Economic facts and fallacies (Basic Books)

From one of America's most distinguished economists, here comes a short, brilliant and revelatory book: the fundamental ideas people most commonly get wrong about economics, and how to think about the subject better.

One reason fallacies are so destructive is that they are not simply crazy ideas. They are usually both plausible and logical, which gains them political support, and only after the ideas they engender have turned into disastrous policies do people think to wonder why they were ever considered attractive.

"Economic Facts and Fallacies" explains why fallacies abound in economic thinking and why they have such political staying power.It describes the essential types of fallacies - the zero-sum fallacy, which assumes that one person's gain is another's equal loss; the 'fallacy of composition', the assumption that what is true of the part is true of the whole; the 'chess-pieces fallacy', which assumes that people's actions can be manipulated and predicted in a rational way; and, the open-ended fallacy, which assumes that certain resources are essentially unlimited - and shows how these and other misconceptions commonly affect thinking on race, urban planning, gender relations, income and other subjects.