This book is pretty blatantly biased in the free market direction, and it colors everything in the book, but I'm going to go with 4 stars, and here's why:

About every other summer, I think something like, "You know, there's no excuse for a mathematician to be so woefully ignorant of economics; I should do something about it." I then pick up an economics book, make a valiant attempt to read it, get wildly pissed off at the overuse of jargon, muddled thinking, confusion of causation and correlation, and general methodologies, and then I throw the book out the window.

Now part of this is entirely cultural. Mathematicians are primarily logicians, which means we start with a set of assumptions then follow them to a logical conclusion. If our conclusions fit with the world, then we're very happy, and if not, then we're not as happy, but we're still pretty happy. If we really want to model the world, we will change our assumptions. But regardless, we learned something: this set of assumptions yields this conclusion. In many ways, this is the opposite of science, which is primarily concerned with the world-as-it-is, and hence you want any assumptions to be the right ones to model the world. I think this (limiting) aspect of science annoys some mathematicians, and this (unreal) aspect of mathematics annoys some scientists.

Regardless, the methodology of economics has always seemed something like this, to me: start with some assumption about how you think something works (for example, it could be something fairly innocuous, like "higher prices decrease demand," or it could be something much more dangerous, like "the government does a really good job at running things"), then you interpret all the real-world data under the assumption that your original hypothesis was true. It's pretty clear why this is dangerous: if your original assumption is wrong, then all your following conclusions are at best tainted, and at worst totally false. And this methodology doesn't give you very good opportunities to re-assess your hypotheses. (Again, in math, you don't have to model any specific physical system, like you're supposed to in economics, and in science, the goal is to proceed with some limited--and revisable--set of assumptions.)

Anyway, I don't think this is necessary a valid opinion of what economics "is." (In fact, it might not even be a valid opinion of what science is. Or even what math is.) But it's certainly the impression I've always gotten, and I haven't particularly changed it yet.

But this book finally explained some things to me! Sowell starts with an excellent definition of his subject (something I don't think I've read before): Economics is the study of how people deal with scarce resources. And that makes sense to me: it's not about money, or financial institutions, or politics: it's just about corn. There's only x amount of corn, and people want y amount of corn, so how do we apportion it? See, that wasn't so hard.

So, when it boils right down to it, I learned an incredible amount from this book. I learned that economics is about scarcity. I learned about unintended consequences (a common talking point for many academics, and something pretty ignored by politicians.) And, while I have never considered myself a capitalist, I have to say that Sowell makes some excellent points and has left me wavering somewhat. (Of course, my real problem isn't with capitalism, it's with consumerism ; but how do we separate these?) Anyway, it had a huge impact both on my positions and opinions, but also on my outlook and how I think about things.

Let me reiterate, before I complain, that I'm now standing WAAAAY closer to Sowell's position that I was before reading the book. In the list of "Books That Strongly Affected My Opinions," this one is in the top 10 easy. But...

I do find his brutal insistence in the amorality of all of this to be disturbing. I completely understand his points, but I just don't necessarily want to live in his world. He seems to conclude, "The free market will do the best for the most people." (How utilitarian!) But I'm forced to say, "Can't we do better?" It could be my religious convictions, or my natural kindness (yeah, right), but I still feel compelled to help the helpless. And his insistence that I shouldn't seems pretty terrible.

And it all seems so rife for abuse. Many of his arguments revolve around the implicit assumption that the consumers are well-informed, but this isn't necessarily true. There are still an awfully lot of products being sold in stores in America made by, at best, "essentially slavery," and at worst "blatant slavery." But we don't necessarily know that, so our dollars don't necessarily reflect what we actually think. But who has time to research every product and study all that? The economy is just too big! (Yes, I know I'm idealistic: I'm still laboring under the possibly-mistaken assumption that people really wouldn't buy something that was a little cheaper if they knew it was made by actual human slaves.) In general, Sowell's blatant faith in the free market system seems as Utopian as the communism he *repeatedly* denigrates. (And by "repeatedly," I mean "r.e.p.e.a.t.e.d.l.y.")

And there's the real problem with many of his opinions in this book. Despite his faith (I don't know what else to call it) that the free market will fix everything, it's just not clear how the free market prevents the kind of slavery common in America 200 years ago, or children working in factories 300 years ago, or the general income inequality that's becoming so rampant in this country right now. And his insistence that "greed" just isn't really a thing that affects anything is patently ridiculous--I certainly must have misunderstood his point. You might as well say that lying or f@#%ing wasn't a real thing.

There are some other problems of varying levels: I did find some numbers in the book that weren't valid, but not many, and they didn't seem to affect his argument. He (seems to) repeatedly confuse causation and correlation, but with something as complicated as an economy, is there any way to measure causation? (Is this a question for Economics as a whole?) Also, he seems to think that America has the highest standard of living in the world, and I'm pretty sure this is false on most scales, but he never says what scale he's using, so maybe that's OK. (But it did seem a little bit like the silly sort of nationalism you see on TV. "Of course America has the highest standard of living: it's America, after all.")

But, having complained about his blatant bias, I do applaud how BLATANT it is. He doesn't hide it, or try to sneak it in: he's up front about it, it colors everything, so you know exactly where he stands. He's proselytizing, but he's doing it honestly. (Like the door-to-door evangelists who open up with, "Hey, I'm from The Church...") And I appreciate that.

So, in summary: learned a lot. Enjoyed the read. Very biased, but very up-front about it. Morally problematic.

Recommended for people who want to learn some economics.

What a life changing book!

This book contains enough knowledge, for an entry-level insight into economics. It is extremely well written, easy to understand and explains just about everything you need to know. It repeats itself slightly but only on major issues, so it has it's fact and point hammered in. It doesn't take side to any kind of political dogma, neither does it belittle the thinking and ideas behind the socialist economies of the former Soviet Union. In the first part of the book, it even quotes Karl Marx and some other Soviet economists extensively.

But it does represent a total belief in the free market, a laissez-faire economy, in the best style of Ayn Rand. It goes to great lengths to explain, why this is in the best interest of the global population. But I can easily picture, that some people would burn this book in sheer white hot rage, within the first chapter. So be prepared.

I found this book as riveting, as the best fiction books. I learned a ton I didn't knew before and I even changed some prime personal opinions, which is a huge kudos to the author. The biggest epiphany for me though, is how incredibly uninformed, not only the general public, but also major political leaders, head of states and execs of big businesses are. I have suspected this for an extensive period of my life, but after reading this book, it has became a glaring and rather shocking fact. How can they not have a basic grasp of economy and socioeconomic history? I'm sure that many do, but either they have forgotten, or elect to suppress this information, in the interest of their politics and personal agenda. Which actually turns out, to be one of the major points of the book.

Thé Clumsy, dated theories reeled off by sowell as fact have been widely articulately and long since toppled by astute thinkers across the world, this book only retains relevance because last century economic understanding like this is still hampering clear thinking by governments especially in the uk and US. As the existential threats confronting us become ever clearer we need better tools to face it down than this old pile of naive fables, folklore and myth. Sowell is innocent to the idea that Intellectual opposition to right wing economic ideology does not imply adopting‘non economic values’ or ‘lofty talk’. In fact the most pressing opposition to his theory is squarely and urgently based on material wealth. The economic ideology championed in this book defines wealth and material well being so narrowly that we are likely to be too extinct to benefit from it. The basic material wealth witlessly excluded from this economic analysis includes air to breathe, ground to walk on, enough water and a temperature our species can stand. Any theory of material well being which can provide elegant analysIs of the demand for cheese graters but not oxygen defies any definition of common sense. Adam Smith would obviously have written his theory differently in circumstances where air, water, temperature cannot be taken for granted as essentially infinite. Perhaps even more troublingly, Sowell naively attempts to exclude ‘hopes and values’ from his analysis, an ambitious and perhaps impossible goal for any social science theory but he is laughably far from managing to do it. At no point in the book does Sowell follow through the logic of his arguments. In an unregulated market where there is limited supply and increasing demand, the price will rise. So far so good. But sowell (with his apparent avoidance of ‘values’) deduces from this that ‘prices force people to share’. Absent from his train of logic is that this sharing can only take place amongst those with a similar income. With a supply shortage, strong demand, and any income disparity sharing would take place between those with high and similar incomes as the price bids up out of the reach of those with lower incomes. This is the very definition of the price mechanism. Under extreme supply shortage and no market regulation the scale of the gravity and urgency of demand would be inversely proportionate to the size of the group able to ‘share’. Staggeringly, sowells own example is of a housing shortage following a widespread natural disaster. He argues that a seriously limited supply of accommodation and sudden urgent demand from many homeless families would bid up the price of accommodation. This he says ‘forces people to share, wether or not they are aware of sharing’. The unregulated price mechanism would increase the price of shelter until it matched the price people were able to pay. The logical endpoint being if there’s a hundred homeless families and one room, the unregulated market would allocate it to the wealthiest of the hundred. Right wing economics at its most blunt on page 3 of Sowell’s ugly outdated polemic.

My new goal: read one Thomas Sowell book per year. The man is a logical, brilliant thinker.

Basic Economics should be required reading for all high schoolers - in fact, my used copy that had never been checked out is from a high school library. It is thorough and yet understandable... admittedly, there were parts I had to read a few times to let it sink in. He put names to scenarios I have seen played out and connected many dots. I cannot possibly do justice to this book without my review being more extensive then I have time for. I'll let the book speak for itself:

"The Soviet Union did not lack for resources, but was in fact one of the most richly endowed nations on earth. What it lacked was an economic system that made efficient use of scarce resources. Because Soviet enterprises were not under the same financial constraints as capitalist enterprises, they acquired more machines than they needed, "which then gather dust in warehouses or rust out of doors," as the Soviet economists put it."

"Few things are more simple than the fact that people tend to buy more at lower prices and buy less at higher prices. But putting that together with the face that producers tend to supply more at higher prices and less at lower prices, that is enough to predict all sorts of complex reactions to price controls, as for example in the housing market. Moreover, these reactions have been found on all inhabited continents and over thousands of years of recorded history."

"Perhaps the most decisive evidence of the role of profit as an incentive is the record of socialist economies which have eliminated it. The sums of money saved by eliminating profits have failed to lower prices and make the consuming public better off, because the absence of incentives has allowed many inefficiencies to go unchecked and technological and organizational changes to lag."

"Many policies are made as if he citizens subject to them are like pieces on a chessboard, to be moved here and there as the policy-makers wish. For example, when tax rates are raised 10 percent, it may be assumed that tax revenues will also rise by 10 percent. But in fact more people move out of the heavily taxed jurisdiction, or buy less of the heavily taxed commodity, so that the revenues received may be disappointingly far below what was estimated."

"Very often either history or economics could have told us what to expect, but neither was consulted. It does not matter that a law or policy proclaims its goal to be "affordable housing," "fair trade" or a living wage." What matters is what incentives are created by the specifics of these laws and how people react to such incentives. These are dry empirical questions which are seldom as exciting as political crusades or moral pronouncements."

Great primer on economics for someone who does not care about the mathematical intricicies, but would rather get an intuitive understanding of why certain policy works, and why certain policy doesn't.

This book is absolutely a must read for anyone who aims to have a relevant political opinion on anything economically involved. It is a very simple, straightforward book that emphasizes the simplicity of economics but the complexity that evolves when considering so many variables at once. It is a must read because if the economic background that is given here is not replaced somewhere else (there are definitely alternatives out there), then I don't think it is possible to have an informed opinion on economic policy. Just keep in mind, this book does not make you an economist, it is severely lacking in rigor. Think of it like reading a pop-science book on a physics topic, you now have a very topical understanding of many areas within the field.

I don't know if it's a good or bad thing that the first book I read in 2016 will most likely be the heaviest book I read in 2016.

Anyways, I picked this up because so many people were saying Bernie Sanders was an idiot who didn't understand economics. I couldn't agree or disagree and that led to the realization that I didn't understand economics either. This was a recommendation from a....book club? Message board? Random stranger on the internet? I don't know what to call it but it was recommended and I can see why.

This was a very in-depth and easily digestible glimpse into what economics is and how it works. It goes into the purpose of it and all the ways it can go wrong. Globalization, politics, capitalism, socialism, minimum wage, production, everything. It was well-written and broken up into segments which made it easily digestible.

I think it would be good for every high school kid in America to read this. Make a course out of it or just make economics a required course for graduation. A more educated society would be a more productive society. It would also eliminate much of the BS politicians push under the auspice of help which will actually hurt the general populace.

I love the way that Thomas Sowell explains economic concepts in such a simple and clear manner. This book is quite book, but it's very thorough and it covers pretty much all economic principles. I wish more people (especially voters) would read this book so that they could become more educated in economics and that they could fully understand the first and second order effects about some political proposals. I highly recommend this book and only wish I had read it sooner.
If you have not read already, I strongly recommend the book "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt

Before reading this book I though I had a good grasp on the whole "supply and demand" thing (as I thought about the economy), but as it turns out knowing about something and understanding the implications of a thing are two different things.

Rarely do I encounter a book that leaves me changed after reading it. Basic Economics managed to change my views on several issues, most of which I thought as "set in stone".

I was very skeptical at start, but I cannot find any hole in the author's reasoning; the book has prompted me to reinvestigate and to rethink my stances on minimal wages, price controls, government interventions or anti-trust laws. On the other hand, it confirmed what I've always felt was important - to look at the underlying incentives of political issues and not at their supposed purpose.

The power of the book is in how incredibly well it is written. The author has a talent with words and explanations. Everything is presented step-by-step and introduced using simple terms. This makes the arguments easy to follow, understand, and to see if they are true.

It might be a projection on my part but I feel the authors dislikes sophistry and overcomplicating the underlying issues, and disdains people who resort to such tactics. He certainly has issues with politics and politicians and I have oftentimes bursted out laughing on some particularly scathing comment.

Sowell describes economics as a "the study of scarce resources which have alternate uses" and the book is devoted to describing different scenarios/parts of economy - prices and markets, industry, work and pay, time, risk, national economy and international trade and non-profit organizations.

The author shows how each may be a benefit to the consumer or puts him under an unnatural burden. He also dispels fallacies and myths surrounding these issues and what happens when the forces of the market are interfered with.

At least for me, some of the issues discussed by the book were obvious, but also as often there were counter-intuitive. The book did manage to change my mind a couple of times.

Most underlying principles used to explain the issues were really simple ("consumers buy often at lower prices than higher prices", supply and demand etc.) and the repeated all the way throughout - hammering some of the points in further.

The book has piqued my curiosity in economic issues, and gave me some small glimmer of hope that I can understand them. I cannot express how much it has impacted me. It's great, and you should read it.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell is a great book for those not familiar with the field of economics, but who still desire to have a general understanding. It approaches the topic in a verbal way (without equations, graphs, etc), and provides a rich argumentative explanation with a plethora of real-life examples.

The book spans a wide range of topics, from basic principles like supply, demand and prices, to financial concepts like stocks, bonds and banking, and to international concepts like international trades. It does not, however, limit itself to mere explanation. Instead, it presents different fallacies, and argues against them in a straight no-nonsense fashion. In addition, the book often reiterates ideas mentioned previously, in order to make sure that the idea is deeply understood by the reader.

My only problem with the book was the over-confident tone, which, I believe, negatively affects its credibility. Economics has never been a precise science; there are always exceptions that go against common theories. But the book explains all its ideas in a tone which conveys that everything mentioned works 100% of the time, with no exceptions whatsoever, which, to me, reduces the credibility of the book, if only slightly.

Overall, Basic Economics was definitely an investment worth spending my "scarce resources, which have alternative uses."

My rating for this book has nothing to do with the author or the way it was written. It was the subject matter that I found boring. I do not like economics.

Should be required reading for everyone on the planet.

Sowell is a must read for his eloquence and easy to understand explanations. There are very few people with his gift.