by Eric D. Beinhocker
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Product Description
What is wealth? How is it created? And how can we create more of it for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and societies? In The Origin of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker provides provocative new answers to these fundamental questions.
Beinhocker surveys the cutting-edge ideas of economists and scientists and brings their work alive for a broad audience. These researchers, he explains, are revolutionizing economics by showing how the economy is an evolutionary system, much like a biological system. It is economic evolution that creates wealth and has taken us from the Stone Age to the $36.5 trillion global economy of today.
By better understanding economic evolution, Beinhocker writes, we can better understand how to create more wealth. The author shows how complexity economics is turning conventional wisdom on its head in areas ranging from business strategy and organizational design to investment strategy and public policy. As sweeping in scope as its title, The Origin of Wealth will rewire our thinking about the workings of the global economy and where it is going.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Astonishing and brilliant, 2008-08-22
Don't be put off by the lengthy critiques found here. You may get the feeling that these reviewers should be writing their own books. If they actually did so, I'd bet they would find that one can't cite every sentence, can't reference every economist who ever contributed to the field, can't explain every generalization at every opportunity. Ignore them and don't miss this great synthesis that pulls from many disciplines to form a wonderful construct that shows how economics is part and parcel of the main drivers of organic life - evolutionary processes.
Btw, Publisher's Weekly also blows their summary. Beinhocker does not use this synthesis as a "panacea." For we humans, his ideas are potentially a more accurate worldview, not a global cure for disease. Beinhocker writes with the aim that we might construct better approximations of reality using this line of thought. Worldviews are big, but that is not the same as a panacea that will cure all that ails you. This is a brilliant work that all thinking members of homo economicus should read.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
This book is about more than economics, 2008-08-05
I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in human society and social evolution. The book discusses a lot of interesting aspects from an analytic viewpoint.
Despite the title which portrays the book as an economics text, this book isn't about making money - it's more about analysing how our economic society works (or doesn't as the case may be).
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 A unified field theory of economics, 2008-06-03
The author does a noble job of trying to integrate nearly everything including Darwinian evolution into economic theory. The penultimate section on stock prices seems to be the finale - what could be next? It is a description of left vs. right, and the end of this political distinction. It was not a good close.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Accessible, Informative, a book for the masses, 2008-03-23
Some have reviewed Beinhocker's book, criticizing the lack of rigorous data, and other empirical evidence to support his arguments. There was another economist who published a book a couple years ago who also banished equations and other math goop to the footnotes and appendices, his name was Alfred Marshall (it really is a good book, another one for your reading list).
Beinhocker has clearly done his homework and understands the material of evolution in economics, complexity and chaotic systems. The Origin of Wealth is highly accessible and Beinhocker clearly explains each component of the theory. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the book is that it is interesting enough to keep the reader engaged, but also to inspire the reader's curiosity and desire to learn more about this fascinating new paradigm (This reader wrote her senior undergraduate thesis on this material - Beinhocker was a HUGE help).
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 Overly ambitious and poorly argued, 2008-03-05
I can hardly improve on A.J. Sutter's review below but feel the need to get the following off my chest:
Beinhocker's book does not live up to its title. I am baffled that the title of this book is not "Complexity Economics: How new computer models and evolutionary theory prove what I'd been thinking all along about Milton Friedman being a bozo and about how Left-Democrat ideas make economic sense."
The book contains roughly three parts. In the first, classical economics is debunked with the same endlessly rehearsed, straw-man argument that economists have heard for years, to wit: "many economic models assume rationality, but people are actually quite irrational sometimes, and therefore laissez faire economics is heartless and also quite silly indeed."
I won't go into it any more than to say that the obvious rejoinder to Beinhocker's exhaustive attempt to prove the above is that no economist ever thought people were perfectly rational, and models are just that: we have to assume some things to make them work, but if they work well, then overly simplified assumptions are an acceptable cost of doing business.
The book's second part discusses a number of new economic ideas that employ computers and biology and complexity and that, taken in isolation, are really quite interesting. I would like to read a book about these ideas written by somebody who understands and can explain them well. This was not such a book.
The book concludes by making the long argument that (1) I have shown that free-market economics is wrong, (2) there are some new models floating around out there that use computers and the like to tackle economic problems, and THEREFORE (3) we should all accept several left-of-center political ideas that I have long held.
I have read very well written economic arguments coming from left-of-center. This book was not one. It was not even an argument. Beinhocker's principal points were consistently assailable with the rebuttal that "you have alleged (A) is wrong and stated that (B) is true but have NEVER shown how (C) therefore follows. And yet you cling to (C) like grim death, hoping that in repetition you will find rhetorical force."
Oh - and also Beinhocker doesn't explain the origin of wealth.
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