Customer Reviews

Essays on Genetic Evolution and Economics

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While the economics profession has its head in the clouds, Professor Burnham's focus is on the ground floor (or perhaps even the basement). His paradigm for understanding the underlying source of our economic preferences is highly illuminating. Interestingly, it supplants the widely-held view in the field that tastes should be taken as exogenously determined. Rather than falling from the sky, however, Dr. Burnham describes the genetic underpinnings of our preferences, and the tug-of-war that often results. I highly encourage others to read this provocative text, and to follow Burnham as he continues to articulate his profound insights in other volumes. Stay tuned. There's more to learn from this teacher and synthesizer of various strands of scientific thought.

115 years ago one of the two most important works in evolutionary biology was written, yet it remained unknown for 30 years, as biologists groped along in the dark. Economists are today doing the same thing, while the Mendel of their field lays unread. This book needs to be read by all who find the current state of economics to be unrealistic in its assumptions about human behavior. We have been groping in the dark too long. Don't let 30 years go by, when the truth is available to us today.

What can the field of Economics learn from Evolutionary Biology? Most economists think the answer is "nothing" and they are very, very wrong. With his creation of "Genetic Evolutionary Economics," Professor Terence Burnham has developed an enormously important new paradigm for economics. At its core, economics is about human behavior: how much should people spend or save or earn, for instance. These questions are simple subsets of a more general question that biologists have been asking for generations: "why do people behave the way they do?" Burnham presents the answer elegantly and lucidly and to biologists it is not a surprising answer. To economists it is more than surprising, however. It rocks the discipline to its very foundations, requiring wholesale reconsideration of decades of research.

We will certainly be hearing more from Prof. Burnham, but for now this book is essential reading for everyone interested in human behavior.

Topic is fairly intriguing, especially Burnham's expert knowledge on issues of self-interest, but writing itself is overall clunky and dull. You find yourself wishing for more spark, warmth and humor in place of the cold, arid, repetitive fact-spewing.