Basic Economics

Hardback, 627 pages

Subtitle: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy

About the Title: Why are homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks of New York in winter, when the abandoned apartment buildings in the city have four times as many dwelling units as there are homeless people in the city?  Why did Russians have to import food to feed people in Moscow, when Russia itself had vast amounts of some of the richest farmland in Europe within easy driving distance?  Why did unemployment reach 25 percent and American corporations as a whole operate in the red for two years in a row during the Great Depression of the 1930s?

 

All these very differentbut equally puzzling and needlesstragedies grew out of a failure to understand and apply basic economic principles.  Explaining these principles for the general public in plain English, with neither graphs nor equations nor jargon, is the goal and achievement of Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.  Professor Sowell has taught economics at leading colleges and universities across the country and now uses his years of experience to bring economics to light in a way that is both easy to absorb and hard to forget.

 

He claims that the failure of economic programs is the result of a failure to understand and apply basic economic principles. This third edition includes expanded and updated material, including new topics:

• the national debt
  
• Third World working conditions
• child labor laws
• the rise and fall of the gold standard 
• "exploitation" theories
  

Copyright: 2007