The End of Economic Man: Principles of Any Future Economics

Wow. This book has 1 review only. I took home 5 books from the library on economics and financial history to try to beef up on a subject that I didn't have a decent cultural literacy of and this was the only enjoyable book. This book is a masterpiece. For those of you who may of had the regular macro and micro intro classes, but feel like you don't really understand economics, this book is for you. It's very comprehensive, but completely readable at all times (on occasion a word might need to be looked up), and destroys classical economics as having the fallacy of being determined (so many subjects tend to leave out the problem of freedom...people hate talking about freedom..they don't like to spend time on an abtuse philosophical concept..but it's necessary! He uses common sense to destroy commonly held so-called common-sense beliefs in the economy. This book does everything it set out to do and more. Get it!

I first purchased Brockway's excellent book about ten years ago, just before the dot-com meltdown. What he wrote made eminent sense, and is as relevant now - with 401k plans having melted down to the tune of more than $6 trillion, as it was then. Some, who view Wall Street and its promised wealth as the keys to a happy retirement, may be shocked especially by Brockway's Chapter 10: 'Speculation: Why A Bull Market is a Disaster'. But he makes the eminent point that at root, investing in any market instrument except maybe money funds, is no different from gambling in Vegas, and a "zero-sum" game. In the end, all "Bull markets" do is set the ordinary person, who can least afford it, up for the next fleecing. Why are Americans so ready and willing to be fleeced, as those who have been picked clean in the Madoff mess? Mainly because our economy no longer words true productivity, as Browkway notes (Chapter 12) but rather speculation. Indeed, what we now have is a highly leveraged speculative economy. This has also been documented in a number of books, among which the best is perhaps William Wolman's and Anne Colamosca's `The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work', 1997). Brockway himself has noted that before about thirty years ago one had a 'productive' economy and a 'speculative' economy (based in Wall Street). There was more or less a balance between them, and the nation as whole benefited as a result. Real productivity kept growing because real investment was made in hands-on materials, plant, research and labor. Most everyone benefited, including workers - via real (defined benefits) pensions (not '401ks') as well as higher wages, and companies that produced REAL goods. Sometime after Reagan was canonized, in the 1980s, the speculative economy - which up until then had been kept in the background- began to take control. A number of steps instituted by Reagan led to the Michael Milkens, Ivan Boeskys and that lot. This also probably laid the fertile soil for our own WorldComs, Enrons, and Arthur Andersen type funny accounting. One step was the Bank Holding (De-regulation) Act of 1984, which sped the way to speculative excesses resulting in travesties such as the S & L scandal in the late '80s. One would have seriously thought the legislative infrastructure would have learned from that - but oh no, they didn't. In 1995, congress repealed the right of investors, shareholders to sue companies. That essentially removed the last private solution that would've kept the criminal speculators (we see today) at bay. Too much big money from the corporate campaign contributors iced it. Just as their money has been desperately trying to cook up a perfidy of a bankruptcy law- and has left a corporate "reform" law that isn't worth much more than the paper it's printed on. (Since it excludes independent audit provisions, and still refuses to count stock options for CEO maggots as expenses). But I digress. By 1987 and the O