Back down to Earth, 19 Jun 2008
Everytime someone shoves me in the frozen food aisle at Sainsbury's, or I see a picture Gordon Brown smiling, or another 200 or 2000 troops get sent to Iraq - I think, "Screw it! I'm just going to stop contributing to this intoxicating globalised society and just go be a farmer for the rest of my life!" Well, it turns out you're just as subject to the banal horrors of Corporatism in overalls as you are in a business suit. This is good to realise, and encourages me to be a different/better kind of consumer in real life, not just in my dream world. Thanks Raj.

Timely, wide-reaching and a real wake-up call, 22 Apr 2008
Excellent. A must read. Anyone who is interested in what they eat, where it comes from, and how it reaches us should read this book. And be very worried.

Another predictable Globalisation basher, 08 Mar 2008
Being written by a former World Bank employee, i thought this book would offer a balanced analysis of the global food productiion system. Sadly, this is just another self-righeous, ahistorical, and simplistic critique of Globalisation. Apart from rare informative moments (chapters on soya beans and supermarkets for example), its pages are filled with the struggles between the 'good', dignified small farmers and 'bad', greedy corporations. The basic contention is for us, 'the people' to 'take back' control of our food supply chains, as if citizens of any modern society in history ever had such power. The author rightly points out the high level of suicides among the farmers and blames it on rampant capitalism. However, he fails to mention that farming in America had been the most suicide-prone vocation since the records began. For those who think that they are saving the world by buying local carrots and who like to take Fair Trade sugar with their organic cappucinos, this book might be able to pacify guilty consciousness. However, if you are looking for an authoritative, fair assesment of complex issues surrounding food production, stay clear of this one.

Lifting the lid on your TV dinner, 18 Feb 2008
A sweeping and passionate exposition of the global food system, 'Stuffed and Starved' is a masterly work that underlines why what we eat is so fundamental to who we are.

Patel's book lucidly and comprehensively deconstructs the idea that our current system is the only way, and the supermarket the only viable purveyor, to put food on our tables. He tracks the global food industry from grower to exporter, retailer to consumer, highlighting the many points at which the system is unsustainable, desperately exploitative, and, ultimately, frighteningly vulnerable.

Whether Patel is writing about urban gardening in south central Los Angeles, soy plantations in South America or the tragic plight of rural farmers in India, his voice is one suffused with a deep and lyrical compassion. And it's this humanity - and his hope that, however unlikely, another way lies within our reach - that makes 'Stuffed and Starved' truly special.

The best thing I've read since Naomi Klein's 'No Logo', Stuffed and Starved will shock, fascinate, anger and inspire you.

Don't trust your food to capitalism, 22 Jan 2008
Superbly written, well researched, and ambitious in its scope, Stuffed and Starved is an eye-opening exploration of capitalism's logic when it comes to food.
The title comes from the striking fact that Patel takes as his starting point - that there are 800 million hungry people in the world, and a billion overweight people. He proceeds to unpack this fact in the rest of the book, touching on the rise of ubiquitous ingredients such as soy or corn syrup, supermarkets, genetic engineering, and the economics at work behind these developments. I found the sections on the supply chain particularly good.
Patel doesn't need to ram his points home or play the guilt card. He presents the facts and the need for change is evident. Those changes, he suggests, include eating locally, rediscovering food as a pleasure, breaking the power of supply monopolies, and ensuring a living wage for everyone along the chain of production.
As a writer based in South Africa who has worked for the World Bank, Raj Patel is well placed to speak to both sides of the development debate. He has done so compellingly, and I will keep an eye out for anything he writes in the future.

Back down to Earth, 19 Jun 2008
Everytime someone shoves me in the frozen food aisle at Sainsbury's, or I see a picture Gordon Brown smiling, or another 200 or 2000 troops get sent to Iraq - I think, "Screw it! I'm just going to stop contributing to this intoxicating globalised society and just go be a farmer for the rest of my life!" Well, it turns out you're just as subject to the banal horrors of Corporatism in overalls as you are in a business suit. This is good to realise, and encourages me to be a different/better kind of consumer in real life, not just in my dream world. Thanks Raj.

Timely, wide-reaching and a real wake-up call, 22 Apr 2008
Excellent. A must read. Anyone who is interested in what they eat, where it comes from, and how it reaches us should read this book. And be very worried.

Another predictable Globalisation basher, 08 Mar 2008
Being written by a former World Bank employee, i thought this book would offer a balanced analysis of the global food productiion system. Sadly, this is just another self-righeous, ahistorical, and simplistic critique of Globalisation. Apart from rare informative moments (chapters on soya beans and supermarkets for example), its pages are filled with the struggles between the 'good', dignified small farmers and 'bad', greedy corporations. The basic contention is for us, 'the people' to 'take back' control of our food supply chains, as if citizens of any modern society in history ever had such power. The author rightly points out the high level of suicides among the farmers and blames it on rampant capitalism. However, he fails to mention that farming in America had been the most suicide-prone vocation since the records began. For those who think that they are saving the world by buying local carrots and who like to take Fair Trade sugar with their organic cappucinos, this book might be able to pacify guilty consciousness. However, if you are looking for an authoritative, fair assesment of complex issues surrounding food production, stay clear of this one.

Lifting the lid on your TV dinner, 18 Feb 2008
A sweeping and passionate exposition of the global food system, 'Stuffed and Starved' is a masterly work that underlines why what we eat is so fundamental to who we are.

Patel's book lucidly and comprehensively deconstructs the idea that our current system is the only way, and the supermarket the only viable purveyor, to put food on our tables. He tracks the global food industry from grower to exporter, retailer to consumer, highlighting the many points at which the system is unsustainable, desperately exploitative, and, ultimately, frighteningly vulnerable.

Whether Patel is writing about urban gardening in south central Los Angeles, soy plantations in South America or the tragic plight of rural farmers in India, his voice is one suffused with a deep and lyrical compassion. And it's this humanity - and his hope that, however unlikely, another way lies within our reach - that makes 'Stuffed and Starved' truly special.

The best thing I've read since Naomi Klein's 'No Logo', Stuffed and Starved will shock, fascinate, anger and inspire you.

Don't trust your food to capitalism, 22 Jan 2008
Superbly written, well researched, and ambitious in its scope, Stuffed and Starved is an eye-opening exploration of capitalism's logic when it comes to food.
The title comes from the striking fact that Patel takes as his starting point - that there are 800 million hungry people in the world, and a billion overweight people. He proceeds to unpack this fact in the rest of the book, touching on the rise of ubiquitous ingredients such as soy or corn syrup, supermarkets, genetic engineering, and the economics at work behind these developments. I found the sections on the supply chain particularly good.
Patel doesn't need to ram his points home or play the guilt card. He presents the facts and the need for change is evident. Those changes, he suggests, include eating locally, rediscovering food as a pleasure, breaking the power of supply monopolies, and ensuring a living wage for everyone along the chain of production.
As a writer based in South Africa who has worked for the World Bank, Raj Patel is well placed to speak to both sides of the development debate. He has done so compellingly, and I will keep an eye out for anything he writes in the future.

Provocative, insightful reflections on capitalism, 18 Feb 2008
Robert Reich, President Bill Clinton's secretary of labor and one of the most provocative public intellectuals in the U.S., unflinchingly explores the transformation of American democratic capitalism into a system of "supercapitalism," in which corporations and the market exercise apparently unbridled power. Reich considers and then discards most, if not all, of the standard leftist explanations for this development. Instead, in a logically coherent analysis, he arrives at some startling but convincing conclusions. For example, arguing that the government should never treat corporations like people, Reich advocates eliminating the corporate income tax. getAbstract recommends this book to anyone who wants to understand today's economics, politics or fiscal events. Although recent legislation attempts to address some of the issues Reich raises, such as the flow of corporate money into political campaigns, his analysis is still relevant.

Of Profits and Global Competition, 13 Nov 2007
Robert Reich provides little new information in this superficial look at how global competition emerged in the last 60 years and makes questionable recommendations for how to improve matters. Unless you feel compelled to read every book that Professor Reich writes, you can skip this one.

Unlike many commentators who praise or criticize business while ignoring society, Professor Reich attempts to reconcile the two. He is tougher on consumers than on business: Business is supposed to focus on making profits, and consumers who complain about business should realize that serving more interests could raise prices and cut customer benefits.

Where Professor Reich gets worried is when competition for government favor becomes part of beating your business rival, when success in business causes a widening of income and net worth within the society, and citizen's interests are ignored by the political process. He feels that all of those factors are a problem now and are likely to get worse in the future.

Professor Reich proposes very few solutions . . . and ones that aren't likely to be implemented. For income distribution, he wants to make the top rates in income higher (like in the 1950s), directly tax corporate shareholders on their share of corporate profits (to further boost the bite on the rich), and provide more of a social safety net for those who lose their jobs or have temporary problems. The political likelihood of those things happening is certainly quite low.

In the field of corporate governance, he wants corporations to lose the right to sue and lobby government. Instead of suing companies, you'll sue individuals . . . something he feels would improve behavior quite a lot. Now, can you imagine business wanting to do those things?

Wealth creation has probably never been more democratic in the United States. By studying the Forbes 400, we see that the great wealth is mostly new wealth, generated by entrepreneurs who mostly played by the rules. Education and access to capital to start up one's own business have never been more available.

It's inevitable that income and wealth distribution will widen in a global economy. Why? The best will get paid on a global rather than a national scale while the least effective will have to compete with more people who are already paid a lot less. When the Berlin Wall fell, this effect was inevitable.

I believe that having a non-responsive federal government is a problem, but that problem will probably have to be solved by the creation of a new political party (or conversion of an existing one) with a focus on representing the broad interests of citizens that corporations don't care about.

I also think Professor Reich doesn't appreciate the extent to which the federal government's power will continue to wane versus the power of the largest and most effective companies. Government is going the way of agriculture in terms of becoming less important, except where corruption makes it hard to do business.


Provocative thesis, but comes up short at the end (3.5 stars), 10 Nov 2007
Robert Reich (RR) has an interesting take on the development of capitalism in the last 40 years, particularly, though not exclusively, in the US. It's also one that might confound the expectations of critics who recall him as Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. Some passages of the book might warm Milton Friedman's heart, were it now warmable. But the book is very weak on proposed solutions.

A rough outline of RR's themes, slightly rearranged from their presentation in the book, is as follows:

@@ We (not just Americans, but most of the developed world) are caught in a paradox today of doing very well as consumers and investors, while feeling increasingly powerless as citizens. "As consumers and investors we want the great deals" that the current form of capitalism brings, while "[a]s citizens we don't like many of the social consequences that flow from them," @ 89. Moreover, we don't know how to act effectively on our feelings as citizens - and we often direct our frustration at the wrong targets (such as at individual companies).

@@ The situation was quite different prior to, roughly, the 1970s (Chapter 1). American industry was dominated by oligopolies, consumers had less choice, the Dow was a fraction of what it is now. Government intervened to control wages and prices, which made established players in industry more secure. (RR points out that as recently as 1994, over half of the Fortune 500 had been founded before 1930, @19.). Citizens belonged to a wider variety of local, regional and national unions and voluntary groups that were "countervailing forces" (in JK Galbraith's phrase) to industry. Government spent more of its time mediating between these countervailing interests.

@@ Today, much of the regulatory framework that was erected to balance these forces has been dismantled, and with it many of the "cross-subsidies" that protected small subgroups of workers and others (@68). While many people are doing better, some people are doing much worse, and inequality has grown since the 1970s (Chapter 3). Government now spends its time mainly mediating between the interests of different segments of industry and different industries. Fewer citizens belong to voluntary groups, and those can't really compete with industry for government's ear anyway. (Chapter 4)

@@ The cause of this shift isn't greed, ideology, or politics but technology. "The real explanation involves the way technologies have empowered consumers and investors to get better and better deals - and how these deals, in turn, have sucked relative equality and stability, as well as other social values, out of the system," @ 51. Container ships, overseas cables, satellites and the Internet all played a part. This also explains why similar shifts are occurring in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. (Chapter 2)

@@ We shouldn't blame companies for this shift, or for bloated CEO pay, or for their intense lobbying of government. They need to do what they're doing to stay competitive. For the same reasons, we shouldn't expect voluntary "corporate social responsibility" (CSR). Corporate responsibility is to shareholders, and while some companies' actions have good effects on others, they should be taking those actions only if they lead to increased corporate profits. If we as a society want to make companies act more responsibly to a larger range of "stakeholders," the way to do so is through government regulation. (Chapter 5)

Up to this point, I felt that RR had a provocative thesis, albeit that many of its parts had been put forward by others previously. (E.g., as to CSR, David Vogel's excellent "The Market for Virtue" (2006), which RR mentions often.) Some may argue about historical points, such as whether regulation in the past 30 years has diminished (RR) or exploded (see other reviews on this page). However, even academic research showing a growing number of pages in the US Code of Federal Regulations (e.g., Dawson, KYKLOS 2007 Feb. @15-36) isn't sufficient to negative RR's point about the shift in *who* is battling over what's printed on those pages today, compared to who did so during most of the 20th Century. RR also has some interesting observations on how antitrust laws are no longer discussed in the context of protecting small competitors, but rather of protecting consumer choice and investor return(e.g., @55n and 163.) Certainly the citizen side of me could identify with the feelings and trends RR describes.

But the last chapter, "A Citizen's Guide to Supercapitalism," was a let-down. Most of it is a list of reasons not to trust politicians or executives who make certain types of claims. E.g., instead of believing executives who say their companies are doing something to advance the "public good," we should remember that "Companies are not interested in the common good. It is not their responsibility to be good," @ 214. Fine, but this is a missed opportunity for some constructive action. Surely there's some benefit if activists and others help or encourage companies to find good stuff to do that also happens to be profitable - this is like low-hanging fruit. RR never makes such a suggestion.

The last section of the chapter is a surprising rant about corporate personhood. RR blasts the "legal fiction," as lawyers call it, that companies are persons. Instead, he claims they are aggregations of contracts between and among individuals. (This theory isn't original, having been described by, e.g., Frank Easterbrook in the 1990s, though RR doesn't cite any predecessors. Nor does he mention any of the less plausible idealizations implicit in this model, e.g. about rationality, utility maximization etc.)

RR draws many conclusions from the non-personhood of corporations, such as they shouldn't have to pay tax (which is shareholder money anyway) (@216ff) and should not have standing to sue (@222). This last notion seemed particularly half-baked. RR doesn't say that only individuals should be subject of regulation. So if corporations are regulated, why shouldn't they have standing to sue about those regulations at least? (Moreover, RR's literal assertion, "Noncitizens should have no right to [seek to overturn American laws and regulations] unless the law or regulations breach some international treaty," (id.) seems to imply that individual non-citizens also should not have standing to sue, e.g., to contest the Constitutionality of any law or regulation affecting their freedom or human rights.) It also seems rather quixotic to think that so many jurisdictions might purge this legal fiction from their laws and jurisprudence in one swoop (and BTW the personhood notion is even stronger in Europe than in the US). The more important issue, it seems to me, is not about personhood, but about balancing the rights of the entity (or of its aggregate of contracting shareholders, if we take RR's view) against the rights of individuals in other roles (as community, consumers, workers, etc.).

Corporate personhood is an old controversy in any event, whose history in the US is nicely summarized in a 2001 article by David Millon freely available on the Social Science Research Network. Millon's conclusion is that the underlying arguments are political ones about what should be the responsibilities of corporations, and that both pro- and anti-"person" points of view can be found on both sides of the political issue. Consequently, there's no need to drag this concept into policy arguments, even when RR's ideas are good ones (e.g., about making Americans more competitive, rather than American companies more competitive, @ 222). That someone of RR's accomplishments and intelligence can't do better than to conclude on such a wobbly and arcane point suggests, sad to say, just how difficult it may be to resolve the paradox he so thoughtfully describes.

Back down to Earth, 19 Jun 2008
Everytime someone shoves me in the frozen food aisle at Sainsbury's, or I see a picture Gordon Brown smiling, or another 200 or 2000 troops get sent to Iraq - I think, "Screw it! I'm just going to stop contributing to this intoxicating globalised society and just go be a farmer for the rest of my life!" Well, it turns out you're just as subject to the banal horrors of Corporatism in overalls as you are in a business suit. This is good to realise, and encourages me to be a different/better kind of consumer in real life, not just in my dream world. Thanks Raj.

Timely, wide-reaching and a real wake-up call, 22 Apr 2008
Excellent. A must read. Anyone who is interested in what they eat, where it comes from, and how it reaches us should read this book. And be very worried.

Another predictable Globalisation basher, 08 Mar 2008
Being written by a former World Bank employee, i thought this book would offer a balanced analysis of the global food productiion system. Sadly, this is just another self-righeous, ahistorical, and simplistic critique of Globalisation. Apart from rare informative moments (chapters on soya beans and supermarkets for example), its pages are filled with the struggles between the 'good', dignified small farmers and 'bad', greedy corporations. The basic contention is for us, 'the people' to 'take back' control of our food supply chains, as if citizens of any modern society in history ever had such power. The author rightly points out the high level of suicides among the farmers and blames it on rampant capitalism. However, he fails to mention that farming in America had been the most suicide-prone vocation since the records began. For those who think that they are saving the world by buying local carrots and who like to take Fair Trade sugar with their organic cappucinos, this book might be able to pacify guilty consciousness. However, if you are looking for an authoritative, fair assesment of complex issues surrounding food production, stay clear of this one.

Lifting the lid on your TV dinner, 18 Feb 2008
A sweeping and passionate exposition of the global food system, 'Stuffed and Starved' is a masterly work that underlines why what we eat is so fundamental to who we are.

Patel's book lucidly and comprehensively deconstructs the idea that our current system is the only way, and the supermarket the only viable purveyor, to put food on our tables. He tracks the global food industry from grower to exporter, retailer to consumer, highlighting the many points at which the system is unsustainable, desperately exploitative, and, ultimately, frighteningly vulnerable.

Whether Patel is writing about urban gardening in south central Los Angeles, soy plantations in South America or the tragic plight of rural farmers in India, his voice is one suffused with a deep and lyrical compassion. And it's this humanity - and his hope that, however unlikely, another way lies within our reach - that makes 'Stuffed and Starved' truly special.

The best thing I've read since Naomi Klein's 'No Logo', Stuffed and Starved will shock, fascinate, anger and inspire you.

Don't trust your food to capitalism, 22 Jan 2008
Superbly written, well researched, and ambitious in its scope, Stuffed and Starved is an eye-opening exploration of capitalism's logic when it comes to food.
The title comes from the striking fact that Patel takes as his starting point - that there are 800 million hungry people in the world, and a billion overweight people. He proceeds to unpack this fact in the rest of the book, touching on the rise of ubiquitous ingredients such as soy or corn syrup, supermarkets, genetic engineering, and the economics at work behind these developments. I found the sections on the supply chain particularly good.
Patel doesn't need to ram his points home or play the guilt card. He presents the facts and the need for change is evident. Those changes, he suggests, include eating locally, rediscovering food as a pleasure, breaking the power of supply monopolies, and ensuring a living wage for everyone along the chain of production.
As a writer based in South Africa who has worked for the World Bank, Raj Patel is well placed to speak to both sides of the development debate. He has done so compellingly, and I will keep an eye out for anything he writes in the future.

Provocative, insightful reflections on capitalism, 18 Feb 2008
Robert Reich, President Bill Clinton's secretary of labor and one of the most provocative public intellectuals in the U.S., unflinchingly explores the transformation of American democratic capitalism into a system of "supercapitalism," in which corporations and the market exercise apparently unbridled power. Reich considers and then discards most, if not all, of the standard leftist explanations for this development. Instead, in a logically coherent analysis, he arrives at some startling but convincing conclusions. For example, arguing that the government should never treat corporations like people, Reich advocates eliminating the corporate income tax. getAbstract recommends this book to anyone who wants to understand today's economics, politics or fiscal events. Although recent legislation attempts to address some of the issues Reich raises, such as the flow of corporate money into political campaigns, his analysis is still relevant.

Of Profits and Global Competition, 13 Nov 2007
Robert Reich provides little new information in this superficial look at how global competition emerged in the last 60 years and makes questionable recommendations for how to improve matters. Unless you feel compelled to read every book that Professor Reich writes, you can skip this one.

Unlike many commentators who praise or criticize business while ignoring society, Professor Reich attempts to reconcile the two. He is tougher on consumers than on business: Business is supposed to focus on making profits, and consumers who complain about business should realize that serving more interests could raise prices and cut customer benefits.

Where Professor Reich gets worried is when competition for government favor becomes part of beating your business rival, when success in business causes a widening of income and net worth within the society, and citizen's interests are ignored by the political process. He feels that all of those factors are a problem now and are likely to get worse in the future.

Professor Reich proposes very few solutions . . . and ones that aren't likely to be implemented. For income distribution, he wants to make the top rates in income higher (like in the 1950s), directly tax corporate shareholders on their share of corporate profits (to further boost the bite on the rich), and provide more of a social safety net for those who lose their jobs or have temporary problems. The political likelihood of those things happening is certainly quite low.

In the field of corporate governance, he wants corporations to lose the right to sue and lobby government. Instead of suing companies, you'll sue individuals . . . something he feels would improve behavior quite a lot. Now, can you imagine business wanting to do those things?

Wealth creation has probably never been more democratic in the United States. By studying the Forbes 400, we see that the great wealth is mostly new wealth, generated by entrepreneurs who mostly played by the rules. Education and access to capital to start up one's own business have never been more available.

It's inevitable that income and wealth distribution will widen in a global economy. Why? The best will get paid on a global rather than a national scale while the least effective will have to compete with more people who are already paid a lot less. When the Berlin Wall fell, this effect was inevitable.

I believe that having a non-responsive federal government is a problem, but that problem will probably have to be solved by the creation of a new political party (or conversion of an existing one) with a focus on representing the broad interests of citizens that corporations don't care about.

I also think Professor Reich doesn't appreciate the extent to which the federal government's power will continue to wane versus the power of the largest and most effective companies. Government is going the way of agriculture in terms of becoming less important, except where corruption makes it hard to do business.


Provocative thesis, but comes up short at the end (3.5 stars), 10 Nov 2007
Robert Reich (RR) has an interesting take on the development of capitalism in the last 40 years, particularly, though not exclusively, in the US. It's also one that might confound the expectations of critics who recall him as Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. Some passages of the book might warm Milton Friedman's heart, were it now warmable. But the book is very weak on proposed solutions.

A rough outline of RR's themes, slightly rearranged from their presentation in the book, is as follows:

@@ We (not just Americans, but most of the developed world) are caught in a paradox today of doing very well as consumers and investors, while feeling increasingly powerless as citizens. "As consumers and investors we want the great deals" that the current form of capitalism brings, while "[a]s citizens we don't like many of the social consequences that flow from them," @ 89. Moreover, we don't know how to act effectively on our feelings as citizens - and we often direct our frustration at the wrong targets (such as at individual companies).

@@ The situation was quite different prior to, roughly, the 1970s (Chapter 1). American industry was dominated by oligopolies, consumers had less choice, the Dow was a fraction of what it is now. Government intervened to control wages and prices, which made established players in industry more secure. (RR points out that as recently as 1994, over half of the Fortune 500 had been founded before 1930, @19.). Citizens belonged to a wider variety of local, regional and national unions and voluntary groups that were "countervailing forces" (in JK Galbraith's phrase) to industry. Government spent more of its time mediating between these countervailing interests.

@@ Today, much of the regulatory framework that was erected to balance these forces has been dismantled, and with it many of the "cross-subsidies" that protected small subgroups of workers and others (@68). While many people are doing better, some people are doing much worse, and inequality has grown since the 1970s (Chapter 3). Government now spends its time mainly mediating between the interests of different segments of industry and different industries. Fewer citizens belong to voluntary groups, and those can't really compete with industry for government's ear anyway. (Chapter 4)

@@ The cause of this shift isn't greed, ideology, or politics but technology. "The real explanation involves the way technologies have empowered consumers and investors to get better and better deals - and how these deals, in turn, have sucked relative equality and stability, as well as other social values, out of the system," @ 51. Container ships, overseas cables, satellites and the Internet all played a part. This also explains why similar shifts are occurring in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. (Chapter 2)

@@ We shouldn't blame companies for this shift, or for bloated CEO pay, or for their intense lobbying of government. They need to do what they're doing to stay competitive. For the same reasons, we shouldn't expect voluntary "corporate social responsibility" (CSR). Corporate responsibility is to shareholders, and while some companies' actions have good effects on others, they should be taking those actions only if they lead to increased corporate profits. If we as a society want to make companies act more responsibly to a larger range of "stakeholders," the way to do so is through government regulation. (Chapter 5)

Up to this point, I felt that RR had a provocative thesis, albeit that many of its parts had been put forward by others previously. (E.g., as to CSR, David Vogel's excellent "The Market for Virtue" (2006), which RR mentions often.) Some may argue about historical points, such as whether regulation in the past 30 years has diminished (RR) or exploded (see other reviews on this page). However, even academic research showing a growing number of pages in the US Code of Federal Regulations (e.g., Dawson, KYKLOS 2007 Feb. @15-36) isn't sufficient to negative RR's point about the shift in *who* is battling over what's printed on those pages today, compared to who did so during most of the 20th Century. RR also has some interesting observations on how antitrust laws are no longer discussed in the context of protecting small competitors, but rather of protecting consumer choice and investor return(e.g., @55n and 163.) Certainly the citizen side of me could identify with the feelings and trends RR describes.

But the last chapter, "A Citizen's Guide to Supercapitalism," was a let-down. Most of it is a list of reasons not to trust politicians or executives who make certain types of claims. E.g., instead of believing executives who say their companies are doing something to advance the "public good," we should remember that "Companies are not interested in the common good. It is not their responsibility to be good," @ 214. Fine, but this is a missed opportunity for some constructive action. Surely there's some benefit if activists and others help or encourage companies to find good stuff to do that also happens to be profitable - this is like low-hanging fruit. RR never makes such a suggestion.

The last section of the chapter is a surprising rant about corporate personhood. RR blasts the "legal fiction," as lawyers call it, that companies are persons. Instead, he claims they are aggregations of contracts between and among individuals. (This theory isn't original, having been described by, e.g., Frank Easterbrook in the 1990s, though RR doesn't cite any predecessors. Nor does he mention any of the less plausible idealizations implicit in this model, e.g. about rationality, utility maximization etc.)

RR draws many conclusions from the non-personhood of corporations, such as they shouldn't have to pay tax (which is shareholder money anyway) (@216ff) and should not have standing to sue (@222). This last notion seemed particularly half-baked. RR doesn't say that only individuals should be subject of regulation. So if corporations are regulated, why shouldn't they have standing to sue about those regulations at least? (Moreover, RR's literal assertion, "Noncitizens should have no right to [seek to overturn American laws and regulations] unless the law or regulations breach some international treaty," (id.) seems to imply that individual non-citizens also should not have standing to sue, e.g., to contest the Constitutionality of any law or regulation affecting their freedom or human rights.) It also seems rather quixotic to think that so many jurisdictions might purge this legal fiction from their laws and jurisprudence in one swoop (and BTW the personhood notion is even stronger in Europe than in the US). The more important issue, it seems to me, is not about personhood, but about balancing the rights of the entity (or of its aggregate of contracting shareholders, if we take RR's view) against the rights of individuals in other roles (as community, consumers, workers, etc.).

Corporate personhood is an old controversy in any event, whose history in the US is nicely summarized in a 2001 article by David Millon freely available on the Social Science Research Network. Millon's conclusion is that the underlying arguments are political ones about what should be the responsibilities of corporations, and that both pro- and anti-"person" points of view can be found on both sides of the political issue. Consequently, there's no need to drag this concept into policy arguments, even when RR's ideas are good ones (e.g., about making Americans more competitive, rather than American companies more competitive, @ 222). That someone of RR's accomplishments and intelligence can't do better than to conclude on such a wobbly and arcane point suggests, sad to say, just how difficult it may be to resolve the paradox he so thoughtfully describes.

A rather biased account, 17 Nov 2008
When I was a young man training as an accountant (after previously completing an engineering degree), I began to get interested in philosophical, political and religious ideas.

Particularly after completing my accountancy examination, I began reading books on politics, philosophy, Christian theology, comparative religion and so on.

Having come from a mainly mathematical and scientific background, I naively thought at first that one only had to read up on each political and religious 'system' e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and so on and Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism and then by subjecting them to rigorous logical analysis determine which one was the best. As anyone who has ever embarked on a study of these subjects soon realizes, however, many of the arguments involved are highly complex and some of the greatest minds that the human race has ever produced have held opposing positions.

As a sensitive and intelligent young man, I was revolted with some of the greed that I saw as an accountant and I was attracted to both Christianity and socialism (even though some branches of socialism can be anti-Christian). I read e.g. George Orwell's essays and novels and I remember reading novels such as 'Love on the Dole' and the 'Ragged Trousered Philanthropists'.

I was just completing my accountancy examinations around the time of the miners strike. I was always against Communism (as opposed to democratic socialism) and I have since read about the horrors of Stalinism. I was against Marxism because of its anti-religious stance at first.

As I began to read more about British history I began to realize that most Labour governments have always messed up the economy and the Brown government is no exception. I used to think that although most Labour governments had been useless that Attlee's government had been a good one but I have since read some economic arguments suggesting that even Attlee's government made huge mistakes that hindered our post war recovery.

I am broadminded enough to follow all aspects of an argument and we subscribe to a wide range of magazines and journals including the Economist, New Statesman, Prospect Magazine and the Spectator.

I would like to believe that there is a viable alternative to the dog eat dog world of capitalism. Unfortunatly, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that capitalism isn't anywhere near as bad as socialism. I have become attracted to Conservative thought in recent years and I also believe that many ideas propounded by socialists such as mass immigration and multiculturalism are misguided too. I think that Edmund Burke had some useful things to say about tradition and I don't like the way that the left always wish to denigrate everything British or Christian or both.

I found this book rather biased and some of the ideas about e.g. about Sweden's economy and welfare system no longer seem up to date with the reality on the ground.

The chips are down, 21 Oct 2007
An outstanding introduction and a meaty one too. Now that I've read three books in the "very short introduction" series, it has been a pleasant surprise to see how formidable these book are.

References, suggestions for further reading and a 9 page index are included.

Newman does not hide the problems that socialists have had but neither does he fail to recognize the ways in which they might help.

The analyses of Cuban communism and Swedish social democracy were illuminating. Socialism may not have dominated, but it has not always been the failure that it is made out to be.

Newman claims "What can be maintained with confidence is that capitalism will not be able to resolve the problems and injustices that it causes...and that socialist arguments remain relevant". He notes the challenge, beyond whatever problems socialists themselves have in running an economy, that "At present, Washington is opposed to any international regimes that might limit its autonomy and is willing to use its power to thwart their development."

Unlike the literature I've read of many socialist parties, which tend to be simplistic and shallow in analysis, Newman does manage in this "very short introduction" multi-dimensional explorations of the challenges facing socialism. He continues to value the role of trade unions, the greens and feminists. The socialist effort is fragmented and it is not clear in what ways it can be effective. Like many socialists, Newman's moral concerns seem clear but Newman's openness and flexibility seems all the more valuable at a time when many socialist groups seem dogmatic and rigid.

Newman's "very short introduction" seems one of the best statements on what Socialism today has to offer.

Useful overview, with interesting points raised, 21 May 2007
The book covers a useful analysis of the roots of socialism, and then chronicles how it diverged into communism on the one hand and more moderate social democratic parties on the other hand. To illustrate this, there is an interesting comparison between communists and social democrats in action, with a chapter dedicated to how Cuba and Sweden used the respective systems in their public policy, often allowing it to cross fertilise with cultural mores (especially true of Sweden), and a discussion of how the Cuban system may not survive Castro's death, being as it is largely based on Castro's personal charisma. By contrast, the Swedish system has much better prospects for long term survival, although it did struggle during the neo-liberal 1980s.

There is also an interesting look at how "green" policies have influenced recent socialist thinking, explaining how this was a significant challenge to traditional socialism and communism, both of which took unlimited growth and industrial activity for granted. By contrast, the greens argued that the emphasis should be on managed growth, and that if this growth threatened the planet, growth should be stopped. Interestingly the greens believed that this was simply an extension of the socialist belief that whilst traditional socialists should care for society's members now, they also had a duty to look after the planet and thus take care of society's future members.

The author also examines how socialism has fragmented, with increasing attention being paid to gender and ethnicity, and less to class amongst more recent writers, a considerable break with tradition. One refreshing feature of the book is the author's honesty, and far from being a partisan rant, the author freely admits that his/her ideology has its flaws and that amending them is not going to be easy. All in all, a good introduction to the semi-interested reader, but more interested readers in the subject of socialism may need to read a more "deep" text.

Back down to Earth, 19 Jun 2008
Everytime someone shoves me in the frozen food aisle at Sainsbury's, or I see a picture Gordon Brown smiling, or another 200 or 2000 troops get sent to Iraq - I think, "Screw it! I'm just going to stop contributing to this intoxicating globalised society and just go be a farmer for the rest of my life!" Well, it turns out you're just as subject to the banal horrors of Corporatism in overalls as you are in a business suit. This is good to realise, and encourages me to be a different/better kind of consumer in real life, not just in my dream world. Thanks Raj.

Timely, wide-reaching and a real wake-up call, 22 Apr 2008
Excellent. A must read. Anyone who is interested in what they eat, where it comes from, and how it reaches us should read this book. And be very worried.

Another predictable Globalisation basher, 08 Mar 2008
Being written by a former World Bank employee, i thought this book would offer a balanced analysis of the global food productiion system. Sadly, this is just another self-righeous, ahistorical, and simplistic critique of Globalisation. Apart from rare informative moments (chapters on soya beans and supermarkets for example), its pages are filled with the struggles between the 'good', dignified small farmers and 'bad', greedy corporations. The basic contention is for us, 'the people' to 'take back' control of our food supply chains, as if citizens of any modern society in history ever had such power. The author rightly points out the high level of suicides among the farmers and blames it on rampant capitalism. However, he fails to mention that farming in America had been the most suicide-prone vocation since the records began. For those who think that they are saving the world by buying local carrots and who like to take Fair Trade sugar with their organic cappucinos, this book might be able to pacify guilty consciousness. However, if you are looking for an authoritative, fair assesment of complex issues surrounding food production, stay clear of this one.

Lifting the lid on your TV dinner, 18 Feb 2008
A sweeping and passionate exposition of the global food system, 'Stuffed and Starved' is a masterly work that underlines why what we eat is so fundamental to who we are.

Patel's book lucidly and comprehensively deconstructs the idea that our current system is the only way, and the supermarket the only viable purveyor, to put food on our tables. He tracks the global food industry from grower to exporter, retailer to consumer, highlighting the many points at which the system is unsustainable, desperately exploitative, and, ultimately, frighteningly vulnerable.

Whether Patel is writing about urban gardening in south central Los Angeles, soy plantations in South America or the tragic plight of rural farmers in India, his voice is one suffused with a deep and lyrical compassion. And it's this humanity - and his hope that, however unlikely, another way lies within our reach - that makes 'Stuffed and Starved' truly special.

The best thing I've read since Naomi Klein's 'No Logo', Stuffed and Starved will shock, fascinate, anger and inspire you.

Don't trust your food to capitalism, 22 Jan 2008
Superbly written, well researched, and ambitious in its scope, Stuffed and Starved is an eye-opening exploration of capitalism's logic when it comes to food.
The title comes from the striking fact that Patel takes as his starting point - that there are 800 million hungry people in the world, and a billion overweight people. He proceeds to unpack this fact in the rest of the book, touching on the rise of ubiquitous ingredients such as soy or corn syrup, supermarkets, genetic engineering, and the economics at work behind these developments. I found the sections on the supply chain particularly good.
Patel doesn't need to ram his points home or play the guilt card. He presents the facts and the need for change is evident. Those changes, he suggests, include eating locally, rediscovering food as a pleasure, breaking the power of supply monopolies, and ensuring a living wage for everyone along the chain of production.
As a writer based in South Africa who has worked for the World Bank, Raj Patel is well placed to speak to both sides of the development debate. He has done so compellingly, and I will keep an eye out for anything he writes in the future.

Provocative, insightful reflections on capitalism, 18 Feb 2008
Robert Reich, President Bill Clinton's secretary of labor and one of the most provocative public intellectuals in the U.S., unflinchingly explores the transformation of American democratic capitalism into a system of "supercapitalism," in which corporations and the market exercise apparently unbridled power. Reich considers and then discards most, if not all, of the standard leftist explanations for this development. Instead, in a logically coherent analysis, he arrives at some startling but convincing conclusions. For example, arguing that the government should never treat corporations like people, Reich advocates eliminating the corporate income tax. getAbstract recommends this book to anyone who wants to understand today's economics, politics or fiscal events. Although recent legislation attempts to address some of the issues Reich raises, such as the flow of corporate money into political campaigns, his analysis is still relevant.

Of Profits and Global Competition, 13 Nov 2007
Robert Reich provides little new information in this superficial look at how global competition emerged in the last 60 years and makes questionable recommendations for how to improve matters. Unless you feel compelled to read every book that Professor Reich writes, you can skip this one.

Unlike many commentators who praise or criticize business while ignoring society, Professor Reich attempts to reconcile the two. He is tougher on consumers than on business: Business is supposed to focus on making profits, and consumers who complain about business should realize that serving more interests could raise prices and cut customer benefits.

Where Professor Reich gets worried is when competition for government favor becomes part of beating your business rival, when success in business causes a widening of income and net worth within the society, and citizen's interests are ignored by the political process. He feels that all of those factors are a problem now and are likely to get worse in the future.

Professor Reich proposes very few solutions . . . and ones that aren't likely to be implemented. For income distribution, he wants to make the top rates in income higher (like in the 1950s), directly tax corporate shareholders on their share of corporate profits (to further boost the bite on the rich), and provide more of a social safety net for those who lose their jobs or have temporary problems. The political likelihood of those things happening is certainly quite low.

In the field of corporate governance, he wants corporations to lose the right to sue and lobby government. Instead of suing companies, you'll sue individuals . . . something he feels would improve behavior quite a lot. Now, can you imagine business wanting to do those things?

Wealth creation has probably never been more democratic in the United States. By studying the Forbes 400, we see that the great wealth is mostly new wealth, generated by entrepreneurs who mostly played by the rules. Education and access to capital to start up one's own business have never been more available.

It's inevitable that income and wealth distribution will widen in a global economy. Why? The best will get paid on a global rather than a national scale while the least effective will have to compete with more people who are already paid a lot less. When the Berlin Wall fell, this effect was inevitable.

I believe that having a non-responsive federal government is a problem, but that problem will probably have to be solved by the creation of a new political party (or conversion of an existing one) with a focus on representing the broad interests of citizens that corporations don't care about.

I also think Professor Reich doesn't appreciate the extent to which the federal government's power will continue to wane versus the power of the largest and most effective companies. Government is going the way of agriculture in terms of becoming less important, except where corruption makes it hard to do business.


Provocative thesis, but comes up short at the end (3.5 stars), 10 Nov 2007
Robert Reich (RR) has an interesting take on the development of capitalism in the last 40 years, particularly, though not exclusively, in the US. It's also one that might confound the expectations of critics who recall him as Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. Some passages of the book might warm Milton Friedman's heart, were it now warmable. But the book is very weak on proposed solutions.

A rough outline of RR's themes, slightly rearranged from their presentation in the book, is as follows:

@@ We (not just Americans, but most of the developed world) are caught in a paradox today of doing very well as consumers and investors, while feeling increasingly powerless as citizens. "As consumers and investors we want the great deals" that the current form of capitalism brings, while "[a]s citizens we don't like many of the social consequences that flow from them," @ 89. Moreover, we don't know how to act effectively on our feelings as citizens - and we often direct our frustration at the wrong targets (such as at individual companies).

@@ The situation was quite different prior to, roughly, the 1970s (Chapter 1). American industry was dominated by oligopolies, consumers had less choice, the Dow was a fraction of what it is now. Government intervened to control wages and prices, which made established players in industry more secure. (RR points out that as recently as 1994, over half of the Fortune 500 had been founded before 1930, @19.). Citizens belonged to a wider variety of local, regional and national unions and voluntary groups that were "countervailing forces" (in JK Galbraith's phrase) to industry. Government spent more of its time mediating between these countervailing interests.

@@ Today, much of the regulatory framework that was erected to balance these forces has been dismantled, and with it many of the "cross-subsidies" that protected small subgroups of workers and others (@68). While many people are doing better, some people are doing much worse, and inequality has grown since the 1970s (Chapter 3). Government now spends its time mainly mediating between the interests of different segments of industry and different industries. Fewer citizens belong to voluntary groups, and those can't really compete with industry for government's ear anyway. (Chapter 4)

@@ The cause of this shift isn't greed, ideology, or politics but technology. "The real explanation involves the way technologies have empowered consumers and investors to get better and better deals - and how these deals, in turn, have sucked relative equality and stability, as well as other social values, out of the system," @ 51. Container ships, overseas cables, satellites and the Internet all played a part. This also explains why similar shifts are occurring in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. (Chapter 2)

@@ We shouldn't blame companies for this shift, or for bloated CEO pay, or for their intense lobbying of government. They need to do what they're doing to stay competitive. For the same reasons, we shouldn't expect voluntary "corporate social responsibility" (CSR). Corporate responsibility is to shareholders, and while some companies' actions have good effects on others, they should be taking those actions only if they lead to increased corporate profits. If we as a society want to make companies act more responsibly to a larger range of "stakeholders," the way to do so is through government regulation. (Chapter 5)

Up to this point, I felt that RR had a provocative thesis, albeit that many of its parts had been put forward by others previously. (E.g., as to CSR, David Vogel's excellent "The Market for Virtue" (2006), which RR mentions often.) Some may argue about historical points, such as whether regulation in the past 30 years has diminished (RR) or exploded (see other reviews on this page). However, even academic research showing a growing number of pages in the US Code of Federal Regulations (e.g., Dawson, KYKLOS 2007 Feb. @15-36) isn't sufficient to negative RR's point about the shift in *who* is battling over what's printed on those pages today, compared to who did so during most of the 20th Century. RR also has some interesting observations on how antitrust laws are no longer discussed in the context of protecting small competitors, but rather of protecting consumer choice and investor return(e.g., @55n and 163.) Certainly the citizen side of me could identify with the feelings and trends RR describes.

But the last chapter, "A Citizen's Guide to Supercapitalism," was a let-down. Most of it is a list of reasons not to trust politicians or executives who make certain types of claims. E.g., instead of believing executives who say their companies are doing something to advance the "public good," we should remember that "Companies are not interested in the common good. It is not their responsibility to be good," @ 214. Fine, but this is a missed opportunity for some constructive action. Surely there's some benefit if activists and others help or encourage companies to find good stuff to do that also happens to be profitable - this is like low-hanging fruit. RR never makes such a suggestion.

The last section of the chapter is a surprising rant about corporate personhood. RR blasts the "legal fiction," as lawyers call it, that companies are persons. Instead, he claims they are aggregations of contracts between and among individuals. (This theory isn't original, having been described by, e.g., Frank Easterbrook in the 1990s, though RR doesn't cite any predecessors. Nor does he mention any of the less plausible idealizations implicit in this model, e.g. about rationality, utility maximization etc.)

RR draws many conclusions from the non-personhood of corporations, such as they shouldn't have to pay tax (which is shareholder money anyway) (@216ff) and should not have standing to sue (@222). This last notion seemed particularly half-baked. RR doesn't say that only individuals should be subject of regulation. So if corporations are regulated, why shouldn't they have standing to sue about those regulations at least? (Moreover, RR's literal assertion, "Noncitizens should have no right to [seek to overturn American laws and regulations] unless the law or regulations breach some international treaty," (id.) seems to imply that individual non-citizens also should not have standing to sue, e.g., to contest the Constitutionality of any law or regulation affecting their freedom or human rights.) It also seems rather quixotic to think that so many jurisdictions might purge this legal fiction from their laws and jurisprudence in one swoop (and BTW the personhood notion is even stronger in Europe than in the US). The more important issue, it seems to me, is not about personhood, but about balancing the rights of the entity (or of its aggregate of contracting shareholders, if we take RR's view) against the rights of individuals in other roles (as community, consumers, workers, etc.).

Corporate personhood is an old controversy in any event, whose history in the US is nicely summarized in a 2001 article by David Millon freely available on the Social Science Research Network. Millon's conclusion is that the underlying arguments are political ones about what should be the responsibilities of corporations, and that both pro- and anti-"person" points of view can be found on both sides of the political issue. Consequently, there's no need to drag this concept into policy arguments, even when RR's ideas are good ones (e.g., about making Americans more competitive, rather than American companies more competitive, @ 222). That someone of RR's accomplishments and intelligence can't do better than to conclude on such a wobbly and arcane point suggests, sad to say, just how difficult it may be to resolve the paradox he so thoughtfully describes.

A rather biased account, 17 Nov 2008
When I was a young man training as an accountant (after previously completing an engineering degree), I began to get interested in philosophical, political and religious ideas.

Particularly after completing my accountancy examination, I began reading books on politics, philosophy, Christian theology, comparative religion and so on.

Having come from a mainly mathematical and scientific background, I naively thought at first that one only had to read up on each political and religious 'system' e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and so on and Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism and then by subjecting them to rigorous logical analysis determine which one was the best. As anyone who has ever embarked on a study of these subjects soon realizes, however, many of the arguments involved are highly complex and some of the greatest minds that the human race has ever produced have held opposing positions.

As a sensitive and intelligent young man, I was revolted with some of the greed that I saw as an accountant and I was attracted to both Christianity and socialism (even though some branches of socialism can be anti-Christian). I read e.g. George Orwell's essays and novels and I remember reading novels such as 'Love on the Dole' and the 'Ragged Trousered Philanthropists'.

I was just completing my accountancy examinations around the time of the miners strike. I was always against Communism (as opposed to democratic socialism) and I have since read about the horrors of Stalinism. I was against Marxism because of its anti-religious stance at first.

As I began to read more about British history I began to realize that most Labour governments have always messed up the economy and the Brown government is no exception. I used to think that although most Labour governments had been useless that Attlee's government had been a good one but I have since read some economic arguments suggesting that even Attlee's government made huge mistakes that hindered our post war recovery.

I am broadminded enough to follow all aspects of an argument and we subscribe to a wide range of magazines and journals including the Economist, New Statesman, Prospect Magazine and the Spectator.

I would like to believe that there is a viable alternative to the dog eat dog world of capitalism. Unfortunatly, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that capitalism isn't anywhere near as bad as socialism. I have become attracted to Conservative thought in recent years and I also believe that many ideas propounded by socialists such as mass immigration and multiculturalism are misguided too. I think that Edmund Burke had some useful things to say about tradition and I don't like the way that the left always wish to denigrate everything British or Christian or both.

I found this book rather biased and some of the ideas about e.g. about Sweden's economy and welfare system no longer seem up to date with the reality on the ground.

The chips are down, 21 Oct 2007
An outstanding introduction and a meaty one too. Now that I've read three books in the "very short introduction" series, it has been a pleasant surprise to see how formidable these book are.

References, suggestions for further reading and a 9 page index are included.

Newman does not hide the problems that socialists have had but neither does he fail to recognize the ways in which they might help.

The analyses of Cuban communism and Swedish social democracy were illuminating. Socialism may not have dominated, but it has not always been the failure that it is made out to be.

Newman claims "What can be maintained with confidence is that capitalism will not be able to resolve the problems and injustices that it causes...and that socialist arguments remain relevant". He notes the challenge, beyond whatever problems socialists themselves have in running an economy, that "At present, Washington is opposed to any international regimes that might limit its autonomy and is willing to use its power to thwart their development."

Unlike the literature I've read of many socialist parties, which tend to be simplistic and shallow in analysis, Newman does manage in this "very short introduction" multi-dimensional explorations of the challenges facing socialism. He continues to value the role of trade unions, the greens and feminists. The socialist effort is fragmented and it is not clear in what ways it can be effective. Like many socialists, Newman's moral concerns seem clear but Newman's openness and flexibility seems all the more valuable at a time when many socialist groups seem dogmatic and rigid.

Newman's "very short introduction" seems one of the best statements on what Socialism today has to offer.

Useful overview, with interesting points raised, 21 May 2007
The book covers a useful analysis of the roots of socialism, and then chronicles how it diverged into communism on the one hand and more moderate social democratic parties on the other hand. To illustrate this, there is an interesting comparison between communists and social democrats in action, with a chapter dedicated to how Cuba and Sweden used the respective systems in their public policy, often allowing it to cross fertilise with cultural mores (especially true of Sweden), and a discussion of how the Cuban system may not survive Castro's death, being as it is largely based on Castro's personal charisma. By contrast, the Swedish system has much better prospects for long term survival, although it did struggle during the neo-liberal 1980s.

There is also an interesting look at how "green" policies have influenced recent socialist thinking, explaining how this was a significant challenge to traditional socialism and communism, both of which took unlimited growth and industrial activity for granted. By contrast, the greens argued that the emphasis should be on managed growth, and that if this growth threatened the planet, growth should be stopped. Interestingly the greens believed that this was simply an extension of the socialist belief that whilst traditional socialists should care for society's members now, they also had a duty to look after the planet and thus take care of society's future members.

The author also examines how socialism has fragmented, with increasing attention being paid to gender and ethnicity, and less to class amongst more recent writers, a considerable break with tradition. One refreshing feature of the book is the author's honesty, and far from being a partisan rant, the author freely admits that his/her ideology has its flaws and that amending them is not going to be easy. All in all, a good introduction to the semi-interested reader, but more interested readers in the subject of socialism may need to read a more "deep" text.

Dubai's success, 07 Sep 2008
A very comprehensive overview of the politics and economics of this new Mecca or Las Vegas of the Gulf. it is well worth a read and very interesting how little oil comes into this story compared to other GSS countries.

Finally... a book on Dubai for the inquisitive, 16 Jun 2008
This highly polished and painstakingly researched book is the first serious study of Dubai - one of the world's fastest growing and most headline-grabbing cities. There are eight chapters, beginning with a substantial historical background before turning to the present day development of the economy and the survival of the ruling family. Although respectful and dispassionate throughout, no punches are pulled and the book builds up to a strong climax with a discussion of security and terror threats. In some ways, the author himself is of equal interest as the book, with englishman Dr.Davidson considered to be as influential as a sheikh in some parts of this oil rich region.

Back down to Earth, 19 Jun 2008
Everytime someone shoves me in the frozen food aisle at Sainsbury's, or I see a picture Gordon Brown smiling, or another 200 or 2000 troops get sent to Iraq - I think, "Screw it! I'm just going to stop contributing to this intoxicating globalised society and just go be a farmer for the rest of my life!" Well, it turns out you're just as subject to the banal horrors of Corporatism in overalls as you are in a business suit. This is good to realise, and encourages me to be a different/better kind of consumer in real life, not just in my dream world. Thanks Raj.

Timely, wide-reaching and a real wake-up call, 22 Apr 2008
Excellent. A must read. Anyone who is interested in what they eat, where it comes from, and how it reaches us should read this book. And be very worried.

Another predictable Globalisation basher, 08 Mar 2008
Being written by a former World Bank employee, i thought this book would offer a balanced analysis of the global food productiion system. Sadly, this is just another self-righeous, ahistorical, and simplistic critique of Globalisation. Apart from rare informative moments (chapters on soya beans and supermarkets for example), its pages are filled with the struggles between the 'good', dignified small farmers and 'bad', greedy corporations. The basic contention is for us, 'the people' to 'take back' control of our food supply chains, as if citizens of any modern society in history ever had such power. The author rightly points out the high level of suicides among the farmers and blames it on rampant capitalism. However, he fails to mention that farming in America had been the most suicide-prone vocation since the records began. For those who think that they are saving the world by buying local carrots and who like to take Fair Trade sugar with their organic cappucinos, this book might be able to pacify guilty consciousness. However, if you are looking for an authoritative, fair assesment of complex issues surrounding food production, stay clear of this one.

Lifting the lid on your TV dinner, 18 Feb 2008
A sweeping and passionate exposition of the global food system, 'Stuffed and Starved' is a masterly work that underlines why what we eat is so fundamental to who we are.

Patel's book lucidly and comprehensively deconstructs the idea that our current system is the only way, and the supermarket the only viable purveyor, to put food on our tables. He tracks the global food industry from grower to exporter, retailer to consumer, highlighting the many points at which the system is unsustainable, desperately exploitative, and, ultimately, frighteningly vulnerable.

Whether Patel is writing about urban gardening in south central Los Angeles, soy plantations in South America or the tragic plight of rural farmers in India, his voice is one suffused with a deep and lyrical compassion. And it's this humanity - and his hope that, however unlikely, another way lies within our reach - that makes 'Stuffed and Starved' truly special.

The best thing I've read since Naomi Klein's 'No Logo', Stuffed and Starved will shock, fascinate, anger and inspire you.

Don't trust your food to capitalism, 22 Jan 2008
Superbly written, well researched, and ambitious in its scope, Stuffed and Starved is an eye-opening exploration of capitalism's logic when it comes to food.
The title comes from the striking fact that Patel takes as his starting point - that there are 800 million hungry people in the world, and a billion overweight people. He proceeds to unpack this fact in the rest of the book, touching on the rise of ubiquitous ingredients such as soy or corn syrup, supermarkets, genetic engineering, and the economics at work behind these developments. I found the sections on the supply chain particularly good.
Patel doesn't need to ram his points home or play the guilt card. He presents the facts and the need for change is evident. Those changes, he suggests, include eating locally, rediscovering food as a pleasure, breaking the power of supply monopolies, and ensuring a living wage for everyone along the chain of production.
As a writer based in South Africa who has worked for the World Bank, Raj Patel is well placed to speak to both sides of the development debate. He has done so compellingly, and I will keep an eye out for anything he writes in the future.

Provocative, insightful reflections on capitalism, 18 Feb 2008
Robert Reich, President Bill Clinton's secretary of labor and one of the most provocative public intellectuals in the U.S., unflinchingly explores the transformation of American democratic capitalism into a system of "supercapitalism," in which corporations and the market exercise apparently unbridled power. Reich considers and then discards most, if not all, of the standard leftist explanations for this development. Instead, in a logically coherent analysis, he arrives at some startling but convincing conclusions. For example, arguing that the government should never treat corporations like people, Reich advocates eliminating the corporate income tax. getAbstract recommends this book to anyone who wants to understand today's economics, politics or fiscal events. Although recent legislation attempts to address some of the issues Reich raises, such as the flow of corporate money into political campaigns, his analysis is still relevant.

Of Profits and Global Competition, 13 Nov 2007
Robert Reich provides little new information in this superficial look at how global competition emerged in the last 60 years and makes questionable recommendations for how to improve matters. Unless you feel compelled to read every book that Professor Reich writes, you can skip this one.

Unlike many commentators who praise or criticize business while ignoring society, Professor Reich attempts to reconcile the two. He is tougher on consumers than on business: Business is supposed to focus on making profits, and consumers who complain about business should realize that serving more interests could raise prices and cut customer benefits.

Where Professor Reich gets worried is when competition for government favor becomes part of beating your business rival, when success in business causes a widening of income and net worth within the society, and citizen's interests are ignored by the political process. He feels that all of those factors are a problem now and are likely to get worse in the future.

Professor Reich proposes very few solutions . . . and ones that aren't likely to be implemented. For income distribution, he wants to make the top rates in income higher (like in the 1950s), directly tax corporate shareholders on their share of corporate profits (to further boost the bite on the rich), and provide more of a social safety net for those who lose their jobs or have temporary problems. The political likelihood of those things happening is certainly quite low.

In the field of corporate governance, he wants corporations to lose the right to sue and lobby government. Instead of suing companies, you'll sue individuals . . . something he feels would improve behavior quite a lot. Now, can you imagine business wanting to do those things?

Wealth creation has probably never been more democratic in the United States. By studying the Forbes 400, we see that the great wealth is mostly new wealth, generated by entrepreneurs who mostly played by the rules. Education and access to capital to start up one's own business have never been more available.

It's inevitable that income and wealth distribution will widen in a global economy. Why? The best will get paid on a global rather than a national scale while the least effective will have to compete with more people who are already paid a lot less. When the Berlin Wall fell, this effect was inevitable.

I believe that having a non-responsive federal government is a problem, but that problem will probably have to be solved by the creation of a new political party (or conversion of an existing one) with a focus on representing the broad interests of citizens that corporations don't care about.

I also think Professor Reich doesn't appreciate the extent to which the federal government's power will continue to wane versus the power of the largest and most effective companies. Government is going the way of agriculture in terms of becoming less important, except where corruption makes it hard to do business.


Provocative thesis, but comes up short at the end (3.5 stars), 10 Nov 2007
Robert Reich (RR) has an interesting take on the development of capitalism in the last 40 years, particularly, though not exclusively, in the US. It's also one that might confound the expectations of critics who recall him as Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. Some passages of the book might warm Milton Friedman's heart, were it now warmable. But the book is very weak on proposed solutions.

A rough outline of RR's themes, slightly rearranged from their presentation in the book, is as follows:

@@ We (not just Americans, but most of the developed world) are caught in a paradox today of doing very well as consumers and investors, while feeling increasingly powerless as citizens. "As consumers and investors we want the great deals" that the current form of capitalism brings, while "[a]s citizens we don't like many of the social consequences that flow from them," @ 89. Moreover, we don't know how to act effectively on our feelings as citizens - and we often direct our frustration at the wrong targets (such as at individual companies).

@@ The situation was quite different prior to, roughly, the 1970s (Chapter 1). American industry was dominated by oligopolies, consumers had less choice, the Dow was a fraction of what it is now. Government intervened to control wages and prices, which made established players in industry more secure. (RR points out that as recently as 1994, over half of the Fortune 500 had been founded before 1930, @19.). Citizens belonged to a wider variety of local, regional and national unions and voluntary groups that were "countervailing forces" (in JK Galbraith's phrase) to industry. Government spent more of its time mediating between these countervailing interests.

@@ Today, much of the regulatory framework that was erected to balance these forces has been dismantled, and with it many of the "cross-subsidies" that protected small subgroups of workers and others (@68). While many people are doing better, some people are doing much worse, and inequality has grown since the 1970s (Chapter 3). Government now spends its time mainly mediating between the interests of different segments of industry and different industries. Fewer citizens belong to voluntary groups, and those can't really compete with industry for government's ear anyway. (Chapter 4)

@@ The cause of this shift isn't greed, ideology, or politics but technology. "The real explanation involves the way technologies have empowered consumers and investors to get better and better deals - and how these deals, in turn, have sucked relative equality and stability, as well as other social values, out of the system," @ 51. Container ships, overseas cables, satellites and the Internet all played a part. This also explains why similar shifts are occurring in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. (Chapter 2)

@@ We shouldn't blame companies for this shift, or for bloated CEO pay, or for their intense lobbying of government. They need to do what they're doing to stay competitive. For the same reasons, we shouldn't expect voluntary "corporate social responsibility" (CSR). Corporate responsibility is to shareholders, and while some companies' actions have good effects on others, they should be taking those actions only if they lead to increased corporate profits. If we as a society want to make companies act more responsibly to a larger range of "stakeholders," the way to do so is through government regulation. (Chapter 5)

Up to this point, I felt that RR had a provocative thesis, albeit that many of its parts had been put forward by others previously. (E.g., as to CSR, David Vogel's excellent "The Market for Virtue" (2006), which RR mentions often.) Some may argue about historical points, such as whether regulation in the past 30 years has diminished (RR) or exploded (see other reviews on this page). However, even academic research showing a growing number of pages in the US Code of Federal Regulations (e.g., Dawson, KYKLOS 2007 Feb. @15-36) isn't sufficient to negative RR's point about the shift in *who* is battling over what's printed on those pages today, compared to who did so during most of the 20th Century. RR also has some interesting observations on how antitrust laws are no longer discussed in the context of protecting small competitors, but rather of protecting consumer choice and investor return(e.g., @55n and 163.) Certainly the citizen side of me could identify with the feelings and trends RR describes.

But the last chapter, "A Citizen's Guide to Supercapitalism," was a let-down. Most of it is a list of reasons not to trust politicians or executives who make certain types of claims. E.g., instead of believing executives who say their companies are doing something to advance the "public good," we should remember that "Companies are not interested in the common good. It is not their responsibility to be good," @ 214. Fine, but this is a missed opportunity for some constructive action. Surely there's some benefit if activists and others help or encourage companies to find good stuff to do that also happens to be profitable - this is like low-hanging fruit. RR never makes such a suggestion.

The last section of the chapter is a surprising rant about corporate personhood. RR blasts the "legal fiction," as lawyers call it, that companies are persons. Instead, he claims they are aggregations of contracts between and among individuals. (This theory isn't original, having been described by, e.g., Frank Easterbrook in the 1990s, though RR doesn't cite any predecessors. Nor does he mention any of the less plausible idealizations implicit in this model, e.g. about rationality, utility maximization etc.)

RR draws many conclusions from the non-personhood of corporations, such as they shouldn't have to pay tax (which is shareholder money anyway) (@216ff) and should not have standing to sue (@222). This last notion seemed particularly half-baked. RR doesn't say that only individuals should be subject of regulation. So if corporations are regulated, why shouldn't they have standing to sue about those regulations at least? (Moreover, RR's literal assertion, "Noncitizens should have no right to [seek to overturn American laws and regulations] unless the law or regulations breach some international treaty," (id.) seems to imply that individual non-citizens also should not have standing to sue, e.g., to contest the Constitutionality of any law or regulation affecting their freedom or human rights.) It also seems rather quixotic to think that so many jurisdictions might purge this legal fiction from their laws and jurisprudence in one swoop (and BTW the personhood notion is even stronger in Europe than in the US). The more important issue, it seems to me, is not about personhood, but about balancing the rights of the entity (or of its aggregate of contracting shareholders, if we take RR's view) against the rights of individuals in other roles (as community, consumers, workers, etc.).

Corporate personhood is an old controversy in any event, whose history in the US is nicely summarized in a 2001 article by David Millon freely available on the Social Science Research Network. Millon's conclusion is that the underlying arguments are political ones about what should be the responsibilities of corporations, and that both pro- and anti-"person" points of view can be found on both sides of the political issue. Consequently, there's no need to drag this concept into policy arguments, even when RR's ideas are good ones (e.g., about making Americans more competitive, rather than American companies more competitive, @ 222). That someone of RR's accomplishments and intelligence can't do better than to conclude on such a wobbly and arcane point suggests, sad to say, just how difficult it may be to resolve the paradox he so thoughtfully describes.

A rather biased account, 17 Nov 2008
When I was a young man training as an accountant (after previously completing an engineering degree), I began to get interested in philosophical, political and religious ideas.

Particularly after completing my accountancy examination, I began reading books on politics, philosophy, Christian theology, comparative religion and so on.

Having come from a mainly mathematical and scientific background, I naively thought at first that one only had to read up on each political and religious 'system' e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and so on and Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism and then by subjecting them to rigorous logical analysis determine which one was the best. As anyone who has ever embarked on a study of these subjects soon realizes, however, many of the arguments involved are highly complex and some of the greatest minds that the human race has ever produced have held opposing positions.

As a sensitive and intelligent young man, I was revolted with some of the greed that I saw as an accountant and I was attracted to both Christianity and socialism (even though some branches of socialism can be anti-Christian). I read e.g. George Orwell's essays and novels and I remember reading novels such as 'Love on the Dole' and the 'Ragged Trousered Philanthropists'.

I was just completing my accountancy examinations around the time of the miners strike. I was always against Communism (as opposed to democratic socialism) and I have since read about the horrors of Stalinism. I was against Marxism because of its anti-religious stance at first.

As I began to read more about British history I began to realize that most Labour governments have always messed up the economy and the Brown government is no exception. I used to think that although most Labour governments had been useless that Attlee's government had been a good one but I have since read some economic arguments suggesting that even Attlee's government made huge mistakes that hindered our post war recovery.

I am broadminded enough to follow all aspects of an argument and we subscribe to a wide range of magazines and journals including the Economist, New Statesman, Prospect Magazine and the Spectator.

I would like to believe that there is a viable alternative to the dog eat dog world of capitalism. Unfortunatly, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that capitalism isn't anywhere near as bad as socialism. I have become attracted to Conservative thought in recent years and I also believe that many ideas propounded by socialists such as mass immigration and multiculturalism are misguided too. I think that Edmund Burke had some useful things to say about tradition and I don't like the way that the left always wish to denigrate everything British or Christian or both.

I found this book rather biased and some of the ideas about e.g. about Sweden's economy and welfare system no longer seem up to date with the reality on the ground.

The chips are down, 21 Oct 2007
An outstanding introduction and a meaty one too. Now that I've read three books in the "very short introduction" series, it has been a pleasant surprise to see how formidable these book are.

References, suggestions for further reading and a 9 page index are included.

Newman does not hide the problems that socialists have had but neither does he fail to recognize the ways in which they might help.

The analyses of Cuban communism and Swedish social democracy were illuminating. Socialism may not have dominated, but it has not always been the failure that it is made out to be.

Newman claims "What can be maintained with confidence is that capitalism will not be able to resolve the problems and injustices that it causes...and that socialist arguments remain relevant". He notes the challenge, beyond whatever problems socialists themselves have in running an economy, that "At present, Washington is opposed to any international regimes that might limit its autonomy and is willing to use its power to thwart their development."

Unlike the literature I've read of many socialist parties, which tend to be simplistic and shallow in analysis, Newman does manage in this "very short introduction" multi-dimensional explorations of the challenges facing socialism. He continues to value the role of trade unions, the greens and feminists. The socialist effort is fragmented and it is not clear in what ways it can be effective. Like many socialists, Newman's moral concerns seem clear but Newman's openness and flexibility seems all the more valuable at a time when many socialist groups seem dogmatic and rigid.

Newman's "very short introduction" seems one of the best statements on what Socialism today has to offer.

Useful overview, with interesting points raised, 21 May 2007
The book covers a useful analysis of the roots of socialism, and then chronicles how it diverged into communism on the one hand and more moderate social democratic parties on the other hand. To illustrate this, there is an interesting comparison between communists and social democrats in action, with a chapter dedicated to how Cuba and Sweden used the respective systems in their public policy, often allowing it to cross fertilise with cultural mores (especially true of Sweden), and a discussion of how the Cuban system may not survive Castro's death, being as it is largely based on Castro's personal charisma. By contrast, the Swedish system has much better prospects for long term survival, although it did struggle during the neo-liberal 1980s.

There is also an interesting look at how "green" policies have influenced recent socialist thinking, explaining how this was a significant challenge to traditional socialism and communism, both of which took unlimited growth and industrial activity for granted. By contrast, the greens argued that the emphasis should be on managed growth, and that if this growth threatened the planet, growth should be stopped. Interestingly the greens believed that this was simply an extension of the socialist belief that whilst traditional socialists should care for society's members now, they also had a duty to look after the planet and thus take care of society's future members.

The author also examines how socialism has fragmented, with increasing attention being paid to gender and ethnicity, and less to class amongst more recent writers, a considerable break with tradition. One refreshing feature of the book is the author's honesty, and far from being a partisan rant, the author freely admits that his/her ideology has its flaws and that amending them is not going to be easy. All in all, a good introduction to the semi-interested reader, but more interested readers in the subject of socialism may need to read a more "deep" text.

Dubai's success, 07 Sep 2008
A very comprehensive overview of the politics and economics of this new Mecca or Las Vegas of the Gulf. it is well worth a read and very interesting how little oil comes into this story compared to other GSS countries.

Finally... a book on Dubai for the inquisitive, 16 Jun 2008
This highly polished and painstakingly researched book is the first serious study of Dubai - one of the world's fastest growing and most headline-grabbing cities. There are eight chapters, beginning with a substantial historical background before turning to the present day development of the economy and the survival of the ruling family. Although respectful and dispassionate throughout, no punches are pulled and the book builds up to a strong climax with a discussion of security and terror threats. In some ways, the author himself is of equal interest as the book, with englishman Dr.Davidson considered to be as influential as a sheikh in some parts of this oil rich region.

Spot on the money, but a bit hazy on economics..., 07 Jul 2008
Ann Pettifor's background appears to be in church groups campaigning for debt cancellation. Her take on debt, in particular third world debt, is primarily a moral one. This is right, as the question only has importance as it is a moral issue. She is also being proven right that, despite what the mainstream news will tell you, the debt crises are gradaully coming closer to the "first world" nations, and will inevitably occur there just as they have done everywhere else.

That said, her understanding of economics and history is a little shaky. In some cases this is only a minor problem, like saying Thatcher was PM in 1978, or the UK lost the Boer War. However, her account of Keynes is a bit mangled, and although she pitches for a moral Guardian-reader audience, her economic understanding probably owes more to writers like Michael Rowbotham. Moreover, although she is justifiably outraged at the dehumanising effects of massive debts, her strident moral tone sometimes reads as if she believes that the banks are run by sadists suicidally bent on causing mayhem for the sheer hell of it. Her attempts at a historical analysis of the development of the modern economy doesn't take into account the fact that economic pressures force people, even those in high places, to act the way they do or else to face bankruptcy themselves.

That said, this is a very timely book, and I'm not sure what other book on this topic is available just now.

highly recommended, 24 Sep 2007
This book analyses the nature, the historical context and the potentially horrific consequences of the enormous levels of debt that have grown in the so-called First World countries during recent times. Ann Pettifor shows us clearly the unsustainable structure and dynamics of our global debt-based financial systems, how Third World countries are already enslaved by irredeemable debt and how, unless we act swiftly and decisively, we will be next. She adopts an ethical stance and contrasts and compares the accepted and now orthodox laxity towards money creation and lending practices with the more controlled and conservative traditions of Islam and earlier Christianity. Towards the end of the book she outlines a five-step programme of action through which we can alleviate and manage the coming crisis by radically changing our beliefs, morals, politics, economics and personal behaviour.

Sometime within the next few years at most it is mathematically certain that there must be fundamental change of one sort or another to the current runaway global debt-laden financial system. Ann Pettifor's book alerts us to this fast approaching massive global dislocation and shows us how we might turn it into a change for the betterment and spiritual uplift of humanity rather than allow a world of misery dominated by universal debt-slavery to engulf us. Her message is that we need not be passive victims of the coming crisis and that radical change is both essential and possible. She shows that we all need urgently first to understand the nature and causes of our predicament, and then to influence and encourage those presently in power to undertake the necessary changes. Her tone is compassionate and hopeful, the issues and arguments are presented in clear and jargon-free language and I thoroughly recommend this book.


Get your head around our strangely designed global financial system..., 25 Feb 2007
If you've ever looked at headlines in the newspapers about the enormous profits of banks, hedge funds and private equity companies and wondered 'just how do they do this' and 'is it really sustainable'?, then this is the book for you.

Ann Pettifor takes the reader lucidly through the complexities of global financial developments since the 1950s, laying out in clear but passionate terms the great challenge facing modern economies and societies today: how to reform capitalism so that it puts productive activity and investment over the 'making of money from money'.

A truly enlightening read, illustrated with a host of powerful case studies and quotes from the world's great thinkers and economists, past and present, which gives hope that a better world is possible.

The book covers vast ground in a concise 180 pages and the chapters on the nature of money lending and how the deregulation of global capital, driven by US political interests, have led to the erosion of public and democratic control of money supply and the setting of interest rates are particularly important for anyone wishing to understand the strange world that we liv