A comprehensive reevaluation of the nature of economic systems across the globe, A New View of Comparative Economic Systems is today's choice for today's world. This exciting text is not merely a re-treading of an obsolete Soviet-oriented text, but a fresh, new, and comprehensive reappraisal of the nature and study of economic systems. A New View of Comparative Economic Systems defines a new approach and will set the standard for years to come in Comparative Economic courses.
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Book Description
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About the Author
Dr. David Kennett is Professor of Economics and Director of the Program in International Studies at Vassar College. His current research interests include Comparative Economics and Soviet and East European Economic Transportation. Dr.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good in facts, sympathies are paradoxical,
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This review is from: A New View of Comparative Economics with Economic Applications Card and InfoTrac College Edition (Hardcover)
This is one of those books - you would expect in the thirties or fourties - that tell you how bad planning is but then suggest that a socialist society is probably great if you live there. The only really annoying part is when facts are down-played, which they are in certain descriptive paragraphs. Describing a centrally planned economy:
"Restrictions on movement and the central determination of wages made the market for labor clumsy and unresponsive, but on the whole workers responded to material incentives just as in the developed market economies." -- Anyone who has studied Socialist planned economies knows just how untrue that statement is. Material incentives were introduced and constantly re-worked in an attempt to get a response from workers, but largely the material incentives did not work or did not work as planned. Firms could not profit-maximize because they had to fulfill a plan, the plan would be given in "tons" or "square meters" and the incentives were skewed toward fulfilling the plan - sometimes for material reward, other times due to coercion, but in neither case was it an incentive system that lined up in the way it does in a market economy. The phrasing leads one to beleive that the incentive is similar in both systems, but the incentives in a planned economy were a constant struggle and often produced the opposite of the objective (eg incentive to produce less instead of more). One or two just misleading paragraphs would not bother me. But there are very many: "Workers performed because of piece rates, bonuses, or the prospect of advancement as well as supervision, just as in the West... Truly coercive systems of labor allocation and job performance are those that rely on slavery, serfdom, indenturement, or peonage." -- So, the USSR had no gulags, then? Forcing people to work and allocating a job for them at a certain wage, with all consumption products from housing to media to milk to clothing also planned and priced by the government - the one employer - is nothing like serfdom, then? The wording is clearly trying to convince the reader that the USSR was an improvement on what came before it. Many Russian would disagree and you have to skew the facts and omit facts - keep the discussion at a very high level - to get this viewpoint across. In case you think I am twisting the words of the writer, he states several times that planning is not that bad, the market is coercive through its "whip of hunger", and "it may be premature to assume that central planning is buried forever", "the widely held belief in the superiority of the market, which may well be called into question in the future." etc etc. My other complaint is that although it *does* do a nice job of describing many different economic systems - it doesn't go into great detail about all of them, and clearly at least some of the high-level analysis is questionable. Therefore it remains a very introductory text on comparative systems that ought to be taken with a grain of salt. There is also one absurd thing that the author does - maybe more than one, but here is an example of a ludicrous bias. There is one very dishonest and obviously biased paragraph in this book. Its so obvious that its bizarre to see it published in a textbook. The book makes the choice to compare two economic freedom rankings. The first is the Heritage Institute's Indices of Economic Freedom. The ranking is described and the table is shown and then the author provides a caveat: "The six 'freest' nations are all small, with an average population of less than 4 million. ... On the whole it is difficult to draw lessons for the design and conduct of an economic system from the experience of such small states, no matter how rapid their their recent growth experience. It is simply not realistic to assume that Russia or India will undergo sustained growth by adopting the same policies as Hong Kong or Singapore." Okay. Reading this one may notice that he seems to want to defend more socialistic states, but perhaps he is simply making the observation that if the "freest" countries by this measure are all small and have had recent growth but not long-term growth, then you may not be able to draw any conclusions. But the table is included and I sincerely hope that no reader falls for that or moves on taking his words at face value. It is completely dishonest. One look at the table shows that his "6 freest" are actuall 6 of 8 - the first three are ranked #1 #2 and #3, then there are 5 ranked #4 that are all equal in score! Guess which countries came in #4 with a score of 1.8 exactly? Estonia Ireland Luxembourg Netherlands United States Then the next in rank is Australia with a score of 1.85. So, is it "difficult to draw lessons" from the Unites States - ranked equally to some of those 6 that he mentioned? Is it "simply unrealistic to assume that Russia or India will undergo sustained growth by adopting the same policies as" the United States, ranked equal to some of his 6? Why pick six? He picked them because they were small, and if the United States ranked *after* them by score, it would make sense, although you might expect him to mention that the US came soon after, if it was close in score. But the US didn't come after, the US tied in score! So did the netherlands which is 19 million, not under 4 million. And then Australia was in fact very close, another larger country. It would be an outrage if it weren't so idiotic. Then again, if you are buying it second hand as I did, only two years old and under $10, it is probably worth the buy and worth the read.
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