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Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "To most people, economics is a dull science full of statistics and jar , mainly concerned with money and designed to answer a nar (but..." (more)
Key Phrases: marginal value curve, budget line shows, caveat venditor, United States, New York, Cost of Making (more...)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

To David Friedman (son of Milton Friedman), economics explains everything. In a way, that's an odd thing for him to say: Friedman Jr. has never taken an economics course in his life (by training he's a physicist). Yet he defines economics broadly and uses it as a tool to understand all aspects of human behavior, from selecting a mate to picking a grocery store line to switching lanes in rush-hour traffic jams. If you like the economics-for-everyman approach of such writers as Steven E. Landsburg, then Friedman is for you.


From Publishers Weekly

Friedman puts the passion back into economics with this unconventional, demanding primer. A professor at Santa Clara University (and son of Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman), he insists that economics is not primarily about money, but rather about needs, wants, choices, values?an imperfect science predicated on the assumption that people tend to rationally choose the best way to achieve their objectives. Using scores of everyday examples to steer the reader through complex concepts, he discusses consumer preferences, street crime, lotteries, plea bargains in trials, sharecropping, financial speculation, political campaign spending and much else. He demystifies international trade (e.g., there's nothing inherently bad about a trade deficit) and deconstructs the economy as an interacting system all of whose elements are interdependent. A rewarding text for serious readers. Translation and U.K. rights: Writer's Representatives.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Harperbusiness; 1st edition (August 1996)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0887307507
  • ISBN-13: 978-0887307508
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #792,977 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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David D. Friedman
David D. Friedman
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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To most people, economics is a dull science full of statistics and jar , mainly concerned with money and designed to answer a nar (but important) set of questions. Read the first page
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marginal value curve, budget line shows, caveat venditor, minimum average cost, insecure property rights, producer surplus, per widget, risk averter, excess burden, depletable resource
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United States, New York, Cost of Making, Lord Thomas, Brown Girl, Los Angeles, Standard Oil, Alfred Marshall, Hong Kong, John von Neumann, Adam Smith, Gordon Tullock, Harvard University Press, Santa Monica, Saudi Arabia, Soviet Union, New Orleans
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Customer Reviews

33 Reviews
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3.6 out of 5 stars (33 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars It is a lot better than Freakonomics., January 3, 2006
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (Paperback)
Economics for the laypersons has become the topic "du jour." This book written nearly a decade ago before economics became hot far surpasses its successors such as "Freakonomics." David Friedman does not dumb down economics like the others. Other reviewers who had at least a rudimentary interest in economics really enjoyed it. A few others who confused economics with their own political views predictably got frustrated with it. Economics is not always intuitive. As a result, several reviewers thought the author made mistakes regarding the graphs on page 29, or the example on housing on page 35. I reread these passages carefully. The author is accurate, it is just that these economics concepts are counter-intuitive. And, contrary to Steve Levitt in "Freakonomics" David Friedman did not shy away from tackling the inherent complexity in economics.

The book gives you a good foundation in both macro and microeconomics. Very early in the book he introduces and graphs demand and supply curves, marginal costs and revenue curves, utility functions. His coverage of international trade, taxation, subsidies, rent control is excellent. Along the way, you will also learn about investment theory and corporate finance. Friedman explains how the Efficient Market Hypothesis applies not only to stocks but freeway traffic and supermarket lines.

Friedman also gives full credit and fleshes out the ideas from the founders of modern economics, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Alfred Marshall. This is unlike Steve Levitt in "Freakonomics" who truly believed he was the first economist to tackle every day issues forgetting that economics is the science of understanding everyday behavior to begin with.

For further reading, if you want to pursue an econ refresher I recommend an actual textbook: "Principles of Economics" by Gregory Mankiw. This is a textbook with a hip and humorous attitude. The Economist, the British magazine, raved about it when it came out. I also recommend Gary Becker's "The Economics of Life", and Steve Landsburg's "The Armchair Economist."
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Shaped my life (not kidding), February 5, 2006
By Bruce_in_LA "reader_in_LA" (los angeles, ca United States) - See all my reviews
  
This review is from: Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (Paperback)
This book shaped my life since i picked it up in 1999 while browsing. I found it fascinating and adept - see the other reviews. I did an MBA, changed careers, worked in strategy consulting, and now have a VP-level job in a $6B enterprise. (Well, besides reading this book, the MBA helped...) This book is really eye-opening and you'll see the world around you differently, and how all kinds of people, organizations, and forces respond to incentives that can be subtle to figure out. For example, I'd known since junior high the Brits wore Red Coats in the Revolutionary War, and that made them easy to shoot at. It had never dawned on me, the British management felt the risk of Brit infantry fleeing AWOL was greater than the risk of the same, getting shot. They took the risk of getting shot, to avoid the risk of their troops fleeing (too obvious in bright red coats). Fascinating. Their are apparently some typos in the book which you can correct via the author's website, but I hadn't known that and was impressed by the book anyway, as is.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent second-stage primer, August 12, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (Paperback)
Like Steven Landsburg's "Armchair Economist," David Friedman's "Hidden Order" is an excellent primer in basic economics. Any book that helps bring real economics (as opposed to pseudo talk-show/pundit/political speech "economics") to an understandable level is good in my book, even if occasionally flawed.

"Armchair" did a good-to-excellent job of boiling down complex economic questions and answers. "Hidden Order" does so as well, but note that it's not for the light-hearted; plenty of graphs are available, and one not versed in Econ 101 may become temporarily lost. Thankfully, Friedman shores up his chapters by proving the theory with graphs, then stating "Here it is in English..." This allows readers who are not graphically inclined to skip over it without losing much understanding, while readers more interested in finding the proof behind the claim can peruse the mathematics at their leisure.

Still, it's not all perfect. There's some issues that he goes into great length, but others are touched on and left hanging. In part this is to reduce the down time for an already-sluggish topic, but the length for each issue varies quite a bit. And I have no idea why a parking meter is on the cover.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Boring
I loved Freakonomics and expected it to be the same. I liked it much less and found it extremely difficult to get through.
Published 11 days ago by James

5.0 out of 5 stars Deeper than conventional wisdom
Friedman strikes a great balance between complexity and plain explanations, while demonstrating why many conventional views of economic behavior are incomplete. Read more
Published 2 months ago by D. Low

1.0 out of 5 stars GIBBERISH
I was expecting a book that explained economic principles using plain language, clear analogies, and relevant examples. It does none of this. Read more
Published 5 months ago by James B. Johnson

5.0 out of 5 stars an excellent primer
David Friedman is a wonderful writer. His "Law's Order" fascinated me and helped draw me into the field of economics, in which I have since earned an MA. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Timothy Michael Vock

1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible Book
Sorry for being so negative about it, found it clumsily written with childish logic... waste of time
Published 10 months ago by TS 2912

4.0 out of 5 stars The loss of a star is only because it's a bit confusing...
Not everyone has heard of David Friedman, son of the Milton Friedman, but he's a professor of economics and has written several books. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Michael Bird

2.0 out of 5 stars Deeply Flawed Analysis
I have to say I didn't read too much of this book before being turned off by it. I will give you a few examples of what immediately caught my eye in the beginning of the book. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Ryan Mcnamara

2.0 out of 5 stars Not What It Seems
This book attempts to explain the dry, boring field of economics in an engaging and painless manner. It fails at doing that. Read more
Published on November 1, 2007 by Philip B. Rich

5.0 out of 5 stars It's an excellent book!
It's an excellent book. Although I enjoyed reading Freakonomics, "Hidden Order" is a much deeper and broader book in terms of issues discussed. Read more
Published on July 28, 2007 by Igor from Silicon Valley

4.0 out of 5 stars Good micro-economics primer, but not of the "popular" genre as it claims...
What David Friedman has written here is a good, but very serious, micro-economics book in a relatively conversational tone. Read more
Published on January 31, 2007 by M. Strong

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