Endorsement and Media Reviews of the Book:
P. A. Samuelson and W. A. Barnett, Inside the Economist's Mind
| Endorsements from Readers |
"In
candid interviews, these great economists prove to be
fabulous story tellers of their lives and times. Unendingly
gripping for insiders, this book should also help non-specialists
understand how economists think."
Professor Julio Rotemberg
Harvard University Business School
Boston
Editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics
jrotemberg@hbs.edu
"The interviews in this volume are
unique intellectual
documents in the history of economic thought, economic policy,
and biography. Scholars
will value them as primary sources. Readers with only a passing
interest in economics will be delighted by their entertaining insights
into the minds and
lives of these great thinkers. This is one of the most valuable
projects in
academic economic publishing for a long time, and we should all be
grateful to the journal, Macroeconomic Dynamics, for collecting
these archival treasures over a number of years."
Professor Douglas Gale
New York University
New York
douglas.gale@nyu.edu
"Autobiography is fascinating.
Interviews are often better, as they compress and highlight the life
events that led to the emergence and evolution of ideas. These
remarkably candid interviews are exemplars of that fact. If you
want to know about the origins of much modern economic thinking, this
superb collection is mandatory reading."
Professor Adrian Pagan
Australian National University and Queensland University of Technology
Australia
arpagan@coombs.anu.edu.au
"Interviews that illuminate the
thinking of the great economists who have shaped our time."
Dr. Richard G. Anderson
Vice President
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Richard.G.Anderson@stls.frb.org
"Economics has made swift progress in the past few decades and its role in
policy-making has radically increased. The interviews of many of the most
prominent researchers and policy-makers offer a unique insider view of
these developments. This book is fascinating reading to anyone interested
in contemporary economics and its role in modern societies."
Professor Seppo Honkapohja
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
smsh4@cam.ac.uk
"Economics used to be called the 'dismal science'. It will be impossible for
anybody to hold that view anymore after reading these interviews. This is
science with flesh and blood, and a lot of fascinating stories that you
will find nowhere else."
Dr. Jean-Pascal Benassy
Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques (PSE) and Centre pour la Recherche Economique et ses Applications (CEPREMAP)
Paris, France
benassy@pse.ens.fr
"This book provides a rare and intriguing view of the personal and
professional lives of leading economists, and the circumstances that
facilitated their creative breathroughs. It is like A Beautiful Mind,
scaled by a factor of 16 [the number of interviews in the book]."
Professor Lee Ohanian
UCLA
Los Angeles
ohanian@econ.ucla.edu
"Histories of economic analysis abound, but if you want an insider view of
how economics has been developing in the last decades, this is the (only)
book for you."
Professor Giancarlo Gandolfo
University of Rome 'La Sapienza'
Rome, Italy
kunz@gandolfo.org
"Reading this book is an easy and exciting way to learn about the
major developments in economics during the last decades: a
delightful view at the production process of scientific progress."
Helmut Luetkepohl
European University Institute
Florence, Italy
Helmut.Luetkepohl@IUE.it
and
Humboldt University
Berlin, Germany
"This book is a fascinating source of insights into the personalities of leading economists - an intellectuals' People Magazine - complete with !%$!!'s and pictures."
Professor Roger Farmer
UCLA
Los Angeles
rfarmer@econ.ucla.edu
"Thanks very much for bringing this exciting book to my
attention. I think every economist is going to want to read
it! It is an inspired idea."
Professor Michael Parkin
University of Western Ontario
Canada
michael.parkin@uwo.ca
"How to enter into advanced knowledge when your are an
outsider? Listen to the people who produced it. They will share
with you their doubts, their tatonnement, their intellectual
battles, and will thus provide you with a port of entry into living
science. This approach is particularly effective in economics, a
field in which facts and ideas interact every day. Reading the
interviews of eminent economists is both the best-guided and the most
pleasant walk into the frontiers of economic knowledge."
Professor Roger Guesnerie
College de France
Paris, France
roger.guesnerie@college-de-france.fr
"Fascinating reflections on the history of economic thoughts through
the lens of some of its founders. A tour de force."
Professor Oded Galor
Brown University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Editor of the Journal of Economic Growth
Oded_Galor@brown.edu
"This
collection of interviews with major contributors to modern economics
makes for fascinating reading. It ranges from the very concrete, as
in the comments of Paul Volcker on Arthur Burns, his predecessor as
Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, and extends to the very abstract,
as in the comments of Robert Aumann (now a Nobel Laureate) on
applications of the theory of games in life and religion (the after
life). The Foreword by Paul Samuelson (the first American Laureate)
provides a brief, but broad ranging and subtle response to the critique
by history of thought economist, Roy Weintraub, that is also in this volume.
I side with Samuelson but others may differ."
Professor William W. Cooper
University of Texas at Austin
Graduate School of Business
cooperw@mail.utexas.edu
"It's a great book; I hope it gets the attention that it deserves."
Professor Michael Woodford
Columbia University
Co-Director, Program for Economic Research
mw2230@columbia.edu
"The study of economics lost one of its greatest minds, Milton
Friedman, in November of last year. He was passionate about freedom and
keeping government from interfering with the most basic element of
choice that underlies the open marketplace of goods and services. A
unique book, Inside the Economist's Mind: Conversations with Eminent Economists
($74.95/$29.95, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, hard and softcover)
is edited by two other famed economists, Paul A. Samuelson and William
A. Barnett. They sat down with sixteen of their colleagues, and their
candid interviews make for some lively reading that even those
unfamiliar with this critical field of analysis would find interesting.
For those for whom economists represent the guidance needed in an ever
shifting landscape of events, this book offers some excellent insights."
Alan Caruba
Editor
Bookviews.com
January 2007 "pick of the month"
"They curse. They dish on their
colleagues. They give the inside scoop. Insights from the world's
top economists are revealed in an upcoming
book, Inside the Economist's Mind: The History of Modern Economic
Thought, as Explained by Those Who Produced it.
Here's a preview: Friedman, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize for
Economics, offered this regarding the 'Great Inflation' in the 1970s:
'I had a session with Nixon sometime in 1970, I think it was 1970,
might have been 1971, in which he wanted me to urge (Fed Chairman)
Arthur (Burns) to increase the money supply more rapidly (laughter) and
I said to the president, "Do you really want to do that? The only
effect of that will be to leave you with a larger inflation if you do
get re-elected." And he said, "Well, we'll worry about that after we
get re-elected.'
Typical. So there's no doubt what Nixon's pleasure was."
"Published earlier this week, Inside the Economist's Mind: Conversations with Eminent Economists
has all the hallmarks of an economic bestseller .... Interviews were
conducted with (in alphabetical order) Robert Aumann,
David Cass, Jacques Dreze, Martin Feldstein, Stanley Fischer,
Milton
Friedman, Janos Kornai, Wassily Leontief, Robert E. Lucas, Jr.,
Franco
Modigliani, Paul A. Samuelson, Robert J. Shiller, Christopher A. Sims,
Paul A. Volcker, Thomas J. Sargent and James Tobin. That's quite a
cast! .... So order the book, and be prepared to be astonished."
"This is as close as
anyone in economics has come to the interviews with influential writers
for which
Paris Review was famous ...Thus Janos Kornai's thesis defense in
Budapest, on the eve of the Revolution in 1956, attracted an audience
of several hundred people. But its appearance as a book,
Overcentralization,
got him fired (while, for other activities, a close friend was
executed). Robert Lucas turned down George Shultz's offer of a job in
Washington and Arthur Laffer was hired instead. Jacques Dreze,
the Belgian polymath who founded CORE (the Center for Operations
Research and Econometrics) at the Catholic University of Louvain and
turned it into a world-class incubator of new ideas, started adult life
in London representing his father's small-town bank in 1949. Before
long he was representing most of the other businesses in his little
Belgian hometown: selling sterling forward on behalf of wool washers,
bartering pig iron to Finns in return for textile machinery, raising
equity capital and mediating labor agreements. The book is full of
illuminating personal stories like these."
Although certainly not an unbiased
review, an advertisement has appeared for this book in the prestigious
December holiday issue of the New York Review of Books.
However, there is a particular distinction associated with the
appearance of this advertisement. Blackwell chose to focus its
annual advertisement solely on this one book in that influential holiday issue . You can
find that advertisement linked below.
Page 34
"J.K. Galbraith joked that 'the only function of economic forecasting is
to make astrology look respectable'. Just as economics is half way
between science and guesswork, so too Inside the Economist's Mind blends academic analysis with biographical informality.
It comprises interviews with 16 economists, half of them Nobel Prize
winners, conducted by fellow economists. The emphasis is on
macroeconomic theorists such as Robert Lucas and Milton Friedman,
though also numbered among the interviewees are central bankers
including Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve under the
Carter and Reagan administrations, and Stanley Fischer, governor of the
Bank of Israel.
The aim is to see how their lives and work have intersected. . . . the
book's value for the layman is to humanise a branch of thought that is
abstruse yet full of practical consequence for everyday life."
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Financial Times of London
January 20, 2007
"Even casual students of economics should find much to like in this
collection of conversations with several eminent economists of our time."
Greg Hack
Kansas City Star
February 20, 2007
"In this collection of interviews, 16 eminent economists speak candidly
on everything from the IQ of U.S. presidents to herd-like behavior in
their profession."
April 2007, p. 24.
"Inside the Economist’s Mind: Conversations with Eminent Economists (ITEM)
will prove an invaluable resource for those wishing to understand the
greats and their work . . . Readers find eccentric and irascible
characters behind some of the major innovations in economic science,
and that is the draw to the book . . . Inside the Economist’s Mind is a very rare thing—an economic page-turner, like Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, Foley’s Adam’s Fallacy, and Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics. The personalities behind the frontiers of economic research make for compelling reading. I can’t recommend it enough."
"
When Nixon himself became president in 1968 and had the opportunity
to appoint a new Chair for the Federal Reserve in 1970, the man he
turned to was the same Arthur Burns who had advised him to ease up on
monetary policy prior to the 1960 election. Milton Friedman offered
these impressions in a 2000 interview that is included in the book
Inside the Economist's Mind:
From the
moment Burns got into the Fed, I think politics played a great role in
what happened. So far as Nixon was concerned, there is no doubt, as I
know from personal experience. I had a session with Nixon sometime in
1970-- I think it was 1970, might have been 1971-- in which he wanted
me to urge Arthur to increase the money supply more rapidly [laughter]
and I said to the President, 'Do you really want to do that? The only
effect of that will be to leave you with a larger inflation if you do
get reelected.' And he said, 'Well, we'll worry about that after we get
reelected.' [page 116]."
"Rules are meant to be broken. Samuelson & Barnett goes on the list
without a complete read. Sixteen stunning interviews; the candor
shocking. But then, this is Samuelson. Taylor interviews Friedman;
Blanchard interviews Fischer. You get the must-read picture."
tkeene@bloomberg.net
Thomas R. Keene's commentary during his live broadcast, interviewing Paul Samuelson and William Barnett about I.T.E.M.:
"It was the talk at the American Economic Association meetings.
Folks, it has my highest, highest recommendation. It is very
exciting. I heard more buzz about this book at the A.E.A. than
any
I've heard in years. And folks I'll be blunt: it's on my
"must read list,"
and it's the first book ever to go on the "must read list" without
being [completely] read. It's so thick, so dense,
so rich. Folks I cannot emphasize enough the energy off the page
because of the uncensored nature of some 400 pages ... I am sure
there will be a volume 2; and after you sell the movie rights, there
will be a volume 3. There is a great energy in this book.
The tension among the economists is great.... I cannot convey to you
enough the
accessibility of the book with a minimal amount of math and a maximum
amount of emotion and candor ... Don't take my word for it. Paul
Samuelson opens up his part of the book with: 'this book adds up
to more than the sum of its parts.' "
tkeene@bloomberg.net
On February 9, 2007, the highly regarded Brazilian financial and business newspaper, Valor Economico, published a front page story about ITEM.
The primary story was written by the newspaper's editor, and his review
was followed by commentaries of five Brazilian economists. The
review
included original artwork produced by the newspaper and color
photographs of most of the economists whose interviews appear in the
book. The photographs are in color and are not the ones that
appear in the book. At present, I only have access to the
original complete article that is in Portuguese and translation of the
editor's cover article. I shall put the full English
translation online, when it becomes available. The pdf of the
original article in Portuguese is online at:
"In frank conversations, unburdened by the formalizations found in
academic papers, 16 eminent American and European economists posit their
philosophies, explain theories and methodologies, and offer their personal
experiences. The end result is a picture of the profession that is in
constant flux ... ITEM, which was recently launched in Europe and the U.S., is already a
best seller on the Financial Times
list and offers great help ... The book which is edited by William A.
Barnett, macroeconomics professor at the University of Kansas, and Paul
Samuelson, 1970 Nobel Laureate, is really a map into the minds of 16
American and European important economists, who are well-known for
their major contributions to economic study. The book regales us with
personal anecdotes of these economists, their memories, choices made,
and landmark moments in their careers ... This book is about unfiltered
ideas, not in the tradition found in the usual academic avenues of
censored personal views in lieu of purely technical models, theories,
or insights. Both interviewers and interviewees successfully rally
around the book's central focus on the importance of intellectual
exchange ... it is useful to learn about the experiences of these
economists and what drives them to their pursuit. This book provides a
coherent vision of modern economics and its connection with the
lifetime experiences of famous economists, whose work was seminal for
the discipline ... It's important to know (or remember) that Janos
Kornai's defense in Budapest on the eve of the revolution of 1956
attracted an audience of hundreds. When he published it in book form
with a title that spoke of the "excess of centralization", he lost his
job, and a close friend was executed ... ITEM is a valuable work, and it succeeds in the need to
contextualize the advances of the field's theories with a sense of its
implicit history."
"This is a collection of interviews commissioned for a journal, Macroeconomic Dynamics.
The idea is to gauge the position of the profession by asking the
people who invented large swaths of the theory their motivations for
doings what they did, when they did it, and how they did it. Readers
find eccentric and irascible characters behind some of the major
innovations in economic science. I loved this book, and read it cover
to cover in a day.
The book purports (pg. xi) to 'contain unique insights into the
thinking of some of the world's most important economists, whose work
contributed to the evolution of modern economic thought,' and does.
. . . So it's great that William Barnett, the editor of Macroeconomic Dynamics, and the co-editor of this book, decided to ask these men these questions."
Dr. Stephen Kinsella, Editor
stephenkinsella.net
January 12, 2007
University of Limerick
Ireland
stephen.kinsella@gmail.com
stephen.kinsella@ul.ie
"On the ultimate excuse for draconian technocratic
controls, the threat of global warming, Friedman was skeptical of
climate models. In an interview published in Inside the Economist's Mind,
by Paul A. Samuelson and William A. Barnett, Friedman drew a comparison
between climate models and the sorts of large macroeconomic models that
were discredited three decades ago...."
Arnold Kling
TCS Contributing Editor
TCS Daily
November 20, 2006
"If you would like to buy a financial
title for the holidays, here are my [five] picks:....This is an
insightful book for anyone who would like to know what the nation's
leading economists are thinking, without plodding through peer-reviewed
journals or textbooks. In nugget-sized servings, the book contains
interviews with 16 economists, including eight Nobel laureates, who
reflect a panoply of views. Freed from the constrained environs of
professional journals, these prominent economists were able to talk
freely and let their hair down. At least those who still have any
left."
"They [Samuelson and Barnett] raise mirrors reflecting the ideas of
eminent economists presented in the volume, and these mirrors, like
those of the Hubble Space Telescope, focus them in sizable bits for the
digestion of the readers . . . The interviews are meticulously balanced
. . . Reflecting on the scope of the book, we find rays of spontaneous
thought from minds that breathe and dream of economics . . . our review
implies that the ideas covered in this volume have some ability to
predict and have been validated thus far in their confrontation with
reality. . . If one is looking for answers to how economists discover
great thoughts, this book is a place to start looking . . . The readers
will find this a source book for comprehensive thought on the deep
matter of economics. No one interested in the modern economy should
fail to read it."
Michael Szenberg and Lall Ramrattan
Pace University and University of California at Berkeley
EH.NET
(Supported by the Economic History Association, Business History
Conference, Cliometric Society, Economic History Society, and History
of Economics Society)
April 27, 2007
Each month, the editors of
Choice publish online the reviews they
decide to highlight as "Editors' Picks."
ITEM was
a "highly
recommended" Editors' Pick for June 2007. The review concluded
with the following. "Summing Up: Highly recommended.
Informed general readers; students, lower-division undergraduate and up; researchers and practitioners."
"All of the interviews first appeared in the journal
Macroeconomic Dynamics,
of which Barnett is the editor, and, uniquely for a leading
peer-reviewed academic economics journal, all were given significant
space and free licence to say what they wanted about economists and
economics to their peers. The end result is a most welcome addition to
the genre in which leading economists outline their life philosophies
and reflect candidly on the evolution of modern economics. Moreover,
whilst not all of the interviewees took advantage of the licence to
offend, those that did will not disappoint, and the reader is directed
to pp. 44–5 on how to respond when your head of department tells you
that you are a luxury good."
"This book can
make you fall in love with economics all over again. A collection of
interviews with 16 eminent economists, it presents the attractive face
of the field –
one rediscovers an economics concerned with improving the human
condition by putting to good use tools borrowed from disciplines as
diverse as mathematics and psychology. The book is a labour of love for
William Barnett, the editor of the journal Macroeconomic Dynamics in
which these interviews originally appeared between 1997 and 2005.
Though the interviews were aimed at professional macroeconomists, much
of the book is of broader interest. That is because these eminent
economists, interviewed by their peers, are often able to describe
their complicated work in simple terms, with modesty and humour, and
enriched with anecdotes from their lives......"
Prakash Loungani, Advisor, Research Department, IMF
Economic and Political Weekly
July 19-25, 2008, pp. 31 - 34
The 2007 second issue of the
Milken Institute Review has a
chapter on
ITEM.
The introduction to the chapter is by Peter Passell, who is the Editor
of the magazine and formerly was an economics columnist and member of
the editorial board of the
New York Times.
The magazine article appears on pages 65 - 85. The
MIR
excerpted the book's entire chapter 6, which was the interview of
Milton Friedman by John Taylor. The magazine added some photographs
that were not in the book, thereby adding to the interest of the
interview.