Review of Free Your Mind: A Beginner’s Guide to Political Economy by Sauvik Chakraverti in Vishleshan Vol. 28, No. 1 Jan- March 2003

Reviewed by Mahesh Bhatt

How is wealth created? If humans are the only species capable of creating wealth, how can population be a cause of poverty? What economic policies should be vote for? This little book will help you find answers to these important questions. Written in a lucid reader-friendly, Jargon- free style, it makes political economy easily understandable to the lay person.

The book is intended for young readers, and it would help the school and college students, teacher, and professors of Economics and Political Science (Civics). It is an ideal text with illustration and verse to illuminate the concepts and with " Point to Ponder" at the end of each chapter.

This book assumes vital importance at a time when state socialism and central planning are being jettisoned for market forces in public discourse, but students in school and college cannot appreciate the working of the market system because they use the same old textbooks that focus on Five Year Plans. This book is intended to make a profound impact on the way political economy I taught and learnt.

The second chapter, for example, shows how population causes prosperity-how cities and towns are richer than scarcely populated villages. It therefore challenges the imagination of the students to envision a country of 400-500 free trading cities and towns, instead of millions of ‘ self-sufficient village economics’: the Gandhi- Nehru vision.

In political economy, this book introduces the basic concepts of modern public choice theory, essential for understanding the working and limitations of bureaucracy and democracy. It dioceses and public goods, market failure, environmental, employment schemes and causes of poverty.

This book explains the role of money and credit by narrating the evolution of money from goldsmiths to modern central banks. It shows how the ‘non-performing assets of state- owned Indian banks represent’ loot by the credit unworthy’.

Finally, this book is about freedom: and it shows how liberty is the supreme political value, superior to the equality that the socialists chased for so long. It is , in this sense, a beginner’s guide to classical liberal values and ideals, essential for any country that wants to build a pluralistic, prosperous and peaceful society.