John Cassidy's "How Markets Fail" is a must-read IMHO. I went through 4 years of an economics degree at a top tier university (top 5 globally in Econ), and Cass

John Cassidy's "How Markets Fail" is a must-read IMHO. I went through 4 years of an economics degree at a top tier university (top 5 globally in Econ), and Cassidy's book just happened to be the weekly assigned reading for a class my last semester. Everything then made sense. All the inconsistencies you hear about economics, with one camp saying one idea and another talking about something totally different, both passing it off as consensus, fit into place. TLDR: Cassidy's book is in 2 parts. The first part, he constructs the classical/rational model of economics through intellectual history. The second part, he deconstructs, drawing from all the critiques of inefficiency, both behavioral and mathematical. (Some of the most fascinating aspects are the beautiful mathematical models that can't be solved). It's all well written prose, no need to have a pen and calculator to follow along. The title is misleading IMHO, because it seems to be a populist polemical. It's not. It should be called something like "A Brief History of Economics", echoing Hawkin's Brief History of Time.