John Quiggin — Economics in Two Lessons

I’ve been promising for a long time to write a new book, framed as a reply to a free-market tract Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, published in 1946, but still in print and popular among free market advocates. Its popularity reflects the fact that it’s a reworking of Bastiat’s “What is Seen and What is Not Seen”, still one of the best statements of the case for free markets.... 

But as a general statement, Hazlitt’s One Lesson is false, which is why my working title is Economics in Two Lessons”.

I've been wondering when someone was going to write this.

Lesson Two is “Market prices do not reflect all the opportunity costs we face as a society”

To someone trained in mainstream economics, as I have been, the immediate examples of this Lesson are “market failures”, such as externality, monopoly and information asymmetries. I originally planned my book to focus on these market failures, making it a somewhat idiosyncratic take on what is usually called public economics. But I kept feeling that I was missing out too much that was important: unemployment, income distribution and many other issues.

John Quiggin
Economics in Two Lessons