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99 of 105 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Economics for You and Me, January 27, 2003
The Austrian School is the most consistently free enterprise school of economic thought. Its most outstanding representative was Ludwig von Mises and its leading thinker in recent memory was Murray Rothbard. Both von Mises and Rothbard wrote substantial treatises on economics. However, there haven't been many introductory works. (Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson focuses more on government intervention than prices, the evenly rotating economy and capital theory.) Gene Callahan has remedied that situation with this excellent introductory work. Written in the style of Rothbard, Callahan provides a primer on methodology, economic theory, and a critique of government intervention. The examples are always vivid and at times humorous. After finishing this book, the reader should tackle Rothbard's Man, Economy and State. Then he should try von Mises's Human Action. Human Action isn't easy, but it will present the reader with the acedmic and theoretical rigor of the Austrian school's greatest exponent. For an introductory work that is more basic that Callahan's, David Gordon's An Introduction to Economic Reasoning is excellent.
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73 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Accessible Introduction to Economics, April 23, 2003
Callahan (and the Austrian school in general) explain economics in terms of human action rather than the abstract and sometimes obtuse models of classical economists. Beginning with the simplest possible scenario, a single human acting in isolation, Callahan builds a hypothetical society and uses it to explain the crucial concepts of economics in a style and language that should be accessible to anyone who has completed high school. He explains the concept of subjective valuation with his individual on the island, then begins adding people and concepts. He quickly takes us through direct exchange, a refutation of the labor theory of value, the introduction of money (including the explanation of the criteria that make something a good choice to use as money), time preference (and how the interest rate serves as the "price" of a time preference), and so on. In the second half of the book he explains concepts that are a bit more abstract - how do central banking and fiat money work? What causes the business cycle? How does a free market system handle externals (benefits or consequences imposed upon those not party to an exchange -e.g. water pollution). Throughout it all, Callahan cogently makes the case for a truly free market as the only means of efficiently satisfying the desires of a society's members. There are things I would have liked Callahan to cover better, for instance, a greater discussion of how the neo-classical economists work, and how their theories influence media reporting of economic issues (think about all the indicators that we are bombarded with in the business section of the paper). However, I don't see how he could have covered that material while keeping the book small and readable. He does give an extensive bibliography for those wishing to further investigate particular points. A handy appendix gives the five page version of the history of the Austrian movement. It seems foolish to say this with it only being April, but I expect this will be the best book I read this year. I would give it more than 5 stars if I could.
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54 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy it! Buy it now!, July 4, 2002
That's why you're reading this review. You know you want to. Hit that one-click button. Are you tired and confused by what passes for economics these days? Did you sit in class in college and wonder what the heck was going on? Do you believe people can't think in graphs and algebraic equations? Do you believe if you took all the economists in the world and laid them in a line they'd still all point in different directions? If you answered "yes" to these questions then you'd be interested in the Austrian school of economics (the only school, by the way, that predicted the Great Depression). And Gene's book is an excellent introduction to that school. Of course, you can just bypass this book and go straight to Ludwig von Mises, the grandmaster of the Austrian school, and read his magnum opus, the 1000+ pages _Human Action_...nah, don't do that, at least not yet. Read this book first, and once your appetite is whetted then you can move on to the graduate level stuff. You'll like this book. I promise.
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