If you are already familiar with basic economics, you will find it not so educative and repetitive.(That's why I gave 3 stars)

The definition of economic progress is important to consider when evaluating any claims of improvement. For example, if we’re using a measure of progress that only looks at financial growth, we might miss other important aspects of economic development. When people experience a loss in income, they often spend less, which can have a ripple effect on the economy as a whole. Our collective beliefs about the future of the economy can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are other important lessons in this book, but if you take away any two, for my money, it'd be the ones above: what a market economy is and what human capital is. Your interests may vary.If there’s one thing that all successful countries have in common, it’s a highly educated workforce. Human capital is what makes individuals productive, and productivity is what determines our standard of living. All countries that have had persistent growth in income have also had large increases in the education and training of their labor forces. A market economy is really just a name for the transaction of buying and selling goods and services, and the scarcer the goods and services and the more demand, the more people are willing to pay for them. This explains in part why LeBron James makes more money than I do. There are fewer people who play basketball exceptionally well than can teach, which is what I do (and remember, teachers are not paid on a sliding scale where the better teachers make more for their outstanding performance). So LeBron James's skills are scarcer, mine are not. Note, by the way, this is not making a value judgment. It is an explanation of the pay disparity. And it is unlikely that the demand would be there for LeBron James's basketball talents were we living in the 18th century, in which case I would have more human capital than someone who can put a ball in a hoop.

Charles Wheelan—professor, author, grassroots activist—harnesses the powerful concepts of economic theory to help you solve real problems. Wheelan doesn’t care about the math and the charts—he just wants you to understand the magic. Naked Economics is the book for the rest of us, helping the non-economist to rationally analyze everything from McDonalds to congestion to political systems. Want to learn the ideas in Naked Economics better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan here.Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science is written by Charles Wheelan— an American economist, author and speaker. He founded The Centrist Party in the US and was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate. Wheelan graduated from Dartmouth College, where he’s a member of Alpha Delta fraternity. He has worked as a correspondent for The Economist, & contributed to several papers & radio shows. Naked Economics Quotes Incentives matter. People work harder when they’re motivated by things like commission-based pay. In systems that don’t rely on market economy, personal incentive is not linked to productivity. This means that people have no reason to do more or better work, which can lead to inefficiencies. Information, and who has access to it, has an outsized influence on how smoothly an economy runs. A free flow of information allows for easy and smart transactions, while information imbalances put one party at a disadvantage to the other. I reread Charles Wheelan's Naked Economics, revisiting it now about four years later. It is still one of my favorite books, but I do have a more modest perspective of it now. I'll try to provide a better summary of Wheelan's book than I did four years ago.

Increasing productivity through specialization: Trade frees people up to focus their efforts where they can be most effective. For example, if you buy a car that someone else built rather than building a car for yourself, you will not only get a better car, but you will have time to do other things that you’re better skilled at. From the producer point of view, branding also solves the problem of sale prices being pushed toward production cost because of competition. Producers can charge more for products made under a respectable brand. In this chapter we’ll examine currencies, and how the international market uses them to function, covering:The Federal Reserve is made up of 12 Reserve Banks located across the United States, as well as a 7-person Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. Its goal is to regulate commercial banks and support the banking infrastructure, as well as manage the country’s monetary policy.