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Tim Harford – THE UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST STRIKES BACK : How to Run-or-Ruin – An Economy
Tim Harford – THE UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST STRIKES BACK : How to Run-or-Ruin – An Economy
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Tim Harford – THE UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST STRIKES BACK : How to Run-or-Ruin – An Economy
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Tim Harford – THE UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST STRIKES BACK : How to Run-or-Ruin – An Economy
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Tim Harford – THE UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST STRIKES BACK : How to Run-or-Ruin – An Economy
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THE UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST STRIKES BACK : How to Run or – Ruin – An Economy

Tim Hardford
BRAND NEW, PAPERBACK
Tim Hardford
BRAND NEW, PAPERBACK

RM20.00

Looking At Daily Life In Wider Picture Through The Lens Of Macroeconomics

ISBN 9781408704257
Book Condition BRAND NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Little Brown & Company
Publication Date 29/08/2013
Pages 320
Weight 0.48 kg
Dimension 23.5 × 15 × 2.5 cm
Availability: 1 in stock

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1 in stock

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Description

 
Tim Harford’s first book, the global bestseller The Undercover Economist, was a sensation – and has gone on to sell well over a million copies worldwide. In it, Harford looked at the world through the eyes of a microeconomist, from the changing cost of a cappuccino to how supermarkets choose to display the products on their shelves. Now, in a world utterly transformed by the global downturn, Harford is back.
 
The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run – or Ruin – an Economy In The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, he turns to the wider picture – to macroeconomics – to help us unpick and understand the complexities of major economies – putting YOU in the driving seat.


 
With a word of advice now and then, the Undercover Economist encourages you to run the show. Along the way you’ll discover what happens to inflation when you burn a million pound notes, why even prison camps have recessions and why Coke didn’t change the price of a bottle for seventy years.
 
This is a brilliant, witty and insightful book about today’s economic thinking that will open your eyes as never before. A provocative and lively exploration of the increasingly important world of macroeconomics, by the author of the bestselling The Undercover Economist.
 
Look out for Harford’s forthcoming book, Messy, a big idea book about the genuine benefits of being messy: at home, at work, in the classroom, and beyond. A million readers bought The Undercover Economist to get the lowdown on how economics works on a small scale, in our everyday lives.
 
Thanks to the worldwide financial upheaval, economics is no longer a topic we can ignore. From politicians to hedge-fund managers to middle-class IRA holders, everyone must pay attention to how and why the global economy works the way it does.
 
Since then, economics has become big news. Crises, austerity, riots, bonuses – all are in the headlines all the time.
☞ Will we be richer or poorer in 10 years’ time?
☞ How can we tell?
☞ But how does this large-scale economic world really work?
☞ What would happen if we cancelled everyone’s debt?
☞ How do you create a job?
☞ Will the BRIC countries take over the world?
 
Asking – among many other things — what the future holds for the Euro, why the banks are still paying record bonuses and where government borrowing will take us, in The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, Tim Harford returns with his trademark clarity and wit to explain what’s really going on – and what it means for us all.
 
Enter Financial Times columnist and bestselling author Tim Harford. In this new book that demystifies macroeconomics, Harford strips away the spin, the hype, and the jargon to reveal the truth about how the world’s economy actually works.
 
With the wit of a raconteur and the clear grasp of an expert, Harford explains what’s really happening beyond today’s headlines, why all of us should care, and what we can do about it to understand it better.
 
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The Independent (UK) Review :
 
Tim Harford is trying to do for macro-economics what he – and a handful of others – have sought to do for micro-economics. That is to demystify the subject, explaining in simple language what we know and don’t know about the way the world economy works.
 
Someone needs to, for this end of the subject is in serious disarray. Most economists failed to warn adequately of the risks in the run-up to the last recession, and now are confused about the best prescription for pulling out of it.
 
We know quite a lot about how individuals and companies respond to economic stimuli and books such as Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner have brought the subject to millions. Harford’s The Undercover Economist carried on this work. But while there have been a host of prescriptive books, there has been much less of a mission to explain.
 
So Harford takes us through the ambiguities of macro-economics, how it developed, the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, and also contributors less well-known to the outside world such as Bill Phillips and Andrew Osward.
 
There are implications for policy. The meat of the book is how to deal with recessions, the central question facing the Western world now. But there are also nice diversions into the baby-sitting co-op that workers on Capitol Hill in Washington founded, Henry Ford’s doubling of his workers’ wages in Detroit, and why cigarettes were a currency in Germany in PoW camps.
 
The first, by the way, failed because there were not enough sitters, the second succeeded because it cut labour turnover, and the third resulted in the cigarettes used for trading having part of their tobacco extracted and smoked – the PoWs debased the currency. As for recessions: is it shortage of demand or shortage of supply? Or both, but maybe at different times? Was the most recent recession a demand shock or a supply shock?
 
These ambiguities are what Harford so cleverly captures. As a general proposition there is usually a conflict between the short-term and the long-term, in that short-term measures to cope with recessions may undermine long-term potential growth.
 
He is also sensible. Macro-economists did not cause the banking crisis, for it was the job of bankers, accountants, politicians and lawyers to keep things safe. But “when the banking crisis hit, the macro-economic mainstream didn’t have good models of what the economic consequences might be,” even if “casual empiricism suggested they wouldn’t be pretty”. So they didn’t really know what to do.
 
That common-sense approach shows through in other parts of the book. Why do we have faster-rising inequality in Anglo-Saxon economies than on the Continent? He suggests it might have something to do with the fact that the English-speaking world has very good universities but not very good schools.
 
He is sceptical of the current fashion for focusing on happiness rather than GDP, noting that the one country that has happiness as a policy objective, Bhutan, has a dubious record on human rights. And as for the concern that growth cannot continue forever, he points out that the peak in energy consumption per person in the UK was back in 1973. It is now the lowest for 50 years.
 
Economists will continue to attract opprobium. Indeed, by their wild assertions they bring a lot of it on themselves. But maybe, thanks to people such as Harford, the profession will gain a better-informed audience, and a more perceptive one for its real shortcomings.
 
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About the Author
Tim Harford is a senior columnist for the Financial Times and the presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less. He was the winner of the Bastiat Prize for economic journalism in 2006, and More or Less was commended for excellence in journalism by the Royal Statistical Society in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Harford lives in Oxford with his wife and three children, and is a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. His other books include The Undercover Economist, The Logic of Life and Adapt.

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