Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering 2007: Where the Road Ends, I... Book

Thomas Sowell's "Applied Economics" ought to be required reading in every high school and college economics, politics, and English courses. While Mr. Sowell is Ph.D economist and fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, his ideas are useful even to the non-economist. As a society, we tend to be taken in too easily by people who make irrational arguments that sound good at first glance but produce miserable results since no one thought about the next step. Often times, too many words are politically popular but are actually quite harmful. Such words include: "living wage," "consumer protection," "rent control," etcetera. When these ideas are actually applied in practice, the results rarely meet the rhetoric over the long-run. Politicians only tend to care about what will get them re-elected, and as a result, few of them have an incentive to think about what will happen 10 years from now. As a result, many often escape the blame since the poor results will be far removed from their disasterous policies. This, of course, could easily be construed as a problem with democracy, but instead, my feeling is that it is a problem with our educational system. If our educational system actually educated citizens to think deeply about what would be the consequences of certain policies, perhaps the heated irrational logic emanating from certain politicians would cease. Perhaps such rhetoric would continue to work in irrational hotspots such as Berkeley, but rare for it to work elsewhere. One could only hope. This book is a must read for everyone -- regardless of who you are.