Bookshelf

THE COMINGLED CODE: Open Source and Economic Development
by Josh Lerner and Mark Schankerman

Discussions of the economic impact of open source software often generate more heat than light. Advocates passionately assert the benefits of open source while critics decry its effects. Missing from the debate is rigorous economic analysis and systematic economic evidence of the impact of open source on consumers, firms, and economic development in general. This book fills that gap. In The Comingled Code, Josh Lerner and Mark Schankerman, drawing on a new, large-scale database, show that open source and proprietary software interact in sometimes unexpected ways, and discuss the policy implications of these findings. The new data (from a range of countries in varying stages of development) documents the mixing of open source and proprietary software: firms sell proprietary software while contributing to open source, and users extensively mix and match the two. Lerner and Schankerman examine the ways in which software differs from other technologies in promoting economic development, what motivates individuals and firms to contribute to open source projects, how developers and users view the trade-offs between the two kinds of software, and how government policies can ensure that open source competes effectively with proprietary software and contributes to economic development.

About the Authors
Josh Lerner is Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in the Finance and Entrepreneurial Units. He is the author of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed and What to Do About It. Mark Schankerman is Professor of Economics and Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London.
MIT Press • October 2010 • $35.00

THE PHILANTHROPY OF GEORGE SOROS: Building Open Societies
by Chuck Sudetic, with an introduction by George Soros

George Soros is one of the world’s leading philanthropists. Over the past thirty years, he has provided more than $8 billion to his worldwide network of foundations: the Open Society Foundations, which have applied the concept of the open society, the cornerstone of Soros’s thinking on democracy, freedom, and human rights, in the United States and abroad. This book, written by former New York Times journalist Chuck Sudetic, marks the first exploration of George Soros’s innovative philanthropic strategies and unmatched commitment to building open societies in places where dictatorship and violent repression have been the rule for too long.

Soros is widely lauded for his brilliant financial and economic insights and investment strategies. But his philosophy-driven philanthropy and its impact are unprecedented for a private individual, and have produced remarkable results. Soros’s visionary efforts include:

• helping to topple communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union
• attempting to foster civil society in China
• initiating and nurturing global and local organizations
• fighting to overcome the drivers of war, repression, and corruption in oil- and blood-diamond states
• helping Sarajevo’s people endure three years of siege during the Bosnian War
• fighting resistant strains of TB in Russia’s jails and Lesotho’s mountains before the disease can devastate the world’s great cities
• undertaking the first attempt in history to help Europe’s most downtrodden people lift themselves from poverty and segregation
• supporting democratic resistance in Burma and building communities in Haiti’s roughest slums
• applying new methods for fighting poverty and drug addiction and reforming dysfunctional justice systems in Baltimore, New Orleans, and other U.S. cities.

The Philanthropy of George Soros reveals the thought and practice behind a lesser-known dimension of this remarkable man’s life, his goals for society,
and his underlying vision for the future.

About the Author
Chuck Sudetic is a former reporter for The New York Times, and is the author of Blood and Vengeance, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a “Book of the Year” by The Economist and the Washington Post. He has written for The Economist, Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and other periodicals, and is a writer for the Open Society Institute.
Public Affairs • May 2011 • $28.99

THE INFORMATION: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

About the Author
James Gleick is our leading chronicler of science and modern technology. His first book, Chaos, a National Book Award finalist, has been translated into twenty five languages. His best-selling biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, were short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize.
Pantheon Books • March 2011 • $29.95

THE NET DELUSION: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov

The internet will set us free—or will it? In this spirited critique of “internet freedom,” blogger and commentator Evgeny Morozov shows how social media and web 2.0 do not always foster civic engagement and democratic reform. In fact, the net can make authoritarian governments even more powerful and repressive.

“The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital entertainment. Could the recent Western obsession with promoting democracy by digital means backfire?

In this spirited book, journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western
do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder—not easier—to promote democracy. Buzzwords like “21st-century statecraft” sound good in PowerPoint presentations, but the reality is that “digital diplomacy” requires just as much oversight and consideration as any other kind of diplomacy.

Marshaling compelling evidence, Morozov shows why we must stop thinking of the Internet and social media as inherently liberating and why ambitious and seemingly noble initiatives like the promotion of “Internet freedom” might have disastrous implications for the future of democracy as a whole.

About the Author
Evgeny Morozov is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and Boston Review and a Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation. Morozov is currently also a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He was previously a Yahoo! Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York, where he remains on the board of the Information Program. Morozov’s writings have appeared in the Economist, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, Slate, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the San Francisco Chronicle, Prospect, Dissent, and many other publications.
Public Affairs • January 2011 • $27.95

HOW INFORMATION MATTERS: Networks and Public Policy Innovation
by Kathleen Hale

How Information Matters examines the ways a network of state and local governments and nonprofit organizations can enhance the capacity for successful policy change by public administrators. Hale examines drug courts, programs that typify the highly networked, collaborative environment of public administrators today. These “special dockets” implement justice but also drug treatment, case management, drug testing, and incentive programs for nonviolent offenders in lieu of jail time. In a study that spans more than two decades, Hale shows how organizations within the network act to champion, challenge, and support policy innovations over time. Her description of interactions between courts, administrative agencies, and national organizations highlight the evolution of collaborative governance in the state and local arena, with vignettes that share specific experiences across six states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, and Tennessee) and ways that they acquired knowledge from the network to make decisions.

How Information Matters offers valuable insight into successful collaboration and capacity building. It will be of special interest to public administrators or policy makers who wish to improve their own programs’ performance.
Georgetown University Press • March 2011 • $29.95

UNDERSTANDING KNOWLEDGE AS A COMMONS: From Theory to Practice
Edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom

Knowledge in digital form offers unprecedented access to information through the Internet but at the same time is subject to ever-greater restrictions through intellectual property legislation, overpatenting, licensing, overpricing, and lack of preservation. Looking at knowledge as a commons—as a shared resource— allows us to understand both its limitless possibilities and what threatens it. In Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, experts from a range of disciplines discuss the knowledge commons in the digital era—how to conceptualize it, protect it, and build it.

Contributors consider the concept of the commons historically and offer an analytical framework for understanding knowledge as a shared social-ecological system. They look at ways to guard against enclosure of the knowledge commons, considering, among other topics, the role of research libraries, the advantages of making scholarly material available outside the academy, and the problem of disappearing web pages. They discuss the role of intellectual property in a new knowledge commons, the open access movement (including possible funding models for scholarly publications), the development of associational commons, the application of a free or open source framework to scientific knowledge, and the effect on scholarly communication of collaborative communities within academia. They offer a case study of EconPort, an open access, open source digital library for students and researchers in microeconomics. The essays clarify critical issues that arise within these new types of commons—and offer guideposts for future theory and practice.

Contributors: David Bollier, James Boyle, James C. Cox, Shubha Ghosh, Charlotte Hess, Nancy Kranich, Peter Levine, Wendy Pradt Lougee, Elinor Ostrom, Charles Schweik, Peter Suber, J. Todd Swarthout, Donald Waters.

About the Editors
Charlotte Hess is Director of the Digital Library of the Commons at Indiana University. Elinor Ostrom is Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science,
Codirector of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, and Codirector of the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population,
and Environmental Change (CIPEC) at Indiana University. Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
MIT Press • December 2006 • $20.00

WORLD BANK PUBLICATIONS

ACCOUNTABILITY THROUGH PUBLIC OPINION: From Inertia to Public Action
Editors: Sina Odugbemi and Taeku Lee

“Accountability ” has become a buzzword in international development. Development actors appear to delight in announcing their intention to “promote accountability”—but it is often unclear what accountability is and how it can be promoted. This book addresses some questions that are crucial to understanding accountability and why it is important for improving the effectiveness of development aid. We ask: What does it mean to make governments accountable to their citizens? How do you do that? How do you create genuine demand for accountability among citizens, how do you move citizens from inertia
to public action?

The main argument of this book is that accountability is a matter of public opinion. Governments will only be accountable if there are incentives for them to do so—and only an active and critical public will change the incentives to make government officials responsive to citizens’ demands. Accountability
without public opinion is a technocratic, but not an effective, solution.

In this book, more than 30 accountability practitioners and thinkers discuss the concept and its structural conditions; the relationship between accountability, information, and the media; the role of deliberation to promote accountability; and mechanisms and tools to mobilize public opinion. A number of case studies from around the world illustrate the main argument of the book: Public opinion matters and an active and critical public is the surest means to achieve accountability that will benefit the citizens in developing countries.

This book is designed for policy makers and governance specialists within the international development community, national governments, grassroots organizations, activists, and scholars engaged in understanding the interaction between accountability and public opinion and their role in increasing the effectiveness of international development interventions.
The World Bank • May 2011 • $45.00

BOOK REVIEWS

THE RELENTLESS REVOLUTION: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby

Reviewed by Michael Woolcock, World Bank Development Economics group.

This wonderful book, a deft synthesis of institutional economics and comparative sociology, seeks to account for the unlikely origins of capitalism in early-modern England, its subsequent uptake and expansion around the globe, and the awkward mixture of wealth and dislocation it continues to generate today. Appleby (a historian) argues that capitalism’s defining characteristic has been its unleashing of relentless processes of change, continuously altering
everything from ideas, identity, and expectations to institutions, class relations, and risk management strategies. Most people for most of history have lived at the mercy of nature, rulers and strangers, unable (and thus unwilling) to either raise productivity, to curb predatory behavior by elites and foreigners, or to trade with those beyond their communal group. Capitalism permanently altered all three; where other nations (Spain, Portugal, China) in earlier times may have made
important scientific, geographic or organizational discoveries, none of these achievements fundamentally altered how the world was experienced, explained,
or exploited. It’s hard not to conclude that today’s development professionals are the apostles of this ongoing revolution, actively promoting its virtues (health,
education, empowerment) but unfortunately much less aware of the discontents that necessarily accompany them.
Norton • 2010

THE MASTER SWITCH: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu

Reviewed by Shanthi Kalathil, World Bank Consultant, Communication for Governance & Accountability Program (CommGAP).

Within U.S. technology and media circles, Tim Wu’s recent book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires has made quite a splash. Implicitly challenging the idea that “information wants to be free,” Wu shows that information, and the various media that have arisen to channel it, is inevitably
shaped (and often contained) by cultural, political and, particularly, economic structures and incentives. The book has circulated less widely in development circles, but its arguments are thought provoking for anyone who seeks to support freedom of expression as a function of good governance. In particular, Wu’s discussion of the role of information monopolies in restricting free expression deserves greater attention by those in the field of independent media development, where emphasis is often disproportionately placed on the technical and professional proficiency of journalists. Master Switch is a relevant read for all those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the market factors affecting the flow of information.
Knopf • 2010

THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ORDER 
by Francis Fukuyama

Reviewed by Verena Maria Fritz, Governance Specialist, The World Bank.

This is a book you should read—although it is probably best to read it with a grain of salt. Fukuyama provides a sweeping history of political orders; and
historians will certainly find room for disagreement on some interpretations. This book is volume one of a planned two volume set: prehistoric times to the
French Revolution are covered in the first, while the period since the French Revolution is to be covered in the second.

Fukuyama himself proclaims this book in the tradition of Max Weber and Samuel Huntington who was his teacher at Harvard University. The book focuses on how “modern” political orders emerge, taking a broad comparative look at state formation in China, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe. Fukuyama identifies patrimonialism, defined as the tendency to hire family and loyalists rather than recruiting a bureaucracy along meritocratic lines, as the default option for larger political orders. In contrast, modern political orders for him are marked by movement toward a meritocracy and away from family networks. Historically, building a dedicated bureaucracy has included drastic measures such as employing eunuchs, slaves captured from their families as children as in the Ottoman Empire, or the imposition of celibacy by the Catholic church as it sought to build its institutional strength. He complements this with a discussion of the relationship between the state and religion, and between the “top executive” and other centers of power, with a view to explaining why and how notions of the rule of law and of accountability emerged, and more so in some places than in others.
Farrar Straus and Giroux • 2011

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