Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

Books for budding economists

"Magrathea is a myth, a fairy story, it's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to be economists, it's..." Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

What books should you give your children (nieces, nephews, friends) if you want them to grow up to become economists?

Literary You-genics

In days of old, literature was subject to strict population controls. As John A Hobson put it back in 1910: 

"Before the arts of printing and of reading became common, most of the great deeds of man, his finest thoughts, his noblest feelings, perished for lack of enduring record and easy accurate communication.... Almost all that was original and beautiful or serviceable in the intellectual and spiritual life of primitive man inevitably died as soon as it was born." 

Book review: Dan Gardner's "Future Babble"

Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen is one of my very favourite journalists. I first came across his work during the 2008 election campaign, in which he distinguished himself by writing what turned out to be the only article on carbon taxes that made no reference to Stéphane Dion's accent. His piece was a beacon of intellectual curiosity in what was otherwise a very bleak media landscape, for which I was almost pathetically grateful.

Happily, he has also found time to write books. His first book, Risk, dealt with the psychology of how we handle uncertainty, and is well worth tracking down, buying and reading. His most recent book, Future Babble, notes that one of the ways we deal with uncertainty is to rely on the predictions of experts. Unfortunately, experts aren't very good at forecasting, but no-one seems to notice or care. Many of the examples Dan uses are, inevitably, from economics, so this is a good book for economists to read and to take seriously.

The Rise and Fall of Marxism?

My latest time wasting tech toy is Google Ngram Viewer. What's an ngram? A one word phrase, like "Marx" is a one-gram. "Karl Marx" is a two-gram. "K. Marx" is a three-gram (the period counts as a gram too). A phrase of indefinite length is an ngram.

The Ngram viewer is based on Google Books. Google has scanned almost every book (including pamphlets, treatises etc) ever written. It's then counted how often every single word (including names, punctuation marks, etc) appears in every book. For example, in 1860, the word "international" was used 513 times in 162 books published in Britain that year. Google has also counted how often every possible two word phrase was used. Every possible three word phrase.

With a research tool like this I'm like a kid in a candy store - I'm just gazing around hardly knowing where to begin.

Why economics textbooks are (sometimes) ideological

In a recent comment on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative Tom Slee shared this experience:

...{W]hen my son comes back from an Economics 101 course at an Ontario university and shows me bald statements like these from his textbook (Parkin and Bade) then I have no problem with using a broad brush to criticize the profession:... "Arguments that protection is necessary for infant industries and to prevent dumping are weak." (yes, that is the entire bullet point) and "Arguments that protection saves jobs... are flawed".

He told me that in the multiple choice section of the exam it was easy to get the right answer - just look for the most right-wing, free-market one of the options.

You can test Tom Slee's son's theory yourself:  http://www.econ100.com/ has on-line quizzes matching the Parkin and Bade text, along with solutions.

I have no opinion on the Parkin and Bade text one way or the other.

The point of this post is to give two reasons why one would expect textbooks to be ideological.

A rambling post on Joseph Heath's "Filthy Lucre"

This was supposed to be a review of Joseph Heath's new book "Filthy Lucre: Economics for People who hate Capitalism". But I'm not used to doing book reviews, so it's going to turn into a ramble on the teaching of economics, and economics in the political spectrum.

I got the call to act as "host" (sort of interviewer) for Joseph Heath at the Ottawa Writers Festival. I said "yes", because I had really enjoyed his previous book (with Andrew Potter), "The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture can't be jammed". Quick and dirty synopsis: "Forget it Naomi Klein fans; the marketing guys are waaay ahead of you!" Actually there's a lot more than that in what is an incredibly wide-ranging book on philosophy, politics, culture, economics, and stuff.