Reviews for Boundaries of Economics

The average rating for Boundaries of Economics based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-08 00:00:00 Muthukumaran Rangaswamy The book was published in 1997 (I got it from a garage sale); therefore its economic information should be quite old by now. But its overall picture is much the same today, only more extreme, with the top 5% becoming even wealthier and the rest of the society stagnating or getting less and less. In its radiography of the American society the author shows surprising disparities in salaries within the same profession (among practicing physicians, lawyers, professors, etc.), within employees based on gender, race, education, geography, within immigrants of different ethnicities, etc., and its dry, neutral and impartial analysis shows the reasons why it is so: economic factors, people or corporation choices, board-of-directors politics, globalization, technologic evolution, etc. He also shows the future evolution of society with a brilliance confirmed sixteen years later by the today reality. What makes his book easy to read and enjoyable is that he uses the numbers of his statistics in a crisp, non-boring way, concise and devoid of unnecessary details or any background noise. What is surprising for a reader like me is that the vast majority of Americans are supporters of the inequality of wealth where 1% own more than 40% of the social pie, and how he shows that even the destitute poor of the society reject a more equitable repartition of income to lift them from poverty. Unlike China or some others countries in Europe, for American mentality extreme inequality is not, and will be not in the future a problem worth mentioning, it is part of the American utopian dream "from rags to riches". The book is rich in information and fascinating aspects of how the American pie is sliced. In conclusion, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a better understanding of America, its society and its future, a kind of writing a detached and perspicacious observer like Alexis de Tocqueville would have found in the distribution of incomes nowadays.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-18 00:00:00 Brandon Chang This was a lecture that Russell wrote during the first world war, and thus, contained vital tokens of his political thought along with romantic language he used to encourage. I chose to read this because I am endlessly interested in Russell's critique of BOTH ideologies of conservatism and socialism. In these pages, one can find Russell's explicit denunciation of capitalism and the wage system (as he calls for it to be abolished) as well as his complete disregard for any form social organization resembling anarchy. He makes sweeping phycological observations about human nature (narrowing our desires down as humans to either Possessive vs. Creative) as well as unsubstantiated sociological observations about human interactions. Russell also does not find time to punctuate which institutions he feels are necessary or which aren't which could contribute effectively to his argument. As a statist and a liberal, Russell does little to add to contemporary thought regarding social democracy or welfare state promotion and instead perpetuates thinking along the lines of John Locke and Wilhelm Von Humboldt. The only difference, and its the reason why I love to read anything Russell wrote, is that he uses such beautiful, hopeful language for his visions of a future society. In short but poignant sections, he always finds conclusive sentences to mark this eloquent departure: "There can be no final goal for human institutions; the best are those that most encourage progress toward others still better. Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active" (17).