Basic Economics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
.jpg) Fifth Edition cover of Basic Economics | |
| Author | Thomas Sowell |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Basic Books |
Publication date | 2000 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 366 (first edition), 704 (fifth edition) (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 978-0465081387 |
| OCLC | 873007676 |
| Preceded by | Intellectuals and Race |
| Followed by | Wealth, Poverty and Politics |
Basic Economics is a non-fiction book by American economist Thomas Sowell published by Basic Books in 2000. The original subtitle was A Citizen's Guide to the Economy, but from the third edition in 2007 on it was subtitled A Common Sense Guide to the Economy.[1][2][3]
Basic Economics is focused on how societies create prosperity or poverty for their peoples by the way they organize their economies.[4]
In the introduction to the fifth edition, Sowell writes that he intends to write a book on economics that is written in plain English so that anyone can understand it. The book contains no charts or graphs.[3]
According to the reviewer R. Bastiat in 2004, the book "starts out with a chapter discussing the subject matter and perspective of economics in terms of scarcity and trade-offs. This is followed by six main topical sections, each subdivided into a few short chapters and concluding with an 'overview' that wraps up the main topic of the section." The six main parts of the book cover Prices and Markets, Industry and Commerce, Work and Pay, Time and Risk, The National Economy, and The International Economy. The revised edition concludes with a new section, Special Economic Issues.
This is followed by discussions about the role of prices, incentives, competition, the consequences of price controls, costs as forgone alternatives, trade-offs and substitutes, taxes, and subsidies. The section on industry and commerce delves into the role of markets in coordinating production and distribution in the face of widely dispersed information, and moves on to profit and loss, specialization, monopoly, antitrust, economic regulation, and a comparison of markets versus central planning. Sowell presents arguments about the social and economic consequences of minimum wages, and questions of income distribution, mobility, and poverty.[5] In a 2004 review of the second edition for Cato Journal, R. Bastiat dubbed Basic Economics "an exhilarating tour of the fundamentals of microeconomics, macroeconomics, financial markets, and international trade, with pointed anecdotes and pertinent examples illustrating every analytical point". He praised the Time and Risk section for containing discussion of concepts "that seldom get treated adequately in introductory courses or popular expositions".[5]
