{"id":22218,"date":"2013-09-22T11:13:09","date_gmt":"2013-09-22T16:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22218"},"modified":"2013-09-22T11:13:09","modified_gmt":"2013-09-22T16:13:09","slug":"by-far-the-worst-thing-about-it-is-the-title","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/22\/by-far-the-worst-thing-about-it-is-the-title\/","title":{"rendered":"“By far the worst thing about it is the title”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the New Statesman<\/em>, Felix Salmon<\/a> reviews the latest book by Tim Harford:<\/p>\n

Harford […] has a breezy writing style and an infectious sense of humour — but he doesn\u2019t let himself go further than a sober, conservative economist would be comfortable going. He\u2019s trustworthy in a way that most other commentators on economics aren\u2019t. He is not particularly interested in political arguments or in imposing his views on others — instead, he just wants to explain, as simply and clearly as possible, the way in which the economics profession as a whole usually looks at the workings of the world.<\/p>\n

Harford, like Levitt, is a microeconomist by training and by avocation; he is most comfortable when faced with questions such as: \u201cWhy does a return train ticket on British rail cost only \u00a31 more than a single?\u201d Hence his Undercover Economist<\/em> franchise: the conceit is that he\u2019s an economist spying on the world, explaining things — and answering readers\u2019 questions — in a way that only an economist would.<\/p>\n

With The Undercover Economist Strikes Back<\/em>, however, Harford has taken a leap out of his microeconomic comfort zone. By far the worst thing about it is the title. There is none of the Undercover Economist<\/em> about this book, unless you include the dialogue style of writing that Harford has perfected in his FT<\/em> column. And he\u2019s not striking back at anything at all: no entity was attacking him in the first place. Even the subtitle (How to Run — or Ruin — an Economy<\/em>) is problematic. No one is going to come away from reading this book convinced that they know how to run an economy.<\/p>\n

Instead, what Harford has achieved with his new book is nothing less than the holy grail of popular economics. While retaining the accessible style of popular microeconomics, he has managed to explain, with clarity and good humour, the knottiest and most important problems facing the world\u2019s biggest economies today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the New Statesman, Felix Salmon reviews the latest book by Tim Harford: Harford […] has a breezy writing style and an infectious sense of humour — but he doesn\u2019t let himself go further than a sober, conservative economist would be comfortable going. He\u2019s trustworthy in a way that most other commentators on economics aren\u2019t. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,831,25,28],"tags":[86,134],"class_list":["post-22218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-business","category-economics","category-media","tag-criticism","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Mm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22219,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22218\/revisions\/22219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}