The Making of Modern Economics, Fourth Edition
The Lives and Ideas of The Great Thinkers
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Narrated by:
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Robertson Dean
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By:
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Mark Skousen
About this listen
The Making of Modern Economics presents a bold and engaging history of economics—the dramatic story of how the great economic thinkers built today’s rigorous social science.
This comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the major economic philosophers begins with Adam Smith and continues through to the present day. It examines the contributions each one made to our understanding of the role of the economist, the science of economics and economic theory. Each chapter highlights little-known and entertaining facts about the economists’ personal lives that had an influence on their work.
The fourth edition adds coverage of modern monetary theory, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, minimum wage debates, Schumpeter and socialism, Malthus and immigration, and more.
The Making of Modern Economics is a valuable, engaging text for courses in the history of economic thought and political economy.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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How Are You Going to Pay for That? is filled with engaging discussions and detailed strategies that policymakers and citizens alike can use to assail even the most entrenched lines of neoliberal logic and start to undo these long-held misconceptions. Equal parts economic theory, history, and political polemic, this is an essential roadmap for winning the key battles to come.
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Not horrible but not correct either
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Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life
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Returning Marx to the Victorian confines of the 19th century, Jonathan Sperber, one of the United States' leading European historians, challenges many of our misconceptions of this political firebrand turned London journalist. In this deeply humanizing portrait, Marx no longer is the Olympian soothsayer, divining the dialectical imperatives of human history, but a scholar-activist whose revolutionary Weltanschauung was closer to Robespierre's than to those of 20th-century Marxists.
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Informative intellectual biography, poor reading
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Nineteenth-century America was the closest thing to pure free-market capitalism that has ever existed. There was no welfare state, no central bank, no deficit spending to speak of, no fiat money, and no income tax for most of the century, and no antitrust laws or federal regulatory agencies until the end of the century. During the 20th century, by contrast, American liberty declined as the size, scope, and power of government exploded. Federal spending, taxes, deficits, and debt have spiraled out of control.
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What constitutes the good life? What is the true value of money? Why do we work such long hours merely to acquire greater wealth? These are some of the questions that many asked themselves when the financial system crashed in 2008. This book tackles such questions head-on.The authors begin with the great economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1930 Keynes predicted that, within a century, per capita income would steadily rise, people’s basic needs would be met, and no one would have to work more than fifteen hours a week.
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The BEST book, I've listened to in a long time
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In 1980, the iconoclastic economist Julian Simon challenged celebrity biologist Paul Ehrlich to a bet. Their wager on the future prices of five metals captured the public’s imagination as a test of coming prosperity or doom. Ehrlich, author of the landmark book The Population Bomb, predicted that rising populations would cause overconsumption, resource scarcity, and famine—with apocalyptic consequences for humanity.
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The End of Normal
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The years since the Great Crisis of 2008 have seen slow growth, high unemployment, falling home values, chronic deficits, a deepening disaster in Europe - and a stale argument between two false solutions, “austerity” on one side and “stimulus” on the other. Both sides and practically all analyses of the crisis so far take for granted that the economic growth from the early 1950s until 2000 - interrupted only by the troubled 1970s - represented a normal performance.
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In his previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired by his then-employer, the World Bank. The White Man's Burden is his widely anticipated counterpunch - a brilliant and blistering indictment of the West's economic policies for the world's poor.
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A Bit Repetitive
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Free to Choose
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Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose, teamed up to write this most convincing and readable guide, which illustrates the crucial link between Adam Smith's capitalism and the free society. They show how freedom has been eroded and prosperity undermined through the rapid growth of governmental agencies, laws, and regulations.
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Fantastic
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By: Milton Friedman, and others
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What listeners say about The Making of Modern Economics, Fourth Edition
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mendy
- 12-10-23
Amazing
This book is Well written and Well narrated. It’s also Easy to understand. Learned a lot. Highly recommend
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- Joel Smallwood
- 08-12-22
Not great as a history
The author tells you upfront that this is not an unbiased history. I don't know much about the author, but it is pretty clear he extremely libertarian. He has clear heroes (Smith, Friedman, and the Austrian School). Everybody else is a villain to one degree or another, trying to dismantle what Adam Smith built.
I don't mind this, too much, but the problem is, it was not a very well-written book, and it definitely felt that some of his "history" was framed in a disingenuous way. He took a lot of cheap shots at his perceived enemies. The biographies were always a bit sketchy (short), so what he decided to include had to be judicious, Yet he chose to underline petty things like whether someone was a misogynist. Or the fact that every one of somebody's children was mentally ill. This was even more obvious by the structure of the book, where he had subsections with a heading like "Did so-and-so hate the Jews?"
It definitely felt I was not getting an honest portrait of the person, which led me to think I wasn't getting an honest portrait of the ideas. It made me wish I had a Keynesian at my side that could give a different perspective. The problem is that I don't know enough about the history or subject to make judgments on my own, so the book is of little utility.
Also, it isn't a well-organized book. It just seemed jumpy. Perhaps because of those sub-headings.
That being said, I definitely learned some things that piqued my interest to learn more. But I will try and hunt for a more dry objective history next time. Just so I can get the facts of the matter, and an honest overview of the debates.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-09-24
Biased and Disjointed
Large portions are nothing more than propaganda for free market capitalism, whereas my goal was simply to understand the terminology and development of major economic theories. This was evidently written as a textbook with side panels and digressions, but the audio reading makes no distinction between these and the main text, so that the flow of the main ideas is unpredictably interrupted and resumed. I would never recommend such a doctrinaire and one-sided interpretation of economic history to a beginner to the field. Absolutely worthless and a waste of time.
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