Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science

Quick Thoughts:
  1. I have to admit, I was prepared to be disappointed in this book.  The preface was written by one of author's colleagues and it seemed like the entire point was trying to make economics sound interesting.  I do find economics interesting.  So when you tell me that most people think its boring, but this book will make it interesting, I get concerned that the book is going to dumb it down, ironically making the entire subject uninteresting.  So, my expectations were lowered.
  2. The introduction lowered my expectations further when the author made a pejorative statement about democrats.  He quickly pivoted to another subject, but at this point, I didn't want to like the author.  In fact, I almost put the book down. I was afraid that I had made a mistake and bought a piece of political propaganda.  I didn't see myself sitting through 250 pages of being insulted.
  3. But, my fears were unfounded.  It was actually a very entertaining and informative book about economics.  The author covered lots of the fun issues like market success, market failure, the role of government, development economics, public goods, taxes, fiscal policy,  international trade, and money supply.  Really he hit the classical issues in a really common sense way.  When he reached an issue that was normative, he would label it as such and then move on.  Basically, he took many difficult and varied economic concepts and made them understandable without resorting to math equations and charts.   That's fairly impressive.
  4. I picked this book as a counter to the popular behavioral economic books I've been reading.  Instead, it was a good review of the concepts that I had during my college days.
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