Two Great Christmas Gifts

With Christmas just a couple of weeks away here are two really worthwhile book recommendations that will stimulate your mind and open your eyes to the future, by reviewing the past.

Major kudos to Steve DeAngelis of Enterra Solutions for this post. Steve writes about Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, on the release of his new book, The Ascent of Money: The Financial History of the World.

Steve links a review by Shelby Coffey III in the November 30, 2008 Washington Post, "Markets Don't Make Bubbles, People Do," and makes insightful comments about both the review and Ferguson's book.

A brief excerpt of Steve's post.

People choking in the grasp of the current financial crisis are wondering how we got in this position and what we can do about it. Ferguson's web site provides this synopsis of his new book:

"Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it’s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labour. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What’s more, he reveals financial history as the essential back-story behind all history. The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to the silver mines of Bolivia.

...The importance of Ferguson's book is that it highlights how essential capital flows are for the success of globalization. The only way to bring millions of more people out of poverty is to create wealth. Ferguson's book explains why financial systems are essential in that endeavor.

Coffey's review noted these remarks made by Ferguson on MSNBC.

Ferguson is making the rounds with his new book, saying last week on MSNBC that the United States should follow up the G-20 Economic Summit with a "G-2" meeting with just the Chinese. The professor also winningly confesses that even he is confused about the thrust of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion rescue fund. Ferguson has, nonetheless, written an admirably illuminating book that will take its place beside such modern classics as John Train's The Money Masters, Peter L. Bernstein's Against the Gods, and Adam Smith's Supermoney.

Ferguson's comments about a summit with China mirror much of what Thomas Barnett has been advocating about locking China in at today's prices.

Read the whole post: Show Me the Money.

Niall Ferguson is one of my favorite authors, writing The War of the World and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire among other best sellers. His expertise in economic history, coupled with an amazing ability to be a great storyteller gives him two tools, that make him one of the important scribes of our time. Among his teaching positions he is also a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

His newly released book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World is described this way on Amazon.

Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.

Through Ferguson’s expert lens familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. Suddenly, the civilization of the Renaissance looks very different: a boom in the market for art and architecture made possible when Italian bankers adopted Arabic mathematics. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world’s first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer.

With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do?

This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can’t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Perhaps most important, The Ascent of Money documents how a new financial revolution is propelling the world’s biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generation—an economic transformation unprecedented in human history.

Based on my previous reading of Ferguson's work I hardily recommend this book to everyone who desires a clear understanding of the current times and how in the end, it is always the money that makes the world go around.

Ferguson's book should be have equal billing on any one's Christmas wish list alongside Thomas Barnett's book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush to be published in February 2009. Tom recently posted the table of contents on his blog to give readers a road map of where he is going with his vision of grand strategy.

Great Powers Table of Contents and for more Great Powers material.

It is described this way at Amazon.

In civilian and military circles alike, The Pentagon’s New Map became one of the most talked about books of 2004. “A combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Carl von Clausewitz on war, [it is] the red-hot book among the nation’s admirals and generals,” wrote David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Barnett’s second book, Blueprint for Action, demonstrated how to put the first book’s principles to work. Now, in Great Powers, Barnett delivers his most sweeping— and important—book of all.

In Great Powers, Barnett offers a tour de force analysis of the grand realignments that are both already here and coming up fast in the spheres of economics, diplomacy, defense, technology, security, the environment, and much more. The “great powers” are no longer just the world’s major nation-states but the powerful forces, past, present, and future, moving with us and past us like a freight train. It is not a simple matter of a course correction but of a complete recalibration, and the opportunities it presents are far greater than the perils. Barnett gives us a fundamental understanding of both, showing us not only how the world is now but how it will be.

I will have more on Great Powers in the coming weeks.

It's The Money Stupid!

Trade beads 500 BC

Ancent Chinese Money

Gold Dubloons

$Money$

"It's the money stupid" has been a refrain, made popular by politicians in recent years. I first heard this term decades ago when a history professor in describing the motivation behind the Age of Discovery exclaimed that, "It was the money, that rich white guys sought, when they expanded across the globe." That quote as politically incorrect as it would be interpreted today, is at the core of what makes the world function. Money, the token of value that allows for easy trade transactions, is also the primary tool of peace.

Examples of societies who gravitated to trade and in turn creating methods of currency, stand out in contrast to those societies whom, only relied on total warfare to restock their community pantry.

Robert Wright the author of The Moral Animal, pointed out that societies that cooperated and avoided conflict thrived, where societies that were constantly at war with their neighbors eventually were cut off from all contact and withered. And Jared Diamond, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (1998), gave further support that societies became less violent when they learned through trade, that those they trade become quasi-kin, with whom conflict needed to be resolved quickly, in order to maintain the all important life sustaining trade.

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This week I was reminded of the these two books, and the words spoken by that long ago, history professor about it being the "Money" that makes the World what it is today.

The trigger for that recollection, came when I perused Tom Barnett's column this week. He writes to remind us of a future that is linked to interconnection through trade and in turn, "Money." The product of ecomomic interconnectivity is security and the advancement of civilization, by connecting as many people on the planet to each other through mutually beneficial arraignments. Thus, reducing the likely hood of total war conflict.

Tom writes:

Think about what made America the world's most stable and prosperous democracy for almost a century and a half: the middle class ideology that emerged when we knit together our sectional economies into a continental juggernaut following the Civil War. That class consciousness wasn't born when the victorious North imposed itself on the prostrate South but when the ambitious East integrated the frontier West.

Today's globalization echoes American experience as West networks East and East integrates South, reducing global poverty at speeds never before seen in human history. This international liberal trade order, modeled on our "uniting states," is America's greatest gift to the world.

Read the whole article:

Barnett: Finding logical center for grand strategy

Looking back one week the theme of money and the economic activity to make it is the theme of an earlier column by Barnett.

He begins:

With American combat troops now slated to depart Iraq by 2011, our intervention moves into its final phase, with the crucial goal being the expansion of economic opportunity for ordinary citizens.

When international business looks at oil-rich Iraq, it sees plenty of opportunity. What it doesn't see in many instances, despite rising security, are sufficient local counterparties - both private and public - to make the necessary deals happen.

As America moves on, we must leverage that example to lock in our hard-fought security gains with follow-on economic progress in connecting Iraq to globalization's juggernaut.

Read the whole article:

Barnett: Develop Iraq to cut deals with world

Adding more to the theme today of it being "It's the money stupid," are two posts by Steve DeAngelis, Enterra Solutions blog.

Steve writes:

The news coming out of Afghanistan over the past several months has been mostly bad. Violence is up and development progress has been stymied by the security situation. For most Americans, Afghanistan was the right conflict to undertake following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The fact that progress has been spotty and that the Taliban seems to be gaining strength in their Pakistani sanctuaries has generated calls for an Afghani surge comparable to the one that made a difference in Iraq.

As tense as U.S./Afghan relations might be at the moment, even the Afghans understand the importance of creating a secure environment to foster a better future. Sustainable development requires a stable and secure environment. President of the World Bank Group, Robert B. Zoellick, recently provided his thoughts on how to proceed in Afghanistan ["The Key to Rebuilding Afghanistan," Washington Post, 22 August 2008].

Read the whole story at"

Moving Forward in Afghanistan

And turning to another example of ecomomic progress being the catalsys for permanent change is this post by Steve DeAngelis about North Korea.

North Korea looks to be once again a country in trouble that cannot even feed its own people [see "U.N. says North Korea needs $503 million in food aid," by Ben Blanchard, Washington Post, 2 September 2008]. I have repeatedly asserted that historically economic progress precedes political progress. Impoverished people are much more tolerant of repressive governments if they believe they hold the key to a better economic future.

Anyone that has followed the Beijing Olympic Games has to have been struck by the Western character of the Chinese audience. I don't know if the Chinese government issued grooming and dress standards for ticket holders, but gone were the drab military-style outfits that characterized the awful days of the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese audience was genuinely polite to the achievements of foreign athletes and just as clearly thrilled with the achievements of their own athletes. There was nothing staged about that. Economics has clearly changed China for the better and its citizens are the beneficiaries of most of those changes. That is exactly the kind of changes that the South Koreans would like to see in the North.

Once globalization washes over walls of North Korea's isolation, it will help bring millions of people living there out of poverty. It will do it one job at a time, but it will succeed.

The whole post:

Breaching North Korea's Walls using Economic Development

In reflection of today's links about money, often touted as the root to all evil. I have another take. Money and economic interaction is the essence of kinship that binds people together. Individuals and societies may falter and fail to see this truth for moments in time, but those who recognized this truth will endure.

Great Powers: A Book, Obama and MaCain Must Read

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Powers-America-World-After/dp/0399155376/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213970164&sr=1-3

I usually don't pre-judge a book by it's cover. In this case Thomas P.M. Barnett's new book Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, is something that I am recommending before it's release date. As many of you know who read this blog with any frequency I have linked many articles written by Tom Barnett, and posted numerous comments about his vision of shrinking the Gap, Non-Integrating Gap, that includes most of the countries we now see as failed states. I have observed Barnett as he prepared for this book by reading hundreds of books from as many disciplines, and collecting thousands of articles, all the while keeping his daily blog where he comments on the state of all things human. He has traveled the world so much in the past three years since his last book Blueprint for Action, that his frequent traveler miles would probably qualify him for a round trip to the moon, if it were available. Tom's Trips

He has traveled across the globe, to address hundreds of organizations, civilian, academic and military. His message is important and needs to be told. It is not about American hegemony, over other nations, it is about connecting the world community by using our leverage and power to facilitate positive change throughout the world. Barnett was one of the first to offer suggestions that we, "lock in China at today's prices" and make them a partner in the security net that needs to be in place to allow for economic growth. Tom also likes to say, "It's the jobs, economic determinism that will allow democracy to bloom."

For whoever becomes President of the United States this fall, be it Obama or McCain, this is a must read book for them, and their policy makers. Barnett's insight is beyond partisan and should be given ever measure of thought and consideration.

To those of you who need more convincing, here is a link to some of Barnett's wisdom via youtube. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=thomas+barnett

And if that whetted your interest, here is a longer brief, Tom Barnett Lecture from TED videos.

To illustrate how Tom Barnett is a voice that resonates within the Pentagon, here is a timely post by Galrahn at Information Dissemination entitled, Observing the Resistance to the Paradigm Shift in the DoD.

And on a lighter note about Barnett's global view, Dan at tdaxp.com, who wrote this Join the Core, Support Firefox! about a post that compared support for Firefox with the Tom Barnett’s Core/Gap model:

I am not being Pollyanna about Barnett. For those skeptics who need more evidence, just click on Tom Barnett in the label links at the bottom of this post to find previous posts about his views.

Barnett's Latest Booklist

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One of the rewards of reading Thomas Barnett's blog has been his book recommendations. This past year as he prepared for his latest book on grand strategy he listed the books he was reading along with a brief review Two new book lists and FAQs. Anyone interested in the complete list can visit his blog and type in books in the site search box.

Keeping with that tradition, Tom has added seven of the most recent books he's read along with brief comments.

Recent books read (1 of 7): Klare's "Rising Powers and Shrinking Planet" »But in this book, even Klare ends with a note about China and the U.S. shifting slowly from competition (not so bad and hardly "war") to cooperation.

Recent books read (2 of 7): Glenny's "McMafia" »

Glenny says when you add up all the estimates, that global crime is 15-20 percent of global GDP. This is the biggest estimate out there, and by definition, I tend to doubt it, because the ones who push these calculations most are always trying to move product with the fear factor.

Recent books read (3 of 7): Robin Wright's "Dreams and Shadows" »

Subtitle is "the future of the Middle East."

Great bit on "pyjamahedeen."

Also like the "peaceful empowerment" logic that is taking root and threatening the old order in the region.

Recent books read (4 of 7): David Rothkopf's "Superclass" »

Subtitle is "the global power elite and the world they are making."

6,000 people actually run the entire world, and Rothkopf's got a list!

Recent books read (5 of 7): Krupp and Horn's "Earth: The Sequel" »

More seriously, the larger point is that we're heading into a period of great and powerful forces: "great powers" that obliterate our old understanding of that term (more on that later).

Recent books read (6 of 7): Wallis' "The Great Awakening" »

Subtitle is "reviving faith and politics in a post-religious right America," and I find that a bit much. If you're going to crank on the new "great awakening," then why get all pissy on the religious right like it's some straw man we must defeat?

Recent books read (7 of 7): Talbott's "The Great Experiment" »

Like how he calls America a "postimperial multinational state" and refers to pre-American role in world as "the imperial millennia."

Sightings around the web

This week, some of my fellow bloggers have generated a rich landscape of interesting stories. Take the time to follow the links and enrich your mind with the thoughtful ideas and images.

Enterprise Resilience Management leads off with a post about connectivity. As a historian, I look back across the ages and see our ancestors spent the past 60,000 years or so expanding to all points across the globe. The tenth century saw Lief Erickson take the first steps to modern connectivity when he sailed across the Atlantic and made contact with people who had crossed the ice-shelf to inhabit what we now call the Western Hemisphere. Humans, for better or worse have continued to connect with each other ever since. Steve DeAngelis's post examines Networked Community Solutions, where relationships trump rank, and connectivity leads to solutions.
http://enterpriseresilienceblog.typepad.com/enterprise_resilience_man/2008/01/networked-commu.html

Mark over at Zenpundit.com, has several enlightening posts this past week. Two caught my eye, the first links to posts by Tom Barnett and John Robb commenting on an article by James Fallows in Atlantic Monthly that addresses China's cash surplus. Take the time to read both the post and the article by Fallows. A timely read considering the current financial crisis looming over the next horizon.

http://zenpundit.com/?p=2570#respond

Next is a visual journey into physics, that puts our existence into it's proper prospective.
Sit back and give your nine minutes of fantastic brain candy.

http://zenpundit.com/?p=2568#comments

Finally, Tom Barnett continues to read books at warp-speed in preparation for his next writing effort. He just posted the latest readings with short synopsis on each.

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/01/another_book_post.html

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/01/another_another_book_post.html

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/01/recent_books.html

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/01/more_books_1.html

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/01/another_books_post.html

I know this is an extensive list, and Tom is proving to be the all-time reading king. By reading the short descriptions, one can pick out books that may spark an interest. Enjoy!

Wow! can't even keep up with Tom. Before this post was two days old, he read seven more books, linked below.

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/01/four_to_go.html

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/01/two_more_books.html

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/01/last_new_book_for_now.html

Books, books, and more books

My fellow blogger's Mark at Zenpundit and Brad of Potbangers have posted links or brief reviews of the reading list that Tom Barnett has been working through in preparation for his forthcoming book. Tom's webmaster, Sean Meade also posted a link compiling the most recent posts by Tom on his reading list.

With a double hat tip to these fine gentlemen, I have listed links to their posts in order to spread the word and encourage all to make the time and read a few of these important books as a way to enlighten and stimulate your mind.

http://zenpundit.com/?p=2539#comments

http://potbangers.blogspot.com/2007/12/thomas-pm-barnett-reading-list.html#links

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/01/two_new_book_lists_and_faqs.html

The list is ambitious undertaking for anyone interested in understanding the world we live in. In that vein, I would recommend picking out books that interest you or challenge your views in order to expand your horizons.

As a person who is immersed in the study of history, I have found that the broader my reading the more that I can understand how history impacts the future. To borrow a phrase written by Steve DeAngelis, that it is more important to be; "Looking toward the future, than watching the wake," history most useful tool is to help remember where the shoals lie and how to identify them.
http://enterpriseresilienceblog.typepad.com/enterprise_resilience_man/2007/12/dont-give-up-on.html

The above referenced booklists serve as guideposts that can only enhance your knowledge of the world.

Book note: Rick Atkinson's Day of Battle

Casualties in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan make the daily headlines and cause some to demand an immediate cessation of involvement by American forces. In another time and war, the focus of casualties and mistakes in leadership, were dimmed by the fog of war and the deft hand of censors. Rick Atkinson has authored what will be a trilogy on World War II in Europe. He won a Pulitzer Prize, for his first book, An Army at Dawn, that narrates the invasion of North Africa by Allied forces. .http://www.amazon.com/Army-Dawn-1942-1943-Liberation-Trilogy/dp/B0009WE0W8/ref=pd_sim_b_img_1

Last month the second installment, Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, was published. http://www.amazon.com/Day-Battle-1943-1944-Liberation-Trilogy/dp/0805062890/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196732258&sr=1-1
In the words of one review, from Publishers Weekly. "Atkinson surpasses his Pulitzer-winning An Army at Dawn." I would recommend this for all who are interested in World War II history and want to revisit a campaign that was mostly forgotten after the invasion at Normandy. The mistakes, heartbreaks, cover ups and triumphs, that are grist to all wars, are vividly brought back to life in Atkinson's prose. He takes the reader from the White House, to the slit trenches and blasted out villages in Italy, leaving a lasting impression in the mind of the reader.

To put this all in perspective, the campaign lasted 608 days and cost the Allies 312,000 casualties, with 25, 502 dead, and the Germans, 500,000, half of which were KIA. The cost to the civilian population of Italy was staggering, years after the war unexploded mines continued to kill. The decision to invade Italy has been debated by scholars ever since, much like today's argument that we could have avoided invading Iraq and still win the "War on Terror." The final result for Iraq is still being contested. Sixty years from now, scholars will still be debating both decisions.