This book is a series of short chapters on various public issues, like tobacco, trash collection, and electric deregulation in California. It’s all standard market economic theory. For the most part fairly informative and gets one thinking about how incentives work. However, particularly in the case of deregulation of electric utilities in California, the authors wrote their chapter too soon. Though standard market economic theory would still probably explain what happened, their explanation doesn’t take into account the chicanery found to have been used by the energy trading companies like Enron and Dynegy.

(Full review at my blog) ( )