From Economics for Adults:
The primer I have enjoyed most, the one I would recommend to a friend who wanted to learn how economists think about the world right now, is one that passed almost completely unnoticed into the stream, perhaps because it is so slight. But then, that is the point of Economics: A Very Short Introduction, by Partha Dasgupta, the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at Cambridge University. He boils down everything that's ordinarily included in a thousand-page introductory text, and more, to 160 graceful but undersized pages.
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It's good that people are reading economics primers, good too that a genre now exists apart from those lugubrious (but necessary) texts. Yet economics is so obviously incomplete, even in its own terms, as a way of understanding the world, that the less cocksure are its expositors in their pronouncements, the better. I wish more people would read Dasgupta's book, and I wish that more economists would write variations on its theme. It is a model specimen.
Note: Every environmental economist knows Dasgupta. Here is how Warsh puts it:
Dasgupta, 65, is one of those figures, well-known to insiders but virtually invisible to those outside the field, until they pop up some year as an October surprise. (Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 2002 "for services to economics.") He has done deep work on issues the length and breadth of economics -- he taught game theory to Joseph Stiglitz and learned the economic history of science from Paul David. But the contribution for which he is best known is a skein of work with Geoffrey eal, then also of Cambridge University, on the economics of natural resources, begun in 1972, in the context of the then-best-selling The Limits to Growth, and finished with a prescient 1979 monograph, Economics Theory and Exhaustible Resources. That led Dasgupta to an engagement with the United Nations, and a long collaboration with Karl-Gšran Mþler, another environmental economics pioneer. Both are still at it; in 2001 Dasgupta published Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, and expanded it in 2004. But also in 1972, he read John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, and that led to a second leg of work on social choice, on mechanism design and, ultimately, on the nature of wealth and destitution.
Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources won the AERE Publication of Enduring Quality Award in 2003. I just added both books to my Amazon.com shopping cart.
