Economics from a people first point-of-view

A Place for Murder by Emma Lathen (NY: Pocket Books, 1963)

Normally I get books at my local library. Given that I live in a poorer city in the Bay Area, the library doesn’t have money to buy new books. The blessing of no funds is that the library doesn’t throw out the old classics to make room for new books. It has a particularly good collection of classic mystery books. However, I didn’t pick up a copy of A Place for Murder by Emma Lathen at my library.

There is a new business in town. It’s a free “lending library,” open only on weekends. You drop off books you don’t want there and take home books you do want. So how can that be a model for a small business you ask? Its a very simple model. I have to admire the entrepreneur who thought it up.

The owner keeps and sells any valuable old books that are donated. The rest can be taken home by anyone else. These books are placed in no order on the shelves, and the staff are there primarily to sort out donations. So, you must browse this bookstore to find what you want. When you “check out” books from the bookstore the staff stamp “NOT FOR RESALE. THIS IS A FREE BOOK” in the front. That encourages people to bring the books back to the store.

I doubt the proprietor spends much on rent. The free books storefront is in a low rent area, and even in high-rent areas in the Bay Area, such as Solano Avenue in Berkeley, commercial properties now have a 20 percent vacancy rate. The only problem with this idea is that it’s a “brick & mortar” store, not an online store. Eventually the local supply of books people don’t want will dwindle. So I’m getting my mystery books now while it’s still in business. A Place for Murder is the second Lathen book I’ve found there.

The place for murder

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This month I am in the middle of a series about why we need economists return to political science. Well, one economist, a liberal economist at that, has just done this. If you haven’t read my last two posts yet, “Political Economy: An Old System for a New Day” and “Checks and Balances For the Field of Economics” you may want to look at them.

I want to call your attention to an awesome editorial by economist Robert Reich in the Financial Times on January 16, 2012, called “We are all going to hell in a shopping basket”. Professor Reich has returned to the roots of economics, the field of “political economy” to analyze the present malaise in this country. (If the above link doesn’t work, type the full title in Google.) Continue reading →

Last time, in  Political Economy: An Old System for a New Day we looked at how much the world has changed since the times when the United States of America was founded and Adam Smith, the Scottish economists published his classic study of political economy, called The Wealth of Nations.

This time (and in the next couple of posts), we’ll be see how the notion of checks and balances from the US Constitution applied to economics is one way of bridging the gap between politics and economics today.

We’ll start by looking at how economics differs from the study of political economy in the 16th through 19th centuries. We’ll see why the field of political economy changed its name to economics at the end of the 19th century. This was throwing out the baby with the bathwater! We now need to go back and rejoin politics with economics. Read on to see why. Continue reading →