Customer Reviews:
 An interesting book for readers with a BA in economics December 26, 2005
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Colander and his coauthors have provided an interesting inside view on a group of economists(some examples are McCloskey,Binmore,Gintis,Rabin,Foley,and Samuelson)whose scholarly work attempts to integrate new techniques and approaches(for example,evolutionary theory,fractals,chaos theory,catastrophe theory)into the mainstream of standard neoclassical economics.Unfortunately,this is not leading to any significant change in economics.This can easily be confirmed by reading any of the current and new economics textbooks at the undergraduate or graduate level.None of these textbooks integrate any of this new material into the teaching of economics.For example,the Mas-Collel graduate microeconomics textbook makes no attempt to integrate into its chapters on decision making the extremely important work done by Ellsberg on ambiguity.Ambiguity is introduced in an exercise problem and treated as a minor anomaly that has no real theoretical importance.A better title for the book would be "Conversations with Some Cutting Edge Economists".I especially enjoyed reading the interviews conducted by the authors with McCloskey,Foley,and Samuelson.The interview with McCloskey highlights her major point about the misuse of statistical significance levels,this time in regards to mammograms.The interview with Foley touches upon the importance of the work done by Mandelbrot on power law distributions because "...skewed,self-similar,and fat tailed distributions are extremely common in economic data...".Unfortunately,the standard neoclassical approach is to model"...according to a Normal Probability Law."(2004,pp.205-206) .Samuelson's small interview is excellent.Strangely,he has to state again for the nth time that he does not accept Say's law.He even commits a small miscue in bracketing Mandelbrot with Markowitz,Modigliani,Merton,Bachelier,Tobin,Sharpe,and Fama(2004,p.310)as regards modern finance theory.All of these individuals,except Mandelbrot,rely on the normal probability distribution.
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