Basic Economics 2nd Ed: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded Edition

Should be required high school reading.

Does a very good job of explaining basic common sense economics. If kids came out of high school with this knowlegde it would be of great benefit to our country. Should be required reading for the citizenry!

You'll want more than one copy

Sowell is a brilliant economist and very talented writer. I loved it so much I've given it as a gift.

So simple, yet so great!!

Even if you think you know economics or you know you do not, this book is outstanding, easy to understand, and written very well. Can't imagine not owning this!

Not a citizen's guide

Thomas Sowell is Milton Friedman with a venomous disdain for politics and the media. The book sells itself as an equationless, odorless introduction to economics, and the magic is certainly in repeated application of intuitive concepts.

Sowell builds your intuition by training you to think in terms of trade-offs of resources and the incentives which guide them. Sowell favors the market because it utilizes these incentives to allocate scarce resources most effectively, while government actions rarely have the proper incentives to direct behavior in the way government intends. As his second objective, Sowell disfavors the media and politics because they use statistics and wording that are misleading.

By using the intuitive concepts presented in the book, it is easy to see how statistics come up short and how words are often too categorical to describe situations reasonably. Later, Sowell concentrates more on economics as the allocation of scarce resources rather than on incentive.

The author also throws in other insightful, more philosophical insights along the way. For example, knowledge and power are often contained in the same person in a free market, but not in socialism, which allows a free market to find a more valuable use for the scarce resource of knowledge just by virtue of the system. For another example, profits are the price of incentive, and removing the visible price of profits causes the invisible price of inefficiency to appear. This ends up costing society more, as many factual cases show. If you consider the relationship of incentive here, this should fall into place.

In all, this book is more akin to a more political book like Free to Choose than its advertisement would lead one to suppose. It is different in that it lives more on the extremes. It has deeper analysis combined with sharper criticism of the "zest of the media" and the "jungle of misconceptions" in politics, as Thomas Sowell puts it. If you can stomach just the occasional jabs at the media and undue references to the Soviet Union--one book about the regime is cited in at least 6 chapters--this book is well worth it.

Note: Beware of the green copy because typos abound. Also, for those who think Sowell is just some pro-market fanatic, I'll leave you with this quote on p. 251, "Economic decisions made through the marketplace are not always better than decisions that governments can make. Much depends on whether those market transactions accurately reflect both the costs and the benefits which result. Under some conditions, they do not."

"Capitalism good, Communism bad"

That's basically it. Repeated ad-nauseum for 128 pages. Unfortunately that's as far as I got, I just couldn't take it. With each new concept presented, the author eventually leads the reader back to the same inevitable conclusion, "Capitalism good, Communism bad". I actually thought I was rereading the same pages by mistake or that sections of the book had been reprinted by accident.

If you are looking for a book about basic economics, as I was, something that would lay out a foundation of universal economic truths, this book is not it.

If, however you need some simplistic, one sided ammunition in order to shout down the next unsuspecting tree-hugging-commie-liberal you meet at your next cocktail party that tells you why he thinks raising the minimum wage in this country would be a good thing, then buy this book. I'm not kidding.