The main contents primarily focus on mainstream economic thoughts (i.e., classical, neoclassical, and modern economics Chapter 4 to 16), but also mentions other heterodox economic thoughts which had often developed in mutual influence with the mainstream's (Chapter 7, 12, 13 and 17). Additionally, it partly includes pre-Smith era, stretching back to 2800 years ago such as Hesiod, Guan Zhong, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle, as well as the Mercantilism and other precursors of Classical economic thought(in Chapter 2 and 3). This book broadly reviews the history of economic thought in the past 250 years.
Damn, quite striking but there's no place for magic wands in economics. I really believed initially that with the advent of econometrics everything would have been fixed but yeeeah, not quite. We are now simply more aware of them and less ambitious about the generality of the results we could achive. So at the end we see that economics has become a much much more formal and rigorous discipline in the way of formulating and testing stuff, which is great, but the main critiques remain. Even the most advanced econometrical model failed to predict a event if the starting hypoteses are wrong or inadequate. So quite depressing, but if you want to achive some results you have to use the right recipee in the right moment and in the right circumstances, THE model doesn't exist, it is all about axioms, setting the perimeter of application of a model hoping that data support the thesis. And this book displayed it in such a way that looking at your textbooks shelf you just want to see your micro and macro books catch fire knowing you just have learned respectively a 150 and a 80 years model probably just because they are easy to understand, but absolutely outdated. So this is pretty much the journey of economics. In the reading process this is the pervasive sensation you get, everytime a new idea came out, it solved a problem and introduce a brand new one, so you move to the next chapter where some guy has a new approach to solve the issue and immediatly the hopes are killed by 3 new problems. But in the processes many new tools, models and ideas came out, reinforcing the thoeretical bag of every researcher in the field.
Economists have been trying to solve the same problems for the past 400 years, everyone tried and everyone failed.
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