From Poverty to Prosperity - Read Jim Fulner

Hardcover, 317 pages

English language

Published Oct. 3, 2009 by Encounter Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-59403-250-9
OCLC Number:: 313017475

The discipline of economics is not what it used to be. Over the last few decades, economists have begun a revolutionary reorientation in how we look at the world, and this has major implications for politics, policy, and our everyday lives. For years, conventional economists told us an incomplete story that leaned on the comfortable precision of mathematical abstraction and ignored the complexity of the real world with all of its uncertainties, unknowns, and ongoing evolution.

What economists left out of the story were the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advancing technology that propel economies forward. Economists did not describe the dynamic process that leads to new pharmaceuticals, cell phones, Web-based information services—forces that fundamentally alter how we live our daily lives. Economists also left out the negative forces that can hold economies back: bad governance, counterproductive social practices, and patterns of taking wealth instead of creating it. …

The discipline of economics is not what it used to be. Over the last few decades, economists have begun a revolutionary reorientation in how we look at the world, and this has major implications for politics, policy, and our everyday lives. For years, conventional economists told us an incomplete story that leaned on the comfortable precision of mathematical abstraction and ignored the complexity of the real world with all of its uncertainties, unknowns, and ongoing evolution.

What economists left out of the story were the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advancing technology that propel economies forward. Economists did not describe the dynamic process that leads to new pharmaceuticals, cell phones, Web-based information services—forces that fundamentally alter how we live our daily lives. Economists also left out the negative forces that can hold economies back: bad governance, counterproductive social practices, and patterns of taking wealth instead of creating it. They took for granted secure property rights, honest public servants, and the willingness of individuals to experiment and adapt to novelty.

From Poverty to Prosperity is not Tipping Point or Freakonomics. Those books offer a smorgasbord of fascinating findings in economics and sociology, but the findings are only loosely related. From Poverty to Prosperity on the other hand, tells a big picture story about the huge differences in the standard of living across time and across borders. It is a story that draws on research from the world's most important economists and eschews the conventional wisdom for a new, more inclusive, vision of the world and how it works.

1 edition

Jim Fulner reviewed From Poverty to Prosperity by Arnold S. Kling

No Virginia, economics is not software development.

2 stars

I didn't like From Poverty to Prosperity. The description sounded awesome, like these economists unlocked the secret to get economies rolling that wasn't limited to the old ideas of lower taxes and more favorable business climates. But they didn't. Pretty much everything they talked as if it was brand new discoveries, in 2009, where stuff we had talked about in my undergraduate political science courses (circa 2005). It really took a while for it to go anywhere, in a year where I have been getting a book read a week, this less than 300 pages took my 8 weeks to slog through.

Their ideas about "weak property rights" that included more coverage, for shorter periods of time, for intellectual property were weird. I felt most of the points they made would actually be better reference points to why there should be 0 protections to intellectual property.

I …

I didn't like From Poverty to Prosperity. The description sounded awesome, like these economists unlocked the secret to get economies rolling that wasn't limited to the old ideas of lower taxes and more favorable business climates. But they didn't. Pretty much everything they talked as if it was brand new discoveries, in 2009, where stuff we had talked about in my undergraduate political science courses (circa 2005). It really took a while for it to go anywhere, in a year where I have been getting a book read a week, this less than 300 pages took my 8 weeks to slog through.

Their ideas about "weak property rights" that included more coverage, for shorter periods of time, for intellectual property were weird. I felt most of the points they made would actually be better reference points to why there should be 0 protections to intellectual property.

I agree with other reviewers on LibraryThing that the interviews they included where much better than the "new content" which was mostly just a strange stretch for unnecessarily forcing economic thought into software development language, particularly as it sounds like neither author has ever been a developer. That being said even the interviews were kind of weird, questions worded in such a way that they would get the answers they wanted and when they didn't, they tried to ask it differently to get it the way they wanted. Why you would do that and still publish the first part is even weirder to me.

Lastly the book just kind of ends with the interview with William Baumol. There is no summary chapter, no conclusions, like a kid whose term-paper is due at midnight.

Jim Fulner

rated it

June 16

Subjects

Creative ability in business
Technological innovations—Economic aspects
Success
Economics