REVIEW ESSAY STEVEN ROSEFIELDE Anti-Systems ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS COMPARED. By P. J. D. Wiles. New York: Halsted Press, John Wiley and Sons, 1977. xii, 608 pp. $22.50. Economic Institutions Compared is Peter Wiles's contribution to the fledging discipline of comparative economic systems. Billed as a text for graduate students and intelligent laymen, the book begins with a theoretical discussion of work; proceeds with a detailed analysis of how microeconomic (chapters 3-11) and macroeconomic (chapters 12-15) institutions affect economic performance; and concludes with a disquisition on wealth, freedom, war, imperialism, and human destiny (chapters 16-21). Within this frame- work Wiles contrasts the institutions of capitalist countries (the United States), democratic state capitalism (the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Ger- many, Belgium, the Netherlands), Statist state capitalism (France), cooperativist populism (Yugoslavia, Algeria), market "Pannonian" socialism (Hungary), and Soviet-type command socialism (the Soviet Union, China, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, and most underdeveloped nations). Kibbutzim, moshavim, ejidos, Illyrian cooperatives, obshchiny, kolkhozy, sovkhozy, Utopian communes, and idiorrhythmic monasteries are also extensively touched upon. Preferring relevance to mathematical tractability, Wiles investigates this insti- tutional profusion polymathically, supplementing economic theory with insights from anthropology, sociology, political science, and genetics (for example, "selfishness and even aggression are instinctive, like mother-love and the sexual appetite" [p. 490], or "human evil comes with the genes" [p. 491]). The narrative is organized themati- cally and the exposition is stream-of-consciousness. Each theme refers to a framework J for economic activity. This device enables the author to demonstrate how every insti- § tutional setting, broadly construed, conditions the behavioral potential of enterprises, | trade unions, cooperatives, slavery, banks, finance, investment, planning, inflation, I and aggregate employment. I As an expositional strategy, the thematic approach has the merit of isolating the J causal effects of specific institutions within systems, rather than imputing observed ,j behavior to systems as a whole. This allows Wiles to demonstrate two points he | deems essential: the malleability of economic behavior rooted in the plasticity of I human nature and the comparative insignificance of systems ("I just do not think J economic systems are that important" [p. 491]). Thematic narrative, however, can | be exceedingly cumbersome. The endless comparison of the effect of diverse institu- I tions on particular forms of economic activity is not only inherently tiresome, but J verges on incomprehensibility unless the intelligent lay reader is given a larger context I and some guidance on institutional taxonomy. I - Wiles tries to alleviate the first problem with extensive cross references, but this | is of little real assistance because his disjunctive style gives the reader little incentive | to skip around in pursuit of elusive context. Inexplicably, no attempt is made to define 1 what an institution is, how various institutions are interrelated, or what constitutes a 1