It's obvious - John Hedges knows his topic. In this book, he brings together an enormous amount of information on Neolithic Orkney and gives it summary and scholarly analysis. If you're looking for a book on life during the Neolithic, this is a definite! Worth every penny.

The distant human past is visible in the Orkneys, the low green islands in the sea north of Scotland. People who lived there five thousand years ago built fine stone tombs and henges older than the Pyramids.

They watched the sky and kept calendars. And they used the right triangle of Pythagoras two thousand years before Pythagoras was born.

It used to be thought that culture slowly radiated north from the Mediterranean to ignorant savages in northern Europe.

But the people of the Orkneys turned our ideas about cultural diffusion upside down.

Tomb of the Eagles is their enthralling story.

Isbister is an economist and an administrator of a Californian public university where many students have immigrant backgrounds. He is pro-immigration; don't be scared. He does a good job in fleshing out the debate. However, if the reader knows about the general arguments over immigration, this book offers little new. At times, it gets bogged down in the economics behind the controversy. If I knew nothing on the matter, I would find this book quite informative. Because I know a little more than that, I wasn't especially pleased here.

Much of the clarity and conciseness that marked the 3rd edition of this work as an excellent introduction to the study of underdevelopment has been lost in the 4th edition. I have used the 3rd edition several times in the past two years as a primary text for a college-level course dealing with Third World culture and politics. This semester, I moved perforce to the 4th edition and have noted that my students (most of whom are having their first exposure to international political economy and who are neither political science nor economics majors) are having far more difficulty in comprehending the theoretical bases for explaining underdevelopment than they have had in the past. In short, the 4th edition is a step backwards and is somewhat disappointing. In my opinion, the 4th edition of this work has replaced an excellent resource with merely a good one.

I would like to say that this book is as bad as it gets, but I've learned that such optimism is rarely justified. I can say no more, then, than that Capitalism and Justice is the most flagrant example of economic casuistry that I've run across to date.

The general, and supportable, thesis is that moral considerations require a certain amount of intervention in the economy and our personal lives in order to correct the amoral influence of free markets. Nothing that you won't find in cocktail party conversations anywhere within fifty miles of an ocean. This book does not do a very good job of the demonstration.

A synopsis of Isbister's discussion of equality should do to show exactly how vapid his arguments are. After examining some justifications for equality as a moral postulate (including Rawls), he denies that any are viable. Since he wants to base his analysis of justice (particularly income inequality) on equality, freedom, and efficiency, obviously he needs to give us a reason why we should. Citing the Declaration of Independence, he decides that he can simply assume equality is good, and go on from there.

Now, he has to decide which sort of equality to use, and so sets up a false dichotomy: should it be equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? The most obvious third choice (equality under the law) is discussed later in a different context (freedom), but what he does with these two is hilarious. He looks at what he wants to call fair, and stipulates that someone who works harder should receive more; therefore he eschews the later equality and prefers the former, which are obviously contradictory in this context. However, he notes, that if outcomes are different for one generation, then opportunities are different for the next; therefore the one implies the other. Rather than note that this is a real problem to which a real solution is needed (such as only using equality of outcomes), he just calls this an "indeterminacy" and decides to apply both principles to income distributions.

How does he do this? He decides that having a 1:1, or equal, distribution of incomes is neither possible nor good, so there must be a larger one. What is it? 8:1; specifically, $20,000 to $160,000. Why? "This is the roughest and most intuitive of conclusions." He guessed. The distribution should also be Gaussian, he says, even though he admits that supervisors should usually be paid more than their subordinates, which would normally imply something closer to a gamma distribution.
About seventy percent of us already fall into the category given (including children under eighteen, college students and retired people and not including all redistributive programs). Why we should put any effort into modifying the income distribution is not given.

His account of freedom is similarly insipid (using the kind of analysis of liberty that the Soviets used as a rationalization), and his criticisms of Nozick are inept. He tells us that it is not just for us to willingly give a quarter to Wilt Chamberlain to see him play, or at least for him to keep the money, because part of the reason he was so good is that he's so much taller than we.

Isbister also looks at the nature of capitalism, globalization, and the environment with just as much insight.

I wonder whom this book was meant for. It is certainly not a scholarly tome, nor is it introductory. Nowhere does it look like a book meant for history. It's really just the sort of thing that Isbister probably talks about once the vodka martinis start flowing out of the mouths of fountains camouflaged as busts of Marx at the college library; it's a book meant to show his friends how dedicated he is to the cause.

If you're considering this book, I'd suggest leafing through it at the library before buying it to make sure it's your cup of tea.