Books to Consider
Every once in a while I come across books that add to our general knowledge of our society and history and how history relates to the current era of society and politics. As I learn of them and their worth, I will post them here with a short comment on the book.
Autumn of The Empire, by Joshua Clover
A brief excerpt from the LA Review of Book:
For a brief period, our various ministers (official and not) insisted that no one had seen the crisis coming, and indeed that no one could have seen it coming. Like so many stories of the moment, this one would not last. The reputed unforeseeability of the bust was a kind of alibi, of course, by virtue of which the bubble-inflators could claim to have had the best intentions. Alan Greenspan was foremost among these bubblistas, with Robert Rubin close behind. Had anyone known, of course we would have done things differently.
But this alibi was itself a bubble. As with the economy itself, once the alibi bubble burst, and the wishful thinking and corruption leaked out, the underlying facts began to present themselves. A couple, or several, okay really quite a few folks had called it. Robert Shiller of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index rose to the fore among them; he had called the dotcom bust as well. Nouriel Roubini, business prof and head of the consulting outfit Roubini Global Economics, achieved media ubiquity — his dire forecasts and dour demeanor would earn him the title of “Dr. Doom.” Dean Baker, founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, had not only issued warnings, but in 2004 sold his home in a recently gentrified quarter of Washington, DC — the gentleman’s way of betting against the market. Then there are the less gentlemanly sorts found in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, who made millions and billions by seeing it coming.
This sounds like a really interesting book to add to one’s summer reading list.
A NEW BOOKS TO READ – 1/20/2012
A new book on the global economy has been released. The Growth Map: Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond , by Jim O’Neill, is a must read for those interested in global economics.
In 2001, Jim O’Neill predicted the fastest growing economies of the past decade. Now he’s back to explore the new growth markets we should all be watching closely today.
It’s been ten years since Jim O’Neill conceived of the BRIC acronym. He and his team made a startling prediction: Four developing nations- Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRICs)-would overtake the six largest Western economies within forty years. The BRIC analysis permanently changed the world of global investing, and its accuracy has stood the test of time.
The Growth Map features O’Neill’s personal account of the BRIC phenomenon, how it has evolved, and where those four key nations currently stand after a turbulent decade. And the book also offers an equally bold prediction about the “Next Eleven” countries: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam. These developing nations may not seem exceptional today, but they offer exciting opportunities for investors over the next decade, just as BRIC did before them.
O’Neill also shares several compelling insights about the world economy. He reveals the value for growing countries in being “willing to play” by meaningfully committing to policies that encourage further growth and engagement with globalization. He explains how the g20 can adjust to better incorporate the BRICs and to better reflect the balance of the global economy.
Finally, O’Neill makes the counterintuitive claim that good things can quite often come from crises. While established economic powers may see the rise of the BRICs as a threat, international trade benefits us all over the long term. Likewise, the recent financial crisis revealed deep problems in our economic systems, problems we now have the opportunity to fix.
A work of astute and absorbing analysis, The Growth Map is an indispensable guide for every investor and every participant in the global economy. Anyone who wants to understand the developing world would do well to heed the man called “one of the most sought-after economic commentators on the planet.” (The Telegraph)
O’Neill’s readers says his predictions are invariably correct and provides a brilliant and insightful analysis of the dynamic forces that are changing our world and the lives of millions of people.
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson
How did the widening gap between haves and have-nots—even worse, the haves and have-mores—come about? In the past 30 years, the top 1 percent have enjoyed 36 percent of all the income growth generated in the U.S. economy. Treating the growing socioeconomic gap like a whodunit, Hacker and Pierson painstakingly detail the gap between the superrich and everyone else. They paint a portrait of a nation that has fallen behind other developed nations in the widening income gap among its citizens. Worse, the wealth gap cannot be explained away by a lack of education or skills. Even among the well educated, a chasm has developed between the middle class and the wealthy. Whodunit? The U.S. government, which details changes in taxation and public policy, particularly regarding the financial markets, which have favored the wealthy at the expense of others over the last 30 years. Finally, they consider the long-term implications of this troubling trend and offer some encouraging signs—health care and financial reform, however anemic—and a growing discontent with the status quo.
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus – Rick Perlstein
The sudden rise of Tea Party conservatives shocked the pundits and caused people in general to wonder where this movement suddenly came from. But it’s not new. It’s been part of the conservative movement for 40 years, ever since the campaign to elect Barry Goldwater came into being. This is the story of how the conservative movement took over the Republican Party and changed it.
To really understand the origins of the Tea Party and the rise of modern conservatism, you need to read this book.
Not every presidential election is worth a book more than a quarter-century after the last ballot has been counted. The 1964 race was different, though, and author Rick Perlstein knows exactly why. That year, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat, trounced his opponent, Barry Goldwater, a Republican senator from Arizona, in a blowout of historic proportions. The conservative wing of the GOP, which had toiled for so long as the minority partner in a coalition dominated by more liberal brethren, finally had risen to power and nominated one of its own, only to see him crash in terrible splendor. It looked like a death, but it was really a birth: a harrowing introduction to politics that would serve conservatives well in the years ahead as they went on to great success. Conservatives learned a lot in 1964:
- It was learning how to act: how letters got written, how doors got knocked on, how co-workers could be won over on the coffee break, how to print a bumper sticker and how to pry one off with a razor blade; how to put together a network whose force exceeded the sum of its parts by orders of magnitude; how to talk to a reporter, how to picket, and how, if need be, to infiltrate–how to make the anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering.
These were practical lessons that anybody in politics must pick up. For conservatives, the rough indoctrination came in 1964, and Perlstein (who is not a conservative) tells their story in detail and with panache. Before the Storm is not a history of conservative ideas (for that, read The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, by George Nash), but a chronicle of how these ideas began to matter in politics. The victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980–to say nothing of Newt Gingrich in 1994 and George W. Bush in 2000–might not have been possible without the glorious failure of Barry Goldwater in 1964. As Perlstein writes, “You lost in 1964. But something remained after 1964: a movement. An army. An army that could lose a battle, suck it up, regroup, then live to fight a thousand battles more.”
