Chaos Pavanred's Blog ….. Exponential Error

The Undercover Economist – Tim Harford

The Undercover Economist is a decent read. The book starts off very well explaining 'who pays for your coffee', the subtle but very important economics involved in efficient pricing of a product, coffee, the scores of different businesses that come together in free market to make a small product like coffee possible (serendipity, it seems like), and similar interesting and clever ideas of some of the world's great economic thinkers simplified so that a normal person can understand. The most impressive parts were the most obvious but rarely noticed aspects like the reason for segregation of classes in trains and even some clever marketing strategies of IBM.

It's a book for the layman, there are no complex economic terminologies and jargons used in the book, and everything is explained with simple real life examples and with simple logic - what I would call 'Logical Economic reasoning’:D.
The book disappointed me when about 30-40 pages of a 250 page book were used to explain that corruption dampens economic growth - I don't have to read to book to learn that corruption hampers growth, more over this explanation was not much of any economic concept but was predominantly anecdotes of the author cheated by corrupt officials in a poor country.
The book ends well, China's economy and its secret for rapid growth, Effects of globalization, importance of trade. Comparison of growing economies - India and China, and their economic policy.

All in all - a decent read.