Legacies of Great Economists (1996)
Legacies of Great Economists(1996) The Teaching Company’s Timothy Taylor provides a marvelous present-day sequel to Robert Heilbroner's classic The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. Taylor brings alive the key turning points of economic thought since the mercantilists and the Physiocrats. Adam Smith, who probably ranks among the world’s least understood and most quoted economists, is presented as a rare, commonsense economist and likable eccentric. Indeed, a Nobel laureate suggests that economics since Smith is primarily footnotes to Smith’s extraordinarily insightful assessments of basic economics and human nature.
Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill are important preludes to Karl Marx, who, according to Taylor, flunks as an economist, though awesome as Old Testament prophet. One wonders why, since Marxist economics are so flawed and contrary to human nature, why this little man reading and writing in the British Library could have had such an impact for nearly 150 years. Similarly, I found myself, in “The Socialist Calculation Debate,” asking how could so many intelligent people delude themselves for so long on ‘basic economics.’
Though Schumpeter gets more attention than Hayek, personally I am impressed by the role of Hayek in the Thatcher/Reagan market economy/privatization economic turnaround of the late 1970s-early 1980s [See Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, the book and the documentary, in which Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw brilliantly document the demise of communist/socialist command economies in favor of more efficient market economies].
Taylor gives kudos to Keynes for his breakthrough thinking about deficit financing and his new insights about international finance. Taylor includes a still living economist, Milton Friedman, because of the importance of his role in the rebirth of classic economics and his brilliant statistical work in monetary analysis. Professor and student alike would benefit tremendously from any of these lectures, which are supplemented with an excellent course guidebook. (Available in video or audio)
