Last week I pulled two “old” books down off the shelf. Clearing away some mental fog that had gradually accumulated, I skimmed the passages I’d highlighted ten or eleven years ago—and, as Yogi Berra said so well, it was déjà vu all over again. I’m glad I dusted off those two gems, and decided you should know about them.
Gem Number One is for anyone who: (a) would like to bolster their understanding of how economies work, of who’s who in economic history, and of why John Maynard Keynes disagreed with Adam Smith; but (b) cannot stand the dry, pedantic, textbook-or-worse way that 98.76% of economists write about their subject. [That’s my estimate, based on two decades of reading their stuff, including contemporary econ blogs].
It’s fun, it’s written in plain talk, and it presents the material in bite-size chunks. If you read this book, you’ll understand our economy better than 510 (i.e., 95%) of our 537 elected public servants inside the Beltway. [That’s my estimate, based on five decades of listening to them]. You can get Elaine Schwartz’s book, Econ 101½ in the used-book marketplace for one dollar and twenty-nine cents, an extremely rare bargain.
Gem Number Two is for anyone who wants to know why many economists, and the statistics they flaunt, are completely missing what’s really important—like the motorist searching for his car keys under a streetlamp at night, because it was too dark to look for them back where he’d probably dropped them. In short, accountants count what’s easy to count, not what counts.
George Gilder said it better thirteen years ago than I can today; here’s one of my many highlights in his book, Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise:
As entrepreneurs accelerate the processes of creative destruction that impel all economic advance, the economists measure the destruction, but not the creativity. They see the sinking value of existing capital but neglect the new ideas, hopes, enthusiasms, and plans of entrepreneurs. They count the bankruptcies, but doubt the business starts; they measure the decline of sterile investment in established companies, but miss the smaller flows of creative capital formation; they count the unemployed, but deny the new employment and self-employment . . . So countries that multiply their production of the well-defined and well-catalogued products of the past—from subsidized steel ingots to protected automobiles—will seem to grow faster than countries that multiply entrepreneurs and innovations.
Read Gem#1 for a fun, quick way to get up to speed on conventional econospeak. Read Gem#2 for a fun way to get up to speed on why most econospeak misses the point.
