Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia Review

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(More customer reviews)Unfortunate honesty... only review here is from my mother, Judy Rae Smith. Loving she is, but unbiased she is not. Ok.
I think the book does a decent job of explaining why some large oil-exporting countries evince political instability while most others don't. One thing I think it does well, and innovatively, is to establish the conditional effects of oil wealth--which some immensely smart scholars like Thad Dunning, Miriam Lowi and others have also elucidated. But it is imperfect, and I enjoy reviewing the article and book-length manuscripts by others who challenge, elaborate, my arguments in Hard Times. Mostly I was after accumulation of knowledge in writing it, and truthfully so many good pieces of research have come my way in the last three years that I am confident that has happened. See my author's page for contact information if you want directions to such research. --Ben Smith

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Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an excellent book to have a compared vision on the three great crisis of capitalism before the 21th century. It gives us a wide view of economic and political tranformations occurred in countries like the USA, Germany, the UK, Swenden and France. All countries and periods were carefully chosen. The periods because they offered an opportunity to analyse the answers that a set of countries gave to face international crisis. The Countries were selected in function of their similarities as participants of the developed world, with, during most of the time, competitive and plural democracies. They also have similarities on the answer given to the crisis.
The cor dimension of the text is tio demonstrate how each country shaped their interpalys of societal internal actors with the international flows of capital, goods and instabilities. There were times where the inter-class coalitions coincided, but the answers, did not. In other cases, the coalition diferred, but the answers were quite similars.
The only weak point, in my opinion, his the lack of references to primary sources related to the selected countries. By the way, excellent book to have a critical overview of how we get here,in the first crisis of the 21th century, and what are the realtions with the past ones.

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