ENGLISH

Capitalism, democracy, and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery

By John E. Mueller

Book information

Publisher
Princeton University Press
Year
1999
ISBN
0691001146, 9781400812776, 9780691001142, 0691090823, 9780691090825, 1400805619, 9781400805617, 9781400823123
Open Library ID
OL7755840M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
1001 kB (1025096 bytes)
Pages
347\347
Topic
Economy
Scanned
yes
Time added
2010-06-26 00:49:36

Description

I thought this was another book along the lines of "Freakonomics," "Naked Economics," or "Predictably Irrational," where the goal was to showcase a slew of counter-intuitive insights from economics and psychology -- the "Economics Can Be Fun" genre, if you will.

Not so. Though I got a lot out of this book, and parts of it made me think, on the whole I would characterize it as stuffy and uncomfortably theoretical.

It's philosophy, really. It's really a survey of how two ideas -- capitalism and democracy -- have been viewed over the years. It examines the ways in which, to paraphrase the first line of the book, capitalism has gotten a worse rap than it deserves, while democracy has gotten a better one than it deserves. (At the hands of poets, historians, novelists, politicians, etc.) It's almost literary history.

So a lukewarm recommendation for this one. There were parts that made me think, but now that I think about it, even those parts were really the author's quoting somebody else's ideas (quite a lot of this here), than coming up with anything original. On the whole, I'd say it's a lot less fun than the groovy cover and loony title seem to promise.

Similar books