Review of: Dr Strangelove’s game: A brief history of economic genius, by Paul Strathern (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99)
AS its nickname suggests, the “dismal” science has a reputation for being dry and dull. The reality is different. While some of the ideas in Paul Strathern’s book may be familiar, their larger-than-life proponents and the influences that shaped them are less well-known. Strathern reveals that many of the economic thinkers who helped shape the way the modern world sees itself were social misfits and, in some cases, seriously flawed human beings.
Take Adam Smith, the Kircaldy-born progenitor of the “invisible hand” theory of markets and a confidant of both David Hume and Voltaire. He took to “seabathing in the Firth of Forth summer and winter” in a vain attempt to cure an ailment described as “shaking in the head” and had difficulties forming intimate relationships. Socially inept, he lived with his mother for most of his life and was seemingly incapable of looking after his own financial affairs.
Strathern writes: “The man who would understand the intricacies of international commerce was all but incapable of the simplest transactions himself. Even his horse would have starved but for a friend buying the oats.”
Then there was John Law, the Edinburgh-born financier who became the richest man on earth through his control of France and the trade monopoly of Louisiana. A convicted murderer, he also invented paper money from his base in 18th century Paris.
Strathern describes how John Maynard Keynes, the languid and bisexual Old Etonian who helped to rescue the world after the 1929 Wall Street Crash, was himself effected by that calamity. “Keynes was hit hard by the crash. He was even forced to consider selling his favourite Matisse.”
Or how about John von Neumann, the crippled, crazed genius who invented game theory, a man feted by President Roosevelt even though he favoured nuking the USSR before the Russians developed an atomic bomb of their own? An exile from Budapest, von Neumann was the model for the hero of Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 movie Dr Strangelove.
Meanwhile John Nash, who helped to devise game theory is described as “an aggressive boor who couldn’t function without constant demonstrations of his own intellectual superiority”.
In Dr Strangelove’s game: A brief history of economic genius Strathern blends humorous and insightful biographical anecdotes such as these with lucid descriptions of economic ideas, which serves to make a highly complex and opaque subject more accessible to a lay audience.
But it isn’t all history: economics is pivotal to modern politics and society and has reasserted its importance in the wake of the 11 September terror attacks on America. The question now being posed is this: should governments and bankers respond to the crisis by following the advice of Keynes and spend their way out of a recession? Or should they follow Smith and von Neumann and let the markets decide?
Strathern’s book, written before 11 September, doesn’t really give us any answers. But one suspects that Strathern – who lists his all-time economic greats as Smith, Marx and Keynes – would have advocated a neo-Keynesian response similar to that already adopted by president George W Bush.
Occasionally, Strathern – whose other books include Pythagoras And His Theorem and a series on philosophers including Socrates, Hume, Descartes and Wittgenstein – slips in an aside that reveals his own perspective.
Writing about Adam Smith, he says: “We see freedom as central to our present life. Yet in fact we spend far more time thinking about money… Caught in this vicious circularity, we can only ask ourselves, ‘Is it worth it?'”
Writing about Karl Marx, Strathern says: “When the production and marketing of goods is motivated entirely by profit, social justice and even basic human needs are disregarded. Such an economic world which finds its raison d’etre solely in profit results in grotesquely distorted social relationships.”
Given the breadth and range of this book and what a non-economist can learn from it, one can forgive the odd misprint such as the Duke of Buccleuth (sic) – who Adam Smith tutored as a boy and accompanied on a grand tour of Europe.
This book review was published in the Sunday Herald on 18 November 2001