Hello, world.

As far as I know, we are a blog without direction. George began this with an exceedingly short Facebook message and, well, here we are. This presents me with an opportunity to set the tone. Naturally, I will waste that chance with a quick blurb about a book I just read.

A former teacher gave me the book The Undercover Economist about a month ago, and I just finished it (I read the majority of it at the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport). By far the best book I've read in a long time. Freakonomics is great, but I've always thought it was somewhat gimmicky. The Undercover Economist is author Tim Harford applying the same idea of using economics to look under the surface of everyday interactions and taking it to a new level. He explains the interaction of supply and demand, externalities, market failure, the forces driving globalization, why poor countries are poor, why used cars suck, and why Starbucks costs so much, and he does this while neither speaking in jargon nor oversimplifying. This is one of the best books I have read in a very long time.