The Emperor has no Clothes!March 2, 2004 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The post-autistic economics movement has followers throughout the world. Its attack of mainstream economic theory is an important revival of long forgotten debates in the field that had been apparently secluded to little read books on the history of economic thought. Its bottom-line argument is that mainstream economics has stopped having the 'real world' as its main purpose of study and has substituted it with models and suppositions that have little to do with the life of human beings.
Edward Fullbrook has edited "The Postautistic Economics Newsletter" for more than two years and provides here a collection of the most important articles that have appeared in that magazine. A few big names in economics like J.K. Galbraith contribute along with many other less known academics. This book has the merit of providing a multidisciplinary critique of economics. It doesn't only concentrate in blaming economics' with being obsessesed with 'bad maths'(as implied by Steve Keen in his book 'Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences' 2001) nor just in criticising the fact that mainstream economics is based on 'rational choice theory' (a theory that has been disqualified by Daniel Kahneman's work on bounded rationality, earning for it the 2002 Nobel prize in economics). Although not directly referring to these works, it indirectly sums up and balances these critiques and adds up a bit more from other fields of the social sciences. The book doesn't get 5 stars because it could have been useful to include debates on the same issues between economists from the XIXth and early XXth Century. That would have set things a bit more in perspective and would have acknowledged the fact that the ones that in our day shout out that the emperor of the social sciences has no clothes are actually not the first ones in doing so. Nonetheless and because of the long history of this debate, a highly recommended book for people that take economics seriously as a social science.