Archive | Book reviews
Book review | Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son by Lionel Barber
The Financial Times | 16 October 2024
At the very beginning of Gambling Man, his biography of Masayoshi “Masa” Son, the founder of Japanese investment firm SoftBank, Lionel Barber concedes that his subject is “probably the most powerful mogul of the twenty-first century who is not a household name”. The rest of the book proceeds to prove how absurd a paradox this is.
Son is, after all, a biographer’s dream. His career is an almost surreal string of personal highs and lows. Zelig-like, he has been present at - and indeed often responsible for - almost every big turning point in global tech over the past four decades. This is a man, Barber, a former editor of the FT, reminds us, who has been “the single largest foreign investor in capitalist America and communist China; the biggest start-up funder in the world, and the boss of one of the top ten most indebted firms, continually threatening a financial implosion”.
You can read my review of the book here.
Book review | Money: A Story of Humanity by David McWilliams
The Financial Times | 4 September 2024
“Not one man in a million understands the nature of money — and you meet him every day”. I imagine that this apocryphal quip from the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson will draw a few wry smiles from Financial Times readers. After all, they are probably as interested as anyone in money’s mysterious secrets. They are also likely well aware that there is never a shortage of authors promising to reveal them.
The last few years alone have seen the publication of 2022’s Money in One Lesson by Gavin Jackson; 2020’s Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein; and 2016’s Money Changes Everything by William Goetzmann, to name but a few. There was even an effort by some bloke called Martin. That’s before one gets to modern staples such as David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) let alone classics like J M Keynes’s Treatise on Money (1930) or the granddaddy of them all, Georg Simmel’s terrifying and impenetrable The Philosophy of Money (1900).
Yet in defiance of Professor Samuelson’s cynicism, David McWilliams’s Money: A Story of Humanity succeeds in offering an enjoyable and insightful addition to this bulging canon. That’s partly because of McWilliams’s unusual background. A classically trained economist who has worked both as a central banker and on the financial markets, he is the founder of Kilkenomics — the world’s first festival of economics and stand-up comedy. But it’s even more to do with the book’s skilfully executed approach.
You can read my review of the book here.
Book review | Why Politicians Lie About Trade by Dmitry Grozoubinski and How The World Ran Out of Everything by Peter S. Goodman
The Financial Times | 16 July 2024
As the World Trade Organization approaches its 30th birthday on New Year’s Day, 2025, the international trading system is in crisis.
The world’s largest economic blocs — the US, the EU, and China — are locked in an escalating tripartite tariff war. The UK has left the EU’s single market. The Covid pandemic saw unprecedented disruption to the flows of goods around the world. National security and decarbonisation have emerged as priorities in stark competition with free trade.
What these winds of change blowing through the global trading system mean is nicely summed up by Dmitry Grozoubinski early on in his new book Why Politicians Lie About Trade : “while you may have chosen to take little interest in trade policy, trade policy is increasingly taking an interest in you.”
You can read my review of these books here.
Book review | The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies
The Financial Times | 4 April 2024
Waiting to board a flight recently, I witnessed a stark example of a phenomenon at the heart of The Unaccountability Machine. A fellow passenger had been refused boarding and was pleading with the airline attendant. The attendant was obviously sympathetic — but the refusal was company policy. It was as frustrating for her as for the passenger, but there was unfortunately nothing she could do.
We were witnessing what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink”: a situation in which a human system delegates decision-making to a rule book rather than an identifiable individual. If something goes wrong, no one is held to account.
The starting point of Davies’s entertaining, insightful book is that the uncontrolled proliferation of accountability sinks is one of the central drivers of what historian Adam Tooze calls the “polycrisis” of the twenty-first century. Their influence reaches far beyond frustrated customers endlessly on hold to “computer says no” service departments. In finance, banking crises regularly recur — yet few individual bankers are found to be at fault. If politicians’ promises flop, meanwhile, they complain they have no power. The Deep State is somehow to blame.
You can read my review of the book here.
Book review | The Age of Prediction by Igor Tulchinsky and Christopher E. Mason
The Financial Times | 30 Aug 2023
“Humanity has entered a new era.” That is the bold claim with which quant investor Igor Tulchinsky and Cornell professor of genomics Christopher E. Mason begin The Age of Prediction — their ambitious new survey of how predictive algorithms are changing the world.
Its publication could hardly be better timed. The public first became aware that something big was happening in the world of AI back in 2016, when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo program defeated the reigning world champion at Go. Four years later, the company’s AlphaFold program solved one of the biggest puzzles in modern biology: the challenge of predicting the molecular structures into which proteins fold, based only on the sequences of their constituent amino acids.
Then late last year came the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — the first of a flurry of Large Language Models that exhibit freakish abilities to sustain human-like conversations, and have left the famous Turing test for dust. Even the experts can’t agree whether we should be tantalised or terrified by the machine learning revolution evidently underway.
But what exactly does it consist of? The Age of Prediction avoids getting bogged down in the debate over what actually counts as AI. Instead, it goes directly to the source and identifies the three big changes which in practice lie behind the startling achievements of the last decade.
You can read my review of the book here.
Book review | Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian
The Financial Times | 25 April 2023
One of the centrepieces of UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s March 2023 Budget was the creation of 12 new Investment Zones — specially designated geographical areas which will benefit from tax breaks and other incentives intended to hot-house investment and innovation. Supporters hailed the scheme for finally making good on the government’s elusive manifesto promise of “leveling up”. Sceptics dismissed it as window-dressing aimed at reviving the ruling Conservative party’s polling numbers in the north.
The aim of leading intellectual historian Quinn Slobodian’s new book is to convince us that special investment zones such as these in fact represent something more profound — and much more sinister. They are, he argues, just the respectable face of what he terms ‘crack-up capitalism’: the strategy of “punching holes in the territory of the nation-state, creating zones of exception with different laws and often no democratic oversight”. Behind them is massed a powerful, tenacious, and well-resourced intellectual movement that has for seventy years been devoted to rejecting the fundamental principles of democratic governance and the social market economy in favour of a libertarian, radical capitalist alternative. They are the entry-level drug to Peter Thiel’s dream of seaborne, law-lite, start-up nations.
You can read my review of the book here.
Book review | Escape From Model Land by Erica Thompson
The Guardian | 30 December 2022
“The only function of economic forecasting,” wrote the great American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, “is to make astrology look respectable.”*
It is characteristic of Erica Thompson’s sprightly and highly original new book on the uses and abuses of mathematical modeling that she dares to turn Galbraith’s verdict on its head. The mediaeval practice of casting horoscopes, she shows in one typically engaging section which illustrates many of her most important themes, has a surprising amount to teach us about the modern practice of using mathematical models to guide policy.
The overall topic is an exceptionally important and timely one. The COVID pandemic, the climate crisis, and the GFC are just three glaring examples of how fundamental mathematical modelling has become to decision-making in many critical areas of modern life.
You can read my review of it for The Guardian here.
* Professor James K. Galbraith - son of John Kenneth Galbraith - kindly wrote to me subsequent to the publication of this review with a correction. Although regularly attributed to his father, Professor Galbraith explains that this remark is in fact due to Ezra Solomon, a Stanford professor who seved on President Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisors. “It’s not a bad line,” he writes, “but my father had plenty of others; he can afford it.”
Book review | Free Market by Jacob Soll
The Guardian | 30 September 2022
Strange things are afoot in the world of economic policy these days.
Liz Truss is, by her own account, Margaret Thatcher’s biggest admirer and a fanatical devotee of economic liberalisation. Yet the very first act of the new Prime Minister was to enact the largest single government intervention in the UK’s history – a price cap for retail energy markets expected to cost the Treasury more than the entire NHS budget. It is not an isolated case.
The flagship fiscal policy of Truss’s immediate predecessor as Tory Prime Minister – “leveling up” – was essentially an admission that free markets cannot be left to their own devices in allocating investment across regions. In the world of money and finance, the era of Quantitative Easing has effectively nationalized large parts of the world’s major bond markets. In international trade, meanwhile, the United States has morphed into the world’s leading protectionist power – whilst communist China is toasted in Davos as the last great champion of free trade.
Forget strange things – it’s more like Stranger Things. Global economic policy seems to have stumbled through a gate to the Upside Down.
Yet how surprised should we really be by these flagrant U-turns and blatant inconsistencies? Free Market: The History of An Idea – a sprightly new history of economic liberalism by the leading intellectual historian Jacob Soll – argues that if we understood our own economic tradition a little better, the answer would be “Not very”.
You can read my review of it for The Guardian here.
Book review | The Currency of Politics by Stefan Eich
Financial Times | 2 August 2022
2022 is turning out to be the year that puts the politics back into monetary policy.
For 30 years or more, inflation was quiescent – even despite the violent shocks of the tech crash and the global financial crisis. As a result, even the unprecedented monetary policies implemented after 2008 failed to provoke much real controversy.
But this year, things have changed. With inflation topping 9 per cent in the UK and US, the questions of when and by how much interest rates should rise – and who will be the winners and losers when they do – are back at the top of the political agenda.
That is just the start. Public satisfaction with the Bank of England’s performance hit the lowest on record last month. Liz Truss, the leading candidate to the UK’s next Prime Minister, has taken note, and pledged to review the central bank’s mandate. The once sacrosanct idea of monetary policy independence is now explicitly under threat.
How should we evaluate these radical developments? Stefan Eich’s new book provides a splendidly clear framework: you can read my review of it for the Financial Times here.
Book review | The Price of Time by Edward Chancellor
Reuters Breakingviews | 8 July 2022
Edward Chancellor’s erudition, expertise, and wit are no secrets to readers of his Breakingviews columns. Some of you may not be aware, however, that he also has an eerie sense of timing.
In 1999 he published “Devil Take the Hindmost”, his superlative history of speculative manias. Within a year, the dot-com bubble had burst. His next book, published in 2005, prophesied that it was “Crunch Time for Credit”. Eighteen months later, the biggest banking crisis in history had begun. Now, Chancellor has given us “The Price of Time”, a blistering polemic against the evils of artificially low interest rates. Right on cue, the gravy train of ultra-loose monetary policy has come to a halt.
Perhaps you should therefore not just buy this book but sell all your stocks.
In The Price of Time, Chancellor addresses the biggest economic question of the past fifteen years. Have the experimental monetary policies pursued by the world’s leading central banks since the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 been a miracle cure or an epochal mistake?
You can find out what his answer is in my review for Reuters Breakinviews here.
Book review | Cogs and Monsters by Diane Coyle, and The New Economics by Steve Keen
Financial Times | 11 November 2021
The question of whether economics needs reform never seems to go away.
The reason is simple. It is that the ultimate subject matter of economics is of intense interest to virtually everyone on the planet: nothing more nor less than how human society really works – and how it might be made to work better.
For equally obvious reasons, every new social and economic crisis gives the debate a fresh dose of adrenaline – and the COVID pandemic has been no exception.
There could not be a better time, therefore, for Diane Coyle and Steve Keen to set out their respective visions of how to make economics fit for the twenty-first century in their new books, Cogs and Monsters and The New Economics.
Coyle and Keen are both distinguished academic economists. But there the similarities end.
Coyle is the ultimate establishment insider, both in intellectual (Harvard PhD, Cambridge chair) and professional (ex-UK Treasury, CBE, numerous public appointments) terms. Her critiques of economics over the past two decades have been subtle, measured, and practical. Previous salvos, though rich in serious argument, have travelled under playful titles: The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters and GDP: a Brief but Affectionate History.
Keen, by contrast, is an inveterate maverick. A leading light of heterodox economics, he carved out his academic career in unfashionable university departments (UWA in Australia; Kingston in the UK). The closest he has deigned to come to the establishment is his current tilt at the Australian Senate under the banner of the mold-breaking New Liberals Party. Rather than diplomatic niceties, he revels in Antipodean bluntness: the title of his most famous book is Debunking Economics.
You can read about the visions of these two very different authors for the future of economics in my review of their books published on November 11, 2021 in the Financial Times here.
Book review | Bettering Humanomics by Deidre Nansen McCloskey
Financial Times | 27 May 2021
It is no secret that the glory days of the kind of economics many of us learned at university are long gone.
The mighty edifice of neoclassical micro erected by Samuelson, Becker, and Stigler – with its hyper-rational homo economicus operating within a crystalline architecture of preferences, incentives, and constraints – went first. It disintegrated following sustained assault by the behavioural school of Kahnemann, Thaler, and Sunstein. By the turn of the millennium, it was out with the hard-nosed regulatory economists of the 80s and 90s, and in with behavioural insights and Nudge Units.
As for traditional macro – whether of the Saltwater Neo-Keynesian or the Freshwater New Classical flavours – that flamed out in spectacular fashion in 2008 when, as the Queen herself famously observed, it failed to predict the biggest economic crisis in history. It took a decade for policy-makers to desert the old doctrines explicitly, but there is little doubt today that the Biden administration’s lodestar is more MMT than JMK or RBC.
Yet are these revolutions really the answer to the shortcomings of Old School Econ 101? For more than four decades, Deidre Nansen McCloskey – professor emerita of no fewer than six separate disciplines at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a truly unclassifiable scholar who has made major contributions to economic theory, history, methodology, and statistics – has been arguing that the problems run deeper. What economics needs to fulfil its unparalleled potential as the premier science of human progress, she insists, is the rediscovery of its origins as the discipline which successfully marries the methods of the sciences and the humanities.
Professor McCloskey explains why in her new book, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science. I reviewed it in the Financial Times on May 27, 2021. You can read my review here.
Book review | The World for Sale by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
Financial Times | 2 March 2021
With the reflation trade suddenly ripping through the exchanges, a $1.9tn stimulus bill steaming through the US Congress, and “Dr Copper” bursting through $9,000 a tonne to prices not seen since the heady days of 2011, the commodity markets are headline news again. Could there be a better moment for Javier Blas and Jack Farchy’s rollicking new account of those markets’ recent history to land on investors’ desks?
It’s as if the Bloomberg News reporters (and former FT journalists) have picked up not just a rich archive of ripping yarns from their years interviewing the industry’s leading traders — but some of their uncanny sense of timing too.
Commodities have not always been a hot topic. In 1998, I landed my first proper job, as bag-carrier to the head of the energy and mining department at the World Bank. Back then, commodity markets seemed in terminal decline. The oil price had plummeted by 45 per cent over the previous 18 months. The mood in commodity-producing developing countries was apocalyptic.
The Bank was on a mission to convince its clients that the good old days were not coming back: privatisation and reform were the only ways forward. At every meeting, we would pull out a chart of the real-terms price of oil over the previous nine decades. The boom times of the last two decades were a historical aberration, we would explain. Oil at $10 a barrel was here to stay.
We were of course spectacularly wrong. In December 1998, the oil price bounced, and then more than doubled in the next 12 months. It was just getting started. The 2000s witnessed a supercycle the like of which the world had never seen before — with the oil price topping out at $145 a barrel in June 2008. We had bottom-ticked the biggest commodity bull market in history.
At the core of The World For Sale: Money, Power, and The Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources is the story of how this historic boom catapulted a group of previously low-key international commodity trading houses — the likes of Cargill, Vitol, Trafigura, and Glencore — to extraordinary financial wealth and political power.
My review of the book was published in the Financial Times on March 2, 2021. If you have a subscription, you can read it here.
Book review | Under the Influence by Robert Frank
New Statesman | 18 March 2020
Behavioural economics – that branch of the subject which rejects the hyper-rational construct of homo economicus in favour of a more realistic understanding of human behaviour – is now so firmly a part of mainstream policy design that it seems hard to believe that two decades ago almost no one outside of the profession had heard of it.
That changed in 2002, when the Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work with Amos Tversky on integrating the real-world foibles of human psychology into economic analysis. Then in 2008, in their monster best-seller Nudge, the Chicago professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein introduced the wonderful possibility that clever policy might actually subvert the innate cognitive biases identified by Kahneman and Tversky to achieve the Holy Grail of liberal government: getting people to make better choices of their own accord.
What is not widely understood, however, is that Thaler and Sunstein’s nudge theory was only one half of the behavioural economics revolution. The other half has thus far made much more limited inroads into the public’s consciousness. With any luck, however, that is about to change; because its story is told in Under the Influence – an invaluable new book from Cornell University’s Robert Frank, another of the founding fathers of behavioural economics. If policy-makers have any sense, this book will be as important a manual in the 2020s as Nudge was in the 2010s.
You can read my review of Under the Influence for the New Statesman here.
Book review | More: the 10,000 Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan
Financial Times | 14 February 2020
Adam Smith concluded the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations with an observation intended to shock his readers out of their complacency. So miraculous is the power of economic growth, he wrote, that “the accommodation of an European prince does not so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king”.
What was the magic formula that had allowed Europe’s economies to furnish even their poorest citizens with such unprecedented material comfort? Smith made this the ur-question of economic history — and in his masterwork, he supplied the ur-answer. The secret sauce is trade, and the division of labour which it permits. That led to his central policy conclusion: a liberal economic order that gives free rein to trade is to be protected at all costs from the partisans of protectionism and monopoly.
More, a lucid and wide-ranging new history of the global economy from Philip Coggan, is a book firmly in the Smithian tradition. Like Smith, Coggan — a senior Economist journalist and former FT columnist — is concerned that the sheer scale of what compound economic growth has achieved is not generally appreciated. Like Smith, he locates the roots of these tremendous improvements in the spread of markets and the growth of trade. And like Smith, Coggan’s ultimate goal is to defend the virtues of a liberal economic order in an age when those virtues are under siege.
You can read my review of More for the Financial Times here.
Book review | Sabotage by Anna Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan
New Statesman | 29 January 2020
Sam Mendes’s 1917 is the talk of Oscar season – but when I went to see it last week I was prepared to be disappointed.
My fears had nothing to do with the film’s cast or crew. The trouble is that the film’s subject matter is hardly virgin territory. Make a film about the First World War, and you are pitting yourself against Renoir and Kubrick, to say nothing of Blunden, Sassoon, Junger, and Remarque – and that’s before you even get to the poets. It is a high bar for any new artistic treatment.
I have to confess that I had a similar sense of trepidation when I began Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan’s new book Sabotage: The Business of Finance. As its title suggests, this is a book about what is wrong with finance and how to reform it. Moreover, much of the evidence it adduces to answer these questions consists of case studies from the global financial crisis of 2007-09.
As Sabotage itself concedes early on, these are topics which by now been picked over in minute detail in a decade’s-worth of articles, books, plays and films. Here too the bar for yet another effort is set high. What new contribution, I wondered, can Sabotage possibly make to set itself apart?
You can find out in my review of the book in the New Statesman.
Book review | John Law by James Buchan
Financial Times | 1 September 2018
Anyone who feels gloomy about the current state of the world’s advanced economies — with their public finances groaning and their policymaking paralysed by vested interests — should spare a thought for France in September 1715.
That was the month in which Louis XIV, the Sun King of Versailles, died after 72 years on the throne and half a century of near-constant war. He left behind a necrotic economy, a treasury on the verge of bankruptcy, and a system of state finance that depended on a vast class of rentiers virulently opposed to any kind of entitlement reform. Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, France’s newly appointed regent, was at a loss for what to do.
Into this desperate situation stepped one of history’s most extraordinary, versatile, and enigmatic characters, and the subject of James Buchan’s masterly new biography — a little-known Scots gambler, adventurer, and sometime economist by the name of John Law.
I reviewed Buchan’s John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century in the Financial Times on September 1, 2018: you can read it here.
I explain in my review that my one regret is that Buchan does not explore Law’s actual ideas in more detail. That is a pity, because in my view Law was a visionary theorist and policy-maker, many of whose ideas are even more relevant today than they were three hundred years ago.
I therefore strongly recommend that anyone interested in Law reads not just Buchan’s biography, but also Antoin Murphy’s John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker – which remains the gold standard on Law’s theoretical and practical innovations.
Book review | Unelected Power by Paul Tucker
New Statesman | 13 June 2018
A few weeks ago, President Erdogan of Turkey announced on the campaign trail that if he is re-elected later this summer, his first act will be to take control of interest rates back from the Central Bank of Turkey.
The currency markets were shocked: the Turkish lira promptly dropped by 10%.
The reason is that President Erdogan’s bold proposal flies in the face of what has been for forty years the modern consensus on the best way to conduct monetary policy. Politicians, that consensus holds, will always be tempted to prioritise popularity at the ballot box over economic stability, resulting in boom-bust cycles ultimately detrimental to growth and employment. The setting of interest rates should therefore be delegated, it says, to a technocratic central bank, which will have the political independence to take the longer term view.
President Erdogan, however, sees things differently. “When people fall into difficulties because of monetary policies, who are they going to hold accountable?” he asked: “They’ll hold the president accountable.” In a democracy, the President was arguing, it is not enough for those who make policy to be competent and effective. When their actions determine who gets what and why, they have to have legitimacy as well; and democratic legitimacy is the one thing that technocrats, almost by definition, lack.
Who is right – the modern consensus, with its emphasis on the need for expertise and independence; or the President, who says accountability and legitimacy should take priority? The underlying issue is summed up in the title of this new book by Sir Paul Tucker – the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, and now a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. It is why, when, and how elected governments should entrust their capabilities to Unelected Power.
In my view, it is difficult to overstate the importance this question – and therefore how valuable and timely this book is. You can read my review of it in the New Statesman magazine here.
Book review | The Great Economists by Linda Yueh
New Statesman | 19 March 2018
Is economics a science? It’s an old question – and in my view, not a terribly useful one. Yet there is of course a reason why it never stops being asked.
Physicists have discovered the universal laws governing energy and motion, and as a result can tell us with scarcely credible precision how to land a man on the moon. Economists, by contrast, can’t even agree on why the last financial crisis happened, let alone what we should do to prevent the next one – and that’s despite the fact we wrote the rules of finance ourselves. Real sciences make progress. Economics, on the other hand, seems to go round and round in circles.
Needless to say, this embarrassing situation irritates economists more than anyone else. As a result, over the past several decades, mainstream economics has attempted to assimilate itself ever more closely to the culture and methods of the natural sciences. These days, self-respecting economists express their theories as mathematical models, not in words. Advanced statistical techniques are deployed to test hypotheses and so resolve the answers to empirical questions. If possible, experiments are designed and conducted. A few of the most avant garde researchers have even gone so far as to rebrand their research groups as “labs”.
Whether these developments represent a long-overdue reform of the methodology of economics, or just the symptoms of a chronic inferiority complex, they have certainly dealt a mortal blow to one formerly central area of the economics curriculum: the history of economic thought. If, after all, economics is a science, there is no more point in reading the economists of prior ages than there is in engaging with Aristotle on biology or mugging up the theory of phlogiston.
The publication of Linda Yueh’s The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today is therefore a fascinating event for anyone interested in economics. For this is a book which, as it title suggests, openly champions the value of studying the leading economic thinkers of the past. You can read my review of it in the New Statesman here.
Book review | The Growth Delusion by David Pilling
Financial Times | 10 January 2018
In the good old days before Brexit and the global financial crisis, politics was all so simple. The western liberal democracies had reached the “End of History”. So far as old conundrums such as ideology and identity were concerned, nobody really cared much any more. All that mattered now was to ramp up material prosperity. “It’s the economy, stupid”, as Bill Clinton apocryphally said.
It all sounds rather naive now, of course. Two and a half decades on from President Clinton’s bons mots, the world’s developed economies are wealthier than ever — indeed, more than 70 per cent larger in real terms than they were in 1992. Yet far from having achieved a nirvana of political stability, they are racked by a social strife and ideological conflict unseen in many decades.
Where did Clinton’s confident verdict go wrong? It is the Ur-question of our era, and the political convulsions of the past decade have ushered in a golden age of popular social and economic analysis intended to explain why an expanding economy is not by itself enough.
The Growth Delusion, a new book by the FT’s Africa editor David Pilling, offers a new and intriguing entry-point to this momentous debate. You can read my review of it for the Financial Times here.
Book review | Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington
New Statesman | 11 October 2016
On April 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a vast cache of information leaked from Mossack Fonseca, a little-known corporate law firm based in Panama City. The “Panama Papers” revealed that this firm had for many decades specialised in devising schemes to enable clients from all over the world to hold their financial assets, often anonymously, in jurisdictions outside their home countries. In doing so, they shone a rare light on the secretive industry that is the topic of Brooke Harrington’s valuable new book, Capital Without Borders: the lawyers, accountants, tax advisers and professional trustees who collectively constitute the world of wealth management.
That world is, by definition, difficult to research. Previous studies have focused on the legal and constitutional anomalies represented by the so-called offshore jurisdictions where the corporate structures they build are incorporated: the British Virgin Islands, Mauritius, the Cayman Islands, and so on. What makes Harrington’s book unusual is that she chose instead to investigate the wealth management industry itself. There were no short cuts to doing so. Harrington went undercover as a trainee wealth manager for two years, living and breathing the profession. The result is an insight unlike any other into how wealth management works.
You can read my review of Capital Without Borders for the New Statesman here.
Book review | Money Changes Everything by William N. Goetzmann
New York Times | 24 June 2016
“The very rich are different from you and me,” Ernest Hemingway has F. Scott Fitzgerald write in the original version of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” “Yes,” comes the response, “they have more money.”
This famous (and wholly fictional) exchange is memorable because it captures so succinctly one of the great fascinations of finance, how it is at one and the same time something so completely mysterious and so utterly banal. It also poses an important question: Does having more money than someone constitute a difference only in quantity, or in quality? Does the increase of financial wealth just make for more of the same — or does it change people in a more essential way?
Hemingway was exploring these questions on the level of the individual. William N. Goetzmann, the Edwin J. Beinecke professor of finance and management at Yale, is shooting for bigger game in his new book, “Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible.” His goal is to explore the consequences of the invention and growth of finance for whole societies. As his title suggests, his conclusion is that they are firmly positive. Financially advanced societies, he argues, are very different from financially primitive ones — and not just in that they have more money.
I reviewed Goetzmann’s fascinating book for The New York Times in its June 26, 2016 issue. You can read my review here.
Book review | The Only Game in Town by Mohamed El-Erian
Financial Times | 22 January 2016
The US stock market has just endured its worst start to a year on record. The fear is that the US may be close to recession, with baleful consequences for the global economy – and still worse, that the world’s policy-makers are out of ammo with which to respond.
What better moment could there be for a book subtitled “Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse”? And who better to write it than Mohamed El-Erian – the man who captured the essence of the present era of low growth, low inflation and low investment returns better than anyone else with his memorable concept of the “New Normal”?
I reviewed Mohamed El-Erian’s new book The Only Game in Town in the Financial Times on January 22, 2016. You can read the review here.
Book review | Other People’s Money by John Kay & Between Debt and the Devil by Adair Turner
New Statesman | 27 November 2015
That is the question at the heart of two books recently published by two of Britain’s leading economists: John Kay’s Other People’s Money and Adair Turner’s Between Debt and the Devil.
I reviewed both books in the November 27, 2015 issue of the New Statesman. You can read my review here.
Book review | The Silo Effect by Gillian Tett
Financial Times | 29 August 2015
Specialisation improves efficiency – but it also leads to tunnel vision and blind spots. This paradox at the heart of modern life, and how to resolve it, are the topics of Gillian Tett’s new book The Silo Effect.
I reviewed The Silo Effect in the August 29-30, 2015 edition of the Financial Times. You can read my review here.
Book review | Pax Technica by Philip Howard
Financial Times | 20 May 2015
The subject of Philip Howard’s Pax Technica — the emerging “internet of things” — could not be more timely and important; and its central premise — that this new stage in the evolution of the web has political implications that will match or even outstrip its commercial ones — is both striking and convincing.
I reviewed Pax Technica for the Financial Times on May 20, 2015. You can read my review here.
Book review | The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams
Financial Times | 19 May 2015
I reviewed Douglas McWilliams’s new book, The Flat White Economy, in the latest New Statesman. You can read my review here.
Book review | Mindful Work by David Gelles
Financial Times | 22 January 2015
David Gelles’ Mindful Work is a fascinating new book about the growing adoption of mindfulness and meditation by Western businesses as a tool, ultimately, to boost the bottom line.
My review of it for the Financial Times was published on January 22, 2015. You can read the review here.
Book review | The Shifts and the Shocks by Martin Wolf
New Statesman | 30 October 2014
I reviewed Martin Wolf’s new book, The Shifts and the Shocks, in the latest New Statesman. You can read my review here.
Book review | Bending Adversity by David Pilling
New Statesman | 6 February 2014
I reviewed David Pilling’s new book Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival in the February 6, 2014 issue of the New Statesman.
You can read the review here.
Book review | Scarity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir & Mass Flourishing by Edmund Phelps
New Statesman | 5 September 2013
I reviewed Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Measn So Much, and Edmund Phelps’s Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change in the February 6, 2014 issue of the New Statesman.
You can read the review here.
Book review | Economics After the Crisis by Adair Turner
New Statesman | 4 June 2012
I reviewed Adair Turner’s Economics after the Crisis: Objectives and Means in the June 4, 2012 issue of the New Statesman.
You can read the review here.
Book review | The End of Money by David Wolman
The Observer | 25 March 2012
I reviewed The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers – and the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman for the Observer.
You can read the review here.