Review Book Instructions Due at the beginning of class on Tuesday, April 19th--NO EXCEPTIONS (if you desire, you may turn in the assignment earlier). For each calendar day that your assignment is late, I will deduct ten percentage points from your assignment grade. Instructions: You are going to read a book and then write a review of it. Your review should contain a basic explanation of the books topic and then a critical review of the authors arguments. You should explain where the author has successfully made his or her point and where the argument is lacking. (I do NOT want a book report, such as you might have written in grade school that merely summarizes a book. It is essential that you critique the book and explain what about the authors argument(s) are good and what are not good. This critique should comprise a large part of your book review.) A list of possible/suggested books is given below. You do not have to use one of these books, but if you decide to review something else, please check with me first. Some of the books are harder than other onesI will take this into account when I am grading. Note also that I am well aware that you can find reviews of most of the books listed below onlineI absolutely expect that you will NOT borrow from these reviews when you write your own review. You may also not review books that you have already read for other classes. Assignment Objective: It is impossible to cover everything about Comparative Economic Systems in a 15 week course. The for with this assignment is to help you learn a little bit more on your own and to force you to critically evaluate what you are reading. Format: The review should be about 2000-3000 words in length (but I will not count words, so unless your essay is well under 2000 words, it will still be fine if you have written a complete review it is also fine if you feel you need to go over 3000 words to write a complete review). Your review should be typed, stapled and include a cover-page. Your name should only appear on the cover page. For the text, use an 11-point Times New Roman font, one inch margins, 1.5 line-spacing, and the APA citation style. You should also keep an electronic copy of your paper in case I decide to have you post your essay on Blackboard so that everyone in the class can read it. Examples: A great place to go to read examples of book reviews of academic books on economics is http://eh.net/bookreviews/ I would not recommend using a site like amazon.com to find examples of book reviews.
Suggested Books: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Charles A. Beard, Macmillan, 1913 Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy, 1888 The Other Path, Hernando de Soto, Harper and Row, 1989 The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto, Basic Books, 2000 Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond, W.W. Norton & Co., 1999 The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly, MIT Press, 2001 The White Mans Burden, William Easterly, Penguin Press, 2006 The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin M. Friedman, Knopf Press, 2005 Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman, University Of Chicago Press; 40th Anniv. ed., 2002 Free to Choose, Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Harcourt Press, 1980 Trust, Francis Fukuyama, Simon and Schuster, 1995 The Politics of Property Rights, Stephen Haber, Armando Razo & Noel Maurer, Cambridge University Press, 2003 The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich A. Hayek, University of Chicago Press, 1944 The Mystery of Economic Growth, Elhanan Helpman, Belknap Press, 2004 Culture and Prosperity : The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor, John Kay, Collins Press, 2004 The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx & Engels, Frederick 1848 Das Kapital, Karl Marx, 1867 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes, 1936 The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David S. Landes, W.W. Norton & Co., 1999 The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas, Cambridge University Press, 1973 Structure and Change in Economic History, Douglass C. North, W. W. Norton & Company, 1981 Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Douglass C. North, Cambridge University Press, 1990
Prosperity Versus Planning, David Osterfeld, Oxford University Press, 1992 How the West Grew Rich, Nathan Rosenberg & L.E. Birdzell, Jr., Basic Books, 1986 The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time , Jeffrey Sachs, Penguin Press, 2005 Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen, Knopf Press, 1999 The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776 Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, William Baumol, Robert Litan, and Carl Schramm, Yale University Press, 2007 One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth, Dani Rodrik, Princeton University Press, 2007 The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, Paul Collier, Oxford University Press, 2007 A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Gregory Clark, Princeton University Press, 2007 Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingalez, Crown Business, 2003 A Political Economy of the Middle East, 3rd Edition, Alan Richards and John Waterbury, Westview Press, 2008 Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, John McMillan, W.W. Norton and Company, 2002 World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Amy Chua, Anchor Books, 2003 Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, Peter Bernstein, Wiley, 1996 or 1998 Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System, Viral Acharya & Matthew Richardson, Wiley, 2009 The Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Liaquat Ahamed, Penguin Press, 2009 Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007, by Gary B. Gorton, Oxford University Press, 2010 A Failure of Capitalism, Richard A. Posner, Harvard University Press, 2009
Books that you can review that are comprised of articles: (If you choose one of these books, you should spend a paragraph or two critiquing each article contained in the book.) Empirical Studies in Institutional Change, Lee J. Alston, Thrainn Eggerstsson, and Douglass C. North, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1996 Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles, and Steven Durlauf, eds. Princeton University Press, 2000 Political Institutions and Economic Growth in Latin America, Stephen Haber, ed., Hoover Institution Press, 2000 Crony Capitalism and Economic Growth in Latin America: Theory and Evidence, Stephen Haber, ed. Hoover Institution Press, 2002 Culture Matters, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Basic Books, 2000 The Mosaic of Economic Growth, Ralph Landau, Timothy Taylor & Gavin Wright, eds., Stanford University Press, 1996 Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies, Joan Nelson, Charles Tilly, and Lee Walker, eds., National Academy Press, 1997 In Search of Prosperity, Dani Rodrik, ed., Princeton University Press, 2003 The Grabbing Hand, Andrei Shleifer & Robert Vishny, Harvard University Press, 1998 Political Institutions and Financial Development, Stephen Haber, Douglass North and Barry Weingast, eds., Stanford University Press, 2008 Government and the American Economy: A New History, University of Chicago Press, 2007