Spencer

My favorite of Thomas Sowell's books!

Revisado: 01-06-22

I am a 27 year old Mexican-American guy with an unusual level of interest in economics. Technically, my bachelor's degree is in economics, but I would argue that I have learned more economics by listening to 10 different books written by Thomas Sowell than I did in all of my economics classes I took in college.

As I said, I have listened (and re-listened) to the audio version of 10 of his books since I first listened to his book Basic Economics when I was about 19 years old and as someone who has read a lot of his books, I can say confidently that Knowledge and Decisions is his magnum opus! It is a work of genius and something rare from modern economists, it is truly a general treatise. But I must warn you, I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, and as someone who earned a bachelor's degree in economics, I like to think I'm fairly well versed in the subject covered in this book.

However, it wasn't until my third time listening to the audio version of this book available on Audible that I was able to actually comprehend his analysis throughout it because this is the most sophisticated, advanced, and precise of the 10 or 11 books written by Thomas Sowell I have read. To be sure, this is an academic book, if you have never read any economics books or textbooks or taken any economics courses or never read any other books written by Dr. Thomas Sowell, this is NOT the first, second, third, or even fourth book of his to read.

It is so rigorous and precise that once I finished listening to it for a third time two months ago, I did something I have never done before in my 9 years of using the Audible app to listen to audiobooks, I started it back over from the beginning instead of moving on to another book!

If you are an economist, a big fan of the field of economics, or follow the work of many economists, or are versed in the history of economic thought, you will be aware of the austrian-born Nobel prize winning economist FA Hayek and his landmark 1945 paper published in the American Economic Review called "The Use of Knowledge in Society." This is essentially a book length and society-wide expansion on and application of the lessons explained in that paper. Hayek himself wrote a glowing review of this landmark book when it came out in 1980.

Besides Hayek, the economist who's fingerprints can be found most often throughout this brilliant book besides Hayek is the legendary among economists, but not well known among the public UCLA economist Armen Alchian. Sowell repeatedly draws on the paradigm put forth in Alchian's 1950 paper "Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory." This makes sense because this book was published in 1980 and Thomas Sowell was a colleague of Armin Alchian in the economics department at UCLA during the 1970s.

Besides resting on a backbone of the Hayekian understanding of the use and role of knowledge in economies and societies more generally and Alchian's evolutionary framing of economic issues and phenomena, the biggest comparative advantage of this book compared to other great books by other great economists is Sowell's insistence throughout the text to refer to political systems, social phenomena, and economic issues exclusively by characteristics as dynamic processes, or has he often puts it, their institutional mechanics rather than their hoped for goals. And for the record, Hayek reviewed this book in 1983 (3 years after it was published) for Reason magazine and called it the best book on general economics published in many years and really sung its praises to a suprising degree for Hayek.

I gave this book a five out of five stars because five is the maximum amount I was allowed to rate it, if I could have given it six out of five stars, I would have! This is tied for my favorite book of all time with Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.

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Fantastic overview

Revisado: 07-13-21

I have been waiting for someone to write this book for years! I have been trying to figure out which arcane academic subjects are behind woke supremacy for years and I kept hearing either postmodernism or critical theory aka The Frankfurt School, I didn't realize neither of those answers were quite right because the real answer was a second stage after those two initial schools of thought until I listened to this audiobook.

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More ADD compatible version than the full length

Revisado: 06-17-20

I wish I had known about this three-hour version years ago when I listened to the 13 or 14 an hour full version of this book twice which took me weeks or months to finish. I finished this abridged version for people with ADHD just now, I started it yesterday.

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The Incerto is a must read

Revisado: 06-16-20

The Incerto is the by far the best book I've read. Antifragile is the best book in the collection, but the other 3 (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan and Skin in the Game) are all amazing as well and vital listening.

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Good but basic

Revisado: 08-24-19

I was hoping for both introductory level and intermediate level models and explanations because I have already watched several YouTube series explaining overviews of Complexity Science, complex adaptive systems, network theory, and a nonlinear systems. Theses series were all only 10 to 20 videos with each video only 3 to 20 minutes long but watching those already taught me 80% of what I learned in this Great Courses lecture series.

This would make a great introduction to the science of complexity for someone who has not already been introduced to it but not necessarily for someone who has already been exposed to the many diverse foundational concepts of this field of knowledge.

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Very direct explanation of economies

Revisado: 01-01-17

To oversimplify a fair bit , the author explain in more detail and using a lot more physics what Hayek try to outline in his influential 1945 paper the use of knowledge in society. the only way I can sort of describe this book is it is a cross between Thomas Sowell's book "Knowledge and Decisions" and Matt Ridley's book "The Evolution of Everything" with a bunch of complexity theory mixed in.

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best ADD book I have found

Revisado: 11-29-16

Most rigorous & thorough ADD book by far in how much detail it provides. Goes into very minute specifics about different regions of the human brain and how they effect or contribute to certain subtypes of ADD.

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good format for me

Revisado: 09-19-16

I am a math major at UC Irvine with multiple learning disabilities who has always had issues with math classes. I've still never gotten an A grade in a math class and I almost failed a class last quarter and was getting pretty down on myself feeling helpless but after listening to this book, I now feel like I have a repertoire of tools with which I can attack my academic issues from all sides which gives me some modest hope.

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Loved every minuite of it

Revisado: 09-14-16

Over the past two months or so I've been getting into complexity science and have been looking for a resource like this, it hit the spot for me!

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extremely dispassionate analysis

Revisado: 07-14-16

Having read several of Thomas Sowell's books already, I was expecting the entire book to be one giant refutation of Marxism. However, only the last chapter is a critique of the Marxian framework. The entire book before then was explaining all the intricacies and nuances of the system of thought co-developed by Marx & Engels.

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