------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW -------------- 
Published by EH.NET (November 2004) 
 
Richard A. Easterlin, _The Reluctant Economist: Perspectives on  
Economics, Economic History, and Demography_. New York: Cambridge  
University Press, 2004. xx + 284 pp. $75 (hardcover), ISBN:  
0-521-82974-7. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Lee A. Craig, Department of Economics, North  
Carolina State University. 
 
 
In the notes preceding Kenneth Sokoloff's 1993 interview of Richard  
Easterlin for the _Newsletter of the Cliometric Society_, Sokoloff  
summarized Easterlin, the man, with "There is always an air of  
mystery about him." Of the man (and his work), Sokoloff wrote, he  
"makes every word count."[1] Nowhere are these observations more  
apparent than in Easterlin's recently published _The Reluctant  
Economist: Perspectives on Economics, Economic History, and  
Demography_. Many, perhaps most, scholars in the twilight of a long,  
brilliant interdisciplinary career -- which in Easterlin's case  
includes a distinguished professorship at the University of Southern  
California, the presidency of both the Population Association of  
America and the Economic History Association, membership in the  
National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellowship of the American  
Academy of Arts and Sciences, to name but a handful of his many  
academic distinctions - would succumb to the temptation to expand on  
their lives, to give those lives broader meaning in the context of  
their scholarly contributions (and vice versa). A reader might  
reasonably expect a good bit of autobiographical material. A reader  
of Easterlin's perspectives would be mistaken. The "memoirs" chapter,  
such as it is, of this volume includes only 18 pages, and much of the  
space is taken up with discussing the work that appears in subsequent  
chapters. Easterlin, the man, remains a mystery. The same cannot be  
said of his work. 
 
Most of the volume's chapters are revised versions of previously  
published articles, and Easterlin appears to have carefully chosen  
these pieces. None is technical by the standards of even the most  
benign usage of the word. Data play important roles in each. Each  
major section -- "Economics," "Economic History," and "Demography" --  
stresses one or two main themes and/or findings around which  
narrative is wrapped. In addition, the theme of the reluctant  
economist runs throughout the volume. Easterlin wields the term as a  
double entendre. At first, it reflects his ambivalence about his  
professional choice as a young man, but later the reader sees it as a  
metaphor for Easterlin's skepticism about the methodology of  
contemporary economics. This skepticism appears most strongly in the  
first three chapters, collectively labeled "Economics." 
 
Of the economics' profession, Easterlin laments, "Model building is  
the name of the game" (p. 11). The tendency to build models is an  
error of commission, according to Easterlin, and it is accompanied by  
two errors of omission: The failure to appreciate and employ  
subjective testimony (Chapter 2) and the blind adherence to the maxim  
_de gustibus non est disputandum_ (Chapter 3). In Easterlin's view,  
_de gustibus_ is worthy of an accounting. The two omissions converge  
on a topic, happiness, which one does not often find addressed in  
much detail in the economics literature. Looking for happiness in the  
midst of an economics paper is like searching for pleasure in a  
treatise on the physiology of human reproduction. It's largely  
between the lines. Easterlin dismisses economists' obsession with  
abridging human aspirations and preferences via the reductive  
assumptions and equations that jointly constitute a "model." But he  
has more important objectives than merely ranting about the failings  
of those who joined the profession after he did. Ever the teacher, he  
shows how the judicious use of subjective data leads one to conclude  
that the inviolable tastes and preferences of economic models are in  
practice quite violable, and more importantly this leads to the  
conclusion that, as aspirations rise with income, there will never be  
a "New Postmaterialistic Society." Societies may or may not be new,  
but there is never anything post about their materialism. The Age of  
Aquarius has Hummers and Ipods. One can only learn this if one asks  
about aspirations. Assuming them away only removes all possibility of  
successfully analyzing the issue. 
 
Some readers -- particularly younger ones who make their living doing  
what Easterlin abhors --will be excused if they conclude that, when  
writing about economics and the economics profession, Easterlin comes  
off a bit curmudgeonly. The chapters in the sections labeled  
"Economic History" and "Demography" are less subject to that charge.  
Probably because of Easterlin's considerable contributions to those  
areas, the material there is more informative than corrective --  
though a few model builders are still taken to task. The history  
section consists of four chapters. The first of these (Chapter 4) is  
a restatement of Easterlin's 1980 presidential address before the  
Economic History Association entitled "Why Isn't the Whole World  
Developed?" Easterlin's answer is education, or more appropriately  
the lack of education. But why don't those undeveloped places just  
purchase more education and be done with it? Well, that is a more  
difficult question. Easterlin reviews a disparate set of likely  
suspects including family structure, government, and that great mass  
social scientists call institutions, but he notes the historical  
record suggests that different combinations of these suspects yield  
different results in different places at different points in time.  
Ultimately, the chapter serves as a call to study the economic  
history of educational systems. 
 
After a short piece (Chapter 5) that reviews the history of long-run  
cycles in real economic activity (Kuznets and Kondratieff Cycles),  
Easterlin turns to the Industrial Revolution (Chapter 6) and the  
history of the market (Chapter 7). The key issue in his take on both  
topics is mortality. With respect to the Industrial Revolution,  
Easterlin writes, "What the Mortality and Industrial Revolutions have  
in common is that they are both manifestations of the explosion in  
empirically based human knowledge, scientific and technological, that  
dates from the seventeenth century" (p. 97). This is a theme pushed  
hard on the Industrial side by Joel Mokyr, most recently in _his_  
2004 presidential address before the Economic History Association.  
Where the two might diverge is on the subject of Easterlin's next  
chapter, entitled "How Beneficent is the Market?" Not terribly is  
Easterlin's answer, or at least not nearly as beneficent as most  
economists would argue (certainly) -- or economic historians for that  
matter (probably). To Easterlin, the evidence suggests that the  
government can be pretty beneficent when it comes to adding years to  
life through public health programs. 
 
The final section of the volume is dedicated to Easterlin's  
perspectives on demography. There is neither a better written nor a  
more concise summary of the various economic approaches to human  
fertility than Easterlin's "An Economic Framework for Fertility  
Analysis" (Chapter 8). It is a masterpiece of scholarly prose. Making  
every word count, as Sokoloff put it, Easterlin uses fewer words to  
better summarize the various fertility theories than any of the  
distinguished scholars who originally espoused or subsequently  
adopted those theories. In so doing, he offers a simple, yet powerful  
model, which has family preferences for children, as one of its key  
elements. He then applies the model to the demographic transition as  
it has evolved and spread around much of the world (Chapter 9),  
demonstrating, that in the absence of an explicit accounting for  
changing preferences, one struggles to characterize one of the most  
important socio-economic phenomena of the past two centuries. 
 
Chapters 10 and 11 contain summaries of, respectively, the long-run  
 
decline of human fertility in the rural United States and the baby  
boom and bust of the second half of the twentieth century. These are  
two of Easterlin's major contributions to demographic history, and  
they remain so nearly three decades after he published the original  
articles upon which the chapters are based. Consistent with the  
discussion in the earlier chapters, the roles of aspirations,  
expectations, tastes and preferences remain prominent in Easterlin's  
analysis of these momentous events. 
 
Finally, and on the same theme, Easterlin concludes his perspectives  
by addressing what at first glance appears to be a peculiar topic,  
namely the curricular choices made by U.S. undergraduates in recent  
decades. In particular, he focuses on the growth of business school  
enrollments. Those readers who appreciate Easterlin's position in the  
pantheon of economic history, especially those who teach the  
multitudes of business majors about whom Easterlin writes, might be  
dismayed to see such a giant engaged in explaining the behavior of  
such a rabble. But Easterlin, as always, has a bigger picture in  
mind. Specifically, he demonstrates that in addition to market  
signals, once again changing preferences -- "as evidenced by life  
goals of the young" (p. 12), and as manifest, for example, in their  
concerns about "money making" (p. 220) -- explain the witnessed  
behavior. He ends the volume by hoping, if that is the word, that  
"preferences be accorded more equal treatment in economics" (p. 245).  
To the end, Easterlin remains the reluctant economist. 
 
Notes: 
 
[1] Kenneth Sokoloff. "An Interview with Richard A. Easterlin,"  
_Newsletter of the Cliometric Society_ 8, no. 1 (1993), p. 3 
 
 
Lee A. Craig is Alumni Distinguished Professor of Economics at North  
Carolina State University. His most recent book, with Robert Clark  
and Jack Wilson, is _A History of Public Sector Pensions in the  
United States_ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,  
2003). He is currently writing a biography of Josephus Daniels. 
 
Copyright (c) 2004 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be  
copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to  
the author and EH.Net. For other permission, please contact the  
EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]; Telephone: 513-529-2229).  
Published by EH.Net (November 2004). All EH.Net reviews are archived  
at http://www.eh.net/BookReview. 
 
-------------- FOOTER TO EH.NET BOOK REVIEW  -------------- 
EH.Net-Review mailing list 
[log in to unmask] 
http://eh.net/mailman/listinfo/eh.net-review