Economics textbook

“The macro-principles textbooks don’t represent our field well. Little of the exciting work that’s been done by this group has made its way into undergrad textbooks. That’s probably inevitable. But it leads to a real misunderstanding about what macroeconomists do – both among lay-people and among economists in other fields. I hope that some of our gifted textbook writers rectify that situation soon!”

“More than a decade ago, when Robin and I began writing the first edition of this textbook, we had many small ideas: particular aspects of economics that we believed weren’t covered the right way in existing textbooks. But we also had one big idea: the belief that an economics textbook could and should be built around narratives, that it should never lose sight of the fact that economics is, in the end, a set of stories about what people do.”

“Even when Econ 101 is right, that doesn’t always mean that it’s important – certainly not that it’s the most important thing about a situation. In particular, economists may delight in talking about issues where 101 refutes naïve intuition, but that doesn’t at all mean that these are the crucial policy issues we face.”

“In our standard economics textbooks and in our modern political debates, laissez-faire is the default rule; anyone who would challenge it swims against the prevailing tide.”

“I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economics textbooks.”

“Teaching Econ 101 students theory after theory after theory leaves them with the impression that they could have just been fed a line of bull. And in fact, they're right -- they could have. Instead, teach them to be skeptical, look at the evidence, and think for themselves.”