[dagw]

Economics in One Lesson is a horrible book for people with no background in economics. Within economics there are several schools of thought, and this book is little more than an outright attack by a proponent of one (fairly niche) school on another (far more prominent) school. Despite its title it isn't an textbook, but a manifesto, and as such Hazlitt's goal isn't to educate you, but to convert you. Hazlitt sets out to do this with great skill, employing every rhetoric tool at his disposal.

And I'll admit he's really good at it as well. He presents theories as gospel truth, making no mention of any caveats or qualifiers that you'd find in a more serious work. There is a complete lack of any sort of critical analysis of the ideas present, or any notion that they may be anything other than universal truths. He greatly misrepresents the ideas of his opponents and loves to use quotes out of context. He makes great use of leading rhetorical questions to lead the reader to make incorrect conclusions, without having to stick out his own neck and make the incorrect statement himself.

So in my opinion the real problem with this book is that it is so convincingly written that a naive and uncritical reading of it will lead the reader to come away with the belief that economics is really simple and that all economic problems have trivial solutions, as spelled out in this book.

That being said, the ideas present in this book aren't completely without merit, it's just that the few actually useful and interesting nuggets are buried in far too much polemic brow beating