Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior by Paul Omerod, Paul Ormerod ISBN: 0-465-05356-4 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 23 January, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.07 (14 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A fair analysis... for the 1930s.
Comment: Paul Ormerod has set out to tell us everything that's wrong with contmeporary economics. Unfortunately he's both a few decades late and short on facts.
As others have pointed out, the economics Ormerod is criticizing is of an old school that predates several generations of mathematical progress. Most of his legitimate criticisms have been addressed over the past few decades by economists working in areas like Rational Expectations, Game Theory and so forth. But even his discussions of classical models are somewhat off the mark. In dealing with market volatility and the efficient market hypothesis, Ormerod forgets one of the cardinal requirements of efficient markets: Free and unfettered flow of information. It has long been recognized that bubbles, whether the 17th century Tulip Mania or the modern market in Beanie Babies, are a consequence of the lack of an efficent market for price information. (One only has to look at how the rise of E-Bay as a source of global price information has affected the markets for collectables like Beanie Babies to see the truth in this.)
Ormerod, like many others, also apparantly still subscribes to the notion of "path dependancy". This is the idea that the first product in a market can dominate it, even when far superior products emerge. Hence the dominance of VHS over the technically superior VHS, Windows over Macintosh and QWERTY over DSK (Dvorak Simplified Keyboard). Unfortunately each of these classic examples has been discredited: VHS triumphed because Sony refused to license Beta, and competition rapidly made VHS machines much cheaper. Apple refused to license the Mac OS, with similar results . And multiple studies failed to replicate early claims of tremendous speed advantages for DSK. We might also note that for every purported path dependancy examples there are probably hundreds of thousands of examples where a better product rapidly displaced a well-established product in the marketplace. Electric light replced gas, Compact Disks replaced LPs, DVDs are rapidly replacing VHS, radial tires replaced bias ply and so forth, even though each of these required a huge investment in new technology and greater cost to the consumer.
So what we're left with is an interesting, well written book that does do a fair job of illustrating some of the complex dynamics of an economy in a non-technical way. Read and enjoy it, but be critical of his pronouncements.
Rating: 5
Summary: A readable analyis of what's wrong with conventional wisdom
Comment: There is a massive gap between the predictions of conventional economists and the real world. The economy seen as a gigantic, intricate machine with buttons and levers is the orthodox picture. Economists, and their numerically able cousins the econometricians, expend increasing efforts to develop ever more refined models to try to explain the observations, with diminishing returns. The optimism doesn't diminish. Along comes a book about ants, but called Butterfly Economics. It really is that simple: the agents in economic and other human systems act more like ants than as rational optimisers moving along iso-utility curves. This book demolishes the conventional wisdom that underpins mainstream economics and sketches out the complex adaptive system paradigm which provides a much more accurate picture the world as it really is. Butterfly economics does not attempt chase every rabbit into every hole, but it does establish, very persuasively, that new insights can yield better models to describe aggregate human behaviour. For the intelligent layman this is a great introduction to the exciting results being obtained by researchers in the new science of Complexity.
Rating: 2
Summary: Trapped in the 1970s
Comment: This isn't a bad book. It is well written and I would recommend that read it to be apprised of the points it espouses. However, it is very incomplete, if not naive, to the body of economic literature that has been produced by both academic and armchair economists and mathematicians since the 1980s. Economists are very aware of the strictures of their assumptions and have forever been relaxing them in producing better models. There are great advancements in Game Theory and alternative modeling theories. For several decades economists have been incorporating , cognitive theory, evolutionary psychology, neural networks, chaos etc. into their theories. In any case, much of foundational micro theory econometrics is still very useful for policy studies. The problem only arises when people use the initial assumptions of economics as a defense of their ideology and their belief that one Political Economic system is better than another. Those same assumptions that are used for armchair debates have little place or use in the economics that is practiced professionally.
For more info on the how aware economics is of its quasi-shortcomings and on how broad and effectual the horizon is for economic theory read poke your nose into some real Journals. A great starting place is the 1994 American Economic Review.
Particular authors who produce both lay and academic literature would be Daniel Khaneman, Richard Thaylor, W Brian Arthur, George Akerloff, Stiglitz, Gary Becker.
In summary, economics is not "flawed to the core", especially in any practical sense. It is actually becoming more powerful than ever since it's given up some of its "physics envy" obsessions.
Arnie
 |
Title: The Death of Economics by Paul Ormerod ISBN: 0471180009 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 15 August, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
 |
Title: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson ISBN: 0684868768 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 10 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo Barbasi ISBN: 0452284392 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks by Mark Buchanan ISBN: 0393041530 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
 |
Title: The Situationist City by Simon Sadler ISBN: 0262692252 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 02 July, 1999 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
