Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month. Gregg Easterbrook The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Peace and War. Robin Edmonds. Norton,...
...How can we avoid miscalculation and misperception...
...There’s more...
...I’ll keep listening, but I suspect that if the New Viewers haven’t made it to first base by now, they’re not likely to get there...
...This is not, in my opinion, a “good criterion” for intervention...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month...
...Instead we dive right in with five pages on Newton’s Principia, then leap immediately to four pages on gravity waves, a speculative concept from astrophysics that makes for entertaining ruminations, but which is pretty far afield from “what everyone needs to know” about science...
...No, the other book replies, government interventionism is a bad idea and is becoming impossible anyway...
...it’s carte blanche for greedy protectionists...
...Historians of World War I1 have been saved from this fate by the events of 1990 and 1991...
...The question, rather, is how much government meddling, and of what kind...
...Moreover, this process accelerates as technology continues linking people and economies...
...Which of these is really a new view...
...export controls...
...To jump from Kuttner’s book to Quicksilver Capital, by economists Richard B. McKenzie and Dwight R. Lee, is to cross the Great Divide of economic policy...
...Norton, $24.95...
...In practice, the government meddles in markets anywaybut it meddles irrationally, through patchwork programs and ad hoc protectionism...
...Robert Kuttner...
...And once you’ve decided to help out a declining industry or subsidize a rising one, when, if ever, do you pull the plug...
...But he offers little that we did not know before...
...Orthodox American opinion,” he says, “has no good criteria for sorting out good interventions from bad ones...
...Now, by return mail from Iraq, comes the answer: Yes...
...It is fast becoming an old view...
...It means information, which is as mobile as the electrons in your telephone wire...
...Thus the two poles of the emerging debate about the post-Reagan economic era: Laissez-faire is dead...
...Trefil can also be heard as a commentator on National Public Radio...
...Last year, we were presented with a heartwarming spectacle: Japan’s Ministry of Finance was humiliated...
...Frighteningly, the movement toward a single world economy is being accompanied by a worldwide political movement toward ethnic nationalism and tribal separatism...
...And once everyone has agreed on “rational” industrial policies and managed-trade deals, how could you make adjustments without recourse to endless renegotiation and a zillion lawyers...
...Kuttner himself offers no solution to this critical problem of finding “good criteria” for intervention...
...It means talent and “brainwork,” which can hop borders easily by plane and fax...
...It ought to be grappled with by anyone interested in the future of government...
...What makes their book important, however, is that it goes beyond merely deploring interventionism: It says that interventionism is becoming impossible...
...You may have heard that Americans have forsaken laissez-faire economics...
...Even Washington is becoming aware of what’s going on...
...How early must force be used to contain a regional power with world ambitions...
...How wise is a policy of unconditional surrender...
...Let’s take it as a given that American policymakers’ devotion to freemarket principles has allowed U.S...
...One typical fact from the authors’ blizzard: the number of international phone calls placed from the U.S...
...The reason is that mobile capital is giving them no choice...
...Free markets...
...One of the seldom-noted consequences of the turbulent period through which we are now passing is its effect on historiography...
...In The End of Laissez-Faire, economics writer Robert Kuttner makes the case for giving up laissez-faire ideals and embracing “a politics of planning...
...The New View has been around now for a decade or more...
...And, of course, “capital” means money, which now zips around the world literally at lightning speed...
...They refused, and he gave up the project...
...McKenzie and Lee, being free-marketeers, take the opposite side: They prefer markets to politicians...
...Not because politicians love markets, McKenzie and Lee say...
...well when we were the dominant economy, but now laissez-faire is a “false idol...
...Unless governments (more buzzwords) “compete” and become “entrepreneurial,” they will ossify and collapse...
...Apparently this book is a compendium of recent interesting “Science Times” articles-a remix, as a record producer would say...
...And while Science Matters lacks the rich reporting details of The New York Times Book of Science Literacy, the volume compensates by delivering what it promises...
...If you think you’ve heard this before, you have...
...Adam Smith...
...It’s all very well to talk about intelligent economic management by strategicminded government officials...
...When McKenzie and Lee put their pens down, the USSR was shining with the hope of perestroika...
...To what degree should agreements between governments be concealed from the peoples of the world...
...Full disclosure: I am acknowledged in Quicksilver Capital because an article of mine inadvertently supplied its title...
...It begins with a clear explanation of the framework by which science attempts to fathom the natural world, then builds to thoughtful yet simple explanations of the principal theories and findings of the major disciplines...
...Edmonds lauds the allies for remaining united, defeating Hitler, and creating the UN, and faults them for leaving the issues of Germany and the role of nuclear weapons unresolved...
...This means that, increasingly, producers or investors or skill-holders who are annoyed by high taxes or activist governments can simply leave...
...in tow, he went to Moscow and vainly sought to per-suade officials of the Brezhnev regime to let him use the archives and interview surviving officials of the war...
...The latter quality, while making for low-input reading, also points to the volume’s shortcoming-no controlling thread having to do with science literacy...
...Now, presuming that glasnost survives the new Soviet retrenchment from reform, Western and Soviet scholars have the chance to rewrite much of the history of World War 11...
...One propounds what it calls the “New View”: Government management of the economy is a good idea and is becoming inevitable anyway...
...rose from about 3 million in 1960 to 200 million in 1980 to 478 million in 1986...
...MacMillan, $24.95...
...With Franklin Roosevelt Jr...
...Hazen is a research scientist at Virginia’s George Mason University, and Trefil is a professor of physics there...
...Historians and readers seeking to understand the origins of the great American-Soviet confrontation looked for answers in Churchill’s efforts to maintain the British empire, Stalin’s frustrations as he waited for the opening of a second front, Roosevelt’s confidence that his powers of persuasion would, in the end, bring the Soviets into line...
...Trefil was a coauthor of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, one of the volumes that initiated the literacy-book boomlet...
...One little box asks, “Why don’t people who take nitroglycerin for a heart condition explode...
...The Cold War’s finale might have made these questions seem more remote and antique, pushing them from the realm of current politics into that of abstract historical debate...
...It is not only the U.S...
...What the book makes clear, however, is that the New View has yet to advance too far...
...During the half-century of the Cold War, studies of World War 11 were in vogue...
...Why are countries and political parties all over the world embracing market-oriented reforms...
...Gregg Easterbrook The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Peace and War...
...The One Big Idea behind the “New Paradigm” movement that is so much the rage right now is this: In the (buzzword) “information age,” a government of centralized 1940s-style bureaucracies and one-size-fits-all programs simply cannot work...
...It happened when Alexander Hamilton became secretary of the treasury and announced that the government’s job was to protect and nurture American manufacturers...
...Maybe not the one that claims to be...
...Science Matters by Robert Hazen and James Trefil is, on the other hand, an actual guide to science literacy...
...The strength of Kuttner’s book is the clarity with which he makes the case (and, I should add, his devastating attack on bizarre U.S...
...This is not helped by a writing style that seems more suited for the minute books of the British Foreign Office than narrative history...
...Kuttner is an economic nationalist because he wants to protect the sovereignty of the electorate against the growing power of markets...
...Even the most deft essayist would have a difficult time writing a central source on the ChurchillRoosevelt-Stalin relationship within the confines of 405 pages...
...No book I have seen has made that case as compellingly or as exhaustively as this one...
...Robert Hazen, James Trefil...
...long live laissez-faire...
...Jonathan Rauch The New York Times Book of Science Literacy: What Everyone Needs to Know from Newton to the Knuckleball...
...Richard Flaste, ed...
...Richard B. McKenzie, Dwight R. Lee...
...Economists always underestimate the power of political passion to overwhelm economic interest...
...he is, for my money, the best and most original legitimate scientist with a public voice today, as insightful as Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould, but without the affected image of the former or the grating egotism of the latter...
...The need remains for a large, analytical history of the “Big Three”: their impact on their times and our own...
...But “capital” also means computing power, which is being relentlessly miniaturized and personalized...
...Market forces had grown too big for them...
...An additional gain for historians of World War I1 is the opening of archives in the Soviet Union...
...We Americans ought to do as our canny European and Asian competitors do, and use a rational mixture of free markets and strategic planning to shore up our economic strength...
...Capital” means, of course, factories and machines, which corporations are now able to put anywhere in the world...
...Most literacy books are the reading equivalent of grazing menus...
...The New York Times Book of Science Literacy, written by 21 staffers from the paper’s excellent “Science Times” Tuesday section and put together by former “Science Times” editor Richard Flaste, follows this formula...
...Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy...
...These two volumes join the recent wave of “literacy” books based on the marketing premise that Americans now emerge from school knowing nothing whatsoever...
...businesses to make serious mistakes and to act in ways that conflict with American strategic interests...
...What a mess...
...Can international organizations take the place of traditional balanceof-power politics...
...Quicksilver Capital: How the Rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the World...
...James MacGregor Burns once considered following his Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom with a book called Big Three, but gave up after realizing the degree to which access to Soviet archives was restricted...
...expanding global competition puts ever-tighter constraints on national governments...
...A former British diplomat and author of a history of Anglo-American relations from 1945 to 1959, Edmonds has done a thorough job of searching American, British, and Soviet sources as well as consulting scholars in all three countries...
...If you’ve always thought you could never understand science, Hazen and Trefil will show you you’re wrong...
...The truth is that free-market ideals served the U.S...
...Not in the land of the free and the home of the subsidy...
...As a consequence, governments have lost much of the monopoly power that undergirded their growth in earlier decades...
...Joseph P. Lash also sought to write a book on the subject, a successor volume to his Roosevelt and Churchill...
...Hazen and Trefil’s book is the one that someone longing for a basic grasp of science ought to buy...
...In light of all of this, one approaches Robin Edmonds’s The Big Three with high expectations of dramatic new information and analysis...
...Condensed, it goes like this: Private individuals and companies make economic decisions which may not be, and often actually aren’t, in the national interest...
...They contain lots of interesting snippets, brief encapsulations, lists, and so on, all suitable for contemporary short attention spans...
...In short, the age of centralization is ending...
...The text is ordered and accessible, never daunting, never jumping ahead of itself a product of the book having been composed by two authors instead of 21...
...Doubleday, $19.95...
...Knopf, $22.95...
...Alas, these expectations go largely unfulfilled...
...Less compelling are the authors’ predictions of a dawning Golden Age of laissez-faire: Government economic power will be constrained, the private sector will take over more and more formerly public functions, special interests will lose power, drugs will be legalized, immigration will be liberalized, trade will become more open, schools will be privatized, and-need one add?the capital-gains tax will be cut...
...I remember asking myself optimistically: Would an escalating international conflagration like World War I be at all likely, or even possible, in the age of the One World Economy...
...But what’s the alternative...
...Maybe, maybe not...
...The ministry’s bureaucrats, who are used to believing that they run their country, tried to keep the Japanese stock market from falling-and found out, to their chagrin, that they couldn’t...
...But how are you going to do it...
...How do you keep economic management from turning into a barrel of pork for rich companies with high-paid lobbyists...
...As Kuttner himself admirably explains, you’d need a different kind of multinational management regime for each kind of industry -since no two are alike, there’s no template...
...Free Press, $22.95...
...True enough-that’s why orthodox opinion argues that we should try to avoid intervening...
...Michael R. Beschloss The End of Laissez-Faire: National Purpose and the Global Economy After the Cold War...
...He fails, for the most part, to even address them...
...In the first place, if you’re going to protect and nurture key industries and technologies, you have to figure out which ones they are...
...Now the USSR seems headed for war or dictatorship, and either is the deadly enemy of limited government and unfettered exchange...
...Like it or not, government power -all governments’ power-is seeping away...
...The closest he comes is this: We should turn to managed trade for “those products where nations are currently restraining trade and for one reason or another wish to retain or develop technological and production capacity...
...You’d think a book with a title such as this would begin with a review of basic principles of natural law and the nature of scientific inquiry, and gradually build to advanced notions...
...The book is lively and enjoyable, rich in sharp details and clever touches...
...Kuttner argues that our attachment to free-market ideals forces us to tinker with markets covertly and irrationally...
...To what extent is the strategy of a war fought by coalition shaped by the postwar aspirations of the coalition members...
...A year ago I would have agreed with McKenzie and Lee that military power will lose much of its usefulness in a world of economic integration and flighty capital...
...Many times...
...And-most seriously of allhow do you separate the economically important industries from the politically powerful ones...
...Kuttner fails to answer them...
...Pure laissez-faire-economic activity untouched by political meddling -has never existed and never will...
...government that faces this problem...
...Here are two new books arguing about both questions...
...Latin quotations, decorative references to Shakespeare, Bacon, and “Ariadne’s thread,” and pedestrian observations such as “Roosevelt was a handsome man” tend to thrust the author between the reader and the events described, too often giving the volume the sound of a historian chatting about what happened, rather than letting the events and analysis themselves take center stage...
...Readers can pretty much dive in anywhere in the volume and skip around at will...
...In the West, two social systems contend for sovereignty: national electorates and international markets...
...Especially since Edmonds spends his first 175 pages on the eight years preceding the alliance, his treatment of this major historical subject winds up being synoptic and unstartling...
...These shortcomings are all the more notable because of the brevity of this book...
...Planning would “only ensure America’s economic decline...
...As the nations of the world grope for new alignments and as the UN coalition tries to tame the dictator described by President Bush as “Hitler revisited,” the statecraft of World War I1 offers important precedents and lessons...
...The questions, none of them new, go on and on...
...both have written books on science before...
Vol. 23 • March 1991 • No. 3
