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Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics Kindle Edition

4.4 out of 5 stars 178 ratings

Since the end of the second World War, economics professors and classroom textbooks have been telling us that the economy is one big machine that can be effectively regulated by economic experts and tuned by government agencies like the Federal Reserve Board. It turns out they were wrong. Their equations do not hold up. Their policies have not produced the promised results. Their interpretations of economic events -- as reported by the media -- are often of-the-mark, and unconvincing.

A key alternative to the one big machine mindset is to recognize how the economy is instead an evolutionary system, with constantly-changing patterns of specialization and trade. This book introduces you to this powerful approach for understanding economic performance. By putting specialization at the center of economic analysis, Arnold Kling provides you with new ways to think about issues like sustainability, financial instability, job creation, and inflation. In short, he removes stiff, narrow perspectives and instead provides a full, multi-dimensional perspective on a continually evolving system.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Kling's latest book, Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics, is to my mind his greatest contribution yet." --Yuval Levin Arnold Kling--the economist, teacher, blogger, and polymath--has a way of cutting through layers of conventional assumptions and laying bare complex realities. He is so adept at doing that, it seems to me, because he doesn't expect to solve the problems he clarifies, but rather sees that the clarification of questions can itself constitute a large leap toward greater understanding. His 2013 book The Three Languages of Politics is a great example of that. The book sheds a bright light on our political life by arguing that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians tend to see political questions as arrayed along three distinct axes: Progressive think about politics along the oppressor/oppressed axis; conservatives think in terms of the civilization/barbarism axis; and libertarians think in terms of the freedom/coercion axis. This makes it difficult for people who incline to one of these three views to quite understand people who incline to the other two, and it leads to a lot of suspicion of motives when in fact pretty much everyone in politics is motivated to do good as they understand it. Try that insight on for a minute as a lens through which to look around at our politics and you'll find that an awful lot of our debates make much more sense. Kling's latest book, out this week and available practically for free on Amazon, is to my mind his greatest contribution yet. Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics, is as ambitious as its subtitle suggests. Kling argues that our understanding of the fundamental character and purpose of the discipline of economics has been distorted by the form that the professionalization of the discipline has taken. Modern macroeconomics implicitly thinks of the economy as a kind of machine that exists to produce GDP. And a great deal of what economists do, for all of its sophistication and impressive mathematics, is a function of that assumption--which is mistaken at its core. He's not suggesting that economists are simple-minded, only that some deeply rooted metaphors that guide their thinking lead them astray. Instead, Kling suggests, we should recover an understanding of the economy as the function of complex patterns of specialization and trade. It's a simple case, in a sense, and not a particularly controversial one. But if you actually follow its logic through, as Kling does, it can lead you to a powerful alternative approach to understanding some basic economic questions. Among other things it points, I would argue, toward a recovery of Adam Smith's economic vision--which is far richer than either its admirers or its critics tend to think. The book is an extended essay, in the best sense of the term. It will make you look at some familiar subjects anew. Very well worth your while. nationalreview.com/corner/436679/arnold-klings-new-book-yuval-levin

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01GW3SOOM
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Libertarianism.org Press
  • Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 13, 2016
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 398 KB
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 162 pages
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1944424169
  • Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 178 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
178 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book thought-provoking, with one noting it provides a useful framework for thinking about economic activity. Moreover, they appreciate its excellent case for trade and specialization-based economics, and one customer describes it as a refreshing new look at macroeconomics. Additionally, the book receives positive feedback for its pacing, with one customer highlighting its rigorous approach, and its accessibility, with one noting it's accessible at the novice level.

22 customers mention "Thought provoking"22 positive0 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking, with well-thought-out analysis and compelling arguments, and one customer notes it provides a useful framework for economic activity.

"In this profoundly stimulating and well-crafted work, Arnold Kling expertly pursues a bold and timely undertaking: to encourage a complete sea..." Read more

"This is the best single exposition of the author's idea about the fundamental component of economies, patterns of sustainable specialization and..." Read more

"...You will find a more useful way to think about things." Read more

"The author makes several very compelling arguments about how economics needs to be re-conceptualized...." Read more

7 customers mention "Value for money"7 positive0 negative

Customers find the book to be excellent value for money.

"...I found the book to be interesting from start to finish. Definitely worth the read." Read more

"Good and easy to read analysis of how the macroeconomy really works...." Read more

"This is an excellent book by one of our most least-noticed but most insightful economists. We need more Arnold Kling!" Read more

"A very interesting and relatively brief exposition of the importance of specialization and trade in modern economies." Read more

6 customers mention "Economics"6 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's approach to economics, particularly its case for trade and specialization, with one customer noting its refreshing perspective on macroeconomics.

"...about the fundamental component of economies, patterns of sustainable specialization and trade...." Read more

"Insightful look at economic theory applied to complex and dynamic market fluctuations. Well thought out analysis. Good to the point synopsis." Read more

"...In addition to providing an excellent case for a trade and specialization based economics, he delivers a good economics primer and a persuasive..." Read more

"Great perspective to establish a sound economic evaluation viewpoint." Read more

4 customers mention "Pacing"4 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the pacing of the book, with one noting it maintains a certain rigor to the material.

"In this profoundly stimulating and well-crafted work, Arnold Kling expertly pursues a bold and timely undertaking: to encourage a complete sea..." Read more

"...fine job appealing to armchair economists while still keeping a certain rigor to the material." Read more

"...Easy to read and understand. Well done, Arnold!" Read more

"Book came in perfect condition" Read more

3 customers mention "Accessibility"3 positive0 negative

Customers find the book accessible and simple to understand.

"...Kling's prose is particularly clear and concise. It is accessible at the novice level while informed by his deep experience and familiarity with..." Read more

"This is a simple and useful framework for thinking about economic activity. The case for analysis from this viewpoint is made convincingly...." Read more

"Straight-forward, insightful economic thinking without the gibberish..." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2016
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    In this profoundly stimulating and well-crafted work, Arnold Kling expertly pursues a bold and timely undertaking: to encourage a complete sea change and re-conception of the nature and character of the modern economy, and to articulate the case that the reliability of the contemporary theory and practice of mainstream Macroeconomics is much more inescapably limited than what is usually accepted.

    Kling's prose is particularly clear and concise. It is accessible at the novice level while informed by his deep experience and familiarity with the profession. This allows him to pack a large number of ideas and insights into a slim volume that can be read in an afternoon and pondered for years. Once one learns to observe the economy in this realistic light instead of through the lens of academic idealizations, one cannot help seeing the complex mechanisms of specialization and trade at play everywhere one looks. And just as importantly, Kling manages to accomplish this without using the field's tribal jargon which usually triggers the kind of my-team-right-or-wrong solidarity that is the true enemy of any hope of progress. It gives the book a feel that is both fresh and fair.

    But let me back up a little and try to explain the nature of this work by way of an admittedly extreme and exaggerated metaphor.

    Let's say that the medical profession was still mired in the rampant quackery that prevailed over a century ago, while still proclaimed by its own credentialed and high-status professional expert authorities to be a 'Science' as legitimate as say, Physics. And all this prior to any understanding of genetics, Microbiology, or the germ theory of infectious disease. Presented with symptoms of diseases that, even today, are notoriously hard to predict, diagnose, and treat - due to the almost hopeless complexity of the underlying mechanisms that give rise to these conditions - the medical doctors nevertheless argued for the validity of their longstanding theories and practices while going about their business in completely misguided ways. Two warring schools of thought based their theories respectively on intricate and elegant models of astrology on the one hand, and palmistry on the other. Meanwhile the typical practice of treatment mostly relied on starvation diets and administration of large doses of nicotine and powdered organs of endangered animals.

    Now, let's also imagine that this crazy approach to "medicine" had come under vigorous and legitimate criticism over the past hundred years or so, but that for all their merits, these critiques were brushed aside by the profession's mainstream and politically influential experts, who tended to respond to these arguments by stating - in a perfectly justified and accurate way - that their theories were rigorously validated and internally consistent and thus, so long as their assumptions were reasonable, their conclusions were bound to be reliable.

    A reasonable and independently-minded person trying to rationally assess the validity of these claims for himself would reasonably conclude that (1) the assumptions are probably too wrong and incomplete to be relied upon, (2) those past critiques deserve to be revisited and elevated in status and respect, (3) never-ending and irresolvable arguments about the relative merits of palmistry or astrology are worse than wastes of time, and (4) it's time to start over and take a completely different approach to trying to understand the phenomena of health, illness, and disease.

    Now let us return from this metaphorical detour to Arnold Kling's extended essay. Kling demonstrates that it is not going too far to say that contemporary academic Macroeconomics, obsessed with complicated mathematical analyses of aggregate demand and gross domestic product, has been going off on the wrong track (and in this metaphorical direction) of unjustified self-confidence since at least World War II. The author, who received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dubs this, with justice, "the MIT tradition".

    The surprise of the depth, severity, and duration of the global financial crisis of 2008, and its many repercussions since, ought to have been the wake up call to shake mainstream academic and other elite economists out of their complacent paradigms and routines. It should have been an occasion for branch-to-root reassessment and an emergence from stale, entrenched positions and towards an efflorescence of new, alternative approaches.

    Instead, the field is (mostly) still marching to the same old drummers. This state of affairs has inspired more than a few critics of the mainstream orthodoxy to more vigorously express the case that something is fundamentally rotten in the state of Denmark. Many of these critics, however, are engaging in argumentative strategies that have proven unproductive. It seems that the current worldview of mainstream Macroeconomics is somehow impervious to these sorts of critical assaults no matter how rigorously devastating these arguments are, or how often the typical models fail to predict or correspond to observations of the real world. No matter what happens, no matter how much the forecasts of the models deviate from the real state of affairs, advocates of various mainstream views all seem perennially unperturbed as there always seems to be some way for proponents of any particular view to salvage and maintain their former outlook.

    The key insight of Kling's book is that the reason for all this is that mainstream Macroeconomics is not a real science, regardless of how adamantly its champions insist it to be. To be blunt, that claim of the mantle of science is an unwarranted, even conceited, pretense. In the absence of any ability to perform controlled experiments or falsify any claims because of an overabundance of causes and degrees of freedom, the best one can do is form a framework of interpretation through which one tries to make sense of ones observations. However, there are many possible and rival frameworks of interpretation, and there is not necessarily any good way to choose between them when, at root, the effort to understand any irreducibly complex phenomena by means of a extending a few simple propositions is always fated to inadequacy.

    But the current framework based on crude conceptions of aggregate demand and GDP - and overconfidence in the utility of government interventions - could surely use some serious competition.

    Kling rises to the task, presenting his alternative framework of interpreting the economy and its fluctuations through the lens of patterns of sustainable specialization and trade. The economy is more like an unfathomably intricate ecosystem or the incomprehensibly variegated Internet than some kind of simple machine which it might be possible for government action to "repair". Kling's is an evolutionary framework in which the price system works to coordinate activity throughout the economy in a dynamic and decentralized fashion.

    It is one in which competitive pressures, social norms, the legal system, and the disciplining and encouraging incentives provided by considerations of profit and loss, lead to ever more efficient patterns of investment and activity. His framework is one in which genuine market failures that justify state-imposed solutions which one can actually expect to work do indeed exist, but are few and far between. And it is a view that is properly modest regarding the possibility of providing much specific advice to policymakers, a principled and humble stand which is appropriate to the insurmountable limits of human understanding.

    Perhaps the best summary of the book's main thesis comes from the author himself and provides a good example of his lucid writing style:

    "Mainstream economists in the MIT tradition can be very interventionist with regard to policy. They look at markets as machines that generate predictable outcomes. Policymakers can tinker with those machines to improve the outcomes. The economist’s task is to advise the policymaker. That approach makes two troubling assumptions. One assumption is that the economist’s model is sufficiently powerful to justify overriding market prices. The other assumption is that the political process is sufficiently clean to implement the policy correctly. Instead, I would argue that, as Peter Boettke would have it, the economist’s task is to explain to the public how one might compare the institutional processes of the market and of government. Those of us who emphasize specialization see markets as trading networks that are constantly undergoing evolution. Rather than look for particular interventions, we raise the question of which institutional mechanisms serve to support the process of specialization and enable it to continue to evolve in a favorable direction."

    If I were to make one criticism it is that Kling could have spent more time explaining in more depth why specialization is essential for, and how it translates into, the much higher labor productivity that makes the wealthy civilization we enjoy possible. But this is hardly enough to take away from its well-deserved five star rating. Highly recommended and a must-buy.
    19 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2016
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    This is the best single exposition of the author's idea about the fundamental component of economies, patterns of sustainable specialization and trade. He makes a convincing case that it is the details of these patterns, which survive (and thrive), which subside or cease to be
    viable, how they affect other patterns, and most of all the necessity of entrepreneurs in exploring the space of possible patterns, that is responsible for the state of economies everywhere.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2024
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Going does more than advocate a position. He explains how his position differs and why he thinks it is better. If you are looking for a silver bullet or a magic pill, you won't find it here. You will find a more useful way to think about things.
  • Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2017
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    The author makes several very compelling arguments about how economics needs to be re-conceptualized. I found the book to be interesting from start to finish. Definitely worth the read.
  • Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2017
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Economists in past decades thought they were bringing a higher rigor to economic thinking by using equations. But they suffered from some of the same intellectual failures as central planners: they had orders of magnitude less information than needed to understand economies and the humans who are the economic actors. There's a strong element of "The emperor has no clothes" to Arnold Kling's book. His skeptical look at economic thinkers isn't a rejection of the importance of economic thinking but rather an attempt to make us understand that while the field is important it's practitioners don't know as much as some of them think they know. I was reminded while reading it of Philip Tetlock's research on expert opinion and it's generally low predictive value.
  • Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2016
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Good and easy to read analysis of how the macroeconomy really works. Some of it is pretty basic for someone familiar with much of macroeconomics, but these elements can easily be skimmed. The analysis of how the complexity of an economy defies large scale regulatory fixes is a well done analysis. Law of unintended consequences.

    The appendix on the financial crisis and its components is a helpful primer. The chapter on the root causes of the mortgage crisis is highly credible. However, it does not discuss the final element of the crisis, which was a massive run on the investment banks, all of whom relied on very short term financing.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2017
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Insightful look at economic theory applied to complex and dynamic market fluctuations. Well thought out analysis. Good to the point synopsis.

Top reviews from other countries

  • Brain on Books
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great read!
    Reviewed in Canada on January 8, 2017
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Real good!

    Follow @brainonbooks (instagram) for book suggestions and transformational quotes!
  • GermanStudent
    5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting book.
    Reviewed in Germany on April 12, 2017
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    This book looks at economics from the two points of specialization and trade, only. It gives a good introduction to why Kling "re-introduces" with this book to economics. According to his view economy evolves with the two factors specialization and trade in particular. These two are the main reason for economy. He gives a good look into the modern world of economics.

    The following chapters give then also a good introduction to the scientific method.

    A good book for people who want to read a clear book about economics.
  • VSG
    5.0 out of 5 stars Economics as an interpretive framework
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 15, 2016
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    "Specialization and Trade" is a concise critical review of the state of modern economics.

    For Dr. Kling economics is an "interpretive framework" rather than a science. This view goes back to Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend and, ultimately, to Ludwik Flek. The development and dissemination of scientific knowledge is a socially-determined process where “thought collectives” sharing a particular “thought style” play a central role. Dr. Kling is highly critical of the thought collective and the though style influenced if not dominated by post-war MIT economists. Consumption versus savings, constrained optimization as the decision making method, a finite set of goods, infinitely living agents such as firms and households are the basic building blocks of this thought style. Dr. Kling offers an alternative interpretive framework: patterns of sustainable specialization and trade define a modern economy. There, the overwhelming complexity of specialization is not a nuisance, is not a bug, it is a feature, it is how the modern economy works.
  • Michael Clarke
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
    Reviewed in Australia on January 24, 2017
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Concise and thought provoking. Offers an alternative framework accessible to a general non technical reader. Some stronger technical depth would have been nice too.

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