ravipotter 's review for:

So You Want To Know About Economics by Roopa Pai

4.0

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I really liked the book and wish something like this was available to me when I was a kid. As a school going kid I was more interested in Geography and History than in Economics, for the simple reason that I wasn't made aware of the gravity of this ever ubiquitous science. I read it in a dry sort of way, understanding it but never really treating as the most important part of the social sciences. I am gonna gift this book to many kids.

I read this more because of an endorsement by Dr. Raghuram Rajan. If he, a bright economist found it interesting surely I can also learn a lot, was my reasoning. There are many things one knows if one really paid good attention during his/her schooling. There are also many things which we knew but forgot as our careers in Engineering progressed and also a few things which were new to me. Even adults can find it interesting if you read the first chapter patiently which can push you away as it mostly contains the stuff we mostly know. Also I felt that this book was inspired, a little, from the book Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan.

There is something in this book in the Acknowledgements, towards the end of the book that I liked more than the book itself. I'm reproducing that here as it is:

'Dr Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, who actually responded, within the hour, while he was still RBI governor, to a cold-call email sent to his @rbigovernor.in address, saying he would not mind taking a look at the manuscript of this book. Within the next ten days, he had done so, and even sent in a warm endorsement of it. Which goes to prove, yet again, that the busiest, most talented people are often the nicest, most efficient ones too.'

I liked the illustrations and wish there were more, as there are ample opportunities for the same. As a final note, you won't regret reading this, unless you're an Economics major, in which case you might be bored to death.