Excellent 20th Century Political Economy Summary
922710
In "Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff" Arthur Okun explains why both the state and the market is needed for an equitable and efficient society.

The First three chapters follow in the vein of John Locke's "Second Treatise on Government" and Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom".  The fourth chapter explains the famous "leaky bucket" analogy that so many professors like.  Given the current situation of our country the elimination of poverty is within our grasp.

Okun has two central themes:
1. The Market needs a place
2. The market needs to be kept in it's place.

"Equality and Efficiency" is a short and worthwhile read for anyone interested in economics or politics.
2501161
If you are reading this review I am assuming you are looking for books about ecological economics and alternatives to our current global system of rapid resource depletion and barbequeing the planet, so I will spare you an introduction into this subject.
  Right relationship borrows from various religious/spiritual traditions and fits them within a modern ecological economics framework. Change must include more than just a scattered radicals and if religious institutions can be engaged in reforms also than true progress is much more likely.
  The book paints a picture of economic as well as ecological interdepedance, a vision of mutually shared destiny which is seems somewhat compatible with pre-neoclassical concept of market economics (ie modern "conservative" economics idealogy focusses on this false notion of individualism which is inherently impossible in a deeply connected economic world such as our own) . In other words, it avoids fiery polemics about revolution in exchange for pragmatic arguments about a different set of global priorities and principles. The tone of the book is exactly the way these issues need to be discussed to continue to transition the movement for ecologically friendly economics to the center of the political spectrum.
  One of the more profound ideas advanced is that we already have a de facto world gov't-transnational corporations. Many nations have a nationalistic cultural impulse that tends to view any type of global governance as a threat to culture, sovereignty, etc.
  Right Relationship makes a clear case that such ideas are dated and that, like it our not, we have a deeply integrated world economy dominated by transnational corporations that requires various types of global governance to curtail our eventual ecological calamity and the suffering it will exact on all forms of life.
  To conclude, this is an excellent book for its ideas and the brevity at which said ideas are expressed. Highly recommended for anyone interested in ecological challenges, economics, geo-politics or public policy.
3808419
A surprisingly interesting account of the former Soviet economic planning system! The book covers the period from around 1927 through 1955. There are chapters discussing the various aspects of the Soviet attempts at constructing  a socialist (or at least a state - owned) industrialized economy. Subjects covered include: Stalin's dominance of the decision making process; other political leaders and organizations; how economic policy was developed; the almost  separate development of the military defense industry;  the economic aspects of the GULAG; how the system worked in practice from the perspective of an enterprise manager; and the last 5-year plan that was developed during Stalin's  last years.

I thought one of the more interesting chapters was Chapter 7 "Economic Crime and Pumishment." The Soviet Union totally lacked (and it's successor the Russian Federation mostly lacks today) a concept of the "rule of law." Concepts such as enforceable contracts, freedom of transactions among buyers and sellers, and freedom from private property confiscations simply didn't exist. In fact, economic transactions among willing buyers and sellers was illegal. The Soviets developed an incredible coercive bureaucracy to do what is done freely in western capitalist systems.
2784350
As is becoming ever clearer, the US has drifted dangerously far from it's roots in free markets, individual liberty, and personal responsibility.  Our preeminence is not an accident but the result of deliberate policies and actions taken over the past 250 years.  As our position is now endangered, it is important for concerned citizens to be informed as to the source of our success:  the free market.

This book touches on a number of areas in which the free market's success is undisputed.  Its is quite readable and I believe anyone with a high-school level of economics understanding will grasp it.  The text is well-written and contains numerous references to back up it's assertions.  It does, however, have the feel of a book hurriedly completed to coincide with the market's collapse, and could probably have benefited from a bit more editing.

If you're interested in understanding the roots of our prosperity and developing critical analysis of current policy proposals, this book should be on your reading list.
3948994
Pestritto and Atto do an excellent job of summarizing the fundamentals of the American Progressive movement in this compilation.  The selected excerpts from notable progressives of the early 20th century (Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt, Adams, Croly, and others)  go a long way to introducing the reader to the roots of progressivism via concrete sources, while supporting the more abstract defintions and explanations provided in the authors' intro.  A must read for anyone concerned with modern politics and the development or erosion of liberal democracies everywhere, depending on your belief system.
2179347
This book brings so much together to explain how economics and politicized economics have been organized for good and ill today.  But it goes so much further to explain in straightforward language how complex dynamic systems really operate and why and how relatively free markets raise the wealth of the world and everyone in it over time.

This is a very techno-optimistic book positing an historical point in our future via technology and relatively free markets where all the needs and many of the desires of everyone on earth can be met with a trivial fraction of productive capacity regardless of whether one has what today we think of as a 'job'.  It is a book about a wide open future, what it takes to get there in economic policy and technology, and some of the mistaken economic ideas that stand in its way.

I think the book does a tremendous service and clarifies much of the old ideological wars between right and left, libertarians and socialists.  It is a book of great hope.

What I think would make it even better or should be in a follow up book is more about how to get there from here - how to keep the wheels on the bus of technological and economic progress while removing the roadblocks and while ensuring believable tangible benefit to all.  In particular I think a large section on IP and its misuse to slow progress and protect existing power centers is sorely needed.  A section on how and when we get beyond the chimera of full employment being required for a healthy society is also needed - something much beyond current welfare state models.
1929143
Chronicles consists of newspaper op eds written by Thomas Piketty for the newspapers La Liberation and one op ed published in Le Monde. Piketty, of course, is the author of Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, a seven-hundred page tome which analyzes the current state of capitalism. One could either slog through this dense but significant work, or could go through these easily digestible op eds and probably obtain the same insights, albeit in a more reader-friendly manner.

While the commentaries may have more meaning for European affairs, the issues discussed are confronted by everyone on this globe. Issues such as sovereign debt, income disparity, the tendency of multi-nationals to oppress working classes, the ineffectualness of politicians and/or political organizations in dealing with structural defects in government administration. Many of these essays date from as far back as 2009 and 2010. Many were written around the time that the Occupy Movement first gained momentum. It is interesting that Piketty was writing about these issues far earlier than when they became a part of the American mainstream political discourse. They are really universal issues, at least at this point in time.

These essays are readily accessible. Because they were written for a general newspaper readership, Piketty tones down the level of academic rigor, use of technical economic terminology, and avoids charts and graphs entirely, which can leave the general reader mentally exhausted after reading Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. In this respect, Chronicles is worth a read.
561108
With the exception of the last two chapters focused on hammering down the political message, this is a fantastic treatise.

For the first time I understood why Forbes lists and other information about income and wealth of other people should be of interest to me. The logic of capital accumulation is explained in a compelling way and supported by ample data. The work that went into obtaining and analyzing the data is enormous, and we should be grateful to Prof. Piketty and his colleagues for undertaking it. 5 stars, however see the last paragraph below.

Author demonstrates how the growth of capital was checked by economic shocks related to World Wars I and II, resulting in a relatively egalitarian society for the next few decades but not much longer. He uses references to the literature of the 19th century in a beautiful way both to liven the subject and  to demonstrate where we can soon find ourselves if capital is allowed to continue growing faster than the economy. The picture is not pretty: masses of nameless servants for whom it is virtually impossible to get ahead with any kind of labor or service, minor nobility desperate to improve their status or at least marry their dowriless daughters, higher strata of society engaged in inane pursuits. If this sounds pretty much like today to some people, the book serves as an invitation to open the eyes to the fact that it used to be much worse and will likely get much worse again.

Missing from the analysis though is a rational view on modern democratically elected governments. It would seem according to the author, that all problems would be solved if they only managed to enact and enforce a global tax on capital. Does the picture of a society with a powerful central authority that has complete information over who owns what to tax away anything deemed extravagant seem suspicious to anybody? At times it almost seems that the author cherishes such a prospect just because his job of analyzing income and wealth distributions would be made much more convenient. (It is so typical to observe academic economists treating the world of live people as if they were electrons in a piece of metal in a lab..) It should not be forgotten that populist initiatives invented in the name of making the world more just tend to mutate into the exact opposite (as an example, take the alternative minimum tax in USA) and that corruption and inefficiency in the public sector is no less a problem than propensity for unlimited self-enrichment in the private sector. So, read and enjoy the book but think for yourself before giving your vote or going outside to  build a barricade.
3625299
Time well spent while getting a realistic review of the early 20th century
4910013
Immanuel Wallerstein is certainly one of the most revolutionary and influential social sciences thinkers alive today, so when he writes a very accessible and informative introduction to the general theory he and his colleagues developed, it is worth paying attention. This book introduces that theory, world-systems analysis (with hyphen!), and gives a quick overview of the historical worldview that underpins it. Despite the easy writing style, it may require some prior knowledge of and familiarity with historiography and political science - world-systems analysis is somewhat notorious for being at least as generous in inventing neologisms in the field as Marxism, so it's easy to get lost without having a firm footing in the terminology. Nonetheless, it is impressive how much information Wallerstein manages to pack in a readable manner into about 90 pages of actual text.

This introduction shows very well the benefits and the drawbacks of the world-systems approach. Wallerstein spends little time defending his theory, but only makes it explicit, which is helpful for keeping an easy overview. The great strength of world-systems analysis is precisely the capability to keep this overview: it is highly insightful and incisive as a tool for understanding international relations, international trade, economic cycles, and their relation to the broad outline of 'systemic' and 'antisystemic' politics roughly since the French Revolution. Possibly even more than Marxism, from which it is in some ways an offshoot, it deals in the grand overviews and the broad sweeps, and it has the virtue over much Marxist work until recently of being strongly embedded in the enormous expansion of economic history as a serious and critical discipline in the last couple decades. It is broadly 'Third Worldist' and anticapitalist in its orientation, and if I mention Marxism in this review more than the book actually does, it is because it consciously or unconsciously has set itself up as the main competitor in 'grand theory' on the anticapitalist social scientific scene. However, this is also where some of its flaws come in. Although as mentioned Wallerstein does not really defend his tenets in this book, and that may make attacking the premises somewhat unfair, the work clearly shows the inferiority of world-systems analysis on the topics of understanding collective action and understanding production and modes of production. Arghiri Emmanuel and others' lessons on international trade have been well taken by world-systems analysis, but in terms of 'hard' economic theory it lags far behind Marxist political economy. Wallerstein's completely incoherent household-based criticism of Marxist class theory in Chapter 2 proves this.

That said, much can be learned from the approach, in particular its highly fruitful use of the great advances in economic history since A.G. Frank, Braudel, Arrighi, Amin etc. An integration of this longue dure perspective with Marxist political economy seems to be the way forward for the social sciences.
4730964
This is a wonderfully informative and elegantly written book. The author travels through the main currents of macroeconomics, starting with Adam Smith and Ricardo, and continuing to Marx, Keynes, the neoclassical, the structuralists... Although the author clearly endorses a more Keynesian/Structuralist approach (as opposed to a neoclassical/neoliberal one) he is very careful at avoiding partisanship. The main assumptions of the models are carefully explained and discussed in a non mathematical way as free from technical jargon as possible. Although not a book about the current crisis, it does not avoid the issue completely, discussing, when appropriate, several of its causes in the theory and practice of current mainstream economical thought. After reaching the final page, every non economist (and, I venture, a lot of economists too) have gained a far deeper understanding of the assumptions underlying the public discourse of economists and policy makers, assumptions that often do not seem to be taken by them as such, but as God given truths immune to any rational discussion. A very good book, deserving repeated visits.
4697959
Krippner's argument is that distributional conflict in American society during the last three decades is responsible for the emergence of the phenomenon of financialization. Krippner argues that economic and social dysfunctions arising from the Vietnam War, inflation, and the breakdown of the housing finance system provoked the state (the Congress, the presidency, and monetary authorities) to reform the financial system by deregulating interest rates, liberalizing capital flows, and through experimental and aggressive monetary policy. Her close reading of US financial history is a refreshing jolt from orthodox texts that belabor the role of speculative euphoria, irrational exuberance, and banker folly. I found much to engage with and criticize in her account; the book will advance discussions about the direction of US finance.

The case studies are unparalleled and highly original. It is obvious that Krippner read through the minutes of every Federal Reserve Board meeting over the last few decades. If you have ever read the meeting minutes of the Fed Board, then you will appreciate the author's courage in this endeavor.

The author is a university professor of sociology. The book will appeal to graduate students, like myself, who are interested in the historical development of the US economy. I think many general readers would also enjoy the counter-narrative provided here, in particular those interested in financial markets, critical economics, and political economy. It is not a long book--the core material runs roughly 200 pages. It is not a quick read either; there is quite a bit of information contained in the three main chapters, although I found that the analytical components in the introduction and conclusion were easy to follow and well-written, if not a bit repetitive (which I do not necessarily fault her for). The book is also reasonably priced at about 15 dollars on Kindle.
3566138
This book  is amust read for any student of twentieth century European  history
1892101
A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in early March.

This book offers not only info on economics, but issues of entitlement, usefulness, the 'expense' of making one choice and not another one (scarcity opportunity cost), allocation of resources, consumption of goods & resources, the history of economics (from ancient Greece and Mesopotamia to the modern era), the definition of marginal revenue, Victorian leisure class, income distribution, entrepreneurship and capitalism, and the mending of one's social life and their personal economy - all with chapters that are highlighted with impactful, simple woodcut illustrations.
1339972
For the first time in four decades comes a fiscal history aimed at the masses.  "Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht have directed their analysis and their provocative hypotheses to a general audience, all the while detailing interesting numbers for the most part by comparing the average percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) attributed to government of seventeen wealthy countries -- the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and so forth -- from the 1870s until today.  Their finding that government's share in GDP has quadrupled in that time immediately catches the reader's attention, and they delve sufficiently deep into data of key subperiods to draw some interesting and unusual references.  Unlike previous analysts, Tanzi and Schuknecht place a great deal of weight on ideological factors in conditioning public choice, but they are wholly aware of the more garden-variety factors such as "Baumol's cost disease" and Wagner's law."
"Probably the most intersting point made in the book is that although government's growth relative to the economy as a whole has been dramatic since the late Victorian era, the fraction of GDP absorbed by government has almost stopped growing since 1980 both in the United States and in other wealthy OECD countries."
Tanzi and Schuknecht "seem to be familiar with the entire range of the analytic literature, though none of the "techy" modelings underlying this literature are revealed in any detail.  This sort of exposition is probably wise because such inclusions would cause the nontechnical reader's eyes to glaze over and are unnecessary for those already anointed.  Tanzi and Schuknecht do develop the theoretical notions intuitively, however, which is more important, and their bibliography will be particularly helpful for the neophyte scholar.  Their index is quite comprehensive, and both lay and professional readers might start their study there after a quick reading of the initial and final chapters."
Tanzi and Shuknecht wonderful explication of fiscal policy should make "Public Spending in the 20th Century" a "must read" book for anyone interested in the growth of government.  "The wealth of descriptive data and the authors' fresh and lively style make this book very readable...A copy of Tanzi and Schuknecht's work should be on the desk of all policymakers who believe...that the institutions of fiscal choice really matter."
4384932
As a Prof. of political economy at a major research university I found this book to be an extremely useful tool for teaching on "The Great Recession."  I would like to see a follow-up on the differential effects of the 2008-09 crisis on the emerging market economies, something that is more explanatory than the description offered here.  However, as it stand Crisis Economics is a timely and important contribution to the numerous works that are being published on this crucial topic.
2595351
Profit Over People perfectly illustrates how neoliberalism's evils have taken hold of much society. It talks about how American interventionism destroyed South America by putting in leaders that were against the citizens will. It analyzes the disastrous, job killing bill called NAFTA, which sent many American jobs overseas in exchange for cheap labor (and exploitation). It discusses the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), and how "investor rights" are actually the "rights" for corporations to have more rights than actual people. The book also discusses how the corporate media has an allegiance to their corporate masters, and hail their proposals while shunning any opposition.

The editing and grammar on this edition had some problems, but that is not from Professor Chomsky himself. This is why i gave it 4 stars instead of 5. However, great informative read.