Economic Facts and Fallacies

The author attempts to provide "facts" to counteract economic "fallacies". Unfortunately, his arguments are highly opinionated and riddled with their own half-truths and fallacies.

The chapters tend to vary in their quality. Discussions on women and income were loaded with factual analysis to back up the arguments. Others, such as "education" and "urban areas" were much weaker.
The education section was mostly fluff, with a lot of supposition, and and only a few examples (such as Colorado law school.)
The urban area and "sprawl" discussion was filled with contradictions, with an attempt to revive the 1960s. Facts were cherry-picked to make points. Houston was said to have low housing prices because it had no zoning or open space restrictions, while Palo Alto was expensive because no new houses were built. Not mentioned was that Palo Alto was a small, mostly built area that was highly desirable; while Houston went on an annexation tear, adding plenty of new land. Houston was also a much larger area that was less desirable - and it did have plenty of house size restrictions that would supposedly reduce housing options. And while he objected to taking private land by the government, he seemed to advocate slashing through built up areas to add freeways. Huh?
He also claimed "freedom" was the ability to have an endless proliferation of car-centric suburban subdivisions. Any form of planning or "smart growth" is seen as an anathema to freedom of choice. He conveniently ignored the fast system of subsidies and regulations (mortgage tax breaks, oil subsidies, road building, etc.) that made those developments so desirable. (This in spite of an earlier section extolling the benefits of toll roads.)

In the end, the message for a lot of the "fallacies" seems to be "incumbents try to use regulation to help secure their position." Companies, residents, professional organizations and institutions all try to use government and self-regulation to secure their position - just as they would be expected to do. It is important to try to see through the rhetoric to the true rationale. However, it is also important to not be so biased by opposing views that things are merely swept in the other direction.