For practitioners of the dismal science, these times are both disturbing and heady. Economists are chided for their failure to foresee the current recession, but are consulted more frequently than ever to venture their guesses about when it will end. Obviously, we need people who can explain economics clearly, but those who do often disagree. That is because—economics’ scientific pretensions to the contrary—an economy is run by people, not on the basis of physical laws, and people are not nearly as predictable as some economists like to think. Two recent books aimed at a broad audience take very different approaches to demystifying economics.
The first comes not from an economist, but from a philosopher who believes that economics is accessible to anyone willing to do some reading and to think logically about a subject that is unfortunately rife with fallacies—notions that sound plausible, but whose correctness wilts under further analysis. Joseph Heath has waded...
Bruce Little is a former economics reporter and columnist for The Globe and Mail. Since leaving the Globe in 2004, he spent a year at the Bank of Canada as a special advisor to the governor and wrote a book, Fixing the Future: How Canada’s Usually Fractious Governments Worked Together to Rescue the Canada Pension Plan (University of Toronto Press, 2008).
Advertisement
Advertisement