Uncertainty in Economics: Readings and Exercises - Peter A. Diamond - Hardcover - REV Book

It’s my own fault, I should have stopped even earlier than I did, but there was something compulsively awful about this book.

There are some things that are truly contemptible, like privileged and relatively intelligent people who assume a sort of corn-pone dumbness, and it seems to particularly affect the US right-wing. So why would anyone who pretended not to understand arithmetic write about economics in Eat the Rich? Well, because it isn’t so much about economics as it is an excuse for a diatribe about how much better the US of A’s “good capitalism” is than any other country’s system. To prove it, PJ takes a series of trips, with his smug US attitudes at full throttle, to so-called “good socialist” countries like Sweden (damned with the faint praise of someone who experiences a culture even slightly different from his own), Cuba (“bad socialist”; say no more, you know what that means), the “bad capitalist” Albania with its endemic corruption and poverty, and the aspiring capitalist Russia ... and manages a sneer at the varied successes (some magnificent, some baby steps) of every one of them.

But what makes EtR so wearying to read is not the piffle and facile economics, but the incessant one-liners. Every line is a wisecrack. (Stupid word that, these are dumbcracks ... bad-a-boom! - and believe me, that one is better than 90% of PJ’s)

I’m not entirely sure where the Eating part comes in, because I had to skip ever-increasing chunks and paused only when I noticed an egregiously appalling bit. But I suspect that it embodies the idea that Good Capitalism encourages the Rich to freely take what they want without any envy on our part, in the belief that the rest of us will somehow benefit. (Of course this was all before Good Capitalism showed its Albanian side in 2008, so perhaps PJ has changed his mind? Though I somehow think not)
Well, if that isn’t the message, feel free to let me know, but you can’t make me read any more of this execrable rubbish.