Making Sense of a Changing Economy: Technology, Markets and Morals

If I were teaching the introductory courses in Economics this is the book I would use in a final unit to test the students'ability to critically absorb what should have been learnt throught the semester or the year. As the author meant: this is a book to digest the textbooks in much the same way an antiacid works upon an upset stomach. Written at a level that should be understood by anyone with the basic rudiments in economic analysis, it should, at least, expose the reader to an interdisciplinary approach to it. The author dwells into the contradictions between theory and practice stemming from the ideological and epistemological foundations on which social phenomena is perceived. It is written in an easygoing style in which the author is as comfortable in explaining in three pages and a footnote the complexities of: Marx'labor theory of value, Sraffa's standard commodity, von Neumann's maximum rate of growth and how the Perron-Frobenius theorem relates to equilibrium prices in an exchange economy (mind you, with a minimum of lineal algebra),- as in explaining how Machiavelli's and Hobbes' understanding of human behavior help us understand the workings of the market in a capitalist economy and how it relates to other social institutions. For the economist this is a book much like - in intent if not in content - to Joan Robinson's Freedom and Necessity through which economic phenomena is seen within the context of historical evolution and social reality. To the layman in Economics it provides the philosophical, historical and sociological framework within which the different issues debated among economists,in the realms of theory and public policy, can be understood.