Steve Reads

I started the above-named yesterday or so, and finished it just now. It’s a breezy, informative, ground-clearing read that I would recommend to anyone. What saddens me the most about it is that Krugman didn’t write it this year; had he done so — and if we could transplant mid-Nineties Krugman to now — he would absolutely eviscerate his New York Times op-ed-page colleague, Thomas Friedman. I really can’t stand Tom Friedman (right), who is so sure about the world’s flatness and the virtues of globalization based on his experiences driving through Bangalore in a BMW. Krugman almost certainly cannot stand Friedman, but one suspects they’ve been required to share more than a few rostra by now.

Cosma Shalizi’s review of the book’s content will surely be a better intro to the material than I could give, besides which I’m lazy. Suffice it to say here that I’ve left Krugman’s book with a deep insecurity about my own knowledge of economics. I’ll need to find some sort of textbook. (Does anyone else who’s a few years out of college feel highly reluctant to pick up undergraduate-level intros to subjects like economics?) Krugman and Obstfeld’s International Economics: Theory and Policy may be a good place to look for at least that subfield.

I can at least leave Pop Internationalism feeling better than Tom Friedman ought to; PI’s final chapter alone dispenses with Friedman’s entire raison d’être with just a few crisp sentences.

 . . . why do we imagine that the global market is something new? Because politics killed that first global economy. Between 1914 and 1945 wars and protectionism tore up the dense web of trade, investment and often family ties that linked old Chicago to the rest of the world. In some ways the world has never recovered. It is a little-known but startling fact that world trade as a share of world production did not return to its 1913 level until about 1970; it is even more startling that net international flows of capital (as opposed to complex financial operations that do not finance real investment) were a considerably larger share of world savings in the years preceding World War I than they have been even in the “emerging market” boom of the last few years. Surely everyone who thinks about it is aware that for all our current hysteria, international migration was far larger in an era that could actually build the Statue of Liberty to welcome immigrants than it ever has been since.

And then we have Krugman’s blithe little toss-off, in the same final chapter, to the effect that the industries a nation is best at are very often those at which it employs the fewest people. The U.S. is an incredibly efficient agricultural producer, which is why we only employ 2% of the country’s labor on farms.

The whole book is filled with moments that made me grimace like that; I should have thought of these things myself. But that’s the main virtue of Pop Internationalism: dispensing with conventional wisdom when it no longer works.

(Incidentally: Matt Taibbi has made it his mission in life to knock down Tom Friedman. His “Mixed-metaphor madness of Thomas Friedman” wins points for sheer humor. But then his review of The World Is Flat adds polemical verve. Highly recommended.)