The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
by Daniel Yergin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Daniel YerginEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-12-23
ISBN: 1439110123
Number of pages: 928
Publisher: Free Press
Book Reviews of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
Book Review: Oil: Nectar of the gods or excrement of the devil?
Summary: 5 Stars
The economic development of the past 200 years has been both remarkable and entirely unanticipated. Over this period, the average person in the U.S. has been able to increase his well-being by a multiple of at least 37, using conservative measures of real per capita GDP over time.
Affordable technologies, such as the washing machine, automobile, airplane, television, medical equipment, cheap clothing, air conditioning, freight transport, etc., have enabled the common man to have access to the 19th Century equivalent of approximately 99 servants (voluntary or otherwise). The economic base of these technologies has been plentiful and cheap energy. Coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy have replaced or supplemented the labor of 19th Century servants, which was only accessible to the elites and ruling classes of the time.
Thus, in order to understand the economic development of the last 200 years, we need to understand the history of energy. In "The Prize," Daniel Yergin provides a very interesting and reasonably comprehensive history of oil. Clocking in at approximately 900 pages, Yergin documents the people, enterprises, technologies and political intrigue that have shaped our modern conception of oil. However, don't let the heft of the tome intimidate you. Yergin's writing style and storytelling are accessible and the book was hard to put down. The only downside is that the book ends at the first Iraq war and has not been updated in subsequent re-issues.
The most interesting themes in the book are as follows:
* The boom and bust cycle: The debates over peak oil have been with us from almost the very beginning of large scale oil production. Used first as an illuminate and then subsequently transformed into a source of motor power, oil has gone through several cycles of being incredibly cheap (i.e. free) to being a source of extreme anxiety over scarcity and price.
* Political conflict: The quest for oil has led to severe political conflicts and its abundance or scarcity among enemies has impacted the outcomes of several wars, particularly WWII.
* Economic rents: While the conflict over oil concessions and revenue splits has largely been resolved, Ricardian rents in oil and whether these rents should accrue primarily to the oil producers or the host countries provides an interesting real-world example of this economic concept.
* The tragedy of the commons: The manner in which oil rights are defined can lead to "over grazing" (i.e. premature exhaustion) since no one has a property right in the reserve itself. A reserve's yield is dependent on its inherent pressure and this pressure decreases as more wells are drilled to access it. Enterprises and governments have a difficult time overcoming this problem as antitrust laws collide with government sanctioned production quotas meant to alleviate overproduction.
* The resource curse: Having sovereignty over a large oil reserve is a lot like winning the lottery. Your wealth and happiness are anything but assured (e.g. Iran, Libya, and Iraq).
We consumers love the technologies and increased well-being that cheap energy enables. But, we continue to have a deep-seated concern about the impact of oil on the environment and resource dependency. Since this ambivalence will be with us for the foreseeable future, Yergin's book will continue to be relevant even though it has not been updated since the early 1990s. Recommended.
Summary of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
Deemed "the best history of oil ever written" by Business Week and with more than 300,000 copies in print, Daniel Yergin?s Pulitzer Prize?winning account of the global pursuit of oil, money, and power has been extensively updated to address the current energy crisis.
Daniel Yergin's first prize-winning book, Shattered Peace, was a history of the Cold War. Afterwards the young academic star joined the energy project of the Harvard Business School and wrote the best-seller Energy Future. Following on from there, The Prize, winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, is a comprehensive history of one of the commodities that powers the world--oil. Founded in the 19th century, the oil industry began producing kerosene for lamps and progressed to gasoline. Huge personal fortunes arose from it, and whole nations sprung out of the power politics of the oil wells. Yergin's fascinating account sweeps from early robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, to the oil crisis of the 1970s, through to the Gulf War.
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