Who'd have thought - an economics book that isn't dull as paste? Next thing someone will manage to make philosophy interesting. (Though that, perhaps, is a step too far. One must keep within the borders of possibility.) Anyway, this is less a cohesive argument than a series of largely unrelated case studies, and I enjoy that. It's like a short story collection but non-fiction, and I do like short stories. And even within the individual studies there are some pretty odd pairings - I would never have thought to compare sumo wrestlers with school teachers, for instance - but then, as the authors argue, economics is the study of incentives, and when laid out neatly it's clear that incentives can encourage some interesting, and ultimately understandable, behaviour. Enlightened self-interest, I suppose you'd call it - an accessible idea, everyone gets it. And by capitalising on this shared knowledge, and by not muddying it up with the type of economic-speak designed to drain interest from stones, the authors have produced a really compelling - and genuinely accessible - book. I can't say it's left me with a terrible yearning to go and study economics, but it has left me looking at the world around me with a marginally more critical eye, and you can't really ask for more than that.