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Summary: A Treasure Chest
Review: Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy is a treasure chest of information. While simplifying the complex principles of economics into easy to understand (and fun to read) pieces, Sowell does not sacrifice his usual quality. Like his more complex works, Basic Economics is full of entertaining and startling examples that make the book more than just a dry treatise. Exsposing many common economic fallacies , Sowell teaches important and critical lessons about a subject usually taken for granted, beaten up, and forgotten. This is a monumental and important work, but also a breezy, fun read.
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Summary: A great book - a real gift
Review: A great book, one that every educated person should read and understand. In only 350 pages Thomas Sowell provides the reader a very clear understanding of economics, money and banking, international trade and many other related subjects. He does this remarkable feat without using any math or charts. This book should be in every family's library. You can provide any high school kid a solid base for future learning and their personal prosperity by having them read this book and then discuss it with you. The title is boring but the book is a real gift to all of us fortunate enough to read it and have it available as a reference. It is just amazing how much knowledge is available for $. I have taken many expensive courses in economics and finance both as an undergraduate and in a graduate economics program. This book covers most of the courses and then goes further. I am recommending this book to everyone who wishes to better understand our society. It well deserves five stars and more. Thank you Thomas Sowell for a very fine book.
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Summary: the antidote....
Review: ...for all those horrible, dry and completely useless economics texts taught in the halls of academia. It has been noted, quite sadly but correctly, that the main use of the field of economics is to employ economists. Most standard economic theory is nonsense, because it is based on the idea that man acts 100% rationally at all times and always considers the action with the highest utility function. Most economists are embarrassed to admit their work is closer to sociology than mathematics, and so they try to fudge it by making their work LOOK like mathematics as much as they can. So they apply so many formulas and calculations to their work in a desperate bid for legitimacy that their findings look like the scribblings of an idiot savant writing random physics equations on a chalkboard, and have about as much meaning. Standard economic theory as taught in universities might work if people were soulless robots who acted with the precision and predictability of computer programs, but they are not and do not. Clearly standard economics as taught in universities has failed, as most politicians, most of the general public and even many CEOs do not understand the basic function of pricing and the implications of supply and demand in a free market economy. This book lays it all out clearly, with no mumbo jumbo and no vapid theories that are dependent on retrofitted curves and laughable variables to try and look impressive. Mr. Sowell speaks plainly and conveys simple concepts that somehow even many ivy league professors find themselves too stupid to really understand (how else can they explain their lingering taste for socialist policies?). If you want to understand how economics works without the ivory tower hype, buy this book. If I had my way this book would be required reading for every politician, and they would have to demonstrate an understanding of its contents before uttering word one about taxes or profits or moral obligations of businesses or anything else related to the economy.
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Summary: Spitting Into the Wind
Review: In the textbook industry, "progress" is signified by style over substance, with the goal apparently to achieve the look and feel of "USA Today." Books compete to have more charts, sidebars, highlighted sections, and, of course, the ever-necessary multimedia CD ROM. Into this wind spits Thomas Sowell, with his delightfully retro attempt to put the "text" back into textbook. Taking us back to the days before Samuelson, and indeed before Marshall, he presents economics in terms of logic, examples, and occasional data. Turning to substance, one might fairly ask, "Is this book an economics textbook or a right-wing polemic?" The answer is "yes." My college economics professor used to point out that the liberal Samuelson and the conservative Friedman believed in the same price theory. However, Friedman applied it to policy more aggressively. Sowell applies economic theory aggressively to policy, and the chips happen to fall well to the right of center. But what is there in "Basic Economics" to which a liberal economist might object? I can only think of a few things. 1. Sowell takes the monetarist view of macroeconomic fluctuations. He does not mention the savings/investment imbalance theory of Keynes. But even most liberal economists won't stick up for Keynes nowadays (I will). 2. Sowell points out that social security is an intergenerational transfer, and that its feasibility depends on the ratio of workers to retirees. Liberal economists agree with this view. But they still like social security, and Sowell does not deal with their rationale (weak as it may be). 3. Sowell points out that poverty is misrepresented in the media, and that economic growth and changes in lifetime circumstances erase much of what is reported as poverty. Again, liberal economists would have to agree, but nonetheless they would have put the issue of "income distribution" into Sowell's chapter on the proper role of government. He never quite meets them head-on. But I wish that liberals would learn "Basic Economics." One need only look at the California "energy crisis" to see the consequences of economic ignorance.
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Summary: Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
Review: Sowell has done it again. He presents basic economic principles in a way that all can understand. But what makes Sowell so unique is that he uses so many interesting and provocative examples to illustrate his points. This book should be read by all intelligient Americans and each member of Congress as well. I plan to recommend this book to those friends you want to understand basic economic principles without the pain of taking a course in economics. This is the best book of its type since Friedman's Free to Choose in 1980. It is fitting that the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow should write it.
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Summary: I wish
Review: I wish there were some way to get this book into the hands of every household in America. Someone with the means should fund that project. The amazing thing is that what Sowell says throughout this book should need saying. Much of what he says is patently self-evident to anyone not blinded by idelogical prejudices. We should not have to continue repeating the mistakes of the past (and present). Sowell, in his own inimitable style, discusses clearly and concisely all of the basic issues involved in economics. Probably the most important thing he says repeatedly is that economic plans should NOT be evaluateed on the basis of their purported goals. Instead, they should be evaluated on the basis of the incentives they will create. It is a failure to take into account these incentives that explain why so many good intentions have resulted in complete and utter failure. Incentives, not intentions, are what count. If you want to know why the common analyses of the ecomomy and the common suggestions for improvement that are promoted by politicians, pundits, and professional news anchors are misguided and counter-productive, read this book.
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Summary: Great basics and wonderful examples
Review: I have lent this out to friends and use Sowell's examples constantly. A wondeful book of basic sound economic principles and what there misuse will bring.
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Summary: Should Be Required College Text
Review: Thomas Sowell knows how to explain economics in simple terms without complicated graphs and charts. There's way too much goofy economic thinking expounded by the media, politicians, and educators today. We'd all be better off if we understood and applied the simple economics taught in this book.
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Summary: Good read, but could be better
Review: Thomas Sowell has two very different styles of writing. One reads like a Ph.D. thesis, with footnotes galore, and the other reads like his columns. Fortunately, this book is written like his columns. I enjoy learning about economics, especially as it applies to political decisions. I teethed on economics first way back as a teenager reading Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose." Sadly, after that book, I found little else in the past 20 years or so that did anything other than say the same things in different ways. Like the laws of physics, the laws of economics don't change, yet it is entirely possible to find an author who enriches your understanding of these laws in such a way that you find you know more than you used to. Richard Feynman was such an author for physics. I don't want to exaggerate, but while Thomas Sowell is no Richard Feynman, this book is the first time I've learned significantly more about economics and its practical applications since "Free to Choose". Sowell takes ideas and concepts that I thought I knew well and makes them even more clear, and further introduces implications of these concepts (especially from modern examples) that were completely new to me. Were this all I had to say about the book, I'd give it five stars. The reason for the four-star rating is that it is not nearly as organized as it ought to be. (I'd give it 4.5 stars if I could.) Sowell has a habit in all of his writings (longer than a column) of repeating facts as if he had not referred to them in previous chapters. Now, as I want to go back through the book and look up a decent short example of what I admired, I have a hard time finding them. There is an index, of course, which has its uses, but the titles of various chapters and sections are usually one- or two-word generalities. For example, I'd like to see headings like "Prices measure economic trade-offs," instead of "Prices and Costs." With a few extra words, he could indicate the real topic matter of the subsequent paragraphs rather than a very general indication, and I would be able to look back through the book, reading the large type to remind me what was discussed. Similarly, he has a very good description and explanation of the Great Depression (deflation is quite bad when you don't let wages get lower along with prices), but it's found under "National Economy" not under "Great Depression." Overall, though, it's a good read. I finished it in about three days, which is pretty fast for me when reading non-fiction. He managed to change my mind on some topics, such as having American companies pay "fair wages" for people they hire in poor countries: is it better for the country in question to hire 1000 people at $10.00 an hour or 10,000 people at $1.00 an hour? The $1.00 is a pittance to an American, but is real wealth in the poor country. At $10 an hour for the 1,000, you leave 9,000 people earning perhaps 10 cents an hour in a local job (if they have one at all), so only a select few benefit from such "fairness." He doesn't actually say that one setup is more fair than the other, but rather that such trade-offs always exist, that economics is precisely about these trade-offs, and the most popular economic fallacies arise from ignoring the trade-offs.
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Summary: Antidote to economic illiteracy
Review: Economic illiteracy (and its political results) may be the single largest cause of avoidable human misery worldwide. Even in the US, (the most advanced market ecomony in the world), it is painful to listen to the daily pronouncements of most politicians and commentators on the subject. Sowell provides a good complilation of what any educated citizen needs to know. As he admits, there is little in this book that hasn't been understood by at least some economists for decades (and sometimes centuries). But he spices the presentation with many recent examples of political folly.
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