Four books about globalisation
I've been doing a bit of reading, me. So here goes with the opinionation (in generally increasing order of relevance and topicality) on a particularly interesting, and undeniably important, topic:
1. Niall Ferguson "The Cash Nexus" - a very ambitious topic for a history, but he's a very enterprising fellow and threw himself right into this one, during his year as a research fellow at the Bank of England - how appropriately fascinating that such a programme can induce such a suitably venerable yet scholastically auspicious survey - a must-read for anyone who consideres themselves interested, or even slightly capable, in the inarguably pivotal world of capital and capital transfer.
2. John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" - i have a confession of my own: i first heard of this in the text of a voice sample in a mash-up breaks track called Alex Stealthy: As a Child vs. DemocracyNOW! feat. John Perkins: Economic Hitman as follows:
"Economic hitman - explain:"
"We identify a third world country that has resources which we covet, and often these days that's oil, or it might be a canal in the case of Panama. In any case, we go to that third world country and we arrange a huge loan from the international lending community, usually the World Bank usually leads that process. So let's say we give this third world country a loan of a billion dollars, one of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90% comes back tothe United States, to one of our big corporations, the ones we've all heard of recently, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons.
"And those corporations build, in this third world country, large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks, big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich in those countries. The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer, they don't benefit from these loans, they don't benefit from the projects, and in fact, often their social serviceshave to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt.
"Now what also happens is that this third world country then is saddled with a huge debt that it can't possibly repay. For example today, Ecuador's foreign debt as a result of economic hitman is equal to roughly 50% of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt. It's the case with so many third world countries. So now we go back to those countries and say"look, you borrowed all this money from us and you owe us this money you can't repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap cost"
"And in the case of many of these countries, Ecuador is another good example here, that means destroying their rainforests, destroying their indigenous cultures. And that's what we're doing today and we've been doing it... it began shortly after the end of World War II, it's been building up over time, until today it's really reached mammoth proportions where we control most of the resources of the world."
A bit of googling and a trip to Borders and I'd read the book - his interview above pretty much sums it up - the book is pretty light on detail but interesting to get an insiders perspective
3. Thomas Friedman "The World is Flat" - this had been sitting in my desk drawer at work for a while waiting for the time.
4. Joseph Stiglitz "Globalization and its discontents" - my learned colleague G. Turner of previous recent Manchester kebab blog reference had lent me the successor to this work, "The Roaring 90s", not long after that one was published. At the time I found it fascinating, very well explained and significantly topical, even for a materials scientist in the midst of thesis-writing self-absorption. Since then i've become consistently more interested in such issues, so i was looking fwd to catching up on Stiglitz' earlier work on globalisation. His most recent popular work "Making Globalization Work" had also hit the shelves. Stiglitz was the chief economist at the World Bank
