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The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor--and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car! (Hardcover) (精装)
by Tim Harford
| Category:
Non-fiction, Business, Economics, Market |
| Market price: ¥ 268.00
MSL price:
¥ 248.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
This book works well as a layman's introduction to economics and grips readers interested in understanding free-market forces . |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 11 items |
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Martin Wolf (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
Most people think economics is boring, difficult and irrelevant. In fact, economics is fascinating, comprehensible and highly relevant. As Tim Harford demonstrates brilliantly in this enjoyable book, the powerful underlying ideas of economics can, in the hands of the right person, illuminate every aspect of the world we inhabit. |
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Steven Levitt (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
The Undercover Economist is a rare specimen: a book on economics that will enthrall its readers. Beautifully written and argued, it brings the power of economics to life. This book should be required reading for every elected official, business leader, and university student. |
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Jagdish Bhagwati (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
If you need to be convinced of the ever-relevant and fascinating nature of economics, read this insightful and witty book by Tim Harford. Using one interesting example after another, The Undercover Economist demonstrates how economic reasoning-often esoteric and dull, but totally accessible in Harford's hands-helps illuminate the world around us. Indeed, Harford's book is a tour de force. |
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The Economist (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
A playful guide to the economics of everyday life, and as such is something of an elder sibling to Steven Levitt's wild child, the hugely successful Freakonomics.... Harford does not take himself too seriously. He is at his best illuminating the economics of small things.... In general, as befits a covert operative, his tone is quizzical and low-key, rather than bombastic and judgmental. For anyone schooled in blackboard economics, The Undercover Economist succeeds in taking the chalkdust out of the subject. |
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Mary Wisniewski (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
Beautifully written.... An Economics 101 class, taught by the most popular professor on campus. Harford shows readers how to think like an economist, demonstrating how theories like David Ricardo's 1817 treatise on farm rents can be applied to coffee shop locations and the cost of oil.... If the ideas are allowed to penetrate, to sink into the arid topsoil of a mind too long out of school, they can change the way a reader sees the world. Once you understand that a 'green belt' of undeveloped land around a city drives up rents, you start seeing green belts everywhere. |
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Dennis Littrell (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
A straightforward title for this book might be "Economics 101." Tim Harford makes the case for the invisible hand of the marketplace, for globalization as good for both the developed world and the undeveloped; he makes "differential pricing" clear, shows the value of free trade and why protectionist policies can be bad even for the protected and always costly to the country implementing them. His is the traditional view of the mainstream economist, the racy title notwithstanding. (I wonder: did the success of Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, which came out a little before this book, influence the people at the Oxford University Press to employ a spicy title?)
It's tempting to compare "The Undercover Economist" with "Freakonomics," but I won't except to say that Freakonomics really is about economics beneath the radar and undercover while The Undercover Economist is a very nice introduction to traditional economic thought as applied contemporaneously. Both books are excellent in their own way. Harford is more of a teacher and explainer, while Messrs. Levitt and Dubner are more interested in surprising us.
Harford is fond of coffee and beer and uses the economics of those products to make some telling points. He is not enamored of the "fair trade" coffee movement believing that the problem for coffee farmers is simply that they have no scarcity power since coffee can be grown in so many places in the world and growing it requires no great skill. He doesn't see sweatshops as a great evil. Instead he believes that if we banned clothing from countries that have sweatshops that would only hurt the workers in those shops since they would lose their jobs. His arguments for the good that globalization does follow the same sort of logic: yes, we in the developed world are gaining nicely from our capitalization of and trade with the underdeveloped countries, but they are gaining too. Without First World investments and a place to sell their goods and services, the underdeveloped countries would be poorer. I call this the trickle down theory of globalization, and I think it is generally correct. The sad truth is that no matter what scheme or system of interaction between the haves of the world and the have nots is employed, the haves are going to have an advantage and they are going to benefit more than the underdeveloped. This has been true since at least the time of the conquistadors.
He uses the sad example of Cameroon to demonstrate why some countries are so poor. In Cameroon tariffs are among the highest in the world; the government is corrupt and not friendly to foreign investment while the ability of the locals to do business is stifled by governmental regulations and taxes, and bribes at every level. When the government steals from the people the people lose their incentive to work.
Harford touts the economic resurgence of China and compares it directly with the failed economy of Cameroon. His main point is that once Mao and his top down economic policies were gone, and Deng was able to move China toward a profit motive economy, beautiful things began to happen. Harford recalls the horrors that the people of China suffered during the so-called Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. China for Harford is an example of a real world economic experiment that proves that a national economy is too complex to be directed from on high as in the communist system. His main point is that the information that we get from the marketplace cannot be had in any other way; and it is this information about what people really want, and what they are really willing to pay, that is what makes the invisible hand so powerful. Much of the book is devoted to illustrating this idea. When governments set prices or make quotas they are inviting gross inefficiency that steals from all of us. Letting the market place fix these values is much more efficient.
Although Harford bends over backwards to let us know that he feels for those who suffer the pain that comes from the constant change that takes place in free economies--people who lose their jobs, people whose companies go out of business, etc. because of competition from afar or because of technological advances elsewhere--I don't think he pays enough attention to the effect of free enterprise on limited and non-renewable resources. Economists tend to believe that when one commodity or element becomes scarce, the economy will find a substitute. Harford is no exception. He doesn't spend any ink worrying about the loss of the rain forests of the world probably because he sees them primarily in relatively short term economics. But in the long run the loss of something irreplaceable such as the rain forests or the coral reefs may cost us dearly in ways we cannot predict. Furthermore, there is such a thing as the aesthetic, spiritual and even psychological value of resources that are not taken into account in the economist's short term view.
By the way, the reason you can't buy a decent used car is the problem of "asymmetric information." In situations where one side has important information that the other side doesn't have, the result is a rip off--or there is no sale since the side without the information may have no confidence in the value of the sale item. In the chapter entitled "The Men Who Knew the Value of Nothing" Harford shows how information can affect auctions as well as used car sales and how the value of spectrum rights licenses and even your house may depend on asymmetric information.
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David Rasquinha (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
Tim Harford's "The Undercover Economist" is in many ways a return to the fundamentals of economics. In recent years, the field of economics has seen a growing influence of quantitative modeling and econometrics, to the extent that the medium has become the message. The complexity and elegance of the modeling often obscures the fact that these are mere tools for the study of economic behavior. At its foundation, economics is the study of human behavior with the focus on how people make decisions by applying (consciously or unconsciously) the basic economics concepts of scarcity, relative pricing, comparative advantage, marginal cost etc.
Harford is a columnist for the respected Financial Times and it shows in his clear and almost conversational writing style. He almost entirely avoids the use of jargon and technicalities, using simple logic and even common sense to explain economics ideas. His use of everyday situations to illustrate his points makes the book read like a collection of anecdotes, with the difference that the anecdotes serve to buttress the theme in the background. Readers will doubtless enjoy his application of economic reasoning to shopping at the supermarket, pricing of a cup of coffee, health insurance and so on. And for those who like the bigger picture, Harford's explanation of the benefits of globalisation and the rise of China are top drawer.
I wish he had not glossed over the free loader issue while discussing externalities. Similarly, in explaining the problem of asymmetrical information in used car sales, he glosses over the role of independent 3rd party information providers who can help in restoring the balance of information. Perhaps he will attack these in a future book? I for one will stand in line to buy it!
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Steven Alyari (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
The Undercover Economist's aim "is to help you see the world through the eyes of an economist." The book builds momentum early on delving into concepts such as:
1. scarcity power - farmers vs. landowners, or coffee shops on busy streets vs. coffee drinkers running late to work
2. "the world of truth" - trying to by a "lemon" vs. a "peach" at the used car lot, when you know nothing and the dealer knows everything
3. externalities - pollution or traffic - things that cannot be negotiated between two or more parties without some top-level planning
4. game theory - Von Neumann's desire to understand the game of poker, which ultimately lead to his and Oskar Morgenstern's work, "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior," which essentially created game theory!
The book does a good job of highlighting both the successes and failures of economic theory when in practice. Proving that understanding economic theory is no silver bullet, and that you still need common sense to craft good policies. And often, suggestions are made which require top-down policy making, such as taxing traffic to eliminate conjestion with no clear method how to get there. Perhaps, this is an exercise left to the reader.
Harford's skill throughout the book is at diving deep into familiar issues and exposing the larger economic forces which drive them using simple yet effective English, no formulas or esoterica. Harford's ability at continually weaving the perfect metaphor or example with the thread of economic theory is seamless. To this end, this book is a great success. However, when the book, coming to its end, attempts to uncover globalization, the theme quickly falls apart and exposes the author's own biases. To be fair, Harford admits both that the topic of globalization demands its own book, and that he is heavily biased in favor of free trade. However, he grapples with the difficult topic anyway and has mixed results.
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Cybamuse (MSL quote), Europe
<2007-06-15 00:00>
It is entirely possibly if I had had access to book like this when I was growing up, I would have become an economist. Harford takes apart many of the conundrums in our modern world and shows how trends, political and corporate decisions have all shaped the world in which we live in.
Of course, there are two books out there right now exploring economics in layman's terms - this one and Steven Levitt's "Freakonomics." Let me say up front that Harford's book was the one I was expecting when I read Freakonomics - this is the REALLY interesting book! Hardford's book is insightful, he never once digresses to statistics to explaing trends, he may use the odd graph here or there, but for the most part, he has created a book which dips and samples many of the things which make us groan and adapt to the world we live in. He also points out many areas where the application of systems are breaking down e.g. taxes, trade subsidies, development in the 3rd world, health care in the US. But he doesn't stop there - he actually presents examples of where not only has one country or company implemented a system which would make any economist proud, he has been able to show it works!
But he's fair in showing that economists have proposed things in the past which have been proven not to work as well - and then goes onto explain why which is usually a variable or several variables have not been factored in. But the underlying principles of econimics remain untouched. If anything, one gets the impression after reading this book that economics isn't about business, its more a science - the science of understanding business! Hypothesese are proposed, tested, modified and/or disguarded.
And its frightening where some of themodels being used in today's world, are the demonstrably the biggest of giant economic failures - like the American health care system, and yet because of 'other policies' countries like Australia and the UK are slowly sliding into the same spiral as the US with an increasingly more expensive health care system, while other countries in Europe (for example) have free health care for all their citizens - and it costs less! Farming susidies, the price of your cup of coffee... The list goes on! Harford has done a spectacular job of explaining many of todays quirks in easy to understand language.
And the nice thing is the book evolves as you read it as well. Its not a collection of random essay points expanded into chapters, as one gets the impression of with "Freakonomics." No, with this book you will feel like you have graduated with a greater understanding of not just what makes governments and companies tick around us, but also a greater understanding of economics and how everything is interconnected with this book. You won't emerge only understanding one or two economics 'finding' you will emerge with the tools to apply the same fundamentals to all sorts of things in your life and gain a greater understanding. I mean, ebay was never mentioned, but after reading about the various types of auctions in Hardford's book,s I have a better idea as to why ebay is such a success!
A thoroughly enjoyable book and I recommend it to anyone and especially to people with a deep curiosity about everything is connected to everything else.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
In The Undercover Economist, Harford explains economic theory in a way that is very readable and very entertaining, even for those of us that have always found economics to be a dry subject. Frequently compared to 'Freakonomics', this is a far superior book, since Harford applies economic theories to situations that affect the typical consumer.
Harford is no-doubt a champion of the free markets, and presents a fairly convincing argument against trade barriers and other regulations. He even goes so far as to state that sweat shops aren't such a bad thing.
Overall, an excellent book if you're looking for something to entertain you as well as inform.
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