The Economics of Life: From Baseball to Affermative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect Our Everyday Life

Author: Gary Stanley Becker, Guity Nashat Becker, Guity Nashat
List Price: $14.95
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ISBN: 0070067090
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Trade (01 January, 1998)
Sales Rank: 94,905
Average Customer Rating: 3.25 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 4 out of 5
Interesting introductory text to practical economics
This is a collection of articles Becker has published during his career as an economic contributer to Business Week. After having read some of Becker's other books, I came to the conclusion that this book is two things:
1) An easy to understand intro to the usage of economic principles to solve problems. Becker's other books were essentially on similar topics, but with a much more rigorous analysis.
2) An intro to new topics that could be approached from a much more rigorous standpoint. Becker's curious mind actually points out to many issues (such as immigration, affirmative action, and many other gov't issues) that would benefit from a more rigorous economic approach.

Good entertainment value, with about 80% of essays really interesting and the rest fillers.

Rating: 4 out of 5
pretty good
Despite the Beckers' clear and obvious conservative bias, this is a pretty good book and well worth reading for anyone who wants to learn more about economics. For less slanted books, I would recommend "The Armchair Economist" and "Naked Economics."

Rating: 1 out of 5
More academic but less entertaining than Rush Limbaugh
This book is good for the smarter-than-average right-winger. If you are suspicious of any ideology, specially about those that claim to have easy solutions to the world's problems, then you are not going to like this book, like me.

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