I’ve always been a bit mystified by two political fields – economics and foreign affairs. The first because everything seems counter-intuitive, the latter because it always seems to be a choice between several bad options.
I haven’t found a good primer for foreign affairs, but this book helped me get a basic “macro” sense on economics.
Ultimately the basic issue is “what are the people producing”? If they are producing a lot, the macroeconomics are going to be generally quite good and the inverse if people aren’t producing a lot of value per capita.
That’s simple enough, but then everything starts to get funky once you add the two other core concepts of money and expectations, which can color the how production is calculated and create odd phenomena around the economy.
Secondary concepts of interest rates, exchange rates, and methods of accounting then fill out the picture. This is when things start to get a little counterintuitive, but nothing too crazy that can’t be handled with a little careful reading.
The counterintuitive part of economics is found in the fact that these basic concepts are affected by a myriad of factors – ultimately all the individual actions of all the players in the marketplace (as in each of us). Also once we get comfortable with a theory, something comes in and bowls us over, as the Great Recession, and people need to reassess their theories. Life tends to be messier than math.
Even though the basic concepts are pretty straightforward, when there are so many players (who aren’t perfectly rational) interacting with each other you end up a pretty complex field.
This book gave me a basic sense of how the big pieces of economics fits together. Even though I doubt I will read another dry textbook on economics and I’ve already forgotten some of key concepts just a couple months later, I sense a residue buried in my brain and these ideas should be much easier to recall when needed, kind of like riding a bike.
This book was just what I needed. For future reading, I’m going back to popular books about wacky counterintuitive quirky economic topics. Sometimes you need to read the fun stuff first to get you interested in a topic, but I find that exposing oneself to basic foundational stuff is always worth the effort, even if you ultimately go back to the candy.