Dani Rodrik's weblog

A tale of two books

It’s been a strangely prolific week publishing-wise. Literally within a few days of each other, I held in my hands two new books with my name on it.

As you might gather from their cover, they couldn’t be more different.

The first is a book that lays out my ideas on globalization and its future, in what I hope is an accessible form. It took a long time to write, and an even longer time to develop. It won’t be available in the bookstores until February.

The second, written with my wife Pinar Dogan, is in Turkish and covers the most important political trial in Turkey in at least five decades, which has just opened. It is based on our blog on the topic, and was written within weeks. Amazingly, the publisher had it in bookstores within 10 days of receiving the final manuscript. (Not to be outdone, Norton, my American publisher, tells me that if necessary they can get a book from finished manuscript to bookstores in 6 days!)

The Globalization Paradox is a book on economic policy and on economic ideas. It is, in a sense, my life’s work.

Balyoz is a legal and political exposé. It details a brazen effort to frame nearly 200 officers for crimes they have not committed. It documents the roles that groups within the judiciary, police, media, intelligentsia, the national science and technological institute, and (last but not least), the AKP government have played in creating what can best be called an “alternative reality.” (Balyoz means “sledgehammer” in Turkish; it refers to the code name of the fictional coup plot on which the book is based.) This is a book I never thought I would (have to) write.

Both books aim to inject a dose of common sense and reality – the first to our narrative on globalization, the second to Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian politics.

Summer report

This has been a summer of e-reading for me.  A combination of being away from Cambridge with too few books alongside, receiving the Amazon Kindle as a birthday present from my wife, and the upgrading of iPhone software has meant that I have spent far too many hours reading electronic books--first on the iPhone and then on the Kindle. 

The experience was surprisingly positive.  OK, the iPhone has a great screen, but it was still a surprise to find out that it can be a good medium for reading for hours on end.  I use eReader, which makes it easy to download books and has a simple interface. The limitation is that there are far too few books for download.  The non-fiction collection is especially poor, unless you are looking for older books with expired copyrights.

The Kindle of course gives you access to a much larger collection of books, and has the great virtue that you can download books directly onto the device (in the U.S.), and do so within a few seconds.  You can browse the Amazon bookstore on the Kindle, and download whatever grabs your interest right there and then.  This instant gratification is quite unlike any other shopping experience. With one-click shopping, it can also be quite expensive.  I am carrying many many more books on the device than I can possibly read.  I think Jeff Bezos somehow knew this...

But the ergonomics of the Kindle are a disaster. It is awkward to hold, with or without the case, and it is virtually impossible to use without pressing on the wrong buttons.  The screen also took a while to adjust to.  Not being backlit, it is obviously not as bright as the iPhone, but it doesn't quite feel natural either. And tables and figures are virtually illegible on the Kindle, as they cannot be enlarged (unlike the text size). 

So what did I read?  The book I enjoyed the most was Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O'Neill, even though I know even less about cricket than I do about baseball.  I also liked Martin Amis' House of Meetings, which is a couple of years old.  I had sort of given up on Amis after finding his other recent stuff close to being unreadable, but this one is really good.  My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare by Jess Winfield was also a lot of fun.  Being restricted to the fiction available on eReader (before I received my Kindle) meant that I also read (or re-read) some old favorites from John Le Carre and Martin Cruz Smith.

Orhan Pamuk's latest novel came out the day before I flew back to the States. Alas, it is not available electronically (nor has it come out in English as far as I know), so I had to lug it along with me.  And it is a big, thick book--the longest to date among his novels.  But I don't know what it is with his novels.  I just cannot finish them. I really enjoy reading the first half or so, but then I feel like I am being led in circles, over and over again. At some point, I give up and stop reading. This one was no different. It is probably more a reflection on me than anything else... (His book of memoirs on Istanbul, by contrast, was quite different: I read it in its entirety virtually in one sitting.)

On the non-fiction side, this summer's reading included a good doze of common sense (some written really well, some less well, some oversold, and some written too hastily), along with some of the scariest, preachiest, and cheekiest stuff I have read in a while. And now it's on to the catchiest...

Ian McEwan the game theorist

Ian McEwan is one of my favorite novelists, and when I picked up a copy of his Enduring Love in Heathrow on a recent transatlantic flight, I thought at first it was a new book. It turns out that it was published in 1997, with a film version in 2004. It is a beautiful book. I don't know if McEwan knows much about or is into game theory, but the book's first chapter is as vivid and enthralling a description of multi-player positive-sum games as you will ever encounter.

The setting is a picnic which the author and his girlfriend are about to enjoy, when the two of them witness a freak accident.  It is a windy day and a hot-air balloon has gone out of control. The pilot has lost his footing and is being dragged along by the moving balloon, which contains a 10-year old boy in its basket.  The author and four other bystanders are nearby, and they all run towards the balloon to help stabilize the balloon and save the child.  The trouble is that by this time the balloon has moved close to the edge of a slope. If they cannot bring the balloon to ground, it will be all that difficult to hold on to it.

Ian McEwan describes with great precision a sequence of two games. The first is a coordination game. When the five strangers reach the balloon, which is edging dangerously towards the slope, they need to quickly decide what to do. They can try to reach inside the balloon to get the child out. They can try to pull the balloon down and anchor it. They can push it away from the slope. But in the panic of the moment, there is no time to settle on any one of the strategies and confusion reigns. The pilot is screaming instructions, but no-one can make out what he is saying. "There may have been a vague commonality of purpose, but we were never a team...  No one was in charge -- or everyone was... Any leader, any firm plan would have been preferable to none"  McEwan's character recalls.  

Before the group is able to bring the balloon firmly to ground and fetch the child out, (mother) nature makes its move. A sudden gust of wind lifts the balloon up in the air and knocks down one of the rescuers (the heaviest among them). Now there is four of them hanging on to the ropes of the balloon, which is a few feet up in the air and moving in the direction of the slope.  If they all hold on, there is a good chance they will be able to bring the balloon down when the wind subsides. But each of the strangers realizes that the ground beneath them is receding the longer they hang on to the rope. "Every fraction of a second that passed increased the drop, and the point must come when to let go would be impossible of fatal....  I didn't know, nor have I ever discovered, who let go first. I'm not prepared to accept that it was me." It is a classic prisoner's dilemma. Except that one of the rescuers does hang on. Without the weight of the others, the balloon keeps rising, and the man eventually has to release his grip and falls to his death.

You have to read the book (or at least the first chapter) to fully appreciate McEwan's masterful portrayal of the strategic and ethical issues raised by these coordination and prisoner's dilemma games. The film version compresses the sequence of events, so does not do full justice to it (when did a movie ever do justice to a good book?).  You can watch a clip of the balloon sequence at YouTube (unless that is you are in Turkey, where you cannot access YouTube (unless that is you have an iPhone and a wireless connection)).  Search under "Amor perdurable."

PS. Gametheory.net has a description of the prisoner's dilemma scene, but not of the coordination game.

A weekend book recommendation

Something different for a change. It's called "Sacred Games," it's authored by Vikram Chandra, and it is the most engaging novel I have read in a while. It is set in Mumbai, and revolves around a police inspector and his nemesis, a famed gangster.  At 900-plus pages, it is a cross between Thomas Mann and John Le Carre, if you can imagine such a thing.

Here is Sartaj, the inspector, closing in on Gaitonde, the gangster. (I am not spoiling anything: this happens at the very beginning of the book.)

'You're never going to get in here,' the voice of Gaitonde said over the speaker after they had been working on the door for three hours. They had tried a cold chisel on the lock first, but what had looked like brown wood from a few feet away was in fact some kind of painted metal, and although it turned white under the blade and rang like a sharp temple bell, the door didn't give. Then they had moved to the lintels with tools borrowed from a road crew, but even when the road men took over, wielding the sledgehammers with long, expert swings and huffing breaths, the concrete bounced their blows off blithely, and the Sony speaker next to the door laughed at them. 'You are behind the times,' Gaitonde crackled.

'I'm not getting in, you're not getting out,' Sartaj said.

'What? I can't hear you.'

Sartaj stepped up to the door. The building was precise cube, white with green windows, on a large plot of land in Kailashpada, which was on the still-developing northern edge of Zone 13. Here, among the heavy machinery groping at swamp, edging Bombay out farther and wider, Sartaj had come to arrest the great Ganesh Gaitonde, gangster, boss of the G-company and wily and eternal survivor.

'How long are you going to stay in there, Gaitonde?' Sartaj said, craning his neck up. The deep, round video eye of the camera above the door swivelled from side to side and then settled on him.

'You're looking tired, Sardar-ji,' Gaitonde said.

'I am tired,' Sartaj said.

'It's very hot today,' Gaitonde said sympathetically. 'I don't know how you sardars manage under those turbans.'

There were two Sikh commissioners on the force, but Sartaj was the only Sikh inspector in the whole city, and so was used to being identified by his turban and beard. He was known also for the cut of his pants, which he had tailored at a very film-starry boutique in Bandra, and also for his profile, which had once been featured by Modern Woman magazine in 'The City's Best-Looking Bachelors'. Katekar, on the other hand, had a large paunch that sat on top of his belt like a suitcase, and a perfectly square face and very thick hands, and now he came around the corner of the building and stood wide-legged, with his hands in his pockets. He shook his head.

'Where are you going, Sardar-ji?' Gaitonde said.

'Just some matters I have to take care of,' Sartaj said. He and Katekar walked to the corner together, and now Sartaj could see the ladder they had going up to the ventilator.

'That's not a ventilator,' Katekar said. 'It only looks like one. There's just concrete behind it. All the windows are like that. What is this place, sir?'

'I don't know,' Sartaj said. It was somehow deeply satisfying that even Katekar, Mumbai native and practitioner of a very superior Bhuleswar-bred cynicism, was startled by an impregnable white cube suddenly grown in Kailashpada, with a black, swivel-mounted Sony video camera above the door. 'I don't know. And he sounds very strange, you know. Sad almost.'

'What I have heard about him, he enjoys life. Good food, lots of women.'

'Today he's sad.'

'But what's he doing here in Kailashpada?'

Sartaj shrugged. The Gaitonde they had read about in police reports and in the newspapers dallied with bejewelled starlets, bankrolled politicians and bought them and sold them -- his daily skim from Bombay's various criminal dhandas was said to be greater than annual corporate incomes, and his name was used to frighten the recalcitrant. Gaitonde Bhai said so, you said, and the stubborn saw reason, and all roads were smoothed, and there was peace.

But he had been in exile for many years -- on the Indonesian coast in a gilded yacht, it was rumoured -- far but only a phone call away. Which meant that he might as well have been next door, or as it turned out, amazingly enough, industry Kailashpada. The early-morning man with the tip-off had hung up abruptly, and Sartaj had jumped out of bed and called the station while pulling on his pants, and the police party had come roaring to Kailashpada in a  hasty caravan bristling with rifles. 'I don't know,' Sartaj said. 'But now that he's here, he's ours.'

(Excerpt courtesy of here.)

And now for something completely different ...

Well, to atone for the super-geeky nature of the previous post, here is something that has nothing to do with economics.

I just finished reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a splendid little book by Mohsin Hamid. It is about a young Pakistani, a Princeton graduate, who works as an investment analyst in New York. After September 11, he discovers that neither he nor America is what he thought they were.  It is a great book for all of us expats in America who went through a renewed culture shock in the aftermath of that momentous event.

And did I say the book had nothing to do with economics? The "Fundamentalist" in the title is actually a play on words. The narrator's job consists of evaluating companies based on their fundamentals.

Leamer on Tom Friedman

Ed Leamer has a highly entertaining review--too funny really to have been published in an mainline economic journal--of Tom Friedman's best-seller The World is Flat in the March issue of the Journal of Economic Literature. Among other nuggets, this:

We economists do linguistic disservice whe we call a relationship-free, frictionless outcome "perfectly competitive." ... Frictions are our friends. Frictions give us the peace of mind that we will still have our jobs when we wake up tomorrow. Frictions reduce the chances that one party will try to "hold-up" the other, absconding with the lion's share of the mutual benefits. Frictions thus give us the confidence to make relationship-specific investments from which great returns can flow. It's the friction that we call "falling in love" that allows the human species to flourish.

Great stuff! But don't try writing like this before you get tenure...