The only thing I might criticize about the artwork is that the backgrounds are a little too sparse, too often, in my opinion. Even though it's not really relevant to the reader what, for example, Léon Walras looks like (he appears in exactly one panel in a non-speaking capacity) it's still good to see that Burr's done his homework here. His generic characters are fairly simple and therefore rather approachable, but he also does a great job capturing the likenesses of historical individuals and keeping them in the same style. Burr does a solid job interpretting Goodwin's text as illustrations. Which leads me, of course, to the artist here: Dan E. The same holds true here: Goodwin's text by itself might be serviceable, but the illustrations are what draw readers in and focus on the material more directly. But by adding the illustrations, the viewer is more directly engaged with the content and is able to visualize some of the concepts in a more concrete fashion. If you just sit and listen to one of those videos, the talk is engaging enough, but can sometimes be monotonous to sit through. I think that's they real key on which Economix hinges. In some respects, the book felt much like those white board style videos, in which an expert on some subjects talks for a few minutes while an artist provides cartoon illustrations on a dry erase board that coincide with the speech. But it seemed easier and less convoluted than any of the textbooks I used. What I'm unsure of is how easy the text would remain if someone is trying to decipher economics for the first time I have more than a few econ classes under my belt, so this was more of a refresher course for me in that sense. There's still some daunting subject matter to cover, but I found Goodwin's examples helpful in explaining everything. But, the text itself is casual and relatively approachable. Or rather, he doesn't have experience writing comics, and his script was overly reliant on prose. In reading through, it does feel a bit like Goodwin didn't write this as a comic.
#Economix review full
It is indeed fully illustrated and laid out in a comic format, but there's a lot of very full dialogue boxes and speech balloons. What's also challenging is that, in flipping through the book, it still looks pretty text-heavy despite it being marketed as a comic book. So, coming from that perspective, it's kind of gutsy to cover nearly half of the cover with the word "ECONOMIX." There's only so much excitement and interest an "X" can add to the word. They expect teachers that talk in Ben Stein's monotonal voice, and to fall asleep as soon as they open the textbook. People are fearful of studying it, and if they are forced into an economics class, they subconsciously set themselves up for a difficult time. That's why you see what amounts to guesswork in even the most highly visible economic jobs in the world.Īnd because of all that, economics comes to the table with a bad rap. Second, in part because of that intersection, economists frequently don't fully understand the subject themselves. Which means that right-brained people have trouble with the analytical half of economics, while left-brained people have more trouble with the fact that people don't neatly fit into mathematical constructs. Which means that it has the hard and fast rules of arithmatic, but with a lot of fuzziness that one might see in sociology. First, it lies in this weird intersection of social science and math. There are a couple problems with studying economics, generally speaking. Author Michael Goodwin notes in the preface that he wanted to relay what he thought was the broad story of economics, but he chose comics as the medium because it was more accessible than anything else. It's a crash course in economics put together in the form of a comic. I recently picked up the 2012 book Economix: How Our Economy Works (and Doesn't Work).
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