Thanks to Science is Awesome on Facebook

Real experts must be annoyed by pundits who pontificate on subjects they know little about.  That seems to be the motivation behind two books.

In “Why America is Not a New Rome” Vaclav Smil addresses his pet peeve.  The “grand analogy” “could be dismissed as just a fashionable wave of insufficiently informed commenting… or superficial comparisons.”  Smil quotes authors from Imperial Rome, discusses other states that have been compared to ancient Rome, and analyzes many comparisons between America and Rome that he feels are superficial, trivial, and misleading.  You’ll learn about Rome, America, and punditry.  This is a neat read.

“Taking Economics Seriously” is very short, more of a booklet at thirty nine pages.  In it, Dean Baker argues that casting a liberal vs. conservative dispute as “big government” vs. “small government” wrongly casts the debate as a dispute over the extent of regulation.  He says liberals and conservatives support different regulations for different goals.  Examples include patents and copyrights, which may not be the best way to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” as required by the Constitution; enforcement actions which are seldom acknowledged to be forms of regulation, and high salaries of professionals that reflect their political power rather than a free market.  He says that market fundamentalism does not exist.  This is also a neat read.

Now when I hear clichés about ancient Rome and free markets, I hope I’ll stop and think.