-proclaimed conscious person for 5 years now.
   I began with reading black history studying ancient african civilizations and traditions. When I found out about Ancient Kemit and Kush and the African connection to the Hebrews I honestly believed that the major problem we had in this country was lack of self-knowledge. Even though I still beleive that to be a major issue, I know now that the force that keeps us down is ignorance of a different type. It is the ignorance of how a Democratic Capitalist system truly works that keeps us at the bottom. It was and is the ignorance of our past and present leaders who push and promote intergration when it's obvious it has failed us. And finally it is each and every black individuals ignorance when he moves out of a black community when they become middle class, diluting our voting and economic base. But now i have no excuses I now know what is going on around me. If you want to know buy this book.



2. A continuation of Black labor White wealth, this account is a program of action for those interested with the implimentaion of the economic model based on Powernomics and the fascinating industries available for exploitation within certain communities. Additionally this addition has updated stats and excellent examples of programs designed to help control-preserve community economic development and culture as well as history...to protect communities from outsiders with their own interests thru ethno-aggregation and consolidation urban communities can learn to impliment basic protective procedures. Fascinating far reaching analysis, that should be of interest for those areas facing population displacement thru gentrification. If developed properly this Powerenomics plan can serve areas well into the next century and beyond.



3. Mr. Andersons' book provides a thorough examination, diagnosis, and best possible cure for what ails black america. Not poor whites, hispanics, arabs, jews, gays, or white women. You owe it to you and your family to at least check out the facts of this examination and then decide.
   
   White america has always put their modus operandi in our face; this is our society, these are our rules, do the best you can with what we decide to give you; don't bother me while I make my money. If you do, the police will handle you.
   
   Here is Black americas' call to focus on what should have been the legacy of civil rights - economic empowerment.



4. Before I read this book, I had not one clue how bad we as African Americans had it. This book truly opened my eyes. The statistics that were presented would make Dr. King literally cry. We have gotten so far behind other nationalities that it is literally pathetic. Claud Anderson's vision if implemented can really change the course that us as Blacks are on. This book should be in every Black American's household.



5. PowerNomics should be required reading for every African American book club, community organization, church, and family. The book embodies tenents set forth from Marcus Garvey to Elijah Muhammed to DuBois and Washington. If you believe that "God helps those who help themselves," PowerNomics is an action plan to achieve self-sufficiency.

2 comments about Cities and the Creative Class.

1. My hunch is this is a cheap sequel. Not a lot of discussion, just a lot of (regression) results reporting. Extremely repetitive. Moreover, given that this often verves into being fairly social science (as opposed to pop), the causal linkages seem pretty poorly established. If you want to read this for professional reasons (social science or urban planning), most of this could be ignored; if you want to read this for personal (i.e., recreational) reasons, it's really boring.



2. This honestly might be the worst book I've ever read. I'm a senior in college and was forced to read it for a Sustainable Urban Engineering elective class, and wow what a waste of time. I've never seen an author repeat himself more than Florida did here. He was saying the same things (really, check it out) on, say, page 140 as he was on page 35...that basically cities need to invest not in tax abatements to attract high-quality and talented businesses and people, but need to focus on increasing diversity and quality of life through developing amenities like good social scenes. The book is filled with a bunch of charts, tables, and graphs, backing up his claims that talent and the creative class flock to diverse regions with lots of stuff to do (which, really in my mind isn't groundbreaking information), but they again are extraordinarily repetitive. The book could have easily been condensed into a short article in and I would have gotten just as much out of it.

3 comments about Urban Economics.

1. I had "Urban Economics" for one of my urban planning courses at graduate school. It was a pleasure to study the principles and processes of city building, growth and dynamics, through this book. Every chapter in the book can be a title for a separate volume. So this is a very comprehensive overall general view of economics as a determinant of urban development and form.

   I particularly liked the chapters on Urban Poverty and Housing. The chapter on poverty explains issues like income transfers, food stamps and their effect on consumer behavior, problems of inner cities and development policies needed to change that.

   Housing has a great chapter devoted to the peculiarities of housing as a commodity and the effect of race and discrimination on housing patterns. The most interesting part concerns the "filtering" of housing from the upper income to lower income populations.

   Also explained is the auto oriented transportation vs mass transit and their specific roles in shaping cities.

   Highly recommended. Easy to read and understand.




2. STILL IN PACKAGE, book was in great shape, brand new, prompt delivery.



3. It's not the perfect textbook for the subject, but it is good enough that I still use it in my class. I gave five stars to the 5th edition. The new edition has less material and it is organized in a more integrated way, which for some could be better, but I prefer to teach in a more focused way (with each chapter focusing on one issue). Thus, because there is less material and the new organization, I would give 4 stars to the 6th edition. The book is still very comprehensive, although there are topics that could be better explored (either simplified or extended) and in some cases more accurately according to the current standard urban economics. It has a very good survey of empirical evidence (actually the best feature of the book), but they lack details on the evidence and on the limitations of the studies. Finally, the examples in the text and in the end-of-chapters are poor (not realistic, not creative, and not well adjusted to the material in the book). There are no questions to test knowledge, just understanding (however, these questions are not very clear or smart).

5 comments about Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

1. Wow. Jacobs is so adept at explaining the complex currents of global, national and local economies that even the casual reader will be spellbound. The book is simultaneously radical (she essentially repudiates all modern macro-economic theory) and reasonable. This book is a great asset to anyone who wishes to comprehend the world around them.



2. "Any settlement that becomes import-replacing becomes a city." Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs

   Written by an economist, this is a very unusual book. Ms. Jacobs is not hampered by orthodox preconceived notions, misleading postulated theoretical myths like utility optimization, rationality, or efficient markets. These standard phrases of neo-classical economic theory cannot be found in her book. Instead, and although her discussion is entirely nonmathematical, she uses a crude qualtitative idea of excess demand dynamics, of growth vs. decline. Her expectation is never of equilibrium. The notion of equilibrium never appears in this book. Jacobs instead describes qualitatively the reality of nonequilibrium in the economic life of cities, regions, and nations. She concentrates on the surprises of economic reality.

   Jacobs argues fairly convincingly that significant, distributed wealth is created by cities that are inventive enough to replace imports by their own local production, that this is the only reliable source of wealth for cities in the long run, and that these cities need other like-minded cities to trade with in order to survive and prosper. Her expectation is of growth or decline, not of equilibrium. If she is right then the Euro and the European Union are a bad mistake, going entirely in the wrong direction. As examples in support of her argument she points to independent cites like Singapore and Hong Kong with their own local currencies. Other interesting case histories are TVA, small villages in France and Japan, other cases in Italy, Columbia, Ethiopia, US, Iran, ... .

   The book begins in the chapter "Fool's Paradise' with discussions of Keynsian economics and Phillips curves (the Philips curve idea is demolished convincingly by Ormerod in "The Death of Economics"), I. Fisher and monetarism, and Marxism. These were all ideas requiring equilibria of one sort or another. Also interesting: her description why, in the long run, imperialism is bound to fail, written in 1984, well before the fall of the USSR. Her prediction for the fate of the West is not better. Jacobs is aware of the idea of feedback and relies on it well and heavily. She is a sharp observor of economic behavior and is well versed in economic history. This book will likely be found interesting by a scientifically-minded reader who is curious about how economies work, and why all older theoretical ideas (Keynes, monetarism, ... ) have failed to describe economies as they evolve.

   I'm grateful to Yi-Ching Zhang of the Econophysics Forum for recommending this book.




3. Some of your other reviewers have said that they believe this book is outdated.

   That is, I can't help but think, the reaction of internet babies, who are spoiled by the 24 hour round-the-clock updating of bloggers.

   This is a printed book that gives evidence of having been written at a certain moment in history, and in a certain portion of the planet. So what? That is true of all great books, and the question for us is whether we can (a) appreciate that context while (b) taking from them something lasting.

   The answer, for this book, is decidedly afirmative.




4. It is true that the opening chapter of this book sounds dated, but the book as a whole still stands up well.
   
   The first chapter provides the motivational background for the rest of the book by discussing the problem of stagflation, and how existing schools of economic thought failed to account for it (prices should not go up when the economy is in a slump). This does have a dated ring to it; who has been worried about stagflation in the past 20+ years? But the discussion of stagflation merely serves as motivation for what follows, and contemporary readers will be able to think up similar economic mysteries that we live with today, e.g. why did years of near-zero interest rates fail to stimulates Japan's economy as theory said they should, and similarly why is the US still struggling to recover from a recession when it interest rates have been at historic lows for several years?
   
   The rest of the book is devoted Jacobs's thesis that the economic unit that matters is not the nation, nor the individual nor the corporation, but the city (or "city regions" as she calls them). She describes (using examples which still hold up today) the economic effects that cities have on each other and on less developed areas.
   
   As in Jacobs's other books, the writing style is clear, direct and easy to understand.
   
   I would like to hear Jacobs's perspective on European currency union: if she holds to the analysis of the effect of national currencies on cities given in this book then she should be predicting (in the long term) serious economic malaise in Europe, especially in those parts of the union which are currently less developed.



5. In The Death and Life of American Cities, Jane Jacobs demonstrated with clarity, intelligence and righteous indignation that city planners had for decades -- going on a century, in fact -- misunderstood the virtues that cities possessed, and hadn't understood why people wanted to live in them. According to Jacobs, all of orthodox city planning was built around the belief that what city dwellers most wanted was to leave the city and live in a suburb or on a farm. So they bulldozed blighted neighborhood after blighted neighborhood and replaced them with parks. When many of those parks themselves became blighted, filled with the familiar sight of the homeless and drug users, orthodox city planners could only scratch their heads; that simply wasn't supposed to happen. If anything, this only confirmed cities' incorrigibility. So they wiped out sizable sections of major American cities and built freeways out; clearly people would prefer to be elsewhere. The millions who continued to live in American cities were an inconvenient datum.
   
   In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs claims that national governments repeat the same misunderstandings of their cities on a larger -- and possibly more tragic -- scale. At this larger level, they believe that they can produce economic activity just anywhere. Struggling farmland? Dam up their rivers, build schools, give them tax breaks, and invite foreign companies to build factories there. Wait a few years and watch a million economic flowers bloom.
   
   City planners believed -- and maybe still do believe -- that a city was just a defective pasture. According to Jacobs, national planners likewise believe that a city could thrive anywhere. So they build cargo-cult cities and pray that the same thing which animates their real cities will turn their farmland into the next New York. But of course that normally fails. A real city has a good reason for being there; a cargo-cult city does not. People aren't fooled. They want real cities.
   
   Jacobs wants to recast all of macroeconomics using these insights and others, and has the rhetorical skills to convince at least one non-economist that she's on to something. All the dynamism in a national economy, says Jacobs, comes from its cities. Even the vaunted "heartland" of the United States only survives because cities have brought industrial technologies to their farms. If you want to understand why a nation succeeds or fails, says Jacobs, look to its cities. The title of her book is no accident: she wants to yank economics off the track that it's been on ever since Adam Smith.

2 comments about The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City (New Edition).

1. Huffingtonpost.com says it best! "Interviews with bold-faced names including designers Diane Von Furstenberg and Zac Posen, musicians The Talking Heads, and club owner of the legendary CBGB's, Hilly Kristal, make The Warhol Economy an engaging cross between the academic and the gossipy-like an intellectualized Page Six of The New York Post."



2. Completely redundant in that she mentioned only a handful of New York City's avante-garde. The book is interesting but limited in its discussion of the subject. Apparently she thinks that Charles and Ray Eames are brothers and that the MMA is now the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. I wouldn't waste your time, if I were you.