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Routledge Dictionary of Economics. - book reviews
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, July, 1996 by Frank C. Genovese
Robert Heilbroner taught economists that the accolade "worldly philosophers" properly belonged to them. As such they explored and pronounced upon all things. This, perhaps immodest tendency, earned some of them enmity from their rather low regard for their sister social sciences. When they ventured outside the social sciences and got into technological matters, as indeed, they often had to, they frequently encountered hostility from their inexpertness in dealing with such matters. A colleague once told me how his statistical study of what was causing artillery shells to leak pointed to nonexistent properties of metals.
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Since the massive majority of scientists that ever existed is alive today, rapidity of developments in many fields results. Certainly, the same thing is true of social scientists in general and economists in particular. The difficulty of keeping current and having knowledge appropriate to problems at hand has become immense. Fifty years ago the great communication scholar, Harold Adams Innis, used to complain that "paper is too cheap." Today's electrons are even cheaper and the "noise" surrounding and obscuring information is deafening.
Thus those who provide guides in the form of "economics" dictionaries are to be thanked. Two of these appeared in 1992 and are available in paperback. David W. Pearce produced the fourth edition of The MIT Dictionary of Modern Economics (Cambridge: The MIT Press) and Donald Rutherford, the Routledge Dictionary of Economics (London and New York, Routledge). Rutherford states that, "A dictionary is a solace for the perplexed, a guide for the scholar and a map of new terrain for the general reader."
The first is rather more "technical," a dictionary for economists. The latter adopts a broader view, having "as its concerns as many issues as the subject Economics now covers." This being so they respectively run 474 and 539 pages.
The "Herfindahl Index" is described in a quarter of a page in the former and "Herfindahl-Hirschmann index" in about an eighth in the latter. But the full giving of credit implied in the title is appreciated. One of its randomly chosen pages (172) lists the "flypaper effect," "FOB," "Fogel, Robert William, 1926-," "FOMC," "Food and Agricultural Organization," "food chain," "football pool," "footloose industry," "footloose knowledge," "Footsie," "forced labour," "forced saving." Footsie, I was pleased to learn, is "Slang for Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Share Stock Index."
The MIT book at about the same alphabetical position had no flypaper, no Fogel, no FOMC, no food chain, no football pool, no footloose knowledge, and no forced labour but it did include "forced riders." But both of these volumes are immensely useful and should be available in every economics and business department, and every college and business library as well as on the desk of every business and economic journalist and security analyst.
Albert Carnesale is Provost of Harvard University, Massachusetts Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138. Kevin Clements, PhD. is Vernon M. and Minnie I. Lynch Professor of Conflict Resolution and director of the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030-4444. Thanks for help in compiling this material are due to Virginia Straus, executive director of the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, 396 Harvard St. in Cambridge, MA 02138-3924. (Telephone 617-491-1090, e-mail brc21c@aol.com). The other authors are identified in the article.
COPYRIGHT 1996 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
