“As close as anyone’s ever come to nailing down the modern industrial economy like Adam Smith nailed down the economy of his day.” Really? Here’s an excerpt from Galbraith’s book: John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State.
Economix goodwin free#
Would he say that Friedman’s explanation of how free markets make it easier to have free speech or how free markets make racial discrimination costly are examples of “blackboard” economics rather than explanations of how things happen in the real world? “A defense of the free market, based more on how it works on a blackboard than how things happen in the real world.” Hmmm. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Look at it for yourself but here are a few things that caught my eye: That, then, motivated me to look at the reference books he relied on, along with short summaries of each, when researching for his book. If my guess is right, though, Goodwin might want to read about what the trusts in the late 1800s actually did, namely pass on the huge cost savings from economies of scale to consumers. My guess is that Goodwin wants us to imagine corporations exploiting consumers.
But the picture shows a big corporation stomping on people. Score one for Goodwin.īut by the third sample page, though, he goes off the rails, talking about corporations: they get big and take over Take over what? He doesn’t say. The first sample is hopeful: he does a nice job of Adam Smith’s pin factory, making it, correctly, entirely about division of labor, as Smith did, rather than, incorrectly, about comparative advantage, which came along decades later with David Ricardo. An author typically wants to put his best foot forward and so I thought I would get a hint from those samples.
The first thing I noticed is that in the praise for Economix, only one of the five “praisers” he highlighted on his web site is actually an economist.īut I didn’t stop there. I haven’t received a review copy of Michael Goodwin’s Economix yet, but I’m not hopeful that it will be good.
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