Lively, clever economics history adds up

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This article was published 25/03/2017 (3415 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you ever wanted to know more about economics but were daunted by the prospect of reading a 500-page-plus “Introduction to Economics” text of the sort favoured by university curricula, this book’s the ticket.

It’s economics delivered as an easily digestible history of ideas. The “dismal science,” as Scottish writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle famously dubbed it, has rarely been presented in such sprightly fashion.

Author Niall Kishtainy is a former policy adviser to the United Kingdom and United Nations Economic Commission on Africa, and a guest teacher at the London School of Economics. He’s also penned two prior books on economics, The Economics Book (2012) and Economics in Minutes (2014).

His latest book consists of 40 lively chronological chapters, each a mere four to six pages long. Each chapter focuses on an idea or figure critical to economic thought or methodology.

It starts with Plato and Aristotle, runs through Karl Marx, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Thorstein Veblen and a host of other luminaries, culminating with the likes of John Nash (he of Russell Crowe-starring A Beautiful Mind movie fame) and Milton Friedman.

The chapters capture big ideas and major historical events, including the invention of money, mercantilism, the rise of capitalism, exploitation of colonial (later Third World-nation) economies, the varieties of mixed (combination free market and government intervention) economies, the Great Depression, entrepreneurship, environmental damage, the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom, and conspicuous consumption.

Kishtainy knows how to capture a lay audience. He cleverly opens each chapter with an arresting anecdote or zippy intro before launching into more substantive narrative and analysis.

For example, the chapter on free-market apostle Hayek opens with a quirky tale about him and his professorial colleague (and ideological opposite) Keynes, sitting on the roof of King’s College, Cambridge, one night during the Second World War as the German Luftwaffe dropped bombs near the university.

A chapter about tariffs on imported goods versus free trade begins with an 1840s economist’s letter to the French parliament, ostensibly written on behalf of French candle manufacturers, complaining about a foreign rival flooding the market with cheap light. The rival was the sun; the letter was a joke, and a dig at nationalist economic protectionism.

Kishtainy’s writing is accessible even when he tackles denser topics, such as Friedman’s monetarism, supply-side economics or game theory.

And he’s always at pains to be balanced. After explaining any given theorist’s take on how money and markets do, or should, work, he delivers sensible qualifiers, caveats or criticism of what the guy pitched as gospel economic truth.

And it’s all guys here — there’s no female representation, at least until the very end, when he sympathetically considers the work of contemporary female economists Dianna Strassmann and Nancy Folbre, who are critical of how economists traditionally calibrated the labours of women.

“Think of all the labour that’s invisible because it’s not paid for: shopping, cooking, cleaning, caring for children,” he writes. “In poor countries women collect wood, heave water, plough land, grind corn, repair huts. Calculations by the United Nations shows that unpaid work could be equivalent to 70 per cent of the world’s economic production.”

The book rounds off with a paean-to-cum-plea-for the field of economics.

Kishtainy cites with approval the work of American economist William Nordhaus, who believes that “with a decisive application of the most basic tools of economics — the balancing of costs and benefits — we still have time to solve the problem of global warming and avoid a planetary disaster.”

Here’s hoping he’s right.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.