So much of our national political debate these days revolves around economic matters -- taxes, health care, even affirmative action and immigration policy -- that it is essential for informed Americans to have a working knowledge of economics. In Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One, the renowned conservative economist Thomas Sowell has made it possible for you to grasp quickly and easily economic elements of key public policies. Better yet, this revised and expanded edition now includes material on roots of the Crash of 2008, economics of immigration, and other timely topics. With an experienced teacher's knack for making the complex simple, Sowell explains why politicians frequently cheerlead for policies that are bad for the economy; why cities with rent controlled housing usually end up riddled with slums; why medical care costs just keep going up; and much more. He turns his keen eye also to the economics of discrimination and even examines the economic development of nations.

And look out, Hillary: Sowell even explains why Socialist schemes like single-payer health care actually offer much less than meets the eye, and invariably fail. Sowell says that many disastrous public policies would never have been adopted if short-sighted politicians had been willing or able to trace the consequences of implementing them beforehand. In this book, he shows this can be done -- how, in the words of the book's subtitle, to "think beyond stage one."

Thomas Sowell reveals:

How government intervention in housing markets led to the current "subprime" mortgage crisis

Single-payer health care: why it makes overall cost of medical care go up -- and quality go down

The unrecorded human costs of price-controlled medical care: how they reveal bankruptcy of the whole idea of socialized medicine

Why New York's ever-increasing corporate taxes are directly to blame for abandonment of the city by many key corporations -- leaving New York with a diminished corporate tax base

California's electricity crisis: how blackouts and higher costs for consumers were the inevitable result of the state government's attempt to keep consumer prices low by legal fiat

Central planning: how it drove the Soviet economy into the ground and why it simply doesn't work, despite liberals' continuing fondness for it

How the economic advantages of a market economy are accompanied by political disadvantages

Planned economies: how they inevitably turn decent people into criminals

A free labor market: how it benefits not only the worker but also the economy

Why the Soviet slave labor system was not as profitable as free labor, even though it accounted for huge sectors of the Soviet Union's economic output

Price controls: why they are usually popular politically despite failing to accomplish what they are instituted to do
Why a free market is the best antidote to racial prejudice: how discrimination inflicts economic damage not only on those being discriminated against, but on those doing the discrimination

The outrageous distortions and half-truths purveyed by Ralph Nader and other self-styled "consumer advocates" (and their devastating economic effects)

Property developers: how they are unfairly demonized by liberal economists and activists

The immensely important role geography plays in economic realities of various places around the globe

Why cities with rent control laws have higher rents than cities that don't -- and how rent control reduces incentives to build new housing, as well as to maintain existing housing

How liberals distort and misrepresent statistics about black and white economic performance in order to exaggerate the lingering presence of discrimination in American society