Visible Hand
A Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the Market
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
To most people, the word "economics" sounds like homework. In Visible Hand, Wall Street Journal op-ed editor Matthew Hennessey brings basic economic principles vividly to life in plain English, without resort to numbers, graphs, or jargon. This isn't Fed policy or the stock market. This is the essential stuff: supply and demand, incentives and tradeoffs, scarcity and innovation, work and leisure. A teenager should be able to discuss these things intelligently. Sadly, too few of us can explain them even in adulthood. Visible Hand equips readers with the essential vocabulary necessary to understand and explain how we make the choices we do. In Hennessey's hands, economics is far from the dismal science. It's the sparkling art of decision making. No homework necessary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wall Street Journal opinion editor Hennessey evangelizes free markets in this accessible if slanted primer on economics. Acknowledging at the outset that he's not a trained economist and doesn't "have a PhD in anything," Hennessey illustrates economic principles with real-world examples—for instance, explaining "diminishing marginal utility" with an account of eating cotton candy at the county fair ("At the third bite, the fun is over")—and name-checks thinkers including Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter without explaining their contributions to the field. (Adam Smith gets the in-depth treatment, however.) Instead, he draws on pop culture and memories of working in his father's New Jersey bar to explain how incentives, pricing, scarcity, and other economic concepts reveal "the hidden impulses and involuntary actions that move lives." Throughout, he defends market capitalism as the economic system that has done the most "to improve people's material circumstances, at both the individual and societal levels," and critiques socialism as a "nice-on-paper philosophy that has always and everywhere diminished human flourishing." Hennessey's sense of humor and lucid prose appeal, but he undermines his case by downplaying the struggles of poor Americans and refusing to acknowledge the structural advantages enjoyed by wealthy ones. Readers who don't already agree with Hennessey won't be convinced.
