How long does it take to read Basic Economics?
Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell takes about 11 hours 30 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 11 hours 30 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2000. 627 pages, about 172,425 words.
23 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 19 hours 10 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 11 hours 30 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 7 hours 11 minutes |
The page count is the median across 15 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Why are homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks of New York in the winter, when the abandoned apartment buildings in the city have four times as many dwelling units as there are homeless people in the city? Why are people hungry in Moscow when there are vast amounts of some of the richest farmland on the continent of Europe within easy driving distance? Why did unemployment reach 25 percent and American corporations as a whole operate in the red for two years in a row during the Great Depression of the 1930s?". "All these very different - but equally puzzling and needless - tragedies grew out of a failure to understand and apply basic economic principles. Explaining these principles for the general public in plain English, with neither graphs nor equations nor jargon, is the goal and the achievement of Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. Professor Sowell has taught economics at leading colleges and universities across the country and now uses his years of experience to bring economics to light in a way that is both easy to absorb and hard to forget.". "His lively examples are drawn from around the world and from centuries of history, because the basic principles of economics are not limited to modern capitalist societies and apply even to situations where no money changes hands, such as caring for wounded soldiers on a battlefield. The focus of Basic Economics is not on how individuals make money but on how whole societies create prosperity or poverty for their peoples by the way they organize their economies. Prosperous countries with few natural resources, such as Japan and Switzerland, are as common as poor countries with rich resources, such as Russia or Mexico."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Economics, Economic conditions, Economics, study and teaching, Economic history
