Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson is the seminal work of Henry Hazlitt. First published in 1946, it is based on Frédéric Bastiat's essay Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas (English: "What is Seen and What is Not Seen"). It was written to expose the popular fallacies of its day. It became his most enduring contribution.

The Lesson
Hazlitt attacked the fallacies of his time by analyzing each in light of the titular "one lesson." This lesson is the the same as the fundamental lesson of Frédéric Bastiat's parable of the broken window: that one's economic analyses must go beyond what is seen to what is unseen, or beyond the obvious, localized, and short-term effects of an action or policy to its subtler, wider reaching, and long-term consequences. The failure to take these latter into account is known as "the broken window fallacy" in reference to Bastiat's parable. Hazlitt viewed this as the supreme economic error, and it was this, in manifold manifestations, that he set out to expose in Economics in One Lesson. As Hazlitt explained in the book's first part:

[one main factor] that spawns new economic fallacies every day. . . is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

Links

 * Economics in One Lesson 1952 special edition for FEE:
 * Full text links
 * Full text in PDF
 * Economics in One Lesson 1978 second edition:
 * Full text in HTML
 * Economics in One Lesson 2007 edition:
 * Full text in PDF
 * "Economics in One Lesson Is Still Relevant" by Art Carden, October 2008.
 * Economics in One Lesson, The Video Series by Jeffrey Tucker, October 2010.


 * Related courses
 * Economic Reasoning Mises Academy course by David Gordon