To Hype and Disappoint

I do hate it when authors exaggerate to promote their books. For example here’s an interview about a book about the underground economy and its size and implications. The author says:

Wired: And it’s growing?
Neuwirth: Absolutely. In most developing countries, it’s the only part of the economy that is growing. It has been growing every year for the past two decades while the legal economy has kind of stagnated.

Wired: Why?
Neuwirth: Because it’s based purely on unfettered entrepreneurialism. Law-abiding companies in the developing world often have to work through all sorts of red tape and corruption. The [underground] enterprises avoid all that. It’s also an economy based on providing things that the mass of people can afford—not on high prices and large profit margins. It grows simply because people have to keep consuming—they have to keep eating, they have to keep clothing themselves. And that’s unaffected by global downturns and upturns.

It certainly sounds good—but then you get to thinking. It turns out a great deal of growth in Africa, to take one example, is attributable to commodities growth recently. Then there’s the growth of cell phone use:

In virtually every single African nation, the leading mobile phone company is now the leading taxpayer to the government, the leading local donor to local causes, and one of the leading employers.

At first thought this wouldn’t be mutually exclusive with the picture Neuwirth is giving us, and it turns out it’s not—it turns out Neuwirth is counting the employment of informal workers for these large telecommunications companies. But that introduces a great deal of conceptual ambiguity to what was once a simply stated, bold premise. That’s unfortunate; you’d prefer a bit more nuance up front.