From John King, Humberston, Lincolnshire, UK
Pascal Boyer makes assertions that he is entitled to make in the field of psychology, but he makes claims in the field of economics that he is certainly not.
If you had asked a psychologist to write an article in which he discussed astronomy, and in that article he asserted that no planet has a retrograde motion, you would have been committing the same error.
The first of his “seven flawed ideas” – the notion that wealth is a fixed-size pie – certainly holds in sub-Saharan Africa.
His assertion that prices cannot be controlled by government regulation is wrong in the field of healthcare. All advanced countries have government controls on spending in healthcare, from Japan's free market with price controls, to the UK with its relatively socialised medicine.
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The only country that doesn't attempt to control prices in healthcare is the US, where health costs are vastly higher than in any other advanced country and outcomes are relatively poor.
I am sure Boyer is correct in his psychological analysis, but he should be careful about his economic assertions.
