“A chatty, witty guide to inflation, gross domestic product and the rest of the economic big picture.” says Roger Lowenstein:
Tim Harford is a brave man to write a book about macroeconomics for the lay person; luckily, he is also a funny man. It is faintly embarrassing to reveal that I giggled in bed while reading “The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run—or Ruin—an Economy.” But though his perky style and chatty asides keep us grinning, it would be wrong to call him a pop economics writer. His quarry isn’t the freakish or bizarre—it is stuff you will see in textbooks.
His hope is to explain what makes the economy tick. He isn’t out to identify cialis villains in the financial crisis (a welcome respite), and he doesn’t fault economists for failing to predict it. We should think of economists like dentists, he says: When something is wrong, they try to fix it.
Mr. Harford, a columnist for the Financial Times, has a knack for posing questions the average reader will have wondered about. (In fact, he frames the book as a dialogue between himself and a policy-curious bureaucrat.) Why couldn’t government solve unemployment by creating useless work? Why is money that is merely paper valued?
The full review is here; you can read other reviews and buy the book here.