Customer Reviews

A Brief History of Economic Genius (Cloth)

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I bought this book hoping it might shed some insights into the thoughts and times of the world's greatest economists and I got what I hoped for. In particular I was hoping to see if the author did a good job in relating economics to other areas such as politics, science, sociology, history philosophy and mathematics and the book fulfilled my desire. The book was well written, in terms of prose, making it an easy book to read economics books, especially for non-economists.

If I had anything to gripe it would be the EXTREMELY poor editing. Throughout the book I found words that had mistakenly been split up by a spac e mark, such as what I have included in this review. One or two can be forgiven but the twenty or so I seem to have come across is truly shameful for a book at approximately $20 or more. As a result of this and the poor examples provided I rate the book a 3 star book

This book, like The Worldly Philosophers and New Ideas from Dead Economists, is designed to illustrate the thoughts and history of the world's greatest economic thinkers. Economists. This book is ideal for those seeking to learn about some of the contributions of the world's greatest economists as well as those who are history buffs and want to learn more about the times / overlap of the world's greatest minds in other areas such as philosophy, science, etc as many of these individuals had an impact on economists of their times.

Economists highlighted in the book, which goes in chronological order from past to recent, include Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Robert Malthus, George Marshall, Thorton Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, John von Neumann, John Nash and Milton Friedman.

Some historic events mentioned in the book, since they affected the economists' thoughts, are Holland's 17th-century bout of tulipmania, Britain's notorious South Sea Bubble, The French Revolution, the Great Depression, and the rebuilding and retribution strategies following the two world wars.

Most of my reviews are in business / economics and I encourage people to read them. If you are interested in another excellent economics book I would start with The Worldly Philosophers (which I would buy before this book) and then read Hernando DeSoto's Mystery of Capital. A great general business book is by the management guru Peter Drucker entitled "The Essential Drucker". Just so you know, he didn't pick the title but his work is excellent and highly applicable for managers.

One final note, The Mystery Of Capital is a highly regarded, easy to read book on economic development that is VERY popular in the offices of dignitaries throughout the world, including Paul O'Neill (Secretary of State for the U.S). During a recent CNBC documentary on Mr. O'Neill the secretary met Mr. DeSoto to get some insights before his trip to Africa where he will focus on ways to improve economic development in 3rd world nations.

Strathern(S) has done a commendable job in this book.He covers practically every major economist who has made a contribution over the last 400 hundred years.The one oversight here is that Samuelson does not receive the number of pages needed to cover his general contributions accurately.
I will concentrate on how S handles Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes.S makes it clear that the libertarian conceptualization of Smith's term,the Invisible Hand,is anathema to Smith.The Libertarian view of the Invisible Hand is that of an optimal self adjusting mechanism that guarantees that the capitalist system can never break down as long as there is no government involvement/regulation in the economy.This was the view of Quesnay,Mandeville,and Say, but not Smith. S fails to mention that Smith's repeated support for interest rate control laws simply means that he had an understanding that savings would not be transformed into Investment intertemporally unless the savings made its way into the hands of productive investment and not speculator con men like John Law.Low and fixed interest rates would promote productive investment and not wasteful extravagance on consumption.S also fails to mention that,while Smith did vigorously opposed protective tariffs aimed at saving the monopoly position of firms in their home market,he did not oppose retaliatory and/or revenue tariffs,although he recognized the second best nature of both tariffs.It is an interesting historical fact that Smith's Wealth of Nations served as the blueprint on which conservatives Alexander Hamilton and George Washington based early American economic policy,while such policies were opposed by the libertarian Jefferson ,who claimed that Say was a much superior economist than Smith.Finally,as claimed by S, there is no contradiction between Smith's advocating universal education and religious instruction for all citizens and his observation that the division of labor reduced workers to unthinking cogs in an economic machine process.The value of education is not reducible to purely one dimensional economic considerations.


S's handling of Keynes is generally correct,but filled with many omissions that undermine the worth of his commentary.The problem shows up on p.269 and p.273 where S claims that " Keynes insisted that the " tacit assumptions " of neoclassical economics " are seldom or never satisfied ...It cannot solve the problems of the actual world." Yet according to the final passage in the General Theory,"If our central controls succeed in establishing an aggregate volume of output corresponding to full employment as nearly as is practible,the classical theory comes into its own again from this point onwards." He seemed to want to have it both ways." Unfortunately,S's mathematical deficiencies have led him astray.I am not singling out S since this characterization of his mathematical capabilities applies to all 20th and 21st century economists ,whenever the issue arises about what was the mathematical model used by Keynes in the GT . Another example is that S is unable to comprehend that,since the marginal propensity to consume,mpc,is equal to 1-(1/k),then,by definition,the marginal propensity to spend on investment goods,mpi,must be equal to 1/k,which is just the inverse of the investment multiplier,k.


Keynes told Dennis Robertson bluntly in mid 1935 that the mathematical model of his theory of effective demand(Keynes's D-Z model) was not contained in the first 17 chapters of the General Theory.Keynes stated that the Employment Function model was contained in a later chapter and not in chapter 3 of the GT, as Robertson argued.It is obvious to anyone who can read English that the model is in CHAPTER 20 OF THE GT,titled The Employment Function. Keynes derives the following condition,first presented to the readers of the GT on pp.261-262:w/p=mpl/(mpc+mpi)is the general optimality condition at the macroscopic level based on a microeconomic foundation of purely competitive firms and industries,of which there were two,consumptions goods and investment goods.w is the money wage,p is the expected price level,w/p is the expected real wage,mpl is the marginal product of labor derived from an aggregated neoclassical production function(see p.283 and p.285 of the GT),mpi is the marginal propensity to spend on investment goods,and mpc is the marginal propensity to spend on consumption goods.Unless the mpc+mpi=1,it is impossible to attain the result required for full employment of all resources in neoclassical theory,excluding frictional or slack unemployment,which is w/p=mpl.If mpc+mpi< 1,multiple stable unemployment equilibria exist in the economic system which cannot be eliminated by labor cutting its money wages because the optimality condition specified by Keynes above requires that the money wages must rise,which is a direct contradiction of classical and neoclassical economic theory.Keynes's central controls are aimed at making sure that mpc+mpi=mpc+mps=1,where mps is the marginal propensity to save.There is no contradiction here on Keynes's part.S simply is ignorant of Keynes's mathematical analysis in chapter 20 of the GT.Only Paul Samuelson has taken this statement by Keynes seriously,although he has operated with it in an intuitive sense only, due to his failing to realize that Richard Kahn and Joan Robinson were lying to him when they told him that Keynes had no correct worked out mathematical or microeconomic theory contained in the GT because Keynes had ignored their advice.

I feel sorry for the author. I do not know enough about the industry to know if this is very bad writing or catastrophically bad editing, but under all this lies quite an interesting book.

As others have pointed out the book starts with frequent editing errors, where the spacing is wrong (somewhat lik ethis). This happens every other page for about the first 25 pages, but then seems to stop. Even worse are smaller, stranger errors that remind me of my student papers before I reviewed them. For example in discussing John Law he makes a very interesting introduction, until he mistakenly refers to him at one point in the text as William Law (he had discussed a William Peterson right before). I find this sort of error inexcusable in a published book, and once I lose respect for the work it becomes truly hard to enjoy it.

I also believe this form of mistake has motivated most of the bad reviews, even those which mention flaws in economic theory. For example one reviewer critiqued the comparative advantage example (I presume it is the one where two men work in a deserted island); it is indeed very poorly phrased, but it is an example of comparative advantage. However, after all the previous mistakes who cares to read carefully that which was not written carefully?

This review is for a book by Strathern published in Canada under the title
"Dr. Strangelove's Game: A Brief History of Economic Genius".

I found this book a major disappointment. It seems to me that the author is
clearly outside his field of expertise, the result being a book riddled
with errors. For instance, in his exposition of Ricardo's theory of
comparative advantage, the example has no comparative advantage. If he had
bothered to read a chapter of an introductory international economics book,
he would have found a clear illustration, Similarly, his description of
Edgeworth's contract curve is muddled and wrong with one consumer gaining
utility at the expense of the other. Indeed, it seems that the author spent
so little time writing the book that he does not even get his arithmetic
right -- his own numbers indicating the American domestic market was 167
percent larger than the British in 1910, not 250 percent larger as claimed.

To his merit, he does say something about nearly every major figure in
economics up to Friedman -- I would probably have included Samuelson as
well -- and other figures as well, e.g., Luca Pacioli, the father of
accounting. And his prose is quite readable, although I found his tendency
towards hyperbole annoying.

On the whole, if you are interested in biographical sketches of leading
economic thinkers in history and are not concerned about an explanation of
their ideas, you may find this book interesting. But I would look
elsewhere.

A Brief History Of Economic Genius by Paul Strathern (Lecturer in Mathematics and Philosophy, Kingston University, London) is an engaging and highly accessible look at the most eccentric and gifted economists including Johann Becher (1635-1682); John Law (1671-1729); Adam Smith (1723-1790); Robert Malthus (1766-1833); Karl Marx (1818-1883); Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929); and John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). These notable and influential figures, along with their triumphs and failings, and the evolution of the science of economics, are all intelligibly considered in this fascinating presentation that is recommended for academia, as well as the non-specialist general reader.

While there is some interesting information in the book, it seems to be riddled with errors and sloppy research. It also has quite an amount of bias - for example Strathern says that the three greatest economists are Marx, Smith and Keynes. Marx isn't even an economist. Further - 'Franklin D. Roosevelt, the greatest president of all'. He might have been a reasonable president - but the greatest of all?? The Great Depression didn't prove Keynes right. Actually, the New Deal slowed the growth of the US out of the depression (see for example the recent International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook 2002 (recoveries and recessions). There are many other errors in economics understanding. (This book is titled 'Dr Strangelove's Game' in Australia