It was a while since I read a book with si much insight. You can listen to a simple, plain English sentence, that will completely change your views on important and complex subjects. Rough paraphrases ahead:

"There are no sollutions, just tradeoffs. If you do not see that, the decision is probably made by someone else for you."

"It is useless to look at an intend of a policy. The only important thing is, what insentives it creates."

A clearly and concisely written analysis of how incentives impact the economic decisions people make. Most notable is the idea that communism fails not only because of people's propensity to cheat in an environment free of incentives, but because of the fact that even in a world full of non-cheaters, a price-control system cannot allocate resources with the same efficiency that a market does automatically. Sheds some light on how a country like the USSR can sit on such expansive natural resources and still never be able to feed itself.

This is a surprisingly easy book to read and makes certain free market economic principles very clear. Unfortunately, as Sowell writes, although “the fundamental principles of economics are hard to understand, they are easy to forget, especially amid the heady rhetoric of politics and the media.” One idea that the book drills I will not soon forget: we need to judge economic policies not by the goals they proclaim but by the incentives they create.

I’m shelving this for now but, because I am forgetful, will keep it for future reference. Also, it will be required reading for my up and coming high school children.

This is an excellent primer on economics that I think all people should read.

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.

A doer. Lives in the real world. Anti academia. One of my favorite social science writers and thinkers.

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.

A long but eye-opening book!

A guide to throw your misconceptions into garbage.

"Nothing is easier to proclaim than a wonderful goal"
"Much confusion comes from judging economic policies by the goals they proclaim rather than the incentives they create." and by extension, the results they achieve.

This overarching idea, along with numerous examples from history of how government intervention in the economy has almost always led to worse overall outcomes were two strong messages that I took away from this book. I was very disheartened by the discussions in the book about economic decisions made by politicians, which ties right back to the first quote above. Politicians get elected by the great sounding programs they propose and support, and when those programs either fail in their aims or have entirely the opposite result as the stated goal, the collective memory is not long enough that it makes any difference, so we end up with more and more programs that help special interest groups (like farm subsidies) to the detriment of the country's consumers as a whole. Not enough people in the country have enough knowledge of economics to allow a person to be elected on sound economic principles because they are attacked mercilessly as pandering to the rich and haters of the poor.

The most often repeated idea in the book is that the entire scope of economics is about allocating scarce resources with alternative uses. Centuries of experience has shown that free market economics is consistently the best way to allocate resources in a way that most efficiently meets the needs of the people. Government intervention in the form minimum wage laws, pricing limits, import tariffs, rent control, punishment for predatory pricing, etc. always ends up harming more people than it hurts. I will not attempt to explain it all here, but the author does a great job in the book.

A great introductory to economics. An eye opening and a life changing book!

This was a truly fantastic book. It is a very thorough, thoughtful, and deep analysis of a topic presented in way that is both consumable and fascinating even if one is not in the field. And while the author has a fairly open right lean, he is so thoughtfully, with very specific and well-laid-out arguments supporting his belief, and with a thorough understanding and addressing of the points of the other side in many cases.

I will say though, in the end I found the book fantastic but was mixed on where I actually agreed or not. For example, the sections on rent control and the housing market in general were fantastic and I was fairly thoroughly on board. In comparison, the section on monopolies was well argued but felt to me to address the issue in a way that effectively presumed them away, and seemed to give no credence to their reality outside situations caused by government control. This seems to me somewhat far fetched, and if I have time I'd like to reread this section to narrow down more exactly where I disagree with the argument as laid out.

In other areas I was a bit more mixed as well, often agreeing and finding deeply useful the broader perspective on economics but in particular cases (e.g. predatory pricing) felt the treatment wandered a bit away from fair. The author was a pains to note that such can neither be proven nor disproven (fair point), but then proceeded to cast such skepticism on the idea being possible to a degree that felt unwarranted based on the evidence he was citing. In both this and the discussion of monopolies I was particularly struck with the sense that the effort/time involved to set up or create a business or situation was simply something he consistently underplayed, and the de facto monopolistic situations that often exist or the effective predatory pricing that can occur by virtue of economies of scale in the age of truly massive corporations on the whole got short schrift. Where I felt something was unfair or incomplete it often tended to be related to this point.

That said, even where I disagreed I learned, and as such would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a profoundly thoughtful, well researched and thoughtful description of how economics works from a right-leaning perspective. I might not agree with everything in here, but it seems unquestionable to me that the arguments here are powerful enough to treat with great consideration even when the conclusion is to disagree.