False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World

[November 2009] The book opens with late 2001. What if Argentina and United States had traded places? Over the course of less than a century, why did the trajectories of two countries differ so much? This immediately piqued my interest. The continued narrative was compelling, but not quite as riveting as I hoped. The remainder of the chapters fell in to a similar pattern. They started out with a punch, but then seemed to drop it to meander around some ho-hum economic history. The contents are all fairly well written and interesting, but not as good as would be expected from the initial 'hits'.