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February 19, 2008
A book recommendation I can endorse
Students occasionally ask what economics book they should read for pleasure. If you're an econ professor, you know what I mean. Greg Mankiw tells us of a recent conversation he had...
Student: Professor Mankiw, if you could recommend just one book, what book would it be?
[Mankiw]: Am I allowed to recommend my favorite textbook?
Student: No. Textbooks are disallowed.
[Mankiw]: In that case, I'll suggest Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom.
Student: That's funny. That's the same answer I got when I asked this question of Professor Summers.
Capitalism and Freedom is a book that I have recommended as well. As I described previously on this blog, that book was and still is a favorite of mine.
By the time I read Capitalism and Freedom, I had already made up my mind to go to grad school and be an academic economist. So it was not a life changing event in that sense. However, by the time I put the book down I knew that I had made the right choice for me. I remember that one of my thoughts after reading it for the first time* was, "Wow, that's how to make an economic argument." Maybe that's why economists across the spectrum from Mankiw to Summers and undoubtedly many more in-between recommend the book to students.
*It is indeed a shame that I will never again read it for the first time and capture that exact feeling again. I am reminded of an episode of "Classic Albums" on VH1Classic in which one of the members of Pink Floyd (probably David Gilmour, but I don't recall for sure) waxed philosophical about what it must have been like for someone to bring home Dark Side of the Moon, turn out the lights, put on the headphones, and listen to it for the first time--and that since he was so involved with brining it into being he never had that experience for himself. I can't help but wonder if Milton Friedman had a similar experience with Capitalism and Freedom.
Posted by William Polley at February 19, 2008 09:18 PM
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Comments
Well I don't know about Capitalism and Freedom, but Dark Side of the Moon was THE album of my senior year in High School and I certainly can recall (or perhaps reconstruct) my first mind-blowing encounter. (It didn't hurt that in that particular time and place - Northern California in 1974 - that marijuana consumption was near universal among my peers.)
I may have to pick up Capitalism and Freedom. I am generally wary of transformative books, there often is a blurry line between illumination and manipulation. For example my first graduate paper was on Derrida. In his dispute with Searle his line of argumentation seemed conclusive, it wasn't until I went back and broke the essay down pretty much sentence by sentence that I found the semantic trick he used to slide his whole theory through. He defined 'communication' in a valid but limited way, showed that texts could not meet that particular definition and drew the conclusion that you could not communicate ideas through texts, they could only be considered as autonomous objects. QED. Well not so D, redefine 'communication' a little more inclusively and the whole theory simply fell apart, Deconstruction on analysis was totally dependent on a single linguistic trick.
Ayn Rand's books are typically totally convincing when first encountered by impressionable teenagers. It is all just so there, so obvious, so gratifying (particularly if you were a little nerdy), not only should engineering geeks rule the world, you actually had proof right there in the backpack. Until you go back and see how Rand actually did it, at which point the whole smooth argument is shown to be a rickety contraption sold by a series of narrative tricks.
So just as the fruits of Deconstruction and Objectivism poisoned by the flaws buried at their respective roots, I have to wonder about Capitalism and Freedom. In this world true clarity rarely comes that easily, the writer and/or the reader having to really work for it.
Posted by: Bruce Webb at February 20, 2008 03:22 PM