Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The End of Power starts like dynamite. Moises Naim, an extremely well-respected and well-informed author (he thanks everybody who's anybody in the acknowledgments except perhaps for David Beckham) is truly on fire to begin with. He starts the book by telling you what power is. He defines it as the ability to make others do what you want them to do. It's not about the size of your army or your nuclear stockpile or your advertising budget. It's the ability to get your way. Next, he sets up a matrix, Mc Kinsey style. Two types of power, hard and soft. And each breaks down in two. So hard power breaks down to coercion and bribery. Soft power breaks down to code and persuasion. So "if you don't eat your broccoli you don't get to play with Lego" as well as "if you don't eat your broccoli you'll have a spanking" are both coercion. On the other hand "if you eat your broccoli you can then have ice cream" is bribery. That's hard power, because I have ways to make you change your mind. On the other hand if the pope says you should practice abstinence, that's soft power, he can't do much to keep you chaste. He sets a moral code and that's that. Similarly, if Patek Philippe buy the back cover of the Economist every week and your wife asks you for a diamond-crusted watch (or you decide to buy a little something for the next generation) that's persuasion, but there's nothing in it for you directly. And of course power is seldom on one vector only. The pope, for example, may be going beyond code. If you don't follow his rules, it may later cost you salvation. And if you do, you might go to heaven. So you could argue it's 70% code, 15% coercion and 15% bribery. You get the idea. With those analytical tools in place, the author then explains that three revolutions have taken place, all of which significantly limit power today. The "more" revolution is self-explanatory. For example, the UN had 55 members in the forties, it has 197 members today. There are more countries out there and that makes for more voices, more alliances and more freedom. The "mobility" revolution is a bit of a misnomer. It is meant to be a catch-all that accounts for a bunch of concepts. Ideas move quicker because information is spreading faster. People can move more, but it's mainly figurative. Technology allows a doctor in India to look at your x-rays, for example, and that's as good as having him there in the ward. Phone cards (which Moses Naim rates higher in impact than the Internet so far in terms of shrinking our world) have made it possible for emigrants to stay in touch with their families etc. In summary, distances are much shorter than they used to be, all borders have become porous, there's no longer such thing as a captive audience, and that limits local power. The "mentality" revolution is the third major force that attenuates power worldwide and, to cut a long story short, it's to do with the fact that ideology across the world seems to be converging toward more liberal ideals, but also with the thing that people have the tools and the information to think for themselves. You can already discern that the three "revolutions" are a bit blurred. Maybe the need to get them all start with an M had an influence. Frankly, getting them all to be adjectives or nouns might have helped more, from where I'm sitting. Less facetiously, the author never, not once, goes back to applying the "three revolutions" to the four-way setup that defines power. He quotes from everybody, he lays out a million examples, he writes extremely well, but with the best possible intentions I failed to see why he introduced the whole setup only to never use it again. You do learn a lot from reading the book. For example, you learn about the decline of Catholicism in Latin America, you learn about the uncontestable spread of democracy across the world, the journey you embark on with Moises Naim is never boring or tedious. The destination, however, is unclear. The intention of the book was to convince me that we face the End of Power. The only thing I took away is that the world is a lot more complex than it used to be and a lot more difficult to analyze with the tools we have. But I would have loved an attempt at using the tools, especially after I've seen them laid out. So this would be a three star book from my angle, but I've taken one off, to reflect that the author quotes Tom Friedman. Please give us all a break! I jest. I took off the third point because the author totally mangles the concept of Entropy, with which I am familiar from the Thermodynamics I studied a long time ago. In reading a book, I trust an author to know what he's talking about. I caught him out in Entropy, but my trust in his ability to analyze rather than quote, got shattered. Shame, because when I started reading The End of Power I could not get enough of telling everybody how much I was enjoying it. As I ploughed my way through, it became increasingly evident that Moises Naim was going to fail to convince me of his main thesis. "Being confused about more difficult problems" would actually have cut it for me. But I'm merely unconvinced.