As someone who has read a fair bit of economics material before, this book was not full of information I did not already have. It did, however, impress me with how clearly it explained concepts that tend to seem much more complex in other texts. It is an excellent introduction to principles of economics, and it would be awfully nice if members of Congress would read something like it.

If it has a flaw, it is the manner in which it presents some information later in the book, where the author's own ideological alignment begins to color the writing a bit more obviously. I think the majority of the conclusions spelled out for readers all too directly would be obvious to any observant reader with a more dispassionate tone in the authorial voice, and those conclusions that would not come across as well are those that are the author's most dubious assertions (specifically, some of the material relating to the effective "purpose" of certain types of investment activity a little earlier in the book than the bulk of other ideologically colored material). A reader ideologically inclined to agree with the author does not need the embedded bias in the text, and a reader ideologically inclined to disagree may also be inclined to dispute other material in the book that the reader might otherwise have simply learned. Overall, though, the biased presentation is relatively rare through the majority of the book, and even most of his biases directly follow the facts anyway.

This flaw is not enough to reduce my rating. I think the only reason that I did not give it five stars is that I did not read it before I already knew the principles presented in this text. It would have changed my world in the middle of high school. ( )