While the global economy languishes, one place just keeps growing despite failing banks, uncertain markets, and high unemployment: Silicon Valley. In the last two years, more than 100 incubators have popped up there, and the number of angel investors has skyrocketed. In Secrets of Silicon Valley, entrepreneur and media commentator Deborah Perry Piscione aims to take readers inside this vibrant ecosystem, exploring Silicon Valley’s exceptionally risk-tolerant culture, and why it thrives despite the many laws that make California one of the worst states in the union for business. Reviewed by Merlin Linehan. 

Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Else Can Learn from the Innovation Capital of the World. Deborah Perry Piscione. Palgrave Macmillan. April 2013.

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A book which explains the secrets behind the world’s technology Mecca should be valuable to the many imitators of Silicon Valley which have sprung up in Ontario, New York, Beijing, and Tel Aviv, and are on the drawing boards of many other town halls around the world. The promise that the power of technological innovation can transform economies has long captured the minds of economists and policy makers. In the present day, advancements in mobile technology have transformed the way in which we communicate with each other. The rise of social media holds the promise that crowdsourcing can help solve our social issues and that developments in solar and wind power can answer our energy and climate challenges.

This book is part guide, part history and part love letter to Silicon Valley, rather than a practical guide to implementing its secrets globally, and is written with a passion that perhaps can only come from a convert. Deborah Piscione arrived from Capitol Hill and its world of lobbyists and legislators, a place which is of course famed for its breath-taking cynicism and back stabbing. Piscione paints Washington in stark contrast to her new home, Silicon Valley, which is a land of milk and honey in comparison, where as she writes people: “talk to one another, and even look out for each other”(p.5). After describing her own background and experiences the author goes onto describe a different aspect of Silicon Valley in each chapter, such as the University (Stanford), how companies are financed, and the history of the region. Of most interest, however, were the descriptions of entrepreneurs and the innovation cycle.

While my inner cynic bridled at suggestions that social media allows “individuals [to] develop a social graph that can be leveraged to create more overall well-being than ever before” with little consideration given to the negative impact of social media (p.21), my more optimistic side was thrilled by the descriptions of far-sighted entrepreneurs who love nothing better than setting up innovative, world changing software companies before going on to do the same trick in other sectors. Covered in the book are those such as the inspirational Elon Musk, a South African born serial entrepreneur who founded PayPal before moving onto electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors, and then to complete the hat-trick working at SolarCity, a successful Californian renewable energy company. Another inspirational story was that of Christina Brodbeck who horrified her family by quitting her job with $40,000 worth of student loans to work for nothing on a Silicon Valley start-up. Fortunately that start-up was YouTube, and in retrospect it was a risk well worth taking.

At times the book is a breathless run through of new ideas and futurology, which is easy to get excited about, but at the same time it is easy to recall how many other predictions for the future fail to materialise. Will we really witness “singularity” – the optimistic idea that technological progression will allow humans to overcome their biological limitations – increase our creative potential and solve problems such as hunger, pollution and poverty?

The one word which crops up over and over again is innovation. Piscione explains how innovation differs from improvement, as it is doing something differently rather than the same thing better. Innovative companies are constantly improving, testing, experimenting and the same goes for individuals who are defined by their “creative intelligence”. The downside of this of course is failure. Failing is perhaps the most under appreciated art of all, yet vital in entrepreneurship and innovation, as most experiments do not initially work, or at least not in the way they were originally conceived. The Valley has a high tolerance of failure, which helps people to bounce back from bankruptcy and to access funding despite disappointments in the past. This tolerance allows entrepreneurs who have failed to start afresh, facing little stigma in comparison to other sectors. It would have been useful to read more on how individuals made decisions that went on to create innovative products. Although subjects such as the discussion of patent law, lawyers, and the battles they fight are important, the book could have done more to illuminate the creative process that spurs on innovation.

While the book’s strengths lie in its descriptions of companies and their bold, imaginative technological innovations which have transformed the world, it is debatable as to whether the key lessons can be adopted by other industries, as the book suggests in its title. As we have seen, innovation in banking is not always desirable and some may doubt whether the creative, non-hierarchical, collaborative structures utilised by many tech companies would work in other fields. Also, more details about when things go wrong would have been useful; a relentlessly upbeat book is great on first reading, but businesses do fail, recessions happen, and disaster is just as interesting and educational as learning about success.

If I was moving to Silicon Valley, this book would be a fantastic guide, I would have a great idea of the dynamics of the area, the best places to raise capital, where to hang out and eat, and even the benefits of raising children and living in that rarefied environment. As a cheerleader for Silicon Valley’s business leaders, entrepreneurs and institutions, Piscione excels, throwing the spotlight on its genuinely brilliant people and ideas. If I was in the business of trying to learn from Silicon Valley there is a lot I could take away, but it is an unrealistic expectation to apply the Silicon Valley formula to other sectors. The book would be a useful read for anyone studying business, or for an MBA, but is accessible to anyone interested in this fascinating place.

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Merlin Linehan is currently writing a book on trade and investment between rising powers and previously worked as a financial analyst and consultant in the fields of SMEs, clean energy and donor finance for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Merlin holds an MSc in Finance and Financial Law from SOAS. Merlin blogs on South –South trade at thekularingtradeblog.com and tweets @MerlinLinehan. Read more reviews by Merlin.

America currently has the most inequality and the least equality of opportunity among the developed countries, writes Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz in The Price of Inequality. While market forces play a role in this stark picture, politics has shaped those market forces. Stiglitz aims to explain how inequality affects and is affected by every aspect of national policy, and with characteristic insight he offers a vision for a more just and prosperous future, supported by a concrete program to achieve that vision. Joel Krupa encounters passionately argued points with a scattering of controversy.

The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Joseph Stiglitz. Penguin. April 2013.

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Although it seems almost comical today, the (now unpopular) former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once fretted over the dangers of persistent budgetary surpluses for the American fiscal situation. Swelling influxes of cash into the Treasury, he believed, could make monetary policy more difficult to implement, as the Federal Reserve increases or decreases the money supply – and, by extension, all-important interest rates – through U.S. Treasury bill sales or purchases. Unfortunately, Greenspan’s supposedly moderating policy prescriptions (lower taxes, frothing asset bubbles, and persistent deficits) had foreseeable consequences, and reached their logical culmination in the Great Recession of 2008. Ludicrous views in hindsight, of course, but as Keynes once opined, “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood”.

This is just one of countless enjoyable titbits shared in Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s recent book The Price of Inequality. A rancorous romp through recent US economic history, the versatile economist that authored it has woven an immensely entertaining and profoundly thoughtful tale. As Stiglitz – no stranger to controversy – freely admits in the introduction, much of his indignant air and decidedly anti-right political leanings are rooted in humble Gary, Indiana (a place this reviewer, who has visited this archetypal declining Midwestern U.S. city on more than one occasion, believes is likely to acutely attune any astute long-time resident to the hardships associated with economic injustice and social strife). The things Stiglitz saw there appear to have ingrained in him a set of beliefs that lingered with him throughout times in the upper echelons of finance that, more often than not, tend to dull such sensitivities; namely, that socioeconomic systems which allow all individuals in a given society to realize upward mobility and better their individual circumstances are not only common sense and rooted in practical ethics – they represent good economic sense, too.

The current economic landscape bears little semblance to any positive normative standards, however, and one can safely argue that prospects appear grim under Stiglitz’s learned gaze. Strong economic forces, already tilted in favour of the wealthy, are being nudged further along by harmful pro-rich political interference in taxation, budgetary, and monetary policies. The mighty United States is becoming more unequal, and that nation’s poorest are becoming poorer while a once-proud middle class is decimated. Odiously, armchair academic economists have provided the intellectual underpinnings to justify these actions, primarily through the promulgation of dubious theories and “scientific” postulations that have little basis in reality.

Timely anecdotes on the demise of the middle class bring the seriousness of this problem into clear view. Stiglitz argues that “the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed cast vast numbers of Americans adrift in the flotsam and jetsam of an increasingly dysfunctional form of capitalism [characterized by a lack of recognition and opportunity for those with less, and actual reductions in their standard of living].” The hard figures associated with this evolution tell a startling tale. Stiglitz again: “For an even more striking illustration of the state of inequality in America, consider the Walton family….[these] heirs command wealth of $69.7 billion dollars, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society”. Some will be displeased with the implications of quantitative analysis on the so-called land of free, but an undeniable truth emerges here: more and more, family income, parental support, and plain old luck play a far greater role in one’s ultimate success than hard work, intellectual capabilities, or personal ambition.

Worryingly (and certainly counter-intuitively to some of inequality’s key proponents), such a configuration over the long-term may even be unhelpful for the short-termist main benefactors. Deeply unequal societies tend to more violent and crime-ridden, as well as economic underperformers. A solid middle class creates demands for the products generated by firms, pays the requisite taxes for sustainable infrastructure and adequate health care provision, and contributes to the pension funds that stabilize equity markets. In short, more equal societies create vibrant, durable, and fundamentally egalitarian economies and societies that are better for everyone – including the rich.

Refreshingly, Stiglitz is also passionate about rectifying excessive economy-related impacts on ecosystems and human health. He sees modern assessment measures like GDP or gross corporate revenues as chimeras, for figures like national growth and corporate profits do not account for the substantial deleterious impacts on the environment that they inflict. For example, the unconscionable lack of taxation on environmentally degrading or carbon emitting activities means that the collective bears the burden for the activities of a few. These cumulative externalities amount to a hidden subsidy and an undeniable misalignment between social returns and private returns. Frustratingly, vested interests seem hell-bent on maintaining this imbalance, and former presidential Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Stiglitz recalls how his attempts to implement curbs on these shortcomings through the introduction of holistic Green GDP metrics were thwarted by unsavoury rent-seekers.

As in all texts, there are some distinctly controversial points. The author apportions a great deal of ink to the gaping holes inherent to overtly right-leaning political and economic ideologies, but his polemic does not concede some of the equally injurious consequences of the leftist equivalents (socialist states, in the opinion of this reviewer, are often far removed from any common definition of utopia). A more balanced critique, hints of which can be found in past work, might have rendered his rhetoric less susceptible to the inevitable cries of bias. Moreover, the generalizations contained in some hyper-partisan statements are more than a little eyebrow-raising; for instance, one section sees him confidently asserting that government lies at the core of innovation at Silicon Valley – a dubious contention, to say the least, as other factors like excellent proximate universities, pleasant weather, and the intangible wonderfulness of Northern California’s cultural ideals are probably more relevant than the governance framework to which Stiglitz ascribes so much influence. In the same vein, he claims that government-backed research and development remains integral to cultivating long-term industry supremacy, even though preliminary evidence suggests that top-down innovation can sometimes have sub-optimal outcomes (see Wallsten, 2000). Relatively – and still admittedly – unsettled minor deficiencies, but still worth noting here.

So what is the solution to the perplexities of economic inequality – a problem which, at least to a limited extent, will always be with us? Stiglitz has some prescriptions for America – higher taxes on the rich, reductions in corporate welfare, and an elimination of taxation shenanigans – but in a finite world still defined by billions of individuals living in abject poverty, the answers clearly cannot be found strictly within the dismal science of economics. This reviewer believes that there may be a non-financial alternative (according to Stiglitz, this would be welcome, as there does not appear to be any definitive long-run relationship between GDP growth and subjective perceptions of well-being) which resides in an under-appreciated branch of philosophical thought known as Stoicism. The Stoic ancients – Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus among others – teach us that happiness is derived more from our social and intellectual capital, as well as our dedication to excelling insofar as our innate limitations allow, rather than from our material possessions or financial prowess. Nurturing the former facets of our own lives, while simultaneously facilitating the latter advancement opportunities for those with fewer material goods, would be a good – albeit far from complete – first step towards resolving some of the complex issues elegantly outlined in the stimulating tome The Price of Inequality.

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Joel Krupa is an energy and environment researcher at the University of Toronto, studying under Dr. Danny Harvey. He was educated at Oxford. Read more reviews by Joel.

This collection examines the policy relevance of behavioural science to our social and political lives, to issues ranging from health, environment, and nutrition, to dispute resolution, implicit racism, and false convictions. The book aims to illuminate the relationship between behavioural findings and economic analyses, and calls attention to what policymakers might learn from this vast body of groundbreaking work. Those in government, non-profits, and the private sector interested in empirically supported ways to motivate people to act in their own best interest will find a rich source of examples and exposure to underlying theory in The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy, writes Jennifer Miller.

The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy. Edited by Eldar Shafir. Princeton University Press. November 2012.

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The UK government has recently announced its intention to find a private partner for its Behavioral Insights Team, colloquially known as the “nudge unit”. Since the publication of their influential 2009 book Nudge, both Richard H. Thaler, advisor to the Behavioral Insights Team, and Cass R. Sunstein, until recently the Director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, have been given a chance to apply their ideas about human behaviour to public policy.

Eldar Shafir, the William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, has compiled a comprehensive review of applied behavioural science – more commonly known as behavioural economics – in The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy.  The Wilson school has been teaching “psychology for policy” for at least 15 years. In this book, Shafir has brought together an example-driven collection of essays that examine the many ways human behaviour depends on context and subconscious interpretation so that this behavioural perspective can inform policy design.

With 30 chapters by over 50 contributors, an introduction by the editor, and a preface by Daniel Kahneman, the book is well equipped to provide a definitive treatment of the work that is emerging at the intersection of psychology, economics, and public policy. Contributors come primarily from the field of psychology, with business and law also well represented. Almost all contributors are working in the US and, although the book’s subject is commonly referred to as “behavioral economics,” only one contributor appears to reside in an economics department.

The book begins with applications in specific contexts, from employment to criminal justice to retirement savings, the environment, health, voting, and more. As Shafir describes it, each chapter aims to show “how research in the behavioral sciences might influence our understanding and the conduct of good policy in a particular domain” (p. 3). Considering that the behavioural scientist’s keen concern for the order in which choices are presented was one of the major themes of the book, I found its structure somewhat counterintuitive.  The book seemed to work backwards from specific topics and cases to a few more general themes.

For example, my attention was drawn early on to the “Choice Architecture” chapter by leading figures in this field: Thaler, Sunstein, and John P. Balz. This chapter, which provides an overview of the main ideas in Thaler and Sunstein’s highly influential and popular book, is the 25^th chapter. This chapter provides a brief introduction to the concepts of incentives, mappings, defaults, feedback, expected human error, and choice structure that inform recent attempts to apply behavioural science in public policy settings. Although the chapter offers little new to those already familiar with Nudge, it provides a useful summary for anyone new to their work.

Chapter 17, “Psychological Levers of Behavior Change,” by Dale T. Miller and Deborah A. Prentice, explains and illustrates with examples the principles of Lewinian psychology behind many of these recent innovations in applied behavioural science. Lewinian psychology emphasizes the limitations of both the economic approach of offering incentives and the typical psychological approach of changing attitudes. It may be more effective to realize that people already have the right attitudes and motivations, but instead need a form of license to take actions that will benefit them and are consistent with their existing beliefs.  Miller and Prentice cite the example of the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” campaign in partnership with the Ad Council, which not only motivates people to speak up by creating discomfort around the idea of betraying friendship but licenses friends to speak up by removing a perceived “psychological tax” on intervention.

The book concludes with four chapters of commentary from various disciplinary perspectives: philosophy, medicine, policy, and economics. For example, William J. Congdon unifies several of the book’s economic themes in Chapter 27 “Psychology and Economic Policy”. Congdon challenges behavioural scientists to move beyond applying their insights to solve existing problems to using those same insights to reframe the problems themselves. He observes the potential for behavioural insights to inform public finance at the diagnosis, judgement and prescription stages, giving rise to new approaches in the areas of addressing market failures, redistribution, and fiscal policy.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a comprehensive perspective on the potential and limitations of the behavioural insights popularized by Nudge and similar works. It is not a light and popular treatment of the topic, but neither is it a dense academic treatment aimed at specialists. Those in government, non-profits, and the private sector interested in empirically supported ways to motivate people to act in their own best interest will find a rich source of examples and exposure to underlying theory in The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy.

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Jennifer Miller is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. She received her doctorate in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests focus on the scientific workforce. She has also written about collaboration among universities, industry, and government in university research centres. Before pursuing her doctorate, she worked for IBM in human resources. Read more reviews by Jennifer.

Unplanned Development offers a fascinating and fresh view into the realities of development planning. To an observer, many development projects present themselves as thoroughly planned endeavours informed by structure, direction and intent, but here Jonathan Rigg aims to expose the truth of development experience: how chance, serendipity, turbulence and the unexpected define development around the world. Reviewed by  Hansley A. Juliano. 

Unplanned Development: Tracking Change in Asia. Jonathan Rigg. Zed Books. November 2012.

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When speaking of “development,” one is tempted to characterize it along the usual jargon of mainstream economic and financial common-sense (or at least how we predict and project their models on existing realities). During the first quarter of 2013, one might be led to believe that progress and growth continues to become imminent in Southeast Asia. The economic status of the region seems brimming with good news: what with Indonesia’s “bright economic prospects” despite political tensions, the Philippines’ rising in investment grade from Standard & Poor’s, and the optimistic projections regarding the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) decision to unite economic activity in the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). Considering the coverage of these developments, one might assume that something must be going right with the public and private institutions in Southeast Asia, and that state intervention and market forces must have come to equilibrium. Yet, the existing realities of intergenerational poverty, lack of transparency and multiple social injustices continue to plague the citizenries of these countries despite seeming economic growth.

Corrupt, mismanaged, and seemingly hopeless: that is how some of the international community viewed Nigeria in the early 2000s. Then Nigeria implemented a sweeping set of economic and political changes in an attempt to reform the unreformable, writes Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. This book aims to tell the story of how a dedicated and politically committed team of reformers set out to fix a series of broken institutions, and in the process repositioned Nigeria’s economy in ways that helped create a more diversified springboard for steadier long-term growth. Joel Krupa recommends the book to readers interested in the future of energy and the region.

Reforming the Unreformable: Lessons from Nigeria. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. MIT Press. October 2012.

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Comprehensively describing petro-states is a difficult and constantly evolving task. Many energy pundits will confidently echo the famous words of former US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and proclaim that “I know it when I see it”, yet few can do so in a concise, timeless manner (see Paul Gewirtz’s article ‘On “I Know It When I See It”’). In Daniel Yergin’s authoritative energy text The Quest, the plain-spoken Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala provides one of the better efforts towards formulating perennial ‘petro-state definition’ relevancy: “If you depend on oil and gas for 80 percent of government revenues, over 90 percent of exports are one commodity, oil, if that is what drives the growth of your economy, if your economy moves up and down with the price of oil, if you have volatility of expenditures and of GDP, then you’re a petro-state”. Deleterious economic and social outcomes are almost inevitable whenever hydrocarbon-linked hot money ebbs and flows with the vagaries of international commodity markets. Within such a context, corruption, despotic regimes, and income inequality tends to flourish, while regulatory transparency, a sound financial sector, and the rule of law inevitably all suffer.

The aforementioned Okonjo-Iweala, a technocratic economist cum author, knows the dangers of such a scenario all too well. Fifteen years after the ouster of long-dominant military regimes (including that of the odious thief Sani Abacha), her recent book Reforming the Unreformable: Lessons from Nigeria provides an outstanding memoir about her experiences at the helm of Nigeria’s sometimes unwieldy economic restructuring. As the largest democracy in Africa and a crucial oil supplier, what happens in Nigeria truly matters at every scale from the local to the global – and Okonjo-Iweala shows us why and how it needs to change. Thoughtfully written, the prose contained in Reforming the Unreformable succinctly highlights the variety of difficult situations facing low-income, export-dependent energy producing nations, and it holds a smorgasbord of transferrable insights for scholars across the disciplinary spectrum.  The Harvard-educated Okonjo-Iweala’s progressive views – stemming from a mix of time spent at the World Bank and a deep knowledge of sustainable economic principles – are on full display as she outlines the array of methods and techniques deployed by the country’s economic leadership, including among other things the successful spearheading of an innovative debt relief solution for sagging external debt overhangs and the not-so-successfully executed reform of graft-ridden Nigerian customs procedures.

Throughout the text, it is repeatedly reinforced that the barriers to success in Nigeria are unusually daunting. As a series of tables and graphs in the book’s Appendix deftly show, the country sits at or near the bottom of seemingly countless comparative metrics of well-being and governance – even when compared to other decidedly troubled Sub-Saharan African states. Nigeria, Okonjo-Iweala makes clear, is plagued by a complex colonial past and a problematic governance structure. No better example exists of these shortcomings than the constitution. Incredibly, Okonjo-Iweala elucidates how this antiquated framework stipulates that a hefty chunk of annual oil proceeds must be allocated to different levels of government, after which political leaders are provided with significant autonomy over spending, total immunity from prosecution while in office, and little to no transparency. A toxic combination with predictable consequences.

Energy analysts will especially enjoy two of the eight sections. The first focuses on fuel subsidy reform – a costly and regressive market distortion that, globally, diverts nearly 3% of GDP from far more useful expenditures like health care, education, and infrastructure spending (see International Monetary Fund for more details on this estimate). Nigeria, blessed with some of the largest oil reserves on Earth, must bear an especially huge burden, as little domestic refining capacity exists and the country is forced to send extracted resources overseas before importing expensive end-products like gasoline and diesel. Sensible and politically acute, Okonjo-Iweala realized that a total phase-out of this monstrously inefficient system was impossible, but a more targeted approach of subsidizing kerosene (a fuel used extensively by the poor) provided a compelling alternative. Sadly, such reformation attempts were largely unsuccessful, as the kerosene subsidies lasted only one year and petroleum product subsidies continue to cannibalize nearly $13 billion per year of the Nigerian budget.

Elsewhere in the text, energy-inclined readers will be intrigued by a more fruitful change. Macroeconomic volatility is a huge issue in the Nigerian petro-state; to counter this, an Oil Price-based Fiscal Rule (OPFR) was implemented that adopted a long-run average oil price for budget planning purposes. Okonjo-Iweala notes that such a measure required concrete political will, and Nigeria was fortunate to implement it during a time of especially low benchmark prices. This smoothing OPFR measure was tremendously successful, as it forced savings, decoupled government spending from unpredictable oil and gas reference prices, and discouraged unsustainable depletion of revenues – situations that invariably arose when short-term mindsets were more du jour. Other nations currently facing the so-called resource curse would do well to examine it.

At the conclusion of this work, one cannot help but wonder two things. First, it will be interesting to see if other energy-rich African states will be able to absorb some of the most poignant lessons outlined by this author. Preliminary evidence suggests there is cause for limited optimism; for example, major oil exporter Angola has recently announced the creation of a somewhat controversial sovereign wealth fund. Second (and despite any contentions to the contrary), it remains depressingly unclear whether Nigeria will ever be able to step back from the perennial economic, political, social, and environmental abysses that still define it, even as brave individuals like Okonjo-Iweala take a stand for a better future, the country’s industries attract ever larger amounts of foreign direct investment, and influential organizations like Goldman Sachs christen it part of the Next 11 list of the most promising 21st century economies. Swelling demographics, abysmal institutional frameworks, still-pervasive corruption, and ongoing sectarian warfare are – to say the least – disheartening. The future of Nigeria is uncertain, but even after reading about the inspiring work of Okonjo-Iweala, this reviewer remains less than hopeful.

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Joel Krupa is an energy and environment researcher at the University of Toronto, studying under Dr. Danny Harvey. He was educated at Oxford. Read more reviews by Joel.