Review of "The Street Economist"

Some people believe that society – and mainly government – should be run by experts in various disciplines. Especially in the case of economics, responsible for the allocation of resources and therefore the ebb and flow of wealth, such technocrats favor command and control economies. In their ideal world, experts in ivory towers would shout orders through bullhorns about what crops we sow, how we travel and where we recreate.

Those with such trust in so-called “experts” will be thwarted by The Street Economist (2023) by Axel Kaiser. More of a field manual than a book, across fifteen chapters and fewer than a hundred pages the reader learns economic concepts in increasing complexity, but with no jargon, abstruse mathematics nor complicated graphs. The author’s tone is even conversational, so it reads like a friend talking to you at the mall rather than some unapproachable lecturer at university. The examples cited for economic exchanges are also very down to earth, so there’s nothing about “widgets” and other abstractions more appropriate for varsity textbooks. Very importantly, The Street Economist demystifies common economic fallacies, such as pricing by the labor theory of value, which ignores the plain reality that a given service or commodity has no value but that which its end user is willing and able to pay for it.

Synthesizing the works of free-market economists like Drs Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman amongst others, Kaiser also surveys interventionist economists like John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx. Though Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson is popular with Libertarians as a primer to relatives and friends about free-market economics, instead I now incline towards recommending The Street Economist as the better introduction since its examples are less dated (Kaiser also references Hazlitt for this book).

Society prospers more by spontaneous order than top-down control, but it is not enough that you and I innately know this. It is crucial that every person have a sound grasp of economics as immunization against those persistent fallacies and the temptation of political intervention in the marketplace. The best answer to those experts bullhorning orders from their ivory towers is a society full of street economists… who know just where to stick those bullhorns!