Philobiblon

Over on Blogcritics I’ve got a review of a development book written by an economist: The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save it From Itself by Lawrence E. Harrison. His heart is in the right place, but the idea that you can decide what is the “right” culture for development (without even debating what “development” is), work out how to get to that by ticking a series of boxes (and getting a resulting culture that looks very like your own) is a little on the simplistic side. Indeed after reading it, you understand why US foreign policy so often gets it horribly wrong.