I was sent a review copy of the book, Economic Thought: A Brief History. A few excerpts:

The classical economists emphasized the asymmetries between social classes in terms of differences in economic property and political power. . .landlords. . .as Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations, “they love to reap where they never sowed.”

…these economists started to see the interdependence of economic units as a central analytical theme. The task of political economy was to analyze the entanglement of intended and unintended consequences that resulted from the actions of self-regarding agents.

…While David Hume had maintained that man is “but a heap of contradictions” and reason “the slave of the passions,” marginalist economic thought became preoccupied with simple, linear characters who know what they want and efficiently pursue it. . .

…While the classical authors had started their analyses with a view to society. . . stratified in different classes, the marginalists began their analysis from the single needy individual.

…The marginalist concept of given preferences, depicted in a utility function (defined in terms of a given and constant set of goods), also does not provide for the emergence of new goods and hence has no way of dealing with dynamic cases. It therefore should not come as a surprise that with marginalism attention initially shifted away from questions about development and economic growth to questions about the allocation of resources toward alternative uses.

In writing a “brief” history of economic thought, any author faces a challenge of when to cut a discussion short and when to let it go on. I did not agree with some of Kurz’s choices. My overall reaction is that I found the book stimulating but not spectacular.

I am interested in the relationship among the issues on which economists focus, the approaches that they develop, and the shortcomings of those approaches. If you’ve read Specialization and Trade, then you know that I think that modern economists have taken an approach that is defective in important respects. I offer the hypothesis that they took this approach in part because of the salience in the aftermath of the second World War of the challenge of producing the combination of ships, planes, tanks and other weapons that would best meet military objectives. They came up with methods that were useful for addressing this challenge but which were inappropriate for describing an economy with many more useful goods and services and a much higher degree of specialization.