The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run or Ruin an Economy - Tapa dura

Tim Harford is a brilliant explainer of economics . . . A superb guide, whatever your level of expertise (William Leith Evening Standard)

Tim Harford is a brilliant explainer of economics . . . beautifully clear . . . A superb guide (William Leith Scotsman)

Tim Harford is a riveting expositor of the field, lively and fair minded, and his books The Undercover Economist and its macroeconomic companion piece The Undercover Economist Strikes Back are excellent places to start, both because they are so interesting in themselves and also because they give a good initiation in how economists think and study these sorts of questions (John Lanchester)

Every Tim Harford book is cause for celebration. He makes 'the dismal science' seem like an awful lot of fun (Malcolm Gladwell)

Harford spurns the polemical style that infects so much writing about macroeconomics, offering a clear exposition of the key debates using case studies ranging from Second World War POW camps to the 1970s oil shock and Brazil in the 1990s ... Harford explains the subject with impressive clarity and wit. (The Times)

clear-thinking and easy to read ... he has mastered the art of dealing with this subject without the use of a single diagram or mathematical equation (Sunday Times)

Our chief economic storyteller ... thanks to people such as Harford, the profession will gain a better informed audience (Independent)

Reading Harford is like finding yourself next to the funniest, smartest fellow at the party. It is such fun that readers will hardly notice that, by the end, they've mastered macroeconomics (Financial Times)

A million readers bought The Undercover Economist to get the lowdown on how economics works on a small scale, in our everyday lives. Since then, economics has become big news. Crises, austerity, riots, bonuses - all are in the headlines all the time. But how does this large-scale economic world really work? What would happen if we cancelled everyone's debt? How do you create a job? Will the BRIC countries take over the world? Asking - among many other things -- what the future holds for the Euro, why the banks are still paying record bonuses and where government borrowing will take us, in The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, Tim Harford returns with his trademark clarity and wit to explain what's really going on - and what it means for us all.