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caseybones's review
I have no background in Econ and was reading this purely to learn. But it is a textbook. A very dense textbook. At a certain point I needed a break, and I just never came back to it. I’d like to eventually but for right now I’ve given up.
breadandmushrooms's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
sett's review
3.0
I wanted a guided introduction into the field of economics to better understand the various schools of thought in the "dismal science". Having skimmed through Piketty's "Economics of Inequality" with only rudimentary understanding accumulated from various internet resources, I thought it would be best to obtain a better conceptual grasp before tackling the tome that is "Capital in the 21st Century" that's been sitting on my shelf for years.
Richard D. Wolff is known to be an outsider in the field, being a Marxian economist, which puts him a good position to explain the various contending theories. I was wary that it might contain rather ideology-heavy writing but thankfully Wolff keeps it strictly in the realm of the explanatory "how" things work.
The book was adequate in what it sought to do (explaining the three contending theories) and I can see it being used as a first-year supplementary textbook. It's worth a read, if only just to understand the implicit theoretical frameworks that people may unwittingly commit to when forming opinions about economic matters: mininum wage, role of taxes and welfare etc...
Richard D. Wolff is known to be an outsider in the field, being a Marxian economist, which puts him a good position to explain the various contending theories. I was wary that it might contain rather ideology-heavy writing but thankfully Wolff keeps it strictly in the realm of the explanatory "how" things work.
The book was adequate in what it sought to do (explaining the three contending theories) and I can see it being used as a first-year supplementary textbook. It's worth a read, if only just to understand the implicit theoretical frameworks that people may unwittingly commit to when forming opinions about economic matters: mininum wage, role of taxes and welfare etc...
rosie_khan's review
5.0
A hundred stars for this book! I read it at the behest of my mom, who's always asking that I read more than just fiction, and despite having spent the last several weeks of summer break freedom making progress on this book, it was fully worth it.
Richard Wolff speaks and writes with elegance and clarity, and treats the contending theories very fairly. The neoclassical and Keynesian chapters were a breeze, as I'd already learned the content via high school and college classes, but I encountered so much new information in the chapter on Marxian economic theory. Truly eye-opening.
I also really appreciated how diverse the approaches to theory itself were. The meaning of theory (entry points, logical structure) is laid out so we know what exactly we're talking about and how. The reader gets an introduction to different epistemologies (empirical, rational, non-absolutist) in the closing, which is brilliant and hopefully does a lot to help discussion between economists, theorists, and people in general.
There's precisely one thing I have to criticize about this book, and it's the usage of "he or she" and "his or her" rather than they/them/their. I know it's a norm in academic writing, so I'm not faulting the authors for it. You can tell that I think this is a great book because that's the only thing I can think of, at the moment, in the entire 378 pages that I disapproved of.
TL;DR: Everyone should read this book, and especially if you care about economics!
Richard Wolff speaks and writes with elegance and clarity, and treats the contending theories very fairly. The neoclassical and Keynesian chapters were a breeze, as I'd already learned the content via high school and college classes, but I encountered so much new information in the chapter on Marxian economic theory. Truly eye-opening.
I also really appreciated how diverse the approaches to theory itself were. The meaning of theory (entry points, logical structure) is laid out so we know what exactly we're talking about and how. The reader gets an introduction to different epistemologies (empirical, rational, non-absolutist) in the closing, which is brilliant and hopefully does a lot to help discussion between economists, theorists, and people in general.
There's precisely one thing I have to criticize about this book, and it's the usage of "he or she" and "his or her" rather than they/them/their. I know it's a norm in academic writing, so I'm not faulting the authors for it. You can tell that I think this is a great book because that's the only thing I can think of, at the moment, in the entire 378 pages that I disapproved of.
TL;DR: Everyone should read this book, and especially if you care about economics!
carlosmartinez's review
4.0
I learned a huge amount from this book, and am very glad to have read it. That said, I don't know to what extent I'd recommend it to others. Wolff's overview of Marxist economics is brilliant. He approaches the subject in a wonderfully (and unusually) non-dogmatic way, and really helps you understand the underlying philosophy, epistemology and methodology. As such you get a very rounded sense of what Marxism is all about.
Personally I found it slightly annoying that neoclassical and Keynesian economics are given equal weight with Marxism here. A huge amount of space is dedicated to describing these fields in a quite technical way, and it felt a bit unnecessary. Wolff is a Marxist, I'm a Marxist, let's just all be Marxists, hehe. I like the comparative nature of the book, but I would have preferred less focus on the other theories; I don't really need a hundred pages of equations to confirm my belief that the basic assumptions of neoliberalism are a load of old cobblers.
So the best part of the book is, IMHO, its portrayal of Marxian economics as a creative and evolving body of ideas. It's not the first thing I'd read on the subject ([b:Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit|925082|Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit|Karl Marx|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1179506221l/925082._SY75_.jpg|910091] is a good start if you want the man himself, or [b:Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works - and How It Fails|36490332|Talking to My Daughter About the Economy or, How Capitalism Works - and How It Fails|Yanis Varoufakis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1509179919l/36490332._SY75_.jpg|44398268] for a modern take). But as a stepping stone between those introductory texts and [b:Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production|325785|Capital, Vol. 1 A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production|Karl Marx|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348385812l/325785._SY75_.jpg|345846], people may find it very useful.
A relatively serious disagreement I have with the author is his insistence that what was established in the Soviet Union and its allies was 'state capitalism', and that a real socialism would see the workers in a given firm collectively appropriating the surplus. The idea of Soviet-style socialism was that this relationship happened at a national level: the people, represented by the state, appropriated the surplus and distributed it in a way that suited the needs of the collective. As such, without the private ownership of capital, what was established meets Wolff's criteria for socialism (albeit at a different scale) and can't reasonably be described as capitalist. Which is not to say that it was an unalloyed success, but that's another story.
Personally I found it slightly annoying that neoclassical and Keynesian economics are given equal weight with Marxism here. A huge amount of space is dedicated to describing these fields in a quite technical way, and it felt a bit unnecessary. Wolff is a Marxist, I'm a Marxist, let's just all be Marxists, hehe. I like the comparative nature of the book, but I would have preferred less focus on the other theories; I don't really need a hundred pages of equations to confirm my belief that the basic assumptions of neoliberalism are a load of old cobblers.
So the best part of the book is, IMHO, its portrayal of Marxian economics as a creative and evolving body of ideas. It's not the first thing I'd read on the subject ([b:Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit|925082|Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit|Karl Marx|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1179506221l/925082._SY75_.jpg|910091] is a good start if you want the man himself, or [b:Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works - and How It Fails|36490332|Talking to My Daughter About the Economy or, How Capitalism Works - and How It Fails|Yanis Varoufakis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1509179919l/36490332._SY75_.jpg|44398268] for a modern take). But as a stepping stone between those introductory texts and [b:Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production|325785|Capital, Vol. 1 A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production|Karl Marx|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348385812l/325785._SY75_.jpg|345846], people may find it very useful.
A relatively serious disagreement I have with the author is his insistence that what was established in the Soviet Union and its allies was 'state capitalism', and that a real socialism would see the workers in a given firm collectively appropriating the surplus. The idea of Soviet-style socialism was that this relationship happened at a national level: the people, represented by the state, appropriated the surplus and distributed it in a way that suited the needs of the collective. As such, without the private ownership of capital, what was established meets Wolff's criteria for socialism (albeit at a different scale) and can't reasonably be described as capitalist. Which is not to say that it was an unalloyed success, but that's another story.
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