Sonuç 9. Sınıf 1.Dereceden Denklemler - Eşitsizlikler ve Mutlak Değer itibaren Sonuç Yayınları içinde LIT biçim

James Diato jdviper — First, the praise: I'm glad I read this book because I think what Skousen is trying to do is very important; by providing a coherent and engaging narrative about the history of economic thought, students of economics are better able to situate the particular theories they learn about. I personally felt like the book filled in some of the gaps in my knowledge (about second-tier economists, discredited-but-once-popular theories, etc.), so I am happy about that. It was also very accessible and had a good mix of biography and theory given that it was billed as a book about "the lives and ideas of the great thinkers." That being said, there were several times I was so disgusted that I almost gave up on it. First of all, the history Skousen tells is incredibly biased. He says in the introduction that he's not trying to write an impartial book -- which is fair, except that his hero-worship of Smith, Menger, and Friedman combined with his sometimes scathing treatment of Keynes, Marshall, and Samuelson very often gets to be too much to bear. In the introduction, he says that many similar books use a horizontal continuum to visually represent the relative positions of the different economists (from totally free market <--> socialist). This reminds him too much of a pendulum, which seems to imply, he says, that some kind of compromise near the middle is the ideal and eventual resting place. So he replaces it with a VERTICAL totem pole-like visual with Karl Marx at the bottom and Adam Smith at the top. Really, Skousen, a horizontal line was too loaded with value judgment so you replaced it with a horizontal hierarchy instead?! This turned out to be telling. The chapter on Keynes, for example, is called "The Keynes Mutiny: Capitalism Faces its Greatest Challenge." One gets the sense that even his treatment of the economists' personal lives is affected by whether or not he agrees with their theories. All in all, he suggests that there is a degree of consensus about the superiority of Austrian and Free Market economics (and the dangerousness of government intervention) that I feel fairly confident does not exist, which is why his partiality is such a problem. My second main complaint is related to the first, and it has to do with the way he creates an historical arc for the material. I think providing some type of narrative is important, both for the readability and the memorability of a book, but the way Skousen suggests that economics has been "completed" over the last century makes it sound dangerously inflexible. To me, one of the main lessons to come out of the story he tells is that economic theory is never permanent: he makes fun of the confidence conveyed by Mill and Ricardo about their theory of value (which has since been discredited), but he is fully guilty of the exact same overconfidence and hubris in suggesting that the monetarists found the "last piece of the puzzle" and that free market theory is the ultimate and permanent rendition of economic theory. I think, in short, that he could benefit from reading some Kuhn or even Lakatos -- he seems to believe that the "revolutions" which he discusses in every chapter have ended with Friedman. Finally, a more narrow complaint: the book says that it is updated with new information on the financial crisis of 2008. In reality, there is about 3/4 of a page on the subject. More importantly, though, the final few chapters are characterized by an optimism about the future of capitalism that exemplifies the naive pre-crisis attitude within economics that has since been condemned and even partially blamed for the crisis itself. He sings the praises of deregulation and says that socialism is on the retreat. This tone strikes me as totally inappropriate given the events of the last few years (or, if it is defensible, he should at least *defend* it by explaining away the crisis), and suggests that although he added that page on the crisis, he didn't revise anything else.