In recent years, innovative texts in mathematics, science, foreign
languages, and other fields have achieved dramatic pedagogical gains by
abandoning the traditional encyclopedic approach in favor of attempting to
teach a short list of core principles in depth. Two well-respected writers
and researchers, Bob Frank and Ben Bernanke, have shown that the
less-is-more approach affords similar gains in introductory economics.
Although recent editions of a few other texts have paid lip service to this
new approach, Frank/Bernanke is by far the best thought out and best
executed principles text in this mold. Avoiding excessive reliance on formal
mathematical derivations, it presents concepts intuitively through examples
drawn from familiar contexts. The authors introduce a well-articulated short
list of core principles and reinforcing them by illustrating and applying
each in numerous contexts. Students are periodically asked to apply these
principles to answer related questions, exercises, and problems. The text
also encourages students to become “Economic Naturalists,” people who employ
basic economic principles to understand and explain what they observe in the
world around them. An economic naturalist understands, for example, that
infant safety seats are required in cars but not in airplanes because the
marginal cost of space to accommodate these seats is typically zero in cars
but often hundreds of dollars in airplanes. Such examples engage student
interest while teaching them to see each feature of their economic landscape
as the reflection of an implicit or explicit cost-benefit calculation.
Table of Contents
Part 1 Introduction
1. Thinking Like an Economist
2. Comparative Advantage: The Basis for Exchange
3. Supply and Demand: An Introduction
Part 2 Competition and the Invisible Hand
4. Elasticity
5. Demand: The Benefit Side of the Market
6. Perfectly Competitive Supply: The Cost Side of the Market
7. Efficiency and Exchange
8. The Quest for Profit and the Invisible Hand
Part 3 International Trade
9. International Trade and Trade Policy
Part 4 Market Imperfections
10. Monopoly and Other Forms of Imperfect Competition
11. Thinking Strategically: A Further Look at Monopolistic Competition and
Oligopoly
12. Externalities and Property Rights
13. The Economics of Information
Part 5 Economics of Public Policy
14. Labor Markets, Poverty, and Income Distribution
15. The Environment, Health, and Safety
16. Public Goods and Tax Policy