Making Sense of Things That Don’t Make Sense

Thomas Sowell does a great job of teaching us economics in four recent, short articles (one, two, three and four).
The articles explain sources of value and knowledge in human interaction and how values and knowledge translate into wages, prices and progress. I won’t attempt to summarize Sowell here, since he is one of the best economics teachers on the planet. If you are a bit puzzled about how economists think you should read them all carefully — he provides lots of examples of the functioning of markets and politics familiar to our daily lives.
Many of us think by casual observation that some prices or incomes are too high (low) or grossly unfair or unjust. Since most of us cannot make sense out of prices or incomes, he urges us not to make matters worse by “doing something” about what we cannot comprehend in the first place. For that reason he entitles his articles “dangerous obsession.”
Sowell is author of two superb books accessible to anyone who can read: Basic Economics and Applied Economcs. I highly recommend them.