How Economics Explains the World

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.