Economic-union Books

Salmond does a great job of showing the variety of causes for which Lucy Randolph Mason worked her entire life. While briefly discussing her lineage, he tirelessly discusses the organizations with which she was associated in both a paid and volunteer capacity. This book is not about the CIO, the YWCA, the NCL, etc. This is about the life of Lucy Randolph Mason, and if you want to know about her life and times and don't have much time, this relatively short and easy to read book is for you. Salmond doesn't sugar coat things, he discusses the painful parts of her life as well as the tragic end of her life, and you can't help but feel inadequate when seeing all that Mason did with her life at a time when a woman in public was relatively uncommon. If you are looking for information on anything other than Mason, you should continue looking, because this book will be of little assistance.

Los Angeles Times
September 7, 1986

It is with good reason that Tom Gervasi titles his book "The Myth of Soviet Military Superiority." He thinks the story of the Soviet Union's preponderance in arms is all a big fabrication. Not only are the Soviets behind us in strategic weapons, he says, but they are behind in intermediate range and tactical nuclear arms in land forces and conventional strength on the European front, and in overall military spending.

Gervasi goes on to argue that the Reagan Administration's massive defense buildup has been sold to the U.S. public with lies and manipulated information, and that the Administration has systematically suppressed dissent by using threats, punishments and selective favors.

As a result, Gervasi concludes, most of the main-stream press and think-tanks have been dragooned into a conspiracy of deceit. The real reason the United States is amassing ever-greater arsenals, Gervasi states, is because the defense industrialists want to increase their already-swollen profits.

Perhaps because of the iconoclastic views presented, this book is sure to be quoted frequently, and its message will be widely spread. Gervasi, the director of the Center for Military Research and Analysis in New York, has amassed formidable statistical information. The appendixes, footnotes, end notes and index constitute more than half of the volume. The dust jacket notes with pride that "comprehensive notes and appendixes document where every piece of evidence was obtained." So the quality of the author's command of facts, his care in argumentation, and his identification of sources become crucial in judging the book's value.

Unfortunately, Gervasi indulges in much the same use of half-truths and tailored arguments for which he so justifiably excoriates his opponents. Regarding bombers, for example, Gervasi calls them and their weapons the "most important" (emphasizing megatonnage), "most accurate" of all, and highly dependable in reaching their targets. In supporting these assertions, however, he obscures the distinction between bombers which would penetrate Soviet air space at some risk to drop bombs or launch missiles, and aircraft which would stand off in relative safety and launch cruise missiles from a distance. Regarding submarine-launched ballistic missiles, he talks about the U.S. SLBMs of today being superior in accuracy to Soviet land-based rockets. While the U.S. Trident II D-5 missiles of tomorrow may have these characteristics, presently deployed U.S. SLBMs do not. One is left with a suspicion that the virtues of bombers and submarines are exaggerated and the effectiveness of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles minimized because Soviet strength is concentrated in the last category.

Regarding U.S. command and control, Gervasi argues that there is not "necessarily any need for a communications system that is sure to survive a nuclear attack. A retaliatory attack does not have to rely on such a system." A hundred pages later, the author discusses the threat to Soviet command and control posed by Pershing-II missile deployments. There he quotes Defense Electronics magazine approvingly: "The removal of C2 (command and control) capability by a comparatively small number of Pershings would render much of the Soviet ICBM first strike and retaliatory forces impotent." Gervasi seems to be arguing the case both ways.

According to Gervasi, U.S. Establishment spokesmen claim that American use of nuclear weapons in Europe would carry "no risk" of escalation to an intercontinental exchange. Perhaps one or two spokesmen have made such foolish claims, but there surely cannot have been very many of them. Gervasi also asserts, in arguing the balance of land forces in Europe, that Soviet forces "in the Leningrad, Baltic, Byelorussian and Carpathian military districts . . . are not in Europe."

In quite a few cases, Gervasi's end notes do not support his statements in the text. For example, he cites a 1949 interview of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to claim that Dulles acknowledged that there was then no real evidence of a threat from the Soviet Union. This did not sound like the Dulles I knew, so I looked up Gervasi's end note, which cited "interview, U.S. News and World Report (March, 1949)." The citation carried no reference, incidentally, to the volume, number, date or page in the magazine, and I went through all four weekly issues of that month finding no interview.

Looking through other issues of the same year, I did find an interview with Dulles published on Jan. 21, 1949. That interview did not carry the words attributed to Dulles by Gervasi, however, and Dulles' tone was not as represented. Dulles said: "You have a tense situation like a dry autumn in the wood when any fool can start a fire. . . . Soviet communism teaches that, while you must work for the overthrow of non-communist governments, you have to pick your time. . . . The peoples of Western Europe . . . feel naked. . . . Russian Communists' . . . methods are violent. . . ."

Take another example. On Page 145, Gervasi asserts that "America paid $122 billion in 1982 alone to equip and maintain its forces in Europe." The author's end note cites a 1983 article by Earl C. Ravenal -- even though, in his text, Gervasi attributes the information to the General Accounting Office. Comparing Gervasi's language with Ravenal's, one discovers that Gervasi misquoted Ravenal's figure by a few billion dollars and got the year wrong.

What Ravenal had done was to break down the total 1984 Defense Department budget request of $274 billion into European concerns, Asian concerns, Rapid Deployment Forces, and strategic programs. He then assigned more than 40% of the total to Europe, figuring that Europe was America's central military commitment. This gave Europe a prorated 40% share of all Defense appropriations of any kind -- from those supporting Army divisions in the United States, to new weapons development, service academies, recruiting stations, Pentagon operations, etc. Ravenal's organization of his data was odd, but at least he explained what he was doing. Gervasi uses Ravenal's figures to argue that U.S. forces stationed in Europe as a "token of support" for NATO cost egregious sums and -- besides -- are really maintained there to subjugate our European allies.

If the examples just given were representative of but a few aberrations in generally careful documentation, it would be one thing; but one could go on and on with additional instances of arguments and citations gone astray. It is a pity, because Gervasi has presented some truths. A powerful case can be made for much of what he believes. A few of his suspicions about the Reagan Administration are well founded without a doubt. The idea of Soviet military supremacy probably is a myth. I am reminded of a remark made by Madame de Stael about the Russians almost two centuries ago: "If they do not attain their objective, they always go past it." Whether or not this be true of the Soviets, it does seem descriptive of Tom Gervasi

The Toronto Star, January 17, 1987
The arms race: When enough is never enough

TOM Gervasi is director of the Centre for Military Research and Analysis in New York and, one assumes, eminently qualified to write "the most comprehensive and fully documented analysis of the relative military capabilities of the two superpowers that has ever been published."

Indeed, the problems this book poses have less to do with credibility than with tone. It reads suspiciously like an election manifesto for the Democrats, bashing Republicans with the stick of economic profligacy at every turn.

Gervasi's thesis is straightforward enough - in fact he sums it up himself in his opening paragraph: "I am a citizen who believes that our nation must have a strong defence. What I have found is that we already have one."

And if that's not simplistic enough for you the rest of the book will make no sense at all.

The American taxpayers, then, have apparently been hoodwinked into shelling out billions to expand their nation's defence (or is it offence?) capabilities under the assumption that such expenditure is necessary to maintain strategic superiority over the Soviets who, Gervasi claims, are in reality hopelessly far behind in the arms race.

The main culprit, it seems, is the Star Wars program, which is, Gervasi insists, still closer to science-fiction than science-fact.

"According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the most powerful lasers we can build are more than a million times below the power level that would be needed to do any damage to more than a small fraction of the Soviet missile force in the time available and over the ranges required."

It is, the author says, suspect logic that leads the U. S. government to pour such vast amounts of money into a scheme without any real evidence that it could possibly save anyone, but even more suspect logic that little effort is expended on what he fervently believes is a real solution: An international agreement to ban nuclear weapons of every kind. Another source of worry, and thus destabilization, is that the Soviets fear Star Wars technology will be used to knock out Soviet defence satellites long before it needs to be employed against missiles.

So often, indeed, does this book invoke our sympathies towards the fears of the Soviets that one begins to wonder where the author has been during the last 40 years of Soviet expansionism.

Since over 200 pages of this book are statistical charts listing such things as how many missiles, what kind of warheads, where situated, and so on, one feels somewhat churlish questioning the factuality of Gervasi's facts. Yet it must be done.

Indeed, statistics often seem a more potent weapon in the hands of politicians than the warheads themselves.

Since 1982, courtesy of President Ronald Reagan, the American public has been chastened with the knowledge that the Soviets have a definite margin of superiority in the arms race. According to Gervasi, this statement is a shameless lie based on juggled numbers and covert politicking by the Pentagon.

Yet the fact remains that, in the heated controversy that has arisen in the States over this book, Gervasi seems to have been out-accused by better informed sources. With all the boundless freedom available in the freedom-of-information act, we must accept the simple truth that, in matters of such complexity, we will always be at the mercy and ulterior motives of interpreters of one sort or the other.

The real strength of the book remains in Gervasi's sobering reminders about the realities of nuclear war.

Even with the most efficient defence system imaginable the chances are that several major cities would be destroyed.

Remembering the aftermath of the relatively minor destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this thought alone should underline the absurdity of any notion of defence more effectively than volumes of statistics.

As for the generals and their demands upon the public purse, Gervasi correctly observes that enough is never enough.

As its title suggests, this book reviews a series of "new instruments" in the area of environmental policy. Many of these new instruments use market instruments in one way or another, so this book could provide a European perspective on a debate that tends to be dominated by American free-marketeers. Most of the contributors do not engage this American debate, however, so the reader will have to make her own connections.

The kind of "new instruments" that the book addresses include issues such as eco-taxes, eco-labeling of products, cap-and-trade mechanisms for pollution, and other market-based mechanisms. The contributors provide good factual information about these instruments in various European countries. The country studies in the first half of the book also follow a common format in their reviews. The low countries are especially well represented in the chapters, though no reason is given for this bias.

The book lacks any unifying theme, much less an argument. Almost all the chapters choose to recite facts instead of explaining or analyzing. While it will inform you, it will not really deepen your understanding of the issues.

Science and technology has been the subject of public interest and support for centuries. The acceptance of a utilitarian argument for the public support of basic scientific research actually predates the Industrial Revolution itself. However, with a few notable exceptions, the organisation of the process of innovation has not been thoroughly discussed so far. This book edited by Alfonso Gambardella and Franco Malerba presents an integrated collection of contributions providing new insights into the importance of the organisation of economic innovation by approaching the problem at stake from a European point of view. This is quite a challenge, since the European economies have many different measures and schemes to enhance innovation and cooperation, and mutual benefits are often hard to achieve.

The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with the patterns of innovative activity in Europe and the second focuses on inter-firm collaborations and research networks.

After a short introduction, Giovanni Dosi and Luigi Marengo set the tone for the remaining part of the first part of the book by stressing the co- evolution of knowledge and organisation. They argue that path dependence, location and tacit knowledge are crucial for organising innovation. These arguments are also viewed as being important in the chapter by Keith Pavitt and Pari Patel (chapter 3). They find that in-house learning is an important determinant of the accumulation of these competencies. In chapter 4, Franco Malerba and Luigi Orsenigo deal with entry and exit of firms thereby dividing technological entry and exit into `real' and `lateral'. Their key finding is that while technological regimes affect both types of entry and exit, lateral entry and exit is also affected by technological proximity and by the degree of pervasiveness of a technology. Chapter 5 (Stefano Breschi) and 6 (Peter Swann) elaborate upon Dosi and Marengo's point of the importance of `location'. Using patent data, Breschi finds important differences in the spatial agglomeration of different sectors and technological regimes. Swann observes that the larger European countries have many industrial clusters, while the smaller countries are probably too small to establish such clusters. Finally, the findings of the chapters in the first part are applied by Nick Von Tunzelmann (electronics industry) and Cristiano Antonelli and Mario Calderini (mechanical engineering) to show their empirical relevance.

In the second part of the book Patrick Llerena and Mireille Matt set the agenda for analysing inter-firm collaborations and research networks by discussing policy aspects of inter-firm collaborations. They focus on a market and an organisational perspective. These perspectives serve as a vehicle for the next three chapters, which all consider different industries. Antoine Bureth, Sandrine Wolff and Antonello Zanfei (chapter 10) look at the European electronics industry; Salvatore Torrisi (chapter 11) compares the European and US software industry; and Margaret Sharp and Jacqueline Senker (chapter 12) discuss learning and catching-up in the European biotechnology industry.

The most interesting parts of the book are chapters 13-15, which focus on research networks and the opportunities for cooperation in a European context. Paul David's work has shown that effective policies for the promotion of competitiveness and long-term economic growth through innovation in any country or region must be based on a consistent building block which generates, distributes, and exploits scientific and technological knowledge. In a relatively long but appealing and convincing contribution, David (with Dominique Foray and Edward Steinmueller) re-examines and extends his work by stressing the importance of explicitly dealing with the norms and behavioural styles of individuals and organisations in the institutions that form networks to develop science and technology. Only if consistent and useful complementarities are found and the right incentive structure is provided, will European efforts to organise innovation be able to blossom. This chapter is complemented by two studies of Aldo Geuna. The first (with Walter Garcia- Fontes) studies the effects of the funding effort by the European Commission (EC) on the supply and the demand of funds. The econometric results suggest that the EC generally serves short-term objectives, whereas long-term strategies are needed for a coherent innovation policy. In the final chapter, Geuna applies the framework of chapter 13 to an analysis of resource-allocation criteria between networks of universities.

The general tone in Gambardella and Malerba's book is that the concept, theoretical nature, and empirical application of the efficient organisation of economic innovation constitute an important contribution to a European science and technology framework. While the first part is a well- structured and thoughtful approach to going into patterns of innovative activity, it fails to provide many new insights into organising innovation in Europe. The more interesting contributions are found in the second part, which present an extremely useful and timely study of how to organise innovation.

This book is an outgrowth of the work of Don Lavoie. Back in 1981 Don Lavoie published his critique of the standard account of the Socialist Calculation debate. Lavoie mentioned Soviet experience, including the failure of War Communism, focused mainly on history of thought, rather than history of events. Lavoie handed the task of applying his ideas (or rather his interpretation of Mises and Hayek) off to his student, Peter Boettke.

The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism is the published version of Boettke's dissertation. Boettke applied the lessons he learned from Lavoie to the early history of the USSR. As such, this book interprets Soviet History from a theoretical perspective that is not universally accepted: the absence of `the market' and `the knowledge problem' developed by FA Hayek. David Levy and Andrei Shleifer claim that public choice problems provide the real explanation of Soviet failure. Janos Kornai points to the soft budget constraint as the explanation of Soviet failure. Others blame the Soviet political system for Soviet failure: the USSR would have supposedly worked if it was democratic.

My own take on the USSR is that it was the absence of financial markets, rather than the absence of markets generally, that doomed the USSR to failure. Consequently, I have a somewhat different take on the NEP. In any case, PEOS is a good source for data and further sources on the USSR, and a good primer on the Lavoie interpretation of the calculation critique.

An overview of Uzbek history, with focus on Uzbek society, but the book has value as background reading only. The material does not even mention, much less address, the '98 regional crisis and its implications for Uzbekistan (conspicuously missing from the chapter on Economic Transformation) and dramatic changes following 9/11/01 have made the chapter on Foreign Policy and External Relations outdated.

Religion and its place in a society where the leaders are publicly professed atheists almost seems like a topic that is guaranteed to take on a life of its own. However, I found Anderson's book to not only be dry and uninteresting, I also found it to be rather one sided. Yes, religion was supressed and even attacked in the Soviet Union, but wasn't this a case of reversed roles in religon's (particularly Christianity's) history? For many years religon attacked non-believers. So I found it hard to sympathize too much with much of the church's plight in Soviet Russia. This feeling may be compounded by Anderson's dry way of describing "assaults" on religion. Very little specific examples are given, although this may very well be due to the difficulty in obtaining reliable resources which would depict specific circumstances. Despite that possibility, I still found Anderson's style to be very dry, almost monotone, and not an exciting read. One saving grace is that the historical chronology is set up in a manner which makes it easier to see why the "Soviet experiment" didn't work in Russia, at least with regards to religous persecutions.

To start off, the editors of this book must have been asleep when it crossed their desks: the numerous erros in spelling and grammar interrupt a generally lucid writing style, with numerous, critical errors even in charts and graphs. The worst editorial aspect of the book is that in several places, entire passages are repeated, sometimes immediately, other times in a different chapter. Being in the field, I know economists are not the most skilled writers, but I place all the blame at the doorstep of the publishing house.

That said, the book is fairly good at getting its point across. While the authors' stance on capitalism-vs-communism is clear, they generally present the facts in a clear manner, and they are evenhanded in their treatment of the opposing theories.

A servicable, if cursory, introduction to Soviet and transitional Russian policy. That said, though, I strongly suggest that you buy it used if at all possible. It's really not worth the $$$$ Amazon wants for it.

I wrote a paper on Samuel Gompers and found this book to be the most informative.
As the industrial age evolved, so did employers and the unions had to adapt. In 1886 the American Federation of Labor was formed, out of the ashes of the former labor federations, with more a more progressive plan for the unions. One man had the insight and dream to better the plight of the working class and create a powerful movement to adapt with industry. The American Federation of Labor still exists today in partnership with the Council of Industrial Organizations. That visionary was Samuel Gompers who is undoubtedly one of America's biggest working-class heroes.

The authors rightly conclude that Britain should leave the EU, because the EU's costs to Britain are unacceptably high, particularly the CAP's costs on our food and farming. But unfortunately, the authors appear to oppose the EU on the grounds that it prevents the freedom of movement of capital, labour, services and goods.

However, the `Constitution for Europe' actually enshrines these four freedoms. It makes the basic principle of laissez-faire - free competition across national borders on the basis of free movement of capital, labour, services and goods - into a constitutional obligation (Articles I-3 and 4, Articles III-130, 166 and 167).

Under the Constitution, the European Central Bank's sole brief is monetarist - to ensure price stability, not to rebuild industry, achieve economic growth or create full employment (Article III-185). Its Article III-147 allows the EU to enforce `liberalisation' of public services like health, education and social services. Article II-88 provides that workers have rights only `in accordance with Union law and national laws and practices'.

The authors back the worst aspects of the EU - deregulation, the single market, cutting down the unions, the Bolkestein Services Directive. They support the Thatcherism of `free trade, non-interventionism and competition'.

They acknowledge that their preferred policies would destroy our manufacturing industry: "competition under free trade largely eliminates manufacture." They praise government policy: "In our economy we have largely let market forces take effect, with generally favourable results for employment and growth (!); as a result we have let manufacturing go where it was essentially uneconomic."

The authors support the government approach of using cheap foreign labour to produce our manufactured goods and using cheap immigrant labour to provide our services. This is a new imperialism.

They don't explain how we in Britain could assert and keep our sovereignty and independence if we no longer produced anything, if we depended on other countries for all our goods and food.