Economics in One Lesson (1946)

This book should mandatory for every North American student before they graduate high school and vote. Economics does not need to to remain in the hands of elitist politicians and academics. Hazlitt cuts through the fallacies, gets to the core issues,and explains where we're going wrong, and why we need to change. ( )

I used to have a black and white photo of Hazlitt and me, taken while he was signing my copy. Yeah, I', old... ( )

Not the book to get if you've already read extensively in different schools of economics. The author isn't an economist or academic; he had less then two years of college. Rather, Hazlitt was a journalist self-taught in the discipline of economics who wrote for the New York Times The Nation and Newsweek. His virtue is that he's clear and lucid and can bring across complex ideas in simple terms for the ordinary person--and as H.L. Mencken said of him, he was "one of the few" in economics "who could really write." And celebrated, even Nobel-Prize winning economists were among his fans: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrick A. Hayek, Milton Friedman. Based on Bastiat's "What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen," as his Preface stated, "This book is an analysis of economic fallacies so prevalent that they have almost become a new orthodoxy." And so many of those fallacies are still heard today, are still the grounds for current policy (rent control and minimum wage being two examples) that this 65 year old book is still sadly relevant. The book is worth the price just for the chapter "The Broken Window" alone, a parable which Steve Forbes in the Foreword to the 50 Anniversary edition rightly praises "ranks with Adam Smith's Pin Shop, Bastiat's Petition or Plato's Cave." Still the best primer around on the principles of free markets. ( )

Este breve ensayo divulgativo es toda una inyección de sentido común sobre aquello que es verdaderamente la ciencia económica y aquello que es simplemente demagogia política. La tesis del autor es que cuando consideramos un problema económico cualquiera debemos analizar sus consecuencias a largo plazo y para toda la población, y no sólo sus consecuencias inmediatas para el target que motiva la intervención económica. Una verdadera lección magistral recomendable para cualquiera que quiera entender algo de esa oscura y manipulable ciencia que llamamos economía. ( )

Everyone should read this. Best exposition you will find on some fundamental economic truths, especially relating to the role of the government. A must read for anyone even vaguely interested in politics. (A classic, first published in 1946) ( )