In my review here of Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World I forgot to mention how amusing it is, and stuffed with anecdotes that my magpie mind adores.

For example, the origins of the Bank of America were new to me (pp141-143) – the Bank of Italy as it was known until 1930, founded by one A.P. Gianni, the self-taught son of Italian immigrants. Mead writes: “Gianni's business model was as simple as it was revolutionary.” It was – integrity. His customers trusted him and he chose customers whose character and judgment he trusted. What's more, his new bank provided financial services to ordinary people. Its innovations such as the long term self-amortizing home mortgage, municipal bonds, automobile credit served the great majority of the population – a contrast with the modern tendency for financial innovations to serve the better-off. Well-off customers can change their pension investments from their smartphones but people on low incomes living in the wrong postcode can't even get a current account.

I also laughed a lot at a chapter on the religious and doctrinal battles of the 17th century. Really. Mead's thumbnail sketch of Church of England pragmatism is funny, accurate – and aroused a sense of national pride. How marvellous that the poet John Dryden wrote a defence of the CofE in iambic pentameter! How characteristic of the national church not to worry overmuch about doctrine but to remain even now very firm about unseemliness in royal marriages.

Mead writes (p205):

“Deprived of the comforts of an absolute or closed philosophy, poor Nietzsche stared into the philosophical abyss and groaned with sick, fascinated horror: 'Nothing is true and everything is permitted.' That hasn't been the Anglo-Saxon response. English bishops saw this truth and saw not the slightest reason to leap into any abysses. .. Instead, they went on to set out the rules for finding Easter each year.”

There is much more entertainment. The book is a great read.

Whether one agrees with Mead's conclusion – in effect a Whig interpretation of history – that the open, sceptical, pragmatic Anglo-Saxon way points to progress and will ultimately triumph over other approaches is another matter. I think so but am not as sure as Mead. Having now seen both Eastern Europe in 1989-90 and the Middle East in 2011 choose traditional freedoms, perhaps my lifetime will also see the ultimate test: will China – as Ian Morris argues – become the world's dominant power? Can it do so without permitting any of the classic liberal political freedoms? Is a dynamic, open market economy compatible with authoritarian politics and repression of speech?

I've been in the mood for the grand sweep of history – no wonder with the images on TV so reminiscent of 1989 – and catching up with a book published a few years ago, Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World. He makes almost the opposite argument to the one made by Ian Morris in his Why the West Rules For Now, which I reviewed here recently. Whereas Morris says that in the grand scheme of human history there is relatively little difference between the trajectories of West and East, but the East may soon overtake the West for a few centuries, Mead's is an argument about Western supremacy.

Specifically, he means Anglo-Saxon supremacy. This is not a national or ethnic marker, but rather a cultural one, a liberal, pragmatic, open mindset. (He and I use 'liberal' in the British/Enlightenment sense, not the politicised American one.) From the days of William and Mary, the policy of building British maritime power and the British Empire created a virtuous circle between trade, economic dynamism, financial innovation and military success. When British dominance slipped, American imperial power (albeit with a small 'i') took its place. Mead also weaves in the sense of moral superiority displayed by the two free-trading, financially free-wheeling liberal democracies. In each war, whether against Napoleon or Hitler, God was on the side of gold. “That God is a liberal has been the great fundamental conviction of the English-speaking powers since the English reformation, and, if history is the mirror of Providence, they were right.”(p81)

An important strand of Mead's argument is that economic strength built on trade and command of the oceans has led to military success: “The Anglo-Americans' enemies all go bankrupt.” (p111) He claims the Anglo-Americans or international WASP tendency – the Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians are included – have never lost a proper war. Military defeats are all painted as temporary setbacks.

This irked some reviewers when the book was first published – What about Iraq? asked Johann Hari in the New York Times. Another question now might be, what about the crash? It's harder than in 2007 to paint the global financial markets as the pinnacle of Anglo-American capitalism. Mead has fun (p127ff) pointing out the number of times pundits have cried wolf over the impact of ever-climbing national debt. He notes that Britain's national debt stood at 268% in 1822, but it could bear the burden and prosper. I'm not so confident about the ability of either the UK or US to bear the burden now, as the baby boom ages and productivity growth slows back down to a crawl.

On the other hand, we might also ask, What about Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen etc etc? Liberal democracy might well, it seems, be a lasting global legacy of the Anglo-American order. It's a question the Chinese authorities will be asking themselves in the centuries-old dance of civilisations.

God & Gold is a beautifully-written book and full of facts and arguments both compelling and provocative. If it won't risk a clash between the Anglos and the Americans, I'd describe it as just my cup of tea.

The Human Capital Handbook for 2011 is available free online. There are some really interesting essays here  including one by an old friend, Raj Thamotheram, who works at Axa Investment Management. He and a colleague focus on the tyranny of – but need for – measurable data to be able to affect companies' treatment of their 'human capital' or people. So many executives say 'Ours is a people business' but treat their employees with no respect.

I was interested to read in the essay that: “In France, companies with more than 300 employees are required to publish metrics on workforce demographics, recruitment and training, absenteeism, staff turnover rates and working time flexibility, and this legislation has already had a significant positive impact on reporting.”

I've got an essay in this book too but of course I'd like everyone to buy as well The Economics of Enough. Here's a pile of them in Heffers in Cambridge, photographed by Kan Banks (@kiwanja).

'Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans' (pdf) by Finn E Kydland and Edward E Prescott, Journal of Political Economy 1977:

“Optimal control theory is an appropriate planning device for situations in which current outcomes and movements of the system's state depend only on current and past policy decisions and on the current state. Current decisions of economics agents depend in part on their expectations of future policy actions. Only if these expectations were invariant to the future policy plan selected would optimal control theory be appropriate.”

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1532

“The promise given was a necessity of the past; the word broken is a necessity of the present.”

Yesterday morning I posted about the oddity that Amazon seemed to be charging more for the Kindle than the hardcover edition of my new book, The Economics of Enough. My esteemed publisher, in the United States, expressed surprise and indeed the Kindle edition is $9.99 on Amazon in the US ($19.53 in the UK though!) versus a $15.49 hardcover price. When I went back to Amazon UK, the anomaly had gone – the Kindle edition is currently showing as £11.88 (it was £12.20 yesterday evening) and the hardcover as £13.20.

(To complicate matters, e-books in the UK attract VAT, added to the list price, whereas physical books do not. This reminds me of the doubtless apocryphal story that imports of animal toys to the EU are subject to a tariff while imports of human figures such as dolls do not, leading to a row about the classification of Star Wars toys.)

However, a bit of slightly random checking suggests the gap between Kindle and hardcover prices is consistently smaller on my side of the Atlantic compared with the US. Maybe somebody from Amazon can explain the policy?

Meanwhile, The Economics of Enough is a bargain at any price and is of course available from all good booksellers!

PS News flash: Amazon Australia is offering an e-version of Enough, and it will also be available via http://www.ebook.com/ on or about 22 February.