Nonfiction
False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World, by Alan Beattie, $26.95
Pop social science — think Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s “Freakonomics” or Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” — is tricky. Authors risk sacrificing the intricacies of scholarship in the service of reader-friendly anecdotes.
But Alan Beattie, the world-trade editor at the Financial Times and a former economist for the Bank of England, resists this kind of reduction in “False Economy,” a thorough examination of economies from the age of empire to the age of the International Monetary Fund.
Standing proudly against psychology, dialectical materialism and inevitability, Beattie writes, “History is not determined by fate. . . . It is determined by people.” He insists that it is not destiny, but the right and wrong decisions by political leaders that cause societies to rise and fall.
Beattie’s analysis dazzles with particulars: He explains why Africa doesn’t grow cocaine (poor infrastructure), why Peru grows most of the asparagus consumed in the United States (good lobbyists), and why both pandas (whose diet is almost exclusively bamboo) and command economies (which can function only under inefficient bureaucracies) are endangered by inflexibility.
A lover of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, Beattie criticizes protectionist mollycoddling of inefficient industries. But despite his generally conservative outlook, his far-reaching history is grounded in a curiously Obama-esque, populist belief that open markets, guided by modest, business-friendly policies, can guide us through the current economic downturn — that, as Shakespeare put it, “our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.”
By Evan Wright
Washington Post Writers Group
Nonfiction
Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut’s War Against the Gap, and Other Adventures With the Totally Lost Tribes of America, by Evan Wright, $25.95
There’s nothing Evan Wright loves more than infiltrating marginal subcultures, but, please, spare him the Hunter S. Thompson comparisons. Gonzo journalism consists of “writing that is more about the reporter than the subject,” explains Wright, author of the best-seller “Generation Kill,” whereas his intent “has always been to focus on my subjects in all of their imperfect glory.”
Imperfection is the norm in “Hella Nation,” a bleak country populated with alcoholic professional skateboarders, Internet-porn scam artists and homeless teen anarchists. Jerry Springer fans will enjoy Wright’s gloomy profiles of damned, damnable “lost tribes,” but others will be seduced by Wright’s muscular prose. “Nazi colors are raised . . . (for) the brave men and women who have sacrificed their lives setting off bombs in synagogues, burning crosses in people’s yards, and assaulting strangers in the street,” he writes in a chapter called “Heil Hitler, America!”
It’s refreshing to read first-person journalism by an unorthodox P.T. Barnum who refuses to put himself at the center of a three-ring circus.
