The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run--or Ruin--an Economy

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and after having read several of Harford's books, this might be my favorite! The style of this book is very different from the other books that he has published and writes in the style of having a conversation with someone else. Each point that he makes, he is very self aware as to what a critic or an interviewer might press him on and this Q and A style is how the entire book is written. It feels like you are along for the ride and you don't know where it's going or when it will end and that made it very entertaining and tough for me to put down. I do not have a background in economics but I have read several books about it so for me, this was a great read! If you love Harford or are looking for a book that touches on a lot of topics (the importance of central banks, what potential solutions are for a recession, the role of regulations, income inequality and how it's measured etc.) then you will enjoy this book! Highly recommend!!

Following the author on his blog now switching to his books: a decision I’m not regretting at all. His books are fun to read and not only informative: you learn a lot. What’s the difference between macro and microeconomics? If you are totally in the dark about a subject like me, this is a great book to start. Or maybe because I was in the dark you’ve better not follow my recommendation. The author mentions that Keynes defined an economist as someone closer to Da Vinci more than to a grey technocrat. The economist literally has to be curious on anything around humans, be a mathematician, admite art, know history, understand humans and also have an instinct for fixing things closer to an engineer... (I’m just paraphrasing so please read the book!). The author in this book shows exactly that looking back in time, bringing stories alive and writing with an amazing prose to bring down closer to your mind and hearts a topic that the same author confesses had taken a very abstract road. It also helped me a lot to understand is our understanding of what makes whole human systems work economically: we started to learn this very very recently and however we advanced a lot yet we do not know so much. Also it makes a fair description of all the voices there on economists: where we are, where we are moving, and you get a better idea where politicians and quoting out of context depending on their political allegiances... clearly some things do not work, some work, and the low level detail yet is not fully understood: there is a lot to apply differently and create different societies however there are already some sound macroeconomics concepts that apply you like or not. Not physics but getting closer maybe...

I read this as a semi-literate economic person. I think Tim Harford does a great job as always in distilling the individual ideas to become interesting and understandable. My only reservation is that the endless complexity of the subject left me feeling a bit overwhelmed in the end.A somewhat tougher read than The Undercover Economist which was more fun.

Tim Harford is a good author and an entertaining read. Unfortunately, this book is exactly what it says on the tin: A macro economics primer. For someone used to reading his more entertaining micro books, it was less than thrilling.I'd heartily recommend this to anyone who wants a macro primer or a light and entertaining way to refresh their memory. If you're 'into' economics, you can safely give this one a pass for the content, although you'll still like it for the writing and stories.

This is a fun read for sure. The writing style is a fictitious Q&A, but it does not bother me at all. What I like the most is that the book comes with a lot of anecdotes. Many economics students might know about theories, but usually people are not exposed to the real-life examples of many economic issues. You can walk through historical and recent economic anecdotes with this book. However, this book is neither a macroeconomic textbook nor its substitute. It is simply incorrect to "learn" macroeconomic theories from it. This book is about macroeconomic phenomena, and we can familiar with the subject. Perhaps the theoretical rigor and depth is compromised, as others point to it; it is because the book is for everybody who may or may not study economics.Highly recommended.

This is a well written book on current economics of the U.S. and the world. It is intended to show what is the basis of economic planning both the successes and shortcomings in predicting the future and what methods have worked and which systems have had trouble. Overall I found it interesting and enlightening on this subject and would recommend it.

I had previously read Tim Harford's Undercover Economist and this is a great follow up. I don't know if you could pass a Economy 101 course with this book, but for the rest of us this gives a great explanation of how the economy works from the consumer's point of view. Of all the things in this book the one thing that stood out was the short discussion of education in the United States. Some great universities but the education of the masses is a total disaster. It's like the vast majority of Americans is being kept ignorant and stupid. The average American is being fed pablum on Television and they live in fear with the never ending portrait of crime and cops.

I would give 5 stars, but the chapter on exponential growth in finite world was very poor. You simply can not use energy and GDP statistics in USA to say that they are decoupled. That is because of globalization and huge international trade by which one can produce GDP in country A and produce energy and pollution in country B. China and developing countries are acting as a chimney of developed countries.Otherwise the book is really good and worth reading.

According to John Maynard Keynes "The master economist ... must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher-in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician."So even a very bright fifteen year old is not going to be able to understand macroeconomics - it will need half a lifetime of professional training and experience to get him to a point where he can grasp even the basics. Unless, that is, he has Tim Harford as his guide. Using the Q&A Socratic debate format Tim leads the reader towards an understanding of why macroeconomics is so hard, why no solutions have yet been found and maps out potential sources of hope for future solutions. Along the way we encounter some of the latest thinking on behavioural economics, on why economics growth can continue forever, on why happiness economics is just plain weird and on how the Euro is like Dr Strangelove's doomsday device with Greece playing the role of Major Kong.Although this book could be read on its own I feel it is better to read  The Undercover Economist  first so that the reader has a basic understanding of microeconomic concepts before embarking on "The UE-SB". The takeaway from this book is different from his earlier works. Reading it has persuaded me that we need a long term inflation rate of more than 2% to get us out of this depression but I believe that the 4% rate that Tim suggests is too high. Let's see what Mark Carney does over 2014.Buy it - Read it - Enjoy it The Undercover Economist

When it comes to pop economics books, Tim Harford's 'The Undercover Economist' is a classic of the genre, selling over a million copies around the world. Having read and enjoyed it, I was curious to see whether its successor 'The Undercover Economist Strikes Back' (named after the Star Wars' 'The Empire Strikes Back') would live up to the illustrious first volume.The answer is that it is does, building and improving upon its predecessor. While The Undercover Economist was mainly if not exclusively focused on microeconomics, Strikes Back focuses on macroeconomics only and therefore covers plenty of content that the original didn't. Another change from the original that is immediately obvious is that Harford has implemented a new 'Socratic dialogue' style in which the whole book is written like an extended Q and A session between Harford and a notional reader. This hasn't pleased all reviewers and some readers may find it irritating, however I felt it made more explicit the precise questions Harford was addressing in each paragraph.Harford covers the key issues of macroeconomics, starting from the role of money, the money supply and inflation to recessions, the labour market, game theory as well as some of the more normative questions over economic policy, such as whether it should be geared towards growth in GNP or other ends. Microeconomics is sometimes thought of as the 'good' economics, and therefore by implication macroeconomics as the 'bad'. This is because macroeconomics is seen as having far more ambiguity over its central questions than microeconomics. Therefore Harford's task is defining for a lay reader a debate as much as a settled discipline. He does this well, giving due attention to the arguments from a Keynesian and Neoclassical perspectives as well as key turning points in economic debate, such as the Lucas critique. However, what Harford does that some other introductions have missed is explain why there is ambiguity, i.e. the genuine difficulty in determining which way the lines of causation run in a complex system like the economy.Therefore 'The Undercover Economist Strikes Back' is a very good introduction to macroeconomics that is just as crisply written and illuminating as Harford's original introduction to microeconomics.

A brilliant book on the big, governmental-level of economics. It occasionally hints at preferred solutions, but the book is mainly concerned with explaining how things work, how things go work and how economic theorists have struggled to understand the underlying processes. It always tries to be fair-minded, careful to explain both a "Keynesian" and a "Classical" approach to the problems. There are no maths or equations, the book uses quotes and (true) stories to illuminate the author's points.It covers all the hot topics: recessions, "austerity", when balanced budgets are a good idea and when they are not, how running a government budget isn't like running a household budget, printing money, rising inequality (or not), job protection and so on.The book is brilliantly written - the tone of it is almost exactly like that he adopts in his radio show "More Or Less", which is simple without being patronizing and with a gently ironic sense of fun. The explanations are very clear - an inquisitive older child could happily follow this book without problems and it is short enough to read in an afternoon, but without leaving you feeling short-changed. I'd recommend this to any reader interested in the subject without qualification.

I am a big fan of the original "Undercover Economist" but was not so impressed with "The Logic of Life", which I found a bit same-y (and I'm afraid I didn't bother with "Adapt" at all). However, this book enters new territory - macroeconomics - and does it well. For me as a lay reader, there was a lot of new information, well-explained and backed up by interesting and illustrative examples. I think I will have to re-read it to fully digest everything, but I'm looking forward to it! The only slight sticking point for me was the question and answer format. Harford has clearly come to like writing this way from his columns in the FT but although the format (usually) works well at column length, I wasn't convinced for a whole book. Sometimes the "questions" were so few and far between that he might as well just have written normal prose and even in the parts that were more conversational I didn't think the format added much. Still, it worked for Plato so you can't blame Harford for giving it a go.

Quite simply, I loved this book. Remember those books you used to read as a kid, that you couldn't put down or which you'd stay up reading, way past "lights out" - Well, here's an example... written about, of all things, economics!Tim Harford writes clearly, concisely and with gentle humour about macroeconomics, in a way that helped me (a science graduate) make sense of how a country's economy works on the grand scale. The tone is wonderfully conversational, but precise. It's logical - I lost count of the number of "light bulb" moments I had, reading it, where something I'd read in the financial press or saw on the news, suddenly made perfect sense :) I'm a big fan of "More or Less", Tim's radio 4 programme about numbers and statistics. That show is a perfect example of the Reith(ian) directive to "entertain, educate and inform". This book does just that :) Read it; you're certain to enjoy it :)