In anticipation of that disscussion, the review below might be of use.
James Grant writes of the February ASET book selection:
Ms. Nasar divides her book into three "acts," like a play. They are "hope," "fear" and "confidence." "Hope" is what the Victorian thinkers, including Dickens, in his role of social reformer, and Karl Marx (of all people), gave the world concerning the possibility of solving the economic problem through conscious effort. "Fear" is what the interwar economists—confronting first hyperinflation and then the Great Depression—had to wrestle with and surmount. "Confidence" is what returned after World War II, as governments implemented the allegedly constructive notions of the Keynesians and monetarists
Grant writes further about notable exclusions from the book:
here isn't room for every economist in this book or any other, but I myself missed the voice of Jacques Rueff, the 20th-century theorist who was able to demonstrate the superiority of the classical gold standard over the faux gold standard devised by Keynes (incorporated in the Bretton Woods system of 1944-71) or the paper-money regime advocated by Fisher and Friedman.
I missed, as well, Murray Rothbard, who blamed the Great Depression on the Hoover administration. It didn't intervene too little, Rothbard unconventionally sought to show in his 1963 book, "America's Great Depression," but rather too much. The economics profession just smiled at this contention, but the unsolved case of the depression of 1920-21 counts heavily for Rothbard's thesis. It was a deep and painful slump (a young Army veteran, Harry S. Truman, lost his Kansas City haberdashery to bankruptcy), with the wholesale price index dropping by 37% and the measured rate of unemployment tripling to 12%.
I wonder which other thinkers our ASET book group would have liked to have seen portrayed in a history of economic thought.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904836104576557360442970594.html
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