Best Economic Theory
In this fifth edition of Basic Economics , Thomas Sowell revises and updates his popular book on common sense economics, bringing the world into clearer focus through a basic understanding of the fundamental economic principles and how they explain our lives. Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and has taught economics at Cornell, UCLA, and Amherst.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"What sets Thomas Sowell apart from many economists and intellectuals is his ability to present complex ideas with both clarity and simplicity. As he himself once noted, "If academic writings were difficult because of the deep thoughts involved, that might be understandable, even if frustrating. Yet the book is of such breadth and depth that economist Dr. Walter Williams says "it provides an understanding of some economic phenomena that might prove elusive to a Ph.D. He also explains why, for similar reasons, rent control decreases the quality of apartment buildings, or why lowering the price of gas can cause a shortage. An insightful chapter, Sowell explains why some countries enjoy luxury while others suffer poverty, pointing to such commonly overlooked factors as geography and culture. Another addition is that this book ends with a section of questions covering important economic issues."
"This should be part of a “how to be a literate citizen” starter pack."
"Should be mandatory reading for HS students."
"The only basic economics text you will ever need."
"I recommend this work to everyone who wishes to know the way sound economic policies should work, and how to go about making the proper changes."
"I got my bachelors degree in economics but this book is so clear I will remember the concepts presented here for much longer."
"The anecdotal teaching of economics is far and away the best for a beginner...a student or a citizen looking to become more educated in a field that is vastly misunderstood."
"Easy to read."
How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing—and whose conclusions turn conventional wisdom on its head. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. “If Indiana Jones were an economist, he’d be Steven Levitt… Criticizing Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae.” (Wall Street Journal). “Principles of economics are used to examine daily life in this fun read.” (People: Great Reads).
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I enjoyed reading this book, and will soon be reading the 2nd book by these authors."
"I enjoyed the many hidden causal connections that no one without the proper research could ever have put together."
"Indeed, the most common reaction I get from people when telling them that I am an economist is that they have read Freakonomics, which implies that they have at least seen some work similar to what I do at aguanomics. All I remember was a lot of math and curves.” This depressing outcome results from lecturers who merely reproduce problems and equations on the blackboard, without helping students understand either why those theories are used or how they came to be so popular with economists. Third, there are books like mine [pdf] that try to explain how to improve failing policies using basic economic insights and incentives. This book with a memorable (but useless) name provides readers with just-so stories that are good for cocktail conversations but not for understanding economics. What struck me is their ongoing attempts to hold onto at least some elements in the original claim in later blog posts in what I’d call a “my-ladydoth-protest-too-much” manner. Looking over their other chapters (on cheating sumo wrestlers, drug dealers who live with their moms, the KKK as a multilevel marketing organization, etc. ), I agree that the chapters are interesting and thought provoking, but they do not provide “lessons on the hidden side of everything.” Instead, they read like a series of magazine articles whose quirky “insights” might contribute to your next cocktail conversation. [7] I didn’t detect any reliable technique (except perhaps to collect a neat dataset and call Steve Levitt), and that’s where I was disappointed. In this case, street dealers are (a) NOT condemned to death, (b) not able to find other work with their experience, and (c) not aware of their statistical mortality as much as their potential wealth. Dubner and Levitt present interesting puzzles worthy of cocktail conversation, but they overstate their contributions and accuracy (“numbers don’t lie” but theory can be incomplete or just wrong). He's a fine person and excellent economist, but this book is too “pop” in its oversimplification of his work and hagiographic treatment of his insights. Yes, he brings interesting statistical tools to“freaky” questions, but he’s not a “rogue economist exploring the hidden side of everything.” He’s just a guy with a dataset and empirical theory who finds some strong correlations. (8) My years of experience traveling in 100+ countries leads me to respect the diversity of beliefs and institutions that result in a variety of outcomes. As another example, take Dubner on page 199, who writes “that paper [on police officer counts and crime] was later disputed… a gradate student found an obvious mathematical mistake in it — but Levitt’s ingenuity was obvious.” I’m not sure I’d say the same about someone whose claims rested on logic with “obvious mathematical mistakes”!"
"I majored in Economics in college, and when I heard people talking about this book, I *had* to buy it and read it."
"This book is absolutely brilliant."
"Some have called the studies covered in this book controversial, however I learned very early on from my math teacher father, "math doesn't lie, statistics do"."
"You may or may not agree with everything in here, but that is not the point."
In doing so, he takes on some of the reigning titans of the redistributionist movementincluding John Rawls, Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitzand shows how a remarkable number of their claims cannot withstand plain common sense, expressed in plain English. American Spectator Sowell's latest book, latest of 52 by my count, contains the kind of acute analysis and fearless commentary his readers have relied on since 1971's Economics: Analysis and Issues ... his writing is crystal-clear, free of academic jargon and the kind of specialist clutter that often disfigures the writing of academics.... Breitbart [ Wealth, Poverty and Politics should be one of the most influential works of the 2016 election season. This isn't just a work of characteristic brilliance from Sowell—it's a laser-guided intellectual weapon aimed at the foundations of liberal envy politics.... Dr. Sowell's book is a masterful fusion of science and common sense on the subject of why some groups are impoverished, and what society can do to lift them out of poverty.... Every presidential candidate should read this book immediately, and require all campaign surrogates to digest it as well....
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Sowell is, of course, an economist by profession, and this book’s basic point is an economic one—namely, as Sowell quotes Henry Hazlitt: “The real problem of poverty is not a problem of ‘distribution’ but of production. Sowell evaluates possible drivers for these differences in achievement, dividing them into geographical, cultural, social and political. Sowell then addresses culture. He points out the success of some frequently transplanted cultures (Germans, Chinese, Lebanese) and the ability of some cultures to successfully change to adapt new ideas (Japan), and the fact that some cultures have failed by rejecting change and regressing (Japan again, but earlier; China in the 1400s). And since cultural receptivity and flexibility is, for Sowell, the touchstone of the ability to flourish in productivity (it is the opposite of cultural isolation), that spells bad things for the Arabs. Related to the benefit of cultural flexibility is one manifestation of the reverse: the frequent hostility of majorities to productive minorities, which Sowell points out is (rationally) encouraged by majority political leaders for their own benefit. This is where Sowell again addresses education, pointing out that while some cultures value education, and this can be valuable, not all education increases human capital—“some education develops little or no human capital when it produces few, if any, marketable skills—and some education even produces negative human capital, in the form of attitudes, expectations and aversions that negatively impact the economy.” Sowell hammers this point repeatedly: “People who have acquired academic degrees, without acquiring many economically meaningful skills, not only face personal disappointment and disaffection with society, but also have often become negative factors in the economy and even sources of danger, especially when they lash out at economically successful minorities and ethnically polarize the whole society they live in. And here Sowell again drives home a point that he has hammered many times before—measuring income inequality by pretending there are two groups, “the rich” and “the poor,” by percentiles, is stupid, because the composition of those groups changes continuously, and many actual people who are “poor” at one point in their lives are “rich” later. (Sowell also here rejects the idea that overpopulation causes poverty, reasoning along the same lines as Angus Deaton did, at greater length and with more moral outrage, in “The Great Escape.”). This section is where Sowell addresses a topic about which he frequently speaks—the argument that black people’s modern collective (but not individual) inability to compete on standardized test scores and educational attainment shows lower IQ. He does not reject that possibility (as I say, he is all about thinking, not rejecting arguments for ideological reasons), but he points out that prior to the modern post-1960s deterioration of black culture, black students scored much higher test and IQ scores than today (and other students from deficient cultures, like whites from Appalachia, scored lower IQ scores than black students). Sowell points out “None of the usual explanations of racial disparities—genetics, racism, poverty or a ‘legacy of slavery’—can explain this retrogression over time.” He attributes it to “ghetto culture, essentially an offshoot of the dysfunctional redneck culture of the South.” (He also explicitly rejects slavery and later discrimination as an explanation for black failures; it’d be interesting to see Sowell feed Ta-Nehisi Coates into his intellectual meat grinder.). As part of this, Sowell rejects the currently fashionable attempt to ascribe success to (poorly-defined) “privilege.” Sowell believes in personal responsibility, which may be made harder or easier by the culture one comes from, but that does not excuse failure or prevent achievement. But Sowell’s (related) main point is that political polarization is a huge barrier to national success, as he shows with examples ranging from the Ottoman Empire to modern Malaysia. They have serious and often catastrophic social problems, but these are seldom the result of material deprivation—and are far more often the result of social degeneration, much of it representing social retrogressions during the era of the rising welfare state and the pervasive, non-judgmental welfare state ideology.” And Sowell repeatedly points out that identity group politics don’t correlate with improvements for that group, but rather for benefits for grievance leaders. And, in fact, although he only mentions it in passing, Sowell actually in part rejects the concept of the Great Divergence, noting that “Economic inequalities among nations did not begin with the industrial revolution, and the international inequalities of ancient times were by no means necessarily less than the inequalities of today.” Greg Clark might disagree, and exploring this point might actually be a fascinating follow-up book by Sowell. While discussing cultural differences, Sowell makes a point that I had made to myself, but had not seen before in print. But I, at least, quit reading the book a few chapters in, when the authors addressed cultural differences among nations, and wholly rejected that cultural differences could explain any differences among national results, with their WHOLE AND ONLY argument being that “Canada and the United States were English colonies, but so were Sierra Leone and Nigeria. The English legacy is not the reason for the success of North America.” Sowell punctures this PC-based approach with the obvious point that regardless of colonial status, the actual culture of Sierra Leone and Nigeria was in no way made English, and in fact their cultures are almost certainly the main driver of their differences today. Sowell also eviscerates the bell-bottom-flavored philosopher John Rawls in four pages: “To say, as Rawls does, that morally nothing should be done to benefit the rest of society if it does not also help those at the bottom can amount to enshrining a veto on progress, on behalf of those with a counterproductive lifestyle.” And, of course, “By pushing the production process off into the background, redistributionists [such as Rawls] avoid confronting the question whether income inequalities might be matched by corresponding inequalities in economic productivity.”. The book does contain the usual Sowell tics, which some readers may find distracting."
"The answers offered to blacks in America have been in principle—despite local variations—very much like the answers offered to Czechs in nineteenth century Bohemia, Sinhalese in twentieth century Sri Lanka, Maoris in New Zealand and many others elsewhere: group solidarity in pursuit of collective political solutions and, in the meantime, resistance to the cultures of those who are more fortunate.” -- page 157. There is a reason that Thomas Sowell is my favorite economist. There are so many factors in play such as geography, demographic composition, weather, availability of water, education, disease, cultural differences and of course politics (as demonstrated in the quotation above) that accounts for much of the economic disparity in the world today. In "Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Prespective" Thomas Sowell makes all of his salient points in a very logical and extremely workmanlike manner."
Best Macroeconomics
NOTE: This book does not include Access Code PRINCIPLES OF MACROECONOMICS, Seventh Edition, continues to be the most popular and widely-used text in the economics classroom. His published articles have appeared in academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics, and in more widely accessible forums, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Fortune.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Lastly, the authors humor comes though and makes the book more fun to read."
"Book is in excellent condition."
"Basic concepts, terms, acronyms and understanding of macroeconomics."
"This text book helped me out a lot because I did not have to use eBook."
"This book is easy to understand and has a great flow for the content."
"Arrived in good condition."
"Love it except for the fact that my professor never used the book....lesson learned: wait to see if the professor actually uses the textbook before renting."
"The textbook came in great condition and was exactly what I needed for my Macroeconomics class."
Best Microeconomics
PRINCIPLES OF MICROECONOMICS, Seventh Edition, continues to be the most popular and widely-used text in the economics classroom. His published articles have appeared in academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics, and in more widely accessible forums, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Fortune.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I needed this for my Microeconomics class, the font was a good size and it was easy to read."
"It was a great experience and the delivery was right on time."
"It's the best Microeconomics book I've ever (been forced to) read."
"The book was written by Gregory Mankiw who has an incredible résumé being a Harvord University professor and an economic adviser to George W. Bush (political bias aside that is impressive)."
"Super easy to read and understand!"
"This is a good book that has understandable explanations and is a fine textbook."
"I think the math behind these curves is important and unfortunately the book stays high level and doesn't provide more in-depth examples or tutorials on how to calculate curves, deadweight loss and other important concepts."
"This is a required text for a class I'm taking, but I have enjoyed it so far."