The J Curve - A new way to understand why nations rise and fall, by Ian Bremmer
Ahhh…economics. I’ve done a bit of economics at uni. You know the one - more graphs without units on their axes than you can poke a stick at (and of course, as anyone with an engineering/physics/maths background will tell you, this is “really bad” TM). Eco101 is actually quite valuable in a degree - I don’t know why more courses don’t insist on it. If you haven’t done it then I’ll present you the first three weeks of the course through the next graph.
The curve can move up or down depending on some country-specific factors. If the price of oil rises, for example, a country that is a large exporter of oil will receive more money which enables the government to increase the stability of the country without having to increase its openness.
Ok, got that? Note the lack of units? Note how the graph isn’t defined for all values of price? Ok - that’s all you need to know.
Welll…I tell a lie, actually. It’s not all you need to know, it’s all my economics lecturers implied I needed to know. The thing is, the most important factor in a market is consumers. Consumers are not rational. Therefore, whilst drawing up silly graphs might be fine in theory, in practise observations of consumer behaviour don’t fit to the pretty lines.
(At this point, if you’re still reading you’re probably vaguely interested in the subject matter. Good on you! Here’s a reward. Jessica Hagy’s website contains more graphs without units on their axes but they’re really funny/thoughtful graphs and Venn diagrams. It’s a like a social mathematician’s ultimate comic.)
But wait, isn’t this review filed under ‘Politics’? Yes it is. Bremmer’s book discusses the stability of nations being a function of how open they are to the outside world. If you were to plot stability versus openness the graph would look a bit like the letter ‘J’, hence the title.
So just looking at the J Curve graphically what can we imply? Nations that are closed (left side countries) can be more stable than slightly more open countries but cannot ever be as stable as the most open countries (right side countries). We can also see that for a country to progress from a very open system to a very closed one (or vice versa) it must, at some point, suffer a period of instability (the depths of the J curve) as it transitions.
The curve can also move up or down depending on some country-specific factors. For a large exporter of oil, a rise in the price of oil gives the government more money which it can use to increase the stability of the country without making it more open. Hence, the entire J curve rises upwards.
Finally, notice the slope of the graph. It is easy for a left side nation to fall into the depths of the curve quite quickly but it will take a right side state a lot more effort to do so. Likewise, little effort is required for a close state to reach stability but an open state has to work much harder to achieve the same level.
That, in a nutshell, is the gist of chapter 1. The remainder of the book discusses three far left side nations (North Korea, Cuba and Iraq under Saddam), three borderline left side nations (Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia), two nations in (at the time) the depths of the curve (South Africa and Yugoslavia) and three right side nations (Turkey, Israel and India). The penultimate chapter is devoted entirely to China, such is the importance Bremmer places on it.
In each of these country dossiers Bremmer gives the reader a brief history of the country in question, then justifies why it resides on the given point of the J curve. Although on the whole I found these parts fascinating, as I ploughed through I began to find Bremmer’s language to be somewhat repetitive - I felt that it went beyond hammering home his message.
In the end I found myself agreeing with Bremmer’s central concept. The model holds up well, although as he notes, China is attempting to cross from the left to the right of the curve without bottoming out into chaos so time will tell as to whether the model is broken by the worlds most populous nation.
Having said all of that I would hesitate to recommend this book to someone with only a passing interest in world politics and/or history. As I mentioned, I didn’t find the pages slipping away under my fingers. It certainly is a book for thinking. It is not, as the cover jacket suggests, the Freakonomics of world political books. This will not bring a whole new group of people who have never cared about politics before to the field. It will most likely only interest people with an existing affection for global politics.
So…to buy or not to buy? I’d suggest getting it
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