I wish I had had this book to read ten years ago. When I was first elected, I felt I ought to acquire a basic grasp of economics, so I set myself a reading list, starting with that trusty companion to first-year economics students, Begg, Fischer and Dornbusch. As I ploughed through the various texts, I became disquieted. So much accepted doctrine seemed counter-intuitive. Why, for example, did economists see consumer demand as a cause of economic growth rather than a consequence of it? Why was it desirable to spend more when nothing of real value was being produced in consequence? Why did almost every expert applaud the disconnection between currency and anything of intrinsic value, such as gold? Didn’t this breakage allow governments, in effect, to transfer wealth from private savers to themselves?
After a while, I realised that there were economists asking these obvious questions. They were generally known as the Austrian School, and they were out of fashion in both academic and government circles. The trouble is that, while some of them wrote accessibly, others produced alarmingly dense works.
