Developing China's West: A Critical Path to Balanced National Development

employment. Government funding of LETS office workers, the authors argue, would raise skills development and facilitate employment creation. However, this seems subject to the ‘‘fallacy of composition. ’’ Active labor market policies, which were pioneered in Scandinavia, create employment by reducing the mismatch between supply and demand for labor. However, it is only when there is a skills shortage that this channel operates, and such would not appear to be the case for administrative workers. The chapter does have a very practical policy suggestion about clarifying the system for welfare claimants so that LETS work will not result in benefit reductions. The chapter by Jacobs on the ‘‘back-to-the-land’’ movement in the United States suggests that an environmentally sustainable ‘‘neo-yeoman’’ agricultural strategy is possible through the introduction of ‘‘green taxes’’ that force corporate agriculture to internalize its externalities. To make this politically viable, a twentyyear phase-in and distribution of relevant tax revenues to lowand middle-income earners via tax cuts is suggested. This is a fascinating, provocative, and, at times, profound book. It is often recognized that the state and civil society are arenas of social struggle, and one of the things this book brings out is that the market is as well. Sometimes, however, there are sweeping generalizations in the introductory and concluding chapters by the editors; for example, they claim that all economies must be class based and, consequently, are inherently conflictual (p. 194). This neglects the fact that the economy, constructed as a separate sphere of social life, is a relatively recent phenomenon. The persistence of subsistence hunter/gatherer societies in parts of the developing world belies such a claim. Another claim that stands out is that all economic geographies are utopian, and in order to be involved within neoliberal capitalist economic geographies, people ‘‘must be continuously persuaded that their involvement in them is the means for achieving this utopia’’ (p. 195). There are two problems with this: (1) mainstream and alternative economic spaces are, to some extent, mutually constitutive; and (2) it is very doubtful that the hundreds of millions of people struggling to survive on the margins of subsistenceFor many others, for that matterFbelieve they are involved in the creation of utopia. The other criticism I have of this book is its inattention to the developing world, and relatedly, despite its title, its emphasis on places rather than geographical spaces. All of the chapters, except one, focus on the United Kingdom. The only reference to the developing world in the whole book is to James Ferguson’s anthropological work in Zambia. There are some major problems associated with this. First, many of the authors are pessimistic about the potential of alternatives, perhaps precisely because of the limited geographic scope of the work and greater ‘‘success’’ of the mainstream economy in the United Kingdom. Argentina in the aftermath of its financial crisis has been the site of massive investment in alternative economic institutions, such as regional currencies and worker takeovers of failed factories. Women’s World Banking, founded in Ghana, has built a membership in the millions across dozens of countries. Economic geographers working in the developing world must be conscious of developments in the global core. Given our commitment to understanding the importance of geographic diversity, the same should apply in reverse. These criticisms notwithstanding, this is an excellent, timely, and provocative bookFa must-read for students of economic and social geography.