Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (ISBN 0887308856)

Amazon.com Review:
To David Friedman (son of Milton Friedman), economics explains everything. In a way, that's an odd thing for him to say: Friedman Jr. has never taken an economics course in his life (by training he's a physicist). Yet he defines economics broadly and uses it as a tool to understand all aspects of human behavior, from selecting a mate to picking a grocery store line to switching lanes in rush-hour traffic jams. If you like the economics-for-everyman approach of such writers as Steven E. Landsburg, then Friedman is for you.

The loss of a star is only because it's a bit confusing...:
Not everyone has heard of David Friedman, son of the Milton Friedman, but he's a professor of economics and has written several books. I had a different book on my list to read first, The Machinery of Freedom, but I came across this title and it looked interesting enough, so I picked it up and I'm glad I did. Friedman tries to bring economics, the study of the allocation of scarcity, into everyday life situations, job hunting, wife hunting and why kids behave as well as discussing how economic policies on a larger scale (government edict) effect everyday life, purchasing power, costs, production, etc. His effort is a mixed of insights and confusion, and he notes near the beginning of the book that if a reader understands all the concepts, even upon a second read, that person might as well be teaching the stuff. I have to agree I was lost in much of the explanations and didn't completely understand a good portion of the logic and how it all worked, however, I did grasp a basic understanding of the overall concepts and even in areas that I couldn't explain myself, I have a better picture of how it all works. One of the reasons this book, and others like it, are important reads is simply because economic policy decisions by our elected leaders make such a long range impact upon our normal lives, it's not that any one voter has much of an effect upon an election, and Friedman goes into depth explaining why most people don't really spend much time or effort to learn about issues or politician's that they are casting votes for, if everyone's basic understanding level was increased, it might have a positive impact upon our lives. Perhaps. Perhaps not. One of the interesting things about how politics work, from an economic viewpoint, is explained by Friedman. He shows how a major bill, whether trade tariff, tax or what not, is huge to a small group, but small to a huge group. Think of it like this; if a bill will cost every American a few dollars in increased costs, but delivers a benefit to a small group in the millions of dollars, who will spend the time and money to see to it that the bill passes? Obviously the small group can focus time and money, it's worth it to them, the large group however, not only is harder to coordinate (assuming someone even tries), it's not necessarily in someone's interest to spend time and money to save a few dollars, so because the cost is spread out, it's harder to coordinate a concentrated effort to stop such a bill. Think of the implications of the economics in the explanation there, a thousand bills passed in congress, each costing you only a few dollars each, cost you thousands a year, yet each one by itself is only a negative of a few bucks, so how much time is it worth it to you to defeat that particular bill? However each of these thousand special interests has millions to gain, so to them, spending thousands and thousands has a positive expectation. The other areas that I found very interesting in this book were the discussions of criminal law and the economics faced by the accused, how the D.A.'s allocate resources (plea agreements), the prisoner's dilemma and other such interesting ways to look at normal everyday problems of society through the lens of economics. There is a little bit of discussion of the drug trade and other libertarian ideas, but mostly the book concentrates on explaining the economics of policy's and laws and of course, supply, demand, monopoly's and the like without much pontificating on Friedman's part about what choices are better or worse for society. There is a discussion of trade and tariffs, how wheat can be turned into cars and how lot's of stuff you hear on the news is uttered by people that have no idea what they are talking about, and often make pronouncements that are the polar opposite of reality. In conclusion, I'd highly recommend this work to anyone even slightly interested in how economics works, and also how they may have been fooled into thinking certain things about laws, trade, benefits, anti-trust, supply and demand and such that are simply wrong and misleading. It may change how you vote, it will certainly challenge the way you view the current political world. Highly recommended.

Deeply Flawed Analysis:
I have to say I didn't read too much of this book before being turned off by it. I will give you a few examples of what immediately caught my eye in the beginning of the book. He claimed that getting rid of the practice of buying used textbooks would not increase sales and then basically said that if you disagree it is because you are stupid. His argument was that the price of selling the book after being used factored in to the cost the consumer would pay. As anyone who has ever attended college knows, you don't get to choose whether or not you will a text book. You have to buy it for the course and the people dictating what book you must buy do not feel the costs themselves and often do not even have much interaction with those that do. This is why my statistics textbook cost over a hundred dollars despite being of far lessing quality than Statistics for Dummies. In another one of poorly hatched ideas, he claims that poor people do not want universal health care because they are choosing not to buy it; better to have food than antibiotics. And being that government health care would be paid with taxes, we would be forcing those people to forgo basic shelter for medicine. He would have us believe that a person could somehow afford something that costs more money than that person has in the bank or that insurance companies would even insure the dirt poor (and therefor prone to illness) with unreliable, low income workers. And in the whole analysis he seems to forget that virtually every modern country in the world has a progressive tax system. That's enough of that I suppose. I just wanted you to get an idea of what kinds of things you will be coming across in this book.

an excellent primer:
David Friedman is a wonderful writer. His "Law's Order" fascinated me and helped draw me into the field of economics, in which I have since earned an MA. I picked up Hidden Order when I was in graduate school, and it served as a nice refresher for basic and intermediate economics. He presents material in an intuitive way, far different from most academics. I served as a TA for an intermediate microeconomics class, and whole-heartedly recommended this book to all my students who were having any difficulty making sense of the material.

Terrible Book:
Sorry for being so negative about it, found it clumsily written with childish logic... waste of time

Not What It Seems:
This book attempts to explain the dry, boring field of economics in an engaging and painless manner. It fails at doing that. The text itself is often times confusing and dry, coupled with graphs that are basically incomprehensible to anyone without an economics degree. I was more confused after reading than the book than before it. To anyone interested in reading about economics actually displayed in an interesting, fun way, I would highly recommend Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan. It is a tremendously informative and funny book, and actually fun to read.