Economics with PowerWeb

Rating:
Summary: Most Important Book I Read in College
Review: As I pursue my doctorate in mathematics education and look back over the textbooks I've read over many years of schooling, I'd have to say that Samuelson's Economics--required reading years ago when I took Freshman microecomics--has had the strongest long-term influence on my world view. Concepts like:
-the way competition works to make an efficient but not necessarily equitable economy,
-positive and negative externalities (i.e., the inefficiency caused when I benefit but you pay)

have been critical in helping me understand the currents behind modern political and economic debates.

You need some comfort with mathematics (algebra and graphing) in order to get the most benefit from this book--but certainly anyone who did well in Algebra 1 has a sufficient background.

I'd recommend this book strongly for anyone interested in developing a deeper understanding of human affairs and society.

Rating:
Summary: A lot of money for a little gain.
Review: By its nature (a text book) this is very boring. Although boring, the material is presented quite well. However, the text won't be of much help unless you have a good economics professor to help you out with some of the material. I don't know why I bought this book, we never used it in class. This book isn't the best source from which to learn economics. A live person can probably help you learn more, and it may well be cheaper than this overpriced book.

Rating:
Summary: The Best
Review: Simply the best introductory economics book

Rating:
Summary: Correction of information on the book
Review: The reviews and the table of contents shown about this book in your site do not seem to correspond to D.Begg's,etal "Economics" but to another book with a similar content.

Rating:
Summary: famed in China
Review: This book is very famed in China.
The reader of the book is not college student but postgraduate.
The publisher in China have translated and published the textbook for above 4 times, The lasted one in 16th edition.

i am a editor.
who can help me that i want to know the top 10 or 20 business textbook in the world? it's including Economics?

[e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Put the mouse down. Step away from the computer.
Review: Want to know why the US and other countries have had such up-and-down economic problems for the last several decades? You can thank Paul Samuelson and other incompetent buffoons like him (I don't mind buffoons that much, but incompetent ones are just too much). Samuelson and his ilk operated on the false assumption that mathematics actually describes economic activity. Once you believe this, the next logical step (in Wacky World, at least) is to have math-oriented "economists" (most of whom are failed wannabe mathematicians, anyway) plan and run the economy.
Fortunately, free markets are stable; they only destabilize when the government intervenes. No neo-classical "economist" understands this, and mathematicians certainly don't (see review
below). The only economic school that describes the real world
is the Austrian school; they are of course are taught in very, very few colleges. Government interference has never worked, and it
never will. And Samuelson got a Nobel Prize? You might as well give me one, too.

Rating:
Summary: Ideology thinnly disguised as science
Review: When I was required to take econ as undergrad physics student and used this text, the professor made a big deal of econ students not understanding 'curves', by which assertion he implicitly meant the plotting of y=f(x) when f is smooth and invertible. Well the professor didn't understand 'curves' at a higher level: he failed to note that nearly all the 'curves' presented in the text were only 'cartoons', mere mental constructions not based on real data, and agreeing with no real data (excepting corn flakes sales in British supermarkets, if Paul Ormerod is correct). The idea of 'utility' is a useless fabrication that has no basis in empirical data. Those mental constructions represent instead the expectations of neo-classical economic theory, the religion of the IMF, World Bank, and a host of other neo-classically-educated economists. To be specific, the price-demand, price-supply 'curves' touted in the text do not exist in reality and also not in theory: e.g., see Osborne's book Finance and the Stock Market from a Physicist's Perspective for the explanation why. See also the economists' own proof that aggregate price-supply demand-suppy curves 'can be anything' even if individual supply-demand curves would behave as they expect! Furthermore, no real market is approximately in equilibrium, all real markets are examples of far from equilibrium systems. Unregulated free markets are unstable. None of this is hinted at in the text, where equilibrium and stability are implicitly and unfairly assumed without warning the unsuspecting reader. Worse, in the introductory chapter Samuelson uses a hokey, irrelevant pictorial argument to try to convince both himself and the reader that physics is as unscientific as neo-classical econ theory. For good information about econ theory, see the following books: Ormerod's The Death of Economics, Mirowski's More Heat than light, and Osborne's book. For those with enough intellectual stamina, there is also Giovanni Dosi's Innovation, Organization, and Economic Dynamics, a collection of essays that also points out that the emperor wears no clothes and tries to find a reliable ruler to replace His Uselessness. Instead of propagating misleading mythology it's now time for economists to face the facts and explain why, after convincing governments to follow their advice and deregulate, we face one big financial instability after the other: LTCM, Argentina, Enron, .... .

As text or as literature, this book is terribly written. Unsystematic, like a hodgepodge of review articles. Samuelson has noted that economists (like Galbraith) who write too well may be suspect by other economists, but this is an unfortunate viewpoint. The best writing is done by the clearest thinkers: Einstein (in both German and English), Feynman, V.I. Arnol'd, and Fischer Black are examples. Bad writing, in contrast, often reflects sloppy thinking. In short, this text could have been cut to half it's size, to the benefit of the reader who wants to understand what Samuelson has to say.

For the story of how neo-classical econ won out academically, see Mirowski's 'Machine Dreams'.