Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)

The key to thinking like an economist is recognizing the trade-offs inherent to fiddling with markets.

By 1991, the Hindustan Fertilizer Corporation had been up and running for twelve years.3 Every day, twelve hundred employees reported to work with the avowed goal of producing fertilizer. There was just one small complication: The plant had never actually produced any salable fertilizer. None. Government bureaucrats ran the plant using public funds

In America, there is no central authority that tells stores what items to stock, as there was in the Soviet Union. Stores sell the products that people want to buy, and, in turn, companies produce items that stores want to stock. The Soviet economy failed in large part because government bureaucrats directed everything, from the number of bars of s

Self-interest makes the world go around, a point that seems so obvious as to be silly.

The more productive we are, the richer we are.

By one calculation, if no new cases were filed in India, it would still take 324 years to clear all the existing cases from the docket.

This idea has profound implications when it comes to something like organ donation. Spain, France, Norway, Israel, and many other countries have “opt-out” (or presumed consent) laws when it comes to organ donation. You are an organ donor unless you indicate otherwise, which you are free to do. (In contrast, the United States has an “opt-in” system,

Per capita income in the United States is higher than per capita income in France; the United States also has a higher proportion of children living in poverty.

In 1999, Angola’s rulers spent $900 million in oil revenues to purchase weapons. Never mind that one child in three dies before the age of five and life expectancy is a shocking forty-two years.

how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets.