I love “little books.” I don’t just mean those that are short or physically small. I’m referring to a genre that introduces general readers, including the young, to a topic using plain language and abundant charm. While many readers first encountered this genre with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, I’m even fonder of Ernst Gombrich’s 1936 masterpiece, A Little History of the World. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it.
Several authors have tried this format to explain economics in simple terms. Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson (1946), now quite out of date, is the prototype. A recent series for investors, called “Little Book Big Profits,” is written by investment celebrities and ranges in quality from excellent to dubious; my favorite, The Little Book of Common-Sense Investing (2007), is by my favorite investor, Jack Bogle.
The Australian politician and author Andrew Leigh’s recent entry, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity, positions his book on the same shelf as these classics, and in some respects it deserves to be. It achieves two laudable goals: it addresses the broad sweep of history, going back as far as prehistoric times, consistent with its immodest title and subtitle; and it draws the connections, Gary Becker-style, between economics per se and the many facets of human activity that so excited Melissa Kearney’s seven-year-old daughter in the epigraph.
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