Sunday, October 28, 2007

Books

Roo (many, many weeks ago) asked what I thought of Tim Harford's "The Undercover Economist".

Short answer: I loved it.

I first heard about it on a "Radio Economics" PodCast, where he read the introduction and the first chapter

The rest of the book was equally enjoyable.

The introduction sticks in my mind, however, because it was really a modern reworking of "I, Pencil". That is: not one person in the world knows how to start with raw materials and end up with pencil.

Milton Friedman explained it well:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really enjoyed the book too, particularly the last few chapters on e.g. Cameroon and China. A real eye-opener for me. I found it a lot denser and harder to concentrate on than Freakonomics, though.

Richard Brown said...

That's a good point. I'd forgotten about those sections till you mentioned them. I suspect I just browsed through them - confirming your point about the density!