COMMON SENSE ECONOMICS: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, everyone should know but not believe this is Received Truth

COMMON SENSE ECONOMICS: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity
VARIOUS AUTHORS
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The fully revised and updated fourth edition of the classic Common Sense Economics.

As the global economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic and debates over the future of work challenge our long-held preconceptions about what careers and the market can be, learning the basics of economics has never been more essential. Principles such as gains from trade, the role of profit and loss, and the secondary effects of government spending, taxes, and borrowing risk continue to be critically important to the way America's economy functions, and critically important to understand for those hoping to further their professional lives—even their personal lives.

Common Sense Economics discusses these key points and theories and more, using them to show how any reader can make wiser personal choices and form more informed positions on policy. Now in its fourth edition, this classic from James D. Gwartney, Jane S. Stroup, Dwight R. Lee, and Tawni H. Ferrarini has been fully updated to include commentary on the effects of the pandemic on the global economy and the workplace; it offers insight into political processes and the many ways in which economics informs policy, illuminating our world and what might be done to make it better.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not entertaining, not as dry as a textbook either. Densely packed tendentious freemarketeering with a curious blind spot to how its own examples undermine its Hayek-lite assumptions about how the economy (as though that was one readily definable, easy-to-encompass in words, entity) works and should work. I think any book that trumpets a viewpoint, eg "low taxes good" here, should be honest enough to mark this out as editorializing. More especially since their own chosen examples of, eg, businesses seeking tariffs on imported goods to protect their market share presented without the expected free-trader's opprobrium, sorta gives the lie to the book's claims to being "commonsense" since this violates their own oft-reinforced (I fought myself hard to strive for neutrality I do not feel by changing the word from the judgmental but truthful "repeated") statements supporting "low taxes good."

The revisions undertaken post-COVID really ought honestly to have been labeled "post-China falling from favor." As a policy guide, not recommended, then. But for an economics explainer of how neoliberal economics wants you to think it works...modern research undermines the existence of the core neoliberal concept of "rational actors"...it's solid and as easy as it can get. All my stars for that useful quality.

Stay skeptical, then, and remember any time someone wants you to think a system is infallible, or "self-correcting," or "maximizing efficiency," they're not just factually incorrect but wrong. Plus almost guaranteed to be manipulating you for their own (however broad a definition of "their" you care to apply) benefit.