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Articles from New York Review of Books
The Mystery of Growth
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, March 13, 2003
The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth
by Liah Greenfeld
Harvard University Press, 541 pp., $45.00
Lectures on Economic Growth
by Robert E. Lucas Jr.
Harvard University Press, 204 pp., $49.95
1.
The question of what causes economies to grow is theoretically interesting and practically important. If we could discover the secrets of economic growth—what causes income per person to increase over time—we might be able to make growth happen at will, abolishing poverty and creating a world of universal abundance.
Until about three hundred years ago, periods of economic growth had always been reversed, leaving long-term income levels unchanged: the standard of living of a European agricultural worker in the sixteenth
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What Makes the World Go Round?
New York Review of Books
Robert Skidelsky
| Thursday, August 09, 2001
The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000
by Niall Ferguson
Basic Books, 552 pp., $30.00
1.
In 1987 the historian Paul Kennedy published a controversial book called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. Its message was that the United States was suffering from imperial "overstretch." Its economy was no longer large or dynamic enough to support its strategic commitments. It had to accept a lesser role in a "multipolar" world. This message was embedded in a grand historical-geopolitical narrative. Kennedy discerned a long-run correlation between economic and military power. This gave rise to a historic pattern of "rise and fall," in which successive dominant
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The World on a String
New York Review of Books
Robert Skidelsky
| Thursday, March 08, 2001
Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism
by George Soros
Public Affairs, 365 pp., $26.00
George Soros is the best-known financial speculator of our time, godfather of hedge funds, those fast-moving and largely unregulated raiders in the corporate jungle that make their killings from fluctuations in the prices of stocks, commodities, currencies. When he writes books readers might reasonably expect tips on how to make money. They will be disappointed. Soros's ambitions are altogether more exalted. Having become a billionaire, he has set himself up as the philosopher and statesman of global capitalism, tirelessly telling the world that it now needs to remove the ladder by which he himself climbed to fame and fortune. On January 2 he
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What’s Left of Marx?
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, November 16, 2000
Karl Marx: A Life
by Francis Wheen
Norton, 431 pp., $27.95
1.
When Karl Marx was twenty-four, a contemporary wrote of him: "Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person…and you have Dr. Marx." Marx was not one of those brilliant young men who fail to live up to their promise. He produced the most powerful, coherent, and influential secular system of ideas ever devised to explain man's past, analyze his present, and predict his future.
What he "fused" together was a dialectical theory of historical stages, a materialist theory of history (in which the struggle of classes replaces Hegel's struggle of ideas in humanity's ascent), an economic and moral critique of capitalist civilization (embodied
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All in the Family
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, May 25, 2000
Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia
by James Fox
Simon and Schuster, 496 pp., $30.00
1.
In the early 1980s, the English writer James Fox was shown a large trunk at his grandfather's house in Northamptonshire covered in Cunard and White Star steamship stickers. On inspection it turned out to contain thousands of letters between the Langhorne sisters, as well as other correspondence, carefully collected and preserved by his grandfather, Robert Brand, who had married one of them. It was a collection, Fox writes, made possible by two or three posts a day and the convention of returning letters to their senders "in time of grief." That first encounter with the trunk has led to his absorbing chronicle of a Virginian family which
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