REYNOLDS

Up the Down Dollar By Edward Meadows Anchor, 280 pp., $10.95 Here is a case where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. The instructive passages and sharp insights to be found in this book do not quite make believable the sweeping themes— one of which exhibits a confusing ambivalence about big business, which the author seems to consider technically necessary but vaguely undesirable.

Meadows rightly argues that “a lazy monopoly becomes a vulnerable monopoly except when it’s protected from competition by the government.” He is appropriately and cleverly brutal to “soft” energy and to the Schumacher notion that “small is beautiful.” Yet Meadows himself holds out a vision of electronic information technology that “offers economies of miniaturization whereby the nation’s infrastructure can recede to more human dimensions. The presumed significance falters, owing to a generally unconvincing ease against larger enterprises.

About the Author

Alan Reynolds

Alan Reynolds, National Review’s economics editor from 1972 to 1976, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Income and Wealth.

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Up the Down Dollar By Edward Meadows Anchor, 280 pp., $10.95 Here is a case where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. The instructive passages and sharp insights to be found in this book do not quite make believable the sweeping themes— one of which exhibits a confusing ambivalence about big business, which the author seems to consider technically necessary but vaguely undesirable.

Meadows rightly argues that “a lazy monopoly becomes a vulnerable monopoly except when it’s protected from competition by the government.” He is appropriately and cleverly brutal to “soft” energy and to the Schumacher notion that “small is beautiful.” Yet Meadows himself holds out a vision of electronic information technology that “offers economies of miniaturization whereby the nation’s infrastructure can recede to more human dimensions. The presumed significance falters, owing to a generally unconvincing ease against larger enterprises.