![]() ![]() A lover of Adam Smith's invisible hand, Beattie criticises protectionist mollycoddling of inefficient industries. Beattie's analysis dazzles with particulars: he explains why Africa doesn't grow cocaine (poor infrastructure), why Peru grows most of the asparagus consumed in the US (good lobbyists), and why pandas (whose diet is almost exclusively bamboo) and command economies (which can function only under inefficient bureaucracies) are endangered by inflexibility. It is determined by people." He insists that it is not destiny but the right and wrong decisions by political leaders that cause societies to rise and fall. ![]() Standing proudly against psychology, dialectical materialism and inevitability, Beattie writes: "History is not determined by fate. But Alan Beattie, the world-trade editor at the Financial Times and a former economist for the Bank of England, resists this kind of reduction in False Economy, a thorough examination of economies from the age of empire to the age of the IMF. Authors risk sacrificing the intricacies of a scholarly discipline in the service of reader-friendly anecdotes. Riverhead Pop social science - think Steven Levitt's and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics or Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point - is tricky. ![]() ![]() False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World, Alan Beattie. ![]()
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