Harford draws on examples from our daily lives and uses them to illustrate basic con-cepts of economics, such as marginal cost, information assymetry, price targeting and externality pricing.

Some of the truths that economics teaches us are commonsensical, but other are deeply unintuitive: the fact that the world is non-zero-sum, for example, and that everyone can benefit at the same time, or that markets don’t need central planners, and prosperity is caused by “human action but not human design”, as the economist Friedrich Hayek would have put it. Harford il-lustrates this well, likening a well-function-ing free market to a ‘World of Truth’, with prices acting as the spies that reveal valuable information about the world. Interfering with this ‘World of Truth’, as subsidies and tariffs and taxes inevitably do, harms all of us and destroys value.

Special-interest groups do this in some countries, dictators in others, and Harford writes about it with such lucidity that many such pernicious examples from India will no doubt pop up in your mind.

The Undercover Economist is no weighty tome, though, pontificating grandly on the world. Instead, it is a book with utility, which will help you decipher the world around you a little better, and will, even, save you a few rupees every time you venture out to the su-permarket.

Also, it is out in paperback in In-dia, which indicates exactly what the pub-lisher thinks of you. Buy it nevertheless: you will both benefit.