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Title: EconoPower: How a New Generation of Economists is Transforming the World
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| EconoPower: How a New Generation of Economists is Transforming the World by Wiley A Must Read | This book needs to be read by every American citizen. If you value freedom and want a better future where you control your life and property, read this book and share its wisdom with everyone you know.
Beware of any politician who does not understand the law of supply and demand. If they want to give you something for nothing, run as fast as you can to the door. | | EconoPower: How a New Generation of Economists is Transforming the World by Wiley Finally, a positive world view and a multitude of solutions! | I read EconoPower the first time with excitement and the second time looking for the multitude of ways to use it in my economics classes. EconoPower is a gold mine of revelations about how the market works in daily life.
The book opens with Mark Skousen's greatest strength, showing how to save and invest rationally. As author of the Forecasts & Strategies financial newsletter, Skousen gives a remarkably upbeat and positive analysis of the current financial crisis by visiting the methods of the successful financial wizards of recent decades. And he leaves us with the poignant reminder that taking care of our money is a useful foundation, but money isn't specifically among the "four elements of happiness."
Skousen doesn't leave readers with the hopelessness that one feels from following the news. Instead, he offers encouragement by spelling out the tools for wise economic analysis. He then turns his eye toward government policy and, in the same positive manner, shows the Chilean path out of America's own looming Social Security crisis.
Part Three takes on a variety of tough domestic issues and shines a light on market solutions to traffic congestion, health care, crime, education, and sports. His chapters offer an extensive survey of economic research into the application of market principles in each of these areas. The style of each chapter is fully engaging, with a multitude of lively examples and straightforward explanation.
The topics of greatest challenge to an economist in the classroom are the globalization issues that pull the heartstrings of the youth: the environment, population, poverty, and jobs. Rather than treating us to the gloom and doom scenarios that so frequently scare younger generations into despair, Skousen shows us how market forces give us solutions to these problems. I was most encouraged to find the vivid resurgence of the ideas of the great development economists: P.T. Bauer and Julian Simon.
The incentive of market competition is frequently discussed, but rarely is it applied to the effects on religion, an especially sensitive subject in recent years. Skousen opens a whole new vista for people to see the benefits of diversity, rather than the too common derision and hatred of diversity. "Incentives, competition, quality, and choice apply not only to the material world, but to the spiritual realm as well."
As the nation plunges into the throes of recession and the general election, Skousen treats us to the role of economic analysis in forecasting. This is important, but more so is his summary of the Chicago and Vienna schools of thought that explain the origins of economic cycles, thus lighting the path out of endless cycles.
So much attention has been focused on the Freakonomics book in popularizing economic analysis, yet the attention of the media has too often been shaped by a bias against free markets. At last, we have a superb popular treatise that is extremely good at explaining the practical good that emerges through freedom of the individual. Skousen will surely re-energize Americans in the manner that Henri Lepage did for the freedom movement in France with Demain le Capitalisme.
| | EconoPower: How a New Generation of Economists is Transforming the World by Wiley Can "EconoPower" Make You a Better Investor? | Most Americans know too little about successful investing. Polls show they understand even less about free markets.
In his new book "EconoPower: How a New Generation of Economists is Transforming the World," university professor, investment advisor and prodigious author Mark Skousen does a superb job of enlightening readers about both.
Since World War II, technology has exploded, entrepreneurship has blossomed, and - despite the many naysayers - the U.S. economy has boomed. So has the stock market.
This strikes many folks as something of a mystery. How has this economic miracle happened, what is responsible and, more importantly, can it be sustained?
According to Skousen, the answer is a qualified "yes." We can boost economic productivity, reduce poverty, improve education, reduce crime, and vastly increase personal prosperity if we understand the individual and economic freedoms that make it possible and insist that our national leaders promote and protect them.
As Frederic Bastiat observed, "Countries which enjoy the highest level of peace, happiness and prosperity are the ones where the law least interferes with private affairs." Or, as the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu said a couple thousand years ago, "Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking."
Skousen begins his book by showing how the science of behavioral economics is revolutionizing the world of economic forecasting. For decades economists, ensconced in academia, drew up mathematical models that were ineffective in predicting human economic behavior.
Now that's changing. Empirical studies are creating powerful tools for achieving new knowledge, building better policies and creating winning investment portfolios.
Skousen describes, for example, how investors have a misguided tendency to buy amazing stock stories - about miracle drugs and next-generation technology - rather than focusing, as they should, on the tried and true.
One of the best predictors of business success, for example, is not cutting-edge innovation but - stifle that yawn - stodgy old dividends. Why?
As Skousen writes, "Earnings may be suspicious due to creative accounting. Revenues can be booked in one year or several years. Capital assets can be sold and the value listed as ordinary income. But cash paid into your account is a sure thing, a litmus test of the company's true earnings. It's tangible evidence of the firm's profitability."
Regular payouts impose fiscal discipline on a company. And history reveals that dividend-paying stocks are both less risky and more likely to beat the market.
Still convinced that your big gains will come from that flashy young technology company working on a cure for cancer or harnessing the power of cold fusion? Well, good luck. As legendary money manager Peter Lynch conceded in his book "Beating the Street," "I note with no particular surprise that my most consistent losers were the technology stocks."
(Or, as the great industrialist Andrew Carnegie once said, "Pioneering don't pay.")
In "EconoPower," Skousen also gives numerous examples of "high-return investing," drawing on the experiences of David Swenson, the market-beating chief investment officer for the Yale Endowment Fund, Dr. Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton Business School and author of "The Future for Investors," Burton Malkiel, the founder of modern portfolio theory, and Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who warned investors in advance about the dot.com and housing bubbles.
EconoPower even has a chapter on whether money can buy happiness. Idealists, of course, will say "no." But as Skousen points out, "Money in the bank gives you a real sense of security as well as freedom to do what you want." And, aside from a shortage of cash, "studies show that unemployed people, believing they are not contributing to society or themselves, are generally unhappy."
In short, this is an excellent book. If you want to be a more successful investor, you face long odds without understanding how free markets, the new science of behavioral economics and other forecasting tools are improving our ability to predict economic behavior. | | EconoPower: How a New Generation of Economists is Transforming the World by Wiley Insanity has taken over economist Skousen | | Like Skousen, I am a Ph.D. and an academic. I have bought this book, and I think the cover on the book is indicative of the complete non-sense this man advocates in his book "Econopower". I think he has written Bush's economic playbook a bit belatedly. In my opinion, this book simply demonstrates that economics is more than ever the dismal science it has been categorized ever since it came on the intellectual horizon.We have had enough of this economic insanity for the past seven years from a Republican dominated administration. It should be a fitting memorial to President Herbert Hoover. Yes, buy this book, and convince yourself of Skousen absolute insanity. | | EconoPower: How a New Generation of Economists is Transforming the World by Wiley Bringing Adam Smith to the Real World | The late Milton Friedman was considered by many to be the libertarian ambassador to the American establishment. His sprightly laissez-faire perspective was, over the decades, a constant reminder to regnant Keynesian intellectuals of the manifold holes in the ship's hull of their paradigm. With an ever-gracious persona and unfailing logic, Friedman carried the flag of freedom brilliantly to those of this world who think. Now that he is gone, there needs to be someone to take his place.
Mark Skousen may just be that man. His works over the past two decades have been both prolific and profound. Like Friedman, he is an economist who can actually write in a prose style that is engaging. With his latest book, EconoPower, Skousen gives us a splendid analysis of why the intellectual progeny of Adam Smith is retaking the battlefield from the Keynesians.
EconoPower is all about how economists of the modern day are no longer satisfied with remaining in ivory towers to scribble out theories about the mysterious thing called Economy. Such a focus on "highly abstract mathematical modeling," says Skousen, is what is called the "Ricardian vice, named after the nineteenth-century economist David Ricardo who developed unreal and oversimplified models without testing them against factual evidence." This has taken economics "down the wrong road."
Today a whole new wave of Smithian progeny is going out into the real world -- the messy, problematic world that we all have to confront every day -- and showing how the science of economics can be applied to the ever-present problems of history to solve dilemmas often thought to be intractable. And they are doing so with dramatic results.
In the first chapter, Skousen presents seven basic economic principles that must be understood and adhered to if humans are to advance their societies. Depending on how closely intellectuals "adhere to or violate" these principles, they will bring good or evil to the world. These principles are a canon of wisdom for civilization, and every professor, politician and pundit exercising authority in this world should be required to learn them thoroughly.
They are: 1. Accountability. 2. Economizing and cost-benefit analysis. 3. Saving and investment. 4. Incentives. 5. Competition and choice. 6. Entrepreneurship and innovation. 7. Welfare.
With great clarity, Skousen demonstrates briefly how each of these concepts must be applied in order to maintain freedom and justice. Because we have not been paying attention to these crucial guides of right economic thinking for many decades now, we are gradually destroying the very essence of America and the Smithian concept of "natural liberty."
Skousen goes on to tell us about a pantheon of remarkable intellectuals and entrepreneurs such as Jose Pinera, John Mackey, Gary Becker, Robert Shiller, Charles Koch, Henry Spearman, etc. who are blazing new trails in the social sciences by using the field of Economics.
This book is packed with an incredible array of practical analyses of a whole range of problems that our authorities are tearing their hair out over. Through scintillating sketches of his pantheon of heroes, Skousen shows us how to beat the market, save Social Security and Medicare, improve the quality of education, combat global warming, and aid the poor. While Keynesians are building onerous bureaucracies to weigh us down, Skousen's heroes are fashioning clever solutions to lift us up. Nothing like the man of the mind combined with the man of action. These characters are the John Galts and Hank Reardens of real life -- saviors, savants, and liberators of the human spirit.
Yet despite a gratifying return among many intellectuals to the Seven Principles of economic wisdom, the battle for freedom and sanity in life is by no means assured. Today's world is still filled with peril, as all periods of history are when men in authority subscribe to ideological fallacies. And unfortunately such fallacious authorities saturate society today. At the end of the book, Skousen gives fair warning to us all about the lessons of the Great Depression of the 30s, and how such an event's recurrence is not probable, but also not impossible either.
"As long as the global financial system is built on a volatile, destabilizing inflationary policy coupled with a fragile fractional reserve banking system," says Skousen, "the possibility of financial chaos and a subsequent economic cataclysm should not be discounted....[T]he most recent financial panic is surely not the last, and one should never underestimate the ability of the global marketplace to react in unpredictable ways."
What is needed so desperately in this tumultuous era of history is a re-acceptance of the Seven Principles of economic wisdom outlined in the first chapter of EconoPower. Our political and intellectual leaders throughout the world should run to the bookstore and devour these principles, and then sit comfortably back for an evening or two of delightful reading as to how real men are implementing them in the real world.
| | EconoPower: How a New Generation of Economists is Transforming the World by Wiley Product Description | | The power of economic thinking can be explained by seven core principles -- accountability, cost-benefit analysis, competition, choice, incentives, investment, and welfare. By understanding and incorporating these principles, better decisions will be made on individual, corporate and government levels. To explain this thesis, the author offers analyses of key economists who have effected significant changes in major domestic and international issues. |
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