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 | | The Making of Modern Economics: The Lives and Ideas of the Great Thinkers by Mark Skousen ISBN-10: 9780765604798 ISBN-10: 0-7656-0479-5 ISBN-13: 9780765604798 ISBN-13: 978-0-7656-0479-8 Hardcover 2001-03 M.E. Sharpe Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Book Description Unlike other histories of economics, Mark Skousen's book provides a running plot with a singular heroic figure, Adam Smith, at the center of the discipline. Skousen unites the great thinkers by ranking them for or against Adam Smith and his "system of natural liberty." He shows how Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, and even laissez-faire disciples Robert Malthus and David Ricardo detracted from Smith's classical model of democratic capitalism during periods of economic failure and upheaval, while Alfred Marshall, Irving Fisher, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman, among others, remodeled and improved upon Smithian economics as the world economy recovered and prospered. | ||
Reviews | ||
Great history told in a clear way I liked the book, clearly written, full of anecdotes and with the history of economic thought flowing from Adam Smith to nowadays. Economics made simple and with an easy to understand linkage to the events that shaped the world. | ||
A Writing Style that will Endear you to this Book This author managed to write an interesting economics book. The book contains the history of economic thought, and details about the quirky lives of famous economists. The author believes in the "no wasted sentences" style of writing. He writes in a Will Durant type style where every page is a mixture of fact, opinions and wit. After every chapter, a reader can feel that He really learned something. Purists would say it is better to read the original text by the economist, Then use this book to find out what economist to pursue. I really enjoyed this book, that provides a lot of bang for the buck, Knowledge nuggets ripe for the picking. | ||
Worth buying for the interesting and funny anecdotes about economists Skousen has written an interesting but badly flawed history of economic thought from a libertarian pespective .There are many anecdotes about the peculiarities and foibles of many of the economists he covers that are worth the purchase price of the book alone.All major economists of the last 300 years are covered in a greater or lesser fashion. The first serious intellectual problem with this book is that Skousen has read only bits and pieces of Adam Smith[Wealth of Nations(WN),1776] and John Maynard Keynes(General Theory,1936).Contrary to Skousen,Adam Smith is not a libertarian.Smith is a conservative, in the sense of Hamilton,Washington,Franklin,Madison,and the Adams brothers.This group is called the Federalists in American history.This group supported a strong federal government ,independent central bank,revenue and retaliatory tariffs,etc..Smith would be an opponent of the Anti -Federalists(Mason,Randolph,Jefferson,Paine,Henry,etc.,supported a weak cental government,no central bank,and no tariffs for any reason)Skousen is an Anti-Federalist.The anti federalists are,of course,libertarians.Skousen essentially covers the first 100-150 pages of the WN.He skips about 800 pages.The following facts will be discovered by readers who actually read WN in its entirety.First,Smith favored the establishment of an all powerful,independent,central bank so that it could set a low,fixed rate of interest, permanently in the long run,at what would today be the prime rate of interest.No rate greater than the prime rate could be charged.Second,Smith combined this policy with the condition that projectors(Keynes's speculators of chapters 12,17,and 22 of the GT),prodigals,and unwise risk takers be prevented from obtaining credit/bank loans so that the savings savers had put in the banks, to loan out for future investment, were loaned out for productive,physical investment that would add to the wealth of nations and not the speculative finance of Wall Street brokers,bankers,and stock market analysts whose activities ,according to Smith,waste and destroy the savings by the creation of bubbles which,when they crash,cause severe negative,undepletable externalities and spillover effects that destroy the wealth of nations.Second,Smith was always a proponent of both retaliatory tariffs, as long as there was any probability greater than 0 of getting the offending country-industry to repeal the tariff,and revenue fariffs.Third,Smith was a proponent of progressive taxation.Fourth,Smith understood the severe problems of free market failure,insufficient public goods provision by the private market sector,and insufficient expenditures on education,which would be provided free of charge by Smith to all who could not afford it.Finally,Smith's system of moral sentiments condemned the libertarian philosophy advocated by Skousen.It is not surprising that a reader of Skousen's book will find NONE of this to read in the book.Skousen has very stong a priori beliefs that were possibly passed down to him by his libertarian father,Cleon Skousen.These beliefs are not testable.Skousen's views are ultimately anti scientific because he refuses to consider as empirical evidence the work actually done in economics by Keynes and Smith.Skousen has his own private interpretation. The chapter on Keynes is as bad intellectually as the chapter on Smith. For example,Keynes never supported any kind of deficit financing/increase in the national debt at all at any time in his life .Economists who believe this are similar to the flat earth believers still around today.Keynes's major policies,explicitly discussed in chapters 22,23,and 24 of the GT ,are directly founded on the wisdom of Adam Smith-Fix the interest rate on loans at a low permanent level.Period.Keynes was an opponent of expansionary fiscal and monetary policies because they would increase the uncertainty in which firms and entreprenuers operated.Finally,it is the uncertainty of the future that creates the sub optimal outcomes that can be observed to occur periodically in the amount of investment and the capital stock.True Keynesian policies seek to create institutions which reduce this uncertainty as much as possible.Only Daniel Ellsberg,with his 2001 exposition in "Risk,Ambiguity,and Decision",has advanced technically and intellectually upon the systematic exposition of uncertainty presented by Keynes in chapters 6 and 26 of the A Treatise on Probability.This exposition serves as the foundation for Keynes's macroeconomics in chapters 5, 12,17,and 22 of the GT,as well as Keynes 's summary of his GT in a 1937 article published in the Quarterly Journal Of Economics. | ||
A very valuable work It has its problems and there is some annoying stuff but it is immensely valuable just by spelling it all out and naming so many names. | ||
Dynamite Book for History of Econ Classes I'm using this book in my courses on History of Economic Thought. My students love it. They are first attracted to the unique, off-beat style of the book that starts each chapter with music selections to put you in the mood that is suitable for each character, each philosophy, and each period of history. The students love the quirky twists in the lives of each of these personalities, making them all very real and human. This is important because too many books of this genre extol historical figures as superhuman or supertrash. Instead, all of these figures come alive as real folk, ones with whom any student could feel comfortable engaging in discussion. I recommend the book highly for class or for just being entertained while delving into the grand issues and debates that are the foundation of current public policy. It is a fun fair for the intellectual. | ||