A concise, persuasive argument for the importance of the collective in economics.
Merchant offers a collectivistic approach to economics in his debut treatise.
It’s long been held that self-interest is the elemental mechanism of the economy, but Merchant respectfully disagrees. He says that the capitalistic claim that humans are motivated by selfishness is just as false as the Marxist assumption that they’re motivated by utilitarianism. Instead, he argues for a third way of thinking that considers human communal tendencies that he terms “collectivistic.” He walks readers through various economic areas, demonstrating how behaviors that one might blithely describe as individualistic, such as dining out, actually have complex, communal dimensions that many economic models don’t consider. The implications of this view help explain why many representations of the economy appear insufficient, he says; it’s not simply the sum of its individuals, but something far greater. The true wealth of a nation, he says, lies not in its land or resources but in its collectivistic potential; he also identifies anti-collectivistic “weapons” that exist in our society that keep us from realizing it. He expresses his hopes that society will eventually move forward into an increasingly globalized, post–nation-state economy. At a little over 100 pages, readers can breeze through this book in one or two sittings. Merchant takes a topical approach to his argument, dividing the essay into easily digestible chapters with titles such as “Consumption: The Concept of Commodity,” “Work: The Concept of Role,” and “Trade: Buying and Selling.” Although many readers may seek out economics books that reinforce their own personal beliefs, Merchant’s vision isn’t traditionally conservative or liberal. Instead, he advocates a holistic approach that’s rarely encountered in mainstream debate. He writes in crisp, accessible prose and offers examples to illustrate the principles he discusses, placing them into the relatable, physical world of the everyday. The brevity and clarity of the work will make it attractive to readers who aren’t engaged by opaque economics tomes and pundit-penned rehashings of established ideas. If it’s true that the most plainly stated arguments win the most supporters, this one should have no trouble entering the larger dialogue.
A concise, persuasive argument for the importance of the collective in economics.Pub Date: April 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-5049-0013-3
Page Count: 108
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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