The Undercover Economist Strikes Back cover art

The Undercover Economist Strikes Back

How to Run or Ruin an Economy

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Undercover Economist Strikes Back

By: Tim Harford
Narrated by: Cameron Stewart, Gavin Osborn
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

 A million readers bought The Undercover Economist to get the lowdown on how economics works on a small scale, in our everyday lives. Since then, economics has become big news. Crises, austerity, riots, bonuses - all are in the headlines all the time. But how does this large-scale economic world really work? What would happen if we cancelled everyone's debt? How do you create a job? Will the BRIC countries take over the world? Asking - among many other things -- what the future holds for the Euro, why the banks are still paying record bonuses and where government borrowing will take us, in The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, Tim Harford returns with his trademark clarity and wit to explain what's really going on - and what it means for us all.©2013 Tim Harford Business Ethics Economics Management Management & Leadership Workplace & Organisational Behavior Business Government Banking Taxation Thought-Provoking Capitalism Leadership Socialism Economic disparity US Economy Tariff Great Recession Economic Inequality

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Contra Krugman cover art
How to Teach Economics to Your Dog cover art
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism cover art
Rollback cover art
Milton Friedman cover art
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal cover art
Economics cover art
Economics in Three Lessons and One Hundred Economics Laws cover art
The Abuse of Power cover art
Economics for Real People: An Introduction to the Austrian School cover art
New Ideas from Dead Economists cover art
The Wealth of Nations cover art
50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know cover art
The Instant Economist cover art
How to Speak Money cover art
Made in Britain cover art

Critic reviews

Tim Harford is a brilliant explainer of economics . . . A superb guide, whatever your level of expertise (William Leith)
Tim Harford is a brilliant explainer of economics . . . beautifully clear . . . A superb guide (William Leith)
Tim Harford is a riveting expositor of the field, lively and fair minded, and his books The Undercover Economist and its macroeconomic companion piece The Undercover Economist Strikes Back are excellent places to start, both because they are so interesting in themselves and also because they give a good initiation in how economists think and study these sorts of questions (John Lanchester)
Tim has a really exceptional talent for telling a simple and a very easily understood and yet still incredibly interesting story about economics (Planet Money)
Every Tim Harford book is cause for celebration. He makes 'the dismal science' seem like an awful lot of fun (Malcolm Gladwell)
All stars
Most relevant
Very good book and great performance by the reader...they make economics sound easy and palatable to an ordinary mind.

Great book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The best teaching comes from telling stories - stories about human feats, challenges which were overcome, where the art of the possible conquers all. Tim Harford in his lectures and his writing does this all the time - putting a human face on problem solving.

This audiobook is for you if:

You consider yourself to be a serious person, concerned about the way of the world, unhappy about lives being wasted through deprivation, poverty and idleness;
You enjoy listening to the output of BBC Radio 4 (and particularly to the BBC Today programme, "More or Less"and new programmes like "The Philosopher's Arms");

I wondered when I bought it why it needed two narrators when novels etc can make do with just one. But the interchange of question and answer, explaining matters by the use of Socratic debate, really demands two voices and Cameron Stewart and Gavin Osborne do it justice as narrators. Tim never uses jargon unnecessarily and it is always explained in simple terms.

This is the idea audiobook to listen to after you turn left at the top of the stairs and settle into your aircraft seat. Get the steward to fix you a long drink, let everyone else watch the highly edited action movies and chill out to a tour de force. It will teach you that the modern macroeconomist needs to be a renaissance man - and that is a really good takeaway.

The perfect book for that business flight

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Good introduction to Macro Economics - just what you'd expect of Tim Hartford. However, why not have him actually read the book? You have an author who is brilliant on the radio and then have someone else on the audiobook?? Why? The narration is not bad - annoying that the 'instructor' voice is more posh than the 'student' but would have been better with Hartford.

Where's Tim???

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
could do with a short summary of key concepts top go with it so the listener can refer back to it later

really interesting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Loved this book as much as the Microeconomics book "The undercover economist" by the same author.

Macroeconomics for a general audience taught entertainingly by an ideology free economist

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews