The Undercover Economist Strikes Back

The Undercover Economist Strikes is a humorous primer on basic macroeconomics. Chapters began with quotes - humorous quotes form Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy lead off a couple of the early chapters. Most of the book is in a conversational "question and answer" format. The "pupil" asks a question which the "economist" answers, leading to additional follow up questions. The answers tend to light-hearted anecdotes that provide an exaggerated understanding of an economic condition. Chapters discuss an early macroeconic modeling system that used hydraulics to solve economic differential equations to model a country's economy. (Enterprising economics even hooked the export pipe of one model one model to the import of another to model the impacts policies would have on other countries.) We also have money supply explained using the failure, success, and failure of a capitol hill babysitting co-op. Printing money can be good, unless it leads to hyper inflation, in which case it is very bad. People can be irrational, and be much more concerned with a drop in their salary, even though a small increase in times of high inflation tends to be worse. In classical economic models, prices rise and fall based on supply and demand. However, in the real world, there are many factors which cause the prices to be sticky. This can often lead to negative economic outcomes. (It is difficult to cut wages. Thus, unemployment tends to worsen when the economy is bad - even though many people would be willing to work for a smaller amount of money.)
By using humor, the author is able to provide explanations to both sides of controversial economic policies such as stimulus and inequality remedies without being dogmatic.