I'm trying to learn more about economics so that I can contribute productively to political discourse without just becoming an unwitting goon for someone else's ideology.

I made a post in a completely unrelated thread a few weeks ago about wishing I knew more about economics, and someone recommended Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies. It looks interesting and he appears to be well-respected, but most of the good reviews are by people who fill their posts with disparaging remarks about "the left." Similarly, the bad reviews argue that this is just "right-wing propaganda."

I could probably get another book by someone on the other side, say Paul Krugman, and just read both, but I imagine that both books will be filled with similarly convincing statistics each appearing to refute the other's premises and arguments.

I'm an aspiring medical scientist, and I really appreciate the value of understanding exactly what we know and why we know it (and perhaps most importantly what we don't yet know for sure) so that I can make rational informed choices that have the highest probability of being correct. I understand the incredible difficulty in positively identifying causation above and beyond correlation in medicine, and I'm sure it's even harder in sociology and economics.

Pundits and bloggers on both sides of economic issues always seem to just state their claims as if they're the most obvious thing in the world and the other guys are clearly dishonest and have no leg to stand on, and I just don't know who to trust. With no formal education in economics, I have no way of telling who is lying and taking things out of context, and who is earnestly trying to follow the data where it leads and do whatever really seems most likely to be in the best interest of our future as a society and species.

I wish it were as easy as studying creationism vs. evolution, where a cursory understanding of the basic science involved reveals one of them to be clearly fraudulent and very much using a "conclusion first" approach to the issue. Maybe it is and I just don't have a good enough understanding of economics, but I doubt it since it doesn't seem like professional economists have anywhere approaching the same degree of concurrence as scientists do on other politicized issues like climate change and evolution.

Any advice? I found myself automatically leaning to the Left after losing trust in the Right due to their recent treatment of science, but I realize that these issues aren't necessarily related and I want to have solid evidence and reasoning behind my beliefs.