Jonathan Derbyshire

The Dismal Science

Popular economics hit the bestseller list in 2005 with Steven D Levitt's Freakonomics, which sold by the bucketload and established a template that, for the time being at least, no aspiring economic populariser would dare to tamper with. Certainly, Tim Harford's The Logic of Life and Robert H Frank's The Economic Naturalist stick closely to Levitt's formula - right down to their subtitles, which promise, as Freakonomics did, that economics will explain "everything" or, in Frank's case, "almost everything".

My review of The Economic Naturalist by Robert H Frank, The Logic of Life by Tim Harford and The Dismal Science by Stephen A Marglin appears today in the Guardian.

Common Reading

Surveying the "railway stalls" where the modern reader bought his literature in 1855, Walter Bagehot observed that a large space was filled by the "review-like essay and the essay-like review." The best examples of this genre were couched in an unbuttoned, digressive style, more like the "talk of the man of the world" than the "lecture of a professor."

As Stefan Collini points out in Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics, itself a collection of review-like essays and essay-like reviews, Bagehot's attitude to "review writing" was actually more ambivalent than this makes it sound. He regarded reviewing as something "able men" fell into rather than chose as a vocation and looked back longingly at the "old days of systematic arguments and regular discussion."

If you're a subscriber to Prospect, you can read the rest of my review of Common Reading by Stefan Collini in the new issue of that magazine.

In gestation

Coming soon: pieces on Stefan Collini and the 'dismal science'.