Tag: Book Review

Summer Reading – Trump Style

With Donald Trump having such an influence on international events, I thought I had best get up to speed on his background and experience. So I have been reading the Art of the Deal first published in 2016 at 384 pages. Don’t let the length put you off as it’s quite an easy read.

It’s really the story of his life up until the date of him writing the book and covers how he achieved some success in property development in New York. His father was a businessman in the development of housing but Donald moved more up-market and into larger developments, particularly in Manhattan.

It’s interesting in how he got people to back him when he had little experience and few financial resources. He was clearly always keen to impress people by putting on a glossy front.

How much the book might tell you about his personality is not clear but in his second term as President he does seem to be acting mainly rationally and is attempting to solve some of the world’s problems – albeit with mixed success. It can do no harm to read this book and get some impression of Trump’s management style.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://x.com/RogerWLawson  )

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Tariff Wars and Book Review

We woke up this morning to the news that President Trump is getting tough on trade tariffs to reduce US imports. With up to 25% on imports from China, Mexico and Canada this could be seriously damaging to their economies and raise the cost of living in the USA. Although it is not clear what the impact will be on the UK or the rest of Europe we cannot expect to get off completely free.

Trump is aiming to reinvigorate US industry by ensuring it can compete with economies where labour costs are lower. That is not an unreasonable proposition but the method chosen is a very blunt instrument. It has already had an impact on worldwide stock markets (my own stock market portfolio is down 1.6% today at the time of writing and it was down also on Friday).

Some of the damage done is from the aggressive rhetoric that Trump has chosen which may fade over time as countries affected retaliate but clearly some sectors of the economy could be badly affected.

The world is now a very complex economy with industries and countries very dependent on each other. A recently published book that explains some of this is the book “Material World”.

Book Review: Material World by Ed Conway (subtitled: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future).  

This is an educational tome which explains what the sources and uses of common products such as sand are – in that case in the semiconductor industry in the form of silicon.

It’s certainly a very good analysis of some industries but at 501 pages it is yet another book that is too long for my liking. However it helps to explain why countries are so interdependent. Although interfering in the free economies can often be worked around at pace (as happened in World War II when Germany had to invent substitutes for some products as it lost access to oil and rubber) it is economically damaging in the short-term.

Free trade is important to maintain if you want a vibrant economy.

The UK has just decided to damage its own economy by a decision in a Scottish court that permits for oil and gas exploration should take into account end-user emissions. This is judges taking decisions that should be reserved for politicians and the electorate. This could be very damaging for companies such as Shell who planned to develop the Jackdaw gas field. Let us hope that this decision is overturned but with Ed Millibrain as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change I am not hopeful that the UK Government will see sense.

Meanwhile China and the USA are expanding energy production (hundreds of more coal mines in China for example) while the UK simply reduces its own energy sources and becomes more reliant on foreign imports. We cannot replace electricity production by wind and solar farms alone and expanding the electricity grid is not a short-term fix.

Politicians need to read the Conway book for enlightenment.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://x.com/RogerWLawson  )

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Book Review – Scared to Death   

One of the books I have been reading lately is “Scared to Death” by Christopher Booker and Richard North. First published some years ago but more recently updated it covers the public scares from BSE to Global Warming including speeding on our roads and why scares are costing us the earth.

To quote from the Introduction: “In the past twenty years, Western society in general and Britain in particular has been in the grip of a remarkable and very dangerous psychological phenomenon. Again and again since the 1980s we have seen the rise of some great fear, centred on a mysterious new threat to human health and wellbeing. As a result, we are told, large numbers of people will suffer or die. Salmonella in eggs; listeria in cheese; BSE in beef; dioxins in poultry; the ‘Millennium Bug’;DDT; nitrate in water; vitamin B6; ‘Satanic’ child abuse; lead in petrol and computers; passive smoking; asbestos; SARS; Asian bird flu – the list is seemingly endless.

Indeed, we are currently in the grip of the greatest such fear of all: that of a warming of the world’s climate which, we are officially told, could well put an end to much of civilized life as we know it. The price we have paid for such panics has been immense; most notably the colossal financial costs arising from the means society has chosen to defend itself from these threats. Yet, again and again, we have seen how it eventually emerged that the fear was largely or wholly misplaced. The threat of disaster came to be seen as having been no more than what we call a ‘scare’”.

The book certainly covers the ground well and shows how these scares arise and are promoted by the ignorant. Popular media and even the supposedly responsible press love a “bad news” story that helps their circulation (or their on-line media “hits” that helps their advertising income).

But the financial cost to the public can be enormous with no cost/benefit justification for the chosen solutions to the perceived problems. Indeed in the case of road safety the chosen measures (speed cameras) have not only been financially damaging but have diverted funds from effective road safety measures and meant that the UK no longer has a lead in reducing accidents and deaths (KSIs).

Some of the scares, such as that for AIDS, did turn into a serious problem only the worst outcomes being averted by advances in medical science and simple contrary public health measures. But other scares just disappeared because they turned out to be unreal – such as the Millenium Computer bug. However many millions of dollars and pounds were spent on curing imaginary problems.

One issue I was personally involved with was the “speed kills” issue which has resulted in the proliferation of speed cameras and speed humps. It is covered in Chapter 10 of the book.

As the book says, during the early years of the last century the death rate from road accidents in the UK consistently fell. By 1993 it was below 4,000. Britain’s roads were the safest in Europe. In France and Germany, the annual death toll was over 9,000. In Portugal the death rate was well over three times as high. Then the rate of decline suddenly slowed. Over the next decade the total fall was smaller than in any of the years between 1990 and 1993. On five occasions the yearly figure actually rose. So what had changed? Road safety policy as promoted by the Government changed.

The book says: “Undoubtedly one important factor in the steady fall in the fatal accident rate in earlier decades, despite a doubling in the number of vehicles on Britain’s roads – from 12 million in 1966 to 25 million in 1994 – had been the technical advances that made vehicles themselves much safer. But this could not have explained the slowing in the fall of accidents in the 1990s, when new regulations had made vehicles safer still”.

In reality the automated speed enforcement and reduction in speed limits created a financial incentive for the police to invest in speed cameras, speed awareness courses and enforcement when they had very little impact on road casualties. Over 2 million people are now issued with speeding fines every year in the UK at enormous cost to themselves and a whole industry has been created to support this mistaken policy due to the scare that “speed kills” when excessive speed is one of the less common factors in the cause of road accidents.

Expenditure on road policing and other effective measures to reduce accidents such as local road engineering were reduced in favour of more enforcement by cameras in the hope that would cut accidents when it did not.

See this web page for some of the articles I have written on this subject: https://www.freedomfordrivers.org/road-safety

As regards the book “Scared to Death” although the authors have documented well how such scares arise and are promoted by the misinformed they unfortunately have not tackled the issue of how to stop us wasting money on false solutions. But the book should be essential reading for all politicians.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson  )

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Book Review:  Money – A Story of Humanity

I am currently reading the recently published book entitled “Money: A Story of Humanity”by David McWilliams. It could be a very dry subject but this is an eminently readable tome on not just how money in the form of coin came into use but the way credit developed to finance commerce.

It is particularly good on how the Roman empire developed due to financial innovation but how it later proved to be one of the causes of its downfall. An eminently readable book and a subject worth understanding for anyone who has financial investments.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson  )

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How Did Silicon Valley Come to Dominate?

Many people have wondered how and why Silicon Valley companies came to dominate several sectors of the modern technology world. Companies such as Google, Oracle, Intel, HP and Apple were all founded in the valley south of San Francisco.

I have just finished reading a book by Ashlee Vance entitled Geek Silicon Valley and it gives you some of the answers. It’s primarily a tourist guide to the sights but it also covers the company buildings and the history of the companies that have built the modern economy in the towns of Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and San Jose.

I formerly spent some time in the area and the author clearly knows the valley well and its history. If you are visiting the area on business this book is highly recommended and there is more to see in the area than most tourists will know about. Most visitors to the area may stay in San Francisco but that would be a mistake.

The author amusingly points out that some people attribute the success of silicon valley to the fact that William Shockley’s mother lived in Palo Alto near Stanford University. Shockley moved back there when he founded a semiconductor business. Spin-offs from that business were Fairchild and subsequently Intel and it was those offspring that made the area the base for new technology companies.

But it was the development of venture capital businesses that funded, and continue to do so, these new world-beating companies that were the real innovation. This book gives you a good idea of the culture that has made silicon valley such a success.

The presence of Stanford University and the attraction of a good climate and relatively low land and housing cost (at least early on) no doubt helped but there have been a number of factors that helped make silicon valley so successful, as the book helps to explain.

Roger Lawson (Twitter https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson  )

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