Thoughts on Books from IES-Europe Students

marina tanase says:

Terry L. Anderson’s book was a challenge for me. That is because the enviroment issue is a controversial one. It is the first time when I read a book with an optimistic view regarding this delicate subject.
Most books state that enviroment is getting worse every day.
Instead, Terry L. Anderson has a different view. The author argues that economic growth has a strong relation with the quality of the enviroment. I agree with his statement. It is obvious that a rich country with a stable economy, make people more aware of the problem and turn them into more rational preoccupied persons.
But what is happening with the developing countries? These countries should take pains in solving other problems such as: raising the standard of living, make institutions work and so on. After solving these issues their goverments can take into account the enviroment problem. So, doesn’t this mean that developing countries are more polluted?
The author also states that three key factors lead to economic growth and automatically to the improvement of the enviroment. These are the following:
– property rights
– rules of law
– limited government
He is right. If one enacts legislation regarding the enviroment, everyone will do his/her best to respect the rules. If people don’t do this, they will end up being punished by the law.
Property rights can also lead to the improvement of the enviroment. For example, if I owe a piece of land I will do my best to preserve it and keep it clean.
Contenders of the “it’s getting better” view have their own arguments.
The author tries to explain their reasons. These are three factors that lay as the foundation of this reasoning.:organizations, researchers and media.
The latter play a central role in sharing us the information but it also transmit incoherent system of information. “So that explains why many of us have such a negative perception on the enviroment problem,”- the author says.
There is another chapter in the book where Terry L. Anderson sustains that globalization improves enviromental quality. I didn’t understand perfectly well how come this can happen? What’s the connection between the enviroment and globalization? Now, I am reading a book I had told you about in the previous mail, Joseph Stiglitz’s:“Globalization and its discontents”.
Stiglitz sustains that globalization has a bad effect upon the enviroment. So what I can’t understand is how can the phenomen called globalization effects the enviroment how come it has a pozitive effect on it Terry L. Anderson’s view?
The book provided me an optimistic perception of this delicate problem but I do not totally agree with the fact that enviroment is improving in the developing countries. I am thinking of Romania where deforestation became a problem. Our country has confrunted lately with floods and that’s because of the fact that many trees are cut every year.
I also enjoyed the book for the fact that I could find out more about the Kyoto protocol. Before reading the book I had heard of it but I didn’t know for example, that Russia just signed it in 2004 and that U.S.A. didn’t sign it at all. Anderson’s book argues that U.S.A made a lot of progress regarding pollution but I can’t understand why they didn’t sign the Kyoto protocol yet. Are there any disadvantages for signing it? What are the implications for a country once it signed the protocol?
In spite of all these underlying questions I definetly enjoyed the book. What I really appreciated was the fact that the author gives the official sources where one can find the correct information and this is a very important thing.
I hope that in the near future Romania too will make progress regarding the enviroment problem. However, we have a long way to go, as our first concern continue to be a stable economy, that will lead to economic growth and of course , to the improvement of the enviroment.
What is sad is the fact that in Romania subjects such as the enviroment are not being taught or discussed in schools or universities and I believe this is the first reason for why people are not aware of these problems.
I hope some day Romania will realize and invest more in this field, because the issue effects everybody’s lives.

cristina tanase says:

How the Scots Invented the Modern World – by Arthur Herman

It is either about making a phone call, getting to the most remoted islands by the modern succsessor of Orvile and Wilbur Right’s plane, reading a James Bond novel or a ‘Daily’ tabloid newspaper, drinking a Lipton tea or having a Johnny Walker whisky. In all these there is as much Scottish influence as it is in Adam Smith’s, David Hume’s or Francis Hutchenson’s writings.
How the Scots Invented the Modern World is historian Arthur Herman’s testimony in support of that Scottish spirit that led to some of the most amazing discoveries of the ‘modern world’. When one reads ‘discoveries’, he/she should not only think of the material/scientifical ones, but also of those sets of ideas on economics, political philosophy, education, literature, arhitecture. In each of these categories, Herman says, we can nominate at least one Scottish leader.
The funny part of the book is that is gives us a flavour of the old Scottish language, by comparing some words with their English counterparts. Thus, craik stands for ‘talk’, nekkid for ‘naked’, critter for ‘creature’.
Herman links a chain of historic events into a smooth, captivating story that does not simply tell, but explains causes and effects, analyses good points and bad points, debates pros and cons. The book is divided into two parts, the first handling the Scottish development from the 16th to the late 18th century, the second completing the portrait of the Scottish Diaspora and underlying its contribution to the development of the Birtish colonies of United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and even Africa.
Religion, education, economics and law played an important role in the Scottish people’s progress.
Scotland was, the author says, Europe’s first modern literate society. By 1696, every parish was supposed to have a school and a teacher, according to the provisions of Parliament’s “Act for Setting Schools”. The act had important effects on commerce: it contributed to the flourishing of book trade, paper making, bookselling and printing.
Abandoning the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Scotland and the Episcopalian England had to share a common history, as their close geography could not be changed.
The Act of Union (1707) united England and Scotland into the Great Britain, governed by a single monarch and a single British Parliament. It is this, the author says, that actually spurred Scotland’s economic growth, moving its economy away from a “Third World country” stage to that of a “modern society”. It is this that made the Scots innovate and use the advantages of laissez-faire private sector into a Union that rendered English-style public order, enforced law and a standing army and navy. The price of this economic boom was the lose of political autonomy, the author explains.
This was exactly the perfect moment for the Scottish Enlightment to made herself conspicuous and showing its scientific side and concern for mathematics, medicine, law, natural philosophy. The concepts of liberty, free society, rights and obligations became popular within the theories of Pufendorf, Hutchenson and Shaftsbury. The term liberty was especially associated with refiness, sophistication and even politeness.
During the 18th century, we find an innovative, industrial and mercantile Glasgow and an artistic and literary Edinburgh leading the intellectual trend of the Scottish society. At the same time, we find ourselves in a jammed, blackened, and totally lacking sanitation Edinburgh. The reader will find Daniel Defoe’s description of the city interesting.
Arthur Herman also tackles the problem of the Scottish cultural identity, bound to its English side. He says the two nations are distinct in political, as well as cultural terms. Yet, Herman beautifully phrases, although Scots became English speakers and culture bearers, they stuck to their Scottish roots.
What you get out of this book is primarily a sense of a true understanding of the Scots’ spirit; concepts like commercial society, monopoly, means of production don’t seem anymore created solely for the purpose of flamboyantly explaining the things they stand for by a group of interested entrepreneurs. Instead, they become alive and more humane due to the author’s excellent manner to bind them to those things that created them: liberty, refinement, progress of the human spirit and commerce.
Personalities like Adam Smith and David Hume receive a whole sub-chapter in Arthur Herman’s book. The historian thoroughly examines their theories and, adopting a fairly balanced tone, emphasizes the innovations these theories present. The author’s balance is evident when, after having extolled concepts like Smith’s division of labour, he also points out to the Scottish thinker’s worries about the effects of capitalism: corruption and the cultural costs.

In the second part of his book, Herman shows how Scottish personalities like James Watt, Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson influenced the rest of the world. This influence is a blend of values, judgements and education received by the Scottish leaders, a blend that Herman says refers to what we are tempted to call the ‘American cultural type’ but which in fact is of Scottish origin. This part is also a short history of the Scots’ colonization of North America, Australia – a former British penal colony – and New Zealand.
Following the Scottish example of education, colonists in North America – of which many where, in fact, Scottish-born – developed a humanistic curriculum comprising the study of ancient as well as modern political thinkers. No wonder that this system based on the principles of free society firmly stood against Parliament’s efforts to tax and regulate the internal affairs, the author says. No wonder that the feelings that animated the spirit of the American Revolution first originated in this Scottish-like prototype, characterised by “an independent intellect combined with an assertive self-respect, and grounded by a strong sense of moral purpose” and vigurously promoting the free exchange of ideas.
Literature stands as another example of Scottish cultural representation. What Walter Scott created by his Rob Roy and Guy Mannering was, according to Herman, an identity highly perceived as ‘national’ and ‘characteristic’ for the Scots: the myth of the noble Highlander with its attire composed of kilts, bonnets, tartans, bagpipes and Gaelic battle songs.
The author uses two interesting terms in this section. The first, brain-drain, has exaclty the same meaning as today, but what is important is that its advantages were already self-evident practice way down to the 19th century. The second, liberal imperialism, points out to the spreading of the liberal philosophy across the world. In the author’s view, this kind of imperialism has good connotations, because it imposes “better schools, more just laws, more prosperous towns and cities, more money in ordinary people’s pockets and more food on their tables.”
The danger in this phrase lies in the word “better”, as good is hard to define in, let’s say, an islamic or buddhist society. It was a positive good what Charles James Napier succeeded in India: economic, as well as religious reforms – the banning of ‘suttee’ (a widow is burned on a funeral pyre after her husband’s death); however, according to the Brahmin priests, this kind of good faced allegations of ‘interfering with an important national custom’.
Arthur Herman’s book is intellectually challenging. The reader need not remember figures, as the important ones will speak for themselves. What he will get, instead, is a flow of occurances that will naturally be borne in his mind and will explain him the ‘why’ and ‘how’ thing. Additionally, he will cast a thoroughly glance on how the Scottish greatest intellects intertwined to give birth to, as the author says, “the true story of how wastern Europe’s poorest nation created our world and everything in it”.