Customer Reviews

The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993

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"The pursuit of reason" is a detailled and excellent written history of the Economist.It's the answer to the question:HOW CAN A BUSINESS MAGAZINE SURVIVE FOR MORE THAN 150 YEARS? The answer of this book is: quality goes never out of style.A must for every economist who loves his job.

This is one of those books which seeks to impress its own authority with thousands of references. As my father worked at The Economist for nearly 40 years, I have met several of its characters and yet when I read Ruth's book it's like meeting different people. With nearly 1000 pages, I soon lost interest in reading everyone serially as even the reason for economics does not come through the way I believe founder James Wilson intended.

Unless the index is itself porous, try a few tests. The one reference to Calcutta does not explain this is where James Wilson died before his time trying to bring ethics to the British Raj. There is no reference to the word entrepreneur even though this is one of the keywords that journalists from The Economist systemically embedded in economics intent on the reasoning that economics - and its compound consequences - should be used to truly and fairly represent all people, and not just the big get bigger.

It would be a pity if The Economist loses its culture and values because of a tome that does not live its founders DNA. Especially in the coming decade where economics itself needed to be transformed (according to The Economist's 1980s future history scenarios) if we are to earn future sustainability of our species. We are hurtling through a series of tipping points of the post-industrial age where it is high time for economics to help all of us unite in confronting inconvenient truths and the corrupted systems that courageous grassroots networkers at Transparency International bear witness to. You will not find such tensely vital neighbours as globalization or micro in the index. So presumably no valuetrue debate on which way round the triangle "micro to inter to macro economics" needs to be mapped if every society and global village network is to be cross-culturally sustainable in the way we all invest in markets - and their networking gatesway to freedom and happiness.

Reasoning needs, now more than ever, to be about open maps from and to diverse destinations, not a uniform managerial mindset carved in Harvardian stone and resembling the dinosaur's world view.