Name: The undercover economist strikes back
ISBN: 9781594631405

The undercover economist strikes back

"A provocative and lively exploration of the increasingly important world of macroeconomics, by the author of the bestselling The Undercover Economist. Thanks to the worldwide financial upheaval, economics is no longer a topic we can ignore. From politicians to hedge-fund managers to middle-class IRA holders, everyone must pay attention to how and why the global economy works the way it does. Enter Financial Times columnist and bestselling author Tim Harford. In this new book that demystifies macroeconomics, Harford strips away the spin, the hype, and the jargon to reveal the truth about how the world's economy actually works. With the wit of a raconteur and the clear grasp of an expert, Harford explains what's really happening beyond today's headlines, why all of us should care, and what we can do about it to understand it better. "

What Hacker News says

sixhobbitsJun 2019

I really enjoyed Tim Harford's books "The Undercover Economist" and "The Undercover Economist Strikes Back".

Maybe they are too far in the "popular economics" category to be included in a list like this (although there are some on the list that look similar) but he explains things clearly and argues well and I feel like I understand economics far better after reading them.

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bbaylesSep 2016

I read Dubner and Levitt's Freakonomics in 2005. It's lame to say that a pop-science book changed my life, but since then I've thought about economics every day.

I would recommend some pop-econ to become familiar with a stylized version of how economists think. I'd recommend Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist Strikes Back and The Logic of Life and Robert Frank's The Economic Naturalist. (Dubner's and Levitt's books are entertaining, but I wouldn't try to learn much about economics from them)

The world of professional economists has been fascinating to watch over the last 10 years, as academic economist blogs are very active and very high quality. Watching debates and commentary about the global financial crises unfold on the blogs in real time was really something. Economist bloggers have a real influence on policy now, and whole schools of thought have coalesced out of blogs (e.g. market monetarism).

There are some excellent economics podcasts out there now. EconTalk (with Russ Roberts) has been going since 2006. I'd recommend listening to some of his interviews with academic economists. Macro Musings (with David Beckworth) just started this year, and the policy discussions have been quite informative.

The Marginal Revolution University website has an fantastic series of videos on economics topics. The "Development Economics" course I would recommend strongly - I wish I'd been taught the Solow Model in school.

Economics is a very interesting discipline to study from the outside. Learning a bit about it puts policy debates in a new light - I've become much more liberal on some topics and much less confident on a lot of topics. I find that reporting about economics issues is generally pretty terrible, so beware that if you get into economics you'll want to stop reading a lot of news analysis.

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davidwMay 2016

Tim Harford's a good writer - he's got some books that I highly recommend as a gentle introduction to economic thinking:

* "The Undercover Economist" - http://amzn.to/1sCImVw

* "The Undercover Economist Strikes Back" http://amzn.to/24bIFT3 - this one's about macroeconomics.

As well as various others. One thing I like is that they're mostly fairly neutral - he's really trying to explain the thinking, rather than beating you over the head or espousing one position.

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davidwJun 2014

I think your heart is in the right place, but your economics are off - by a lot.

It's hard to rectify that in a quick comment though, as it's a complicated, interesting and fascinating subject.

Just to pick one thing, you mention 'efficiency'. Capitalism is not very efficient in a lot of ways. However, it happens to be more efficient for large groups of people than all the other systems people have tried, if you don't mind me poaching Churchill's quote about democracy.

And another: money. Money is merely a means of trading scarce goods. Looking at it as a problem is a red herring. The actual problem is the availability and distribution of scarce resources like food and shelter and iphones and other things people want.

Here's a book I'm fond of - it's fairly mainstream economics.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Undercover-Economist-Tim-Harford/d...

He's written another one lately about macroeconomics which is pretty good as well:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Undercover-Economist-Strikes-Back/...

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davidf18Sep 2016

I strongly recommend "The Undercover Economist" written by Tim Harford, A Financial Times columnist with a BS and MS Economics from Oxford. It is fun to read and focuses on microeconomics (market inefficiencies, market failures). He has a chapter dedicated to the failing economy of Cameroon which he visited and the growing economy of China.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199926514/

Harford also as a book on macroeconomics, "The Undercover Economist Strikes Back" https://www.amazon.com/dp/159463291X/

Harvard Economist Eduard Glaeser is an expert on cities and he will help to explain (as does Harford) that the reason for the high cost of housing in NYC, London, SF, SD, LA, DC, Boston, and other cities is because of "economic rents" which is a market inefficiency that in this case uses politics to create artificial scarcity in housing through zoning density restrictions. These economics rents benefit landlords by transferring wealth from apartment renter to landlord.

Glaeser: Build Big Bill: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....

Glaeser book: "Triumph of the City" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143120549/

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MarkMcDec 2013

> Underpinning the value of gold is that if all else fails you can use it to make pretty things.

But this 'floor' only accounts for, say, 3% of the price of gold. Whatever makes the remaining 97% a reliable store of value could also provide Bitcoin with 100% of its store of value.

A similar point comes from Tim Harford's fascinating description of the currency used on the Pacific island of Yap:

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Oddly enough, there is a near real-world equivalent to the Ningi, the triangular rubber coin larger than Mars dreamed up by the humorist Douglas Adams. It can be found on the island of Yap, in Micronesia in the West Pacific. Their coins, the rai, are stone wheels with a hole in the middle. Some are fairly portable a handspan or less across, and the weight of a couple of bags of sugar. But the most valued stones are far bigger - one British sailor wrote in the late nineteenth century of a stone wheel that was four and a half tons in weight and over nine feet in diameter. In other words, it was almost completely immovable.

Yap’s stone money used to be a serious business. The stones were quarried and carved on the island of Palau, 250 miles away One Victorian naturalist witnessed four hundred men from Yap, a tenth of the adult male population, at work in the quarries of Palau. Getting the stones from Palau to Yap on a little bamboo boat was a difficult and sometimes lethal affair - some of them weighed as much as two cars. (And rai were especially valuable if someone had died on the expedition to fetch them.) The biggest stones might have been used for major transactions such as buying land or wives; more modestly sized stones - a couple of feet across - were exchangeable for a pig. Even then, it would have been a lot easier to move the pig than to move the stone.

All this meant that for purely practical reasons, the Yap islanders had to develop an important monetary innovation: they divorced ownership of the stone from physical control of the object. If you wanted to buy my pig, that transaction would be publicly witnessed: I’d give you the pig and in exchange, you’d transfer ownership of one of your stones - the one leaning against the tree, second on the left behind your hut. Now everybody would know that that particular stone was Tim’s stone. You and I wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of actually moving the thing. One day, a crew from the quarries were bringing a new large stone from Palau when they ran into a storm not far from the coast of Yap. The stone sank while the men swam to shore to tell the tale of their lucky escape and their loss. But of course, if the stone propped up outside your hut doesn’t need to move around to change ownership, why should the stone at the bottom of the sea be any different? This giant stone on the seabed had an owner - the chief who had sponsored the expedition to get it. And now his ownership could be transferred to another rich islander, and then to another, just as with any other stone. It was perfectly good money, even though it was out of sight and out of reach.

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From "The Undercover Economist Strikes Back" by Tim Harford: http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Economist-Strikes-Back-Ruin...

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