Book review: An Optimist’s Diary

It is difficult to use labels to describe Guy Sorman — academic, columnist and author, with an interest in economics, philosophy, energy, environment and human rights will suffice. He has authored more than 20 books and there are other volumes with a more coherent structure (The American Conservative Revolution, 1983; Exit of Socialism, 1990; The Empire of Lies, 2008). There is also one specifically on India (The Genius of India, 2000). “Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut, the pessimist the hole!” That was Oscar Wilde. Guy Sorman believes in the much-maligned expressions: liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. He would prefer to say he believes in the liberal principle of free markets, with appropriate regulation. A corollary follows. When that principle of free markets has been followed, the world has become a better place. That’s the optimist’s take. Indeed, regardless of empirical indicators, one can’t dispute the world has become a better place to live in. Poverty, malnutrition, hunger, disease, lack of human rights and civil liberties, and whatever other warts and blemishes one points to, only underline that the size of the doughnut could have been larger.

But this book is an odd one. It’s described as a diary. The diary entries, arranged chronologically, span the period from spring of 2007 to August 2012. During this period, the philosophical economist has observed our world and has written on whatever has struck his fancy. Sometimes, the topic has warranted 200 words, sometimes more like 5,000. It might have been possible to organise this smorgasbord differently, such as thematically, instead of chronologically, and weeding out the really short pieces.

My favourite ones are on the real Che Guevara (not the romanticized Steven Soderbergh film) and pop economics. On Che, “The real Che, who spent most of his time as Castro’s central banker supervising executions, deserves to be better-known. Perhaps if Soderbergh’s two-part Che epic succeeds at the box office, his financial backers will want to film a more truthful sequel.”

Here is Sorman on pop economics and Joseph Stiglitz. “Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in economics, has created a new literary genre — call it pop economics… We better keep him writing fiction and basking in the cheers of Greek audiences, to whom he recommends that their country not repay its debt…Stiglitz’s Nobel Prize on market asymmetry was well deserved. His opinions on everything else are just opinions and deserve to be treated as such.” There is another essay on two Joseph Stiglitzes.

Understandably, there is more than one diary entry on the role of economists and economics. There is quite a bit on France, Europe, United States and China (which Sorman doesn’t like). The scepticism about the Asian century follows from the scepticism about China. Unlike the importance given to China (reflected in his travels there), there is little in this volume on India, directly. There is one entry on Mahatma Gandhi (a review of the Joseph Lelyveld biography). There are two that are indirectly related to the reform discourse on India, one on understanding populism and the second on a negative income tax, more popularly expressed as replacing a welfare state with a cash subsidy for the poor. The only one directly about India is titled, ‘The Battle of the Poor in New Delhi’, written in July 2010. Other than BPL numbers, this is what it says: “But bureaucrats and the old Left are of the view that the free market creates inequalities and does not do enough for the least advantaged; thus they argue against further market freedoms and for multiplying programs of direct assistance to the poor…And what a pleasure it is — and one I share with my interlocutors — to discuss anything we wish in New Delhi. In Beijing, no such discussion is possible.”

That essay, written in July 2010, still rings true. Nothing much has changed in India. But this book isn’t about India. It is about the world and Guy Sorman’s take on what is happening there. Apart from what I have said about organising it better, it is very well-written and well-translated (by Alexis Cornel). The quality of production (including the binding) doesn’t do justice to the contents. Instead of trying to keep prices down, the publisher should have invested in a table of contents and perhaps an index. As Sorman himself will tell the publisher, the experience of shortage in centrally planned economies is that artificially low prices lead to quality suffering.

On the contents, there is a lot of interesting stuff and that optimism also brushes off on you. Read the book. Focus on the doughnut and forget the hole. It isn’t a heavy book. It isn’t meant to be. It’s just a diary, which happens to be written by an economist.