Economics

Rating:
Summary: Close but no cigar.
Review: McConnell and Brue do a B+ job in this book.However,it does not equal Samuelson's introductory textbook in economics in explanatory power in a number of areas.In this review I will concentrate on just one point of comparison concerning the paradox of thrift.McConnell and Brue effectively discuss this paradox at the macro economic level using the short run aggregate supply curve's three ranges-the horizontal Keynesian range,the upward sloping synthesis range and the Classical-Neoclassical vertical range.If the economy is operating in the Keynesian range or the lower part of the synthesis range,then McConnell and Brue correctly show that more current savings will lead to less future savings due to a decrease in investment and a reverse multiplier effect reducing spending.On the other hand, they correctly show that if the economy is operating in the vertical range,more savings will reduce inflationary pressures while making it possible for investment to increase IF(and only if)businessmen have correct expectations about the future.Samuelson also goes through this analysis.However, Samuelson goes one step further. Samuelson first discusses the linkage at the microeconomic level between the paradox of thrift and its microfoundations in the Production Possibilities Curve(PPF).Essentially, if the economy is operating inside the frontier(on the horizontal Keynesian range or upward sloping portion of the synthesis range),then more savings is detrimental and moves the economy deeper into the interior of the PPF.On the other hand,if the ecomomy is operating on the boundary of the PPF,then more savings can potentially be transformed into more investment,assuming that businessmen, operating in the private sector,have correct expectations about the future.Samuelson demonstrates that in the interior the micro optimality conditions break down and are not operational.McConnell and Brue do not cover this in their textbook.

Rating:
Summary: Good, in fact very good
Review: As an MBA (with a fair subject background)interested in applied economics I found this to be an impressive piece of writing. The real world examples and colloquial expression can only comfort a reader intimidated by this very complex and volumnous discipline. I was rather srprised to see some of the reviews calling this a very difficult-to-comprehend text. In my opinion even someone relatively new to economics will find his knowledge stacking up as he progresses through the text. Given that the sequencing is not classic with micro followed by macro, I feal the authors have done a good job of going against the conventional and merging the potent interrelationships of these two basic areas-after all one evolves into the other. Also the web-based material was also more than helpful. Finally a book in its fifteenth edition, read over 40 odd years better be good.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book!
Review: I am pursuing an MBA. I had no economics background, however I found this book to be easy to read, very well structured and most of all, you can find the actual applications of Economics. I highly recommend this book over Economics from Samuelson, he's a brilliant economist but he clearly doesn't explain as good. If you are going to buy only one book of economics, I recommend this one.

Rating:
Summary: Very good tool !!!
Review: I don't study Economy, but I found that this book is easily understandable for those that have at least some notions on the subject. I liked it, because it includes the main themes on which everybody should know at least something, and it is quite entertaining (for a book on this subject).

Also, at the end of each chapter the authors include some questions that help you to understand it better. There is also a web link that provides you with the answers to those questions (so, if you are like me, and want to be sure you answered correctly, you have the opportunity to find out).

Anyway, I highly recommend this book: it is a thoroughly good introduction to economy!!!!. And last, but not least, it is also of good help in exams, because some basic questions have a tendency to be repeated, and with this book: you have the answers!!!).

Rating:
Summary: It stunk!
Review: I used this book last semester at a local community college, and it stunk.

First, the book comes off as if the student already knows Macroeconomics. It uses difficult terms, it isn't harmonious (it doesn't "flow" well), it was confusing, and it obviously wasn't written for the layperson in mind.

Second, some the excersises at the end of the chapter makes you answer questions that has little to do with the chapter you've just read. For example, after you've finished reading chapter 1 and then go on to the chapter review questions (and there are a ton of them) you'll find it hard to answer them because they had little to do with the chapter.

I don't recommend this book to any college student. So far it has been the most horrendous piece of work I have ever seen!

Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: I used this textbook in an advanced placement Macroeconomics course. Believe me the textbook itself is more interesting than the class. The text provides well detailed explainations of concepts and even provides a comprehensive glossary for those who might find the language alittle to difficult to understand. An overall great book, I've read other economics texts and this one is absolutely stellar in comparison.

Rating:
Summary: It will teach you ammoral economics
Review: Mc Connell doesn't mention that indignity, disempowerment, and hunger accompany capitalism worldwide. No one sensibly denies this, yet even among those who despise capitalism, most fear that suffering would increase without it. While some certainly find capitalism odious, few celebrate an alternative and those who do generally favor "market socialism," But there's a great alternative. To transcend capitalism, we can advocate equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, and ecological balance. What institutions can propel these values in domestic economics, as well as get economic functions done well?
To start, we should advocate public/social property relations in place of privatized capitalist property relations. In the new system, each workplace is owned in equal part by all citizens. This ownership conveys no special right or income. Bill Gates doesn't own a massive proportion of the means by which software is produced. Instead, we all do--or symmetrically, if you prefer, no one does. At any rate, ownership of productive property becomes moot regarding distribution of income, wealth, or power. In this way the ills of private ownership such as personal accrual of profits yielding huge wealth, disappear. But that's it. We haven't accomplished anything more than that, only a removal. We must go much further.
Next, workers and consumers are organized into democratic councils with the norm for decisions being that methods of dispersing information to decision-makers and at arriving at preferences and tallying them into decisions should be such as to convey to each actor about each decision, to the extent possible, influence over the decision in proportion to the degree they will be affected by it. Councils exist at many levels, and have subunits such as work groups and teams and individuals, as well as supra units such as workplaces and whole industries. Councils are the seat of decision making power. Actors in councils are the decision-makers. Votes could be majority rule, three quarters, two-thirds, consensus, etc., and would be taken at different levels, with fewer or more participants, all as appropriate depending on the particular implications of the decisions in question. Sometimes a team or individual would make a decision pretty much on its own, though within a rubric of other encompassing decisions that were made more broadly. Sometimes a whole workplace or even industry would be the decision body. Different voting and tallying methods would be employed, as needed for different decisions. There is no a priori single correct choice. There is, however, a right norm to try to efficiently and sensibly implement: decision-making input should be in proportion as one is affected by decisions.
Next, what about the organization of work? Who does what tasks in what combinations? Each actor does a job, of course, and each job is composed of a variety of tasks, of course. What changes from current corporate divisions of labor to a preferred future division of labor is that the variety of tasks each actor does is balanced for its empowerment and quality of life implications. Every person participating in creating new products is a worker. Each and every worker has a balanced job complex. The combination of tasks and responsibilities you have accords you the same empowerment and quality of life as the combination I have accords me, and likewise for each other worker and their balanced job complex. We do not have some people overwhelmingly monopolizing empowering, fulfilling, and engaging tasks and circumstances. We do not have other people overwhelmingly saddled with only rote, obedient, and dangerous things to do. For reasons of equity and especially to create the conditions of democratic participation and self-management, we establish that when we each participate in our workplace and industry (and consumer) decision-making, we each have been comparably prepared by our work with confidence, skills, and knowledge to do so. The typical situation now is that some people who produce have great confidence, social skills, decision-making skills, and relevant knowledge imbued by their daily work, and other people are only tired, de-skilled, and lacking relevant knowledge due to their daily work. Balanced job complexes do away with this division of circumstances. They complete the task of removing the root basis for class divisions that is begun by eliminating private ownership of capital. They eliminate not only the role of owner/capitalist and its disproportionate power and wealth, but also the role of intellectual/decision making producer who exists over and above all others,. They retain the needed tasks, but they apportion them and also rote and unempowering responsibilities more equitably and in tune with true democracy and classlessness.
But how much are people paid? We work. This entitles us to a share of the product of work. But how much? This new vision says that we ought to receive for our labors an amount in tune with how hard we have worked, how long we have worked, and with what sacrifices we have worked. We shouldn't get more by virtue of being more productive due to having better tools, more skills, or greater inborn talent, much less by virtue of having more power or owning more property. We should be entitled to more consumption from society's product only by virtue of expending more of our effort or otherwise enduring more sacrifice in its creation. This is morally appropriate and also provides proper incentives due to rewarding only what we can affect, not what we can't. With balanced job complexes, for eight hours of normally paced work Sally and Sam will receive the same income,. This is so if they have the same job, or any job at all. That is, no matter what their particular job may be, no matter what workplaces they are in and how different their mix of tasks is, and no matter how talented they are, if they at a balanced job complex, their total work load will be similar in its quality of life implications and empowerment effects, so the only difference specifically relevant to reward for their labors is going to be length and intensity of work done, and with these equal as well, the share of output earned will be equal. If length of time working or intensity of working differ somewhat, so will share of output earned. And who mediates decisions about the definition of job complexes and about what rates and intensities people are working? Workers do, of course, in their councils and with appropriate decision-making say using information culled by methods consistent with employing balanced job complexes and just remuneration.
There is one very large step left to proposing an alternative to capitalism, even in broad outline. How are the actions of workers and consumers connected? How do decisions made in one workplace and all others, and by collective consumer councils, as well as by individual consumers, all come into accord? What causes the total that is produced by workplaces to match the total consumed collectively by neighborhoods and other groups and privately by individuals? For that matter, what determines the relative social valuation of different products and choices? What decides how many workers will be in which industry producing how much? What determines whether some product should be made or not, and how much? What determines what investments in new productive means and methods should be undertaken and which others delayed or rejected? These are all matters of allocation, among others that are too numerous to list in their entirety here. Existing options for dealing with allocation are central planning (as was used in the old Soviet Union) and markets (as is used in all capitalist economies with minor or greater variations). In central planning a bureaucracy culls information, formulates instructions, sends these instructions to workers and consumers, gets some feedback, refines the instructions a bit, sends them again, and gets back obedience. In a market each actor in isolation from concern for other actors well being competitively pursues its own agenda by buying and selling labor (or the ability to do it) and buying and selling products and resources at prices determined by competitive bidding. Each actor seeks to gain more than other parties in their exchanges. The problem is, each of these two modes of connecting actors and units imposes on the rest of the economy pressures that subvert the values and structures we favor. Markets, for example, even without private capitalization of property, distort valuations to favor private over public benefits and to channel personalities in anti-social directions diminishing and even destroying solidarity. They reward primarily output and power and not only effort and sacrifice. They divide economic actors into a class that is saddled with rote and obedient labor and another that enjoys empowering circumstances and determines economic outcomes, also accruing most income. They isolate buyers and sellers as decision-makers who have no choice but to competitively ignore the wider implications of their choices, including effects on the ecology. Central planning, in contrast, is authoritarian. It denies self management and produces the same class division and hierarchy as markets built first around the distinction between planners and those who implement their plans, and extending outward to incorporate empowered and disempowered workers more generally. Both these allocation systems subvert the values we hold dear, rather than propelling them. What is the alternative to markets and central planning.
In place of top-down imposition of centrally planned choices and in place of competitive market exchange by atomized buyers and sellers, we opt for cooperative, informed choosing by organizationally and socially entwined actors each having a say in proportion as choices impact them and each able to access needed accurate information and valuations and having appropriate training and confidence to develop and communicate their preferences. This choice is consistent with council centered participatory self-management, with remuneration for effort and sacrifice, with balanced job complexes, with proper valuations of collective and ecological impacts, and with classlessness. To these ends, activists favor participatory planning, a system in which worker and consumer councils propose their work activities and consumer preferences in light of accurate knowledge of local and global implications and true valuations of the full social benefits and costs their choices will impose and garner. The system utilizes a back and forth cooperative communication of mutually informed preferences via a variety of simple communicative and organizing principles and vehicles including indicative prices, facilitation boards, rounds of accommodation to new information, and so on - all permitting actors to express their desires and to mediate and refine them in light of feedback about other's desires, arriving at compatible choices consistent with remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory self managing influence.




Rating:
Summary: GREAT TOOL!!
Review: THE BOOK WAS EAZY TO FOLLOW AND THE STUDY QUESTIONS WERE ACTUALLY CLOSE TO THE EXAM QUESTIONS.

Rating:
Summary: Solid Text Reinvents Itself
Review: The subject of Economics as a social science may not be readily grasped by everyone. The blame certainly shouldn't be laid upon this text which is suscinct, informative, and modern. The 15th Edition, written not neccessarily for only the post graduate student, has current examples and flows nicely. Professors may want to change the order of the chapters for ease of teaching style, but that is to be expected. It is an overall winner.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad.
Review: This definately wasn't written for the layperson, but for the college level reader/student.

Overall, the book wasn't that bad. However, there were some instances where it just seem to drag on and on, which was a tad annoying. I think the authors could've written some things in a better way to make it more understandable.

Although Economics isn't necessarily an easy subject, this book is considered authoritative in the feild of macro/microeconomics. The authors should've definately made it a little more easier to understand.

Thank you.