Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life

by David D. Friedman

Book Overview

For readers who would like to learn economics for the fun of it, economics understood not as the study of the economy but as a tool for understanding human behavior: crime, marriage, politics, and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887307507
• ISBN13: 9780887307508
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

It's an excellent book!

It's an excellent book. Although I enjoyed reading Freakonomics, "Hidden Order" is a much deeper and broader book in terms of issues discussed. What I really like about it that in additional of covering existing issues, it helps to learn how to approach new problems. The sad thing is although the book was written in 1996, we(and politicians, and TV/Radio talk heads) are still using the same uninformed reasoning during the discussions. It would be great if the book became a required reading in the high schools and colleges. After getting it from a library, I bought it for my friends.

Shaped my life (not kidding)

This book shaped my life since i picked it up in 1999 while browsing. I found it fascinating and adept - see the other reviews. I did an MBA, changed careers, worked in strategy consulting, and now have a VP-level job in a $6B enterprise. (Well, besides reading this book, the MBA helped...) This book is really eye-opening and you'll see the world around you differently, and how all kinds of people, organizations, and forces respond to incentives that can be subtle to figure out. For example, I'd known since junior high the Brits wore Red Coats in the Revolutionary War, and that made them easy to shoot at. It had never dawned on me, the British management felt the risk of Brit infantry fleeing AWOL was greater than the risk of the same, getting shot. They took the risk of getting shot, to avoid the risk of their troops fleeing (too obvious in bright red coats). Fascinating. Their are apparently some typos in the book which you can correct via the author's website, but I hadn't known that and was impressed by the book anyway, as is.

It is a lot better than Freakonomics.

Economics for the laypersons has become the topic "du jour." This book written nearly a decade ago before economics became hot far surpasses its successors such as "Freakonomics." David Friedman does not dumb down economics like the others. Other reviewers who had at least a rudimentary interest in economics really enjoyed it. A few others who confused economics with their own political views predictably got frustrated with it. Economics is not always intuitive. As a result, several reviewers thought the author made mistakes regarding the graphs on page 29, or the example on housing on page 35. I reread these passages carefully. The author is accurate, it is just that these economics concepts are counter-intuitive. And, contrary to Steve Levitt in "Freakonomics" David Friedman did not shy away from tackling the inherent complexity in economics. The book gives you a good foundation in both macro and microeconomics. Very early in the book he introduces and graphs demand and supply curves, marginal costs and revenue curves, utility functions. His coverage of international trade, taxation, subsidies, rent control is excellent. Along the way, you will also learn about investment theory and corporate finance. Friedman explains how the Efficient Market Hypothesis applies not only to stocks but freeway traffic and supermarket lines. Friedman also gives full credit and fleshes out the ideas from the founders of modern economics, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Alfred Marshall. This is unlike Steve Levitt in "Freakonomics" who truly believed he was the first economist to tackle every day issues forgetting that economics is the science of understanding everyday behavior to begin with. For further reading, if you want to pursue an econ refresher I recommend an actual textbook: "Principles of Economics" by Gregory Mankiw. This is a textbook with a hip and humorous attitude. The Economist, the British magazine, raved about it when it came out. I also recommend Gary Becker's "The Economics of Life", and Steve Landsburg's "The Armchair Economist."

Hidden Order: An AP Microeconomics Student's Perspective

This book was easy to read, helpful, and gave interesting and unique examples for common economic theories. This is a great book to use in an AP class! Paired with our economics textbook, this reading explained the phenomena that we read about in the textbook.

Clever and fun

David Friedman has done remarkable job in writing an intellectually challenging yet very readable and enjoyable exposee of modern economics.What sets his book apart from the rest is the use of realistic examples and not the usual textbook apples-to-oranges consumer preferences. Friedman discusses e.g. why is popcorn expensive in movie theaters, is it worth driving to a neighboring town for a bargain sale, who benefits from export duties on japanese cars and economic consequences of divorce.All of this is rigorous but without mathematics. All of this sounds convincing: rationality assumption of consumers (or economic agents in general) is shown to produce miracles in economics. David Friedman, son of Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, takes his axiomatic economics sometimes too far: for example, he believes, like his father, that destabilizing speculation does not exist. Reading Kindleberger's Manias, Panics and Crashes will cure anybody of this folly.Friedmans text is lucid, the reading experience is exhilarating. If there had been economics books like in my youth, I would have become an economist (and not a physisct like David Friedman !)