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generalheff 's review for:
The Penguin History of Economics
by Roger E. Backhouse
It is safe to say that I had no idea how boring an economic history would be. Let me explain. I have been reading a lot of history recently. I’ve read a couple of histories of the Middle Ages, one on quantum mechanics and another on Einstein. All four books are markedly different. The books on history were dense and turgid at times but gave the reader a sense of what different times were like. The science history books, by contrast, have a clearly teleological approach: quantum mechanics or relativity is demonstrably an improvement so the story can proceed (in fits and starts) from a position of less to more knowledge.
I didn’t really give much thought to how a history of economics should be written; unfortunately for me, Roger Backhouse seems to have failed to answer this question as well. In his History of Economics, the author deliberately eschews a story of ‘progress’: the book is not “either conservative (celebrating the achievements of modern economics) or revolutionary (revealing its fatal errors to overthrow contemporary orthodoxy)”. In other words, Backhouse makes a very deliberate attempt not to meld a story of inexorable advance out of the work of Smith, Ricardo, Keynes and Arrow. This is a perfectly valid response to the much more murky notion of ‘success’ in the world of economics compared to the world of physics to which it is so often inappropriately contrasted.
Yet without some sort of framing of the past - such as by the notion of progress or else by the economic standards of the present - the book becomes effectively a prose encyclopaedia: a series of vignettes of different economists and their ideas. As Backhouse himself acknowledges, such a book “serves to provide economists with a vision of where their own work fits into a wider story”, which might be useful for them but is hardly enticing for non-economists.
In the works of history I’ve recently read this avoidance of a sense of progress is positively to be embraced as a counterweight to crude notions of ‘civilisation’s advance’. In science, progress is the aim of the game so must be a factor. That leaves me wondering whether there is any point in a history of economics if the discipline as a whole has come so little distance. Time and again I found myself struggling to differentiate a 200 year old idea from something I’d heard about recently - the notion of the rational individual (modern) and utility maximisation (old), for example. The author, to be clear, is at pains to point out these links between old ideas and new, but it’s hard to get away from the idea that current economics is simply going in circles.
Perhaps most frustratingly of all, the author acknowledges this, particularly with his comments against the mathematisation of the discipline: “economics became a much more technical subject, and mathematical techniques were systematically applied … comparisons with ‘basic’ or ‘blue-sky’ research … in science and medicine were used to justify such inquiries”. The author’s borderline contempt for such reality-detached economics points towards the book he could have written. Rather than a chronological recitation of ideas and economists, why not write a critique of where economics is and how it got there, framed around what the purpose of economics is. As it is, this book likely provides a useful historical primer for economists. For the rest of us, though this book is gratifyingly short and clearly written, I cannot see much to recommend.
I didn’t really give much thought to how a history of economics should be written; unfortunately for me, Roger Backhouse seems to have failed to answer this question as well. In his History of Economics, the author deliberately eschews a story of ‘progress’: the book is not “either conservative (celebrating the achievements of modern economics) or revolutionary (revealing its fatal errors to overthrow contemporary orthodoxy)”. In other words, Backhouse makes a very deliberate attempt not to meld a story of inexorable advance out of the work of Smith, Ricardo, Keynes and Arrow. This is a perfectly valid response to the much more murky notion of ‘success’ in the world of economics compared to the world of physics to which it is so often inappropriately contrasted.
Yet without some sort of framing of the past - such as by the notion of progress or else by the economic standards of the present - the book becomes effectively a prose encyclopaedia: a series of vignettes of different economists and their ideas. As Backhouse himself acknowledges, such a book “serves to provide economists with a vision of where their own work fits into a wider story”, which might be useful for them but is hardly enticing for non-economists.
In the works of history I’ve recently read this avoidance of a sense of progress is positively to be embraced as a counterweight to crude notions of ‘civilisation’s advance’. In science, progress is the aim of the game so must be a factor. That leaves me wondering whether there is any point in a history of economics if the discipline as a whole has come so little distance. Time and again I found myself struggling to differentiate a 200 year old idea from something I’d heard about recently - the notion of the rational individual (modern) and utility maximisation (old), for example. The author, to be clear, is at pains to point out these links between old ideas and new, but it’s hard to get away from the idea that current economics is simply going in circles.
Perhaps most frustratingly of all, the author acknowledges this, particularly with his comments against the mathematisation of the discipline: “economics became a much more technical subject, and mathematical techniques were systematically applied … comparisons with ‘basic’ or ‘blue-sky’ research … in science and medicine were used to justify such inquiries”. The author’s borderline contempt for such reality-detached economics points towards the book he could have written. Rather than a chronological recitation of ideas and economists, why not write a critique of where economics is and how it got there, framed around what the purpose of economics is. As it is, this book likely provides a useful historical primer for economists. For the rest of us, though this book is gratifyingly short and clearly written, I cannot see much to recommend.