A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Clear and Absorbing Historical Overview I got a lot of nourishment from Niall Kishtainy’s A Little History of Economics (2017). His history begins with the first philosopher-economists like Plato, moves through economist giants like Adam Smith, and finishes with contemporary figures like Thomas Piketty. Along the way it concisely references historical events like revolutions, wars, famines, bubbles, depressions, recessions, and so on. I like Kishtainy’s accounts of things like normative economics, Marxism, exploitation, free trade vs. protected trade, conspicuous consumption, game theory, creative destruction, speculators, “pegged” currencies, externalities, feminist economics, behavioral economics, rational expectations, auction theory, and so on. He explains difficult concepts clearly and uses helpful analogies (some from the economic theorists he’s referring to), like the bathtub, the parade, the football (soccer) team, the pineapple island, and the noisy trumpeter. He uses simple language to explain complex concepts. As an economics tyro, I learned a lot from his book (although I also feel that, because it’s a short book and I’m not good at retaining complex information, I will probably forget much of what I learned). Kishtainy is rather balanced and unbiased in his history, presenting the ideas of key figures like Keynes and Friedman while showing opposing points of view or theories to demonstrate how complex the field is and how many different ways there are of understanding economics. Some figures he covers are really neat, like the Indian economist-philosopher Amartya Sen, who started looking at different ways to be poor or wealthy than traditional money/food ones, focused on “capabilities” rather than on mere freedoms, and also cast a light on gender inequality. Kishtainy’s overall point is that economics is an important and interesting field, exploring in the context of scarcity “what do people need to be happy and fulfilled” and “what makes them truly thrive.” He succeeds in making us see that “Economics is a matter of life and death.” He also argues that we should use economics to solve specific problems, because it’s not so effective at solving big complex problems. And that economists should have cool heads and warm hearts. The audiobook reader Stephen Crossley is fine: clear, personable, committed, without drawing attention to himself. Sometimes while listening to the audiobook, I wished I were reading the physical book so I could dip in and out of earlier or later chapters to firm up an understanding of points where Kishtainy says something like, “As we saw in chapter 29,” or “As we’ll see in chapter 36,” so I several times listened to chapters over again after finishing them once. The book is well-written and well-read enough that re-listening to chapters was interesting rather than a chore. Readers new to economics—especially young readers—should find much of interest here, though older readers well-versed in them may not. View all my reviews
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