It's kind of interesting that the review (and the other comments here so far) doesn't even mention the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs the evil socialistic Emergency. Is that view just so ingrained that it's not even worth mentioning?
The Emergents were socialists? I've always seen them much more as fascists. For me, the sensor network plus 'focused' monitoring was a pretty terrifying exploration of a technologicially perfect fascist state.
the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs the evil socialistic Emergency
I enjoyed that in the books, but I'll point out that his Realtime books are much more explicitly anarcho-capitalist.
As an aside, I think you're wrong to characterize the economics as politics. It's very common to assume that such as "minimum wages increase unemployment at the margin" as a direct condemnation of minimum wage policies. But that presupposes a given set of values. It's quite quite possible to make a political statement in favor of minimum wages (for example), while acknowledging the economics of it.
Economics and politics are two separate things. They are related, they inform each other, but there's always a case to be made for things like "I accept that doing X would have a negative effect on total economic efficiency, but we have a moral obligation to pay that price."
The same author (Leonard) also published a paper in _History of Political Economy_, "More Merciful and Not Less Effective." I remember it as similar, but I'm not finding an ungated version online.
