Daniel Davies:
“Who’s In Charge Here” by Alan Beattie – A Field Guide To Maynards: Alan Beattie… has now written a book... “Who’s In Charge Here?”… sets out the complete mess which is the state of global financial institutions today. I will now review that book in the “London Review of Books style” – ie, by writing an essay on a tangential subject of interest to myself, and then tacking on a paragraph or so about the book at the end….
The reason I wrote [my choose-your-own-Greek-adventure] post was to try and get people to understand the sort of constraints that the international policy structure are working under. The CYOA format really is an excellent teaching tool for this sort of exercise…. [B]y framing the discussion from the viewpoint of Maynard and his boss, you really do encourage the reader to empathise with the decision makers and the problems they face.... As a propaganda tool, the CYOA structure is a great way to manipulate people…. [T]he only choices in the adventure are choices which would actually be open to a European civil servant who didn’t want to think outside the box or rock the boat too hard…. [A]lthough it is important to make a good faith attempt to understand the constraints that people work under (which is why I wrote the post), it is equally important not to regard those constraints as necessarily being imposed by Ultimate Reality….
These constraints are further explored in “Who’s In Charge?”…. I think it’s well worth buying the book and reading it, as a preparatory step for thinking about what kind of a new world system you really want to see….
It’s worth noting that “Who’s In Charge” costs £1.99 and has 60 pages, all of which are written by Alan Beattie. A typical copy of the FT costs a penny more and can have as few as 56 pages (not counting the adverts and the unit trust prices), with the vast majority of these pages not written by Alan Beattie at all, despite the fact that he is clearly one of the best journalists there. The book is clearly better value.
