Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street [Hardcover]

Very few book do I read that just surprise my by their originality. The Economics of God and Evil is one. Sedlacek is a Czech Economist, journalist and Economic Advisor to the first Czech President after the fall of communism. This book was originally written and published in Europe (and was adapted as a theater piece) before being reworked and now published in the US.

Few really well documented books (footnotes are about a third of almost every page) also clearly explain fairly academic subjects as well as this book does.

The concept is that Sedlacek traces several texts that show how we have thought of economics in history. These include the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, Ancient Greece Philosophy, Christianity and New Testament, Descartes, Mandeville (who I had no concept of) and Adam Smith. He showed how the concepts of economics were different under each of these worldviews and how they influenced the rise of Western Thought about economics. Throughout he gives hints about places where he thinks that modern economics may have ventured away from what might be a better explanation.

Then he traces modern economic thought. The rise of desire, the change of economics from a philosophical science to a mathematical predictive science, the movement of 'invisible hand', the rise of the rational human, the dependence on progress and the eventual bloat of economies due to debt.

There is a real argument here and I am not going to trace it all, but I would encourage anyone that is really interested in economics, especially if you are a Christian (because I think Sedlacek best work is his exposition of the Old and New Testaments), to pick this up and really read it. I found it interesting that this week a survey was released that said that Evangelicals are most likely to think that there is no conflict between Christianity and Capitalism compared to the general population or any other segment of Christianity. In other words, those that are most conservative about their Christianity are also most likely to believe that it matches with the dominant economic model of the day.

In the end, Sedlacek calls for a renewed study in economics on morality and the philosophy of why our economy works as it does. He does not want to do away with the mathematical models that he criticizes so frequently, but to partner them with a deeper (almost religious) view of ethics. The final section is about the limitations of economics (and primarily the mathematical models of economics) and how economists (and those that rely on economists) need to be humble about what economics can reliably do.

One of the more interesting side tracks was the tracing of economics from a 'dismal science' to a progressive science, which views everything improving and getting better. He thinks that it is as much about the personality of the major thinkers as anything else, but he does think that we have moved too far toward a concept of perfectionism (which definitely has some Christian roots). But he is far from the only religious critic of progressiveness. He quotes CS Lewis as saying disapprovingly that we have begun to believe that, "Goodness equals what comes next."

Honestly, this is one of the most insightful and challenging books on economics I have read. I highly recommend it.

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This book was provided by the Amazon Vine program for the purposes of review.

"Economics of Good and Evil" by Economist Tom Sedlacek is a collection of self-contained essays on a general theme. That theme, that modern economics has been overrun by "quants" - those economists that emphasize mathematical models and analyses that ignore the fact that economics is fundamentally about individuals making decisions.

The first part of the book "Ancient Economic" is a collection of essays about the economic world views of various ancient civilizations up through Adam Smith. I particularly enjoyed his essay on the Greek Epicurean and Stoic views.

The second part of the book "Blasphemous Thoughts" is a collection of essays on meta-economics, i.e. it looks at economic ideas and examines them in a philosophical way. I especially liked his discussions of the rather surprising role of myth and religion in economic thought.

This book was originally published in the Czech Republic in 2009 where it became a best seller and was turned, somehow, into a popular play! I admit that I can't imagine how this was done. This translation is well worth reading for the author's fascinating ideas and analysis, but I will say that the translation seems a bit awkward, even ragged, at places and makes reading the book a not unalloyed joy.

This is a very ambitious book. It weaves together a variety of seemingly disparate ideas and comes up with an imaginative and coherent tapestry. In a nutshell, one might say that it is about meta-economics and the history of economic ideas. Sedlacek argues that the concerns of economics are also the concerns of myths, of theology, and of philosophy. Here, one of Selacek's points is that the rigorous structure and formal logic of modern day economics obscure the fact that it represents a narrative and that this narrative supports a particular normative world view.

Definitions of economics usually boil down to it being a social science that focuses on the choices that people make. Thus economics encompasses most human concerns. Certainly it overlaps the other social sciences and we can even think of it as applied ethics (in that economics has a set of normative criteria for judging choices). It is in this context that Sedlacek suggests that key arguments of economics ultimately tend to be about good and evil. Yet, economists strive to deny this and our notion of positive economics is all about avoiding judment. As Sedlacek points out, there is great irony in the fact that economics sees itself as a science of values and yet it pretends to eschew value judgment.

Sedlacek's tour de force narrative is not easily summarized. Suffice it to say that he is a fantastic writer. One might even refer to him as a seductive storyteller. I have seen elements of his arguments before, but I have never seen them put together this persuasively. And, while I did not necessarily agree with all of his arguments, I still enjoyed this book tremendously.

I should note that sometimes his account of modern day economics is oversimplified and he tends to see arguments that were originally made for expository clarity as evidence of a particular a world view. Moreover, he is a methodological anarchist who gives little credence to the intrinsic logic and power of economics. The way I see it, while individual economic models can be wrong or misleading, economics is still built on a set of a few relatively simple and yet pretty much irrefutable ideas: choices have opportunity cost; people tend to respond to incentives; talk is cheap; trade is bilateral, etc. And while recent advances in psychology and neuroscience have complicated things, the basic logic of economics still remains.

All that said, the bottom line is that I loved this book. Moreover, when compared to dumbed-down accounts of economic ideas (like Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophers, for example) this book is a true masterpiece.

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