Ryan Avent takes a nice swing at what we might call "the offset twentieth century" - it's a good review.
Have you seen his follow-up piece on September 29th? It's also very interesting. It illuminates some corners of what, seen from the outside, is Slouching's strategy - but it also shows the serious limitations of what I'll call "journalist's economics" and, indirectly, a possible flaw in Slouching: the grand narrative that depicts the long twentieth century as a kind of dialogue between Hayek, Polanyi and Keynes, while it may be helpful to non-economist (i.e., most) readers, may only serve to confirm the prejudices of journalists on the economics beat, who really need to get beyond the Hayek-Freidman-Thatcher thing. When Avent writes:
"The belief that you can discern most of what you need to know about a society by assuming that people mostly try to maximize their own utility, or the idea that society is something which can and should be engineered through the clever application of incentives: these are strange components of a particular belief system which was not shared by other people at other times and places and which shapes behavior at the individual level and in aggregate".
--I find myself wishing he'd read Dani Rodrik's "Economics Rules" or Bob Frank's "The Economic Naturalist" rather than Slouching. When he writes:
"Where do ... cultures come from? How do ideas spread? Which beliefs will we find ourselves at the mercy of in the years ahead? Brad’s book does not have the answers to these questions, in large part because economics does not have the answers to these questions."
--he's not saying you lapsed as a historian, he seems to be protesting the fact that economics is not cultural history. A discipline as influential (or as arrogant?) as economics somehow should have all the answers. This just seems off.
The good side is that Slouching is getting into a lot of cracks - and triggering some revealing reactions.
Ryan Avent takes a nice swing at what we might call "the offset twentieth century" - it's a good review.
Have you seen his follow-up piece on September 29th? It's also very interesting. It illuminates some corners of what, seen from the outside, is Slouching's strategy - but it also shows the serious limitations of what I'll call "journalist's economics" and, indirectly, a possible flaw in Slouching: the grand narrative that depicts the long twentieth century as a kind of dialogue between Hayek, Polanyi and Keynes, while it may be helpful to non-economist (i.e., most) readers, may only serve to confirm the prejudices of journalists on the economics beat, who really need to get beyond the Hayek-Freidman-Thatcher thing. When Avent writes:
"The belief that you can discern most of what you need to know about a society by assuming that people mostly try to maximize their own utility, or the idea that society is something which can and should be engineered through the clever application of incentives: these are strange components of a particular belief system which was not shared by other people at other times and places and which shapes behavior at the individual level and in aggregate".
--I find myself wishing he'd read Dani Rodrik's "Economics Rules" or Bob Frank's "The Economic Naturalist" rather than Slouching. When he writes:
"Where do ... cultures come from? How do ideas spread? Which beliefs will we find ourselves at the mercy of in the years ahead? Brad’s book does not have the answers to these questions, in large part because economics does not have the answers to these questions."
--he's not saying you lapsed as a historian, he seems to be protesting the fact that economics is not cultural history. A discipline as influential (or as arrogant?) as economics somehow should have all the answers. This just seems off.
The good side is that Slouching is getting into a lot of cracks - and triggering some revealing reactions.