Reviews for The Ends and Means of Welfare: Coping with Economic and Social Change in Australia

The average rating for The Ends and Means of Welfare: Coping with Economic and Social Change in Australia based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-07-01 00:00:00 Brent Matsen This has been probably the easiest of my econ history readings so far.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-14 00:00:00 Charles Thompson This book excels at story-telling and I really appreciated the description of the development of the Soviet economic system, however... ...I'm a numbers guy and I just can't stand the way that numbers get abused. Charts are just awful (how about just 3 data points for a line chart?). Things that should be charts are instead presented as tables with tens of columns and a plethora of footnotes. Or even worse, put into text, covering many pages full of lots of different numbers about different countries. Millions and billions get mixed up on more than one occasion. ...Lots comparisons of apples and pears, mixing up related numbers. How about comparing total public debt of some country with foreign debt burden of another (p 312)? ...Several facts are unclear. "Europe [represented] 46 percent of the world's total GDP, and 41 percent of the world's per capita GDP". How am I to interpret that? If you sum up the World's GDP per capita, isn't that the same as the world's GDP? It couldn't possibly be that the European number was 41 percent of the world's average? Or was 41 percent of the world's average contributed for by Europe? ...Several facts are just plain wrong: -Mixing up hedge funds with their management companies. (p. 309) (Fact: those are separate entities.) -Claiming that derivatives at large were invented by IBM and the World Bank in 1981. (p. 309) (Fact: This was the first formalized swap agreement, other forms derivative deals have have been made for thousands of years.) -Claiming that Milton Friedman "believed that the undisturbed free market would solve all social problems" (p. 310) (Fact: He didn't, which is why he famously proposed a negative income tax for low earners.) -Claiming Dow Jones to be "at the New York Stock Exchange", and quoting it in dollars. (p. 311) (Fact: it is an index independent of any exchange and is quoted in index points.) If you like story-telling and don't mind skipping all the numbers than this is actually a decent book. But I just can't stand it. The high prevalence of errors in some areas also makes me wonder how accurate this book is overall.