Book Title: The Great Economists – How their ideas can help us today

Author: Linda Yueh

The book may be about economics, but fret not, because the book is not written in the format in which you would publish your thesis for your Masters or Doctoral. On the contrary, it is written in normal English and doesn’t necessarily assume that the reader understands all the jargon before starting off with the book.

Fair warning, it does use some jargon without giving the explanation beforehand, but those include ‘inflation’ and ‘unemployment rate’ which I believe all of us have heard at some stage in our lives. Therefore, don’t let the title scare you off from this great read.

The author includes at least 12 economic thinkers whose theories and principles have shaped the modern world as we know it today. Some of the authors include the notorious Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes which are the most commonly heard names.

What I strongly liked about the book wasn’t that the author was just presenting the theories and principles that each economist has introduced to society, but also a quick biography of where and when and how they lived. This not only gives you some additional context about who the author was, but strongly supports our understanding what circumstances led the author to think of that principle.

To paint a picture, imagine your whole country is struck by poverty. The stock market just crashed, the worst in the century and the unemployment rate has just skyrocketed. What would you as an economist suggest to the president? What John Maynard Keynes suggested somewhere way back in time was that government should perform ‘quantitative easing’ by spending more than it was taking in from taxes so as to grow the economy. It is this background, I believe that adds much more value to the reader than only reading the principle because it provides you with both 1) theory and 2) application.

This was just one theory from the entire book, but the book gives you many more to think about.

The style of the book is written well for the reader to properly UNDERSTAND and not just read through the book. This is my kind of book, where the author invites the reader not just to read the book, follow the context and then check off another book they read, but to present the problem and then provide a solution that another economist presented.

At the end of each chapter the author poses a question of a problem/situation that one country’s economy is facing today, and invites the reader to reflect on what they read to think about the question that was posed. Therefore, have fun, put your Economics Hat on and give your solution to the problem or event. 🙂

In summary,

The book offers the reader an alternative financial solution to acquiring all the big expensive economics books from the authors and gives the reader the opportunity to learn/refresh their understanding of the economic theories/principles that are implemented every day. The book explains the theories well, and gives background so that that can be implemented immediately by the reader in a real-life scenario. The book in my opinion definitely deserves a 5.5/5 for the value it adds to any reader.