The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Most people associate economics with larg-scale wonders like the stock-market, big business, and international trade. Most people also assume that economists are dismally technical. Stephen Landsburg attempts to prove them wrong. He shows how the laws of economics can reveal themselves in surprising and humorous ways. He demonstrates that, no matter what the endeavour, people respond to incentives in understandable, if not always predictable ways. By illustrating how economists think about daily experience, he lays the basis for a richer appreciation of the full range of economic activity. In this guided tour of the familiar, through an unfamiliar lens, Landsburg explains many of the key issues of economics in chapters that read more like detective stories than textbook lessons.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Most of economics can be summarized in four words: "People respond to incentives." Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Most of economics can be summarized in four words: "People respond to incentives." Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deep arguments lightly presented,
By richyrich78 "richyrich78" (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life (Paperback)
A joy to read! Insightful, yet beautifully simple, arguments for many key economic ideas, such as why prices are good and arguments in favour of free trade. Some of the arguments are counter-intuitive, such as seatbelts killing people and recycling paper being bad for trees, but are great truisms which make you think differently and more lucidly.
I also like Landsburgh's modesty. For example, he admits that, despite being a top-notch economist, he cannot satisfactorily explain why popcorn is so expensive at cinemas! And I like his sense of humour -the book is full of jokes which add enormously to the pleasure of reading it. Great for both economists and non-economists who want an introduction to the subject.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worth reading, but not necessarily agreeing,
By
This review is from: The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life (Paperback)
The Armchair Economist is clearly written and interesting, but to me it's real value is in understanding how "supply-side" economists think. Much of the value is in trying to spot the hidden assumption or the logical fallacy.
As an example of the first: he argues that we should decide whether to do anything on global warming based on the monetary value people place on driving cars versus the monetary value other people place on not having their islands flooded. Ok, that's probably a self-consistent way of evaluating a policy, but there are at least two other frameworks for evaluation in common use that he doesn't mention: i) some idea of democracy, whereby the wishes of the (poorer) islanders have the same weight per person as the (richer) car drivers; ii) the idea of an external moral or ethical standard requiring that we avoid or minimise damage to the planet, independent of the opinions of others. Failure to acknowledge standards for decision making other than monetary seems a major flaw in the book. The second weakness, the logical fallacy, is mainly illustrated whenever he demonstrates that two choices for economic policy have equal cost - e.g. a country paying for a something now versus borrowing money to pay for it; or making cars in the USA versus growing corn for export and buying cars from Japan. To a first approximation, he's correct in saying that the two alternatives are of equal cost. However at this point he should go on to consider the cost of second-order effects - e.g. the rising interest rate as borrowing increases, or the loss of future choice if the industrial capability to build cars is lost. Since most or all of the book suffers from one or both of these problems, I wouldn't recommend this as a way of understanding economics, so much as a way of understanding economists. Given the importance of supply-side economists sharing his views, the book is useful to understand how and why economic policy is set.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Too cocky by half,
By Gareth Greenwood "morgol" (Wales, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life (Paperback)
Parts of this book delighted me and parts infuriated me. From a conventional economic perspective, Landsburg does a standard demolition job on many popular misconceptions about how markets and economies work. On the other hand he never questions the validity of the conventional economic theories on which he bases what he says. Worse, his cocksure tone belies what I suspect are some stark intellectual limitations.
Part VI, entitled, "The Pitfalls of Science", is IMO one of the most revealing in the book. In it Landsburg reproduces the text of a letter he sent to the organiser of his daughter's group at a Jewish Community Centre. The letter complained that the group was indoctrinating his daughter in environmentalism. He writes of himself and his wife, "...We are not environmentalists. We ardently oppose environmentalists. We consider environmentalism a form of mass hysteria akin to Islamic fundamentalism or the War on Drugs. We do not recycle. We teach our daughter not to recycle. We teach her that people who try to convince her to recycle, or who try to force her to recycle, are intruding on her rights." This sadly typifies the mentality of the many economists who ignore all biophysical considerations in economics. His daughter's rights won't count for much on the trashed planet that people with his attitudes are likely to create. I found myself asking how much weight I should attach to Landsburg's other arguments when his views on environmentalism expose such addled thinking.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
