Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One
Products for Sale — By Shopping Blogs on November 7, 2009 4:35 pm
Product Description
This revised edition of Applied Economics is about fifty percent larger than the first edition. It now includes a chapter on the economics of immigration and new sections of other chapters on such topics as the “creative” financing of home-buying that led to the current “subprime” mortgage crisis, the economics of organ transplants, and the political and economic incentives that lead to money earmarked for highways being diverted to mass transit and to a general neglect of infrastructure. On these and other topics, its examples are drawn from around the world. Much material in the first edition has been updated and supplemented. The revised and enlarged edition of Applied Economics retains the easy readability of the first edition, even for people with no prior knowledge of economics.
Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One
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Tags: Economics
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Thomas Sowell’s central point is that government intervention to correct economic or social problems can lead to unintended subsequent consequences. The book’s main weakness is that it only provides examples where implemented governmental policies have caused problems: as if all government interventions are bad. A second weakness is that it provides no guidance in making better policy. There is little to learn from this book.
Rating: 1 / 5
You Sowell worshippers just don’t get it do you? Your country is in a truly shocking state. If you measure US performance against any other developed country on virtually any social/health index (homicide rate, obesity, educational performance, life expectancy, teenage births, mental health, drug usage, crime rates, imprisonment… I could go on) you will immediately see that the US performance is nothing short of desperate. It is precisely the policies that Sowell promulgates in this book (more rights for private property, lower and regressive taxation, weak unions and fewer regulations) that cause this state of affairs, and which are tearing your country apart at the seams. Nearly all social and health problems are fundamentally related to the level of inequality in a society. In Scandinavia and Germany – where there are high levels of Government intervention, including strongly progressive taxation to ensure that inequality does not become too great – the performance on these indices is streets ahead of the US (eg. three years higher life expectancy in Sweden, half as many infant deaths per thousand live births in Sweden, three times as many obese adults in the US as compared to Sweden, three times more homicides per million people in the US than in Sweden etc. etc.). Indeed, across the OECD there is an almost perfect linear relationship between inequality and worsening performance on any social or health related index. You may have a (slightly) higher GDP per head than Western Europe (whatever it is that GDP measures), but the USA really is a deeply dysfunctional society.
And what is true for your social infrastructure is just as true for your physical infrastructure. Just try landing at JFK and then taking the New Jersey turnpike – it is literally crumbling in front of your eyes. It is the same story wherever you go in the US (remember the Minneapolis bridge collapse a couple of years ago?). I was genuinely shocked on my first visit to the USA at the poor state of repair of your cities compared to Germany. I could not believe that this was supposed to be the richest country in the world.
Please go and visit Germany or Scandinavia and see for yourself the gaping chasm in the quality of life that exists between the USA and most of Western Europe – you certainly won’t find evidence of it in a Thomas Sowell book. All he can do is offer a more extreme version of the already extreme right wing economic policies that have practically destroyed the social fabric of the USA since the 1980s. This is because Sowell is at heart a dogmatic ideologue who uses highly selective arguments and evidence to promote a deeply unpleasant political philosophy (essentially social Darwinism). For some more specific criticisms of his basic arguments see my review of Sowell’s `Basic Economics’.
Rating: 1 / 5
The revised, enlarged edition of Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One is fifty percent larger than the first edition and includes a chapter on the economics of immigration and new sections on other topics, making this a ‘must’ for collections that have enjoyed the previous edition. Much material in the first edition has been substantially revised, also, in a book recommended highly and equally for students of economics as well as those with no experience.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book Applied Economics is about thinking beyond the obvious answers to questions of public policy because the obvious answers usually lead to unintneded and costly effects. It is because of the obvious answers that politicians enact policy that produce costly and counterproductive effects.
This book covers a number of the public policy topics, including housing. Note that even though this book covers the housing crash, this book does not replace Sowell’s following book Housing Boom and Bust.
It is a very good and insightful book, typical from Thomas Sowell.
Rating: 5 / 5
Thomas Sowell latest book Basic Economics is a must read especially for the uninformed. The book belongs in schools through the country. Mr. Sowell is a national treasure who few people are aware of and will be sadly missed one day.
Rating: 5 / 5
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