Book review: Tomáš Sedláček, Economics of good and evil: The quest for economic meaning from gilgamesh to Wall Street

Abstract

The author of the book in concern is Tomáš Sedláček. Born in 1977 in Prague, Sedláček is rather a young but well-known and talented Czech economist. He got his education from Prague University. One of his main successes is that at the age of twenty-four, he worked as an economic adviser to the former Czech president Václav Havec for two years. Then he became one of the members of the National Economic Council which is an advisory body to the Czech Prime Minister. He worked there also for two years. Currently he is the Chief Macroeconomic Strategist at the Československá obchodní banka (CSOB), a well-known commercial bank in Czechia. Additionally, he lectures at Charles University, and also writes as a columnist. The book written by Sedláček is titled as Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street. The book was firstly published in 2009, and it had its second edition in 2012. The book received the Wald Press Award in 2009, and Deutscher Wirtschaftsbuchpreis (Frankfurt Book Fair Award) in 2012. Furthermore it was translated into twenty one languages including Turkish.1 The book consists of fourteen chapters starting from The Epic of Gilgamesh, and ends with Masters of Truth. Between these two, there are chapters focusing on the main economic ideas of different time periods following each other (nearly) chronologically. Thus the book can easily be accepted as a book on history of economic thought, though a unique one. In fact Brittan (2011) calls Sedláček’s book as “effectively a critical history of western (economic) thought.”