Review: Economics: A Very Short Introduction by Partha Dasgupta (2007, 172pp.)

If there's one thing all three main parties in the U.K. agree on, — if there's one thing that hasn't been changed by the Liberal Democrats' sudden emergence as a main contender on the political stage, — it's the importance of economic growth. Of course, there isn't just one thing; bickering aside, the three prospective leaders probably share very similar views on lots of things in principle, but as Gordon Brown learned first-time-round, repeatedly saying "I agree" doesn't make for much of a televised debate. Right now, economics — The Economy — is pretty much as up there as you can get on the political agenda. You'd be hard pressed to find a politician who isn't talking about it. And you know things are bad when Greece's socialist leader is talking about how to make the country 'competitive' and 'viable' again, just like it was any other big, shiny business.

So given the headlines of late and over the last year (whereever you look), there's probably no better short non-fiction book to be reading right now than Partha Dasgupta's Economics: A Very Short Introduction. As with all the books in Oxford University Press' series (except maybe the one on the E.U.), this one can be picked up and put down — or into a coat pocket — with relative ease. It'll also help you understand that little bit more about the world we all seem to be currently inhabiting. Finally, importantly, the author seems to achieve the appropriate mix of enlightening and depressing that makes such books worth reading.

One of the reasons that this book is so accessible is that Dasgupta begins at the ground-level, with sketches of two ten-year-old children — one in the developed world, one in the developing. They are both similar in many respects, and yet they both live in totally different worlds. Dasgupta claims that economics can help us understand why those worlds are so different. Throughout his mostly straightforward explanations of complicated and abstract concepts it's his constant recourse to the human causes and effects that keeps the theory side relevant and applicable to the real world.