naked economics - wheelan, charles

[...]... This book is not economics for dummies; it is economics for smart people who never studied economics (or have only a vague recollection of doing so) Most of the great ideas in economics are intuitive when the dressings of complexity are peeled away That is naked economics Economics should not be accessible only to the experts The ideas are too important and too interesting Indeed, naked economics can... everyday life This book by Charles Wheelan changes all that Wheelan has an anti-Midas touch If he touched gold he would turn it to life This is a truly unique book It contains no equations, no inaccessible jargon, and no inscrutable diagrams While equations and diagrams may well be behind many of the ideas in economics, Wheelan shows that they can be reduced to plain English He boils economics down to its... the economics were wrong It didn’t happen The Perot campaign was, as he might have put it, “a dog that didn’t hunt.” But that does not mean that those world leaders who do get themselves elected have a solid grasp of basic economics The French government in 2000 undertook a program to tackle chronic double-digit unemployment with a policy that was the economic equivalent of fool’s gold The Socialist-led... excessive use of mathematics Moreover, they often fail to admit what they don’t know Why is economics the butt of so many jokes, and why do students often become glassy-eyed when confronted with the study of economics as a discipline? The reasons, I think, are that economists generally do not write well and that most economics texts rely far too much on algebraic manipulation and complex diagrams Moreover,... knowledge and enthusiasm to many new readers and students naked economics CHAPTER 1 The Power of Markets: Who feeds Paris? In 1989, as the Berlin Wall was toppling, Douglas Ivester, head of Coca-Cola Europe (and later CEO), made a snap decision He sent his sales force to Berlin and told them to start passing out Coke Free In some cases, the Coca-Cola representatives were literally passing bottles of... whether they liked Coca-Cola But we didn’t even have to say the name! We just shaped our hands like the bottle, and people understood We decided we would move as much Coca-Cola as we could, as fast as we could—even before we knew how we would get paid.”1 Coca-Cola quickly set up business in East Germany, giving free coolers to merchants who began to stock the “real thing.” It was a money-losing proposition... remarkable enough that we can now shop for a television twentyfour hours a day from the comfort of our own homes; it is equally amazing that in 1971 a twenty-five-inch color television set cost an average worker 174 hours of wages Today, a twenty-five-inch color television set—one that is more dependable, gets more channels, and has better reception—costs the average worker about twentythree hours of pay... students Does Oseola McCarty’s behavior turn the field of economics on its head? Are Nobel Prizes being recalled to Stockholm? No She simply derived more utility from saving her money and eventually giving it away than she would have from spending it on a big-screen TV or a fancy apartment Okay, but that was just money How about Wesley Autrey, a fifty-year-old construction worker in New York City He was waiting... forecasters are asked to make longer-run projections on such subjects as global warming, their range of forecasts makes economic forecasts appear precise by comparison Economics is more difficult than the physical sciences because we cannot usually run controlled laboratory experiments and because people do not always behave predictably A whole new branch of behavioral economics has attracted considerable... economy has created millions of new Internet-related jobs over the last three decades —jobs that not only didn’t exist in 1980, but that no one could have even imagined— all without the government trying to divvy up work hours In 2008, the French government under Nicolas Sarkozy passed legislation allowing companies and workers to negotiate away the thirty-five-hour workweek, in large part because the . stand might—and do—impact my life. Bravo, Charles Wheelan, for doing the impossible: making the study of economics fascinating, comprehensible, and laugh-out-loud funny.” —Deborah Copaken Kogan,. NY 10110 Library of Congress has catalogued an earlier edition as follows: Wheelan, Charles J. Naked economics: undressing the dismal science /Charles Wheelan; foreword by Burton G. Malkiel.—Fully rev. and. Malkiel.—Fully rev. and updated. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN: 97 8-0 -3 9 3-0 797 5-3 1. Economics. I. Title. HB171.W54 2010 330—dc22 2009052148 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500