Economics [antikvár]

PREFACE This is an introduction to economics. It is designed for a half-year or a full-year beginning course, and for students who may or may not go on to further economic study. This sixth edition is one of the most drastic of all revisions. Economics is an important subject. It is also an exciting subject. Being a professional economist, I naturally think this. But repeated surveys of opinion show that a well-designed economics course almost always scores near the top in enrollment popularity, and very often in life you meet up with people who bemoan the fact that they never had the chance to study economics. When I wrote the first edition of this book, I said to myself: "What should an intelligent person know about economics in this last half of the twentieth century? A reader will probably find those subjects interesting that are likely to be most important to him twenty years from now when he will himself begin to be in a position of power and responsibility." The result has been successful beyond my fondest hopes. The book has been widely used, universally translated, and flatteringly imitated. Economics teachers—here and abroad, in junior colleges and great universities—were apparently ripe for a text that applied the tools of analytical economics to the vital economic problems of the changing times: unemployment and inflation; growth and development; pricing efficiency and changing inequality of income; gold and foreign trade; the mixed economy and challenging communism; in short, on the problems of today and 1970, not yesterday and 1929.