Breve storia del pensiero economico

by Alessandro Roncaglia

Una ricostruzione completa e chiara del pensiero economico, dall'antichità classica ai giorni nostri. L'autore presenta con rigore e senza inutili tecnicismi tanto le opere dei grandi classici come Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter, Sraffa, quanto i contributi delle varie scuole, come i fisiocrati, i ricardiani, la scuola austriaca. Particolare attenzione è dedicata agli sviluppi più recenti, dal secondo dopoguerra all'inizio del terzo millennio.
Un libro indispensabile per tutti coloro che vogliono comprendere le radici dei dibattiti economici dei nostri giorni. Dietro le divergenze sulle scelte di politica economica, infatti, vi sono contrasti tra concezioni diverse dell'economia; gli stessi concetti-base, come valore, mercato, prezzo, equilibrio, assumono significati diversi nel contesto della concezione classica, marginalista, keynesiana.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction

421 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 6, 2016

About the author

Professor of Economics in the Department of Economic Sciences, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’.

Reviews

[Ivan Savić]

The book is hard to read, it is full of long sentences and additional comenting in brackets. It follows the economy through theories of notable people. Mostly mentioning the names of the books they wrote, but scarsly and not clearly explaining what thay actualy tought and wrote about.

Here is one random sentence to ilustrate what I mean:
"Sraffa (1925) argued that the problem of the ‘empty boxes’
does not concern how to apply the three categories to real situations
but rather stems from insurmountable theoretical difficulties within the
theory of firm and industry equilibrium, resulting from a conceptual
confusion: in classical political economy the law of decreasing returns
was associated with the problem of rent (that is, with the theory of
distribution), while the law of increasing returns was associated with the
division of labour, or in other words general economic progress (that is,
with the theory of production)."

It is written to be more academic, so it is almost unreadable for average user. Some of the concepts are not explained at all. And you surely do not get any clearer idea of how economy actually works.