Economics does a remarkable job of mimicking the format of a high-school textbook. Every page or two has a summarizing subtitle ("Transaction costs and institutions: the rise of New Institutional Economics"), key terms are highlighted in bold face ("the theory of comparative advantage"), and vast subject areas are dispatched in one or two paragraphs. As I read the book, I imagined the questions that would appear on the quiz.
The book is an introduction to the field of economics. The most interesting chapter summarizes the various schools and describes their strengths and weaknesses. The history of capitalism is pretty interesting too.
Chang claims that most public economic discourse is dominated by the Neoclassical school, which is not the appropriate approach in all situations and which smuggles in certain political assumptions.
Economics is a political argument. It is not –– and can never be –– a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements.On the one hand, Chang argues that we need to choose different approaches and assumptions depending on the problem we're considering. On the other hand, he casually advocates specific positions that sound mostly Keynesian and developmentalist, certainly left-leaning.
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