50 Economics Classics: Your shortcut to the most important ideas on capitalism, finance, and the global economy (50 Classics)

Another in a long line of excellent reviews of a field of knowledge. Great introductions to things I ought to know and then can choose to read in depth.

Another wonderful book covering an important field. Helpful. So clear. The book is a gift for those like me who want an overview of a field of study for further study, and as later reminders of worthwhile works. Highly recommended.... David

Learned a lot

Interesting topics.

Read it and bought this as a gift. Great book!

I enjoyed the authors thorough and engaging writing style .He makes the dismal science both relevant to today's issues and exciting to read.

Another thorough addition to the 50 Classics series. Distilling some of the best works on economics into concise and easy to digest summaries. Once again many of the works summarised will end up on my book shelf as the intros from 50 Classics leave me wanting to discover more.

Tom Butler-Bowdon has summarized 50 economics books spanning 240 years (1776 to 2016), however 40% of the books were published in the 21st-century, thus offering contemporary relevance with historical context. Indeed he notes in the introduction, “if there is anything that the financial crisis of 2007-08 told us, it is that economic and financial history matters.”Each book is distilled to about six pages. Among the many topics covered are: the euro, the Great Depression, subprime loans and the 2008 financial crisis, the value of a college education, the economics of cities, free trade, protectionism, globalization, the gold standard, income inequality, innovation and entrepreneurship, investing in the stock market, employment, technology, poverty, famines, crime, foreign aid, property, dead capital, and behavioral economics.Here are some selected highlights.The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon – 2016“As wonderful as smartphones and the internet are, they are no match for [water mains and sewers] or the mass-produced automobile in dramatically raising living standards. As a result, the growth rate of the last 45 years has been less than half that enjoyed between 1920 and 1970.”“The almost decade 1996 to 2004 saw a spike in productivity thanks to the diffusion of computers, but unlike the productivity increase caused by electricity, which lasted decades, the one involving computers lasted eight years. Today, Gordon says, most of the benefits of digitalization have already worked through the economy.”“For all the array of new technologies coming out, from DNA sequencing to supercomputers, nanochemistry, and genetic engineering, we don’t know how life will be radically improved until these technologies play themselves out. Yet Gordon sees all of these as incremental rather than revolutionary… Rich countries can’t expect to keep growing at the rate of 1920-1970, any more than today’s China or India can expect to maintain growth rates of 8-10 per cent.”The Euro by Joseph Stiglitz – 2016“While the euro throws all the states in to the pot as if they are the same, there are yawning differences. For instance, the low-debt, low-deficit model that underpins the currency is a reflection of German attitudes to financial rectitude, particularly the horror of inflation, but it is perfectly legitimate for other countries to want to prioritize employment over inflation. Yet if you have a single currency and a central bank, how do you set interest rates: to prevent inflation at all costs, or to prevent unemployment at all costs?”Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker – 1985“‘The Entrepreneur,’ Frenchman J.B. Say said in 1800, is one who simply ‘shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.’ This was the original definition—and the best, Drucker maintains.”“Classical economics says that economies tend towards equilibrium—they ‘optimize’, which results in incremental growth over time. But the nature of the entrepreneur is to ‘upset and disorganize’. He or she is a wild card generating wealth through the process economist Joseph Schumpeter described as ‘creative destruction.’”“The best innovations can be alarmingly simple, and often have little to do with technology or invention. For example, there was nothing technically remarkable about creating a metal container that could be easily offloaded from a truck onto a ship, but the advent of container shipping as a standardized system of moving things around the globe was an innovation that quadrupled world trade.”“It is only when innovation meets the market through the catalyst of entrepreneurial management that you start to create things of great value. For example, De Havilland, the British company, produced the first passenger jet plane, but Boeing and Douglas took the industry lead because they created ways for airlines to finance such expensive purchases.”The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs – 1968“Her message is that economic dynamism comes from people being engaged in the ‘unroutine business of economic trial and error,’ that is, experiments which create new ways of doing things, and therefore new work. If this process is absent, a city, despite its size, can decline. Great cities do not simply produce more things, but new things.”“One of her key points is that to develop new kinds of work, a place need to have many different sources of finance, since what people consider a good investment differs hugely. This ‘inefficient’ deployment of capital is actually what makes a city grow.”“A key lesson from Jacobs’ work is that, because great cities grow organically, the main job of government is simply not to ruin what is already there, including the ‘inefficient’ streetscapes which prevent crime by increasing visibility, and which provide the vital social interaction that makes city life so interesting and productive.”The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen – 1899“Veblen gave us the term conspicuous consumption.” He viewed capitalism as driven by pride and envy, and observed that we are “less influenced by those several classes above us, or people well below us in the social strata, than those slightly above. This has been borne out by psychological studies in the last 30 years, which suggest that, in terms or happiness, it is not our absolute wealth that matters as much as how wealthy we are in relation to our friends, neighbors, or co-workers.”Irrational Exuberance by Robert J. Shiller – 2000“Most human thinking, Shiller observes, ‘is not quantitative, but instead takes the form of storytelling and justification’ … [The] ‘buy low, sell high’ truth, unfortunately, is lost amid market frenzies, when it is believed that a ‘new era’ has begun in which higher than normal prices are justified by a new technology or demographic trends.”“Shiller’s crucial insight is that big falls in the stock market generate hangovers lasting much longer than is commonly thought. After the stock market peak in 1901, for instance, there was a 20-year decline, only for stocks to rise again with the bull market of the 1920s. Then, after the Great Crash of 1929… the Standard & Poor’s Composite Index did not return to its 1929 value until 1958. Yes, there was a market boom from 1960 to 1966, but with the long bear market that followed, the market did not return to its 1966 levels until 1992.”Shiller also puts real estate gains in perspective. “Viewed from the longer time span of history, home price growth has been less than real income growth, which has been around 2 percent a year from 1929 to 2013. The prices of most American homes have only increased by between 0.7 and 1 percent a year over a century. It seems like a big increase if your grandmother bought her house for $16,000 in 1948 and it sold for $190,000 in 2004, but not when adjusted for inflation. As with the idea of getting wealthy through stocks, the popular wisdom is wrong.”Poverty and Famines by Amartya Sen – 1981“The poor cannot be seen as a monolithic group. For example, between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, although there was a fall in the total number living below a poverty line in Bangladesh, the number living in ‘extreme poverty’ (i.e. those with income not enough to meet 80 percent of the recommended calorie intake spiked sharply. Thus, the apparent rosiness of the official statistics hid a greater vulnerability to famine than before.”The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto – 2000“When properly documented, assets ‘lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence,’ de Soto says… When ownership cannot be clearly demonstrated, in contrast, an asset is ‘dead capital,’ because it can’t generate more capital through being securitized or collateralized.”“De Soto’s team estimated that in developing and ex-communist countries, 85 percent of urban land, and around half of rural land, is dead capital. Yet combined, it was worth an amount equal to all the companies listed on the main stock exchanges of the richest countries, and twenty times all Third World foreign direct investment… Instead of giving, aiding, and loaning to the developing world, rich countries would be much more useful if they used their influence to facilitate formalization of already-existing assets.” Another benefit: “Law and order increases, because formal ownership rights make you respect the rights of others more.”The following is a list of the authors whose works are summarized in 50 Economics Classics, grouped by publication date: 1776-1798: Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus. 1817-1899: David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Henry George, Alfred Marshall, Thorstein Veblen. 1904-1949: Max Weber, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, Friedrich Hayek, Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, Benjamin Graham, Luwig von Mises. 1955-1996: J.K. Galbraith, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Ayn Rand, Jane Jacobs, Albert O. Hirschman, E.F. Schumacher, Thomas C. Schelling, Amartya Sen, Peter Drucker, Hyman Minsky, Ronald Coase, Elinor Ostrom, Michael E. Porter, Julian Simon. 2000-2016: Hernando de Soto, Robert J. Shiller, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, John C. Bogle, Naomi Klein, Paul Krugman, Niall Ferguson, Liaquat Ahamed, Dambisa Moyo, Michael Lewis, William J. Baumol, Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, Diane Coyle, Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Thomas Piketty, Richard Thaler, Deirdre McCloskey, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert J. Gordon.Butler-Bowden has done a great service in extracting the main ideas from so many books, representing a range of viewpoints. Some of the ideas may pique the reader’s interest to read the original text. In other cases, maybe not so much. The author comments on David Ricardo’s 1817 book: “It was not a great pleasure to read. In attempting to make economics more scientific, Ricardo wrote in a dry style that totally lacks the flourish and colorful examples of Adam Smith.” The author has a Masters degree from the London School of Economics.Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book.

Unfortunately, in the fields of economics there are no shortcuts. The books title makes it look like it will give you the ideas of the different economics thinkers.. However what it actually does is a simple catalogue of 50 economics and finance writers with only 1-2 page attained to them. The idea is that you would look at this book and if you find the economist interesting from their brief 2 pages, you go ahead and read more about their ideas from other sources.If you are really looking to get into economics this book is not for you. If you are only looking to gain extremely simple knowledge about economics which could also be acquired from wikipedia go ahead, this is your book.

I don’t come from an Economics degree but have always had an interest in the subject. Tom’s book works as a wonderful summary of all the major ideas, covering all the core classics and bringing us right up to date with newer economic works and thoughts from upto the last 10 years. I love the summaries which give a mini critical appraisal to challenge thought including linking it to events as current as Brexit. I also love the inclusion of thinkers from the Finance world. I certainly feel much more educated on this important area of academic thought and helped me to think in a much more rounded way about current trends and events.

The book is expected to provide a good overview of top 50 core economic and financial ideas. But in fact it is only a loose collection of those ideas without practical guidance. For each topic the author does not provide his own strong view but instead just recites what others have said. Not recommended for those who want to have a good understanding of various economic ideas.

Good 2 to 3 page summaries of many key books / papers that have influenced economics - very good to provide a background of the bigger picture for economics. The book helps to identify some of the weaknesses in the approach taken by economists e.g. behavioural economics being a latish addition to the discipline undermining the 'rational behaviour' assumption that underpins some of the economic models.

Good overview to economics, which as someone less well educated in this area it does give some points of direction for further reading; the author does make clear at the beginning that the whole purpose of the book is to inspire further reading of the works listed in the text, which to me it has.One frustration is the biases of the author who freely gives caveats about many of the books in his 'last thoughts' section, except for those by proponents of unregulated capitalism which are allowed a free-pass, despite many of the books included warning against this kind of economy, so one gets an idea of where the author's beliefs are. For this I drop one star - but otherwise the summaries are excellent.