An old Wall Street adage holds that if all the world's economists were laid end to end, they would never reach a conclusion. Ormerod suffers from no such inadequacy in this vigorous, informed, and thoughtful critique of the dismal science. According to Ormerod, classical free-market economics has not been very helpful during the latter half of the 20th century in explaining, let alone solving, the Global Village's economic problems. Despite the high regard in which they are still held throughout the West, he charges, most if not all economists cling to ossified orthodoxies that provide precious little perspective on an increasingly complex world. In making a persuasive case against the discipline that, broadly speaking, studies the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of goods and services, Ormerod (an English businessman and former head of economic assessment at the Economist) reviews the work of economic pioneers, arguing that over the years, once-exciting theories or constructs gained the status of doctrine; in the meantime, economists (envious of the certainties vouchsafed their counterparts in the physical sciences) became hooked on math and modeling. Ormerod maintains that society has paid a high price for their tendency to take a linear, mechanistic view of commerce and industry. By way of example, he cites the challenge of business cycles, government spending, inflation, and unemployment, all of which continue to confound policy makers and their principal advisors, the economists. Arguing that there are links between joblessness and price levels that could be discerned and exploited via more insightful, less inflexible inquiries into human as well as statistical factors, Ormerod offers a wealth of proposals as to how creative economics could yield substantive benefits for the body politic. An effective indictment of (rather than an obituary for) a branch of learning that's overdue for renewal.
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13464-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
Sharply drawn and deeply depressing, Freeland’s tale is missing only a whining country-and-western soundtrack to complete...
The sorry story of the fiasco known as the Russian capitalist economy, thoroughly if at times crassly told by correspondent Freeland.
The Russian economy hasn’t really collapsed, according to Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Freeland, since it has never stood upright to begin with—either before or since the fall of communism. What did take place was a massive redistribution of wealth after communism’s demise—along similarly unequal and unfruitful lines. Sometimes the redistribution was rude and crude—witness the rise of the Russian Mafia—but the grand-scale theft was accomplished with all the slipperiness of an eel. During the latter half of the 1990s, the author explains, while shoot-’em-up mobsters grabbed all the headlines, a small group of businessmen (the oligarchs) have grabbed Russia’s most valuable asset—its natural resources—in exchange for their political muscle. Freeland does an exquisite job of delineating the scheming, convoluted politics that shaped this arrangement—particularly those that swirled around the increasingly pathetic figure of Boris Yeltsin. She admirably sets the disastrous macroeconomic stage: Russia’s lack of civil society, its weak tax-collecting powers, its bent judges, its malleable civil servants, its complete lack of checks and balances, and the inevitability of its Soviet-era business directors staying in power. Then she sketches out the dance of death that ensued between the reformers and the oligarchs, as well as the betrayals and character assassinations and the final collapse of the upstart economy (via an IMF bailout that facilitated the flight of investment capital). Freeland stumbles only when she takes mortifying cracks at being irreverent (as in “an arbitrage trader’s wet dream” or “Wall Street’s Big Swinging Dicks”).
Sharply drawn and deeply depressing, Freeland’s tale is missing only a whining country-and-western soundtrack to complete its doleful atmosphere.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8129-3215-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
Damning data and persuasive arguments that should set some Communist knees a-knocking.
A freelance journalist and counsel to an American law firm in China predicts the imminent implosion of the economy and government of the People’s Republic of China.
Chang (who has lived in China for nearly 20 years) argues that the economy of China can no longer withstand the internal and external pressures for change. The greatest problem is the scandalous state of the country’s State Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Because the Communist cadres force the Chinese economy to conform to their archaic and procrustean social theories, the SOEs stagnate from lack of competition and suck ruinous loans from the state-owned banks, which are needed to underwrite such failing enterprises as petrochemicals, cement, steel, and electronics. The banks continue to function only because the Chinese are the world’s most thrifty people, saving about 40 percent of their incomes in bank accounts. Should public confidence in the system eventually erode (a probability, Chang argues), massive bank failures will inevitably follow. Chang also believes that China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) will accelerate its economic decline: no longer will the SOEs have monopolies on key industries, and if China fails to adhere to its agreements, dire consequences will ensue from its trading partners. Chang also considers the possibility—perhaps probability—of a war with Taiwan, a conflict the mainland cannot win, he says, if it employs only conventional forces and weapons. The immense potential for loss of life (and face), and the destruction of mainland property will exert on the Communist government pressures that it cannot sustain. Political corruption—pervasive in the country—is yet another force that may eventually send into the streets the masses of protestors whom the government fears. Chang documents his work heavily (with about 75 pages of endnotes), and his arguments carry the weight of his considerable experience and study. But he is often repetitive, and a shorter format might have served his purposes more effectively.
Damning data and persuasive arguments that should set some Communist knees a-knocking.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50477-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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