5 comments about Income and Wealth (Greenwood Guides to Business and Economics).

1. I bought this book thinking it was a get rich quick book...boy was I disappointed! It suxs.
   
   If you're interested in money, who has how much, and why, I recommended the book by Andrew Hacker, which is cheaper, entitled "Money: Who Has How Much and Why" (1997). Data therein can be multiplied by 1.3 to give current inflation adjusted figures.



2. I consider myself a blue collar American now retired and with time to try to understand these economic conditions I find I have been living within. If you feel you are not understanding what you are reading or the media is telling you about as concerns inflation, unemployment, rich-poor income gaps, etc., then this is probably the book for you, too. I feel it is very clear and very complete, but I will have to read it again, mostly because it changed my mind on so many things, I want to be sure where I have been left in my opinions on these things. The price, which I consider high for a "blue collar" reader, may hold you back. It did me for a few weeks. But, I am glad I finally ordered it.



3. OK, maybe the book is a bit advanced for high schoolers (thanks to the stranglehold that the teachers' unions have on the public school system). But the main point is this--Reynolds lays out his case in plain English, in a manner accessible to anyone with an open mind, that so much of the economic commentary emanating from the "minds" of pundits and politicians is just pure BUNK.
   
   The main themes of the book, which recur throughout, are these:
   
   1) Most published reports of income/wealth inequality are based, at best, on incomplete measures, failing to account for government transfers (from "rich" to "poor") and for the painfully obvious fact that two-earner households tend to have higher household incomes than one-earner or (especially) zero-earner households.
   
   2) "Static" analyses of income/wealth inequality fail to account for the simple fact that people's income and wealth tend to increase over time as they develop ever greater skills and as their 401K plans grow over the years.
   
   Reynolds also points out the only effective ways to achieve "true" income/wealth equality. Either have widespread poverty, so that nobody has anything, or have exorbitant tax rates so that nobody can keep anything.
   
   This should be a very important book as we all decide what sort of President to elect in 2008.



4. The Federal Reserve, US Department of Treasury, publishes every three years a Consumer Finance Survey
   that details the distribution of Wealth in the USA. This is the authoratative source. According to this study
   half of the population owns 2.5% of the wealth of the country. One percent owns 33% of the wealth. Readers of this book should go to the most credible source of information, and also be familiar with the works of Edward Wolff and other scholars.



5. In this terrific little book, Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute patiently destroys some of the cherished myths of the Left, such as (1) the middle class is "vanishing"; (2) income inequality is increasing; (3) wages have stagnated.
   
   Reynolds convincingly unravels the statistical jujitsu employed by the likes Paul Krugman purporting to show that Americans are no better off than they were three decades ago. How anyone alive in the 1970s could find such an argument plausible to begin with is amazing itself, but that would be the subject of another book. Reynolds is an economist, not a psychoanalyst, so he confines himself to dissecting the economic data.
   
   One of the shibboleths he convincingly lays to rest is that of the vanishing middle class, a line often repeated by Krugman and TV huckster Lou Dobbs. Indeed, there have been numerous reports showing a decline in the percentage of households earning between $30,000 and $50,000. However, as Reynolds observes, the decline was due to the fact that the percentage earning more than $50,000 had gone up! In other words, a rising percentage of households are joining the ranks of the rich and leaving the middle class, a fact that should be celebrated, not bemoaned.

No comments about Understanding National Accounts.

No comments about Handbook of the Economics of Innovation and Technological Change (Blackwell Handbooks in Economics).

1 comments about Optimal Control Theory and Static Optimization in Economics.

1. I am almoust sure that mathematicians and "orthodox" economists do not like this book but for graduates with a lousy background in and a certain degree of fear of mathematics it is a perfect tool to begin and get affected.

No comments about Intermediate Macroeconomics : A Statistical Approach.

No comments about The Household: Informal Order around the Hearth.

No comments about Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality.

5 comments about Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

1. That the nature of work, collaboration, and other economic activities is changing very rapidly these days is indisputable. However, it is not immediately clear to everyone what are the forces that are driving this change and what sorts of effects it may have. This book tries to answer these and many other questions in the realm of how the latest advances in various information tools are enabling the radical shift in collaborative production. It is a very readable book aimed at the general audience. The fact that it doesn't delve too deeply into the technical details (like the "Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More") may be a plus, as this way it may be more suitable to appeal to the wider readership base. Overall, it is an interesting read if you are not familiar with the general trends in open and collaborative economy.



2. This is the sort of book that often comes out about new social and technological developments... it touches on all of the hotspots surrounding wikis and massively parallel collaboration, even name-drops many important people and cases related to each, but usually gets the details wrong.
   
   Precisely because the issues raised are so important to understanding how we as a society can collaborate on the scale of millions of people working together on similar projects, I must disrecommend this book to anyone interested in the topic : it will hamper those reading it from later coming to a true understanding of how these processes work.
   
   The writing is clear and informative in places, but repetetive and obfuscating in others. The whole could have been improved by being cut down to 1/4 this length, with better sources and serious analysis.



3. I heard a lot of buzz about Wikinomics when it was published a few years ago, but when I finally picked it up a few weeks ago I was sorely disappointed. I'm very surprised that it gets such a high overall rating on Amazon.
   
   First and foremost the book is extremely repetitive. I feel that instead of 300 odd pages it could have easily been under 100 while becoming significantly more readable. Granted, some sections are very well written, but I found most sections of the book difficult to read for more then 20-30 minutes at a time.
   
   This is a subject that I'm very interested in, and am not clueless about, so perhaps I'm a bit biased in that I was already familiar with most of the ideas in the book. However, I still feel that there was way too much hyperbole and not enough critical analysis.
   
   The 7 "business models" that the authors present (which aren't really business models) have so many things in common that dedicating a large chapter to each just doesn't make sense.
   
   The authors use words like 'b-webs' that no one else uses as if they were widely used. Sure, one of the authors coined this word in one of his previous books but it hasn't caught. Deal with it. There's no need to try and force it on us here again.
   
   When it comes to criticisms of the authors' ideas, they get brushed aside without any critical evaluation by just citing another author that agrees with Wikinomics and stating something along the lines of "X is wrong, but Y is right". Having some economic data would have been much more useful than stating "the tide is coming, get in line with the new business models" over and over.
   
   Maybe the book would have been better if the authors published it through a Wiki? I think it would have quickly been edited down to about 70 pages then.



4. As has already been stated, the view of the world of mass collaboration presented in this book is rather simplistic. It could be helpful, though, if you are new to the topic and would like to understand what "emergence", "wikis" and "prosumers" mean and how the term "knowledge" is changing in meaning.



5. The authors are hacks. This is the worst kind of pseudoscience, and it's way too long.
   
   The authors build a case for various forms of collaboration using anecdotes and a few statistics (w/ fewer references). Before the reader has a chance to ask "how do I know collaboration was the factor that accelerated this company's growth" or "what else might have been going wrong at the other company" the authors quickly make up a few scientific sounding words and speak in broad generalizations about what successful companies of the future will do.
   
   The following comes from page 103: "In the late 1990s P&G launched an internal survey and discovered it was spending $1.5 billion on R&D, generating lots of patents, but using less than 10 percent of them in it's own products. Yes, that's less than 10 percent!"
   
   Thanks Tapscott, it really didn't sink in the first time, but now that you've repeated yourself and added an exclamation point, I'm blown away. Yes, blown away!
   
   Don't bother to mentioning whether or not this is a reasonable number, how it compares to others in the industry, other industries that do more or less collaboration, or any other metrics to provide context for this statement. They never even explicitly show how this number changes as a result of collaboration.
   
   The smartest thing the authors did was to create a title that rides Freakonomics' coat tails. It's not in the same class with that, or the Long Tail, Gladwell's books, Wisdom of Crowds, etc... this is the kind of tripe Taleb rails on.
   
   They were clearly in a hurry to get Wikinomics the shelves before someone beat them to the punch with "The Wiki Point."

2 comments about Globalization (Greenwood Guides to Business and Economics).

1. OK so most people know if they are pro or anti globalisation, but everyone should read this book; it's authoritative, short, clear, and knocks the anti camp out for ten; read it! the chapter on the balance of payments deficit should be compulsory reading for every politician and political/economic journalist before they are allowed to open their mouths on the subject! Don said on econtalk the price was outside his control but he wished it was cheaper, so do i, then it could be set text for my students.



2. I've read several recent books on globalization while planning an economic geography course, and this is the best-written, by far. In particular, Boudreaux presents exactly the right amount of detail for beginning students (and for anyone else who wants to understand the subject without taking a year of economics beforehand). A course on globalization would require additional readings -- I'd supplement it with chapters from Global Shift, by Peter Dicken, among other things -- but this book is the best core text on the subject.

3 comments about Memos to the President: A Guide Through Macroeconomics for the Busy Policymaker.

1. This is a GREAT book to use to understand the macroeconomy. I read it in 2002 and although the book was written 10 years ago, it described what was happening in the economy perfectly. The 30 10-page essays are an ideal way to learn an important but dense topic: small, manageable bites. I highly recommend this book. After taking my time reading it, I am going to read it again after 6 months. It is worth the price and the time to read it.



2. I thought that in general the book was pretty good. I liked the essay format as they were good sized chunks that explored a single topic well. It is a very easy read, especially at a chapter or two a day. I would have liked to see more mathematical discussion of some points, but that is not the point of the book so I can't fault it for not covering any. All in all a good read, but a bit dated at this point, thus the 4 stars.



3. All you need to know about this book is that it's written by a useful idiot helping out the government who makes completely false claims such as that:
   
   1.) The Federal Reserve protects the dollar, never mind that the dollar has lost over 90% of its value since the Federal Reserve was created.
   
   2.) The government should work to guarantee full employment, never mind that government policies and regulations are what cauase massive unemployment to begin with and government jobs themselves are usually less useful to the rest of society, such as paper shuffling.
   
   3.) The government should manage international trade, never mind that massive problems that have come about because of institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the Orwellian titled North and Central American Free Trade Agreements. Never mind that regulation of international trade usually exploits consumers for politically-connected domestic interests.
   
   4.) The government should protects us from pollution of our environment when it's places where government is biggest such as in D.C. where it's usually dirtiest.
   
   5.) The government can create in increased standard of living for all, yet Americans' standard of living has decreased for nearly thirty years due to the growth of government and its having its hands in almost every area of the economy.
   
   6.) There is such a thing as overall demand in the economy when there really isn't amongst consumers.
   
   7.) Investments and capital are the same thing. Actually they're very diverse.
   
   8.) Perhaps the biggest superstition is the attempt to separate micro from macro in economic affairs and claim that the decisions of individuals don't affect the overall picture. This is false because the decisions of numerous individuals is what makes up the overall picture.