Rating: 
Summary: Great book name but moronic theories
Review: Two examples: 1. Temperate places are better than tropical places for development. I guess the author never had to live without his heated house, heated car and heated classroom. All of the earliest civilizations being in tropical places never indicated anything to author. Zillions of flies, multiplying human beings in tropical places, whole of US getting produce from california/florida every winter never meant anything to author. 2. Work, tenacity, honesty in authors opinion are reasons for success (so called cultural values). This is classic causal fallacy. Did these values occur after the industrialized society became richer or was it the cause of it. If anyone doubts this, I suggest that they go to one of the non-industrialized nation and see how they behave after some time. 10 years back, the bay area drivers were supposed to be very polite. Now due to over crowding of freedays they are considered the worst in the nation (based San Jose mercury news article). In my opinion the industrialization was driven purely by greed and nothing else as is the current internet revulution. In fact my contention would be that history of mankind is a history of greed.
Rating:
Summary: Same ol' economic determinist bile!
Review: The last time I checked, the "progressive" nations and the sick industrial complex that props them up were grovelling at the feet of the boys with the big money caps. There is no culture in economics, just greed. Always has, always will!
Rating: 
Summary: Factual and perceptive; zonks the PCers!
Review: In reading this book, I was reminded of one I read years ago, "Le Mal Francais" by Alain Peyrefitte. Peyrefitte explains France's division as stemming from two "mentalities" constantly clashing; the northern, protestant philosophy and the Latin, Catholic, southern philosophy. Landes, in his book, covers the problem of 'mentalities' and their role in the making of nations, along with gegraphical and climatic elements. However, it is culture - which includes what for want of a better term what I have called 'mentalities' which distinguishes the backward, in both the economic as well as cultural sense, from the forward-looking and progressive nations. Landes exposes the sloppy thinking and contorted facts of the seekers of excuses for the inability of former 'colonies' to make any economic or even humanitarian advances in the world. The section on Japan is most enlightening and the analysis of Islamic nations alone is worth the price of the book - I ended up after reading the section on Arab Islamic countries much more knowledgable and even changed my previous posture to becoming more pro-Israel. Whatever section I may praise really could be applied for just about most of the chapters in this excellent book. I found little to which I could take take exception. Thoroughly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Wealth of prejudice, poverty of analysis
Review: There is no need to pay for this book as the only thought-provoking part is free for all to read on the back cover, namely a series of encomia by such heavyweights as Galbraith and Arrow. The thought in question is why such a sloppily written and superficial book deserves such praise.Landes' big idea is that the history of the world is the history of winners overcoming losers. What does it take to win? Mastery of technology! According to Landes, anyone who disagrees with this view is self-evidently 'anti-intellectual' per se or a sinister proponent of political correctness or Islamic fundamentalism. Leaving aside such diatribes, the residue of the book is a thoroughly conventional travel writers' approach to the history of technology, which manages to avoid almost all discussion of history of ideas, politics and society (An achievement of sorts). Given that Landes has so much bile to spit at his real or imagined critics, one might expect him to be fired by a grand technological vision of the future, but this remains a closely-guarded secret, with the book's slow plod through time coming to an inconclusive halt somewhere between 1945 and 1995. Landes admires Japan, for example, as one of the few non-Western countries to master technology. If that were all it took, however, then why, one asks, has that country been caught in a vicious recession for the last eight years, far worse than anything seen among its less technologically endowed rivals. This point is almost entirely ignored, as if we had never left the good old days of quality circles and the 'Japan that dares to say No'. His analysis is limited to a few comments along the lines of, 'the Japanese are smart people who will eventually pull themselves out of any hole they may have fallen into'. Well, yes, but isn't he supposed to be telling us why they got into it in the first place, and how and why they will get out?
Rating: 
Summary: This is a good history book, economics is sometimes left out
Review: This book is more about the history of the world, according to David, than about economics. I wanted an economics book, and got a history book. The "Wealth and Poverty of Nations" begins with an awesome chapter on how temperature has a profound effect on economies. Higher temperature regions have much poorer economies. This is partially because of the greater numbers of parasites and diseases, partially because soil is thinner due to heavy rain, and partially because the human body simply can get less work done due to heat overload. This chapter got me excited... the book would have a whole slew of gems like this. But quickly the story turns into a history of lots of trading and deals, without even elucidating insight into why or how this has impacted our current economic situation. Do you want to know who was buying coffee 150 years ago? You can find out in this book, down to the name of the ship owner and the name of the company that bought it. But if you want to know why third world countries have difficulty ammasing enough capital to bring about the required steps of industrialization, open another book.
Rating: 
Summary: Culture makes the difference
Review: As I was hanging out my freshly washed underpants the other day I knew I was performing an act of great symbolic importance. Cheap washable cotton and mass-produced soap were two of the great advances that marked the Industrial Revolution. They not only put something other than unwashed wool next to the human body, but also helped reduce the incidence of diseases that used to kill out ancestors like flies. I learnt this from one of the most provocative and diverting histories to appear this year, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations". You might well wonder why a book supported by 70 closely printed page of bibliography and 40 pages of endnotes would stoop to a consideration of cotton underpants in its introduction. It's because David Landes is trying to pull together the lessons he has leant from his lifelong concerns with time and technology and the nations they have revolutionised. Like his great predecessor, Adam Smith, Landes is concerned with the factor! s that make nations wealthy. But he is also concerned with what keeps some nations poor. Why is that the difference in income per head between the richest and poorest nation today is about 400 to 1 compared to perhaps five to one 250 years ago? Why is that there is also a huge gap in health as well as in wealth? Why is it that we divide the world into three kinds of nations:1)Those that spend lots of money to reduce body weight 2) Those where people eat to live and 3)Those where people don't know where the next meal is coming from? In this witty and wide-ranging history David Landes examines many possible reasons, beginning with nature's inequalities and differences in geography. These suggest, for example, that nations in temperate zones are more favoured than those in tropical climes. Then, looking at what makes Europe and its colonies more successful, he notes that they became freer earlier than other parts of the world. They made room for multiple initiatives from be! low rather than relying on everything being dictated from a! bove. They rediscovered and reasserted property rights. With the advent of Protestantism they encouraged invention and a greater assertion of political and economic rights. This in turn helped to develop a split between the secular and religious, unlike Islamic societies where the two remained virtually one. In his Eurocentric (not to say very American) history, David Landes notes that Islamic societies were once inventive but religion eventually discouraged invention. And in China, the one civilization that might have challenged the West, development was discouraged by the lack of a free market, the absence of institutionalised property rights, by the quasi-confinement of women and the discouragement of individual initiative. Among the key reasons why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe rather than elsewhere are that autonomous intellectual inquiry flourished there, empiricism was encouraged and measurement developed further there. One of the great influences o! n Landes' view of the West's development is Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism". Rejecting many of the criticisms levelled at Weber, he argues that Protestantism was especially influential because it encouraged reading (mainly The Bible) and thereby education. It respected manual labour and individual initiative. It was also preoccupied with time and its measurement. These were fundamentally important to the development of capitalism and its associated spirit of entrepreneurship. But the key point of his argument is this: "If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference. (Here Max Weber was eight on.)" Western culture encourages development, competition, invention, and the maximising of wealth and well-being. What counts in developing a nation and also in curing poverty is work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity, a positive attitude and eyes-open realism. (What we use! d to call the Victorian values.) Relative poverty flows fro! m the failure of political, religious and mercantile elites in poor countries to maintain or regain independence. David Landes develops his complex argument with great confidence, laying it out with broad strokes and illustrating it with countless examples and illustrations (not all of them relelvant). His prose is brisk and breezy, and every page is peppered with provocative or epigrammatic obiter dicta that will surely stir up criticisms and objections. But no one who loves a good read - and certainly no one who love a good hstory - will be bored by this book. It even makes washing your underpants interesting.
Rating:
Summary: Nation's Success = Adoption of Inventions + Cultural Values
Review: Harvard professor emeritus of history David Landes's new economic history of civilization called *The Wealth and Poverty of Nations* gives ample illustrations of two significant factors that help determine a nation's prosperity: its ability to adopt new technologies and innovations, and its cultural values. Through history, nations have outprospered their neighbors when they have been able to rapidly adopt innovations such as underwear, clocks, and notions of standardized parts (e.g., Ford's Model T). France was slow in adopting electricity, but experienced remarkable growth in the 30 years after World War II. Landes describes famous failures too, such as Egypt's in the 1820's and 30's when Mohammed Ali force-fed British textile know-how on his people, who for various reasons were never able to produce quality cloths. Landes believes that because of the Mid East's backward cultural! values and also its dependence on the limited resources of oil, which will run dry in 160 years if current consumption rates continue, this area of the world will not be able to sustain its fortunes. Japan, on the other hand, is reported as a success story, although no mention is made of the recent bubble-bursting there which has been caused by its overextending itself on domestic loans. Landes's opinionated style is easy to read, with short sentences and more parentheses per page than you are likely to see anywhere. In all, it's an informative and occasionally funny read. In describing the bleak conditions in Chernobyl in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster, he describes a Russian who sold apples under a sign labeled "Apples from Chernobyl." The apple seller's friends advised him that he may not want to advertise that the apples are from Chernobyl. "On the! contrary," he replied. "Many are buying them for! their mothers-in-law!"
Rating:
Summary: Warmed-over theory.
Review: Landes inherits a wealth of scholarship on the varieties of capitalism --- a problem addressed by intellectuals of the calibre of Adam Smith, Max Weber, Alexander Gershenkron, Karl Polanyi, Albert Hirschman and others --- and produces a giant just-so story. The theory is just the warmed-over idea that some cultures produce a need for achievement in people, a view made popular in the 1950s by Clark Kerr as an explanation for underdevelopment. (He got it, in turn, from a terribly restricted reading of Weber.) In addition, Landes echoes more recent ideas about the importance of institutions and property rights, originally and more carefully expressed by Douglass North amongst several others. Do your brain a favor and stay away from the the David Landes and Jared Diamonds of this world and read any of the authors mentioned above, together with modern scholarship. The question Landes asks is deep and resonant. It's occupied the best minds in sociology, politics, his! tory and economics since the 19th century. It demands --- and has received --- better treatment than this.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: It's hard to write a book that Explains Everything. All such books are open to criticism for what they choose to emphasize and omit. That said, this is an excellent book, better than Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" which won the pulitzer prize that -- in my opinion -- this book should have received. Landes is relentlessly self-critical and undogmatic. His conclusion: that culture matters more than resource endowments. Is it true? As "true" as any broad statement in the humanities can be. Just compare resource-rich Nigeria to, say, Malaysia. Because of the book's scope, everyone will find something to quibble with, but overall it's well worth reading and pondering.
Rating:
Summary: A great book that I could not put down
Review: I enjoyed the book immensely. Unlike some of the reviewers, I found that I could not put it down. Of particular interest was the history of medieval Europe where some critical inventions (glasses, clock) had a major impact on what followed. The total lack of concern for political correctness makes the book most refreshing. Projecting the conclusions into the future, one is dispaired to think that the next century will continue to bring chaos, famine and hunger to Africa and unstability and poverty to the Middle East. Wide based prosperity is not for tomorrow, not even for the day after. Technology changes quickly but cultures move like glaciers.
|
