The Discovery of France

Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, from the Revolution to the First World War. W.W. Norton, 2007.

This is probably the best non-fiction book I have read in 2007. It is an eye-opening (and imagination stimulating) account of the "discovery" of France by its own people in the 18th and 19th centuries. Discovery? Well, yes. Much of France was unknown, even to the French, until as late as the 20th Century. The famous Gorges du Verdon, the most monumental geological site in all Europe lay undiscovered (except by the locals, who always knew it was there) until a hundred years ago, despite being placed only a few miles from a provincial center.

The discovery of France begins by explaining why discovery was necessary. Communication was difficult and sometimes impossible because of the complex set of languages and local dialects that existed in France and persist today. There was no lingua franca in France until the state determined to make Parisian French the standard -- over all objections. Discovery was further frustrated by systems of roads and transportation that made travel to some places all but impossible.

Lack of human contact combined with impenetrable language barriers predictably created isolated cultures with intensely suspicious local residents, who, in the first chapter, are frightened enough by anything new to hack to death a government surveyor who has entered their small little world to make a map of it.

The story of why France was undiscovered and the role of the state, technology and economics in finding it is fascinating and is told here with real style. I found something to appreciate on almost every page. Having read this book, I think I have a better understanding of French colonial policies during the golden age of French globalization (I wrote about this in Chapter 8 of Globaloney). French colonial policy was to wipe out native language, culture, food, etc. and replace it with standard Parisian practice -- an external policy that clearly reflected internal fears and concerns.

Rodrik on One Economics, Many Recipes

Dani Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institution, and Economic Growth. Princeton University Press, 2007.

You can think of this book as a highly rigorous reply to the Washington Consensus. The Washington Consensus, as it has become enshrined in the development literature, was a simple universal prescription for structural change and economic growth. One problem with the Washington Consensus was that it often didn't work, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at the Kennedy School of Government/Harvard, explains why. Economic growth is very important, he says. It is just about the most important thing you can imagine for a less developed country because most of the other goals that you might propose are difficult or impossible to achieve if growth is not present. There is a reason why development economics is biased towards growth.

But when we look at the data, we find that there is no one sure path to development. Rather there are many successful recipes for growth (and many unsuccessful ones, too). If the world is going to grow, including especially the less developed countries, the world is going to have to accept that that growth will be diverse, powered by different engines and following different rules of the game.

The rules of the game are economic institutions. Rodrik argues that as much as markets are needed for economic growth (that's part of the Washington Consensus), effective market-supporting institutions are also needed and these institutions need to be designed in ways that take into account economic, political and even natural resource differences among countries.

The diversity of successful development requires us to rethink the institutions of international economic governance, too. The WTO, for example, has become mainly a forum for economic liberalization discussions. But free trade isn't a goal, Rodrik argues, it is a means to a goal -- the goal of economic development. The WTO today actually undermines that goal by trying to shoe-horn different countries into a single model of economic institutions. A development-driven WTO, he says, would instead take on the more difficult job of mediating trade tensions that result from the institutional diversity that economic growth requires. Free trade would be slower to develop with such a WTO in place, Rodrik suggests, but economic development might progress more evenly and at a faster pace.

This is a thorough and thoughtful critique that enlightens by going beyond the usual generalizations about the Washington Consensus and development, replacing overstatement with tight analysis and thoughtful consideration of the data. And it is very readable, too.

I must admit that I was initially disappointed when I opened One Economics. The book is a collection of nine papers, some that have already been published and some that are still "forthcoming." I am not a big fan of collected papers volumes because they seldom hang together very well. I would almost always prefer a purpose-written book that makes good use of the format to present an extended but tightly organized argument rather than presenting bits and pieces written at different times for different audiences.

It seems to me that purpose-written books almost always have more impact than collected paper volumes. That's why Joe Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and Naomi Klein write them. But they take more time to write, too, which is a factor. Rodrik does a pretty good job dealing with the inherent problems of this format, in my opinion, but I wish he'd find the time for a big book.