The full review, by Pietra Rivoli, is here. Here’s the introduction:
For years economics professors had little competition in their own market, and shamelessly bored generations of students with dusty graphs of wine and cloth. Thankfully, the past decade or so has brought some variety and colour to the enterprise… if there is an undisputed leader in this spoonful-of-sugar approach, it must be the Financial Times columnist Tim Harford. His 2005 book The Undercover Economist cleared the muddy windshield of microeconomics for more than a million readers. Now, in The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, Harford’s target is macroeconomic policy. He tackles this using, well, a gimmick: putting a hypothetical reader in the driver’s seat of the economy and offering guidance in a book-long series of Q&As.
And the conclusion:
So should I buy the book?
Without question. Reading Harford is like finding yourself next to the funniest, smartest fellow at the party. It is such fun that readers will hardly notice that, by the end, they’ve mastered macroeconomics through perhaps the intermediate level. Economics professors everywhere should be very afraid.
You can buy the book, or find out more, here.