Jonathan Teller-Elsberg

I teach economics to undergraduates, and have been looking for supplementary material that would (i) encourage students to take a heterodox view of the discipline, and (ii) stress the importance of grounding even the most basic analysis in an understanding of the data.

As for the first aim, this book is hardly an appropriate vehicle. Its tone is almost uniformly carping; whilst US capitalism certainly has much to answer for, this account has such a pronounced tendency to look on the gloomy side that it almost comes across as caricature. Much more suitable, I suspect, would be EPI's "The State of Working America" - just as I find "The Nation" more useful in the classroom (and more interesting to read) than "Z Magazine".

The book is organised thematically by chapters, not all of which (Health, The Environment) would be found in the conventional "guide to economic indicators" - a genre with which this book ought not really to be compared. Each chapter is broken down into single pages on related topics (thus the chapter of Government has pages on Policing the World, and on Corporate Tax Loopholes). Although I'm sympathetic to a broad view of "the economy", this approach can lead to a lack of focus: HIV/AIDS, for example, is given a page of its own, without any particular obvious link to the "US Economy" that features, after all, in the book's title.

Most pages have a few paragraphs of narrative, a more or less snappy political cartoon, and a simple graph related to the text. It is these graphs that offer the best chance I could see of using this book in class - because they were all backed up by detailed sources in the last fifty pages.

The first of these final pages consists of a Toolkit that many students could find useful. Section T1 is a guide to general sources; T5 walks us through the Census Bureau's distinction between households and families; T9 (a guide to the budget) mentions Eisner's "The Misunderstood Economy: What Counts And How To Count It" which I have on my shelves and really ought to read; T10 cites Patricia Ruggles' "Drawing A Line: Alternative Policy Measures And Their Implications For Public Policy" (which I don't have, but perhaps should recommend for the library), as well as some handy web sources on income data relating to the various quintiles. Some other sections of the Toolkit (T2 on reading graphs, T3 on means and medians) struck me as less directly useful, but the sections I have mentioned are enough for me to keep this book on my shelves rather than donate it to the table for "free books".

The Toolkit is followed by a Glossary, which suffers from the weaknesses of the first part of the book - do we really need to define Extinction, as in species? - and then by the backing up of every figure cited in the whole text, in sufficient detail for students to find the data themselves (in many cases, at least); there is no fobbing off the source as merely "Bureau of Labor Statistics". The following list is unlikely to interest anyone else, but the charts and data I found most helpful were 8.5 (on Environmental Racism and, in particular, the reference to Pastor et al, "Which Came First?", which could be used in a statistics class to explore issues surrounding correlation); 8.6 (on "Upper-Class Benefit Analysis", where the book's constructs of "power distribution" and "environmental stress" could also be used in a statistics class, in this case to explore validity issues); 9.5 (for data on productivity, even though I should know them already); and 10.13-15 and 17 (for data on foreign trade and capital flows, idem).

Material such as this makes the book helpful to the instructor wanting to ground students' knowledge of economics in actual data. (I spotted only one mistake: in 9.9, the federal funds rate is confused with the discount rate.) It's too bad that the first two thirds of the book, with what I've called its carping tone and the repetitive humour of its cartoons, can quickly tire even the sympathetic reader. It might be best simply to tear out all the pages before 183 and throw them away. What remains is succinct, practical and wideranging enough to accomplish the purposes I had in mind when acquiring this book.… (mehr)