Book review: The Soulful Science

I've been a bit quiet on the blog the last week or so, because I've been busy with population projections work (more on that in a future post). However, I have found time to read, and I just finished Diane Coyle's 2008 book The Soulful Science. The book contains a summary of recent advances (at least, up to 2008) in economics research, and to my mind she does an even better job of it than similar books of a similar vintage such as Economics 2.0 (which I reviewed here). Coyle has an ambitious goal for the book, expressed in its first sentences:

I want to persuade you that economics gets an unfairly bad press. Even though economists are widely criticized for either failing to predict the financial crash, or for causing it, or sometimes both, economics is nevertheless entering a golden age.

It seems to me that those who might benefit most from reading a book with that purpose in mind, are unlikely to be willing to read it. As Coyle notes:

The popular unpopularity of economics rests on perceptions which are twenty or thirty years out of date and were always a bit of a caricature anyway.

In my experience, people have a misguided view of what economics is and what economists do. Towards the end of the book, Coyle discusses what the nonspecialist sees of economics, being:

...largely the kind of macroeconomic debate covered in the news programs and newspapers: the forecasts about how much the economy will grow or how severe the recession will be, what will happen to inflation or the dollar, whether the financial markets will go up or down. Most of this economics is:

(a) of poor quality and spuriously precise, as it's not possible to forecast these things in any detail...

(b) jargon-ridden and possibly not understood even by the person - often not actually an economist but an investment manager or media pundit - spouting the jargon on television; and

(c) being used for a purpose such as advancing one political party or gaining ones' employer some good PR. 

Nothing has really changed in the twelve years since this book was published. The problems of the misunderstanding of what economics is, and negative public perception of economics, are not new issues, and aren't going away any time soon.

So, one book isn't going to unwind economics' 'popular unpopularity'. However, I do see great value in this book, for beginning economics students trying to get a sense of the possibilities. Even though the book, and the research to which it refers, is getting a bit dated, it still outlines a number of interesting (and relatively recent) developments in economics research, including advances in economic history, models of economic growth, life satisfaction, and the economics of information. I certainly made a number of notes that I will use in teaching next year.

Coyle is also an excellent writer, and incredibly well-read (as a quick few minutes spent on her blog, The Enlightened Economist, provides ample evidence to support). She also embeds a lot of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) humour into the book. For instance, where else could you read about Jeremy Bentham's testicles?:

In fact, Bentham was an all-round eccentric. He was ahead of his time in wearing knitted woollen underpants (so it was discovered post mortem by Mr. Smith): most Victorian men simply tucked their shirt tails between their legs. And, whether or not due to the scratch of wool on his testicles, Bentham was the intellectual father of utilitarianism, the philosophy that can be summed up as "the greatest happiness of the greatest number."

I really enjoyed this book, and I highly recommend it to current and future students of economics. It captures more 'mainstream' economics research than books like Freakonomics, but does so in a way that is engaging and entertaining. I wish there were more books like this, capturing economics research advances in the twelve years since.