[3] According to the reviewer R. Bastiat in 2004, the book "starts out with a chapter discussing the subject matter and perspective of economics in terms of scarcity and trade-offs.

The section on industry and commerce delves into the role of markets in coordinating production and distribution in the face of widely dispersed information, and moves on to profit and loss, specialization, monopoly, antitrust, economic regulation, and a comparison of markets versus central planning.

Sowell presents arguments about the social and economic consequences of minimum wages, and questions of income distribution, mobility, and poverty.

He praised the Time and Risk section for containing discussion of concepts "that seldom get treated adequately in introductory courses or popular expositions".

[6] Edmund A. Mennis wrote in Business Economics[7] that Sowell gives good examples of government controls having bad consequences, and of the way profits and losses in free markets signal to producers how scarce resources should be used.