By Shane Wright
HISTORY
The Shortest History of Economics
Andrew Leigh
Black Inc., $27.99
Andrew Leigh, economics academic, author and assistant minister for competition in the Albanese government, is also a long-distance runner. He has taken his love of running the trails around Canberra to economic history with a book giddy with speed as it sprints from how much effort it took Babylonian workers in 1750 BCE to create light to the threat posed to humanity by the singularity.
Andrew Leigh’s book on economic history races from the ancient Babylonians to the rise of Skynet.
In one four-page gallop, he touches on philosopher John Stuart Mill, the invention of the mirror, the advent of clocks and train timetables, Lord Byron, Britain’s Poor Laws, the Luddites, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.
A little further on, Leigh fits in seven paragraphs on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, increase in aircraft speed, magnetic strip credit cards, cars that turn out to be lemons, China’s Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
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Economics is known as the “gloomy science”, but Leigh – across 190 pages – doesn’t give the reader time to become depressed or question their economic choices. He says he wants his small book to tell a big story. That story is the development of modern capitalism, which, as Leigh argues, is a story of innovation and creativity.
The structure of the book means Leigh has to leap over important developments. For instance, the Punic Wars, and how they pitted Rome and its policy of plunder economics – seizing the assets and people of another state – against the trade-based policies of Carthage don’t get a mention.
But model Miranda Kerr gets a reference, as does a six-year-old chimpanzee called Raven, who outperformed professional share brokers by throwing darts to choose her stocks. Not that economics isn’t made more interesting with models and chimpanzees. Leigh knows that the best way to keep a reader turning the page is to make economics both engaging and relevant to their everyday life.
Hence, he tells Paul McCartney that you can buy love, reveals that ski resorts happen to report more snow on weekends and touches on the importance of McDonald’s to the rise of franchising. By furnishing these types of public touchstones through this book, Leigh is able to sneak in some fundamental economic theories and the people behind them.
John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith and Milton Friedman obviously get mentioned. But so do other important economic voices, such as Arthur Pigou, Elinor Ostrom, Alfred Marshall, Joan Robinson and Daniel Kahneman.
The fact he canvasses so many great economists, it seems strange that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels don’t rate a mention. Their work in the 19th century influenced economic thought and debate even if their arguments were turned by the various communist parties of Lenin and Mao into something else.
But that is a minor quibble in a book that acts like a coach urging you to run faster. By the time you’ve read that the chance of the average European being murdered today is a 10th of what it was 500 years ago, you’re wondering if the future is Star Trek or Terminator.
The debate around inequality features prominently throughout the book. From The Great Gatsby Curve to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Leigh’s interest in egalitarianism shines through. We also get facts that tease at equality issues – Putin’s Russia is probably more unequal today than when it was ruled by Tsar Nicholas II.
Leigh manages to give the casual reader an insight into economics, one of humanity’s most powerful forces, while enticing them to run even further.
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