Brookings Press Blog

What’s on your bookshelf, Ben Bernanke? A copy of the Brookings Press book “Too Big To Fail”

Photo Credit: Christopher Morris for TIME

Ben Bernanke was recently named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year. A photo of the Fed Chair’s bookshelf is included alongside his interview in the print edition, and the publication points out that his collection includes the prescient Brookings Press book Too Big To Fail. When first published in 2004, the book’s authors Gary Stern and Ron Feldman cautioned that the belief that some financial institutions were “too big to fail” was a serious problem and they believed the situation was getting worse and needed attention. Unfortunately, Stern and Feldman’s warning went unheeded, and as a result, the U.S. government spent billions of dollars over the past two years rescuing large financial institutions such as Citigroup, AIG, and Bear Stearns.

The paperback edition of Too Big to Fail, published in April 2009, includes a timely new preface, with recommendations that should constitute a core part of any new approach to managing TBTF.

- Learn more about Too Big to Fail

- See Bernanke’s bookshelf

 

Books on Climate Change

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference enters its second week in Copenhagen, negotiators from around the world are still at odds over a number of issues. Brookings Press has published a number of books in recent years that illuminate the issues at hand.

In Global Warming: Looking beyond Kyoto, some of the best-known and respected authorities in climate policy—including members of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—provide a comprehensive agenda for global collective action. Representing both industrialized and developing nations, the contributors present a thought-provoking examination of the economic, social, and political context of climate policy within their countries.

Although international attention has focused primarily on the industrial and energy sectors, the agriculture, forestry, and land use sector is a major driver of the climate change problem. Thus, it must also be an integral part of the solution. In Climate Change and Forests: Emerging Policy and Market Opportunities international experts explain the links between climate change and forests, highlighting the potential role of this sector within emerging climate policy frameworks and carbon markets.

Increasingly, climate change and development are two sides of the same coin. Climate Change and Global Poverty: A Billion Lives in the Balance? draws on expertise from the climate change and development communities to ask how the public and private sectors can help the world's poor manage the global climate crisis.

Climate change threatens not only the environment but global peace and security as well. Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change brings together experts on climate science, foreign policy, political science, oceanography, history, and national security to take measure of these risks. Its editor, Kurt Campbell, currently serves the Obama administration as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

And as policymakers strive toward a post-2012 climate change framework, the success of the trading system in building a relatively successful international institution might provide lessons for the climate change system. Climate Change, Trade, and Competitiveness: Is a Collision Inevitable? examines the relationship between climate change and trade and lays out the complex decisions facing policymakers.

- Learn more about Global Warming

- Learn more about Climate Change and Forests

- Learn more about Climate Change and Global Poverty

- Learn more about Climatic Cataclysm

- Learn more about Climate Change, Trade, and Competitiveness

Ben Wittes, author of “Legislating the War on Terror,” on closing of Gitmo Bay, trials of 9/11 terror suspects in U.S.

The attacks of 9/11 and subsequent American actions irrevocably changed the political, military, and legal landscapes of U.S. national security. Terrorists threw out the old rules of war, and the United States is still trying to decide upon new ones. Taking a step in that direction, the Obama administration announced that it would try accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators in New York. Benjamin Wittes, author of Legislating the War on Terror, recently participated in a web chat on the upcoming trial and President Obama’s plans for closing Guantánamo Bay.

During the chat, Wittes said:

The risks of trial in federal court are a combination of logistical problems, court rules that make terrorism trials challenging, and security challenges these cases pose for judges, prosecutors, and jurors. By contrast, military commissions have addressed some of these issues, but they create issues of their own. Most serious is the fact that the government has actually had great difficulty getting this system off the ground. There have been only three military commission convictions since 9/11 and no satisfyingly long sentences.

- Read the full chat transcript.

In a video interview, Wittes also discusses the prosecutions, the risks for the administration, and why critics are ready to pounce if the process falters.

- Watch the interview.
- Learn more about Legislating the War on Terror.

Vanda Felbab-Brown Analyzes the President’s Strategy in Afghanistan

What impact will the deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. troops have on Afghanistan? Is military force effective on its own as a means of counterinsurgency? What about alternatives to the announced strategy, such as immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan or continuing with current troop deployments? Vanda Felbab-Brown, author of the just published book Shooting Up, answers these and other questions about President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy in a piece on the Brookings website.

Commenting on the differences between the strategies pursued by Presidents Bush and Obama, Felbab-Brown observes: “Under President Bush, the strategy remained . . . economy of force. The military effort, as well as the development effort, was never sufficiently resourced to allow for a sustainable momentum to develop on the side of the Afghan government and NATO. President Obama’s commitment of additional multifaceted resources provides an opportunity—though far from a guaranteed outcome—that such a strategic reversal will be achieved. Also, under President Obama’s strategy, there is, for the first time, a clear emphasis on the quality of governance and a sense that Afghan leaders need to be held accountable to the Afghan people and their international partners. There are no more blank checks. Finally, there is now a far stronger emphasis on the regional aspects of the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and the need to involve all of the important stakeholders in the region and worldwide.”

"Creating an Opportunity Society" discussed by Ron Brownstein in National Journal and Duncan Currie in National Review

This important new book by Brookings senior fellows Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill continues to receive coverage, garner praise, and spur discussion. In the National Journal, Ron Brownstein said that the book “collects decades of pragmatic insights into the challenge of re-creating an economy that works for all.”

In the National Review, Duncan Currie writes that policymakers “will find a veritable armory of intellectual firepower in Creating an Opportunity Society. . . . The authors have thought long and carefully about their subject matter. In many ways, their fair-minded and illuminating discussion is even more valuable than their proposals. Creating an Opportunity Society overflows with keen social and economic insights. It deserves the attention of conservative and liberal policymakers alike.”

- Learn more about author Ron Haskins

- Learn more about author Isabel Sawhill

- Read about Creating an Opportunity Society and view an interview with the authors

Chad Bown Op-Ed in Asian Wall Street Journal: “Free-Trade Greenshoots”

Recessions often bring high tariffs and trade wars, and recent figures from the World Bank show that industry requests for trade barriers are up 30% over the past year. But according to Chad Bown, there is cause for optimism as well. In an op-ed in the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal, Bown writes that the "global economy may still stay on a pro-trade path." He points to a recent U.S. government decision to deny new trade barriers on imports of aluminum pistons from Argentina and China's use of the World Trade Organization to formally question barriers instead of resorting to retaliatory measures. Bown discusses the WTO's dispute settlement system in his new book Self-Enforcing Trade: Developing Countries and WTO Dispute Settlement.

- Read the op-ed

- Learn more about Self-Enforcing Trade

“Performance Incentives” in Education Week: Article Discusses Authors’ Findings on Using Pay for Educational Change

Education Week takes a look at the research presented in Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education edited by Matthew G. Springer:

While much of the national debate over performance incentives for teachers has centered on bonuses based on student test scores, a new book suggests that such incentives come in all shapes and sizes, and offers some new research on little-studied aspects of those strategies.

The articles goes on to discuss the potential of incentives for weeding out ineffective teachers, retaining good ones, and recruiting hard-to-staff schools.

- Read the full article

- Learn more about Performance Incentives

South Asia expert Bruce Riedel talks with PBS NewsHour on President Obama’s options in region and his book "The Search for al Qaeda"

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and chair of President Obama’s interagency review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, was recently interviewed on the PBS NewsHour. He spoke with Margaret Warner about the administration’s strategic options in Afghanistan and his book The Search for al Qaeda.

From the interview:

MARGARET WARNER: Now, in the strategy review, and also in your book, you advocated and advocate massive investment in development, in economic security, in governance.

There are again many who say Afghanistan's never had a strong central government, a strong functioning operation like that, and that it's really a fool's errand for us to get mired in that.

BRUCE RIEDEL: Afghanistan shouldn't be measured against the standards of the United States or Western Europe. It should be measured against the standards of the region it works in.

We don't have to build a modern state in Afghanistan to improve it. Simply building roads, so that farmers can get their crops to market, will fundamentally change the dynamics of this country.

- Read the full transcript or watch the video

- Learn more about The Search for al Qaeda

Will Sarah Palin be the 2012 Republican nominee for president? How the GOP’s winner-take-all primaries could boost her chances

The release of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, is creating a lot of buzz. Many political observers wonder if her book tour is laying the groundwork for a run for president in 2012. Could such a polarizing figure win the Republican nomination?  Walter Shapiro outlines a possible scenario in his Politics Daily column.

Republican Party rules are made-to-order for a well-funded insurgent named Sarah to sweep the primaries before anyone figures out how to stop her. If Palin can maintain, say, 35-percent support in a multi-candidate presidential field, then she is the odds-on favorite for the GOP nomination.

The secret of Palin's presidential potential is the Republican Party's affection for winner-take-all primaries. According to my friend Elaine Kamarck's invaluable new book, Primary Politics, 43 percent of the 2008 Republican delegates were selected in primaries where the winner corralled all the delegates by winning a state or congressional district.

Illustrating how candidates have used the delegate counts to create momentum is one of the topics Kamarck discusses in Primary Politics. The book offers an insider’s view of how the presidential nomination process became the often baffling system we have today.

- Read the full article

- Learn more about Primary Politics

Clive Crook discusses “Creating an Opportunity Society” in Financial Times: “book is full of excellent analysis and proposals”

In his Financial Times column, Clive Crook finds much to like in Creating an Opportunity Society, the new book by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill.

The great virtue of this book—a comprehensive policy manual and the outline of a new social contract—is not just in recognizing that upward mobility in the U.S. is less than it should be, but is in calling for action, and in insisting on fiscal discipline. Its real strength is its distinctively American remedies, with their emphasis on rewarding effort rather than idleness, and insisting on personal responsibility.

Crook applauds the bold centrist and fiscally responsible policies Haskins and Sawhill outline to beef up spending on early education, improve schools, provide incentives to work, and postpone having children until after marriage.

- Read the column

- Learn more about Creating an Opportunity Society