This is an issue with any pop-X book, namely that complicated, messy topics are oversimplified and packaged neatly.<p>As a reader, it is very enticing - you feel like you are learning very efficiently, the reviews are filled with comments like 'I learned more from this book than 5 years of geography/economics/history/physics/chemistry etc in school'. People that have swallowed the pop-X book wholesale become evangelists, telling everyone who will listen how important it is to 'Sleep for 8.5 hours a night', or 'Stop eating bread'. But really, you are often paying to be told a fairytale about topic X.
/r/BadEconomics is a fun subreddit; it's people with at least some passing acquaintance with formal economics writing snarky takedowns of economic claims made elsewhere on Reddit (or the Internet at large). It's not quite as good, content-wise, as the tier-1 subreddits like AskHistorians, but it's a solid tier 2.
Pop-econ, as a subgenre of pop-science, is a necessary evil.<p>The thing about econ is it's closely connected to political philosophy, and politics causes all sorts of partisan issues. Witness the furore over Piketty's work over recent years.<p>So why do I say it's necessary and evil?<p>Well it's necessary because it's often the only way for someone outside of academia to get an overview of a topic. Without these kinds of work we'd be lost rifling through various journal papers, not knowing which ones are considered important and which ones not.<p>It's evil because that editorial power is seductive. To sell books, that author needs to make a forceful point. To do that, you can't just leave the evidence at "inconclusive", even though that might be sensible. Why write a book at all if it says "we don't know"? So we get selection bias in what books are written.<p>A friend of mine writes pop-econ books, and from a very libertarian point of view. Something about it seems like a just-so story. The inherent noisiness of economic evidence is lost, all the graphs are cherry picked to support his view. And yet you'd have to dig quite a lot to find specific things to complain about.<p>I studied economics myself, and on a lot of things I thought the stack of papers had good arguments one way and the other. My tutor, a famous Marxist, was also quite good at giving the free market side of evidence, so it's not like he was all one-sided.<p>My main concern is that people who haven't had a bit of exposure to economics at university think that it's like picking up A Brief History of Time. Basically true, but for laymen (wonder what a real physicist would think, heh). In actuality a lot of it is opinion, disguised as science. (In fact I tend to view a lot of economics like that; Opinions well defended by some sort of evidence.)
Two unstated premises here: 1) You can't share quantitative methods in a pop science book. You can't share with a general audience ideas like multiple regression, covariance, controlling for confounding factors. 2) There is no compelling evidence to back up many economic empirical results other than multiple regression. Some intro stats professors and some Kaggle competitors would balk at those assumptions.
I thought Ha-Joon Chang’s books on economics were excellent, because they provided a fresh perspective, and most economic principles are not that hard to understand anyway, it’s just a highly ideological “science”.<p>Even Michael Hudson’s books which are full of the jargon of the trade, are accessible because he explains the nomenclature.