Contemporary Issues

Becker, Gary, Guity Nashat Becker, The Economics of Life: From Baseball to Affirmative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect Our Everyday Life

Friedman, David, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life

Hazlitt, Henry, Economics in One Lesson

Although more than 50 years old, this book remains engaging and relevant. Hazlitt patiently and clearly introduces the reader to the basic principles of the economic way of thinking. It states one fundamental lesson in economics and then uses that lesson to point out the fallacies in a number of widely accepted propositions, policies, and proposals. The principle is "economics consists of looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequence of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups." It is hard to think of another book that makes the "mysteries" of economics so clear to a general audience.

Gwartney, James and Richard Stroup, What Everyone Should Know About Economics and Prosperity

Klein, Daniel, Binyam Reja, Adrian Moore, Curb Rights: A Foundation for Free Enterprise in Urban Transit

Landsburg, Steven, The Armchair Economist

Less systematic than Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, Landsburg's book shows the mind of a first-rate economist at work analyzing a variety of real-world phenomena. Landsburg is one of a distressingly small handful of contemporary economists who can really write—who truly care about teaching economics to a wide audience and who understand that economics is ultimately useful only insofar as it makes reality more understandable. But Landsburg excels even further: he makes economics fun. This is a fun book.

Lee, Dwight and Richard McKenzie, Failure and Progress: The Bright Side of the Dismal Science

Rothschild, Michael, Bionomics

Scitovsky, Tibor, The Joyless Economy