Foreign Affairs - Books for the Century

评语：To paraphrase the economist Paul Krugman: when it comes to economic growth, technological progress is not everything, but it is almost everything. Just as the pace and direction of technological change shaped the last economic century, it will equally shape the next. Gordon advances a pessimistic view of the capacity for technological change to continue raising living standards at the rate to which Americans grew accustomed in the last century. He points to “one great wave” of inventions and innovations between 1870 and 1970, such as electricity, indoor plumbing, and the internal combustion engine, and questions whether current advances in artificial intelligence, human genomics, and robotics can improve living standards to the same extent. Many readers will find Gordon’s skepticism regarding today’s new technologies counterintuitive. But they will be forced to think again about the capacity of these developments to improve the human condition. New technologies also have distributional consequences—as any early-twentieth-century horse-drawn carriage maker would attest. People must acquire skills and training to rise to the demands of new technological competition. Goldin and Katz view this interplay through the lens of U.S. history. They describe how the United States became a leader in the provision of universal education and how it pioneered the “high school movement.” They show how educational attainment advanced faster than technology in the first half of the twentieth century, leading to a drop in economic inequality. In the latter half of the century, however, technology “sprinted ahead” and accentuated distributional problems. The book raises questions about whether educational systems can continue to successfully impart requisite skills and training, whether they will win the political support needed to do so, and how inequality will deepen in the event of their failure. The global economic future will be shaped, in no small part, by the geostrategic contest between China and the United States and by the performance of their respective economic and political systems. One hesitates to recommend a book on the economic competition between these two countries, given the rapidity of change in their respective economies and polities and, no less, in their bilateral relations. But readers probably can’t do better than Pettis’s 2013 work. He emphasizes policy distortions that artificially boost saving and investment in China while depressing them in the United States, producing trade imbalances, financial weakness in China, and deindustrialization in the United States. Pettis did not predict the election of U.S. President Donald Trump or the economic and political clampdown under Chinese President Xi Jinping, but his analysis highlights the economic vulnerabilities of both countries as they face the next century. Finally, any reckoning with the economic future of the planet must include the challenge of climate change, to which the recent book by Nordhaus, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, is an essential introduction.

评语：To paraphrase the economist Paul Krugman: when it comes to economic growth, technological progress is not everything, but it is almost everything. Just as the pace and direction of technological change shaped the last economic century, it will equally shape the next. Gordon advances a pessimistic view of the capacity for technological change to continue raising living standards at the rate to which Americans grew accustomed in the last century. He points to “one great wave” of inventions and innovations between 1870 and 1970, such as electricity, indoor plumbing, and the internal combustion engine, and questions whether current advances in artificial intelligence, human genomics, and robotics can improve living standards to the same extent. Many readers will find Gordon’s skepticism regarding today’s new technologies counterintuitive. But they will be forced to think again about the capacity of these developments to improve the human condition. New technologies also have distributional consequences—as any early-twentieth-century horse-drawn carriage maker would attest. People must acquire skills and training to rise to the demands of new technological competition. Goldin and Katz view this interplay through the lens of U.S. history. They describe how the United States became a leader in the provision of universal education and how it pioneered the “high school movement.” They show how educational attainment advanced faster than technology in the first half of the twentieth century, leading to a drop in economic inequality. In the latter half of the century, however, technology “sprinted ahead” and accentuated distributional problems. The book raises questions about whether educational systems can continue to successfully impart requisite skills and training, whether they will win the political support needed to do so, and how inequality will deepen in the event of their failure. The global economic future will be shaped, in no small part, by the geostrategic contest between China and the United States and by the performance of their respective economic and political systems. One hesitates to recommend a book on the economic competition between these two countries, given the rapidity of change in their respective economies and polities and, no less, in their bilateral relations. But readers probably can’t do better than Pettis’s 2013 work. He emphasizes policy distortions that artificially boost saving and investment in China while depressing them in the United States, producing trade imbalances, financial weakness in China, and deindustrialization in the United States. Pettis did not predict the election of U.S. President Donald Trump or the economic and political clampdown under Chinese President Xi Jinping, but his analysis highlights the economic vulnerabilities of both countries as they face the next century. Finally, any reckoning with the economic future of the planet must include the challenge of climate change, to which the recent book by Nordhaus, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, is an essential introduction.

评语：To paraphrase the economist Paul Krugman: when it comes to economic growth, technological progress is not everything, but it is almost everything. Just as the pace and direction of technological change shaped the last economic century, it will equally shape the next. Gordon advances a pessimistic view of the capacity for technological change to continue raising living standards at the rate to which Americans grew accustomed in the last century. He points to “one great wave” of inventions and innovations between 1870 and 1970, such as electricity, indoor plumbing, and the internal combustion engine, and questions whether current advances in artificial intelligence, human genomics, and robotics can improve living standards to the same extent. Many readers will find Gordon’s skepticism regarding today’s new technologies counterintuitive. But they will be forced to think again about the capacity of these developments to improve the human condition. New technologies also have distributional consequences—as any early-twentieth-century horse-drawn carriage maker would attest. People must acquire skills and training to rise to the demands of new technological competition. Goldin and Katz view this interplay through the lens of U.S. history. They describe how the United States became a leader in the provision of universal education and how it pioneered the “high school movement.” They show how educational attainment advanced faster than technology in the first half of the twentieth century, leading to a drop in economic inequality. In the latter half of the century, however, technology “sprinted ahead” and accentuated distributional problems. The book raises questions about whether educational systems can continue to successfully impart requisite skills and training, whether they will win the political support needed to do so, and how inequality will deepen in the event of their failure. The global economic future will be shaped, in no small part, by the geostrategic contest between China and the United States and by the performance of their respective economic and political systems. One hesitates to recommend a book on the economic competition between these two countries, given the rapidity of change in their respective economies and polities and, no less, in their bilateral relations. But readers probably can’t do better than Pettis’s 2013 work. He emphasizes policy distortions that artificially boost saving and investment in China while depressing them in the United States, producing trade imbalances, financial weakness in China, and deindustrialization in the United States. Pettis did not predict the election of U.S. President Donald Trump or the economic and political clampdown under Chinese President Xi Jinping, but his analysis highlights the economic vulnerabilities of both countries as they face the next century. Finally, any reckoning with the economic future of the planet must include the challenge of climate change, to which the recent book by Nordhaus, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, is an essential introduction.

评语：To paraphrase the economist Paul Krugman: when it comes to economic growth, technological progress is not everything, but it is almost everything. Just as the pace and direction of technological change shaped the last economic century, it will equally shape the next. Gordon advances a pessimistic view of the capacity for technological change to continue raising living standards at the rate to which Americans grew accustomed in the last century. He points to “one great wave” of inventions and innovations between 1870 and 1970, such as electricity, indoor plumbing, and the internal combustion engine, and questions whether current advances in artificial intelligence, human genomics, and robotics can improve living standards to the same extent. Many readers will find Gordon’s skepticism regarding today’s new technologies counterintuitive. But they will be forced to think again about the capacity of these developments to improve the human condition. New technologies also have distributional consequences—as any early-twentieth-century horse-drawn carriage maker would attest. People must acquire skills and training to rise to the demands of new technological competition. Goldin and Katz view this interplay through the lens of U.S. history. They describe how the United States became a leader in the provision of universal education and how it pioneered the “high school movement.” They show how educational attainment advanced faster than technology in the first half of the twentieth century, leading to a drop in economic inequality. In the latter half of the century, however, technology “sprinted ahead” and accentuated distributional problems. The book raises questions about whether educational systems can continue to successfully impart requisite skills and training, whether they will win the political support needed to do so, and how inequality will deepen in the event of their failure. The global economic future will be shaped, in no small part, by the geostrategic contest between China and the United States and by the performance of their respective economic and political systems. One hesitates to recommend a book on the economic competition between these two countries, given the rapidity of change in their respective economies and polities and, no less, in their bilateral relations. But readers probably can’t do better than Pettis’s 2013 work. He emphasizes policy distortions that artificially boost saving and investment in China while depressing them in the United States, producing trade imbalances, financial weakness in China, and deindustrialization in the United States. Pettis did not predict the election of U.S. President Donald Trump or the economic and political clampdown under Chinese President Xi Jinping, but his analysis highlights the economic vulnerabilities of both countries as they face the next century. Finally, any reckoning with the economic future of the planet must include the challenge of climate change, to which the recent book by Nordhaus, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, is an essential introduction.

评语：Neither Chandler nor Nove had much to say about the roles of finance and economic fluctuations in the development of technology. These issues were the focus of Perez’s influential 2002 work. Like the economists Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger before her, Perez emphasized the volatility of investor sentiment, the role of new technologies in precipitating investor manias, and the tendency for financial markets to go through cycles of boom and bust. She described how bubbles, when they burst, can be both destructive and generative: they leave behind not just the detritus of failed financial investments but also tangible infrastructures that underpin subsequent economic growth. The railway boom of the late nineteenth century and the dot-com bubble during the early years of this century illustrate her claim. The financial crashes and crises of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries may have been costly and disruptive, but they were integral elements of the ongoing, if unsteady, forward march of the market economy.

评语：Neither Chandler nor Nove had much to say about the roles of finance and economic fluctuations in the development of technology. These issues were the focus of Perez’s influential 2002 work. Like the economists Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger before her, Perez emphasized the volatility of investor sentiment, the role of new technologies in precipitating investor manias, and the tendency for financial markets to go through cycles of boom and bust. She described how bubbles, when they burst, can be both destructive and generative: they leave behind not just the detritus of failed financial investments but also tangible infrastructures that underpin subsequent economic growth. The railway boom of the late nineteenth century and the dot-com bubble during the early years of this century illustrate her claim. The financial crashes and crises of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries may have been costly and disruptive, but they were integral elements of the ongoing, if unsteady, forward march of the market economy.

评语：Nove’s work on the Soviet economy, originally published in 1961, has been revised and updated repeatedly; the final edition was released in 1992 in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nove dissected key episodes in Soviet economic history, from the New Economic Policy of the 1920s and farm collectivization in the 1930s to the heavy industry drive and abortive economic reforms under Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and other Soviet leaders. His successive editions also showed how scholarly views of the Soviet experiment evolved over time. Nove was able to reconcile the successful growth in the first half of the Soviet period—achieved, to be sure, at immense human cost—with the eventual decline and collapse of the Soviet economy and Soviet society. As he showed, central planning in general, and its Soviet variant in particular, had always been riddled with flaws. These faults came to the fore with a vengeance toward the end of twentieth century.

评语：The signal economic developments of the last century were the rise of the U.S. economy, the collapse of the Soviet economic system, and the increasingly complex interplay of technological progress, finance, and business-cycle instability. Chandler’s 1977 magnum opus remains the definitive account of U.S. managerial capitalism. The Pulitzer Prize–winning business historian emphasized the key role of corporate managerial decisions but also the structural advantages of the size and reach of U.S. companies, specifically for firms positioned to sell first to a continental market and then to the entire world. In explaining why some firms achieve market dominance, Chandler pointed to “first mover” investments (preempting the market by being first to invest), global distributional networks, and efficient management hierarchies. His arguments were later challenged by critics who argued that new information and communication technologies vitiated the advantages of corporate size and hierarchical control. These new technologies, the skeptics suggested, put small firms on an equal footing with big ones. But the survival of large manufacturing firms that were Chandler’s focus and the ascendancy of a new generation of even larger information technology companies essentially vindicated his claims.

评语：The signal economic developments of the last century were the rise of the U.S. economy, the collapse of the Soviet economic system, and the increasingly complex interplay of technological progress, finance, and business-cycle instability. Chandler’s 1977 magnum opus remains the definitive account of U.S. managerial capitalism. The Pulitzer Prize–winning business historian emphasized the key role of corporate managerial decisions but also the structural advantages of the size and reach of U.S. companies, specifically for firms positioned to sell first to a continental market and then to the entire world. In explaining why some firms achieve market dominance, Chandler pointed to “first mover” investments (preempting the market by being first to invest), global distributional networks, and efficient management hierarchies. His arguments were later challenged by critics who argued that new information and communication technologies vitiated the advantages of corporate size and hierarchical control. These new technologies, the skeptics suggested, put small firms on an equal footing with big ones. But the survival of large manufacturing firms that were Chandler’s focus and the ascendancy of a new generation of even larger information technology companies essentially vindicated his claims.

评语：Not since the 1930s or the dark days of the Cold War has the future of liberal democracy seemed so uncertain. Political philosophers such as Shklar sought to defend liberalism in a world of rising violence and tyranny. In her many books and essays, Shklar argued that liberalism cannot remake societies or resolve fundamental moral disagreements. Instead, the liberal ethos of forbearance and magnanimity in negotiating differences provides the best institutional framework for protecting humans from the destructive forces of oppression. Shklar laid the groundwork for this view in her 1957 masterwork, in which she traced the religious and Romantic backlash to Enlightenment beliefs in human reason and social progress. Shklar showed that reactionary and critical thinkers have shadowed liberalism from the beginning, rejecting its alleged utopianism and opening the way for an illiberalism rooted in fatalism and social despair. Liberalism can only endure, she insisted, when anchored in people’s mutual vulnerability to suffering and their aversion to the greatest of all “public vices,” cruelty. Safeguarding the delicate accomplishment of liberal societies will require the reaffirmation of the toleration of difference, a noble spirit that Shklar hoped could sustain liberal democracy even in an age of disillusionment.

评语：The years ahead will be shaped by China’s ambitions, the continuing struggles of liberal democracy, and the climate crisis. The rise of China might well be a defining feature of the twenty-first century. If so, it is a drama that the world has seen before. The rise and decline of great powers and the struggles over international order have marked world politics since the age of Thucydides. No modern book of international relations theory offers a more sweeping, elegant, and influential account of these global power transitions than Gilpin’s 1981 classic. Gilpin saw world politics as a succession of ordered systems created by leading (or hegemonic) states that emerge after war with the opportunity and capabilities to organize the rules and arrangements of interstate relations. Order is built not on the balance of power but on a structured asymmetry of power. These hierarchical orders can persist for decades and even centuries, but eventually the underlying material conditions of power shift, and the ordered relations of states break apart, sometimes violently. Gilpin’s book encourages the reader to place upheavals in contemporary world politics in a deeper historical perspective. Change is inevitable, and no order lasts forever. The question Gilpin leaves the reader with is the most profound: “Is there any reason to hope that political change may be more benign in the future than it has been in the past?”

评语：The emergence of precisely that kind of order after World War II ranks as one of the most important developments of the modern era. In the shadow of the Cold War, Western liberal democracies engaged in new and far-reaching forms of cooperation. They reopened the world economy, built regional and global institutions, launched the European project, turned former foes Germany and Japan into partners, and embedded their societies in a system of common security. In the 1950s, Deutsch’s pioneering work marked the beginning of serious efforts by social scientists to map the logic and significance of the new rules-based order. In Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, Deutsch and his co-authors advanced the claim that states are not trapped in a world of anarchy; through trade, exchange, learning, and the exercise of political imagination, groups of states can establish durable zones of peace. Deutsch argued that the countries of the North Atlantic region offered the most advanced form of this effort to dampen and even eliminate the anarchic causes of war. He showed that anarchy is not a fixed condition in international relations but a historical outcome that coordinated political action can prevent.

评语：On the eve of war in 1939, the historian Carr published a portrait of the political and economic turmoil of the prior two decades. Like John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Carr’s work can be read as a polemic against the missteps and delusions of the Anglo-American peacemakers who crafted the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Carr contended that liberals in the nineteenth century and again at Versailles thought that their international projects succeeded—and would again—because of the fundamental rationality of state actors and the harmony of their interests. But this was a delusion. The prewar international order was actually built on British hegemony and liberal ideology, forces that had dissipated by 1914. Carr’s depiction of Wilsonian-era liberals as “utopians” has not stood up to subsequent scholarship, which finds post-1919 liberal internationalists as remarkably pragmatic, experimental, and in many ways more clear-eyed about the coming fascist threat than was Carr. But for generations, Carr’s book has catalyzed debate over the role of authority, ideas, and power in the rise and fall of international order, and it remains a major contribution to the study of twentieth-century world politics. As Carr argues—and the twentieth century shows—powerful states do make international order, but if that order is to last, it will need to be backed by restraints on the abuse of power and infused with a shared sense of social purpose.

评语：The pivotal transformations of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a liberal international order anchored in Europe and North America. Polanyi, the Hungarian economist, provided one of the most influential midcentury arguments about the deep forces that had imperiled liberal democracies in the interwar period. In this seminal work, published in 1944, Polanyi traces the roots of the crisis to the rise of modern capitalism and the breakdown of the world market system during World War I. The utopian liberal dream of a self-regulating market never emerged, Polanyi argued. Instead, the market was built and embedded in an international system of geopolitical power and social order. Market society was neither natural nor truly self-regulating but was “submerged” in social relationships. “Laissez-faire,” Polanyi remarked, “was planned.” The crisis of the interwar years was a consequence of the breakdown of this complex embedded system. Polanyi’s message was clear: if capitalist society was to be rebuilt after World War II, it would need to be through a social democratic project of cross-class institutions that emphasized protecting citizens from economic predation and fostering political solidarity within a wider collaborative international order. The long “golden era” of postwar economic growth and social welfare in the Western industrial societies vindicated his hopes, and the current breakdown of that era confirms his fears.

评语：The pivotal transformations of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a liberal international order anchored in Europe and North America. Polanyi, the Hungarian economist, provided one of the most influential midcentury arguments about the deep forces that had imperiled liberal democracies in the interwar period. In this seminal work, published in 1944, Polanyi traces the roots of the crisis to the rise of modern capitalism and the breakdown of the world market system during World War I. The utopian liberal dream of a self-regulating market never emerged, Polanyi argued. Instead, the market was built and embedded in an international system of geopolitical power and social order. Market society was neither natural nor truly self-regulating but was “submerged” in social relationships. “Laissez-faire,” Polanyi remarked, “was planned.” The crisis of the interwar years was a consequence of the breakdown of this complex embedded system. Polanyi’s message was clear: if capitalist society was to be rebuilt after World War II, it would need to be through a social democratic project of cross-class institutions that emphasized protecting citizens from economic predation and fostering political solidarity within a wider collaborative international order. The long “golden era” of postwar economic growth and social welfare in the Western industrial societies vindicated his hopes, and the current breakdown of that era confirms his fears.