Review of The Passionate Economist: Finding the Power and Humanity Behind the Numbers (Hardcover)

This is an interesting account of the career of a successful business economist.Diane Swonk puts plenty of passion into her economics, which is great.She's a good writer. Her call for more accurate economic statistics is well taken.I like her definition of economics as "the study of collective human behavior."She states one of her purposes as educating armchair economists; as a biochemist and patent attorney by profession, I certainly feel I have learned something from her.
The book's flaws are mostly in its assumptions.Ms. Swonk thrills to every tiny increase in GDP, but she never stops to ask what GDP really means.GDP by definition excludes any consideration of depletion of resources, costs of pollution, effects of population growth, or quality of life.GDP has its uses in making short-term business forecasts, but applying it more generally to say how the country's economy is going is questionable at best.More accurate measures of the U.S. economy, such as the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), tend to show that the amount of true economic growth per capita since 1947 has been fairly small, and that there has been little or no real growth since 1980.It strikes me as odd, therefore, that Ms. Swonk believes so sincerely that increasing GDP is the key to improving our country's prosperity. Most people's sense of economic well-being depends greatly on whether they're better off than others, so that trying to improve people's lives by continually increasing GDP strikes me as a squirrel cage to nowhere.
Ms. Swonk states that immigration is good for the economy, which I think is very questionable.Immigration may be good for business in the short term; in the long term it is simply subsidizing other countries by letting them export their population problems here.Ms. Swonk includes a push for more deregulation.I agree that deregulation is helpful in some instances, but where significant externalities exist deregulation is likely to make our country's economic situation worse.
Ms. Swonk's discussion of her personal life seems to show the same blind spot.She details her struggles dealing with an asthmatic son, but it never crosses her mind that polluted air could be affecting him.



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