Takeshi Amemiya, Edward Ames Edmonds Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford, is known to many readers of this Journal for his two textbooks on econometrics and his long-term contributions to the discipline (represented well in the collection of articles Studies in Econometric Theory (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1994)). The book under review has grown out of five years of teaching a course at Stanford by the same title; the description of ECON114 in the Stanford Bulletin 2007–2008 is indistinguishable from the content of this book.

A preface that lists the pieces of the book is followed by Part 1, History, Society, Culture, an idiosyncratic survey of the Greek world. The historical survey, pp. 3–12, is not without imperfections, some of these substantial, but I pass them by because they do not pertain to the economic history of Athens.

“Society and culture” (pp. 13–36) begins with a three-page comparison of Greek and Shinto religions, with the Greek descriptions supported by sparse scholarly references and the Shinto supported by zero. Religion is followed by half-page subsections entitled “Honor and shame,” “Oikos and polis,” “Helping friends and harming enemies,” and “Competition.” When we get to “Status of women,” Amemiya settles into a measured discussion of this thorny subject, but here as elsewhere his good intentions are undermined by excessive and unnecessary quotation of original Greek that is unfortunately filled with errors. The subsection on slaves and slavery contains cogent observations on slave productivity and return on capital at the factories they worked in. There follow largely irrelevant subsections on homosexuality and population. This last subsection estimates the population at Athens by offering to readers the range of numbers available in the eight sources used for population. Here as elsewhere Amemiya makes no attempt to discriminate among his secondary sources, and his dependence on others for the interpretation of primary sources is unfortunate.

Sections 3 (“Athenian democracy”) and 4 (“Was Athenian democracy a success?”) are straightforwardly descriptive. In section 4, he makes lists of failures and successes of the democracy, although I am wondering whether some of Amemiya's readers would not think that some of the failures in fact were successes, and at least two of the failures, the Sicilian Disaster and the execution of Socrates, had little to do with the form of government. The discussion of “Elite and mass” (p. 51) is unnecessarily problematized by a reference to Alkmaion's father Megakles as his descendant.

Part 2 brings us to the Economy. An intelligent and succinct discussion of the primitivist-modernist/substantivist-formalist debate, about the embeddedness of the economy in ancient Athens, is made less excellent by a reference on p. 57 to the date of Karl Bücher's seminal essay as 1983 when it is in fact 1893 (and Die Wirtschaftliche Entwicklung des Altertums is absent from the bibliography under either date) and by the fact that Moses Finley is credited on the same page (and earlier on p. x) with introducing the term “substantivism,” when in actuality the term was Karl Polanyi's coinage in his collaborative Trade and Market (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). Amemiya accurately reminds us that Finley's approach to the ancient economy is not on the pedestal that it once was (a modification amply but respectfully demonstrated by Amemiya's Stanford colleagues Joe Manning and Ian Morris in their The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005]), but it is also misleading for Amemiya to say on p. 60, “[W]e can safely say that the scholarship of the last ten years has decisively supported the modernist's view regarding fifth- and fourth-century Athens.”

Section 6, “The Athenian Economy of the fifth and fourth century,” is the heart of the book and here Amemiya is at his best and worst. Long lists of prices of things (pp. 68–74, taken from lists assembled elsewhere) and of agricultural outputs and consumption (pp. 74–80, using secondary sources without discrimination) are followed by a dissertation on trade (pp. 80–114), which is not informed by recent scholarship (e.g., Amemiya is unaware of Charles Reed's Maritime Traders in the Ancient Greek World [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]). Amemiya makes assertions about trade in staples and slaves and then offers the reader a five-page (pp. 87–91) mathematical thought experiment on how many slaves needed to be imported each year (6,000 is his answer). His handling of public finance (pp. 92–106), which draws on a number of reliable secondary sources, is comprised of lists without arguments. Subsections on money lending and borrowing practices somehow ignore Paul Millett's Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The section ends with a “model of the Athenian economy of the fourth century” that begins, promisingly, with thoughtful discussions of per-capita consumption of grains, diet varying by level of wealth, and includes fascinating and not unreasonable assumptions about wages and the number of work-days, and other quantities. He continues with two pages of columns of numbers, which are drawn from earlier discussion, and reaches a mathematical conclusion—the narrative is no longer present—that in the fourth century Athens's GDP was 4,430 talents. (In a footnote he adds, with characteristic silence about his secondary sources, that John Adams estimated the GDP at 6,000. I checked the reference: Adams says nothing about Athenian GDP and if he had done so he would have been talking about the fifth century not the fourth.) There is much here to read and to enjoy for a variety of reasons, but there is little to carry away.

Finally in Part 3, Amemiya gets to the Economics. There are sections on “Xenophon's economics,” “Plato's ethics,” “Aristotle's ethics,” “Plato's economics,” and “Aristotle's economics.” For those unfamiliar with these subjects, these pages will for the most part be illuminating, but Amemiya's treatment of these important thinkers is undercut by his inability to use primary sources (continuously revealed by the butchered Greek), an eccentric use of secondary sources, and a tendency toward digression (e.g., the interruption of his discussion of Aristotle's economics to offer Edgeworth's contract curve as a way to solve a problem Aristotle could not [pp. 152–53]). A final section on Bentham and utilitarianism is designed, I surmise, to explain that modern economic theory is grounded in it, although he forms no arguments, and to hammer home Amemiya's own useful initial observation that for the ancients economic theory existed to articulate how citizens should behave, as opposed to modern, utilitarianism-influenced, economics that asserts how people do behave.

This book, which appears to consist in large measure of the notes for Amemiya's course, is not one I can recommend for those unfamiliar with ancient Athens. But for those who are already comfortable with the subject and would enjoy an experienced econometrician's take on the ancient Athenian world, this is a brisk read, but one that must be undertaken with care.