The Severed Cortex

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Economist-Exposing-Poor-Decent/dp/0345494016/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211072671&sr=8-1

I have actually read a book in the last couple of months. I read this one almost two months ago. I do have to admit I've read little since then, excepting, of course, baseball news while surfing the internet and The Economist whilst dropping the kids off at the pool. (Did you know that one week in April the only world market with a gain was Pakistan's Karachi Stock Exchange?)

Economics is not a subject that comes easily to me, but even though I might ride the short invisible hand to the economics school, I'm fascinated with the science of it. I was OK at microeconomics but I attribute that to the professor, a gentleman from Kenya whose name escapes me. Instead of widgets or guns and butter, he used examples that we could all relate to as college students such as beer or pizza. I did well in that class but ask me today to explain the concept of marginal utility and I'll just stand there and drool. Macroeconomics I took later in life and because I was a little bit wiser about the interplay of how politics and finance work I really enjoyed it. The professor was pretty non-descript so I know it was the material that fascinated me. I've been a bit of a minor economics junkie since then.

The tag lines on this book lead you to believe that Tim Harford is going to be able to show you real life examples of how economic theories are applied and suddenly you are going to understand how the economic engine works. Didn't happen for me. Because this stuff doesn't come easy to me like math, I had to read passages over several times before I really understood what he was saying. Eventually I got it, but a couple of times you had to hit me over the head with a hammer. Some stuff in here I still don't fully understand, but I will have to give Mr. Harford credit. This does not read like a Economics 101 text. It reads as if you've got this guy standing next to you whispering in your ear why the Americano is $1.95 and the Cappuccino is $3.95 at Starbucks even though they both have the same basic ingredients. If he had been standing next to me I'm sure on several occasions he would have had to dumb it down a little more for me.

I grasped the first couple of chapters fairly well. Product stratification, perfect markets and the insider information that destroy them, and externality charges all make sense to me, although once again there are facets of them that take me several minutes of cogitation to really understand. Each chapter builds on the other and at one point it became too tough for me to remember all the things that are hard for me to remember, and then apply them to the new topic at hand. I struggled with several of the ending chapters although probably my favorite chapter in the book, Why Poor Countries Are Poor, falls in towards the end. I really wanted to understand the global force that is China, but the last chapter devoted to that was just too much for me.

Don't let me frighten you into thinking that it's not worth reading though. It is written in a style that won't frighten you about economic theory and at times it's even a little bit funny. I just think you need to be interested in economics as a hobby quite a bit to really be the audience that Tim Harford is shooting for. I'm guessing there's not a lot of folks that fall in that category.

Nancy's uncle Will read the whole thing on the way from Lake Wales, FL to Vienna, IL. He pronounced it a very good read and we discussed topics on it along the drive.