Despite having been to business school (I considered Economics as a major) and spending my career in the Banking industry, I felt a need for a refresher in economics to ensure I wasn’t jumping to conclusions or making invalid assumptions as I read the business and political news of the day. I found this book exceeded the cumulative value of all the economics courses I have taken, explaining it all in a very understandable manner while incorporating many real-world examples and using the logic explained to interpret historic and more recent economic events. I do not feel you need economics or business knowledge or experience to understand what is provided; you only need an interest in the subject. However, at times the material is dry.

Thomas Sowell was recommended to me, and I was most impressed. He analyzed and explained every economic-related problem I could think of and explored the difference between the answer economics provided and a business, government or political interpretation of the same issue. In doing so, he defined what economics is and what it is not. He also helped me to understand what we are missing as a citizenry if we lack a healthy understanding of economics. This was not some intellectual discussion; on every page Sowell was describing how economics could be applied to the problems and challenges of today.

Published in 2000 this did not feel dated. At times it felt as if it was written to directly address some of the confusion and misunderstandings of the past ten years. It was not only a refresher for me; I gained a deeper understanding of several issues, and some problems were explained for which I had little previous understanding. The sections on international trade strengthened my understanding and opinions about tariffs and protectionist trade strategies, which was one of the takeaways I had hoped to get from the book. If you already have a wealth of economics knowledge, you might not find this book of value, or you might want to read specific sections from which you think you could benefit.

Has its biases but definitely offers a valid way of thinking about economics. I think the Chicago School of economics offers a good framework to work off of and this book is a good introduction to the intricacies of various economic frameworks (with an obvious bias towards the Chicago School).

I found the last 5 or so chapters really insightful (especially the chapter on the international disparity of wealth) so try to make it through the book and you might learn something new irrespective of which economic framework you prefer.

Really good, filled in a lot of cracks for me.

Thomas Sowell exposes the fallacies and outright lies the American people have been subjected to in the advancement of progressive entitlement centric economic programs by the modern crop of corrupt politicians. If you take anything from this book, it should be this: The intended goals of any type of economic aid can never be considered separately from the actual economic incentives the policies implemented to ostensibly reach that goal will create, without causing more destruction and more harm to the economy and the people as a whole.

It is up to us as citizens of this great nation, to hold our governments accountable and to demand that they consider the full economic ramifications of their plans before they implement them. Why bother, you say? Economics is so boring. But boring as it may be, it is inextricably tied to man's liberty, and if we neglect it, if we leave it to the politicians and corporations, we may awake one day to find that we have somehow lost it, both for ourselves and for our children. Read this book, and begin to take your responsibility as a citizen a bit more seriously.

4.5 stars. Karl Marx was not a scientist. Nor was Adam Smith before him. They were philosophers. Theorists. Idea men. That’s what all economists in those days were. They had little tested knowledge, and so which economic system was best was all a matter of opinion.

But things are now much different. Nations and local governments tried the various theories. And we’ve seen the results. We now have a whole century of data. Furthermore, economists now are scientists. They use scientific methods and deal with tested knowledge. Sure, there are still controversies, just as there are in any science, but the basic principles of economics today are NOT matters of opinion.

For example, we know what happens when governments impose price controls in all their many varieties—rent caps, minimum wages, laws against price gouging, and medical care cost limits. These last few years we’ve seen a dramatic demonstration of what happens when they meddle with the prices of home loans. We know what happens when they impose tariffs or give subsidies to special groups like farmers or steel producers. We know what happens when they create barriers to people entering a market to compete, like they’ve done with immigrants. We know what taxes do.

The unfortunate thing is that many of these principles seem to be ignored by our politicians. And by those who vote them in. And so we can have a Congress pass massive health care legislation that will cause health care shortages just as similar laws caused shortages in other countries. This is how we have a president who in a recent speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce suggested, in good Marxist fashion, that it was business owners who kept the American workers down by hoarding all the profits. Has he not looked at the data which shows that huge profits invite more competition, which tries to get ahead of the leader by cutting prices, which allows the American workers to get more for less, thus raising their standard of living?

In the 1980′s and 1990′s India and China began to make fundamental changes to their economic policies, doing the things that have been proven to work. Suddenly, the economies of those nations started to grow. It’s estimated that 20 million people in India rose out of poverty in a decade. In China, more than a million people rose out of poverty EACH MONTH.

But this seems lost on a number of politicians. Don’t let it be lost on you. We have critical elections coming up. One of the best things we can do is educate ourselves about these basic economic principles so we can cut through all the political blarney. I haven’t found a better, more enjoyable book on the subject than Basic Economic Principles: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell. Sowell is an economist and Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His book is written for the general public and so foregoes dry charts and lots of theoretical ho-hum for lots of real-life examples and straight-forward explanations. There are times when I wish he would have gone into more detail on a few subjects, but what he lacks in depth in a handful of areas, he makes up with breadth. Furthermore, the way he presents the topic was interesting enough to make me stay up late a number of nights well past my bedtime.

How do you review a book that has been heralded and scorned for years? It’s not likely that my thoughts are going to add anything to the debate. The argument over free markets or centrally planned economies, open or isolationist policies, government regulated or private contracts has been going on for centuries. Both sides have their eloquent apologists. They have all weighed in on this book at great length.
Unfortunately, it appears that the tyrants are winning in the court of public opinion. This book goes a long way in exposing the fallacies that allow those socialist ideas to sound so good. Sowell uses history, data, and current events to explain the dangers of many popular ideas and policies. It was fascinating.
One thing I did find out…
It’s not intimidating. I’m not even sure why, but I always thought of this as some tome to only be attempted by the incredibly smart or fiercely determined. Instead, I found it a fascinating explanation of the way our world works and as easy to understand as any popular history. So, that was my tiny contribution to the supporting reviews of Sowell’s wonderful work.
Read it. Give it to your teens. Read it to them if you have to. You need it. They need it.

Thomas Sowell is a genius. I knew that going into this book, but now I'm completely convinced. In the spirit of refusing to be passively educated by pop culture and the media, I have decided to educate myself on hot topics by reading material from authorities on the subject. Thomas Sowell and this book fit into that profile (and, yes, I am that much of a geek that I'm exclaiming over an economics book!).

Please note that, although this is not written in high academic prose, it is still not happy-fluffy-after-work reading. It is, however, a book in which Sowell does a wonderful job of covering the basic workings of economic principles, a subject that is so often poorly understood and so often easily misconstrued. In plain English, Sowell explains an economic principle and then illustrates how that principle operates, frequently contrasting the reactions of a capitalistic economy and a socialistic economy. If I could create a required reading list for Americans concerned with their future and their children's future, this would be among the top books on that list.

Thomas Sowell is a generational thinker. Friedman is gone, Sowell is basically retired. And what's left of the Austrians, really? I guess we're all safe to assume Keynes, flawed as some of his theories may be, will at least be the last book tossed onto the fire.

A PhD is a Marxist for most of his early years. He pulls himself out of abject poverty and spends his entire career studying "the dismal science." He reaches conclusions that don't make ideologues on either side feel good. That's one unfortunate thing about economics...as far as I can tell, when done properly, it's not in the business of validating peoples policy ideas.
"...(economics) pours cold water on many otherwise attractive and exciting-but fallacious-notions about how the world can be arranged." Should we read his work thoroughly and reach our own conclusions? No, best just to declare him a "conservative" or "right-wing hack" or "pseudo-intellectual" and remain in our untouched bubbles of virtuousness.

Even if you lean left, to pretend that you can take nothing away from one of the most accessible economic texts ever written is silly. We're living in Silly-Town, population: most of America. The principles outlined in this book are very simply laid out, and backed by historically accurate unfolding of events. You could argue that Sowell only uses empirical facts/events that suit his case, and at least that would be an argument worth contending with...but to just declare him a "right-wing" economist is patently absurd. I don't like that kind of narrow thinking.

The basic things I took away from the book:

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses.

The first rule of economics is scarcity. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.

n  1. The only morally acceptable way to distribute labor and finite resources is through the voluntary interaction and negotiation between informed and consenting adults.n
Even if your basic worldview is that capitalism is an imperfect system, it's STILL hard to disagree with this statement, based on historical evidence that's been repeated over and over again. The free market, warts and all, is the most moral way to conduct transactions among free men in a free society. Capitalism is the least oppressive system for allocating scarce resources. People will, generally speaking, not refuse prosperity because of their dislike of ethnic/racial/religious groups. Milton Friedman, who taught Sowell, talks about this. The free market doesn't care about your skin color or religion...only whether or not you can produce goods or services that the public demands at the price it demands it.

n  2. Every policy and every law that has ever been passed - by either side of the isle - has been voted on based on its INTENDED result. But they all have unintended consequences, and unforeseen results.n
“Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.”

“Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies. Its fundamental concern is with the material standard of living of society as a whole and how that is affected by particular decisions made by individuals and institutions. One of the ways of doing this is to look at economic policies and economic systems in terms of the incentives they create, rather than simply the goals they pursue. This means that consequences matter more than intentions—and not just the immediate consequences, but also the longer run repercussions of decisions, policies, and institutions.”

n  3. Economics is about trade-offs, not solutions.n
"There is no escaping trade-offs, so long as resources are scarce and have alternative uses."

"By its very nature, as a study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses, economics is about incremental trade-offs - not about "needs" or "solutions." That may be why economists have never been as popular as politicians who promise to solve our problems and meet our needs."

The timeline that separates politics and economics is vast. Economics, as defined above, takes time. Time for things to unfold...time to measure data...time to unpack that data...time to make sense of statistics (which are the real 'dismal science') that are generated from this elapsed time.

Politics is a different beast. The timeline involved is often the next election cycle. Governors have created unintended consequences and been in the federal house or senate long before the ramifications of those consequences reach the public. And when your electorate is, in general, ignorant to the basic principles of economics...the incumbent gets blamed for the failures of previous policies.

n  4. The price system in a free market is the most effective and efficient way in human history to quickly convey vast amounts of information from individual consumers to producers.n
Government interference in this price system is almost always the problem. Government overriding the decisions made by millions of individuals, operating autonomously, almost always creates negative 'unintended' consequences. Prices are not costs. Prices are what we pay for costs. The price system is almost too vast to understand, and certainly too vast to cover in this review. Disseminating the decision-making power to *millions* of individuals, acting in self-interest, is so much more efficient that centralized pricing that it's not even really worth belaboring. There is no central power that can determine the prices of *millions* of products and services (as evidenced in the Soviet Union) because the knowledge of even the most Platonic central power cannot match the level of the division of knowledge that a free market price system provides. History has proven this time and time again. "The state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not,
it works on behalf of itself.”

n  5. 'Non-economic values' is just unearned moral high-ground.n
You'll often hear someone advocating for a particular policy that is having cold water poured on it by economic analysis say things like this. Economics needs to take into account non-economic values. To the ideologue, economics is AT BEST a nuisance that stands in the way of what they desire. At worst, it's cast as 'morally warped.' But the thing is...economics is not a value in itself. There are no 'economic values.' It's merely a system that provides information by which decisions can be made. Greed has nothing to do with the study of economics. Even if it did, greed for money is far less dangerous than the greed for power (a non-economic value, if ever there was one)...there are a hundred-million corpses from the 20th century who would agree with that statement.

I think this book is a good starting point for anyone either ignorant or interested in economics. Sowell is one of the clearest thinkers of our generation. The book is easy to read, accessible, and easy to relate to. Hazlitt is close, but on the whole I think Sowell writes more clearly. It's an easy read.

I'll end with this quote by Murray Rothbard:

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."

Everyone who can read should read this book - otherwise, get the audiobook.

Thomas Sowell is a god. I'm a big fan of his writing style because it's clear and concise. Basic Economics is highly informative and easily accessible. This book should be required reading, not just for econ majors or business majors, but everyone.

Big ideas:
1. Economics is about trade-offs, not solutions.
2. Every policy or law has consequences, many of which are negative and unforeseen.
3. Capitalism is the least oppressive or racist system for allocating resources; very few people will refuse to prosper because of their dislike of an ethnic group.
4. Economic efficiency is critically important to increasing standards of living and general happiness.
5. Government interference in free markets is almost always bad because it overrides millions of people's decisions and creates unintended negative consequences.
6. Transactions among willing, informed participants are mutually beneficial.
7. The price system conveys information more quickly and efficiently than any alternative.
8. Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses.
9. Economics is not about money; it's about the underlying resources that money and prices represent.
10. There are only noneconomic values because economics is not a value in itself; rather, it is a system that supplies information by which decisions can be made.

This was the most difficult audiobook listening experience I have ever had. Not because it was technical, but for reasons outlined below. I had notes for a point by point review, but then realised we only have so much time on this planet. So, a condensed version follows.

In any serious book review, one should try to find positive things to say, and start off with these. So here goes:

First, in the audiobook reading, Tom Weiner does a great job in conveying Sowell’s utterly arrogant and deeply misanthropic ideas. It’s like when you watch a horror film and there’s a creepy scene and you’re so frightened the only thing you can do is smile.

Second, although this book is a terrible testament to the failure of humanity, I do think everyone should read it. Better than any ‘bleeding heart liberal’ columnist, this book explains why we are in such dire straits economically, socially, and environmentally in the 2020s. Take it from the architect himself: humans or the planet are not factors in the functioning of Sowell’s ideal economy. As long as markets are free, everything’s fine. Never mind the massive evidence to the contrary (unprecedented global inequality, climate change, you name it). Freedom is freedom for the corporations to make a profit. The human consequences of that ideology simply don’t matter.

Third, the presentation is impressive. With a combination of misdirection, half-truths and lies, Sowell paints a neat picture where one theory passes for ‘economics’. For example, the outcomes of government interventions are always treated monocausally, but of course otherwise economics is complex (ie. better leave it to the people who know better). Rhetorically, Sowell uses a familiar trope: His neoliberal theory is ‘reality’ and ‘facts’, whereas anything else is ‘ideology’. The utter condescension is repeatedly presented as alternative ideas bringing ‘emotional fulfilment’ for politicians and journalists (the two main culprits in Sowell’s laissez-faire utopia), but unfortunately flying in the face of Sowell’s selective ‘facts’. You don’t have to be an economist to see through the charade, but I do worry that this works for many readers. Ideology disguised as ‘realism’ and blaming everyone else for being ideological is the oldest trick in the book.

Now, the downside (I’ll stick to just one):

Unfortunately, this not an introduction to economics at all. It is a very thick political pamphlet on the ideology of neoliberalism, and an economic theory that legitimates that ideology. If you take a word count of the text, there are probably more mentions of ‘government’ than the economy. The whole book is built on presenting different propositions of neoliberal theory and then spending page after page whining about why government actions ruin the beautiful theory. There are plenty of popular books on economics out there, if you’re interested. This is not one of them.

I should have googled Sowell before buying the audiobook. Now that I did, turns out he has become a meme star among the most rank far right trolls on social media. In fact, you can see it in these reviews as well and how they have become a cultural war battleground. There’s not a little bit of sad irony in that. Then again, I guess it’s fitting for an author who would be outraged by government intervention in the lucrative business of slavery.

Professor Sowell can be quite biased and overly sarcastic at times but I still count this book as one of the most important books I've read in the last few years. Anyone of voting age should seek out a greater understanding of our market economy and this book is a great resource particularly because of the emphasis on how economics affects and is affected by government policy. After reading this book, I am now very interested to find a book that argues against the pro-free markets arguments in this book to better understand what might actually happen when policies like increased minimum wage are put into effect.