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Licence to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us

Jonathan Aldred

4.09 · Rating details · 33 ratings · 3 reviews

'It is going to change the way in which we understand many modern debates about economics, politics, and society' Ha Joon Chang, author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Over the past fifty years, the way we value what is 'good' and 'right' has changed dramatically. Behaviour that to our grandparents' generation might have seemed stupid, harmful or simply wicked now see/>Over/>

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Kindle Edition, 311 pages

Published June 6th 2019 by Penguin

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Jun 20, 2019 Marks54 rated it really liked it

Big time academic economics is a strange area at times and is certainly an acquired taste. Theory has been highly abstract and mathematical for quite a while and the empirical tribulations of trying to show evidence in the world for some theoretical claim are daunting. Readers of popular books and policy summaries may easily fail to notice that this is also an elaborate occupation here, with its own detailed rules and status orderings. Academic jobs that pay well are highly competitive and much Big time academic economics is a strange area at times and is certainly an acquired taste. Theory has been highly abstract and mathematical for quite a while and the empirical tribulations of trying to show evidence in the world for some theoretical claim are daunting. Readers of popular books and policy summaries may easily fail to notice that this is also an elaborate occupation here, with its own detailed rules and status orderings. Academic jobs that pay well are highly competitive and much of the work and pay may come from consulting, litigation support, or other advisory activities. ...and then there are the journal articles - dense, abstract, with lots of numbers and symbols - not very accessible to most readers. It sometimes seems as if one has stumbled on an alternate culture.

Jonathan Aldred’s new book provides an intelligent and probing look at some of the backstories and inside baseball of contemporary economics. The focal theme is that to build their area, economists have developed a detailed logic of “rational man” - homo economicus - and provided a simplified story of individual greed and autonomy as the basic story for how people do and should act in the brave new world of game theory, public choice economics, behavioral economics, strategic contracting, and the world of perfect competition, the cost disease, and the minimal state. This is a generally well done tour of some key topic areas and is well written and highly informative.

It is easy enough to dismiss some of the artificiality of these theories and models as the requirements of finding solutions to models or addressing statistical problems. The key to the book, however, is how these ideas, have come to be treated as mainstream and even commonplace in current politics, regulation, and corporate management. People in power have come to accept this stuff and economists have come to believe their own theoretical simplifications as being true. The trouble, of course, is that real people do not seem to behave this way (or did not, at least) and Alfred suggests that by embedding economic excesses in rules and regulations, they may come to be adopted by the people involved who will then start behaving according to the dictates of “rational man”.

The tone of the book is highly critical and in my opinion, Professor Aldred is both withering and effective in his critiques. Perhaps the brush is a bit too broad. In all fairness, however, I know many who understand the game and do not believe their own witticisms about selfish behavior. There are many critics both in and outside the field who have made similar criticisms as well.

Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and it struck numerous chords with me. It works as a distinct criticism. If it prompts people to read further, that is even better. ...more

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Jun 21, 2019 Peter Mcloughlin rated it really liked it

Shelves: 00001bad-things, 1890-1959, 1960-to-1989, 1990-to-2019, american-history, complexity, economics, european-history, general-history, intellectual-history

Keynes quip that every person who considers themselves a practical person of action is in thrall to some dead economist or other. Economic thinking contains values and shapes our view of the permissible. Economics in the mid-twentieth century the author pins it on Austrian School, Chicago Boys, and Strangelovian characters at the Rand Corporation but the villain is homo economicus becoming the paragon of ethics is the problem. We abstracted away a lot of moral strictures in the pursuit of being ...more

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Sep 13, 2019 Like_magic rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Book was just hard for me to follow. There was no roadmap to follow and it was not clear where the author was trying to take me nor what he was trying to convey. I may have been able to understand individual examples but I continually failed to place them into the larger context. In addition to that, there seems to be an overly large (in my opinion) emphasis on the role that individual economic theorists have played in the development of the economy as it stands today.

I was not able to understa ...more

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