Introduction to Economics

by Alan C. Stockman and Stockman

Offering an interdisciplinary approach to economics, this volume discusses how economics relates to major social and political issues. This edition features advice boxes, which offer hints on economic... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0030224144
• ISBN13: 9780030224140
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: South Western Educational Publishing
• Length: 840 Pages
• Weight: 4.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 8.8" x 11.1"

Customer Reviews

Fantastic!

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

Probably the best Principles text around

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.