Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let me edit my review slightly. Please notice the first words of my original review: "Given such accomplished economists." I don't think it's unreasonable to hold these authors to a very high standard. Because I know that they could have done a much better job of organizing their thoughts, and given the stakes involved at an early stage in the development of financial crisis when policy makers were in dire need of good advice, I was very critical. Consider this - in a book on "Animal Spirits" there is very little on entrepreneurship! BTW Keynes did not originate the term, and Adam Smith was not an uncritical apologist for capitalists. Milton Friedman was not a blind apologists for corporations, and Ronald Reagan was not as radically free-market as people these days think. Gosh, how many times do these things need to be said? Given such accomplished economists, and being sympathetic to behavioral economics I expected better from this volume. The book has obviously been rushed to print. There are numerous errors. Just to give a few examples: They present Adam Smith as the father of the rational economic man model when in fact he was the author of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" (a masterwork of psychology) and certainly never claimed that emotions did not matter for economics. They present Keynes as having "animal spirits" at the center of his theories which is not true. They do not even give the background to the phrase, which was more than two hundred years old at the time Keynes wrote. They completely misrepresent the work of Milton Friedman generally and with respect to the Great Depression specifically. They even get his ideas about money illusion wrong. They seem hopelessly confused about the difference between Friedman and the later "rational expectations" theory. In fact there is surprisingly little about modern macroeconomics including modern Keynesian thought. Did they even read Friedman's great work on the Monetary History of the United States? They make a single reference in passing to it in the text. It is extremely meticulous in tracking the events of the Great Depression. Even J.K. Galbraith highly praised it as a work of empirical research. Although they discuss bubbles and speculation the general reader would finish the book with no idea that experimental economists have been replicating and studying these phenomena in the lab for over 20 years and have discovered many things about what contributes to them. This is part of the authors' pattern of setting up mainstream economics as a straw man with no concern for psychology. A more fundamental flaw is that they never make a persuasive case that animal spirits are the core of the problem. Yes there are many historical anecdotes and stories - but there is no overall scheme or theory in this book. It's a mess of disconnected thoughts, stories, anecdotes etc.. On a final note, there is a degree of condescension to the general reader which is quite irritating. For example, in discussing poker in the introduction we are informed that players often try to deceive their opponents and this is called ... "bluffing." (!) In summary, a book that was rushed to market. An addendum - just happened to pull the book off my shelf in July 2012. Was I too harsh before? I opened a chapter at random. Chapter nine - the authors try to argue that Friedman was wrong about there being no long run inflation/unemployment tradeoff. Somehow, in all this chapter, they manage to never once reference the ruinous stagflation of the 1970s! Instead they want to fuss about the difference between a 1.5% inflation target rate vs. a 0% inflation target rate. They invoke a lecture by Paul Samuelson - in 1964. Let me contrast that with Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky in "The Return of the Master": "Milton Friedman predicted the coming of simultaneous increases in inflation and unemployment - so-called stagflation - as early as 1962." Even the most Keynesian of Keynesians agrees that at least on this one point Friedman had it right. No, I was not too harsh.