Economics For Dummies
Posted by Stephen Cline on February 5th, 2010
If you think economics is a complicated discipline that’s reserved for theorists and the intellectual elite and has nothing to do with you, think again. Economics impacts every aspect of our lives, from what we eat, to how we dress, to where we live. Economics might be complicated, but it has everything to do with you. Economics For Dummies helps you see how your personal financial picture is influenced by the larger economic picture. When you understand how what happen… Buy Economics For Dummies at Amazon
This is probably the first and last review I’ll ever do of a “Dummies” book, but I just had to give this book a plug. Whoever wrote it (I don’t remember and I’m too lazy to scroll up and see) did a fantastic job. It’s really good!
I confess that I was so impressed with the explanations and examples offered in this book that for a while I mulled over having our school switch from our current texts (Mankiw’s “Principles of Macroeconomics” and Samuelson’s “Economics”) to this one.
But I soon thought better of it: the department would probably acquire a bad name in a big hurry if students were seen walking about with copies of a “Dummies” text under their arms as their official course text. And that would be bad for me.
But that’s how good it is. Too bad I’m so self-interested! Now the students will just have to slog through inferior texts.
Don’t think you’re getting a free lunch, though: there are graphs, models, and equations you’re gonna have to learn to wade through it.
But in my estimation, going through a layman’s course in both micro- and macroeconomics could not be made more painless than here, unless your needs are so casual that you’re looking to dispense with graphs and equations altogether.
In which case, good luck learning anything solid about economics!
I got this book because I wanted to learn about the basics of economics and the multitude of terms associated with it. It did a very good job of explaining the major universal concepts of economics, and when the author did have to “dumb” parts down in order to avoid over-complications, he very clearly stated this, which I liked. The book certainly did not cover very advanced topics, and I did not expect it to. It gave a good simple framework on the basic principles, which is what I was looking for.
One of the things I did not like, which may be just because its part of the “for dummies” series, is that much of the book’s content says things like: “In this chapter, I’m going to talk about such and such” or “Please refer to chapter 10 to learn about such and such”. I just felt it got extreme at times and that these constant references detracted from the actual content at times. I also am not a fan of the constant joking in the text, especially when it comes in the middle of important content, but that just comes with the Dummies books I guess. If you can filter that out though, then I think this is a good introduction to basic economics and I got what I wanted from it.