I wasn’t a fan of [amazon_link id=”0141019018″ target=”_blank” ]Freakonomics[/amazon_link] and it sounds like the new Dubner and Levitt book, [amazon_link id=”1846147557″ target=”_blank” ]Think Like a Freak[/amazon_link], is one to skip, at least judging from this review by David Runciman (author of the marvellous [amazon_link id=”0691148686″ target=”_blank” ]The Confidence Trap[/amazon_link]). The freakiness of [amazon_link id=”0606324305″ target=”_blank” ]Freakonomics[/amazon_link] is what bothered me. What that book really did was apply the assumptions and quantitative methods of economics to all sorts of social questions.

It was the logical extension of the [amazon_link id=”0226041123″ target=”_blank” ]Gary Becker[/amazon_link] approach, the economic imperialism of claiming non-economic subjects for economic analysis. And while this cast an interesting, and accurate, light on many subjects, I think it went too far. It is interesting to understand the economic aspect of marriage choices, but wrong to claim this is the most important aspect. On this I’m with Ha-Joon Chang’s [amazon_link id=”0718197038″ target=”_blank” ]Economics: The User’s Guide[/amazon_link]. (I’m part way through.) Economics is (mainly) about the economy, and while there is a fuzzy boundary between the economy and society, the Freakonomics world oversteps it.

Tim Harford has a terrific column about this, reflecting on Becker’s legacy after his death the other week. He’s more positive about Becker’s influence.

[amazon_image id=”1846147557″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Think Like a Freak: How to Think Smarter about Almost Everything[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”0226041123″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Economic Approach to Human Behavior[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”0070067090″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Economics of Life: From Baseball to Affirmative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect Our Everyday Life[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”0226041026″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Uncommon Sense: Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism[/amazon_image]

Ha-Joon Chang’s new book, [amazon_link id=”0718197038″ target=”_blank” ]Economics: The User’s Guide[/amazon_link], is sitting enticingly on my desk. It starts: “Why are people not very interested in economics?” A false premise surely? All the evidence from rising student numbers to popular economics book sales (not to mention the Piketty phenomenon) is that people are *hugely* interested in economics. And a good thing too – far too important to be left to us economists.

[amazon_image id=”0718197038″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Economics: The User’s Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)[/amazon_image]

I was disappointed by his column with Jonathan Aldred in last Sunday’s paper, which pretends that it’s only a beleaguered but wise minority of economists who want to see curriculum change, and dismisses the CORE curriculum that’s under development without – on the internal evidence of the column – having looked at it. Calls for radical reform make for good newspaper copy but ignore the practicalities of achieving change. It would be a shame if the real momentum behind curriculum reform got dissipated because of ill-informed comment from people who should be supporting it. Still, it’s the prerogative of would-be revolutionaries to be idealistic/unrealistic. Here is my VoxEU column, trying to be balanced about the curriculum debate.

Paging through the new book, though, it looks very good. It’s one of the launch titles in the new Pelican series. And at £7.99, about the same price adjusted for inflation as my 1970s were £1.95 Pelicans.

It’s terrifying how easy it is to be blithely unaware of the intellectual history of economics, even if you read a lot, as I do. History of thought is one of the glaring gaps in undergraduate and graduate courses, alongside economic history per se.

Last week, when I was speaking at the Manchester Statistical Society, my discussant, Dr Richard Pryke, mentioned the work of Ian Little. At the weekend I looked him up and found this fabulous obit written by Professor Peter Oppenheimer and this by Robert Skidelsky.

It turns out that Prof Little’s [amazon_link id=”0198281196″ target=”_blank” ]A Critique of Welfare Economics[/amazon_link] of 1950 was hugely influential and was reissued in 2002. I’m not at all proud of knowing nothing about it, and will try to fill the gap.

[amazon_image id=”0198281196″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]A Critique of Welfare Economics[/amazon_image]

Bill Easterly’s [amazon_link id=”0465031250″ target=”_blank” ]The Tyranny of Experts[/amazon_link] and The Idealist, Nina Munk’s book about Jeff Sachs’s Millennium Villages project in Africa, [amazon_link id=”0385525818″ target=”_blank” ]The Idealist[/amazon_link], were reviewed in an interesting article by Andrew Jack in the Financial Times yesterday. The books – neither of which I’ve yet read – seem to be part of the big shift that has occurred in development economics in recent years. That shift reflects a welcome shedding of the belief, at least on the part of many economists, that a single conceptual approach will deliver a ‘silver bullet’ solution or method that can be applied everywhere.

[amazon_image id=”0465031250″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”0385525818″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty[/amazon_image]

This is obviously far from a universal view, or Easterly and Munk would not have written their books. However, a number of the OECD economists I was lunching with on Friday were discussing exactly this subject. One said that he thought the RCTs approached, as so brilliantly described in Duflo and Bannerjee’s [amazon_link id=”1586487981″ target=”_blank” ]Poor Economics[/amazon_link], would turn out to have transformed the field when we look back in a few years’ time. He was keen to see the developed economies scrutinise their own policies as rigorously as some aid interventions are scrutinised now.

[amazon_image id=”1586487981″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty[/amazon_image]

As well as the methodology question, though, there is the tendency so widespread among economists to assume away the importance of historical and geographic specificities. One of the reasons I so loved Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert Hirschman, [amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher[/amazon_link], was its emphasis on this aspect of Hirschman’s development work, the crucial importance of the specific context.

The reductive turn in economics that dominated our subject from the 1970s to the 2000s is tenacious, but it seems to be on the retreat. Development economics is one of the straws in the wind. Perhaps I’m overoptimistic, but I do think economics is returning to the real world from its surreal Wonderland.

[amazon_image id=”1853260029″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Alice in Wonderland (Wordsworth Classics)[/amazon_image]

Economists out to lunch?