My favorite part of Tyler’s book is where he asks a very good but non-obvious question: Why did it take so long for economics as a field to develop a coherent model or framework of analysis? Much of the book discusses how three economists simultaneously developed marginal analysis, with a focus on the work of Stanley Jevons. Here I’ll briefly provide the intuition of marginal analysis and then explain why economics is both extremely easy but also quite difficult…

Tyler does a great job explaining why Jevon’s model of marginal analysis (which underlies most of modern microeconomics) is elementary on one level, but also something that wasn’t discovered until the 1860s because it was not at all obvious. Here’s how he concludes Chapter 3:

[This is TC now] By studying the slow intellectual development of economics, and contrasting it with other fields of study, we can learn the following:

1. Some insights are very hard to grasp, even if they are apparently simple once they are understood. People need to “see around corners” in the right way to understand these insights and incorporate them into their world views.

2. Economics is one of those fields, and that is why it took intuitive economic reasoning so long to evolve, marginalism included. Those of us who are educators, or who spend time talking to policymakers, should take this point very seriously.

3. Even very, very smart people are likely unaware that these “see around the corner” insights are missing – did Euclid rue that he did not have access to proper supply and demand and tax incidence theory? Probably not.

4. Economics is not the only such field that is hard to grasp, some other examples being segments of botany, geology, and evolutionary biology.

5. Scientific revolutions come about when many complementary pieces are in place, such as financial support, intellectual independence, and networks of like-minded others to talk with.

Those conditions help people to understand that “seeing around those corners” can bring both high social and professional returns.

Are there major conceptual corners that today still no one can see around? If so, how might we discover what they are? And why are we not working harder on this? Or are we?

Here is the rest of Scott’s commentary.  Here is the online book.