FAIR PLAY
Author: Steven Landsburg
List Price: $24.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0684827557
Publisher: Free Press (08 November, 1997)
Sales Rank: 79,073
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 2 out of 5
Overrated
I probably would have liked this book better had the author not adopted such a smug attitude of moral and intellectual superiority. I also feel sorry for his daughter if he truly interacts with her as he claims.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Economic enlightenment for the layperson, with flaws
I agree that "Fair Play" is an entertaining read, and generally somewhat worthwhile; although you'd do better to read Robert Kiyosaki's financial books. "Fair Play" approaches a subject we Americans are grossly under-educated in from a plain-english, down-to-earth perspective. Nearly everyone can stand to be enlightened by this book. The author does have his faults, however; and they usually stem from his desire to force-feed economic theory, at the expense of all other logic, into every area of sociology. At one point, he tries to adjudge the number of forests to be saved by their price of admission!?? At another point, he starts off with a discussion of our responsibility to future generations, and somehow arrives at the idea that even un-conceived humans should have legal rights. Chapter 13, in which he takes a stab at explaining away environmental issues using pure economic theory, contains so many single-minded leaps of logic that it actually discredits the author, and the book. Thank goodness economists are not the caretakers of our environment, or the earth would be paved over, and unlivable!Chapter 9 on the "perfect tax," which disgusted a previous reviewer, I found to be a sarcastic exercise in futility. I found it somewhat amusing and illustrative. I don't think Landsburg was being serious, because a truly serious discussion of the "perfect tax" would have to include the concept of consumption taxes.
On the positive side, of which there is plenty, here is a quick example of the kind of economic enlightenment this book can provide: "$1,000 invested seventy years ago would be worth about $13,000 today if invested in bonds, or about $850,000 if invested in stocks." And paraphrasing: bondholding is 25 times more conservative than any other type of risk-related behavior... this "is a paradox that economists call the equity premium puzzle." Again, on balance, an admirable, though flawed, attempt at delivering economic knowledge to the layperson.
Rating: 3 out of 5
A different perspective on Economics
Much of this book will make you say "Hmmmm... I never thought about it like that. He does have a point."Chapter 17: "The Arithmetic of Conservation" was particularly enlightening.
Although some of Landsburg's analysis is great, I only give him 3 stars because much of the book contains a contradiction - Landsburg claims that there is no right and wrong - no good or bad, but at the same time, he is advocating a system! For an economist of this caliber, I was disgusted with Chapter 9: "The Perfect Tax".
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