Peter May's Review of "Prosperity without Growth"

I don't remember seeing this before, except in the form of a special review section - Two reviews of the same book in the same journal. http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2009/11/review-of-prosperity-without-growth.html">You've seen my version. Now here is Peter May's version.

Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Model of Economic Development

I remembered Mick Common mentioning this book and I saw that it was referred to by http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2009/08/allen-british-industrial-revolution-in.html">Robert Allen. I found that ANU's library had a copy but it was nowhere on the shelves and I put in a missing book search request. It couldn't be found. So I was surprised to get an e-mail while I was in Adelaide telling me to

Review of Prosperity without Growth

Here is a draft of my review to be published in Ecological Economics of Prosperity without Growth:Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite PlanetBy Tim Jackson, Earthscan, London, 2009.Reviewed by David I. SternUsually, I find myself disagreeing with advocates of zero economic growth (defined as non-increasing GDP). First, a large part of the world’s population remains poor by any

Allen: The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

Robert C. Allen tries to explain why the Industrial Revolution took place in Britain in his new book The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective.Allen (2009) places energy innovation centre-stage in his theory. Like Tony Wrigley, he compares Britain to the Netherlands and Belgium. These were the most developed economies in the world in the early modern age with much higher wages than

Collapse

I have been reading Collapse, Jared Diamond's account of the collapses of several past civilizations - Easter Island, the Maya, the Anasazi, and the Greenland Norse settlement prominent among them - and discussions of environmental stresses and sustainability issues in modern societies. Included is some original research of his with a coauthor on the factors affecting success or failure in the

Predicting Nobel Prize-Winners in Economics

I've been reading bits of "Lives of the Laureates" on and off recently. The book is based on a lecture series at Trinity University where Nobel laureates in economics are asked to describe their evolution as economists. Many of their lives do seem to have been "stochastic trends" :) Some like Clive Granger weren't even sure that they were ever economists. John Harsanyi left ANU because some

Book Review: The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth

I have been reading The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth by Barry Naughton. It seems to be a nicely balanced objective survey of the Chinese economy covering both its evolution, especially since the key dates of 1949 (founding of the PRC) and 1978 (beginning of liberalization). As the author writes, most commentators seem to either over- or under- estimate China. And as other commenters on

Vaclav Smil

I'm having a look at a recent book by Vaclav Smil: Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years . I'm very surprised to find that there is no Wikipedia article on Smil. I'm also a bit shocked by his criticism of other authors. On Jared Diamond's Collapse, he writes: "a derivative, unpersuasive, and simplistically deterministic book". Almost at in the same class as Taleb. The book is a

Book Reviews: Gladwell

I read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. While it is a good read I found it rather frustrating. I agree totally with the tone of the Wikipedia article. I guess it is too journalistic and not analytical enough. Sometimes making intuitive judgments is good and sometimes it is not. Some people are born with the abilities to make them and other times they can train to have those abilities. Well, the real

Book Reviews: Zilliak and McCloskey and Taleb

Shuang brought home borrowed copies of Ziliak and McCloskey's "Cult of Statistical Signficance" and Taleb's "The Black Swan". in a way both are rants against standard practice in quantitative analysis. But Taleb's book is ten times better or more than Ziliak and McCloskey's. The latter have a single point that researchers often misuse the concept of statistical significance and ignore the actual