The Accidental Theorist
And Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science
Paul Krugman
METU Library number: HB74.5.K78
Last Updated: September 21stSunday 19:55, Ankara, Turkiye
I plan to learn more about economics since I am quite illiterate about it although it affects our everyday life so much. The following was taken from the introduction of the book:
Economists are supposed to be boring. And the reputation is justified: Most of us really are quite boring when we talk about our work. But then so are most other people, from scientists to supermodels. Why do economists get singled out?
The answer I believe, is unrequited longing. Economics matters to people-it is, as John Maynard Keynes put it, "dangerous for good or evil" in a way that, say, literary studies or even history are not. People come to economists in search of emotional or political satisfaction. They are therefore dismayed to find a discipline that seems to be all equations, diagrams, and impenetrable jargon.
There are some excuses for that impenetrability. Economics, Keynes wrote elsewhere, is "a difficult and technical subject, but nobody will believe it." The central ideas of economic theory are very simple: They boil down to a little more than the proposition that people will usually take advantage of opportunities, plus the observation that my opportunities often depend on your actions and vice versa. But applying these ideas to particular cases-to the effects of technological progress on employment, of international trade on wages, of the money supply on economic growth-requires some close, hard thinking, thinking in which a bit of math and some specialized jargon can often help you stay on track. This is not to deny that much of what modern economists (or academics of any type) do is pointless technical showboating, using fancy math to say things that would be obviously silly if their meaning were not obscured by the math. But not all of the technicality of modern economics is obscurantism; sometimes it is actually a way to make things clearer and simpler.
Still, there should be a lot more accessible, interesting, even exciting writing about economics than there is. Astronomy is a difficult, technical subject, too; yet where is the economics equivalent of the late Carl Sagan? (Did you know that U.S. consumers spend trillions and trillions...never mind) On many issues, including some of those where passions run highest, economics offers startlingly illuminating insights, insights that could with a little effort (all right, with a lot of effort) be explained without the jargon. Yet that explanation is usually not forthcoming. We are a profession without populizers.
But wait-aren't there some very influential economic gurus, men whose books routinely grace the best-seller list? Yes, there are, but they are not populizers in the proper sense of the word. Sagan was a populizer: He found a way to make serious astronomy-the discoveries and theories of professional astronomers - comprehensible and exciting to a wide audience. Our popular economics writers, however, are not in the business of giving their readers a ringside seat on the research action; with no exception I can think of, they use their books to do an end run around the normal structure of scholarship, to preach ideas that few serious economists share. Often, these ideas are not just at odds with the professional consensus; they are demonstrably wrong, and sometimes terminally silly. But they sound good to the unwary reader. In fact, as far as most people know-including people who regrad themselves well-informed, who watch public TV and read intellectual magazines-that is what economics sounds like.
The essays in this volume represent attempts to do something about that.
