[Book Review] The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good

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The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very intellectual book with some truly original and thought-provoking ideas about how individual interests and collective interests sometimes diverge and how such divergence could lead to wasteful outcomes especially in a competitive environment. It is definitely interesting to see the author pitting Adam Smith against Darwin Charles and arguing that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand Principle could be viewed as a special case of Darwin Charles more general Natural Selection/Sexual Selection hypothesis. The examples cited in the book and the thought experiments suggested by the author are all very illustrative, albeit a bit repetitive.

The major drawback is the way that the book is structured – or unstructured, for that matter. The entire book, when read from front to back, seems very fragmented. Ideas do not flow naturally and smoothly from one chapter to the next. The middle section of the book is devoted almost exclusively to the framework suggested by Ronald Coase, but it is not immediately clear how Coase’s framework fits with rest of the book. The best way to read this book, on hindsight, might be starting from the last chapter, picking out the points that are of most interest to the reader and flipping back to the chapters that elaborate on these points.



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