A Brief History of Economic Genius

By Paul Strathern

Book Overview

Paul Strathern uncovers the lives and ideas of the great philosophers of money against the backdrop of some of history's most turbulent events: The South Sea Bubble, the French and Russian... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1587991284
• ISBN13: 9781587991288
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: Texere Publishing
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Very good general overview of the history of economic thought

Strathern(S) has done a commendable job in this book.He covers practically every major economist who has made a contribution over the last 400 hundred years.The one oversight here is that Samuelson does not receive the number of pages needed to cover his general contributions accurately. I will concentrate on how S handles Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes.S makes it clear that the libertarian conceptualization of Smith's term,the Invisible Hand,is anathema to Smith.The Libertarian view of the Invisible Hand is that of an optimal self adjusting mechanism that guarantees that the capitalist system can never break down as long as there is no government involvement/regulation in the economy.This was the view of Quesnay,Mandeville,and Say, but not Smith. S fails to mention that Smith's repeated support for interest rate control laws simply means that he had an understanding that savings would not be transformed into Investment intertemporally unless the savings made its way into the hands of productive investment and not speculator con men like John Law.Low and fixed interest rates would promote productive investment and not wasteful extravagance on consumption.S also fails to mention that,while Smith did vigorously opposed protective tariffs aimed at saving the monopoly position of firms in their home market,he did not oppose retaliatory and/or revenue tariffs,although he recognized the second best nature of both tariffs.It is an interesting historical fact that Smith's Wealth of Nations served as the blueprint on which conservatives Alexander Hamilton and George Washington based early American economic policy,while such policies were opposed by the libertarian Jefferson ,who claimed that Say was a much superior economist than Smith.Finally,as claimed by S, there is no contradiction between Smith's advocating universal education and religious instruction for all citizens and his observation that the division of labor reduced workers to unthinking cogs in an economic machine process.The value of education is not reducible to purely one dimensional economic considerations. S's handling of Keynes is generally correct,but filled with many omissions that undermine the worth of his commentary.The problem shows up on p.269 and p.273 where S claims that " Keynes insisted that the " tacit assumptions " of neoclassical economics " are seldom or never satisfied ...It cannot solve the problems of the actual world." Yet according to the final passage in the General Theory,"If our central controls succeed in establishing an aggregate volume of output corresponding to full employment as nearly as is practible,the classical theory comes into its own again from this point onwards." He seemed to want to have it both ways." Unfortunately,S's mathematical deficiencies have led him astray.I am not singling out S since this characterization of his mathematical capabilities applies to all 20th and 21st century economists ,whenever the issue a

The evolution of the science of economics

A Brief History Of Economic Genius by Paul Strathern (Lecturer in Mathematics and Philosophy, Kingston University, London) is an engaging and highly accessible look at the most eccentric and gifted economists including Johann Becher (1635-1682); John Law (1671-1729); Adam Smith (1723-1790); Robert Malthus (1766-1833); Karl Marx (1818-1883); Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929); and John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). These notable and influential figures, along with their triumphs and failings, and the evolution of the science of economics, are all intelligibly considered in this fascinating presentation that is recommended for academia, as well as the non-specialist general reader.