Alan Beattie - False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World
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A provocative ... persuasive (The New York Times) book that examines countries economic destinies. In False Economy, Alan Beattie weaves together the economic choices, political choices, economic history, and human stories, that determine whether governments and countries remain rich or poor. He also addresses larger questions about why they make the choices they do, and what those mean for the future of our global economy. But despite the heady subject matter, False Economy is a lively and lucid book that engagingly and thought-provokingly examines macroeconomics, economic topics, and the fault lines and successes that can make or break a culture or induce a global depression. Along the way, readers will discover why Africa doesnt grow cocaine, why our asparagus comes from Peru, why our keyboard spells QWERTY, and why giant pandas are living on borrowed time. Read more...
Abstract: A provocative ... persuasive (The New York Times) book that examines countries economic destinies. In False Economy, Alan Beattie weaves together the economic choices, political choices, economic history, and human stories, that determine whether governments and countries remain rich or poor. He also addresses larger questions about why they make the choices they do, and what those mean for the future of our global economy. But despite the heady subject matter, False Economy is a lively and lucid book that engagingly and thought-provokingly examines macroeconomics, economic topics, and the fault lines and successes that can make or break a culture or induce a global depression. Along the way, readers will discover why Africa doesnt grow cocaine, why our asparagus comes from Peru, why our keyboard spells QWERTY, and why giant pandas are living on borrowed time
Abstract: A provocative ... persuasive (The New York Times) book that examines countries economic destinies. In False Economy, Alan Beattie weaves together the economic choices, political choices, economic history, and human stories, that determine whether governments and countries remain rich or poor. He also addresses larger questions about why they make the choices they do, and what those mean for the future of our global economy. But despite the heady subject matter, False Economy is a lively and lucid book that engagingly and thought-provokingly examines macroeconomics, economic topics, and the fault lines and successes that can make or break a culture or induce a global depression. Along the way, readers will discover why Africa doesnt grow cocaine, why our asparagus comes from Peru, why our keyboard spells QWERTY, and why giant pandas are living on borrowed time
Alan Beattie: author's other books
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Alan Beattie
B. W. Hodder
Edward W. Gondolf
David A. Dieterle
Thurow
Mandelbaum
Peter Temin
Alan Beattie
Raghuram G. Rajan
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Table of Contents
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada),
90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green,
Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books
India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Center, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ),
67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada),
90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green,
Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books
India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Center, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ),
67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright 2009 by Alan Beattie
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any
printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy
of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
The lines from Tony Harrisons The Blasphemers Banquet are quoted from
Collected Film Poetry (Faber & Faber, 2007).
printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy
of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
The lines from Tony Harrisons The Blasphemers Banquet are quoted from
Collected Film Poetry (Faber & Faber, 2007).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beattie, Alan.
False economy / Alan Beattie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Beattie, Alan.
False economy / Alan Beattie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-04689-0
1. Economic history. 2. Economics. I. Title.
HC51.B
330.9dc22
HC51.B
330.9dc22
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses
at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors,
or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over
and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors,
or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over
and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
To my parents
Time, that gives and takes our fame and fate
and puts say, Shakespeares features on a plate
or a Persian poets name on a Tandoori
can cast aside all we commemorate
and puts say, Shakespeares features on a plate
or a Persian poets name on a Tandoori
can cast aside all we commemorate
and make Lot 86 or Lot 14
even out of Cardinal and Queen
and bring the holy and the high and mighty
to the falling gavel, or the guillotine.
even out of Cardinal and Queen
and bring the holy and the high and mighty
to the falling gavel, or the guillotine.
TONY HARRISON
The Blasphemers Banquet
The Blasphemers Banquet
PREFACE
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, perhaps the greatest of all of Americas presidents, loved stories about himself. One of his favorites went like this: During the Great Depression of the 1930s, one Wall Street commuter had a daily morning ritual. He would buy the newspaper on the way into the train station. He would glance only at the front page and then, without taking another look, hand it back to the newsboy and board the train. Eventually, the boy got up the courage to ask him why he read only the front page. The commuter explained that he bought it solely for the obituaries. The newsboy pointed out that the obituaries were at the back. Boy, the man said, the son of a bitch Im interested in will be on page one.
At the time, Roosevelt was busy trying to save the U.S. economy in the face of a colossal global dislocation. He was working to preserve the most powerful engine for creating wealth in the history of the world. To do so, he expanded radically the frontiers of American government. And a decade later, at the end of his presidencyand his lifehe would help to create the institutions that led a global economy shattered by war and by misguided isolationism back on the road to openness and prosperity.
And yet he was vilified by some, like that New York commuter, who would continue to benefit from the success that FDR helped to restore. Roosevelt was trying to save capitalism from itself, and some of the capitalists were resisting. Knowing the right thing to do to enrich your nation and the world is hard enough. Bringing people with you to get it done is even harder.
The financial crisis that started in 2007 and exploded around the world in 2008 was a reminder of how fragile and reversible is the history of human progress. But it should also remind us that our future is in our own hands. We created this mess and we can get ourselves out of it.
To do so involves confronting a false economy of thoughtnamely, that our economic future is predestined and that we are helplessly borne along by huge, uncontrollable, impersonal forces. To explain the vast complexity of the economic history of the world, there is a rich variety of fatalistic myths on hand: that some economies (the United States, Western Europe) were always going to get rich and that others (Africa) were always going to stay poor; that certain religions are intrinsically bad for growth; that market forces are unstoppable; that the strutting vanguard of globalization cannot be routed and driven into retreat.
The aim of this book is to explain how and why countries and societies and economies got to where they are todaywhat made cities the way they are; why corruption destroyed some nations but not others; why the economy that fed the Roman empire is now the worlds biggest importer of grain. But it will reject the idea that the present state of those economies, countries, and continents was predetermined. Countries have choices, and those choices have substantially determined whether they succeeded or failed.
Economic history is a challenging thing to explain, and to read, for two reasons. First, it involves forcing together disciplines that naturally fall out in different directions. History, in its most traditional form, lives on specifics and particularitieswhat the historian Arnold Toynbee (disapprovingly) called the study of one damned thing after another. It stresses the importance of narrative in the way that countries develop, the role played by chance and circumstance, and the influence of important characters and events. Economics, by contrast, seeks to extract universal rules from the mess of data that the world providesproviding reliable and testable predictions that economies run in a particular fashion, or that starting off from a particular point, they will end up a particular way. Both approaches have risks. If history can become the undisciplined accumulation of a random heap of facts, economics risks descending into the pseudoscientific compression of a complex reality into a simplistic set of fixed categorical molds.
Second, economic history is vulnerable to fatalism. Any study that takes as its endpoint the present day is always vulnerable to arguing backward from the conclusion. History is so rich in scope and detail that it is always possible to pick a particular constellation out of the galaxy of facts to explain clearly and precisely why things are as they are. Yet such reasoning is frequently proven wrong by subsequent history. Or it completely fails to explain why other, similar, countries and economies came to a different end.
If we are going to learn from history rather than just record it, we need to stop explanations from becoming excuses. Drill too far down into explanations of how things turned out the way they did and you risk hitting a bedrock of determinism. There are plenty of reasons why countries have made mistakes. Often their decisions are driven by a particular interest group, or a coalition of them, whose short-term gains stand at odds with the nations long-term interests. But such interests can be overcome. Similar countries facing similar pressures can take meaningfully different decisions. Most nations that discover oil and diamonds in their ground suffer as a consequence, but not all do. Some interest groups have captured countries and dragged them down; some have been resisted. Islamic beliefs have proved a drag on certain economies at certain times, but they do not have to. Some economies have managed to capture great benefits from the globalization of markets in goods and services; some have missed out.
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