David McWilliams. The History of Money: A Story of Humanity.

    I checked out this book from the dying breed of public libraries thinking that a former central banker must be competent in the monetary issues. When I already checked it out I noticed that the endorsements on the back cover were from the "wonderful trio" of neocons: Nyall Ferguson, Peter Frankopan and that FOE (Friend of Epstein) Steven Pinker. Furthermore, McWilliams' mother country, Ireland, like Switzerland as this author already noticed is a preserve of intellectual fashions of yesteryear.

   My general opinion of the book by David McWilliams can be summarized by my favorite quotation from the "Pulp Fiction": "I like it, but it ain't true." The book is an easy and entertaining reading. 

    But despite the author's best intentions, the book suffers from typical pangs of neocon discourse: Europocentric outlook, simplistic explanations of complex phenomena, sloppy research and outright fabrications. It begins with supposed "quotation" of Vladimir Lenin's interview to the British Daily Telegraph. There was no such interview, furthermore the authors of the reference in the Journal of Economic Prospectives, from which McWilliams took this text suggest that, probably, this quotation was invented by the émigré Russian anti-Bolshevist forces. [1] 

     Population of the world in year 1 CE was much larger than 100 million cited in the book. Only well surveyed population of the Han Empire was about 60 million, the Roman Empire by the uncertain but credible estimates was between 45 and 70 million, and there existed two rather numerous polities: in the Near and Middle East (Empire of Seleucids in different incarnations, e.g., Antioch, Parthia and others) and the Indian subcontinent. There were also several less populated areas such as Africa, Northern Eurasia, Americas, Indochina and South Pacific. All in all, it is hard to justify the figures much lower than 220 million. 

    City-state of Florence was not the inventor of a gold coin. Introduction of the Florentine florin, as well as Roman scudo, as well as Venetian ducat was an imitation of the Byzantine solidus, which was used in Europe throughout all the Middle Ages. 

        The most puzzling though, is author's oversights in the field of banking. For instance, he writes: "When you go to the bank and ask for a loan for a car, the bank creates the money out of nothing, and puts it into your account. The new money didn't exist yesterday; today it does. It has been created not by the central bank, but by a commercial bank (p. 331)." It happens only in countries with insufficient bank supervision both by regulators and the buy-side investment analysts of the private banks. In reality, this fiction can exist only till the next corporate report is due. Since the invention/adoption of double entry accounting in Europe around twelfth century, a commercial bank must create an asset (claim on the car, house, etc.) on the other side of a ledger.[2]  

    Despite McWilliams' many statements, with which I tend to sympathize, his playing fast and loose with the facts and theories -- also a hallmark of neocon literature -- my opinion on his book is strongly guarded. 

[1]  Lenin, indeed provided an interview, about that time but not to the Daily Telegraph but to Manchester Guardian. In it he talked mostly about the independence of Finland and Estonia. Lenin could have been a bloodthirsty maniac, but he was also a genius of manipulation. His interviews to non-Communist media were usually well reasoned. Certainly, Russian political émigrés of that time were much smarter than their current crop, and the text cited by McWilliams imitates the contemporary style of Bolshevik theorists Y. Larin and N. Bukharin very well. Lenin was extremely sceptic of them both, and G. Pyatakov, the author of the First Five Year Plan openly ridiculed monetary nihilism in one of the Party Conferences when Lenin was still alive. 

[2] Directors of the defunct Credit Swiss learned this at their peril. When the bank went into trouble, its managers decided to confiscate, Nazi-style, the assets of Russians as being the "bad people". However, these assets were liabilities for the Credit Swiss. So, to keep their balance sheet in order they had either to write down on paper some of the assets of their own, i.e. declare to the world that some of their loans were uncollectable -- because the outsiders cannot distinguish between truly toxic assets or accounting reappraisal -- or to increase equity, i.e. go through a bailout. Bailout by the IBS finally happened and the Credit Swiss ceased to exist. 

David Holloway. Nuclear Weapons. An International History.

     When David Holloway's "Stalin and the Bomb" appeared in early 90s, it was nothing but revolutionary. Despite limited information at the time, from the studies of the Soviet war plans, he basically concluded that the post-war occupation of Eastern Europe and communization of its politics was, to a large extent, a realpolitik answer to the US nuclear dominance rather than ideological construct. Soviet leaders simply wanted to extend strategic depth to the degree when any nuclear attack on the USSR would mean the end of the European civilization, the price Truman and Eisenhower were not willing to pay. Stalin and the Bomb was mostly positively reviewed though there were some neocons criticizing him for his portrayal of Soviet leaders as rational political actors. 

     Current US media and academic orthodoxy requiring depiction of the Russians as bumbling idiots or cartoon villains and the Americans as knights in shining armor did not spare a researcher even with the stature of Holloway. Any realistic description of Israeli policies is forsworn. Every chapter must end with a moral lesson showing the inherent superiority of the West. 

        Consequently, US and UK policy debates and actions showing contemporary contradictions and missteps are almost absent from his 600 pp. book. Israel, whose nuclear policy was strenuously opposed by all US administrations before Nixon, is given only three short pages. Other nuclear states fare better but only slightly. China, for instance, is discussed only in the context of worsening Sino-Soviet relations with perfunctory place given to the US concerns about Chinese (and others) nuclear weapons.

    In fact, during the Cold War, there were a lot of similarities between US and USSR concerning nuclear policies. Both great powers had coincident interests during the Suez crisis in 1956. They, and two other European nuclear powers, Britain and France, were sharply opposed to West Germany acquiring nuclear weapons. Both detested idea of a separate NATO nuclear deterrent, as well as, by the way, any neutral and Eastern Bloc countries developing nuclear weapons of their own (Sweden, Romania and Czechoslovakia had their own credible nuclear programs). After some vacillations, US policy makers basically accepted Soviet view on the need to keep nuclear weapons in a separate category from all others. Their views on China, India and Pakistan's nuclear programs were more nuanced but mostly compatible. 

         Hysterical anti-Russian bias, now universal in Western media (an old example), required Holloway to turn to the sources, such as the memoirs of Soviet defectors and dissidents who had likely to adapt to the Western publishing milieu (or their handlers) and must be treated with caution. Out of five endorsements on the cover of his book, two belong to Ukrainian nationalists (attempts of post-Soviet Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons is a big story in itself). Saying all that, Holloway is incomparable to other US political scientists in his observational probity, technical competence, and when prevailing ideology and unimpeachable cult of Reagan and Thatcher (and Dulles, though nobody remembers him now) does not cloud his judgement, his book provides a broad prospective of nuclear issues. 

Michael Grunwald. We are eating the Earth.

 Book of more constructive proposals than Clapp's "The Waste War" and, consequently less readable. The thrust of a book is to turn attention of environmentalist community to the destructive effects of modern agriculture. Agriculture produces more greenhouse gases than aviation and marine freight combined, or so he says. Furthermore, agriculture makes enormous amounts of organic wastes, polluting water by runways, destroys the landscapes and influences quality of life in a myriad other ways. Grunwald uncovers fake ways to reduce greenhouse emissions on paper, such as Scandinavians burning "biomass" considered emissions neutral but in reality using wood pellets as fuel -- dirty, uneconomical process contributing to destruction of the environment in poorer countries. But his suggestions for mitigating agriculture's footprint other than employing the most productive methods in the poorer countries to mechanically reduce area used for cultivation and the promotion of swamps/wasteland are bordering on fantastic. These are drastic reductions in beef consumption -- in fact, a large fraction of world cows does not go into meat in India -- and synthetic meats. 

Des Fitzgerald. Living city: why cities don't need to be green.

    Ireland as is Switzerland is a veritable preserve of the views, which are considered antediluvian by the standards of developed world. For instance, in the early 1900, in Europe there was a vogue to rank "races" according to intelligence, etc. Of course, Brits and Germans were on top, French and Italians -- in the middle, but the Irish and Finns -- Europeans which were "unable" to create their nation-states at the very bottom. Jews were considered incapable of education, Japanese were inherently lazy, and so on. 

    Currently, such bullshit can still be published in Ireland, or in Switzerland as "science", only instead of Irish and Finns, they are being replaced by the Russians and Belo-Russians. Similarly, Fitzgerald considers the main criteria of quality of the cities the approval of some self-styled "philosophers" and snobbish architects for the very wealthy. Livability of the city, for instance, planning for convenience of commuting to work, existence of public parks or optimization of infrastructure, he variably, and sometimes anachronistically calls "fascist": such as P. C. L'Enfant, the architect of Washington, or Baron Hausmann, the creator of XIX century Paris, or even "communist". I would not call his outlook "reactionary", just bizarre. 

Karen G. Lloyd. Intraterrestrials: discovering the strangest life on Earth.

     Karen Lloyd wrote a brilliant book about the microbial life forms on Earth, so strange that no science fiction author could seemingly invent anything like that. The book is hard reading. This is an example: "Indeed, we find that at increasing depths in marine sediments, microbes make enzymes with a higher specificity that are available in the subsurface, suggesting that they are specially adapted for this environment". Or "the researchers also found genes suggesting that they might have passed hydrogen back and forth with an endosymbiont (maybe a proto-mitochondria), as well as external structures that would help them hang on to their Alphaproteobacterial friend". But overall, the book is a wonder.