The canonical Big Picture of 300 years of economics

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	• The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers [7th Edition] Robert L. Heilbroner Touchstone, 1999 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 72 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A marvelous introduction to the world of economics

It's a bit easy to typecast economics as nothing more than mindless pencil pushing, terminal curve shifting, and painful comparative advantage calculating. As far as the social sciences go, it's something of a black sheep, lacking the excitement of political science or the drama of history. The average Joe would probably rank it somewhere between communication studies and linguistics as the interestingness scale, and somewhere between geography and pocket lint in terms of usefulness. In a way, I can sympathize with Joe. I mean, he just took an economics class in high school, maybe a semester of macro in college, and he probably slept through all of it. He probably took one look at an AS/AD model, with that inexplicably vertical Long Run Aggregate Supply curve (how can a line be a curve?!?!), and decided that this wasn't the field for him.

But in another way, I want to call Joe an idiot. Economics is one of the most intellectually stimulating and, yes, enjoyable fields of study ever devised. And besides that, its relevance to modern times (and all of human development) simply can't be overstated: Behind all of the circular flows and Philips curves and marginal propensities to consume lie the very ground rules of human livelihood, the essential dynamics of societal development, and the basic instructions for to go about the surprisingly complex task of not dying. Nations rise and fall at the turn of an interest rate or the flick of a business cycle, and corporations live (and die) on that unpredictable dance of supply and demand. The study of incentives provides us with the best chance we have of truly predicting human behavior.

Perhaps Joe should read this book. The Worldly Philosophers is an engaging, enjoyable, and insightful introduction to the beleaguered study of economics, and a handy guidebook to its most pertinent ideas. Rather than slog through a series of impersonal concepts and theories, the book focuses on the truly remarkable individuals who helped shape the key tenets of economic thought. Its approach is logical and accessible, presenting the development of economic thought from the early days of civilization to the bedrock principles of Adam Smith and onwards through such luminaries as Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, leading right up to modern times. Their ideas are laid out plainly, and always with plenty of contextual and historical background.

What the book does for economics, it also does for economists. It completely dispels the notion that its subjects were stuffy, dull calculator (or abacus) jockeys. Each chapter is stuffed with humorous anecdotes, engrossing biographical sketches, and amusing asides that reveal the often-eccentric nature of the great economists. The human element is very much in evidence here, and the effect is delightful and entertaining.

It's the kind of thing that Joe would love: Entertaining, endearing, accessible, and informative. Perhaps you would, too.

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Good, but too much

I do think this is a very informative book, but I think the author tries too hard. I have a decently large vocabulary, but there were still several words per chapter I needed a dictionary for. There are also a few passages where the author tried to get a little to linguistically creative, which is not really suit the nature of this piece.

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The canonical Big Picture of 300 years of economics

The Worldly Philosophers has now gone through seven editions and is more or less the canonical popular intro to economics. Hence I doubt there's anything I could say about its content that many, many others haven't already said. Still, one ought to say something.

The book's aim is to convince you that economists and their ideas have mattered. In this, it's a narrower and more vulgarly (in the good sense) written "History of Western Philosophy". In the latter, Bertrand Russell wanted people to stop thinking about philosophers as remote, irrelevant thinkers in togas. Robert Heilbroner is somewhat less successful at convincing us that economists -- with the exception of Marx -- have had much of an effect beyond the academy. He normally will state without explanation that one idea or another fell like a bombshell; it's not clear whether these bombs blew up a few dusty university filing cabinets or houses with people living in them.

Where Heilbroner thrives is in sketching the contents of these economists' ideas. This he does in a few spirited pages per person. In perhaps 5 pages, Heilbroner explains John Maynard Keynes's ideas with more clarity than I could glean from Robert Skidelsky's thousand-odd pages of biography. In every one of Heilbroner's sketches, I found at least one book that will have to go on my to-read list. If that wasn't enough, Heilbroner includes an extensive, charmingly annotated for-further-reading section at the back.

As a presenter of economic facts and theories, Heilbroner is the best I've found so far. His view of economics, though, is less grand than I've come to expect. What I get from an economist like Sam Bowles is a picture of economics-as-she-could be, and economics-as-she-has-been, that encompasses enormous questions: how institutions form and die, how inferior institutions survive, how people behave at the voting booth, why altruism would spread, and so forth. Heilbroner more or less sticks to the smaller questions: how people spend their money, the rise and fall of capitalist economies, and what practical men can do to spur spending during times of economic crisis. These are surely important questions. They just don't inspire me quite the way economics does when it's applied to broader questions of politics and coordination.

Heilbroner's mind and scope in this book are quite broad, just along a different axis. The opening chapter, in particular, asks and answers the question of why Adam Smith is revered as the first modern economist. What was the world like before Smith? To hear Heilbroner tell it, there was nothing for economics to do before Smith: command economies of the sort that built the Egyptian pyramids didn't need to worry about where best to allocate resources or what budgets they were operating under: a dictator sent an army of slaves to do his bidding, and that was it. Feudal economies didn't need to think of moving economic resources from one use to another or people from one job to another: you were born into your father's profession and you would die there. The world had to go through astonishing spasms (think even of medieval laws against usury) to make the capitalist world possible; until then economics had nothing to study.

Which is to say that Heilbroner is extremely valuable: he reminds us that the world we live in isn't the only possible one. There was a time when capitalism didn't exist, and there will probably come a time when it no longer does. (Schumpeter certainly thought that capitalism had no long-term future.) We need to be reminded of this as often as possible. It's too easy to view the world with the comfortable certainty of middle-class, early-twenty-first-century American life; it's nice to be shaken out of that from time to time.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

The Worldly Philosophers is a bestselling classic that not only enables us to see more deeply into our history but helps us better understand our own times. In this seventh edition, Robert L. Heilbroner provides a new theme that connects thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The theme is the common focus of their highly varied ideas -- namely, the search to understand how a capitalist society works. It is a focus never more needed than in this age of confusing economic headlines.

In a bold new concluding chapter entitled "The End of the Worldly Philosophy?" Heilbroner reminds us that the word "end" refers to both the purpose and limits of economics. This chapter conveys a concern that today's increasingly "scientific" economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics. Thus, unlike its predecessors, this new edition provides not just an indispensable illumination of our past but a call to action for our future.

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