Review: "Economics in One Lesson"

            I had to take an Intro to Economics course when I was in college.  I remember the professor drawing a graph showing the rate of people who wanted to buy butter versus those who want to buy guns…and then I passes the course somehow…I don’t remember what else happened in that class.

I heard Ben Shapiro recommend Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson:  The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics, and I thought – “one lesson, how bad could it be?” 

The lesson is:  “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy, it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups” (17, italics his).

The rest of the book is a compilation of various situations applying the lesson.

For example: chapter two concerns someone breaking a window.  To understand the economics of a broken window, one needs to consider the cost to the person who now has to purchase a new window, but the cost to all of the various people the person with the broken window would have spent that money on that he is now forced to use to repair the window.

The makes sense. 

So, if you are looking for a book on economics, I join in recommending this book.  There is even a chapter in this book looking at tariffs and how they do not benefit the country placing them, Mr. President.

Oh, well.  This book widened my thinking about how economics works.

            [This review appears on my blog, Amazon.com, and Goodreads.com.]