Posted: 8/5/2008 8:23 AM
Post subject: I certainly wish economics texts were like this in college!
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arflech
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Joined: 5/3/2008
Posts: 1120
http://introecon.com/ No fluff, just substance and a solid grounding in calculus here; this free text could serve as both an intro. and an intermediate microecon. text and is half as short as either type. Also, seriously, why the hell can't economics departments (in America at least) just make calculus a prerequisite for taking the *serious* introductory economics classes, like physics departments do? In both cases the material is a lot easier to understand that way and no time is wasted on hand-waving and convoluted arguments that would just need to be refined later on, and what is now the usual intro course can be separated off into a *service* course for business majors and other idiots.
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Posted: 8/5/2008 9:34 AM
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ElectroSpecter
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Joined: 8/6/2006
Posts: 784
Location: Connecticut, USA
I have a gripe with a lot of economics texts... a lot of them deal with economics as a static thing that is unchanging, and assume that things like people's emotions are predictable (or they don't even mention emotions and human fallibility) and that the environment is an infinite resource, and it ultimately won't affect anything no matter how much of it we use. I'm not exactly an avid environmentalist, but I feel that these texts need to "go green," more so than many other things that we're focusing on.
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Posted: 8/5/2008 1:31 PM
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arflech
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Joined: 5/3/2008
Posts: 1120
"going green" and the like are considered too advanced for a usual intro. book, but some of that kind of stuff is treated in the one I linked to (in that oh-so-delectable Chapter 6 about market failures) The thing about the simplifications in a usual intro. econ. text is that they are easy to work with, even though they are oversimplifications, and sadly some conceptual models are misunderstood, distorted, and treated as gospel (see: Laffer curve). In a way, your complaint is much like complaining that introductory physics classes don't deal with mechanical problems requiring knowledge of PDEs, the calculus of variations, or nonlinear dynamics, though the political implications of introductory econ. churning out Randroids are definitely greater.
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