His book Basic Economics taught me more than any economics classes did in school.
Few days later they, and everyone in city got an exviction notice. Mobile home parks all decided to close down and sell the land.
Because of this book, this made perfect sense.
>A mathematics-first approach encourages oversimplified assumptions.
Wrong. It makes the oversimplified assumptions more clearly identifiable, instead of concealing them in prose which is not measurable. This is why they are superior, because we can clearly identify why they are wrong, and by how much. This is how science and the positivist framework improve our knowledge.
In fields like economics it's easier to make a grandiose and "falsifiable" piece of math that is absolutely correct but doesn't actually reflect anything real.
Or more often reflects a tiny part of a first order effect.
Yet people get blinded because the math is right.
If you know of a way to improve upon the existing methodologies, then show it to us, and be precise. Then you will have an argument that deserves to be engaged with. Ambiguous claims that the math "doesn't actually reflect anything real" sound intelligent, but really aren't saying much at all.
Reading through this book you’ll understand that higher taxes often mean less tax revenue, and vice versa.
Many people get stuck on zero sum game.
This isn’t a mathematicians book.
This is a book so people don’t think stare bonds are free money, etc.
The book is a pithy, digestible introduction to a bunch of basic topics in economics. It is also lacking a lot of the detail and mathematical explanation of introductory university courses.
For example, I understood the basic concept of comparative advantage after listening to the book, but when I later revisited the topic using a textbook, the graphs and worked examples gave me a clearer picture and it was better related to adjacent concepts like marginal cost, the production-possibility frontier, etc.
I don't have the impression that academic economics as presented to undergraduates diverges greatly from the book, although it has been years since I heard it and my recollection is fuzzy.
Sure, many people find their confirmation bias reinforced by it ... but otherwise there are more useful books to really learn about economics: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/reading#wiki_general...
Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles [1] is, ironically, a very good starting point in understanding what makes Sowell "conservative" (the Constrained Vision) vs "progressive" (the Unconstrained Vision). I think this is the work that impressed Steven Pinker.
The categories get really messy, for example when he describes Marxism as a hybrid ideology, but the core idea is that people tend to believe either: 1. we are made of crooked timber and are made better by social structure, or 2. our potential is being held back by selfish oppressors/exploiters.
Regardless of which vision drives you, I imagine Thomas Sowell would do very well in Bryan Caplan's Ideological Turing Test [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions
[2] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm...
Actual communists tended to start out living that creed: they'd systematically destroy any existing institution. But then they'd find society didn't work at all without them, so they'd pretty rapidly build new institutions, that all happened to be controlled by them.
Conservatives on the other hand are, by their nature, conservative about changing things. They tend to regard existing social structures as evolved and thus encoding great wisdom, even if it can't be easily articulated. To change those institutions is thus highly risky, even if it may not be immediately apparent why that is. This is the opposite of Marxism, which is a utopian ideology in which changing everything at once is not too much.
The Constrained vision assumes that the best we can do is choose a set of trade-offs that are least bad; the Unconstrained vision assumes that trade-offs are illusions imposed by defective institutions, and so if we improved/reformed/abolished the institutions, we could eliminate the trade-offs.
There's a lot more to it, so you should read the book, but that's the basic thesis.
Krugman overlooks that many conservatives were once liberals, while the reverse is typically not true. That doesn’t mean that those folks were wrong before and are correct now. But in terms of Krugman’s proposed test, they can probably at least articulate the opposite view based on having once held those beliefs.
Speaking for myself: I was a pretty standard agnostic coastal liberal back in high school, while wife was in Iowa reading National Review. We’re the same age and have experienced the same political history over the last 20 years. But I don’t think it was until recently that I could’ve cogently articulated her views on those various events. More importantly, I don’t think I could even have cogently articulated what she viewed as the parameters of what was being debated. (That is to say, I perceived a political debate being about X, while she perceived it being about Y.) She, on the other hand, is pretty good at articulating what I thought back then—like most young people her friends held liberal views.
Is there any data to support that claim? It’s the opposite of my own personal anecdata.
> On average, Americans identify as more politically liberal at age 18 and become increasingly conservative between their 20s and 60s.
See also: https://fee.org/media/14135/chart2_socialism.png?width=100%2...
I agree with some of the criticisms, but in general I think the dichotomy of the two visions is appropriate for explaining why two individuals may irreconcilably disagree on a particular issue at a given point in time.