"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when
his salary* depends upon his not understanding it!"
--Upton Sinclair
* For "salary", Might one substitute the words "self-worth" and/or "identity" without loss of meaning?
The United States population is equivalent to 4.34% of the total world population.
* For "salary", Might one substitute the words "self-worth" and/or "identity" without loss of meaning?
The United States population is equivalent to 4.34% of the total world population.
Andrew W. Lo, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency isn't wrong but merely incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo's new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought--a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation" From the text: "LAW IS A CODE[:] To regulate the financial system as a whole, we need to better understand the existing corpus of financial regulation as a whole. This might seem like a hopeless task. No single person--neither the most highly paid lawyer nor the most accomplished politician--is able to hold the whole of modern financial regulation in his or her head. And given the exponential growth of finance, which implies similar growth for financial rules and regulation, there's no reason we should expect this of anyone. But technology offers an interesting solution." "The U.S. legal system is a working example of adaptive regulation. Based on principles of common law that date back to the Middle Ages in Europe, it incrementally changes in response to societal needs and political pressure. However, it wasn't designed for period of rapid change. In fact, many of the Founders saw a slow, deliberate pace in legal change as a positive good, Codification of federal law began startlingly late in American history (1926), and federal statutes are still poorly organized." "What if we looked at the law as a piece of software, the operating system of the United States of America? After all, laws play the same role as software in providing instructions for a given system--if this, then that, and so on. If a team of software engineers was asked to analyze the entire body of federal law, they would see tens of thousands of pages of poorly documented code, with a multitude of complex, spaghetti-like interdependencies between the individual components. Could the principles of good software design be used to improve the way we write financial regulations?" Id. at 371-372. "[T]he Adaptive Market perspective suggests that the financial system needs a different gift: the gift of pain." Id. at 378.).
Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) (See Judith Shapiro, "China World," NYT Book Review, 6/18/2017).
Jagdish Bhagwati, Termites in the Trading System: How Preferential Agreements Undermine Free Trade (New York: A Council of Foreign Relations Book/Oxford U. Press, 2008) (From the book jacket: "Numbering by now well over 300, and rapidly increasing, these preferential trade agreements, many taking the form of Free Trade Agreements, have re-created the unhappy situation of the 1930s, when world trade was undermined by discriminatory practices. Where this was the result of protectionism in those days, ironically it is a result of misdirected pursuit of free trade today. The world trading system is at risk again, the author argues, and the danger is palpable. [Bhagwati documents the growth of these PTAs [Preferential Trae Agreements], the reasons for their proliferation ad their deplorable consequences which include the near-destruction of the nondiscrimination which was at the heart of the postwar trade architecture and its replacement by what he called the 'spaghetti bowl' of a maze of preferences. Bhagwati also documents how PTAs have undermined the prospects for multilayer freeing of trade, serving as 'stumbling blocks,' instead of 'building blocks,' for the object of reaching multilateral free trade.")
Paul Blustein, And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out): Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).
Paul Blustein, Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations: Clashing Egos, inflated Ambitions, and the Great Shambles of the World Trade System (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009).
Heather Boushey, J. Bradford Delong, & Marshall Steinbaum, eds., After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Thomas Piety's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent history, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers of from here in exploring the ideas Piety pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of economists and other social scientists tackle these questions in dialogue with Piety, in what is sure to be a much-dented book in its own right." Needless to say, one should read Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century before tackling this collection of essays.).
Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, & Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (An International Security Reader) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England. The MIT Press, 1995) (From the "Preface": "Two centuries ago, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant predicted that republican states would enjoy a 'perpetual peace' with other republics. More recently, many observers have noted that democratic countries virtually never go to war with one another. Since the early 1980s, this apparent pattern has been regarded as one of the most important empirical features of international relations. Jack Levy claims that 'the absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.' Bruce Reset believes that 'this is one of the strongest nontrivial and non tautological generalization that can be made about international relations.' This absence of war between democracies has come to be known as the 'democratic peace'." "This volume collects important essays that have advanced and challenged the idea of a democracy peace." Id, at ix, citations omitted.).
David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Columbia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1993).
Justin du Rivage, Revolution Against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) ("For many of the Enlightenment's finest minds, the shot fired at Lexington and Concord, the storming of Bunker Hill, and the signing of the American Declaration of Independence signaled that the age of imperial exploitation was coming to an end. Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, and the French minster and philosophe Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot were all convinced that the crisis that spilt the British Empire was a transformative moment in worlg history. . . [T]hey believed the battle over American independence was ultimately a fight about what kind of empire the British Empire would become. Colonists' resistance proved beyond a doubt that colonies and trade restrictions, which had long seemed the source of Europe's power and grandeur, were, in fact, its undoing. Britain's rebellious colonies had seen an unmistakable message to Europe's sovereigns and states. Power through conquest and violence, extraction and slavery, was no longer viable in a modern, enlightened world. Statesmen and thinkers would have to find new models for governance and growth, models that we more economically and morally sound than those that had guided European politics for the past three centuries." Id. a 1-2. You can hear the "but" or "however" whistling in the wings of that paragraph. And here it comes: "Brian tough they were, Franklin, Pownall, Smith, and Turgot were wrong that American independence had sounded the death knell of imperial exploitation and the dawn of a more peaceful world. They were, however, right that the American Revolution was part of a transformation in politics every bit as significant as the system of European states that emerged from the Thirty Years' War. Although it fractured the British Empire and offered hope to independence movements all over the planet, it also marked the beginning of an age in which colonialism dominated much of the planer. Europe's empires would become more extensive, extractive, and authoritarian than they had ever been. Indeed, Britain, which seemed crippled by the loss of its North American colonies, became the greatest empire of them all. [] That transformation came with real economic consequence, allowing Europeans to grow increasingly wealthy, even as they consumed more than they produced. [] As diverse and ramshackle as the empire was, nineteenth-century Britain's industrial economy, dominance of international finance, and military might were sustained by its control of people, money, and resources all over the world. "The United States followed a different path form the dramatic transformation that painted the glob French blue and British red. . . That path reflects the fact that the American Revolution was a revolution not for or against monarchy, but against the authoritarian transformation of the British Empire." Id. at 3-4.).
Haley Sweetland Edwards, Shadow Courts: The Tribunals that Rule Global Trade (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016) (Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) allow foreign corporations to sue sovereign nations before supranational arbitration tribunals. Intended to protect (via compensation) foreign investors property rights, the impact has taken a new and broader course with an expanded notion of protecting, for example, "expected" profits though expropriated by government actions or policies.).
Michael J. Green, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket:"Soon after the American Revolution, certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American statecraft that reflect the nation's political philosophy and material realities. [] Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe ad the Middle East." From the text: "The losing battle for the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Obama administration and the opposition of both presidential candidates to TPP in 2016 suggest that the tension between free trade and protectionism is becoming greater as time passes. Yet, in many respects, that close call on trade legislation reflects a failure of strategic vision and leadership as much as it does real divisions among the American people. In 2015, 70 percent of American supported free trade, while fewer than 20 percent of the member of the unions that opposed it were actually engaged in manufacturing that might be affected by foreign competition. American manufacturing, meanwhile, was on the rise in this period. Nevertheless, trade has become a proxy for other problems with the U.S. economy in terms of stagnating middle-class wages that are more related to globalization and automation than trade agreements. Had President Obama understood the centrality of trade to American internationalism and influence the way Reagan and Bill Clinton did--and made the case for it--then the trade arm of American engagement in Asia and the Pacific wold have had more credibility at home and abroad from the beginning." Id. at 547-548. Note: Trump is a nationalist, not an internationalist; he is a protectionist, not a free trader; and he and his base believe that everyone is cheating America. As a result, Trump is weakening America's role on the global stage generally, and in the Asia Pacific, especially. Needless to say, nuclear-capable North Korea is an 'interesting' conundrum for the United States. Food for thought?).
Jakub J. Grygiel & A. Wess Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier: Rising Rivals, Vulnerable Allies, and the Crisis of American Power (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) (This book was written before the authoritarian-strongmen-loving, isolationist-leaning, pro-Russia, and poorly-informed on international matters, Donald Trump entered the White House. He would be advised to have someone summarize the book for him. From the book jacket: "From the Baltic the South China Sea, newly assertive authoritarian states sense an opportunity to resurrect old empires or build new one at America's expense. Hoping that U.S. decline is real, nations such as Russia, Iran, and China [NOTE: Don't forget North Korea!] are testing Washington's resolve by targeting vulnerable allies at the frontiers of American power. The Unquiet Frontier explains why the United States needs a new grand strategy [Note: And not isolationism!] that uses strong frontier alliance networks to raise the cost of military aggression in the new century. [] Grygiel and Mitchell reveal how numerous would-be great powers use an arsenal of asymmetric techniques to probe and sift American strength across several regions simultaneously, and how reveals and allies alike are learning form America's management of increasingly interlinked global crises to hone effective strategies of their own.").
Douglas A. Irwin Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1996) (From the book jacket: "About two hundred yeas ago, largely as a result of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, free trade achieved a intellectual status unrivaled by any other doctrine in the field of economics. What accounts for the success of free trade against then prevailing mercantilist doctrines? And how well has free trade withstood various theoretical attacks that have challenged it since Adam Smith's time? In this . . . intellectual history, Douglas Irwin explains how the idea of free trade has endured against the tide of the abundant criticisms that have been leveled against it from the ancient world and Adam Smith's day through the present. . . . Irwin traces the origins of the free trade doctrine from premercantilist times up to Adam Smith and the classical economists. . . . [H]e shows how Smith's compelling arguments in favor of free trade overthrew mercantilist views that domestic industries should be protected from import competition. Once a presumption about the economic benefits of free trade was established, various objections to free trade arose in the form of major arguments for protectionism such as those relating to the terms of trade, infant industries, increasing returns, wage distortions, income distribution, unemployment, and strategic trade policy. Discussing the contentious historical controversies surrounding each of the arguments, Irwin reveals the serious analytical and practical weaknesses of each and in the process shows why free trade remains among the most durable and robust propositions that economic has to offer for the conduct of economic policy.").
Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Tracing the Mongol takeover of the eastern Islamic world, which began when Chinggis Khan and his warriors overran Central Asia and devastated much of Iran, Jackson offers a fresh and fascinating consideration of the years of infidel rule, demonstrating how Islam not only survived the savagery of the Mongol conquest, but in fact thrived and expanded throughout the empire.").
Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2015) ("For the most part the Magna Carta is dry, technical, difficult to decipher, and constitutionally obsolete. Those parts that are still frequently quoted--clauses about the right to justice before one's peers, the freedom from being unlawfully imprisoned, and the freedom of the Church--did not mean in 1215 what we often wish they would mean today. They are part of a document drawn up not to defend in perpetuity the interests of national citizens but rather to pin down a king who had been greatly vexing a small number of his wealthy and violent subjects. The Magna Carta ought to be dead, defunct, and of interest only to serious scholars of the thirteenth century." Id. at 1. 'The Magna Carta's terms applied only to 'free men,' who were then at best 10 percent or 20 percent of England's adult population." Id. at 2.).
Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization, The Return of History (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Globalization, long considered the best route to economic prosperity, is not inevitable. An approach built on the principles of free trade and, since the 1980s, open capital markets is beginning to fracture. With disappointing growth rates across the western world, nations are no longer willing to sacrifice national interests for global growth; nor are their leaders able--or willing--to sell the idea of pursuing a global agenda of prosperity to their citizens. A 'them-and-us' political narratives re-emerge, isolationism and protectionism are making an unwelcome return." "Combining historical analysis with current affairs--including both Brexit an Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 US presidential election--economist Stephen D. King provide a provocative and engaging account of why globalization is being rejected, what a world ruled by rival states with conflicting aims might look like, and how the pursuit of nationalist agendas could result in a race to the bottom. King argues that a rejection of globalization and a return to 'autarky' will risk economic and political conflict, and uses lessons from history to gauge how best to avoid the worst possible outcomes." From the text: "I make six key claims: First, economic progress that reaches beyond borders is not, in any way, an inescapable truth. Globalization can all too easily go into reverse. Second, technology can both enable globalization and destroy it. Third, economic development that reduces inequality between nation states but appears to increase it within those states inevitably creates a tension between a desire for overall gains in global living standards and a yearning for economic and social stability at home. Fourth, the desire for domestic stability may be undermined by huge twenty-first migration flows. Fifth, the international institutions that have helped govern globalization's advance are losing their credibility: rightly or wrongly, globalization is increasingly seen to work for the few, not for the many. Creating new twenty-first-century institutions to combat this perception will not be easy however, particularly given the potential clash in values between what might be described as Western democracies and Eastern autocracies. Sixth (and as the Western powers are belatedly beginning to recognize), there is more than one version of globalization. As US relative economic power declines, so other nascent superpowers will be looking to reshape the world around them in ways that serve their own interests and reflect their own histories. If the Cold War was ultimately a binary rival, the twenty-first century is likely to see multiple rivalries, closer in nature to the imperial disputes of the nineteenth century. Indeed, President Xi's speech in Davos in January 2017 only served to reinforce the sense that globalization is up for grabs." Id. at 6-7.).
Stephen D. King, When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Alliance (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("Yet even with all these reforms, the risk of financial collapse will remain. Systemic financial failures are no different from systemic medical failures . . . Systemic failures in any walk of life are precisely those that few individuals can rely be held responsible for. To deal with these kinds of failures, prevention is a much better option than any eventual cure." "We're given plenty of eduction regarding our physical health . . . " "In the financial world, however, there is no education whatsoever. It's a jungle out there and, in the jungle, the fat cats always seem to win. Leveling the playing field will hardly be easy but, at the very least, financial education should be stepped up. People able to understand what it means to save for a pension, and the risks that might be involved. They should understand how mortgages work, including the simple distinction between repayment and interest-only mortgages. They should know the fee structures charged by financial intermediaries and be able to shop around for the best deal. And they should have some idea of the safety of the financial institutions that are receiving their money: it wouldn't be difficult for regulators to provide 'health ratings' for banks based on, for for example, their loan to deposit ratios or their level of capital (in the same way that all restaurants in New York have to prove a visible hygiene rating). People might then this twice before leaving their lifetime savings with an internet bank that just happened to offer a higher deposit rate than rival institutions. It would be wrong to tell people what to do but there is no reason why they cannot be nudge in the right direction." Id. at 257-258.).
Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (The Progeny of the Roman Empire: The Ottoman Empire; The Habsburg Empire; The Russian and Soviet Empires; The British Empire; The French Empire).
Lee Kuan Yew, The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World, Interviews and Selections by Graham Allison. Robert D. Blackmail, & Ali Wyne, Foreword by Henry A. Kissinger (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belfer Center for International Security/ The MIT Press, 2013) ("China is sucking the Southeast Asian countries into its economic system because of its vast market and growing purchasing power, Japan and South Korea will inevitability be sucked in as well. It just absorbs countries without having to use force. China's neighbors want the U.S. to stay engaged in the Asia-Pacific so that they are not hostages to China. The U.S. should have established a free-trade area with Southeast Asia 30 years ago, well before the Chinese magnet began to pull the region into its orbit. If it had done so, its purchasing power would now be so much greater than it is, and all of the Southeast Asian countries would have been linked to the US, economy rather than depending on China's. Economics set underlying trends. China's growing economic sway will be very difficult to fight." "China's emphasis is on expanding their influence through the economy. In the geopolitical sense, they are more concerned now with using diplomacy in their foreign policy, not force." Id. at 6-7. However, note the administration of Donald Trump, rather foolishly, has pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), not to mention the Paris Climate Accord, essentially conceding international leadership and opening the door (further) for China.).
Justin Yifu Lin & Celestin Monga, Beating the Odds: Jump-Starting Developing Countries (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Contrary to conventional wisdom, countries that ignite a process of rapid economic growth almost always do so while lacking what experts say are the essential preconditions for development, such as good infrastructure and institutions. In Beating the Odds, two of the world's leading development economists begin with this paradox to explain what is wrong with mainstream developmental thinking--and to offer a practical blueprint for moving poor countries out of the low-income trap regardless of their circumstances.").
Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (London: Little, Brown, 2006) ("India and Chine both possess a third attribute that was lacking in Britain but was present to some extent in the United States--a large population. This can be both a strength and a weakness. The population density of China and India will lead to growing strains on their environments and on their scarce supplies of arable land. Unless they seriously qualify the nature of their economic growth, this could lead to large-scale environmental crises as the century progresses. But if the two Asian giants can sustain their economic growth rates, then sheer weight of numbers will ensure they overtake all other economies, including eventually the United States--although that will take several decades longer. [Note: China has already replaced the United States as the world largest economy.] However, the disadvantages of having a large population could check and even reverse this advantage if the two countries permit indefinite environmental degradation. This would also impose an unbearable cost on everyone else. Laos and Bolivia can degrade their resources as much as they wish. But if China and India fail to take environmental sustainability into account over the coming decades, they will export their suffering to the rest of the world. . . [I]t is worth mentioning in passing that America, China and India--the large nation states to which the twenty-first century is expected to belong--are today probably the three most important obstacles to an international consensus to tackle global warming." Id. at 263.).
Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) ("On, or about, January 2017, the global economy changed guard. The venue was Davos, the annual gathering of the world's wealthiest recyclers of conventional wisdom--and consistently one of the last places to anticipate what is going to happen next. This time was different. The assembled hedge-fund tycoons, Silicon Valley data executives, management gurus and government officials were treated to a preview of how rapidly the world is about to change. Xi Jinping, the president of China, had come to the Swiss Alpine resort to defend the global trade system against the attacks of the newly elected US president, Donald Trump. With minimal fanfare, the leader of the world's largest developing economy took over the role of defending the global trading system in the teeth of protectionist war cries from the word's most developed nation. It portended a new era in which China would aspire to be the responsible global citizens. The bad guys were swapping places with the good. 'Some people blame economic globalization for the chaos in our world.' Xi told Davos. 'We should not retreat into the harbour whenever we encounter a storm or we will never reach the other shore . . . No one will emerge as a winner from a trade war.'" Id. at 19-20. "[T]he most moral threat to the Western idea of progress comes from within. Donald Trump, and his counterparts in Europe, did not cause the crisis of democratic liberals. They are a symptom. [] Since the of the millennium, and particularly over the last decade, no fewer than twenty-five democracies have failed around the world, three of them in Europe (Russia, Turkey, and Hungary). [] Is the Western god of liberal democracy failing? The backlash of the West's middle classes, who are the bigger losers in a global economy that has been rapidly converging, but still has decades to go, has been brewing since the early 1990s. In Britain we call them the 'left-behinds'. In France, they are the 'couches moyennes'. In America, they are the 'squeezed middle'. A better term is the 'precariat'--those whose lives are dominated by economic insecurity. Their weight of numbers is growing. So, too, is their impatience. Barrington Moore, the American sociologist, famously said, 'No bourgeoisie, no democracy.' In the coming years we will find out f he was right." Id. at 11-12. ).
Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012) ('The truth is that America's stock has been falling around the world for quite a white. At home, opinion polls register mounting disappointment. . . . Simply proclaiming the superiority of the American model is not helping anyone's credibility. . . . Were America's politicos to peer closer into American hearts, I imagine they would be more circumspect. They would find rising fear and anger. They would also come across a growing sense of boredom; Americans are increasingly turned off by politics And they would surely meet families . . . who know the difference between saying and doing but who fear their country has forgotten." Id. at 281.) )
Duff McDonald, The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite (New York: Harper, 2017) (I think this passage sums up the most important takeaway from the book. Its essence applies not simply to elite MBAs, but also to elite JDs. And it does not simply apply to the elites, it applies to all of us in both our professional and personal lives, as if there is a difference. "'What I think HBS does, and does very well,' says [Casey] Gerald, 'is train people to in situations of ambiguity, to take imperfect information, uncertain outcomes, and tight deadlines and figure out what to do in the most effective, efficient, and powerful way. But the tragedy of the Business School is that you can use that ability to do two things at once, to build great companies and destroy the planet in the process. Or its people. Robert S. McNamara was an HBS alum. He helped turn around Ford Motor Company, and then went on to wreak destruction in Vietnam. We have to have a conversation about which one we're doing--and why we should be doing one and not the other. There's nothing ambiguous about it.'" Id. at 3-4.).
Gary Saul Morson & Morton Schapiro: Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (Princeton & ford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (There are numerous passages in this book where one could readily substitute the word "law" for the word "economics" and the authors' point would remain pertinent. Thus, one might take my including this book on this list as a suggestion that law students, and members of the law profession generally, can learn a lot from the humanities and from reading great works of literature. Seven-five years ago this would have been obvious, but legal education has lost it way, and what was once obvious is now obscure. Many lawyers today are, at best technicians, showing very little capacity for empathy. From the text: [R]eading great literature is unlike any other university-taught discipline, in that it involves constant practice in empathy. Theories of ethics may or may not recommend empathy, but learning those theories does not require practice in empathy, as reading great novels necessarily does. Of one has not identified with Anna Karenina, one has not really read Anna Karenina." "When you read a great novel and identify with its characters, you spend hundreds of hours engaging with them--feeling from within what it is like to be someone else. You see the world from the perspective of someone of a different social class, gender, religion, culture, sexuality, moral understanding, or countless other factors that differentiate people and human experience. And as characters interact, and you identify with each in turn, you see how each perspective may look to those with another. You even learn to understand misunderstanding. Tracing the heroine's thoughts as she thinks them, you get inside her head, which you cannot do with people in real life. If she makes a foolish decision you wince. You live her life vicariously, and in doing so you not only feel what she feels but also reflect on the feelings, consider the morality of the actions to which they lead, and, with practice, acquire the wisdom to appreciate real people in all their complexity." Id. 12-13. Perhaps the explanation for why so many of us today live in social, political, intellectual, or whatever, bubbles, with an inability or unwillingness to see things from there others' perspectives, is in part our having abandoned liberal education and the reading and studying great works of literature. So, I hope the law students and young lawyers, who are reading this, read or reread their Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, Shakespeare, etc. t is not to late to develop one capacity for empathy.)
Dorit Rabinyan, All the Rivers: A Novel, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen (New York: Random House, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Banned from classrooms by Israel's Ministry of Education, Dorit Rabinyan's remarkable novel contains multitudes. A bold portrayal of the strains--and delights--of a forbidden relationship, All the Rivers (published in Israel as Borderlife) is a love story and a war story, a New York story and a Middle East story, an unflinching foray into the forces that bind us and divide us. 'The land is the same land,' Hilmi reminds Liat. 'In the end all the rivers flow into the same sea.'" Also see James B. Stewart, "Profit or Loss," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/30/2017.).
Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008) ("If war has been mankind's most powerful negative urge, then the universal agreements that limit the horrors of war and protect civilians have been the hallmark of progress and have reflected man's deeper instincts for civilization. The Geneva Conventions may not have halted the Jewish holocaust, Rwandan genocide, or terrorism but they have given us a code of conduct by which we can judge the actions of our leaders in the desperate times of war. That is why the decision by President Bush on February 7, 2002, to deny captured al Qaeda, Taliban, and other terrorist suspects prisoner of war (POW) status or any access to justice was a step backward for the United States and for mankind--one that has haunted the United States, its allies, and the international legal system ever since. Whereas in the West it created a furious debate about civil liberties, in the Muslim world it further entrenched dictatorship and abuse of civilians." "For the greatest power on earth to wage its 'war on terrorism' by rejecting the very rules of war it is a signatory to, denying justice at home, undermining the U.S. Constitution, and the pressuring its allies to do the same set in motion a devastating denial of civilized instincts." Id. at 293.).
Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, The CIA, and the Sino-India War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2015).
Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (New York: Norton, 2011) ("Replacing our economic world on a safer footing requires a better understanding of the fragile balance between markets and governance. I will offer an alternative narrative in this book based on two simple ideas. First, markets and governance are complements, not substitutes. If you want more and better markets, you have to have more (and better) governance. Markets work best not where states are weakest, but where they are strong. Second, capitalism does not come with a unique model. Economic prosperity and stability can be achieved through different combinations of institutional arrangements in labor markets, finance, corporate governance, social welfare, and other areas. Nations are likely to---and indeed are entitled to--make varying choices among these arrangements depending on their needs and values." ". . . Trite as the may sound as stated, these ideas have enormous implications for globalization and for democracy, and for how hard we can take each in the presence of the other. Once you understand that markets require public institutions of governance and regulation in order to function well, and further, you accept that nations may have different preferences over the shape that those institutions and regulations should take, you have started to tell a story that leads you to radically different endings." "In particular, you begin to understand what I call the fundamental political trilemma of the world economy: we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy , national determination, and economic globalization. If we want to push globalization further, we have to give up either the nation state or democratic politics. If we want to maintain and deepen democracy, we have to choose between the nation state and international economic integration, we have choose between deepening democracy and deepening globalization, Our troubles have their roots in our reluctance to face unto these ineluctable choices." Id. at xviii-xix.).
Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and The United States, 1939-1950 (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) ("On 21 February 1930, a few months after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain traveled to Munich in an attempt to appease Adolf Hitler, the royal Institute of International Affairs in London held a panel discussion about world order. The main speaker, Lionel Curtis, argued that interdependency was the main characteristic of the modern world; 'What one small country, a Serbia or a Czechoslovakia, does or leaves undone instantly affects the whole of human society'. He added that in spite of the fact that 'socially and economically human society is now one closely integrated unit', the political order reflected fragmentation rather than unity. His conclusion was clearly stated: 'I am now convinced that a world commonwealth embracing all nations and kindreds [sic] and tongues is the goal at which we must aim before we can hope to move to a higher plane of civilization. Indeed, I will now go so far as to say that unless we conceive that goal in time, and take steps to approach it, our present stage of civilisation is doomed to collapse'. Curtis's address was followed by a lively debate about the merits of is suggestions . . . " Id. at 1. "The Emergence of Globalism is an intellectual history of the complex and nonlinear genealogy of globalism in mid-century visions of he world order. Ever since the outbreak of the war, American, British, and emigre intellectuals had diagnosed the emergence of globalism as the defining condition of the post-war era. Their proposals for ordering the post-war world envisaged competing schemes of global orders motivated by concerns for the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty and diversity, and the decline of the imperial system. In this book, I explore the languages employed to outline the meaning of the 'global' as a political idea to shed light on the configurations of 'world order' as a normative foundation for geopolitical, economic, and legal structures." Id. at 2. "'Practical men in positions of power', Barbara Wooton wrote in her memoir, 'can always demonstrate the impracticability of idealistic proposals by the simple device of making sure that these are never tried.'." Id. at 272.).
Steven B. Smith, Political Philosophy (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) ("I have written this book as an introduction to political philosophy rather than the more conventional history of political thought. What I understand by political philosophy is . . . a rare and distinctive form of thinking and is not to be confused either with the study of political language in general or with the dry and desiccated form of 'concept analysis' so prominent in the 1950s and '60s. Political philosophy is the investigation of the permanent problems of political life--problems like 'Who ought to govern?' 'How ought conflict to be managed?' 'How should a citizen and a statesman be educated?'--that every society must confront." Id. at ix. On "transpolitial cosmopolitanism": "The task of becoming a citizen of the world is no easy business. It requires a kind of abstraction form the comfort and security of the familiar." Id. at 246.).
Siep Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "For much of history, strangers were routinely classified as barbarians and inferiors, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of a common humanity was counterintuitive and thus had to be invented. Siep Stuurman traces evolving ideas of human equality and difference across continents and civilizations from ancient times to the present. "Despite humans' deeply ingrained bias against strangers, migration and cultural blending have shaped human experience from the earliest times. As travelers crossed frontiers and came into contact with unfamiliar peoples and customs, frontiers experiences generated not only hostility but also empathy and understanding. Empires sought to civilize their 'barbarians,' but in all historical eras critics of empire were able to imagine how the subjected peoples made short shrift of imperial arrogance, "Drawing on the views of a global mix of thinkers--Homer, Confucius, Herodotus, the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, the Haitian writer Antenor Firmin, the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal, and others--The Invention of Humanity surveys the great civilizations frontiers of history, from the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies in ancient Eurasia and Africa to Europeans' first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the New World, to the Enlightenment invention of universal 'modern equality.' Against a backdrop of two millennia of thinking about common humanity and equality, Stuurman concludes with a discussion of present-day debates about human rights and the 'clash of civilizations.'").
Rachel L. Wellhausen, The Shield of Nationality: When Governments Break Contracts with Foreign Firms (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2015).
Hugh Wilford, America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2013) (From the book jacket: "Hugh Wilford reveals the surprising history of the CIA's pro-Arab operations in the 1940s and 50s by tracing the work of the agency's three most influential--and colorful--officers in the Middle East. Kermit 'Kim' Roosevelt . . . Archie Roosevelt . . . Miles Copeland . . . With their deep knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs, the three men were heirs to an American missionary tradition that engaged Arabs and Muslims with respect and empathy. Yet there were fascinated by imperial intrigue, and were eager to play a modern rematch of the 'Great Game.' the nineteenth-century struggle between Britain and Russia for control over central Asia. Despite their good intentions, these 'Arabists' propped up authoritarian regimes, attempted secretly to sway public opinion in America against support for the new state of Israel, and staged coups that irrevocably destabilized the nations with which they empathized. Their efforts, and ultimate failure, would shape the course of US-Middle Eastern relations for decades to come." From the text: "Evidently, the era of the CIA Arabists was foundational to the current American relationship with the Middle East. At a time of renewed and profound flux in the Arab world, it would serve all those concerned with US policy in that region to study the early moment carefully, to understand better the underlying historical forces, domestic as well as foreign, cultural and emotional as well as political, that have shaped the fraught American-Middle Eastern encounter ever since." Id. at 299.).
Jon Wilson, The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India (New York: PublicAffiars, 2017) ("Wherever it is invoked, the idea of Britain's absolute sovereign control over anything, including just itself, conveys a sense of the country as an embattled and isolated, surrounded by chaotic forces it cannot deal with, imbued with the idea it can only service by building defensive walls to protect and defend itself. As in India, it is an idea based on delusion. In fact, Britain has never done anything alone. The history of Britain itself has been shaped by global trade, and by friendship and conflict beyond the places its empire dominated. Britain itself is made up of different interests, towns and countries and identities; it has been most successful when authority has be exercised far from Westminster, and then coordinated by an inclusive form of political leadership. In practice, the absolute sovereignty of the monarch and Parliament is not the same thing as effective power. There are better ways Britain can engage with itself and with the world." Id. at 4990500.) Perhaps this is a cautionary tale for the United States, which has suffered, and continues to suffer, from its own grand delusions.).
Thomas J. Wright, All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the Twenty-First Century and the Future of American Power (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) (From the book Jacket: "The two decades after the Cold War saw unprecedented cooperation between the major powers as the world converged on a model of liberal international order. Now, great power competition is back, and the liberal order is in jeopardy. Russia and China are increasingly seeking to establish and maintain spheres of influence. The Middle East appears to be unraveling. The European Union is on the brink of disintegration. President Trump has proclaimed an America First foreign policy and the end of U.S. global leaders. What will great power competition look like in the decades ahead? Will the liberal world order survive? What impact will nationalism and rising tensions have on globalization? In this book Thomas Wright explains how major powers will compete fiercely even as they try to avoid war with each other--responsible competition--to navigate these challenges and strengthen the liberal order." From the text: "The title of this book, All Measures Short of War, comes form U.S. strategy in the early years of World War II, when President Roosevelt sought to help Britain in every way he could without actually fighting Germany. Today's great powers will compete vigorously with each other in order to shape, transform, or undermine the world order, but they all hope and intend to avoid a major war. The risk and cost are simply too great and the potential benefit too small. Of course, war could still occur inadvertently. Perhaps a leader will take a chance, thinking he or she can keep any war limited, but miscalculate. Or a leader may misunderstand the intentions of another and overreact. But as the United States, China, Russia, and several others engage in geopolitical competition with their rivals, they will do so with the intention of winning in peacetime. They will use their military to establish positions of strength; they will employ the tools of diplomatic coercion [Note, however, Trump has gutted and muted the State Department.]; they will seek to win the hearts and minds of other nations [Note, however, Trump has insulted several world leaders and embraced and sang the praises of some authoritarian leaders.]; they will ruthlessly exploit each other's weaknesses; they will use economic leverage for geopolitical ends; and they may countenance the use of force against third parties or even fight each other in proxy wars." Id. at 32-33. "Trump is the first president who campaigned against the liberal international order that the United States created after World War II and has led ever since. Every other president accepted the parameters of postwar U.S. strategy, but Trump argued that American leadership of the order was hurting the United States." Id. at 224. "Four years of American nationalism will weaken the liberal order. The crisis of American leadership is merely the most dramatic example of rising populism and nationalism in what West. The year 2016 was truly an annus horribilis for internationalists." Id. at 225. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that, if the U.S. is not going to lead the liberal order, it get out of the way.).
Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, January--March 1961) (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961) ("Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rest. I look forward to a time when the historian and sociologists and political thinkers of the English-speaking world owl regain their courage for that task." "It is, however, not the waning faith in reason among the intellectuals and the political thinkers of the English-speaking world which perturbs me most, but the loss of the pervading sense of a world in perpetual motion. This seems at first paradoxical; for rarely has so much superficial talk been heard of changes going on around us. But the significant thing is that change is no longer thought of as achievement, as opportunity, a progress, but as an object of fear. When our political and economic pundits prescribe, they have nothing to offer us but the warning to distrust radical and far-reaching ideas, to shun anything that savors of revolution, and to advance--if advance we must--as slowly and cautiously as we can. At a moment when the world is changing its shape more rapidly and more radically than at any time in the last 400 years, this seems to me a singular blindness, which gives ground for apprehension, not that the world-wide movement will be stayed, but that this country--and perhaps other English-speaking countries--may lag behind the general advance, and relapse helplessly and uncomplainingly into some nostalgic backwater."" Id. at 150-151.).
