Reviews for Outlines & Highlights for Manufacturing Processes for Engineering Materials by Serope Kalpak...

The average rating for Outlines & Highlights for Manufacturing Processes for Engineering Materials by Serope Kalpak... based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-09-24 00:00:00 Angela KAY Wishful thinking is bad thinking and leads to little wish fulfillment. I’ve long cherished the secret dream of becoming some sort of modern Renaissance man. My mind would rove over every academic subject, thereby giving me a complete picture of the current state of knowledge in every domain. How to do this? I could think of only one obvious way: to read textbooks in every discipline. But over time, my enthusiasm for this project cooled; and that is mainly because I realized it was impossible. There is simply too much specialized knowledge to become an expert in everything. Nowadays, it takes a genius and a lifetime’s worth of work to make a lasting contribution to even one field, let alone all of them. Even if I couldn’t achieve expert status, the idea of dipping my feet into every subject still appealed to me. What better way to become that most vaguely defined and least well remunerated of persons, the intellectually well-rounded individual? So I set my sights on acquiring textbooks. After doing a search for books on economics, Samuelson inevitably popped up. The recent editions were too expensive, so I began to look for used copies of earlier versions. Soon I stumbled onto this book—a reprint of the very first 1948 edition of Samuelson’s landmark textbook, a work that changed the discipline forever. It was perfect: both a historical artifact and an introduction to the dismal science. I couldn’t resist. It is easy to see why this book became so influential. Samuelson is a strong writer, and works hard to keep the reader engaged and entertained. I could never have guessed that accounting and interest rates could be so enjoyable to learn about, but Samuelson pulls it off. His style is informal and leisurely, astoundingly so for a textbook. It seems it was Samuelson’s aim to explain economics as if he were a friend having a chat with you. The result is that the book is far longer than it has to be, for Samuelson often repeats himself and includes numerous examples. It is not uncommon for the same idea to be explained in three different ways, followed by several worked out case studies. This makes for easy reading—so easy, in fact, that it often doesn’t feel like you’re learning. Although this book is obviously dated, it has held up remarkably well. In the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War, Samuelson was grappling with many of the same problems we are still dealing with today—unemployment, public debt, controlling the business cycle, recessions and depressions. In fact, with Samuelson’s emphasis on the limitations of monetary policy (money supply, inflation and interest rates) and the importance of fiscal policy (taxes, government spending), this book may be more relevant than much of the economic thinking that came later—what with the rise of the Chicago School and its heavy emphasis on monetary policy and its complete de-emphasis of the role of government. We have learned from painful experience that Keynes’s insights into the causes and solutions of depression are still vital, and Samuelson tries to show why. Nonetheless, it is impossible to forget that one is reading a book written over half a century ago. For one, there is the entrenched sexism. Samuelson assumes that all his readers will be male, and that every family will include a male breadwinner and a wife who does the shopping, cleaning, and cooking. The only women in this book with money are widows. But of course, it is easy to forgive Samuelson for this, as this was a pervasive aspect of the culture at the time. Another interesting mark of this book’s age is the anxiety about the communist threat. Already he is talking about how the West must prepare to beat back the encroaching influence of the Soviet Union. As well as its cultural and historical viewpoint, the book shows its age in its theory. Absent from Samuelson’s vocabulary are the words “macroeconomics” and “microeconomics.” And strangely, he doesn’t cover supply and demand curves until Chapter 19! Also old-fashioned was the complete lack of equations of any kind. Samuelson explains even abstract relationships and processes using no math, but only with graphs and words—which is also partly responsible for this book’s bulk. Of course, none of this prevents the book from being interesting and educational; and whatever the reader loses in modern economic knowledge is made up in historical interest. It is hard to say how much I learned—as learning from this book was so effortless—but one thing that struck me was the importance of the fallacy of composition: what is true of a part need not be true of the whole. Samuelson gives many examples: 1. If all farmers work hard and nature cooperates in producing a bumper crop, total farm income falls. 2. One man by great ingenuity in hunting a job or by willingness to work for less may thereby solve his own unemployment problem, but all cannot solve their problems this way. 3. Higher prices for one industry may benefit its members but, if the prices of everything bought and sold increased in the same proportion, no one would be any better off. 4. It may pay the United States to reduce tariffs charged on goods imported even if other countries refuse to do likewise. 5. It may pay a business firm to take on some business at much less than full costs. 6. Attempts of individuals to save more in depression may lessen the total of the community’s savings. 7. What is prudent behavior for an individual or a single business firm may at times be folly for a nation or a state. This is the fallacy that people fall into when they compare running a government to running a business, or the behavior of the economy to the behavior of an individual. It’s sadly not true that the lessons gleaned from being a responsible businessman translate into fixing an economy. So it goes. Perhaps this textbook was the perfect place to continue on my quest to become well-rounded. For, as any competent economist will tell you, specialization makes processes more efficient and productive. Adam Smith gave us the example of the pin factory: A single man, by himself, could make a dozen or so pins a day; but a team of ten men, all performing different tasks, could make thousands. The same seems to be true for intellectual endeavors: specialization makes the acquisition of knowledge many times more efficient. So if I am ever to cease being a dilettante and to develop some expertise, I’ll need to focus on one area. Yet there is another side to this story: The single man making pins at least gets to switch tasks often, preventing his job from becoming tiresome; but a man on the pin assembly-line does the same thing every day, all day—and that leads to intellectual stagnation. We have to keep exposing ourselves to new things in order to broaden our perspectives and to keep our minds young. So perhaps this quest isn’t such a bad idea after all. Or is that just wishful thinking?

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-12 00:00:00 Harvey Morgan Baluarte 32 This book always makes me believe I'm an economist. I love it.