economist

This book is a compilation of columns by America's strongest voice of liberty, Dr. Walter E. Williams. In this book Dr. Williams offers his common sense, freedom-loving take on the vital issues of the day. He fearlessly confronts the many liberal fallacies responsible for eroding our precious liberties. A must read for anyone wanting to expand their base of knowledge and unafraid to confront stark truths. A great antidote to the toxic political propaganda many of our universities dispense. And, a great book for Blacks brave enough to challenge the ethnic grievance industry (Jackson-Sharpton).

This is a collection of Prof. Walter Williams's newspaper columns. It's in his usual plainspoken, tough minded style. A must for the Prof. Williams fan.

Over the past 15 years I have read numerous works by many libertarian writers. Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Ayn Rand, Charles Murray, P.J. O'Rourke, Dave Barry, Henry Hazlitt, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Julian Simon, and many others. Walter Williams is my definite favorite libertarian writer. He tells the plain, simple truth in a way that is very easy to understand. He presents the facts in such a way that only a fool could read him and then walk away without becoming a libertarian. This book is pretty much on par with his others. Which is to say, it is excellent. Mr Williams is a true supporter of individual liberty, freedom, private property rights, and strict limits on the size of government. Good for him!

Morbid curiosity drove me to open this book. I suppose I expected to find some sort of arch-conservative, Reaganite-Republican, Ayn-Randian, ultra-capitalist dogmatist. But the figure that actually emerges is that of a dedicated, technical-minded civil servant.

The book contains selections from different Greenspan speeches given over the years. Most selections are prefixed with some scene-setting remarks by the author, Kahaner. The book doesn't have much structure to it -- the chapters are in alphabetical order (e.g., "Banks", "Capitalism", "Derivatives", etc). So you can skip back and forth without losing anything.

While Greenspan's speaking style is usually clear, he does have a roundabout way of talking. For example: "I don't want to suggest we're about to do anything at this stage, but I would confirm we are obviously going to do a great deal of thinking about the whole process." Somewhere else, he jokes: "I've been able to string more words into fewer ideas than anybody I know, and I'm continuing to do that."

Nonetheless, the reader can pick up most of Greenspan's opinions without too much trouble. For example: (a)Debt - bad. (b)Inflation - very, very bad. (c)Capitalism - hurray! His view on income distribution: "No society succeeds unless virtually all of its participants believe that it's fair and gives people opportunities." That one sounded all right to me, but his views on labor strike me as downright creepy; for example: "It should always be remembered that in economies where dismissing a worker is expensive, hiring one will also be perceived to be expensive."

On a subject of current political concern, the privatization of Social Security (or "modernization" is what they're calling it now, I think), Greenspan argues against it for workers already contributing to the system: "Investing Social Security assets in equities is largely a zero sum game." But he also suggests that allowing younger workers the option to move to a semi-privatized plan might be practical.

Greenspan maintains a pretty aloof tone in most of his speeches. For example, while touring the economically devastated region of South Central Los Angeles, he dryly observes, "We regulators are swamped with all sorts of data... It's important to put a face on the numbers." On the matter of dealing with others: "...beyond the personal sense of satisfaction, having a reputation for fair dealing is a profoundly practical virtue. We call it 'good will' in business and add it to our balance sheets."

A section near the end of the book contains remarks others have made about Greenspan. One economist sums it up best: "When Greenspan dies his headstone could read: 'I am guardedly optimistic about the next world, but remain cognizant of the downside risk.'"

The core of this book is a series of quotations by Dr. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve (1987 - ) on the subjects of banks, capitalism, competition, debt and deficits, derivatives, education, employment, the Federal Reserve, forecasting, the gap between rich and poor, globalization, gold, housing, humor, inflation, the new economy, politics, reputation, risk, small business, Social Security and Medicare, the stock market, technology, and trade. The quotations are simplified into their key principles in brief commentaries by the author, Mr. Kahaner. The author has also provided a brief biographical sketch of Dr. Greenspan as well as comments by others about Dr. Greenspan. (For trivia buffs: Did you know he was once married to the painter, Joan Mitchell?)

Alan Greenspan is a classic conservative, monetarist economist. His views fit nicely into that category. He also has a lively wit, which is normally well hidden behind the facade of "non-speak" that he specializes in. The author has considerately included some of Dr. Greenspan's most famous bon mots. His convoluted sentences are more famous across the planet, and deliberately so.

For when Alan Greenspan really speaks, as he did about "irrational exuberance" in the stock market a few years ago, the ground moves beneath the financial markets. So he has to be careful.

Care is also required because of politics. The Federal Reserve is supposed to be an independent body that is not part of the political process. Yet Congress can change its powers very easily. So the best approach is to hide in the shadows, as much as any 800 pound gorilla can.

This strategy is complicated by the fact that the chairman has to make many speeches, and has many required reports to Congress each year. So, Chairman Greenspan has to utter a lot of words while saying very little.

Perhaps the truest statement in the book was the quote about him pointing out that people on both sides of any issue quote Alan Greenspan as supporting their position. And that's the brilliance of these obscure sayings.

The only times he can be open is when he is in front of a group that doesn't matter. For example, he can praise the small community banks to the skies, because they are so small. Bring up Citigroup, and he has to move off in other directions.

The book that still needs to be written about Alan Greenspan is his art of saying much while communicating little. Now, that would be a book!

My favorite slant on Alan Greenspan was missing from this book. The financial news channel, CNBC, has developed a way to anticipate which way interest rates will go. It depends on the size of Greenspan's brief case when he goes into a Fed meeting. When it is thick, rates change. When it is thin, nothing happens. With a between-sized case, the bias between tightening or not may shift. Interstingly, they are often correct with this approach. And this story shows perfectly how much scrutiny he is under.

The man has done a fabulous job of running the Federal Reserve. We should not forget that in our focus here on his words. This is an area where actions speak louder than words, as they often do.

Now that we are off the gold standard, controlling the money supply is more important than ever because there is no limit on the potential to create inflation. As a former economic forecaster, Greenspan knows that economic forecasts are more often wrong than right. So you have to be vigilant and aggressive in anticipating problems. You will get a good sense of that perspective from this book. It will bring all of those words into a coherent sense of Greenspan's philosophy for you.

After you have finished absorbing these very long sentences, I encourage you to think about when in your life it is good to be balanced in your communications in order to moderate the response. Clarity is not always a virtue. But do be clear whenever it is important to get the point across. Follow Hemingway then. When obscurity helps, follow Greenspan.

May you aggressively pursue the opportunities in front of you, but in a balanced way that exercises extreme caution about the risks involved. In considering your choices, you should pause to consider how forecasting may not always be correct. Naturally, you will want to give full weight to the concerns that your hear as well. (This is my attempt at a Greenspanism, for demonstration purposes.)

At a time when so many on Wall Street hang on his every word, this compendium of Alan Greenspan quotations is just what is needed. Reading a collection of quotes -- along with the author's excellent analysis -- gives you a better understanding of Greenspan's theories. The author does an excellent job of organizing the Chairman's thoughts into concise chapters with brief commentary. I found the book an easy read for a topic that can be hard to comprehend.

Excerpts from the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 13 #2, Winter, `99: ``Though not entirely successful in depicting the `essential' Veblen . . . .[this new Veblen biography] is essential reading for students and scholars of Veblen. It cannot replace Dorfman's but it deserves equal billing,'' Clare Virginia Eby. ``Flaws and imperfections notwithstanding . . . . their book has entered the sholarly literature on Thorstein Veblen and will henceforth be obligatory reading for anyone wishing to know him,'' Russell H. Bartley and Sylvia Erickson Bartley.

. . . . Stanford alumni Elizabeth and Henry Jorgensen have written a clear, engrossing biography that corrects significant errors in previous accounts, but they can't overcome the central problem, Veblen himself . . . . Veblen returned to Palo Alto in 1927, 18 years after Stanford fired him for supposed "immorality." . . . .the signal achievement of this book (flawed mainly by the Jorgensens' too-brief sketches of Veeblen's thought): demonstrating, once and for all, that Veblen was not an unscrupulous womanizer. Though implausible oin its face, that reputation has gone largely unchallenged for half a century, mostly because Ellen Veblen blackened her husband's name so well.

The authors undertook this project because they believed that a man with such cantankerous ideas must have had an interesting life. Those who had written about him before were earnest in their approach but did not convey an appreciation of his unique personality. Now with the current interest in the millenium, there seems to be a Veblen revival. The WALL STREET JOURNAL of January 11, 1999, devoted a full page to fifteen of the ``Best and Brightest Economic Thinkers Who Made a Difference.'' In this Pantheon of those ``who challenged the conventional wisdom'' and whose perceptions ``changed the way millions thought and lived'' were Saint Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen. Other recent accolades to Veblen are found in Adam Goprik's article in the April 26-May 3, 1999 issue of THE NEW YORKER, and John Carroll's column ``Conspicuous Presumption'' in THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE of May 3, 1999 Alex Beam of THE BOSTON GLOBE in his colum (April 21, 1999) entitled ``The Love Song of Thorstein Veblen'' had this to say about out book: He observed that he was turned off by books that sort of dragged the sex lifes of their subjects in by the heels, and said: ``Not every distinguished man's sex life is worth researching. . . . But Veblen, the enfant terrible of the turn-of-the century economics profession, enjoyed not just an interesting sex life, as his latest biographers Elizabeth and Henry Jorgensen make clear, he enjoyed his life in full. ``There can be no such thing as a dull biography of Veblen, and this one does not disappoint. ``The man who would later anathematize the titans of capital was a cradle contrarian . . . While Sioux marauders were killing fellow Norwegian homesteaders in Minnesota during the 1860s the boy Thorstein sided with the Indians. . . . [He was also] A-religious--- `If there is a difference between religion and magic I have never seen it.' [Thus] Veblen disdained hsi family's prairie Lutheranism and mocked the pieties of America's golden age. ``He was at heart an anthropologist. THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS represents field work among the grandees who sent their children to the universities where he taught, and among his censorious in-laws. . . . His trenchant analysis of what came to be called male chauvinism in his essay, `The Barbarian Status of Women,' made him ever more unpopular. Escept perhaps, among women. ``Veblen attracted intelligent women, who shared his contempt for male ritual. Even for the serious-minded Jorgensens, it seems impossible to separate Veblen's life story from his love stories. His first wife, Ellen Rolfe, destroyed his academic career by tattling about her husband's affairs to the presidents of Stanford and the University of Chicago. After trudging all night through a blizzard to visit his second wife [-to-be] in `Nowhere,' Idaho, Veblen contacted double pneumonia, which crippled him for life. ``The Jorgensens correctly note that even his most famous writings seem thick and turgid to the modern taste. But he was the rarest of birds in 20th-century Amderica: a dangerous thinker.''

Alexander Gerschenkron is the type of man many of us would like to be: smart, charming, interested in the world, charismatic, etc. His grandson, Nicholas Dawidoff, seemingly captured his life in a surprisingly honest and thoughtful manner. I say "suprisingly honest" because one could certainly understand if Dawidoff were to give in to hero worship -- given the important role his grandfather played in his upbringing. But Dawidoff saves the hero worship and the highly personal anecdotes for the opening and concluding chapters. The 300 or so pages in between give a very balanced depiction of a complicated man, and that's the stuff of great biography. The first half of the book is a real page-turner, chronicling Gerschenkron's difficult times as a young man in revolutionary Russia and fascist Austria. How could Dawidoff possibly keep up this pace once his grandfather settles down as an educator at Harvard? Well, he doesn't, through no fault of his own. Dawidoff's depiction of Gershenkron's latter life is beautifully written, but the exciting pace of the earlier pages simply can't be sustained. Dawidoff clearly spent a great amount of time interviewing Gerschenkron's colleagues and students, most of whom (although not all) were effusive in their praise. But the book tended to feel slightly repetitious toward the end with the ongoing remembrances and non-related anecdotes. For one so close to the story, Dawidoff managed to expertly review and analyze Gerschenkron's complicated doting relationship with his wife, Erica. Also, a wonderfully telling anecdote at the end of the book reveals not only Gerschenkron's character, but Dawidoff's patient understanding, as well. Although Gerschenkron was an expert chess player, somehow he managed to lose his queen to the 14-year-old Dawidoff. Gerschenkron swept his arm across the board, spilling all the pieces onto the floor. "Num, num," he said. "Let's go eat lunch."

Maybe you had a grandfather who was quite wonderful, but you did not have a grandfather who was wonderful like Nicholas Dawidoff's grandfather was wonderful. Dawidoff's charming biography of his grandfather, _The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World_ (Pantheon) starts with his own memories of Alexander Gerschenkron. For instance, Gerschenkron, known as "Shura" within his family, had an arsenal of fly swatters, each of just the proper color and heft for its particular target. The baby blue flyswatter was just the thing for his particular enemy, the wasps, because they were vicious, and the mild color would make them let down their guard. If he were successful in swatting the wasp (not often), he would give "lengthy disquisitions on swatting technique." He would never allow the insect body to be cleaned up, for he "claimed they were deterrents, that other yellowjackets would encounter their unfortunate colleague and feel inclined to keep away themselves."

Shura was, to be sure, a character. But he was also brilliant in an obsessively academic way. He mastered some two dozen languages, but his field of expertise was not language. He was able to discourse on (and write academic treatments of) _Hamlet_ and _Dr. Zhivago_, but he did not teach literature. He was an economist, a quintessential Harvard professor who left a lasting mark on economic thought with his theory of "economic backwardness." He had a rather exciting early life, fleeing the Russian Revolution, and then fleeing the Nazis, before he found himself in the economic department of Harvard that was to be his academic home. He was a natural show-off. He could certainly be obnoxious and overbearing, and his students often felt they were not measuring up to his superhuman standards, but none of them forgot him, and he left a strong mark on the next generation of economists. Dawidoff makes the case that his standards were so exacting, and his sense of the overwhelming complexity of history and economics so complete, that he constantly spent time in library stacks gaining more information, but was intimidated about committing himself in print. He did, however, play chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, disparage Vladimir Nabokov for an inept translation of Pushkin, and charm Marlene Dietrich to give him her phone number.

One of the great strengths of this engaging book is that it makes Shura's wide-ranging academic endeavors almost as exciting as his flights from political oppression. The love of reading and the love of learning just for the sake of exercising one's mind could not have a finer exemplar. And while most people would regard a life in libraries as unexciting and unromantic, Shura was fond of living his life as fully as his capacious mind would allow. After he had recovered from a cardiac arrest in the foyer of the Harvard Faculty Club, he used to bring his students to the very spot where he had temporarily died. "You know, there was nothing. No beautiful colors. No castles. No bright lights. Nothing. So, if there are things you want to say and do, don't wait. Say them and do them. You won't get the opportunity after you're dead." During decades devoted to learning, this comprehensive biography makes plain, Gerschenkron drove himself to a life which for all of its time in an ivory tower was full of exuberance and courage.

Growing up Nicholas Dawidoff had a talkative and demonstrative larger-than-life maternal grandfather who had lived in, to paraphrase the Chinese curse, interesting times: his home town Odessa during the Russian revolution and Vienna (where he had to start over, learning German as a student) during the rise of Nazism. Alexander Gerschenkron (called Shura) had married a fellow student, Erica Matschnigg, in Vienna, whom he would deem "perfect," and who was his lifelong intellectual sparring partner. To save their lives they emigrated to the US. After a time Shura found work at UC Berkeley, The Federal Reserve Board in Washington DC, and then at his favorite place ever: Harvard. In addition this brilliant and cultured grandfather was kind and funny, educated, eccentric, and more than willing to act as a sort of a dad for his grandson, whose own father was mentally ill.

The one thing, though that Gerschenkron couldn't, or wouldn't, provide for family, friends, or colleagues - or his beloved and loving grandson - was so much as a shred of concrete information about his childhood, his youth, and anything remotely resembling his feelings. No one got into his inner life, and those who tried (and there were many) learned that it was at all times off-limits. So this book is a memoir but also a work of informed conjecture and detection.

Dawidoff, an insightful man and a compassionate reporter, draws a careful and reasoned portrait, "a biographical memoir, a work of reconstruction" that is a pleasure to read. The "dismal science," economics, has never seemed so vitally important and downright interesting as it does in this book.

Gerschenkron was hyperactive; he gave up reading the newspaper in middle age, citing the number of books he had yet to read and reasoning that the time the papers took from this was objectionable. He loved to argue and to win, but he was courtly, too. He practiced what he called "French manners," combining recognizable rules of European etiquette with extreme chivalry. He could be exasperating, but he was generous and possessed astonishing depth and breadth of knowledge (in many areas, not just economics) which he more than willingly shared with the world. Gerschenkron developed theories of economic behavior that are classics, now, and some which were of great importance to US policymakers' understanding of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and of developing nations' economic behavior. He was a prolific essayist and loved literature. Rather than read translations, he taught himself entire languages. He worked out chess problems without a chessboard. He was a character, and became something of a curmudgeon in later life.

Gerschenkron was also fiercely loyal to certain things - countries, colleagues, ideas, people, and the most ordinary stuff of his life. Dawidoff takes pleasure in this information, and I did, too Of Shura he writes. "[He] had a party (the Democrats); a team (the Red Sox); a player (Ted Williams); a board game (chess); a breed of dog (Labrador retriever); a flower (pink rose); a lower body haberdasher (he sent to a Vienna tennis shop for white linen trousers); an upper body haberdasher (he ordered his wool plaid lumber jackets and matching caps from a hunting supply outfit in Maine); a brandy; a chocolate bar; an aspirin; a bullet; a pencil; a shaving soap; a foreign bookstore; a domestic bookstore; a barber; a newsstand (he would go miles out of his way to buy his periodicals from Sheldon Cohen at Out of Town News); and a weekly news magazine (L'Espresso)." And of course he had a school, Harvard, which he loved beyond all measure. Gerschenkron's calculus was simple: the US was the best nation on earth, and Harvard its best school. He thrived there. Dawidoff claims that Harvard "made his personality possible."

Gerschenkron dominated people and gatherings and enjoyed contact, but also required and demanded great blocks of solitude. Sometimes he hurt those he loved. He insisted that his young daughter practice her flute when he wasn't at home, because the sound annoyed him. He disappointed his daughters often and had some stormy relations with friends and colleagues.

There's hardly a dull moment in this account of a life and the many lives that Gerschenkron touched, and Dawidoff has provided enough interesting tangential information to serve as jumping-off points for a lot more reading and inquiry.

There are Source Notes and Acknowledgements. The books lacks an index, which is a real shortcoming. There are hundreds of interesting and important people, places, and works of art and scholarship in this book and its publisher ought to have splurged on something so essential as a good index. Gerschenkron (a lover of notes, acknowledgements, appendices, and indices) would agree.

From 1982 to his death in 1995, Murray Rothbard wrote a monthly column for the Ludwig von Mises Institute's newsletter, The Free Market. In these columns - which are collected here - Rothbard commented on the economic affairs and policies of the day. While these pieces generally use certain current events as the starting point, Rothbard used these events as a springboard to discuss Austrian economics. Taken as a whole, they provide an excellent introduction to economics from the Austrian school.

This book also contains a few unpublished pieces. The best is Rothbard's analysis of the 1994 elections. As usual, Rothbard gets to the crux of the issues involved, dealing with the characters whose actions (often behind the scenes) were decisive. Reading this piece reminded me of how much we lost in Murray's death - not just a brilliant theoretician, but a man whose comments on the events of the day were a constant source of illumination. Make sure you also get THE IRREPRESABLE ROTHBARD, his collection of essays from the Rothbard-Rockwell report.

I liked this book because it tries to fill in the gap in the free-market literature of today. I find too many free-market many books on general topics like taxes, education, antitrust, money, and economics in general. However, I like to see real-world opinions of a noted libertarian on topics of the day. This collection is just that. Here, I can see how Rothbard applied his fundamental beliefs and knowledge to the contemporary news stories. The essays range from 1982 to 1995. I can compare his views with views of other commentators, both leftists and conservatives. It's too sad he did not live through all the Clinton years, I'm sure he'd have had much to say. I learned much from these short essays because they _are_ short and to the point.

Murray Newton Rothbard tragically ceased to be "the State's greatest _living_ enemy" when he died in 1995. But his thought lives on in this posthumous collection, mostly drawn from his monthly essays for _The Free Market_ between 1982 and 1995. These essays cover a wide range of topics, from the welfare state to Clintonomics to fiat money to U.S. intervention in the Middle East -- and Rothbard is uniformly sharp, clear, incisive, and witty wherever he turns his pen. This collection should also be of interest to those of Rothbard's readers who have heard that he somehow changed his views near the end of his life; the fact is that Rothbard was as strongly laissez-faire and libertarian in his later years as he had ever been. Some of his readers had simply failed to recognize that the earlier Rothbard was not at all "libertine" but socially quite conservative; they were therefore surprised that he found anything good to say about Pat Buchanan (as he does here, several times) or against allowing illegal aliens to have access to the vast machinery of the welfare state (as in a passage regarding California's Prop. 187 in the book's final essay, a previously unpublished commentary on the November 1994 elections). As the essays in this volume make clear, it was those readers, not Rothbard, who were guilty of inconsistency. Rothbard was uncompromisingly and consistently devoted to liberty throughout his entire career; he simply did not, as some of his readers have done, confuse antifederalism with moral nihilism. Also, the penultimate essay provides an overview of the history of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (Auburn, AL), of which Rothbard was Academic Vice President until his death. By the time readers reach this essay, they will be unsurprised that, when Austrian economics sprang again to life in the 1980s and 1990s, it was wearing a rumpled jacket and a bow tie.

I just got this book and love Maya Angelou's introduction of Julianne Malveaux. I'm enjoying these essays, as well. I'm more familiar with Julianne Malveaux as a televison commentator than as a writer, but she seems an equally talented writer as talker! I highly reccomend this book

Julianne Malveaux is one of my favorite talking heads. On CNN, PBS, and MSNBC, she has a feisty "take no prisoners" style of debate. She is unapologetically left and feminist, but she is also quirky, funny, and thought-provoking. This collection of columns is great! She covers lots of economic issues, deals with women and family issues, and also moral issues. My problem with this book is that the essays are too short, and so is the book. I am waiting to read 200 pages in this wonderful woman's voice. Some of my favorite columns: the column where she compares Long Term Capital Management with gamblers; the USA Today column in which she talks about buying her home; a rejoinder to the organizers of the Million Women's March (she is no fan of either the Million Man or Million Woman March, and she explains why); a tribute to Betty Shabazz. This isn't a book you'll read cover to cover. You'll pick it up and put it down, and pick it up again. It is so full of facts, opinions, statistics, and provocation that I expect to be using it as a resource for quite some time.

Want to know where the money is and isn't being spent, read this book. The Sistah has BIG SKILLS.

As a professional economist who is constantly looking for better ways to communicate the essence of economics to non economists, I couldn't be more enthusiastic about Henderson's The Joy of Freedom. Without mind numbing diagrams and equations, Henderson conveys more economic understanding than any of the standard text books I know--and I know a lot of them, having written a few myself. And it is not just economic concepts and the standard perspective on economic efficiency that he communicates so compellingly. With a personal story beautifully woven into the narrative, Henderson shows how humane and socially concerned economists can be (and generally are). Read this book and find out that economists can be passionate in wanting to make this world a better place, and have real guide posts in going about it, guide posts that elevate the ideal of freedom to the central organizing principle. The next time I teach a principles courses I'm going to do my students a tremendous favor by using David Henderson's The Joy of Freedom: An Economists Odyssey as the main text.

David Henderson is my friend and I helped him with this book, so I suppose I'm biased. But my familiarity can help you decide whether to buy this book or not.

The Joy of Freedom is the work of an exceptional teacher who has a skill for communicating economic concepts. It is the result of his lifelong desire to understand the world, to better himself, and to help others. As the reader, we walk side by side with David as he struggles to understand complex and important issues. He tells us stories from his life, from childhood through his successful career as an economist. The result is an interesting, easy-to-read, understandable, and enjoyable book about some of the more pressing problems of our time. How many other books can make that claim?

If you care about your personal retirement assets, your ability to get good health care, the education of yourself or your children, your rights and security, the inner workings of the government, the laws of economics, discrimination, or the environment, this book has something for you. You don't have to agree with everything Dr. Henderson says. In fact, because he is such a good thinker and communicator, his path of discovery should help you on your own, whatever course it may take.

This is an enjoyable book. It is part autobiography and part political philosophy and, perhaps best of all, it provides well supported and practical solutions to many of our country's biggest problems -- including the environment, public schools, social security and medicare, health care, etc. I rarely read a book where I feel, as I did with this one, that I would love to meet the author and discuss these issues. A very clear and intelligent writer who doesn't pretend to know all the answers. He clearly has a great deal of experience with these issues but has none of the ego or arrogance that we so often see these days. This is an excellent book.

Wilhelm Röpke is a brilliant German-born economic, social and political theorist, and perhaps my favorite amongst the "Austrian school." He stands apart from his colleagues in that he thinks on a more humane level rejecting crude utilitarian calculations in favor of sound empirical reasoning. The crux of Röpke's economic thought is that the individual counts. This brilliant German economist of the "Austrian school" stood up to the centralizing and dehumanizing policies of the Nazis. Collectivist ideologies lay waste to civil society-destroying the intermediary institutions between individual and state-supplanting them with institutions to empower and enhance the state. Röpke recognized that allocating resources by the fair play of supply and demand is the most humane system and he was champion of the market economy. He was influential over economist Ludwig Erhard, who architected FRG's postwar economic plan, which emphasized free enterprise.

Röpke possessed some peculiarities in his lexicon that set in him apart from his colleagues, but his motive for such peculiarities was principled. Röpke rejected characterizing socialism as a "planned economy" since in his view a market economy is just an economy "planned" by entrepreneurs as opposed to state planners. He preferred the delineation of "market economy" to "capitalism," since what often passed for capitalism in the early twentieth century was a large interventionist welfare state in a cozy lockstep relationship with big business monopolists. This was state corporatism not capitalism. Moreover, "capitalism" was, of course, coined by its chief critic Karl Marx and while the term captures the importance of capital to the market economy, it remains rather sterile. Capitalism frequently connotes a materialistic consumerist ideology or images of big business rather than a social framework based on the market economy. Röpke would attest that mammon is not the measure of all things. In Röpke's eyes, the intangibles-that is to say faith, family and tradition-are the things that animate life and give it meaning.

Röpke recognizes the limitations of the market economy. Röpke possesses a remarkable sense of prudence and conservative sobriety in his thinking as it relates to the political economy. He rejected the idea of making economists into social engineers whether in the interests of "efficiency" or "social justice." And amongst his "Austrian" colleagues like F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, he brought economics to a more humane level, rejecting crude utilitarian logic in favor of more humane empirical reasoning to defend the market economy. Furthermore, he refrains from the market idolatry that is so common to libertarian apologists for the free-market these days. Libertarians frequently espouse an ideology that can be summed up as "everything in the market, nothing outside the market." (This, of course, turns Mussolini's mantra on its nose.) Röpke recognizes something that libertarians miss with their penchant for crude utilitarian calculations and their moral neutrality that often makes being an avowed "libertarian" indistinguishable from being a "libertine." Many libertarians content themselves writing diatribes defending the "robber barrons" of the yesteryears while praising the colossal (e.g. Wal-Mart.) In their efforts to defend any and everything related to "the private sector," they forget that the apparently sporadic interventions of the state often come at the behest of big business. Many big business capitalists content themselves with cozy public-private partnerships that translate to steady, predictable profits and a regulated environment that drowns small business competition. Big business possesses a comparative advantage in that they can absorb the regulatory costs easier than their smaller competitors and perhaps influence the regulations. Röpke, however, scorns the colossal not in demagogic rhetoric, but in the rhetoric of an economist. He likewise sees "big business" as a concomitant pillar of "big government" and its regulatory state.

Underlying Röpke's humane economy is the idea that a market economy needs a prudent civil framework, widespread distribution of property, a strong entrepreneurial middle class and emphasis on parochial traditionalism. Anyway, Röpke itinerates the need for sound monetary and fiscal policy on the part of the state. He holds that the gold standard is the only real safeguard against the vicious boom-and-bust cycles of modern capitalist society. Röpke recognized that a market economy flourishes when tradition and community guard against the centralizing depredations of the state and big business. Röpke further emphasized the principle of subsidiarity, which in Europe today seems to survive only in that beautiful alpine island of parochialism-Switzerland-which itself is straddled by the colossal and cosmopolitan EU super-state as if it is ready to be consumed.

In the Humane Economy, Röpke surmised that: "The market economy, and with social and political freedom, can thrive only as part and under the protection of a bourgeois system. This implies the existence of a society in which certain fundamentals are respected and color the whole network of social relationships: individual effort and responsibility, absolute norms and values, independence based on ownership, prudence and daring, calculating and saving, responsibility for planning one's own life, proper coherence with the community, family feeling, a sense of tradition and the succession of generations combined with an open-minded view of the present and the future, proper tension between individual and community, firm moral discipline, respect for the value of money, the courage to grapple on one's own with life and its uncertainties, a sense of the natural order of things, and a firm scale of values." To answer those who might sneer at this, Röpke nimbly replies, "Whoever turns his nose up at these things... suspects them of being 'reactionary'... may in all seriousness be asked what ideals he intends to defend against Communism without having to borrow from it."

John Zmirak does a wonderful job profiling the life and work of a very brilliant man. Bravo! Röpke's ideas are remarkably original, but even so are analogous to that of conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet, Anglo-Catholic distributists like Chesterton and Belloc, and the Southern agrarians like Agar and Tate. You might check out their works as well, if Röpke interests you.

The author has done an excellent job in pinpointing to what extent Wilhelm Röpke, in his most mature work, was fired by his first-hand knowledge and experience of the small-scale, directly democratic, and partially corporatistic and communitarian institutions of his Swiss environment. Röpke's twin emphasis, on the one hand on private property rights, individual liberty and self-reliance, and on the other on a social setup characterized by face-to-face networks can be regarded as an antidote against the incipient facelessness of both an atomized capitalistic mass society and a bureaucratic welfare state. -Robert Nef,

A window on the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century, seen through the eyes of Wilhelm Röpke, outstanding economist and social thinker. A tale skillfully retold by a scholar of our times in this very readable account of Röpke's life and work. A pleasure for anyone interested in the economic history of the twentieth century. Röpke's insights into the Great Depression, the errors of National Socialism and, after World War II, attempts at reconstruction and reform have the ring of truth and are of relevance to our times.

I got this little book when I was in college studying economics and kept it throughout grad school in econ. It's been surprisingly useful, mostly because it contains formulas and no extraneous text. A pocket version would be even better.

This book is great. It provides an outstanding reference tool for graduate, but also undergraduate students. Even if you're not entirely into studying economics, and only come up against it occasionally, you can get your money's worth with this title. I purchased this as a reference while finishing undergraduate work and I'm sure it will serve me well in graduate school as well. Don't miss this, and buy a copy while it's available.

Sydsaeter et al. have compiled what must be the most condensed reference book in the field, given its amazingly broad scope but small number of pages. Just a few of the multitude of topics covered in this book are set theory, dynamic optimization, vector spaces, convexity, determinants, risk aversion theory, and probability distributions. The presentational format is essentially that of an extensive list, with copious notes in the margins.

The brevity of Economists' Mathematical Manual is simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The strength obviously lies in its diverse scope. Few books could claim to be authoritative over such a wide spectrum of subfields of economics.

Yet the lack of exposition can also be perceived as a weakness. This book is extremely useful as a reference, but first-year Ph.D. students should be warned that it should be considered supplemental only. A textbook such as Simon and Blume's Mathematics for Economists or Chiang's Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics should be the reference of first recourse for anyone encountering mathematical economics for the first time.

For the realtively uninitiated. These days, anything related to the Austrian school of economics is worth al least looking at. Rothbard is a bit extreme, proposing that un-backed credit creation is equivalent to counterfeiting. In my opinion there is a difference, since money supply based solely on credit can evaporate into bad debt write-offs if a credit bubble bursts, while money supply cannot evaporate if based on the issuance of counterfeit currency. Nevertheless, this is interesting material in a concise book with no fluff. If you're reading a dozen books on the Fed and money, this might as well be one of them.

Ever since the creation of the Federal Reserve Board ("the Fed"), the American economy has been subject to a cycle of boom and bust. Most recently, we saw a bubble in technology stocks in general and telecommunication stocks in particular, fueled by the creation of credit. But no one wants to blame the culprit -- the Fed. Why has an institution that was created allegedly to bring stability to the economy caused such havoc? Equally importantly, why is an institution that has so much power so unaccountable?

Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) provides in this book an outstanding discussion of money, banking, the Fed, and U.S. monetary policy. As usual, Rothbard sees the "big picture." There was no need for a central bank, however the Banksters ' in combination with Big Business and Big Intellectuals -- pushed for the creation of the Fed. Rothbard's discussion of the battles between the Rockefellers and the House of Morgan is fascinating. (See his Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy for a more elaborate discussion of this great "conspiracy" in U.S. history.)

The foundation for this work is Austrian economic theory. Through fractional reserve banking ' which is little more than legal counterfeiting ' banks are permitted to print new money, thus creating inflation. Yet the central insight of Austrian theory is that this creation of money doesn't simply increase prices, but distorts the cycle of production as it works its way through the economy. This creates the boom and bust cycles that have plagued our economy.

For a more detailed discussion of many of the issues raised in this book, the interested reader should consult Rothbard's The Mystery of Banking.

Murray Rothbard once again cuts through the popular dogma and conventional knowledge which government would prefer we all simply take on faith. In this case, the subject is money and the creation of it. Rothbard, an exceptional economist, showcases his ability to set aside the technical jargon and higher mathematics of the profession in favor of language accessible to everyone. In "The Case Against the Fed," Professor Rothbard examines the roots of money, as a commodity with subjective value which, because of wide-spread acceptance and other desireable qualities, becomes a medium of exchange for a people. Furthermore, he exposes the government's, via the Federal Reserve, monopolization of money. Rothbard shows how the Fed uses the power of the printing press to tax the people via inflation, to redistribute income, and to artificailly lower the interest rate leading to the infamous "business cycle" and the roller coaster of depressions and booms which our eceonomy is regualraly subjected to. Anyone who is concerned about the purchasing power of their income and about the unemployment which the business cycle regularly brings should read this book. Professor Rothbard portrays the federal government as what it is: the self-proclaimed, legitimate counterfeiter