A Really Good Book on Economics
I cannot recommend this slim volume highly enough. As I have perhaps mentioned in this blog, Dierdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) is arguably the finest conservative transsexual economist writing today.
The Donald-Dierdre transition may have affected her economic thinking a bit, as this work has a decidedly humanist bent. She offers three critiques of modern economics: First, that it has elevated statistical significance to a level of importance that defies any common sense application of the concept. Second, that its application of mathematical values of axiom and proof relegates most recent economic work to abstract, sterile irrelevance. And third, that social engineering is doomed to failure (well, what do you expect, she taught at the University of Chicago when she was he).
Now how much would you pay? But wait! There's more! A bonus chapter on ethics and economics, citing everyone from Jeremy Bentham to Aristotle to Adam Smith! The outrageous suggestion that economics should try to solve the problems of actual people!
It's a fine book. Everyone should read it. Then general equilibrium theorists would be mocked in the streets, and graduate students in econometrics tarred and feathered when the populace was in a particularly ugly mood.
Such a day may be far away (Aunt Dierdre, as she calls herself, estimates 10 years at least), but I shall continue to dream in the meantime.
posted by Anonymous at 7:52 PM
1 Comments:
Aged Undergraduate liquids bubble to the surface - I remember a long discussion in a political science class where we rued the end of Political Economy as a department (I think that used to be the Harvard model, long, long ago). Politics is power is economics is politics....if I gather the gyst of the present thesis (lord that was pompus) for all the useful mathematical operations you may perform, economic activity is an abstract formalization of certain, or maybe all, power relationships.
I think about this when my money directs a young woman to unfold a bag and put it a hamburger, or when my fear of death is amelieorated by the the promise of insurance payment, or when I am reduced to indifference by a check when a painting I've worked long on walks out the door. (An indifference most welcome).
Post a Comment
<< Home