Washington Post,April 26, 2009 on page B7:
Pop social science - think Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner's "Freakonomics" is tricky. Authors risk sacrificing the intricacies of scholarship in the service of reader-friendly anecdotes.
Alan Beattle, the world-trade editor at the Financial Times and a former economist for the Bank of English,resists this kind of reduction in "False Economy," a thorough examination of economies from the age of empire to the age of the IMF. Cf. recent blogs on IMF at www,blogger.com several days ago.
Standing proudly against psychology, dialectical materialism and inevitability, Beattle writes, "History is not determined by fate...it is determined by people." I concur in toto as shown in "Keys for Economic Understanding." He insists that it is not destiny but the right and wrong decisions by political leaders that cause societies to rise and fall. Leaders in economics got involved as well.
Beattle's analysis dazzles with particulars: He explains why Africa doesn't grow cocaine (poor infrastructure), why Peru grows most of the asparagus consumed in the US(good lobbyists), I would point out the Law of Comparative Advantage. Why pandas (whose diet is almost exclusively bamboo) Pandas are well-liked by children and adults alike in China, USA and in nations in the world. Why? the Combo of the Black and the White colors from China as a clear indicator of the rise of China.
A lover of Adam Smith's invisible hand, Beattle criticizes protectionist mollycoddling of inefficient industries. Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy. But despite his generally conservative outlook, his far-reaching history is grounded in a curiously Obama-esque, populist belief that open markets guided by modest, business-friendly policies can guide us through the current economic downturn - that, as Shakespeare out it, "our remedies oft in ourselves do lie." President Obama has received high approval so far.
Here I would like to reiterate the newly coined word of "Lingonomics" for rhetorical desiderata.
Francis Shieh aka Xie Shihao, an octogenarian student of economics wishing to share with readers for the current state of economics as empirical evidence of the worth or dearth of any shape and form of economics.
Sunday, April 26 2009 at 2.08 p.m.
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