Reasonably Simple Economics: Why the World Works the Way It Does
Evan Osborne
Language: English
Pages: 332
ISBN: 1430259418
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The goal of Reasonably Simple Economics is, not surprisingly, simple: to help us think like economists. When we do, so much of the world that seemed mysterious or baffling becomes more clear and understandable―improving our lives and providing new tools to succeed in business and career.
In a chatty style, economist Evan Osborne explains the economic foundations behind the things we read about or see in the news everyday:
- Why prices for goods and services are what they are
- How government spending, regulation, and taxation can both hinder and help the economy
- Why and how some people get fabulously rich
- How entrepreneurs reorganize society beneficially
- Why markets sometimes fail and when or if governments should intervene when they do
- How economics and statistics can explain such things as discrimination in hiring and providing services (and why discriminators are shooting themselves in the foot), why we’re smarter than we’ve ever been, and how technology makes the idea of Earth’s “carrying capacity” meaningless
Along the way, you will learn the basic concepts of economics that well-educated citizens in democratic countries should know, like scarcity, opportunity cost, supply and demand, all the different ways economies are "managed," and more.
In the manner of The Armchair Economist, The Undercover Economist, or Naked Economics, Osborne uses current examples to illustrate the principles that underlie tragedies like the Greek economy or the global market meltdown of 2008, and triumphs like the continuing dominance of Silicon Valley in the tech world or why New York City markets are stuffed with goods despite the difficulty in getting them there.
As Osborne points out, the future, in economic terms, has always been better than the past, and he shows you how to use that knowledge to improve your life both intellectually and materially.
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Http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=690, a work also referenced in this footnote. 21 The data in this paragraph are from Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, Civil Society Report on Climate Change (London: International Policy Press, 2007), available online at www.csccc.info/reports/report_20.pdf. 22 http://reason.com/archives/2006/05/05/peak-oil-panic 23.
Powerful theoretical justification for doing this, and for doing it on a large scale. As noted, President Hoover had himself, contrary to conventional wisdom, engaged in very activist attempts to right the ship after the October 1929 stock market crash, urging businesses to keep wages up and engaging in numerous infrastructure projects. Once he took office in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did much the same, hiring people to manage the national parks, create art, build major electric-power.
“gambling ” cause tremendous damage. So what can we make of this hostility? First, Mr. Kennedy’s concessions are correct. The existence of oil-future contracts does allow people to manage risk. If Southwest Airlines is worried that fuel prices may be very high in two months at the holiday travel season, they can buy a contract that allows them to obtain delivery of the fuel during that time at a price locked in today. (This is what futures contracts are—contracts to buy or sell a certain amount.
Plan to organize local grain interests in every State, so that the producers will have control of the grain until it reaches the manufacturer. This is a fight against the broker and the middleman.” (The “brokers” actually were middlemen too.) The article goes on to indicate that such middlemen charged farmers $50 million a year for their services. As the quote suggests, the Bureau also sought to eliminate the speculator, but as we learned in Chapter 4, the speculator is only the deliverer of.
With parts of East Asia, the most peaceful region of the world, where people have long lives, and, compared to earlier generations, crime is by historical standards a non-factor (although fear of crime, driven in part by the media, is not). Homicide rates in Europe are less than 10% of what they were in the Middle Ages, when they were already considerably lower than what they were, according to many estimates, in the pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies often wrongly romanticized by.