I haven’t read any popular book on economics, but what you (and Hanson) say about physics popular books sounds right. That’s the reason I don’t like popular books on physics (I am a physicist). The presented ideas are counterintuitive, and, at the best, the counterintuitiveness is countered by some arbitrary loose analogy, which may be reinterpreted in a completely different way without much difficulties. What is worse, people seem to like exactly this obscure quality of such books.
(Once I had read a popular book by Landau and Kitajgorodskij and I really liked it, but it was about Newtonian mechanics mainly, and I think it included several equations. A book about cosmology, quantum physics or even string theory without any equation at all—save the ever popular E=mc² - can hardly convey any meaningful information.)
I haven’t read any popular book on economics, but what you (and Hanson) say about physics popular books sounds right. That’s the reason I don’t like popular books on physics (I am a physicist). The presented ideas are counterintuitive, and, at the best, the counterintuitiveness is countered by some arbitrary loose analogy, which may be reinterpreted in a completely different way without much difficulties. What is worse, people seem to like exactly this obscure quality of such books.
(Once I had read a popular book by Landau and Kitajgorodskij and I really liked it, but it was about Newtonian mechanics mainly, and I think it included several equations. A book about cosmology, quantum physics or even string theory without any equation at all—save the ever popular E=mc² - can hardly convey any meaningful information.)