" I would like to give this book about 3.5 stars. This is a book designed to present the topic of economics to people who would not otherwise be that interested in it, and give them an introduction to core concepts that are necessary for general economic discussion. In some ways, it did accomplish that, but it had some shortcomings. It touched upon a lot of interaction between the government and economics, and had a more free market view than I anticipated. The emphasis was more on the number of examples than fleshing out the details of each one. I felt like more depth with fewer examples might have been more powerful. Although they served slightly different purposes, I thought that the book Freakonomics demonstrated a good balance between covering topics and offering more depth. To a degree, the point of the book was to offer only intuition without any charts, graphs, or numbers, and he delivered on that. I thought the book would have been a little bit stronger if he did offer one or two charts or graphs in a few of the chapters. The fact is, we come across charts and graphs as we look at economic data on the evening news, and I thought some discussion was warranted. If people think that charts and graphs are scary, it is my view that it’s better to show how accessible they are by explaining the components, rather than leave them as some mystery that a lay person cannot figure out. I thought it was lacking in sources a little bit as well. He is a big fan of a few economists/economic commentators (such as Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman) and has many examples from articles that they have written in the New York Times. I thought that examples by more of a variety of people (not just going to Thomas Friedman every time you needed an example) would have been better. Lastly, this book seems like it was written to seem very current. Many of the examples were very current and newsworthy…in 2002. This is fine, but instead of being somewhat timeless, it reads a little bit like a walk down memory lane where you keep thinking, “Oh, yeah, I remember when people used to care about the WTO†and other things of that nature.
There were some shortcomings, and the somewhat rambling style did not inspire me to read it for hours at a time, but he did cover a number of good topics, and was on target with most of his explanations. As with anything, there is a bit of room for your own opinion to overshadow the facts of the matter, but he did a decent job of presenting what is generally accepted economic thought without just presenting opinions. Overall, I would recommend the book to people who have previously been intimidated by economics to get a general overview of a wide range of concepts dealing with how people respond to incentives and how the economy works in general. For people who already know a bit about economics, it probably won’t be that informative, but it will give you a sense of what people might know from reading another one of the mass market economics books that is out there. "
— Kevin, 1/7/2014