How Economics Explains the World
A Short History of Humanity
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A Short History of Humanity
Ratings1
Average rating3
“If you read just one book about economics, make it Andrew Leigh's clear, insightful, and remarkable (and short) work.” —Claudia Goldin, recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics and Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University A sweeping, engrossing history of how economic forces have shaped the world—all in under 200 pages In How Economics Explains the World, Harvard-trained economist Andrew Leigh presents a new way to understand the human story. From the dawn of agriculture to AI, here is story of how ingenuity, greed, and desire for betterment have, to an astonishing degree, determined our past, present, and future. This small book indeed tells a big story. It is the story of capitalism – of how our market system developed. It is the story of the discipline of economics, and some of the key figures who formed it. And it is the story of how economic forces have shaped world history. Why didn’t Africa colonize Europe instead of the other way around? What happened when countries erected trade and immigration barriers in the 1930s? Why did the Allies win World War II? Why did inequality in many advanced countries fall during the 1950s and 1960s? How did property rights drive China’s growth surge in the 1980s? How does climate change threaten our future prosperity? You’ll find answers to these questions and more in How Economics Explains the World.
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Being vastly shorter and written with a more engaging style, this book has a far lower opportunity cost than “Slouching Towards Utopia” and tells much the same story. Leigh is a far better writer, and he makes good use of a few choice graphics. But, in the end, his “How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity” is just another glib and superficial paean to capitalism that actually explains nothing.
The one trick repeated again and again in lieu of any actual “explanation” is to note some great advance in human wellbeing and ascribe that advance somehow to “economics” — in other words, all the work from the Enlightenment and all the study and effort that physicists and chemists and agronomists have put in to propel great advances in health and welfare is counted as having somehow depended on economics and economists. Thus, in writing about economics, Leigh is like virtually all other economists, acting like the “researchers” at the Institute for Creation Research (the outfit that masquerades as scientifically minded folks who just happen to think that evolution is a myth) — they already know the gospel, their sole task is to busy themselves trying to tell more and more vignettes of the received wisdom in an ever more compelling way. If economists had any explanatory power, societies with more economists would out-compete societies with more physicists and chemists and engineers. Better to read Harari’s “Sapiens” than this.
