written by Yoram Bauman
illustrated by Grady Klein

How much do you really understand about how our economy works?

Yeah, me either.
 
Following up their first volume, which naturally focused on microecomics, Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman (“the world’s first and only stand-up economist”) now have released The Cartoon Introducation to Economics, Vol. Two: Macroeconomics. This is where things get decidedly more complicated.
 
Luckily, Bauman and Klein have a great sense of humor. Even better, they have a firm grasp on what it all means, and they make it simple enough to pass on to laymen. This is also when we get into tricky territory, like trade between countries and the morally troubling debates over what to do about workers’ rights when rich countries trade with poor ones. Naturally, everything is complicated here. Nothing is a straight, black-and-white, good-or-bad answer.
 
Klein and Bauman are to be commended for making a richly understandable book that provides all the information of a textbook without getting too dry (also, despite the title of the book, it never gets too cartoony, either, striking a difficult to achieve balance between being informative and being funny).
 
The humor does wear thin in spots, but that’s hardly a criticism. It’s a relief to see a book explain what we need to know about macroeconomics in such a lucid way.

-- John Hogan

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