Tiffany K. (tiffanyak) - , reviewed on 1/1/2015 + 215 more book reviews

This is a very fascinating book, which I highly recommend to everyone. Essentially, the authors use economic principles and ideas to analyze several very interesting questions, such as why drug dealers live with their mothers. Trust me when I say that you never knew just how large of a role economics plays in our everyday world. I came away from the book looking at everything in a whole new way, and with a whole new level of appreciation for economics as a field of study. The anecdotes are amusing, the questions explored are relevant and interesting in ways you have never realized, and the entirety is tied together nicely and written in a very approachable fashion. The one downside, if you can call it that, is that not a lot of the data and information used in the analyses was provided or explained, with the authors instead largely falling back on saying what they found, with the reader basically taking their word for it. While this makes the book far more approachable and interesting for an everyday reader, it means that the education in actual economics that is provided is severely limited in scope, and their conclusions cannot be investigated further (based on what is provided in the book alone) if someone wishes to do so. They basically manage to make economics readily approachable for the everyday reader, while also allowing for very little true additional understanding of the field of study itself. This is only a minor weakness overall, as most would not be reading it for those purposes, but it did jump out at me a bit.

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