How to Think Like an Economist
Great Economists Who Shaped the World and What They Can Teach Us
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- 149,00 kr
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Capturing the essence of history's most influential economists in enjoyable and illuminating biographical sketches, this book shows how the great economic thinkers are still relevant today.
We live in the economy – and we are part of it. Living through a pandemic, governments had to work out how to put economies into a deep freeze without destroying them. Avoiding climate catastrophe means changing economies so that they don't bake the world.
In explaining how economic thinking is indispensable to tackling these huge problems, this book is a sure-footed guide, spanning Aristotle's ideas about restraining consumption, Adam Smith's thinking about the importance of moral character for sustained economic development, and Esther Duflo's ongoing work to help the world's poorest communities lift themselves out of poverty. It shows how the greatest economic thinkers – Karl Marx, Maynard Keynes, and Friedrich Hayek, among many others – have enabled us to see the world differently, and how we can make it better.
It shows that economic thinking emerged, long before there were economists – and that good economics is about much more than the economy, so everyone should understand these vital ideas.
Along the way, the book quietly subverts what you think you know about economics, especially by showing how women found a place in the development of ideas even when discrimination denied them any formal role.
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Mochrie, an economics professor at Heriot-Watt University, debuts with an erudite history of economics, told through profiles of thinkers who have advanced the discipline. According to Mochrie, Aristotle believed that charging interest was immoral, and Saint Thomas Aquinas only grudgingly allowed that merchants could ethically profit from trade. Elsewhere, Mochrie impartially contrasts Adam Smith's conception of the market as a mechanism for channeling self-interest into socially benign cooperation with Karl Marx's ideas about how market dynamics empower capitalists to exploit workers. In addition to discussing the ideas of John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, and Friedrich Hayek, Mochrie highlights the contributions of contemporary economists, describing how Gary Becker applied economic analysis to ostensibly non-financial relationships (he argued that families exist only because membership confers monetary benefits) and how Esther Duflo's research showed the benefits of conducting randomized controlled trials over analyzing data collected for other purposes. Mochrie has a talent for making economic ideas accessible, and the analysis covers major disputes within the discipline without picking sides. This is an ideal resource for readers whose eyes otherwise glaze over at the mere mention of supply-and-demand curves.
