Economic-union Books

Written by Assemblies of God pastor Dwight Wilson, I first came across "Armageddon Now" in the 1980s when some evangelicals were predicting nuclear war with the Soviet Union and the imminent end of the age. Now the Soviet Union is mouldering in the ash heap of history, the predicted nuclear war never came to past, but dispensationalist eschatology continues to march on (thanks in good measure to the sensational success of Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" series which, he fervently believes, is just a fictionalized account of biblical prophecy).

But there is a lively debate in evangelical churches about whether this blood-and-gore reading of the Bible is the right one. Wilson's church, the Assemblies of God, officially affirms the style of biblical interpretation that lies behind LaHaye's books, but Wilson asks a lot of thoughtful questions in this easy-to-read introduction to the subject.

The book describes the many travails facing the young Armenian nation. The narrative begins with the breakup of the Soviet Union. The difficulties of a nation with few natural resources and bordered by historically hostile neighbours are delineated in great detail. The war with the Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh was not necessarily inevitable. But while hostilities have cooled to a frigid peace, trade is still minimal.

The inner workings of the Armenian government are explained, along with a synopsis of the society. There is massive crime and corruption, with the government itself estimating that 40-53% of the economy is dominated by organised crime. Leading to the supposition that the actual percentage is perhaps higher.

The book is not a cheery read. The authors offer an unvarnished look at Armenia.

Paul Klemperer was the principal auction theorist advising the UK Government on the design of the 3G spectrum auction in 2000, which raised $34 billion, the biggest auction in history. In this book he reviews auction design both theoretically and in practice - the two perspectives turn out to be very different.

Chapter 1 is a survey of auction theory. The author begins by identifying four types of auction: the English type of open ascending bids, the Dutch auction using descending bids where the first bidder wins, the first-price sealed-bid auction where the highest bidder wins and pays their own bid price, and the second-price sealed-bid auction (the Vickrey auction) where the highest bidder wins, but pays the amount bid by the second-highest bidder. If the latter seems counter-intuitive, note that in the English auction, the winner also pays an amount set by the second-highest bidder (the last person to drop out). Note also that the Dutch auction and the first-price sealed-bid auction are equivalent.

Another important distinction is between private-value auctions, where each bidder has their own, invariant valuation of the object(s) being auctioned, and common-value auctions, where bidders might alter their valuations depending on signals (i.e. observed bids) made by other participants.

The key result in auction theory is the Revenue Equivalence Theorem, which states that all the standard auction methods, under certain plausible conditions, generate the same revenues. This accounts for the fact that no one method of conducting auctions has displaced all the others. However, practical considerations often favor one kind of auction design over another, and this is analyzed extensively later in the book.

Chapter 1 finishes with a mathematical appendix which proves some of the main results plus some questions (and answers) from the Oxford University MPhil economics examination.

Chapter 2 is titled `why every economist should learn some auction theory' and extends application of the theory to economic issues such as litigation models, wars of attrition, market crashes and trading frenzies, and Internet sales models.

Chapter 3 is a detailed guide to auction design. Auction theory is about mathematical models and their properties. Auctions in the real world are competitions where real money is at stake and any and all tactics will be employed to win. Critical tactics to `game' auctions include collusion between bidders to avoid bidding against each other therefore lowering prices for everyone, and predatory behavior, where weaker bidders are frightened off either before or during the auction, thereby clearing the field and closing the auction early. Examples are given of extraordinary behavior by bidders which succeeded in effectively wrecking auctions as revenue-generating vehicles. Klemperer analyses each of the four types of auction in the context of deterring such behavior and concludes that there is no one right answer: auction design is `horses for courses'.

Chapter 4, `using and abusing auction theory', is aimed at academic auction theorists seduced by the mathematics at the expense of real-world issues. Klemperer argues that `undergraduate economics', taking into account the concerns of industrial organisation (e.g. monopolistic, oligopolistic and perfectly competitive behaviours) are more central to successful auction design than some of the more `sophisticated' topics of the graduate-level theory. He also emphasises, with examples, that political realities can negate even the best auction design, if the designer is naive and doesn't take politics into account in advance.

Chapter 5 gives an overview of the European 3G spectrum auctions, which ranged from brilliantly successful to absolute disasters, while chapter 6 explains in great detail exactly how the UK auction (perhaps the most successful) was designed. This chapter is extremely insightful in indicating how many general economic intuitions have to be employed, over and above the specific insights of auction theory, to get a design which can resist the best efforts of the bidders to sabotage its effectiveness.

Chapter 7 analyses some of the more interesting and puzzling bidder strategies seen in the auctions, while chapter 8 is the reprinted Financial Times article, `were auctions a good idea', which defends the idea of auctions against special pleading by industry lobbyists that they had to pay too much, and that as a consequence the industry was wrecked. Not so.

Overall, this book succeeds in creating in the non-economist reader a sense that they understand the basic terrain of auctions - what they are about - although there is clearly a much deeper set of theoretical results underpinning this map of the territory. The chapters tend to be quite repetitive, but that can help offset Klemperer's use of jargon whenever he gets into conceptual analysis. It looks as though he doesn't know he's doing it, and that the people who reviewed it are his colleagues who use this stuff every day and didn't notice either. With a small amount of additional explanation to clarify the use of terms, much of the conceptual analysis would have been more accessible. The alternative is to read the book twice! Recommended.

The author undertakes a highly complex statistical study of 18 OECD countries during the period from 1950 to 1989 that correlates the growth of union density with the extent of left political parties, the centralization of worker representation and bargaining, that is, union structure and function, and union-paid unemployment benefits. The main point is that it is the class power of workers as reflected in pro-worker institutions that insulates unions from market forces such as the business cycle and permits unions to grow or maintain their standing.

This is not a book that makes an effort to find the historical basis of worker class power: why it exists in some places but not others. Furthermore, the reader cannot discern from this study the relative importance of class power as reflected in left political parties versus that reflected in centralized union structures and roles. Which way do the arrows of dependency point? Which comes first?

The author does show that those nations that have a strong mix of pro-worker institutions have been best prepared to withstand the forces of political conservatism, large unemployment levels, and globalization that emerged in the 1980s and continue to the present day.

The book is somewhat difficult and tedious to read. Its origin was for a PhD dissertation. It was assumed that the audience would have a background in advanced statistics, but there is room for the general reader. Furthermore, the book largely falls in the category of proving the obvious. At least by the 1930s it was obvious to all working classes that state and state-enabled or -permitted institutions ultimately based on workers' political power would be essential for their economic well being. Nonetheless, the book is interesting in its demonstrations of the importance of institutional power.

(Click the author's name for several other editions of this book or the two "Other Editions" for more copies of the book)
For Young Readers
By A.H. Raskin
New York Times Book Review
January 28, 1968

The concern of this compelling book is with the march of the nation's industrial workers out of conditions as destructive of health and self-respect as any that had prevailed on Southern plantations under slavery.

It is a one-dimensional story of battle by an infant labor movement against the forces of corporate greed in a period when all the institutions of government and polite society were on the side of the employer. The very fact that the book is episodic and often overdrawn adds to its usefulness in supplying a new generation of readers with some illumination things unions do now that they when large membership, huge treasuries and economic power sufficient to paralyze entire communities...

Mr. Meltzer's pages, prickly with eyewitness accounts of unionism's birth pains in the sweatshops, the factories, the railroads and the mines, are a goad to revitalized activity in defense of industrial democracy and higher economic standards for those who remain on the outskirts of American affluence.

Listen to this 1880 report by a textile mill superintended on how his mill insured labor peace when new technology enabled it to switch fro a process known as mule spinning to an alternate technique called ring-spinning.

"The mule-spinners area tough crowd to deal with. A few years ago they were giving trouble at this mill, so one Saturday afternoon, after they had gone home, we started right in and smashed up a roomful of mules with sledgehammers. When the men came back on Monday morning, they were astonished to find that there was no work for them. That room is now full of ring framers run by girls."

Often it was not the machinery but the workers who were smashed. Federal troops, the state militia, the police and hired thugs were at the call of the bosses when a strike got too big or too stubborn. Mr. Meltzer includes generous excerpts from John Reed's classic description of the 1914 massacre of strikers and their wives and children at the Rockefeller-owned coal mines at Ludlow, Colorado. No less heart-rending is Ray Stannard Baker's report on the great 1912 uprising of the textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, under the slogan that gave the book its title, "We want bread and roses too."

All the bloody way stations on the road to labor's present strength are points of call for Mr. Meltzer. There are Homestead and Pullman and Haymarket Square, where a bomb explosion in 1886 killed seven Chicago policeman and labor's immediate hopes for an eight-hour day. Four anarchist leaders were hanged for the bombing, though there was no credible evidence of guilt.

Prophetically, one of the convicted men said on the scaffold after the hood had been fastened over his head: "There will come a time when out silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today." And so it proved when the new Governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned three others on their way to the gallows, insisting that they had been framed and that the real offenses against justice had been committed by the men of property and the enforcers of law and order.

Many will feel, with considerable validity, that Mr. Meltzer's book is oversimplified history-that none of the epic labor struggles he recounts could possibly have involved such a monopoly of guilt as emerges from page after page of worker's laments about the villainy of their employers. Still others may argue that, in any event, such as unrelieved picture of industrial oppression has scant relevance to this day when labor is often the aggressor and shows autocratic unconcern about the hardship its abuses of power inflict on the public.

But those who put forth such demurrers will find it hard to explain why other pillars of the community, through all the period of which Mr. Meltzer writes, were invariably certain that labor was ruining the country by its arbitrariness and its contempt for lawful process. N o present executive of a giant corporation looks back with pride on what happened at Homestead or Ludlow; the fashion now is shamefaced dismissal of such episodes as skeletons to be buried with the vanished "robber baron" phase of capitalist expansion.

Yet, while the battles were going most of the other civilized voices were almost as one in deploring the "anarchy" of the strikers and warning that no society could survive such lawlessness, "The mob is a wild beast and needs to be shot down," said The New York Herald of the vanquished railroad strikers in 1877. And a similar expression of contemporary civic outrage attended almost every other contest in the Meltzer chronicle...

Mr. Meltzer's book will not tell young people all they need to know about labor. But it will give them a better understanding of the reasons for labor's undiminished belief that its unity is its only dependable source of strength, the rock on which rests both its material success and its capacity for survival.

This book is a very good primer to Unionism. As a Teamster Union Member for many years I was impresed with Albert Rees' understanding of the Unions benefits to the working man. It also gave me a better understanding of the effect that Unions have on Business and Capitolism. It was easy reading!

I have learned directly from this man at Michigan State University and was fortunate enough to have read advanced sections of this book prior to its release. This is an outstanding piece of history which discusses a part of Soviet society that is most often glossed over, if not completely ignored, in most Soviet history courses. If you are teaching Soviet history I strongly recommend this book.

This little paperback (31 pages) was published in 1993, just before Chavez passed away at the age of 66. It is probably considered out of date.

But it has some great photographs of Chavez all through his life. It has a short, concise biography.

What did I learn? Chavez's grandfather immigrated from Mexico and fathered 14 children. Cesar's father was the last one to leave the family home and married rather late, at the age of 38.

Cesar did not like school, nor did he like the English language.

He fasted three times for over three weeks each. This must have been tough and may have indelibly harmed his health.

So, this book of course was published before Chavez's birthday became a state holiday in California. And we hardly hear anything anymore about the United Farm Workers. That's an area for some young person to follow up. Diximus.

A nice discussion of the recent history of industrial relations in the European Union and Switzerland. Each country gets a chapter explaining who its main trade unions are, their membership demographics, and a description of their counterparts in the corporate world. Comparisons are made between countries, regarding their relative levels of unionisation and industrial disputes.

Often, the pressures of a EU-wide common market are also explained. The effects of these on nation-based trade unions, which are still most of them, due to legacies of language and history.

The book is good for getting a quick, accurate briefing on each country and on the entire EU scene.

This book discusses and proposes how EU countries can close the productivity gaps among them. Chapter 1 of the book is the key chapter for it sets the stage. It argues that productivity gaps depend on efficiency. However, often equally efficient economies can also experience differential productivity. The reason is that the diffusion of productivity is a function of a nation's "social capability", "technological congruence", trade, and foreign direct investment.

Chapters 2-6 of the book examine the mechanisms through which " social capability", "technological congruence", trade, and foreign direct investment come to affect productivity growth. The chapters draw their examples mainly from Central-East Europe.

The seventh chapter adds policy dimensions to the productivity gaps within the EU. Chapter 8 briefly details the implications of the results to productivity catch-up and competitiveness internationally.

Again the first chapter carries the book; its excellent overview would benefit any reader. Policymakers would gain the most from other parts of the book.

Amavilah, Author
Modeling Income Determinants in Embedded Economies : Cross-section Applications to US Native American Economies
ISBN: 1600210465