Economics for Everyone

JULY 8 2008: This month's edition of the CCPA Monitor contains a detailed (and very generous) review of Economics for Everyone from Mel Watkins.

Click here to read the full review.  Mel uses lots of very kind superlatives to describe e4e, including "splendid," "uniformly good," "most informative," and perhaps most unjustifiably, "concise" (it is, after all, 350 pages long -- not quite as "short" as promised in the sub-title!).

Mel is a household name in the economics community in Canada, but for international readers a little background is in order: he helped found what became known as the "new Canadian political-economy" in the 1960s, with his writings on Canada's unusual (and destructive) dependence on the production and export of staples resource products, and our corresponding dependence on foreign investment.  That's a topic near and dear to my own heart these days, given Canada's rapidly regressing industrial structure (we're once again dependent on unprocessed natural resources for a clear majority of our exports -- a throwback to much earlier times).  Later, in the 1970s, Mel co-founded the Waffle movement: a radical stream within Canada's social-democratic NDP which was eventually thrown out of the party (after capturing 37% of the vote in a leadership challenge).  Incidentally, in 2001 I co-founded a similar reform movement, called the New Politics Initiative that also got -- no kidding -- 37% of the vote at an NDP convention!  Cosmic left-wing political-economy karma, I'd say.  Mel continues to make huge contributions to the progressive policy and activist communities in Canada.  He was recently the first co-winner of the Progressive Economic Forum's JOhn Kenneth Galbraith Prize in economics and social justice.  (See here for details.)

Anyway Mel, thanks so much for your kind words.  His best endorsement of all was this:  "When I was still teaching on a regular basis, ... there was no book like this around. Had there been this one, I would have been delighted to use it as required reading."