Adam Smith

Hard economic times are upon us and the reasons are as obscure as they are fundamental. Why? Because there is more to economic theory than the usual simplifications and slogans that most people realize. In this age of globalization, “free trade“, competing nation states, and political turbulence the usual simplifications such as the law of “supply and demand“, economic equilibrium, or econometric theory no longer suffice to describe even a simple laissez-faire economy. While the simplifications of “perfect competition” and a “closed” economic system has historically resulted in some brilliant insights, they are insufficient for describing modern economies.

This is a fact recognized by economists, politicians, and indeed, by most of the world’s populace. The problem is that few people have any idea how to realistically describe our current economic system much less fix the system using some appropriate criteria (whether that criteria is based on efficiency, fairness or ?) not to mention the fact that politicians are constantly fiddling with the economy in order to provide short sighted political gains which all too often result in long term problems.

Of course the real world has forced the economic experts to make ad hoc exceptions and additions to basic economic theory. Thus we factor into economic considerations such things as people’s psychological responses (e.g., consumer confidence), special conditions (e.g., level playing fields, monopolies, etc.) while paying slavish attention to concepts that are becoming increasingly marginal in a global world (e.g., comparative advantage; not that they are or will remain marginal, after all the world continues to change). All these special conditions are accurate within their realm of validity but determining that realm is often difficult (even intractable) and controversial.

The problem is that each economic crisis spawns a new set of special conditions that seems to catch the traditional system off guard. There does not seem to be a consistent and logical framework that encompasses both historically proven facts and theory while containing the flexibility to anticipate (and hopefully prevent) new crisis. To paraphrase, the economists are always well prepared to solve the last crisis. What is needed is some method that ties all these ad hoc insights together with current conventional economic theory into a complete representation of a practical economic system so that the system’s responses can be analyzed and reliably predicted so as to prevent or minimize future economic crisis.

…………………….> plus more in the book

If you’re interested in reading more the book is available from the following sources:

• Print version
  • Printer Direct (recommended)
    This was a fairly easy publishing process with only a few minor bumps. The book is currently available.
  • Dominance Economic Principles
    The book was also easy to list on Amazon.com
• Electronic or eBook version. This is a minefield. Even though everyone claims to use the standard epub format each publisher has nuances that make the standard format unsuitable.
  • Apple iPAD – I’m in the process of publishing on the iPAD. Apple seems to have a problem handling internal links from epub files that pass a validation suite. Stay tuned, I’m waiting for a reply from APPLE in order to solve this mystery.
  • Kindle”" – I was able to publish successfully on Kindle but note Kindle doesn’t handle links or tables well. Submitting a HTML file with tables replaced by images seems to have worked.
  • Nook
    Barnes and Nobles pubit system is now up and running. Click on NOOK to connect to their syustem and see the book!
  • Sony Reader
    I am giving up on pursuing this option. Sony is NOT at all author friendly. They are unresponsive and misleading. I expect that unless they change then e-publishers such as iPAD and KINDLE will probably relegate Sony to a minor e-publishing role.
  • Scribd
    This was a rather easy publishing event. Essentially it consisted of uploading the same PDF file used to publish the book.

Stay tuned. I’ll report on my successes and failures later.

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Tags: books, Economics

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 19th, 2010 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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