Book club

When someone publishes an op-ed, longer essay, or book, they have to write a tagline.  It's usually two sentences describing their title and affiliation, and whatever big projects are associated with them. 

After watching the preview for The Invention of Lying, however, I began to wonder what these tag lines would look like if they were brutally honest.  With a nod to Megan Mcardle's "Full Disclosure" post from a few years ago, here's fifteen examples I came up with: 

• Jack Silver is a fellow at the Institute for Strategic Studies.  He has been Henry Kissinger's bitch for something like three decades, so when Henry passed on writing something for us, he was the next logical choice.     

 

• Suzie Wong has never been to the country about which she is writing.  What's in this op-ed is culled from a quick perusal of the Economist and a few phone calls.     

 

• Cass Bunstein is a law professor.  He dashed off this essay in his head while commute to work this morning, wrote it in under thirty minutes, and it's still smarter than anything, my dear reader, that will ever pop into your brain. 

 

• Augustine Cornington has been teaching at an obscure state school for two decades, lying in the tall grass, waiting for her archnemesis to make a mistake in print.  This book review is her chance to completely eviscerate him. 

 

• Joe Schlub Jr. is a law professor.  This essay is a badly mangled version of an interesting idea he heard Cass Bunstein riff on at a cocktail party last week. 

 

• Andrew McClutchen is a former governor.  He hopes that this op-ed is the first step in getting beyond that horrible sex scandal from a few years ago. 

 

• Madeleine McFadden is a former cabinet secretary, and did not write a single word of this policy essay.  It is possible she read the first few paragraphs of it, but that's being really optimistic.

 

• Jane Babbington has no extraordinary policy expertise.  She does have an awesome book jacket photo, however, and will have better hair and skin than you do until the day she dies.  

 

• Lou Marston is a very smart professor at Princeton University.  This op-ed is woefully underplaced because he took his own sweet time writing it, and this issue is from last week's news cycle.  

 

• Robert Knaus lost the capacity to write long-form essays years ago - what you just read is what an intern scraped together from one year's worth of Twitter tweets. 

 

• Ann Stoneham is the foremost expert on this topic, and cannot write her way out of a paper bag.  Her uber-competent editor busted her ass for the last 48 hours to try and convert this essay into semi-readable prose

 

• Gwen Pollard is an area expert at a prominent DC think tank.  She fervently hopes that everyone has forgotten how completely wrong she was about this topic just five short years ago.

 

• C. Thomas Pope is a professor at the University of Chicago, and his worldview hardened into an inpenetrable black mass the day he turned twenty-four.  As no amount of contradictory evidence will cause him to change his mind, he is perfectly willing to make absurd, idiotic statements without worrying that he is wrong. 

 

• Richard Jensen is a professor at Harvard University.  He has the Mother of All Balloon Payments due on his mortgage next year, so any extra income helps. 

And, of course.....

• Daniel Drezner is a professor at Tufts University, and is publishing the fifth version of exact same idea with this essay.  Seriously, the man would be nothing without the cut and paste function.

Readers are warmly welcomed to come up with their own brutally honest tag lines in the comments. 

Philip Tetlock has a must-read review essay on political forecasting in the latest issue of The National Interest.  Tetlock is the author of Expert Political Judgment, one of my all-time favorite books in political science. 

Tetlock reviews books by three political prognosticators: Stratfor's George Friedman (who has been mocked just a bit by your humble blogger), FP and Eurasia's Ian Bremmer (who has been panned just a bit by your humble blogger) and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (who was on your humble blogger's dissertation committee and is therefore the source of much Good and Light in the world). 

You'll have to read Tetlock's essay to get his assessment of all three books -- but I do like this one-paragraph summary: 

The authors are all entrepreneurial futurists, but each offers a strikingly distinctive approach to prediction. I organize these approaches under three headings: the superpundit model in which readers take it, more or less on faith, that the forecaster has a pipeline into the future not available to ordinary mortals (a category into which I place George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years); the technocratic-pluralism model in which the authors never get around to making falsifiable predictions of their own but do offer readers a pretty comprehensive survey of forecasting mistakes and an inventory of tools for avoiding them (a category into which I place Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat’s The Fat Tail); and the scientific-reductionist model in which the author embraces a particular theory from the social sciences and shows how, if you apply that theory thoughtfully to real-world contexts, you can derive surprisingly accurate forecasts (a category into which I place Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s The Predictioneer’s Game).

What I found more intriguing was Tetlock's formulation for how to use pundits:

The best thing I can say for the superpundit model is likely to annoy virtually all of that ilk: they look a lot better when we blend them into a superpundit composite. Aggregation helps. As financial journalist James Surowiecki stressed in his insightful book The Wisdom of Crowds, if you average the predictions of many pundits, that average will typically outperform the individual predictions of the pundits from whom the averages were derived. This might sound magical, but averaging works when two fairly easily satisfied conditions are met: (1) the experts are mostly wrong, but they are wrong in different ways that tend to cancel out when you average; (2) the experts are right about some things, but they are right in partly overlapping ways that are amplified by averaging. Averaging improves the signal-to-noise ratio in a very noisy world.... From this perspective, if you want to improve your odds, you are better-off betting not on George Friedman but rather on a basket of averaged-out predictions from a broad ideological portfolio of George Friedman–style pundits. Diversification helps.

I wonder if such an exercise would actually work.  One of the accusations levied against the foreign policy community is that because they only talk to and read each other, they all generate the same blinkered analysis.  I'm not sure that's true, but it would be worth conducting this experiment to see whether a Village of Pundits does a better job than a single pundit. 

OK, so by my calculations, your humble blogger has heard from at least .001% of the Icelandic population in response to my latest book review.  By an eerie -- and not conspiratorial!! -- coincidence -- they have been unable to post responses using FP's f***ed-up somewhat dysfunctional comment software.  Sooo... as a special courtesy to Icelandic Friends of Drezner's Blog (IFDB), here are the responses: 

1) From Petur Henry Peterson: 

You seem, rather naively, to think that this book was written by the Nation of Iceland. You would be better to "follow the money" and realize that its author is one of the people hired and payed handsomely,  for what at the best, appears to be to deceive and manipulate Icelanders about the real state of their banking system. Is he going to identify himself and his friends as the culprits, I dont think so. Strangely, the people who were the best and the brightest, now claim to have been totally clueless
(well some of them were and still are ;).

Most Icelanders realize all too well the cause of the meltdown in lax regulations and cronyisms between right wing politicians (and their supporters, the farmers party) and the financial sector, plus a dash or two of nepotism, stupidity, greed, lack of active democracy and a national minority complex.

I think that's supposed to be "inferiority complex" rather than "minority complex," but you get the idea. 

2)  This one comes from Audur Ingolfsdottir:

I have not read the book myself, and thus have no comments on your analysis on the book itself. However, I must agree with your own second thoughts, on if the last part of the review is perhaps a bit harsh. Not so much because I think Icelanders should not look within to find explanations for the crash last October, but rather you assumption, after having read a book by a single individual, that his analysis are reflective of the "country´s mindset".

The Icelandic public went out to streets, outraged, pounding their pots and pans, which resulted in the government resigning and early elections were called. The director of the financial serveillance authority resigned after huge public pressure. The central bank managers were forced to leave theirs seats, also after great pressure by the public. Hardly any of the people that were in power during and before the collapse are still holding their positions.

Currently the government is going through the very painful process of cutting down costs in the public sector. At the same time, considerable amount of money is being spent in order to investigate the banks, and what went wrong.

So I would say that although there were of course some strong international forces influencing the chain of events, most Icelanders are acutely aware of that a number of things went wrong in our own country, and a lot of work is aheaad to clean up the mess. 

These are fair comments, and it would certainly be unfair to say that Jonsson's worldview represents all Icelanders.

That said, I'm not the only one who's picked up on this meme.  Both Michael Lewis and Ian Parker sussed out the same vibe when they visited Reykjavik -- and it comes out a little bit in the newest Icelandic PM's recent public statements.  Furthermore, the Financial Times recently noted that, "Iceland has a tendency to imagine a British or Dutch conspiracy behind any bad news." 

The problem with this kind of label is that it's hard to shake, so maybe this is dogpiling on a small country.  I'll merely point out, with respect, that this statement in my book review was not based only on Jonsson's book -- rather, it is emblematic of everything I have read to date about Iceland. 

I have a book review in today's Wall Street Journal of Why Iceland? by Ásgeir Jónsson.  The closing paragraph: 

The greatest value of "Why Iceland?" is the window it may open on the country's mind-set. Mr. Jónsson ­devotes page after page to the international culprits that allegedly helped to scupper the economy. In one chapter it is hedge funds. In another, rating agencies, aiming their malice at Iceland in ­particular. Finally, it is a cabal of central bankers who, it is claimed, froze Iceland out of the help they could offer and forced it into the arms of the IMF. None of this is convincing. In the end, Icelanders who want to find someone to blame for their woes may want to look at themselves.

That's a bit harsher than I intended -- Iceland is not solely responsible for theire predicament.  Still, the lack of self-reflection about what happened is quite extraordinary. 

I'm not a big fan of this book, but a great book on this case is dying to be written. 

Back in the spring, I hinted that I would be willing to produce a top ten list of must-read books on the international political economy/global political economy (IPE or GPE for those in  the know), provided there was sufficient demand. 

Judging by the e-mail response, the demand is robust and quite persistent.  So I've decided... to postpone that list for another month or two.

Because you're not ready yet. 

Let's face it, if you have read this far in the post, it means you're either: 

• A curious professor ready to minimize this page if anyone walks in;
• A grad student seeking the keys to success in the profession;
• An intense undergraduate student who really wants to study IPE. 

This is great.  The thing is, most graduate programs in political economy don't give you that much historical background before throwing the cutting-edge theory and methodology at you.  This year I was lunching with some Ph.D. students at one of the top IPE schools in the country, and the students (and some of the professors) made it pretty clear that they didn't know all that much about the topic beyond the tricks of the trade - formal modeling, econometric techniques, etc. 

If you're expecting me to go off on a rant here about the uselessness of these tools, well, you're going to be sadly disappointed.  There are some pretty good reasons to learn these techniques - among other things, they'll help you to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to what blogs, pundits and public intellectuals are saying about the global economy. 

That said, the opportunity cost can be significant - a failure to learn anything about global economic history beyond the stylized facts contained in the most-cited articles.  This would be a weird collection of scattered knowledge, ranging from the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty to the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act to the birth of the Washington Consensus. 

Soooo..... before you are ready to ready the ten books in IPE that you have to read, you should first read these ten books on global economic history.  I'm leaving a lot out here (North and Thomas' The Rise of the Western World; Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation; anything and everything by William McNeill, Joel Mokyr, David Landes, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Joseph Needham; some things by Niall Ferguson, etc.).  That's partly because I've slanted this list towards more recent scholarship, and partly because while these books are excellent economic histories, they don't focus as much on the international dimension. 

[There are some other newly-released books, such as Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance or Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market, that might very well belong on this list.  I'm still in the middle of reading them, however, so the jury is still out.]

Once you imbibe the (sometimes contradictory) information contained in these books, you can look at what the stylized facts contained in IPE books with a much more astringent perspective.  It's not a coincidence that the foundational IPE texts are by the twentieth century's greatest economic historians - Eli Heckscher, Albert Hirschman, Charles Kindleberger, and Jacob Viner.  Trust me - you will feel much the wiser for it. 

The following would be my preferred order of how to read them, but it's hardly the only way to do it: 

1.  Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms:  A Brief Economic History of the World (2007). I've already tagged this book as an interesting read.  If nothing else, the first chapter of this book - "The Sixteen-Page Economic History of the World"  - actually matches the audacity of the title.  As I said, I don't completely buy Clark's explanation of Malthus + genetics = Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.  His attempt to explain away the irrelevance of institutions doesn't hold up to scrutiny.  Still, I will say I better appreciated the heyday of mercantilism after reading Clark. 

2.  Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, Jr., How the West Grew Rich (1986).  Perfect when paired with Clark, because Rosenberg and Birdzell present the classical argument for why Western Europe was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. 

3.  Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997).  The third leg in the triad of "why did Europe dominate the globe?" explanations.  If Clark focuses on genetics/culture, and Rosenberg and Birdzell focus on institutions, Diamond proffers a geographical determinism.  Simply put, he thinks the temperate climate of Eurasia was bound to produce the most sophisticated societies with the most advanced animals, germs, and technologies.  Diamond's argument complements rather substitutes for the institutions and culture arguments.  If nothing else, it is impossible to read this book and ever buy the ending to War of the Worlds.

4.  John Nye, War, Wine and Taxes (2007).  David Ricardo's classic example of comparative advantage was English wool for Portuguese wine.  Nye explodes the "natural" aspect of this trade, demonstrating how high tariffs against French wine proved a boon to both the Portuguese and English beer distillers.  Nye stretches his argument too far at times, but the interrelationship between war, protectionism, and statebuilding is pretty damn fascinating. 

5.  Douglas Irwin, Against the Tide:  An Intellectual History of Free Trade (1996).  Irwin's book is more a history of economic thought than economic history, but nevertheless tells a remarkable story:  how did the idea of free trade knock off mercantilism, protectionism, strategic trade theory, and other doctrines?  

6.  Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization and History (1999).  A lucid, detailed and fascinating study of how the nineteenth century of globalization went down.  When anyone argues that the current (fast fading?) era of globalization is historically unique, take the hardcover version of this book and whack them on the head with it.  Special bonus book:  people who liked this should go on to read Power and Plenty by Kevin O'Rourke and Ron Findlay). 

7.  Jeffry Frieden, Global Capitalism:  Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2006).  This book is to the twentieth centiury as Williamson and O'Rourke's book is to the nineteenth - except it's written for a wider audience, so it's a more accessible read.  Accessible doesn't mean simple, however - this book is chock full of interesting arguments, cases, and counterarguments.  

8.  Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital:  A History of the International Monetary System, second edition (2008).  A more narrow work than Frieden's, Eichengreen's book is the starting point for understanding the classical gold standard, the Bretton Woods regime, and whatever the hell system we have now the Bretton Woods II regime. 

9.  Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights (1997).  Yergin and Stanislaw tell a cheerleader's tale of how the Washington Consensus displaced the old quasi-Keynesian, quasi-socialist economic order that had its apogee and downfall in the 1970s.  What's particularly interesting is their argument that what mattered was the content and spread of the ideas themselves, and not some coercive power, that led to the re-embrace of markets.  

10. Paul Blustein, The Chastening (2001).  Blustein, a reporter for the Washington Post, tells the you-are-there version of the Asian financial crisis and the reaction from the U.S. Treasury Department.  If you want to know why Pacific Rim economies started hoarding foreign exchange reserves beginning in 1999, read this book. 

OK, readers, which books would you recommend? 

The International Studies Association announces a book contest: 

The International Studies Best Book of the Decade Award honors the best book published in international studies over the last decade. In order to be selected, the winning book must be a single book (edited volumes will not be considered) that has already had or shows the greatest promise of having a broad impact on the field of international studies over many years. Only books of this broad scope, originality, and interdisciplinary significance should be nominated.

Hmmm.... which books published between 2000 and 2009 should be on the short list?  This merits some thought, but the again, this is a blog post, so the following choices are the first five books that came to mind: 

1. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001)
2. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory (2001). 
3. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill (2003)
4. Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, Savng Capitalism from the Capitalists (2003). 
5. Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms (2007). 

I don't agree with everything in these books -- but they linger the most in the cerebral cortex. 

So, dear readers, which books do you think are worthy of consideration for this award? 

Free books are both a major perk and a major inequity of being a senior professor.  Academic publishers send loads of free books to me and my senior colleagues in the hopes that we assign them in class, mention them on the blog, etc.  This is a tragic inequality of the academic system, since as a full professor I should, in theory, be able to buy these books Meanwhile, debt-ridden graduate students have to pay for these things. 

Yesterday, however, was a real treat, because I got several books in the mail that were written by my friends (at least that's what my Facebook page tells me):

1. Daniel Nexon's The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe:  Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change.  A book about the ways in which transnational religious movements threatened the old political order of continental Europe.  Gee, it's too bad this kind of discussion doesn't resonate in today's world politics. 
2. Sadanand Dhume, My Friend the Fanatic:  Travels with a Radical Islamist.  Why is radical Islam such a growth industry in Indonesia?  Dhume travels across that country with an Islamist who worships Osama bin Laden to examine its appeal. 
3. Joshua Gans, Parentonomics:  An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting.  Josh and I started in grad school at the same time, so I'm already freaked out by the concept that he's a parent.  That he's written a Steve Leavitt-inspired book on the topic is even freakier.  Of course, I have no choice but to read it. 
4. Daniel W. Drezner, ed., Avoiding Trivia:  The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy.  Sure, you might call this shameless self-promotion, but guess what?  I can honestly say that I'm the least important person involved in this book.  The other contributors -- including Richard Haass, David Gordon, Jeff Legro, Bruce Jentleson, Stephen D. Krasner, Amy Zegart, and FP's own Peter Feaver and Will Inboden -- are the ones who provide the real meat of the book.  I just set the table and poured the wine on this project. 

Enjoy!

In the category of "book reviews that would fit on Twitter," we have this sentence from Louise Richardson's New York Times Book Review of Michael Burleigh's Blood and Rage:  A Cultural History of Terrorism: 

To appreciate the virtues of this book (it is, in its way, an exceptional synthesis), one has to make a conscious and concerted effort to ignore the condescending tone, the incessant sneering, the unsupported assertions and the gross generalizations.