Friday, October 5, 2007

Assorted

Gregory Clark's Farewell to Alms: It's Not What You Think

Malthus on Stilts: Clark Misinterpets the Malthusian Model

Oomph v. Statistical Significance

Why I wrote a book;
Now that my new book One Economics, Many Recipes is selling at Amazon, here is something that I should have written in the Introduction, but did not.

My main goal in writing the book was to present a sensible alternative to two mutually hostile schools of thought. One school identifies too much government intervention in markets as the central problem of underdevelopment, tends to downplay the second-best complications graduate students in economics learn about, and prescribes a standard policy package made up of free trade, privatization, and deregulation, along with an increasingly ambitious set of governance reforms. This is the orthodox policy agenda, represented by the original Washington Consensus and its descendants. If you want to attach names and faces to this school, think of Al Harberger, Anne Krueger, Jeff Sachs (before Africa), and Larry Summers (circa 1990s).

The other school takes as its starting point the historical experience of rich and growing countries, and notes that none of these countries achieved success through policies of free trade and free markets. It faults mainstream economists (and mainstream economics) for peddling dangerous medicine. Two books published this year are good representatives of this genre: Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism and Erik Reinert's How Rich Countries Got Rich ... and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor.


The most embarrassing thing Joe Stiglitz ever wrote?

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