Introduction to Economics

Fantastic testbook, and fantastic professor! Stockman has written a concise yet witty text for students in economics.

Stockman has written a fine introductory university text on economics, based on more than 20 years experience teaching undergraduates. It is the only such text written from a Chicago price theory perspective which, however wonderful, is dying at Chicago! Hence the strong emphasis on supply and demand, market distortions, the gains from trade, consumer and producer surplus, the division of labour, and so on. It is much easier and more conventional than that other classic in the Chicago tradition, Alchian & Allen. It is also the only principles text to emphasise macroeconomic market clearing and growth over business cycles. No IS-LM here, which is fine by me.I started economics 30 years ago with the 8th edition of Samuelson. Much of what I learned there I had to unlearn later. Many statements in that book struck me as less than fully true, and my subsequent education bore out my suspicions.Most telling, Stockman understands that a market economy is a self-organising social process that economises on articulated knowledge, and that elicits cooperation among people who do not know each other and never will.Flaws: many of Stockman's definitions are nonstandard or simplistic. He should use fewer clippings from the press, and higher quality ones. His discussion of labour economics is rushed. He should devote more space to property rights and law & economics, and less to, eg, monopolistic competition, moral hazard and adverse selection. He should say more about the role of economics in the intellectual history of our civilisation, starting with David Hume in 1748 and with Richard Cantillon. Every principles text should explain that much of the apparatus of our discipline was invented by Alfred Marshall while teaching at Cambridge in the 1870s and 80s. The book is too long and too expensive, in part because it has too many colour photographs.