The Armchair Economist

I recently read the book The Armchair Economist by Steve E. Landsburg. The book is a collection of essays that explain the logic of economics can be applied to everyday situations. Topics like pricing, sales taxes, deficits, pros and cons of taxes, football, courtship are illustrated in an very easy to understand style. One story that really stuck out to me was one explaining the concept of incentives. This short story showed both meanings of incentives, the positive ones, promoting good actions, and bad ones, promoting harmful actions.. One such example of these incentives is the seatbelt. While it appears to be a life saving piece of genius, its existence actually causes almost twice as many automobile accidents as before law required it. The thinking behind this is that if drivers thought of driving as a very dangerous action, they would be very careful, trying to limit as many risks as possible. But the addition of the seatbelt has caused many drivers to think of driving as a more casual and harmless everyday factor. This in turn causes them to be more reckless and take more risks that end up in crashes.

            The author uses many other examples like this to show his points in a very clear way. He also uses a plethora of analogies to illustrate the situation to the reader in a way that persuades them to his perspective, much like we did in our speeches. Even though this would seem to be a very dry read, the author implements clever logic, humor, and irony to keep the reader interested. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for some interesting non-fiction that is not only fun to read, but will also teach you some valuable lessons.