Seven Deadly Economic Sins
Obstacles to Prosperity and Happiness
Every Citizen Should Know
By James R. Otteson
ISBN 97811008843379 316 pages Hardcover/$27.95 April 2021
You have heard of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Each is a natural human weakness that impedes happiness.
In addition to these vices, however, there are economic sins as well. And they, too, wreak havoc on our lives and in society. They can seem intuitively compelling, yet they lead to waste, loss, and forgone prosperity.
In this thoughtful and compelling book, James R. Otteson tells the story of seven central economic fallacies, explaining why they are fallacies, why believing in them leads to mistakes and loss, and how exorcizing them from our thinking can help us avoid costly errors and enable us to live in peace and prosperity.
About the Author
James R. Otteson (photo) is the John T. Ryan Jr. Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (2002), Actual Ethics (2006), The End of Socialism (2014), and Honorable Business (2019).
Advanced Praise for Seven Deadly Economic Sins
Otteson, a philosopher, has written for non-economists the best short introduction to economics, and to a wider political economy. It is lucid, generous, open-handed yet thorough, and solidly based scientifically. Come to think of it, most economists should read it, too. They might stop using “philosophical” as a term of contempt, and get back to an Adam-Smithian depth of understanding. Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois, Chicago
The word “Deadly” in Otteson’s title is no exaggeration. The great frustrations and famines of recent decades have been failures of state management, rather than contradictions of capitalism. Otteson’s contribution is to explain why these catastrophes are the result of good intentions, moral misunderstandings, and confusions about what markets can do. As society moves toward reopening the economy and restoring prosperity, this book is essential reading for what might be done, what can’t be done, and the things that lie in between. Michael C. Munger, Duke University
James Otteson is not just a scholar of markets, he is their Mozart. In this compelling tour, Otteson lays out economic principles the way Mozart laid out a sonata. Otteson orders and presents key principles in a fashion any American can understand and appreciate. Amity Shlaes, author of Great Society
For more information, please contact:
Diana Rissetto, Cambridge University Press, DRiss
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