How Economics Made Us Civilized

from the sounds-great dept

When people wonder how I can be so fascinated by the subject of economics, I often point them towards The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner, which details the lives and ideas of some of the world's greatest economic thinkers, and makes you realize that instead of a boring topic involving supply and demand charts, economics is philiosphy. It makes you think, and once you start exploring economics, you continually discover more and more interesting things. From the sound of this review, I may have another book to add to that list of more interesting (less technical) books about the philosophy of economics. The book is called Who's Afraid of Adam Smith? by Peter J. Dougherty, and looks at how Smith (and plenty of other economists) realized that economics goes well beyond boring supply and demand charts and equations to look at how we become civilized.

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