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Business Management Book Store > Business Management books beginning with U
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The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor--and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car! |
Author: Tim Harford
Published: 2007-01-30 |
List price: $14.95
Our price: $10.17
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As of: November 21st, 2008 03:37:57 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Enlightening read, entertaining.
This book kind of over billed itself, with the marketers adding "why the rich are rich, the poor are poor and why you can't find a good deal on a used car." This book doesn't read like Freakanomics, Blink or Tipping Point, unfortunately, because the author does have a lot of good things to say and does do a good job of explaining economic terms and theories in laymen's terms.
I'd recommend this book to anyone that is interested in a better understanding of economics and demystifying some of the jargon and terms used on news broadcasts and in newsprint. There are often people of all strips talking about demand, supply, cost, profit and other things that they know little about or sometimes, worse, think they know something but in reality have an understanding that is completely backwards.
Economics theory builds upon a basic foundation and understanding that foundation and the nature of the bricks laid upon it are crucial to having any grasp of what an economist is talking about when he pontificates or simply gives a lesson. Some things are agreed upon by most, but not all things come under a consensus of what is true and what is false and what is unknowable.
If I'm confusing you a bit here, no worries, read this book and my ramblings will sound completely coherent and simple. The knowledge required to totally grasp the theories and the intricacies of markets and why things are priced how they are is such that if you could totally get this book you wouldn't need to read it.
I think most people would benefit from a reading of this, as most people are blind to economic theories and how markets actually work, and therefore are often beguiled by politicians. I give this work a strong recommendation to those interested in econ and those that are students of it as well.
 Objective, entertaining, if inot narrow in scope and flawed in areas
Among social science literature I try to detect bias -- this book obviously contains bias, but relative to other books in this category it is refreshingly objective and based on empiricism, fact, logic.
For example, the authors expose environmental abuses, leftist attacks on 3rd world working conditions, while at the same time offer an empirical defense of abortion as a primary causal mechanism for the decades long reduction in crime.
without offering my personal bias and logical objection to many of the assertions made by the authors, as i have done in other reviews, I will simply note that it is rare that an author attacks extremist environmentalism, defends "sweat shops in china" and defends abortion in the same book.
I would recommend this book for any objective, independent thinking, and rational reader.
Basic Economic Principles Applied to Real Life
The science behind this book is, in the end, a dumbed-down version of what you would learn in Economics 1 at any college or university. The author explains basic principals such as externalities and Adam Smith's "unseen hand"; there are no break-through insights here.
On the other hand, this is no college textbook. It is much more fun to read and much more accessible. There are no formulas or math. The concepts are explained in simple English, and then immediately applied to everyday life situations such as the price of coffee at Starbucks, health care and traffic. Whether or not you know anything about economics, you won't be bored.
Most importantly, this book helps people think in rational terms about hot-button issues like free trade and the environment. The author has his own views -- we all do -- but his approach to issues is rational. He encourages us to think critically, rather than simply reacting emotionally. For that reason, if no other, this is a worthwhile book and the world would be a better place if everyone read it.
Note: my undergraduate degree is in economics, although that was a long time ago and I have not studied it, nor used it in my job for about 20 years.
`..the difference between nineteenth century farming and twenty-first-century frothing ..'
This is an entertaining and informative journey through some aspects of economic theory. By using contemporary examples (such as the various factors that influence the price of a cup of coffee), Mr Harford removes some of the mystery and explains how some of the conclusions consumers may draw can be both logical, and flawed. While this won't make your coffee any cheaper, it may make some decisions more informed. And you can always strike up a conversation with your fellow coffee aficionados about the analysis of coffee rents. Just wait until they've had at least one coffee first.
Readers should note that this book addresses market behaviour rather than social issues. Most readers will consider sweatshops to be inherently bad: however the alternatives for the participants need to be considered as well.
Like other books in this field, this could be a starting point for discussion. Knowing more about the way in which supply, demand and the markets which address both work gives some insight into a field which is often seen as full of dry, mechanistic arcana. Who knows? You may even understand the used car market.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Economics demystified (for the developed world only)
Harford is a mecro-economist, a bridge between macro and micro economics. Harford explains macro-economic phenomena such as retail pricing, stock market behavior, taxation, health-care, environment, and licensing air-waves; by one-by-one getting inside the heads of each stake-holder on that poker table and dissecting their behavior in accordance with the first principles of economics: scarcity and choice. However, the insights only go as far as the developed world does. In the last 3 chapters where Harford tries to similarly explain the woes of the poor and developing worlds with examples of Cameroon, Belgium and China; his views quickly appear shallow and cliche, lacking the same wisdom as the rest of the book. 70% of the book is therefore a 5-star, and the rest is a 2-star.
The book loses its panache is in trying to decipher globalization and the developed world through the "X-ray goggles of the undercover economist". Harford falls into the trap of taking the usual one-dimensional view of large developing countries (India and China in particular) as if they are obviously in a certain step in their evolution to become more and more like the developed world. These simplifications might be half true, but hardly insightful. Any statement of generalization about either India or China is like generalizing about North and South Americas combined (a contiguous land-mass with about a billion people) or Europe and USA combined (the developed nations with about a billion people). How valuable or insightful can any statement about the Americas as one entity or USA & Europe as one entity be? It is as futile, therefore, to attempt the same for either India or China without having an appreciation or perspective on the infinite diversity of the subject.
With the Undercover Economist, Tim Harford de-mystifies the wiggling jelly of economics (where you cannot kill farm-destroying birds without suffering population explosion of farm-destroying insects and so on). What sound like conundrums are actually logical explanations of common-sense causal chains. For example, he explains that "more rational the behavior of stock market investors, the more erratic the behavior of the stock market becomes." I try to summarize: rational investors would buy shares today if it was obvious that they would go up tomorrow, but then everyone would buy today driving the price high enough so that it cannot go higher tomorrow. Rationality would obviously and consistently second-guess rationality, implying rationality cannot lead to predictable behaviour. The only thing left then is unpredictable news, which is a random event. This means that shares would behave like random walks. But if this was absolutely true, it would be a paradox, since rational investors would not invest in shares and only invest in predictable alternatives. The balancing point then lies somewhere in between. Harford then goes on to draw parallels with supermarket queues and how everyone tries to predict the fastest one, and a game of poker with players analyzing the outcome based on fundamentals yet betting based on their understanding of what the other players are thinking.
A very readable economist with a fun and easy style. References to Nobel Laureates in Economics, and key theorems of importance would also make you keep going back to the book. This is one to keep.
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