Two massive peaks of interpretative political economy tower over the arid, flat plain inhabited by the conventional modern economists who, lured on by the mirage of mathematical determinacy, undue generalisation, illicit aggregation and inadequately documented secular vistas, aspire to the status of scientists.
The one is John Kenneth Gaibraith’s “The New InduBtrial Society,” about the induatrialized, opulent, yet increasingly , self-frustrated societies of the West. The other is “Asian Drama. An Inquir’ Into the Poverty of Nations,” a gigantic encyclopedia of 2,284 pages analyzing the political economy of South and Southeast Asia, prepared by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal.