Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson is the brilliant work of Henry Hazlitt. First published in 1946, it was written to expose the popular fallacies of its day. It became his most enduring contribution.

The Lesson

Hazlitt attacked the fallacies of his time by analyzing each in light of the titular "one lesson." This lesson is the the same as the fundamental lesson of Frédéric Bastiat's parable of the broken window: that one's economic analyses must go beyond what is seen to what is unseen, or beyond the obvious, localized, and short-term effects of an action or policy to its subtler, wider reaching, and long-term consequences. The failure to take these latter into account is known as "the broken window fallacy" in reference to Bastiat's parable. Hazlitt viewed this as the supreme economic error, and it was this, in manifold manifestations, that he set out to expose in Economics in One Lesson. As Hazlitt explained in the book's first part:

[one main factor] that spawns new economic fallacies every day . . . is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

Contents

PART ONE: THE LESSON

PART TWO: THE LESSON APPLIED

• 2. The Broken Window
• 3. The Blessings of Destruction
• 4. Public Works Mean Taxes
• 5. Taxes Discourage Production
• 6. Credit Diverts Production
• 7. The Curse of Machinery
• 8. Spread-the-Work Schemes
• 9. Disbanding Troops and Bureaucrats
• 10. The Fetish of Full Employment
• 11. Who's "Protected" by Tariffs?
• 12. The Drive for Exports
• 13. “Parity” Prices
• 14. Saving the X Industry
• 15. How the Price System Works
• 16. “Stabilizing” Commodities
• 17. Government Price-Fixing
• 18. What Rent Control Does
• 19. Minimum Wage Laws
• 20. Do Unions Really Raise Wages?
• 21. “Enough to Buy Back the Product”
• 22. The Function of Profits
• 23. The Mirage of Inflation
• 24. The Assault on Saving
• 25. The Lesson Restated

PART THREE: THE LESSON AFTER THIRTY YEARS

External links

• Economics in One Lesson on Wikipedia.
• Availability of Economics in One Lesson: read the online edition (PDF), listen to the audiobook, or purchase the book.
• Economics in One Lesson Is Still Relevant by Art Carden, October 2008.
• Economics in One Lesson, The Video Series by Jeffrey Tucker, October 2010.