My review in the New Statesman of Nicholas Phillipson's fine new biography of Adam Smith – Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life –  is available online. It's a biography that places Smith firmly in the context of his times, and contributes to the continuing rediscovery of the humanism of his thought. Surely the free market caricature of Adam Smith is on its way out?

The book was also reviewed in Saturday's Guardian by James Buchan, and by Noel Malcolm in the Telegraph.

This week sees the publication of Red Plenty, Francis Spufford's marvellous new book about Soviet Russia in the early post-war years of optimism about what central planning could deliver to the people – and why the dream failed. I trailed it on this blog a while ago. There have been some positive reviews over the weekend, and Francis Spufford wrote about the book in the Guardian recently.

Before reading the book, I'd never have believed anybody claiming that an account of shadow prices, and the formal equivalence in a general equilibrium model of a centrally planned economy and a market economy, would make for a gripping read. But here is that book, which I devoured in a couple of sessions. It captures both the hopes and the inevitable, slow failure of central economic planning. It also gives an amazing flavour of life in the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the Brezhnev era, and is a terrific introduction to that 20th century epoch for younger readers who didn't themselves experience either the terrors of the Cold War or the way our own politics was constructed around how well – or not – the USSR's economy was performing. We forget now that up until the 1980s, the western economies and the Soviet bloc were widely believed to be performing comparably well. The USSR hollowed out from the inside, and the tight control of information and dissidence meant that the rest of the world had little idea about its failures.

The book starts with the Kruschev's famous 1959 visit to the United States following the American National Exhibition in Moscow earlier that year, when more than two and a half million Soviet citizens experienced the joys of American consumerism. (Here is quite an interesting US account of the exhibition.) Through several separate strands Red Plenty then follows the efforts to ensure the Soviet economy matched US achievements, and their inevitable unravelling as the political thaw which had followed Stalin's death gave way once more to repression and state oppression. The account explains brilliantly the political and cultural reasons, as well as the economic and purely practical reasons, for the relative success of markets and failure of planning.

I have just one gripe. When Faber sent me a proof copy of Red Plenty a few months ago, the book was presented as non-fiction. Now it's being billed as 'faction'. Why the hesitation about describing it as a novel? They should describe it as the historical novel it is, and enter it for next year's Booker Prize, for which it would surely be one of the strongest contenders. But never mind – buy it and read it, especially if you're off on holiday soon.

Here is the FT's review; here is the Observer's.

One of my more serious holiday reads was Linda Polman's War Games, a serious critique by an experienced journalist of the role played by NGOs in situations of civil conflict. This is a very sobering book.

Interestingly, Polman starts and ends with a philosophical question which has hung over the aid business since its birth with the founding of the Red Cross. Its founder, Henri Dunant, debated with Florence Nightingale the concept of impartial aid. The fledgling Red Cross aided soldiers on both the Austrian and the Franco-Sardinian sides after the bloody Battle of Solferino in 1859. Dunant insisted that the assistance given to wounded soldiers had to be neutral. In correspondence with him, however, Florence Nightingale expressed disapproval. She argued that it was the responsibility of government authorities to ensure that combatants were adequately cared for, and voluntary aid simply let the proper authorities off the hook. Neutrality was a myth, she said. (An aside: here is a Guardian article on Nightingale's marvellous diagram on cause of mortality in the Crimea.)

Polman ends with the politicisation of NGOs in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan. In these conflicts, the aid agencies are inescapably seen as politically aligned with the western powers. As a result, the attempt to offer 'neutral' aid has resulted in the kidnapping and murder of aid workers. The agencies therefore huddle with the UN troops behind barbed wire and concrete, further confirming their political alignment, and making it impossible for them to work except through a chain of subcontractors, with no hope of limiting corruption or ensuring effectiveness.

In between, the book looks at a number of other examples of the perverse or even adverse impacts of NGOs in other contexts, especially Rwanda. It is a tale of almost-criminal political naivety on the part of many aid workers, self-interest on the part of the large number of people making  a well-paid career in the aid business, competition between NGOs for media attention and funds, counter-productive or simplistic journalism, distorting effects on the local economy – not to mention corrupt local governments and warlords. The bottom line is that just a small proportion of the funds raised by tapping the compassion of donors is spent on people who need relief.

One could end up concluding that it would be better to scrap the whole business of aid, but that's not Polman's conclusion. Rather, she argues that NGOs must be properly accountable, and also more tightly restricted by the co-ordinating UN agencies and forces. In most conflict and disaster zones, there are dozens or hundreds of NGOs, each competing for the media attention that will enable them to fundraise and win the next contract, so they can stay in business and grow. There are clearly too many for effective assistance to people in huge distress. Some are cowboy or maverick organisations that inflict real damage. Some readers might conclude that Polman is too generous in this conclusion, given the evidence she presents. Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid argued the case for ending 'everyday' development aid. It seems that at least some of the emergency category of aid is at least as damaging.

War Games has generated a bit of controversy, as one might expect given that it's critical of the aid business. One response, from the respected Overseas Development Institute (downloads as a pdf file), is that nobody knows how much aid is diverted by corruption or to fund arms purchases. But this seems to me simply to confirm Polman's main recommendation, namely that NGOs need to be much more transparent and accountable in tracking and reporting the uses of the funds they raise. Another criticism that's been made is that her book is just a list of anecdotes, although it's hard to see what else it could have been given the absence of transparency she highlights.

Looking at some large international NGO websites today, I was unable to find any acknowledgment of the issues raised by War Games. Nor indeed any straightforward accounting for funds in a way that would help assess either the impact of NGO spending or the proportion of money raised that goes to different uses – staff salaries, admin, campaigns, 'fees' and 'taxes' to local authorities, subcontracts, straightforward bribes – oh yes, and to ultimate recipients. I'll find it hard to take seriously any NGO campaign on, say bribes paid by multinationals, or the supply chain impacts of big business, unless I can go to their website and see a valid assessment of their own impacts.

There are other reviews of War Games on Linda Polman's home page.