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6) Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
First in what should be a spurt to get me to 10. I've been slowly making progress in three big books over the past month and am within 50 pages of the end in all three.
Lords of Finance won the Pulitzer Prize last year and it deserved it. In terms of critical evaluation, I really needn't say much more than that. It's an analysis of the events leading up to the Great Depression and the fall of the gold standard from a macroeconomic point of view, focusing on the central bank officials in Europe and America whom Ahamed maintains had the power to have prevented the Depression if they'd had a better understanding of their situation.
The descriptions of the bankers are personal and intimate. Ahamed seeks to understanding not merely their decisions but what drove them to make those decisions. The descriptions of financial maneuevers are clear, simple, and do not require a Ph.D in economics to follow. Ahamed takes massive, complicated financial systems and expresses them in terms that make sense. While I'm always going to be mistrustful of this process, I felt much less mistrustful than I usually do with popularizations of complicated mathematical ideas. By leaving the mathematics entirely out and focusing on the processes, Ahamed was able to explain what happened without showing his work, and his clarity and precision served as adequate substitute for the actual equations.
Needless to say, the book was so acclaimed because it professes to teach lessons about our present economic difficulties. There are unquestionable parallels, and Bernanke and the European Central bankers have carefully studied the history of the Great Depression in order to learn how to approach this crisis. If I had a criticism about the book, though, it's that in the epilogue where Ahamed tries to draw these parallels, he avoids specifics and does not probe as deeply into the issues as the rest of the book does.
The book is also avowedly Keynesian and does not give much time to rival economic theories. Not necessarily a bad thing, just a bias to take into account. But I loved his affectionate portrayals of Keynes, Norman, Strong, Moreau, Schacht, and the rest of his characters. If anybody knows Keynes RPF, it would satisfy an itch.
tags: a: ahamed liaquat, economics, nonfiction
First in what should be a spurt to get me to 10. I've been slowly making progress in three big books over the past month and am within 50 pages of the end in all three.
Lords of Finance won the Pulitzer Prize last year and it deserved it. In terms of critical evaluation, I really needn't say much more than that. It's an analysis of the events leading up to the Great Depression and the fall of the gold standard from a macroeconomic point of view, focusing on the central bank officials in Europe and America whom Ahamed maintains had the power to have prevented the Depression if they'd had a better understanding of their situation.
The descriptions of the bankers are personal and intimate. Ahamed seeks to understanding not merely their decisions but what drove them to make those decisions. The descriptions of financial maneuevers are clear, simple, and do not require a Ph.D in economics to follow. Ahamed takes massive, complicated financial systems and expresses them in terms that make sense. While I'm always going to be mistrustful of this process, I felt much less mistrustful than I usually do with popularizations of complicated mathematical ideas. By leaving the mathematics entirely out and focusing on the processes, Ahamed was able to explain what happened without showing his work, and his clarity and precision served as adequate substitute for the actual equations.
Needless to say, the book was so acclaimed because it professes to teach lessons about our present economic difficulties. There are unquestionable parallels, and Bernanke and the European Central bankers have carefully studied the history of the Great Depression in order to learn how to approach this crisis. If I had a criticism about the book, though, it's that in the epilogue where Ahamed tries to draw these parallels, he avoids specifics and does not probe as deeply into the issues as the rest of the book does.
The book is also avowedly Keynesian and does not give much time to rival economic theories. Not necessarily a bad thing, just a bias to take into account. But I loved his affectionate portrayals of Keynes, Norman, Strong, Moreau, Schacht, and the rest of his characters. If anybody knows Keynes RPF, it would satisfy an itch.
tags: a: ahamed liaquat, economics, nonfiction