Reddit reviews Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life

The book "The Armchair Economist" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0029177766) mentions this phenomena. The first chapter of the book is entitled "The Power of Incentives: How Seat Belts Kill". Incentives like this are a core feature of economics.

"Because people respond to incentives, drivers are less careful. The result is more accidents." I have talked to people that refuse to believe this. Certainly the opposite seems true, as the book says, if you mount a spear on the steering wheel pointed at the driver's chest, they will certainly drive more carefully, but it is not obvious that people will act more recklessly just because they are safer.

Now this is really the same thing, if you make driving a car more dangerous, and people drive more carefully, then they were clearly driving less carefully before, with less danger.

The book talks about a study by Sam Peltzman on the seat belt issue, finding that although there were fewer driver deaths per accident after various car safety regulations were enacted, the number of accidents increased, and, in this case, the effect cancelled out.

That is, there was no change in the number of driver deaths before and after the various safety regulations. There was certainly a cost for all those regulations though, in terms of all the safety equipment that had to be purchased by the consumer.

An interesting side effect was a noticible increase in pedestrian deaths, as all of the safety equipment made the insides of cars safer, but, due to increased recklessness, had an apparent net negative impact on the safety of the outside of the car.

My two favorite books which introduce economic thinking are Armchair Economist and The Undercover Economist. They're quick reads, they're jargon free, and actually teach some of the thinking. Unlike the pop-econ books (Freakonomics and its ilk), which are simply about strange results from research (some of Landsburg's later books suffer from this problem). For an introduction to behavioral economics, you can't do better than Predictably Irrational.

For substance, textbooks are probably best unless you have a carefully chosen list of academic articles. Wooldridge for Econometrics, Mankiw for introductory macro, and Nicholson for introductory micro (Krugman's micro book is fine too). Mankiw writes my favorite econ textbooks. For game theory, I used an older version of Watson's textbook, and it was fine, but I don't know how other game theory books stack up.

If textbooks are a bit much, but you still want a substantive book, the first chapter of Thomas Sowell's introduction is very good, the rest is decent repetition. If you want a some discussion of discredited economic theories that are still trotted out regularly (like trickle down), Zombie Economics is a really fun read.

If you're interested for your own interest and not for college, I'd recommend starting with books written for a general audience like

The Cartoon Introduction to Economics

Freakonomics

The Armchair Economist

Spin Free Economics

Lastly, Lives of the Laureates offers biographical accounts of 23 Nobel Laureates in Economics. I find it interesting since it offers insights into the minds of the Laureates, their intellectual process, and some of the most important contributions within the economics community.

I also often recommend Economics in the Afterlife to people since it shows that economists have no shame and economics can really be applied to anything.

You could probably find PDFs online of some of these books if you were so inclined.

These two books will save you a lot of time and effort trying to piece together economic thinking yourself:

Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life by David Friedman

The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life by Steve Landsburg (used copies available for $4)

If you read one (or both) of those, even Econ topics that weren't addressed at all in them should make a lot more sense. Most of Econ is in applying a framework of thought to a problem. Once you get that down, most of the rest is actually fun.

I enjoyed the book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. It's not entirely apropos your interests, but I think you will find it agreeably skeptical about the prevailing economic mumbo-jumbo. Steven Landsburg's The Armchair Economist is another easy, thought-provoking read. I have not read it, but I am curious about More Heat than Light ("Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics ").

May I recommend "The Armchair Economist" or "Economics in One Lesson." Those two books completely changed how I see the world.

Bionomics - Economy as Ecosystem by Michael Rothschild, Well written and mind-blowing.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches by Marvin Harris. TL;DR many irrational cultural practices are in fact imminently logical objectively.

Long, but good:
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, Pulitzer winning book on the Oil industry from its beginnings.

The Armchair economist - the Economics of everyday life, sort of an earlier and better version of 'freakonomics'.

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

Dogs and Demons: Tales from the dark side of Japan

Reflections on a Ravaged Century Robert Conquest

A History of the American People Paul Johnson. Good stuff.