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Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life |  |
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Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life | |
-- Joe Queenan, The Wall Street Journal
The Armchair Economist is a wonderful little book, written by someone for whom English is a first (and beloved) language, and it contains not a single graph or equation...Landsburg presents fascinating concepts in a form easily accessible to noneconomists.
-- Erik M. Jensen, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
...enormous fun from its opening page...Landsburg has done something extraordinary: He has expounded basic economic principles with wit and verve.
-- Dan Seligman, Fortune
编辑推荐 From Publishers Weekly
Landsburg demystifies the economics of everyday behavior in these diverting if not always persuasive essays. Why don't promoters of sell-out rock concerts raise the advance ticket price? Because, suggests the author, promoters want the good will of teenage audiences who will buy lots of rock paraphernalia. Why are executives' salaries so high? One reason, opines Landsburg, is that stockholders expect managers to take risks, and well-heeled executives are more likely to do so. Associate professor of economics at the University of Rochester in New York, Landsburg applies his counter-intuitive analyses, with mixed results, to everything from taxes, auctions, baseball and the high price of movie theater popcorn to government inefficiency, the death penalty, environmentalism (which he attacks as a dogmatic, coercive ideology) and NAFTA.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Landsburg (economics, Univ. of Rochester) demonstrates the economist's way of thinking about everyday occurrences. The result is a compilation of questions ranging from why popcorn costs so much at movie theaters and why rock concerts sell out to why laws against polygamy are detrimental to women. Many of the issues raised are controversial and even somewhat humorous, but they are clearly explained only from an economic perspective as opposed to other dynamics of human behavior. There are also clear explanations of the misconceptions about unemployment rates, measures of inflation, and interest rates. The book is not a textbook but shows how one economist solves puzzling questions that occur in daily living. Recommended for general collections.
- Jane M. Kathman, Coll. of St. Benedict, St. Joseph, Minn.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
An economics professor's sometimes charming, sometimes glib, always counterintuitive guide to evaluating the small anomalies of daily life in a free-market society. In a series of interchangeable chapters, Landsburg (University of Rochester) asks questions like: Why do laws mandating use of seat belts increase the rate of traffic accidents, as statistics show they do? Because, he says, drivers have been given an incentive to drive more quickly and less carefully by being made to feel protected. In the service of what he calls efficient markets, Landsburg argues that wheat farmers, say, ought to be forced to pay damages done to their crops by sparks thrown off from railroad trains, since such damages can be borne more cheaply by farmers than by the railroad companies that are at fault. When analyzing the costs and benefits of legalizing drugs, he admonishes that increased tax revenues from a heretofore untaxable criminal activity are a neutral item; transfer of wealth from individuals to government is never equivalent to the creation of new wealth and may even be a societal drain. In general, Landsburg cheerily points out, economists value efficiency rather than justice, market solutions over legislated compromises, consumption over saving, and the creation of wealth above all else; these principles secretly drive the profession's public analyses of criminal penalties, tax policy, environmental legislation, and the ultimate good of market- based free trade. For all his cleverness, Landsburg never seriously questions the ``neutral'' assumptions of the dismal science--a fact that considerably decreases the value of his book. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
