In this book, Paul Krugman, one of the prominent critics of Bush's economic policies and more, demonstrates that understanding economics and economic policy is far from being a difficult task; it should not create headaches for the "average" citizen.

With clear, accessible, and beautiful language, he analyzes in short texts the issues of unemployment, growth, the stock market bubble, trade theories, the trajectory of the American economy, and the monetary crisis in Asia, Brazil, and Argentina.

He criticizes the efforts of some who selectively explain economic phenomena based on international developments alone, removing the responsibility of economic policy from their governments, attributing everything to forces and institutions outside their country.

He explains how a national economy works. Through simple examples, he analyzes that there are good-simple and bad-difficult economic theories. He explains that governments and many academics resort to overly complex schemes in order to obscure the real economic facts.

In this book, Krugman shows that the inflationary spread of certain economic ideas does not make them any more accurate or effective for the everyday problems of citizens. On the contrary, there are economic ideas and practices that directly benefit both the citizen and the country.

And all this is written with style, clarity, simply but not simplistically. As R. Nortons wrote in Fortune, "Krugman writes better than any economist since Keynes." And The Economist claimed that "he is the most creative economist of his generation." [Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]