Good, Unbiased and Simple Introductory Economics Text?

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Truth in advertising.

I recently saw a recommendation for Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. While I do not have any in principle objections to people reading Hazlitt's writing(although I think it'd be better to just read Bastiat), I do want to make sure that people get a neutral foundation first, rather than learning an ideologically biased framework as if it was the mainstream fact. *THEN* they can learn all of the crazy ideological stuff. I don't spend a lot of time reading popular introductions to economic ideas, so I am not an expert on this matter.

So, any recommendations?

I really doubt that anything dealing with economics can be unbiased. It can be tricky (but certainly doable) to find unbiased expert opinions on purely theoretical matters. But when dealing with money? As they say where I come from, fuhgeddaboudit!

I haven't read this book, but "Economics: A tool for critically understanding society" sounds half-decent from the descriptions.

im with obres on this one, i dont think that exists.

Well, the issue is that a standard textbook IS a good marker for an unbiased source. This isn't to say that a textbook literally is unbiased, but we can reasonably expect a textbook to present most ideas to a relatively complete degree and to suppress some of the political views of the authors to some degree because textbooks are marketed on their fitness to present ideas for the first time.

The problem is that popular books are not selected on grounds of unbiasedness in the vast majority of cases, which makes this harder, as it is likely an author somewhere does make efforts to curtail bias while exploring the conceptual field well, it is not necessarily easy to know which book.

Das Kapital.

I dunno. Don't you think that might be somewhat slanted towards a Marxian view of economics?

Modern economics, at least as taught in a lot of places, is basically just a lot of calculus, isn't it? Supply curves, demand curves, welfare shifts, etc.

In principle, the economist is supposed to be neutral, and just present the results of calculations, which policy-makers use and on which they place their own spins, at their whims.

Perhaps, but Marx makes at least some perfectly valid points, especially about the sale of labor, that are almost certain to be completely overlooked in any economics text geared towards an American audience. So wouldn't those texts be slanted away from a Marxian view? So isn't "unbiased" a completely subjective term itself?

But economics is a model of human behavior, not of natural phenomenon that can be measured and yield a consistent result. I could argue that people are greedier or stupider or kinder or less/more informed than you think, and thus that the fundamental curves should be different.

Economics in One Lesson is a biased book. Don't read it to learn about economics, it works just as well for enjoyment. I have never read a book that was as engaging as Economics in One Lesson. I cannot reccomend that book more highly. It's not only my favorite book on economics, it's one of my favorite books of all time.

Unbiased Books

I would go with A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Fantastic book - more on investing than economics but it is eye-opening. It really makes you question what we really know. I found it to be an enjoyable read

Freakonomics is another great book. One of my favorite books on economics. I agree with many of the criticisms of the book - especially regarding the argument on abortion - that it's written in a very controversial way for the sake of controversy, but it still stand out in my mind as a terrific book.

Biased Books and Other Media

Irwin Schiff's comic "How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn't" fantastic description of how markets work. Actually I would not say the comic itself is biased, only the person who wrote it is. So I don't know whether or not it should be considered a "biased book"

Peter Schiff's "Mortgage Banker's Speech in 2006" is my favorite speech. Check it out on youtube. It introduces concepts in an introductory way, very compelling analogies.

I have always liked The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers by Robert L. Heilbroner.
Its is where I got my interest in becoming an economist.

That is a good book, but I don't remember it well enough on whether it would actually TEACH someone macroeconomics or microeconomics. I mostly just remember it as an intellectual history of various thinkers, not as playing a role similar to a textbook. (Note: I gave away my copy of the book to a friend... who probably never read it)

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 25 Aug 2011, 7:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'd rather recommend a person read some Frederic Bastiat. Hazlitt borrows heavily from Bastiat in that his book is centered around the parable of the broken window, but the issue is that Bastiat's writings are basically classics and still referenced to this day.


Eh, neither really introduce one to the field. Economics in One Lesson does that, but is very biased.

However, the first book is just on the efficient market hypothesis, and the second book is really just an application of microeconomics to some very specific issues, and so a person may read it without really growing in knowledge as much as a broader introduction.

I am going to count bias and slant as relative to the economics profession. This is the most straight-forward and sensible way to do this, as otherwise we continually have to ask ourselves whether X group has a great but ignored point. And... well... those great ignored points can be learned through secondary readings.

yea I don't think it exists since there are always moral ends to achieve with its use - be it playing robinhood or building a thriving middle-class.