Economics: Making Sense of the Modern Economy by Simon Cox
My Rating: 2 of 5 stars
It is easy to be stunned by the manifest foresight that a book like this can showcase. But the reader has to remember that in a magazine like The Economist, a number of contrasting ideas about the current world economy would always be sloshing around. To later make a selective compilation of those articles that proved to be ‘prophetic’ is an exercise in exclusion that is designed to present a false sense of confidence or analytical foresight. Just because a collection of articles from a magazine turned out to be quite close to the mark, there is no reason to believe that any random article you might pick up from this week’s Economist will be of equal predictive value.
I have nothing against the magazine or the book. I greatly enjoy the magazine and to a more moderate extent liked the book as well. But the blatantly triumphant endnotes trumpeting the date of each article and a further note on how the world actually played out was grating to say the least.
Related articles
- Economist Scott Sumner Analyzes the End of Quantitative Easing (prweb.com)
- Getting it WRONG: The Economist on Educational Technology, Testing and School Reform (speedofcreativity.org)
- Two eloquent statements about Henry George (lvtfan.typepad.com)
