Reviews for Economic regulatory policies

The average rating for Economic regulatory policies based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-10-21 00:00:00 Tamara Schwarz This is one of those books that is incredibly interesting, yet virtually no one has heard of it. It was recommended in "Patterns and Repertoire in History" as a comparative macrohistorical study, so naturally I added it to my project on "the mechanics of historical change". In short, the author's model describes historical changes in society as the result of dynamic processes that emerge from human decision-makers acting on, and reacting to their environment. In some ways it is similar to how agent-based models in economics work. To give a more elaborate answer I think his comparison to a game is quite intuitive. The playing field is our natural environment. The environment can undergo changes independently, which happen slowly, but can also undergo changes as a consequence of the actions of players. Human decision makers are the players. They are competing against each not just for survival but also to maximize their well-being. He argues that this is embedded in human nature. The rules of the game are set by the physical laws of the world, but also by social rules agreed upon by the players. The social rules are enforced by institutions but also change over time. Changes in economic forces (prices of labour and capital, abilities and access to resources) determine what the most cost effective strategy is. When the marginal returns of a strategy go below the costs of implementing a strategy the civilization has to come up with a new strategy or face collapse/restructuring. People will try out new ideas & strategies in reaction to the exhaustion of the pre-existing strategy. Those who have adopted the best strategies will be imitated. This strategic imitation leads to the strategy spreading through a society, almost defining a civilization. Economic strategies can be put into four categories: Population expansion, Conquest, Commerce, Technological advancement. Population expansion happens when there is an abundance of resources that the society can grow into. His simplest example of this is the spread of people across the Australian continent to take advantage of the vast land unoccupied by humans. The Commerce strategy is the result of people taking advantage of or creating profitable trading opportunities between regions. It is associated with increased specialisation between regions, lower transaction and transportation costs. It also requires less dominant substrategies in technology (to achieve better transport and transaction) and warfare (in order to protect the right to trade or monopoly in trade). Historically this would be the Mycenean Greeks, Venetians, and Dutch. Conquest is mostly a zero-sum strategy in that it either doesn't increase global material advantage or only marginally so (through spread of superior technology and institutions). The society that has successfully adopted this strategy can increase its living standard beyond its carrying capacity by taking from others and suppressing their living standard. The author argues that technological advancement has become the primary strategy adopted since the industrial revolution, and is also the most important because it can provide sustainable increases in well being by giving us greater access to natural resources. A large portion of the book is dedicated to walking through the past few thousand years of history, describing well known civilizations through the lens of his model (From Assyria, Greece, Rome, through to Venice and England and beyond). The author puts a lot of effort into examining other models of history and pointing out shortfalls. This was helpful, for me in particular because I am trying to learn about all of these different perspectives. The models he spends the most time on, probably because they are most obviously flawed in light of his model, are the recurrent flavours of malthusian theories. Predictions of the future based on deductively constructed models can only be as good as the assumptions going in. The assumptions should also be tested based on historical data. This is where the ideas of Malthus, "limits to growth" and "club of rome" breakdown. Firstly, they ignore the ability of humans to pursue leaps in technological innovation that increase the carrying capacity of the world, such as the neolithic and industrial revolution. Secondly, if humans were prevented or unable to pursue technology they would have to consider war to improve their prosperity. Pursuit of prosperity is fundamental to human nature. The book takes an exceptionally long time to read not just because it is long but also because it covers a lot of topics, the ideas take time to internalize, and he uses a breadth of vocabulary. There are many interesting ideas I haven't even covered here. This is not light reading, but in the end it really is worth it. In particular if you love thinking about history in a systematic, and endogenous way. It also helps to be familiar with many different historical narratives and threads of historical analysis. This is the first in a series of books, which incrementally build on his model. Its a daunting task but I look forward to working through the rest, and exploring the implications of his ideas.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-05 00:00:00 Felix Anstirman There is a surprising lack of good economic commentary these days. Noah Smith at Bloomberg is worth reading, but, otherwise, Paul Krugman, New York Times polemicist, has largely obliterated Paul Krugman, excellent academic economist, much as Darth Vader slew Annakin Skywalker. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when leading economists would write for a mass audience, commenting on the issues of the day, and applying economic principles to them. If you can find collections of these articles and read them in order, not only do you get a decent course in economics, but you also get a good education in America’s post-war economic history. These six books are a suggested guide. Henry Hazlitt was a leading journalist who developed a keen interest in economics. His book Economics in One Lesson, first published in 1946, remains an excellent introduction to the subject for the general reader. From 1946 to 1966, he commented on the economy for Newsweek in his ‘Business Tides’ column. These have now been collected together and are available in a book called, well, Business Tides. In it, Hazlitt covers the recession which followed World War Two, the recovery in the 1950s, and the boom of the mid-1960s which was already causing him concern by its inflationary nature in 1966. Milton Friedman is one of the great economists. He worked both at the highest level of abstract, academic economics, and was also able to communicate economic ideas to a mass audience. His books Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose remain essential reading for anyone trying to understand the relationship between free markets and free people. The liberal yin to Friedman’s free market yang was Paul Samuelson. Like Friedman, Samuelson worked at both the highest level of academic, economic abstraction, and in communicating his views to a wider audience. If you studied economics at college, the chances are that you used either Samuelson’s textbook Economics, or a more recent version by William Nordhaus which carries it on. Between 1966 and 1981, both men wrote columns for Newsweek (Friedman continued until 1984). Many of these can be found in four books, now sadly out of print, but still attainable for a reasonable price. An Economist's Protest picks up Friedman’s columns from 1966 to 1974 with Bright Promises, Dismal Performance taking them up to 1982. For Samuelson, The Samuelson sampler and Economics from the Heart respectively cover the same periods. The two men, good friends in real life, offer differing perspectives on a period which covered the end of the post-war Golden Age, Stagflation, and the rise of Reaganomics. The economics of Friedman eclipses that of Samuelson. Like Samuelson and Friedman, Gary Becker was a Nobel prize winner in economics. Again, he was a first rate academic economist who applied economic principles to a variety of fields, from the family to crime to education. From 1985 to 2004, he wrote a monthly column for Business Week. The first eleven years worth are collected in The Economics of Life. This was a period when, following the experiences of the 1970s, macroeconomic intervention was frowned upon and a consensus of sorts had formed around free markets. Reflecting this, Becker’s columns focus more on microeconomic issues such as crime and discrimination. Here you get accessible distillations of the often math heavy academic work which won him his Nobel prize and made him one of the most influential economists of the last three decades. Every Freakonomist is following in Becker’s footsteps. These six books offer a course in both economics and the economic aspects of post-war U.S. history. They also offer a window on a time when debate about these issues was, perhaps, less shrill than it is now. It was also, probably, more fruitful.