Common Cents by Nancy J. Kimelman
January 28th, 2009Title: Common Cents
Author: Nancy J. Kimelman, PhD
Publisher: Sterling Publishing (2008)
Did you hear that the economy is struggling? It’s been in the news a bit. We recently covered one of the causes of the problems in the sub-prime mortgage mess. Maybe some of you have some questions about how this all works? Well, it’s pretty lucky that you read this website because the next step of your financial education is about to begin with a very well written book about that very subject!
Common Cents: How The Economy Works – from the Global Market to the Supermarket by Nancy J. Kimelman, PhD does a fantastic job of explaining the basics of economic behavior to less smart people, such as myself. I should confess to being somewhat obsessed with how various economic systems work and financial responsibility and all that stuff. I’ve read a number of books on this topic and this is one of the better ones. (side note – the best one is Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell).
As a trained economist, Kimelman does an excellent job with the Basic Skills section. This includes chapters about supply and demand (the foundation of all economic behavior!), Credit, The Fed, the US financial institutions and other things. She takes these pretty complicated subjects and is able to boil them down to the basics using examples in real life. Her writing style is also pretty funny…if you like economics jokes. Which I do.
The second section of the book isn’t as good in my opinion as she attempts to de some predictive analysis on what is going to happen in the future. Unforunately, economists are historically bad at predicting the future of events outside of theory related things. On the plus side…at least she isn’t as bad a predictor as the author of The Next Great Bubble Boom: How to Profit from the Greatest Boom in History: 2006-2010! Now that’s a book I wouldn’t want my name on!
All in all…I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning a little more about how the economic system works. I promise you will learn something interesting!
Rating: 4 out of 5
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January 29th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Sounds pretty interesting. I wish everyone in America would have to take a basic economics course in high school or some such.
April 8th, 2009 at 6:05 am
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