Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism", Princeton University Press, 2009.  ~and~ Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies", W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. This is the first time on my blog that I am reviewing two books together, but I thought it made sense in this case because the books are complementary: both are about economics, yet they take different perspectives. Animal Spirits  by Akerlof and Shiller is essentially a vision of "behavioral macroeconomics", criticizing the mainstream standard story about the economy as incomplete and offering a theory that includes human psychology. The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee applies the principles of economics to the issue of technological change in the 21st century and argues that the digital ...

I haven't updated my blog for a while, but I am in the process of writing another book review. This time it will be two books, both related in some way to economics. Before that post is ready, I thought that it would be cool in the meantime to post a "list of questions for economists", based on a book by Rod Hill and Tony Myatt called The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics (Zed Books, 2010). The purpose of the book is to challenge the standard, conventional treatment of microeconomics of a typical undergrad textbook. It is not against mainstream economics, but against mainstream textbook economics. According to the authors, the problem with the standard text is that it obscures the most important value judgments in economics and pretends to objectivity. Hill and Myatt also criticize the world-view of market fundamentalism assumed by most introductory textbooks. Throughout the book, the authors pose "questions for your professo...