Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies [Hardcover]

This book surprised me. From the title, I expected it to be a diatribe against the evils of Enron. It is not.

Rather, the book traces the major figures in the energy industry starting with Thomas Edison (starting in 1878) and ending with the pre-Enron Kenneth Lay (ending in 1984). The book is, therefore, a history. As the middle volume of a trilogy, it leaves (most of) the discussion of economic policy to the first volume ("Capitalism at Work") and of the evils of Enron to the last volume ("Enron and Ken Lay: An American Tragedy").

As history, the book reads well. The author, Robert Bradley, can tell a story. He gives interesting facts about the people he talks about, and seems to get the context right. For example, he spends a lot of time on Samuel Insull, an interesting character who built the electricity industry as an industry. Other authors mention that Insull died in a Paris subway station with only pennies in his pocket, implying that he died a friendless pauper. Here we learn, though, that no papers or identification were found on Insull's body. So he was no pauper, but had only pennies in his pocket because his wallet had been stolen. Although his riches had all evaporated, Insull still had an annual pension of $21,000, which was plenty to live on at the time.

I've read a lot about energy, and a lot about many (though not all) of the people the book covers. Still I found lots to interest me. The book is not straight history. Policy gets discussed too. But agree with the author or not, the policy adds to the book, rather than dilute the history.

The main fault I found was that the book was a little raw and rambling. Sometimes there was too much detail. Sometimes the strokes of the author's brush were too broad. There were even some technical problems with the text -- too large blank spaces between words, mistaken words, and errors. (As it is published by Wiley, that surprised me.)

Overall, though, I enjoyed reading the book. Although I hesitate to predict what others will think, my hunch is most people will like the tone and approach too.

The author of this tome has taken on a huge task in his documentation of the collapse of Enron, going beyond the simple story to write an amazing expose on the history of energy and its inevitable entanglements with politics. As American's today decry special favors given to General Motors, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, and Solyndra, a more politically correct term for an economic policy once described as fascism, namely "crony capitalism". In other words, the implementation of government economic policy not through government agencies but rather through ostensibly private companies that can act as conduits for government dollars in return for campaign donations or other types of favors.

Bradley doesn't use the term "crony capitalism", but rather "political capitalism", which means essentially the same idea. It depicts what people perceive as the free market, but with hindrances and inefficiencies driven by what is sometimes influence, but often complete collusion with the local government.

In fact, the reason I say the book is sensationalistically titled is that it is more a history of the energy market of the US. Edison plays a small role - it is more about Insull. Even Enron is just a small piece, but given the author's personal connection and the need to sell books with a known player in the title, I suppose the title makes sense.

Some who are unfamiliar with the works of Hayek, von Mises,and Rothbard may find the author, Robert Bradley Jr, difficult to understand when he refers to various economic forces and how they interplay between the free market and government mandate. I have not read Volume 1, but presumably that tome is his introduction to these ideas.

In this book, Volume 2, Bradley covers the rise of the domestic energy market, and how intrepid entrepeneurs like Insull and later Lay would often shoot too far too fast, building huge empires that would collapse under their own weight. He documents how each would engage not in true free market capitalism, but in political entrepeneurship, generating market protections not borne out of creating a better product but borne from what is today called "crony capitalism". While I was already familiar with many ways in which the energy market was entwined with the government, the nature and depth was not completely clear to me before this book.

Edison to Enron is well researched and quite in-depth with its analysis. All of the players and names for the last 100 years are laid out with all of their successes and failures. If you purely want to learn the dangers of the so-called mixed economy, there are plenty of books by economists to cover this path. But if you want to literally be an expert in the rise of the energy economy, I have not read a book yet with this level of amazing detail and analysis. It will take me awhile to completely absorb everything here, but if you have this interest, it is worth the read.

I finish every book that I review unless it clearly is a reference book. With that said, this book is a very hard read with what I've seen is the most meandering style of writing I've seen in a non-fictional work. My suspicion is that the author wrote this book (vol 2 of a three part series) over an extended period of time and needed to "splice" all of it together. Worse yet, how do you polish an apple that's take a long time to grow? The author, a friend and business associate of Ken Lay, presents in this volume the history of the energy market through three historical characters with the idea that he'll lead to the third volume on the Enron debacle with all readers waiting intently to see what happens (just kidding). In reality, I think the intention of the author is to provide a historical reference that no other author has really attempted. And it definitely comes off as a sort of "War and Peace" type epic of the energy industry.

The extent of my reading is a selection of chapters from the book always hoping with a new chapter to find one that doesn't have me trying to follow the "action". In all honesty, if you're really interested in the energy field and want to know its history, this may be the perfect book, but at times, it's worse than watching paint dry trying to work through the book. I personalize give myself a D- for perseverance which is a category I'm usually an A student. So you decide for yourself whether you want to take a chance at this book, but in the end for most I believe it will be a cure for insomnia.

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