For many years, Tim Harford's
The Undercover Economist and its sequel,
The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, were my favorite go-to books when I wanted to remind myself of the basics behind some current economic phenomena. My only formal education in the field was a 2-semester, 4 hours per week, economics course at university, which taught me exactly a handful of primary school-level equations with acronyms whose meanings I didn't know even during the exams I passed. (I don't want to be unduly harsh to those professors, so hanging them for wasting hundreds of thousands of hours of young lives I wouldn't recommend. Just fire them ceremoniously.)
