Getting Undercover
Review of the Undercover Economist
Many of the people in my generation get a sour taste in the back of their throat at the mere mention of “economics,” or anything even vaguely related to the subject. Certainly many advertisements these days play off of this squeamishness, attempting to bring in the late 20-something and early 30-somethings with “WaMu”‘s new, fresh, hip checking accounts.
As I touched upon in my “Wake Up Neo” article, this attitude places many people in a position to be taken advantage of, and creates yet another lever for those who are playing “the game” to reach out and yank on. (Or pwn3d, if you prefer.)
Thus there is a need in the market for an introductory guide to economics, a way in from the outside that teaches people how to model economic (and social) systems from the outside in, rather than the other way around. Enter The Undercover Economist
Though it isn’t the point of this book, there are also several interesting anecdotes about things as seemingly droll as product pricing. (For instance, did you know that IBM put money into developing a chip that would slow down their “bottom-shelf” printer, which was actually the same as their “top-shelf” printer, minus the chip? This was of course done so that they could ask a higher price from “premium” shoppers.)
As is the case with many books that try to take you inside such a vast subject in just several hundred pages, much is expressed as fact that may not be, and still more is simplified to the point that I’m quite sure economics professors are slitting their wrists the long way in halls across the country with suicide notes that merely read “IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE THIS WAY.”
The fact of the matter is, if there is any way to bring the now aging counterculture 2.0 out of the tall grass and teach them how to organize and subvert from the inside, I’m all for it.
Order the Undercover Economist
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Over the summer my brother (getting his MBA in finance) gave me an off the cuff lesson on how interest rates affect the market by controlling how much any available money is worth, and how there are a bunch of other dirty tricks to screw around with the economy on a large scale. I think it was a bit of revenge for talking to him about aliens and time travel and the like for the past 20 or so years, but it was worth it.
I’ve also found the Mises Institute to be a pretty amazing economics resource. They would appear to be based on actual math and science, rather than making academic excuses for corporate crime — the difference is almost a system shock, since so much of what passes for “economics” is just horseshit.
They recently did one of the only honest, sane articles on the current US economic situation:
http://www.mises.org/story/2676