From: Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 27 1997 - 17:34:55 MST
Eric Watt Forste writes:
>Damien Sullivan writes:
> > Has anyone read David Friedman's _Hidden Order_? Any comments?
>
>I haven't read it, but I've leafed through it a few times and noticed
>that much (at least 50%, I'd guesstimate) of the material has been
>adapted from Friedman's excellent but basic price theory textbook,
>PRICE THEORY. Now when I first read PRICE THEORY, I thought, "Gee,
>this is a great book. Everyone should read it. Too bad it's packaged
>as a scary college econ textbook." It seems to me that HIDDEN ORDER
>addresses this packaging concern perfectly.
I read it a few months ago. (After being named in the dedication, how
could I resist?)
Yes, its a price theory textbook pretending to be a chatty book for
the rest of us. Nice examples, but there are some places where the
reader will have to pay attention and really think or get lost (like a
textbook).
I'm not sure how many people will fall for that, but D.D.Fr. claims at
least a few thousand. I'm not sure how many of them have already read
an intro econ text.
Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:13 MST