Economics in One Lesson

TL;DR — Hazlitt’s 1946 primer built on a single idea: trace the effects of a policy on everyone, not just the visible beneficiary.

⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. Explicitly free / author-released / CC.

Mises Institute edition. The one lesson is Bastiat’s, sharpened: the art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy, and at the effects on all groups, not merely one.

Hazlitt then applies it, chapter by chapter, to public works, tariffs, minimum wages, rent control and the rest. The broken-window fallacy is chapter two and is the book in miniature.

⚠️ A polemic, and openly one — it argues a position rather than surveying the field. It is the clearest statement of that position, which is why it stays in print eighty years on.

Where this came from

• Brendan Sheehan’s public are.na channel

205 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.