{"id":31,"date":"2008-03-19T22:48:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T03:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/2008\/03\/19\/review-the-mind-of-the-market\/"},"modified":"2008-03-19T22:48:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-20T03:48:00","slug":"review-the-mind-of-the-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/2008\/03\/19\/review-the-mind-of-the-market\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Mind of the Market"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently bought Michael Shermer’s latest book, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics.<\/em><\/p>\n

The book starts off highly interesting: it brings up points about free trade few people have likely considered before, and in general makes interesting observations. Readers of Shermer’s other works, however, will notice a common theme between books — Shermer brings in evolution and intelligent design for yet another<\/em> battle, and some of his examples from Why People Believe Weird Things<\/em> are used over again in the new book.<\/p>\n

While it is interesting, The Mind of the Market<\/em> seems to suffer from a catastrophic failure to make a point. Shermer brings in studies and stories and numerous interesting facts, but yet never draws these studies together and offers his own hypothesis or uses them to make a broad point about economics. One can’t help but think that the book is more a compilation of interesting evolutionary economics rather than Shermer’s attempt to advance his theory. There just doesn’t seem to be a common thread between the stories.<\/p>\n

So while the book is interesting (like all of Shermer’s work), it seems like it needed some more work and perhaps a strong-willed editor. If you’re looking for an interesting read, get the book — you’ll learn things you’ve never heard before. If you’re looking for a persuasive discourse on evolutionary economics, look elsewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently bought Michael Shermer’s latest book, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics. The book starts off highly interesting: it brings up points about free trade few people have likely considered before, and in general makes interesting observations. Readers of Shermer’s other works, however, will notice…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,15],"tags":[23,27,55],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-science","tag-book","tag-economics","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}