Robert L. HeilbronerCríticas

Одна из лучших книг, которых я читал за всю жизнь. Автор мастерски описал социо-экономические революции произошедшие за всю историю человечества, но самое главное автор указал, кто смог проанализировать и описать данные революции, а иногда даже предсказать их. Каждая глава имеет историю о великом экономисте, его жизненном пути, а также как он пришел к своей великой идее. Каждая глава начинается с вопроса и отвечает на него, но в процессе ответа, задает след. вопрос. Книга имеет 10 глав, и подводит читателя к пику книги - что будет дальше с Миром? Что будет дальше с экономикой? Я считаю, книга обязательна к прочтению любому человеку. Она поможет понять, почему мир такой как он есть.

Dated now, it was good for me to read at the time.

This is history of when what we call economics was still part of philosophy, with some more recent economists too. Each one is worth knowing about.

Later, in 2023, I learn that the seventh and last edition of Worldly Philosophers included a new chapter, chapter 11, titled "The End of Worldly Philosophy?". It discusses "end" in both of its possible meanings, as termination, and as purpose or goal.

Heilbroner mentions how economics has become very mathematical, with lots of numbers and theories. That's fine, he thinks. What disturbs him, though, is economists who believe their field is a science like physics. Humans, with our free will and emotions, and ethics, and values can't be described in the same way that, say, electrons can.

He hopes for an economics that more and more realizes that it is linked to politics more than to physics, and one that realizes it is not value-free, an economics with a sense of social responsibility.

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Buen repaso de los grandes economistas, con una buena descripción de época donde se desarrollan esas ideas y que en muchos supuestos las explican y le dan sustento

I decided to read this book many years ago because it purported to explain how the US economy works, in jargon- free language. In this respect, it lived up to that description. Unfortunately, I found the subject itself dull, and as of years later, I seem to have retained little of the book's contents. Doubtless, this is no fault of the authors.

Uncritical and sometimes innacurate or at least tendecious account of a mixed selection of economist and fringe charaltans. Don't really see much value in this as it's all very superficial and willl not give you any grasp of the presented economists ideas.

An excellent survey of economic history and ideas organised around key economic thinkers. It is not a technical book and makes for great reading in general interest.

A text book on the lives of the great economists. Passably interesting, but contains little one would not have easily heard before.

Goes pretty light on the failure of economics over all and, basically, forever (so far).

An Excellent Book for anyone interested in Economics but put off by mathematics. Focuses mostly on the history of economic thought. Delivers balanced assessments of every figure, including Marx. The last chapter is particularly interesting because it stresses that economics can't be divorced from social concerns.

It has some great anecdotes on early economists, but ends with Schumpeter—far too soon. The scale is so broad that we only really learn about macroeconomics—never micro—and there is at least as much sociology or political theory as macroeconomics. Heilbroner's own economic judgements are often questionable, and his last chapter, summing up and suggesting a future for economics, is atrocious. It is also interesting how he manages to completely ignore some of today's major economic and political issues, e.g., inequality.

> It was said that he [Adam Smith] had brewed himself a beverage of bread and butter and pronounced it the worst cup of tea he had ever tasted.

> In contrast with Bastiat, who was drawn to the irrationalities of economic sophistry, or with Henry George, who saw the injustices of life cloaked with economic sanction, or with Hobson, who looked for hidden destructive tendencies in the impersonal processes of capitalist economics, Marshall was primarily interested in the self-adjusting, self-correcting nature of the economic world. As his most brilliant pupil, J. M. Keynes, would later write, he created "a whole Copernican system, in which all the elements of the economic universe are kept in their places by mutual counterpoise and interaction."

> If Marx's view was right, for example, and the proletariat was irreconcilably and diametrically opposed to the capitalist, what prevented the revolution from breaking out at once? Veblen provides an answer. The lower classes are not at swords' points with the upper; they are bound up with them by the intangible but steely bonds of common attitudes. The workers do not seek to displace their managers; they seek to emulate them. They themselves acquiesce in the general judgment that the work they do is somehow less "dignified" than the work of their masters, and their goal is not to rid themselves of a superior class but to climb up to it. In the theory of the leisure class lies the kernel of a theory of social stability.

> Planck turned to Keynes and told him that he had once considered going into economics himself. But he had decided against it—it was too hard. Keynes repeated the story with relish to a friend back at Cambridge. "Why, that’s odd," said the friend. "Bertrand Russell was telling me just the other day that he'd also thought about going into economics. But he decided it was too easy."

Excellent intro and overview of economics for the non-economist.

An OK introductory text, but nothing special. I probably could have gotten the same information from Wikipedia. Although, in this case, the authors were nice enough to organize it for me...

A history of economic thought.

The prose is excellent. Well written and lively, and easy to digest. I also like the introduction of some more fringe "economists" that would have escaped my attention otherwise.

My criticism is that the book seems outdated, and more interesting to read as a window into an age rather than for information. I would take most of the Heilbroner explains as "fact" with a large grain of salt. The book overall seems to be a product of an earlier pre-Chicago school age, of a leftist- to socialist grain. It's interesting as a historical artifact but has little informative value in my opinion. Heilbroner is far more sympathetic to Utopians, Marx and Keynes than to cornerstones of the economic establishment. He dismisses Marshall and Edgeworth with a wave of the hand. For some basic economic ideas, Heilbroner seems confused, or even misconstrues them.

I liked the exploration of the individual lives of the economists. I thought probably the best point that Heilbroner makes is that economics needs to see society as evolving and changing (each era of history is likely to have it's own set of economics, all possibly valid since the nature of organization has changed) and that abstract math cannot and should not replace the political, social and psychological aspects of economics.

I feel mixed about the book overall. I did not agree with the ideas and saw some simplifications as simply wrong but ultimately I am glad that I read the book.

This is a good book to have on hand when writing about or discussing the ideas that are attributed to the economic theorists included in this book. While no substitute for reading the whole thing of each text, this book has excerpts of the main texts from Smith, Malthus, Mill, Veblen, Marx, and a few other key philosophers who helped shape economic theory as we know it today. Having these authors all in one book is handy, regardless of whether one agrees with Heilbroner in his interpretation of these philosophers' texts.

What I particularly like about this book is how Heilbroner begins with the term “political economy”, then relegates it to “economics” (as happened in history), only to revive the term at the end where he tells us that Schumpeter is the last worldly philosopher as we have – more or less – learnt all we can through a scientific approach based significantly on grand assumptions about the behaviour of homo economicus, and it is time to reintroduce politics. That Heilbroner ends with Schumpeter is interesting. I am not sure if his eschewing of Hayek (who gets a few mentions in the book) is ideological. Nonetheless, it is an interesting approach to understanding the economy although a newer edition (the seventh was released in 1999) might be useful to mention the impact of the return to free trade and back again with the recent Global Financial Crisis. Regardless, this should be the first port of call for novice economists or political scientists alike. As a second reading, I found the suggested reading list at the end of the book to be most helpful to guide a revisit to the many classics which are now readily available for free on the Net. Indeed, it was well-worth revisiting Heilbroner and I may do so yet again.

I've had this book on the shelf for over twenty years. I purchased it for an Intro to Macroeconomics class but I must not have read it at the time – or maybe we only had to read a small part because I found my annotations in only one chapter – but I decided to pick it up again and I'm very glad I did. Heilbroner looks at the great (and not-so-great) economists from Adam Smith down to John Maynard Keynes. And he truly tells you about their "lives, times and ideas" and makes the history come alive. Not only does he tell about Smith's "Invisible Hand" and supply and demand but also how he'd sometimes go into these trances where he'd end up marching for hours before coming out of it! And you learn about Keynes' insights into economic depressions (which may explain our current economic malaise) as well as his dalliances with men. There's also many in between, including some of the 'nuts' like Robert Owen, Henry George, and Thorstein Veblen. And, of course, there's Karl Marx.

The section on Marx is probably my favorite because Heilbroner makes you see the world Marx and his theories came from – as well as how often he was right! He points out that Marx "was not the architect of actual socialism" – that was Lenin – and it's so insightful that it almost makes me want to read Capital! In fact, the whole book was utterly fascinating. Heilbroner doesn't just explain economic ideas or even merely put them into context, he does it in a way that entertains, and he even made me laugh! My copy is from 1986 and it would be interesting to see what he'd thought of the collapse of communism just a few years later (maybe it was updated in a later edition?). (Modified from my 2/10/15 blog posting:http://bookworm-dad.blogspot.com/2015/02/marx-maynard-and-dr-dick.html)

I had originally read this in High School and wanted to see how well it had aged. It remains a great intro to the economic philosophers

This book provides a fascinating introduction to the history of economic thought, albeit from an American point of view.

Starting with Adam Smith and tracing the evolution of economics through Malthus and Ricardo, JS Mill, the Victorian Socialists, Marx, Veblen, Keynes and Schumpeter, it provides a rich set of models for thinking about how society produces and distributes wealth.

Definitely recommended for anyone wanting an overview of what the issues are.

short book, with ideas that I only partially share, but plenty of "food for thought"- worth buying

note: read in Italy, and the translation was quite impressive

Read and enjoyed many decades ago.

With a very personal Introduction by the author for this VIth edition.

Heilbroner introduces the "economic revolution". Humans have found only three ways to keep "the possibility of social breakdown" at bay: (1) organizing society around tradition, (2) submitting to authorities, or (3) allowing development of a "free market system". This last calls forth the economists. [21]

My disagreements with Heilbroner stem from the ivory tower quality of his global pronouncements, but he is brilliant in biography and the historical positioning of his selected "economists": Adam Smith, Parson Malthus, David Ricardo, Frederick Bastiat, the Utopians Socialists, Karl Marx, the Victorians, Thorstein Veblen, Henry George, John Maynard Keynes, and Joseph Schumpeter.

By way of contextualizing the relevance of this work for today, post Heritage Foundation assault on the free market by monopolists, there is not the slightest suggestion drawn from the faintest shadow of a fact, which can support the late GOP suggestion that "the wealthy create jobs". This serious work was published in 1986, the last year of middle class growth and at the onset of the war declared by the Koch Brothers and executed by Roger Ailes on behalf of the GOP against the middle class. Clearly, its abundant message was swept aside, and political America stopped listening to economists.

"How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values generated by a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deception, in which it is common knowledge that only a fool is taken in by the charades and messages that supposedly tell us 'the facts'?...But the market mechanism also contains profound weaknesses that have been overlooked during the period of uninhibited capitalist expansion. One of these is its tendency to create extremely skewed distributions of income and property, a tendency that a straitjacketed economy will no longer accept with the forebearance of an expanding one. Another weakness is the failure of the market to protect us against the socially deleterious side effects of production, such as pollution, an aspect that becomes intolerable in a threatened environment. And a third weakness is the matter to which we have just referred -- the exclusive focus of the market on economic activity conceived and measured in quantities of material output, not in qualities of human input. The market celebrates private consumption and ignores private production. This indifference to the experience of work corrodes and corrupts much of the way of life in a business civilization...These 'civilizational' challenges of the long run are also intimately associated with the prospect of a decline in, and finally a halt to, growth."