Customer Reviews

Economics

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First of all if this was not a great book, it wouldn't be taught in hundreds of countries worldwide. I read this book 4 years back in Pakistan. I loved the book and wanted to come to USA and meet this great man in Boston (Which I finally did). Only weakness of this book is it's high level content. In this book some very simple contents have been potrayed as very complicated.

The latest edition of Samuelson and Nordhaus is still a very good deal.However,Nordhaus is probably responsible for watering down the exposition,just as Nordhaus is most likely the one responsible for eliminating Samuelson's brilliant exposition of the paradox of thrift in a previous edition of Samuelson and Nordhaus before it was restored.Of course,given that Samuelson is approaching 90 years of age,it is likely that Nordhaus is going to be able to make further changes to the book that will weaken Samuelson's evenhanded treatment of the Keynesian-Neoclassical Synthesis.This edition should be looked upon as the last one in a line of succession stretching back to the original 1948 edition.It is this edition that presents the microfoundations of the paradox of thrift analysis using the Production Possibilities Frontier Curve .Neoclassical theory is a special theory of an economy operating on the boundary of this curve(a statistical version would be that the average or mean position of the economy is on the boundary due to a business cycle consisting of minor inventory changes over time as businessmen in the private sector correct for minor forecast errors made in their product mix).The interested reader can take a look at my detailed review of the original 1948 edition .Such a reader is also adviced to be on guard against "reviews" that claim that Samuelson said something,but provide no page citation or quote out of context by combining parts of different quotations from different pages of the textbook.

While other reviewers have justly criticized Samuelson for being model-bound (as most economists are) and dragging the Phillips Curve out of its grave, this remains a fine introduction to basic economic concepts, including the notion that some kinds of wealth are subjective and not quantifiable. Most of the reviewers a-froth over Samuelson name other fine econ primers -- Hazlitt's, Friedman's, etc. -- but the reader should note that their bias is to call democratic socialism imprisonment, and taxes theft. Frankly, I'd recommend reading both sides, and then reading essayists like Galbraith and his conservative counterparts for some descriptive reality, which is in short supply in most econ textbooks.

This is a seminal book on economics by world renowned author Paul Samuelson who was later joined by the able William Nordhaus. This is an exceptional book on economics which has benefited hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world for almost six decades.

The book has evolved over the years as the world has significantly changed, so as to deal with the real life issues besetting mankind. Over this period, the book has remained as the standard textbook for teaching elementary economics worldwide. The book is now in its sixteenth edition to reflect its continued popularity and utility.

The book maintains some basic Keynesian and classical economics models and has included later generation economic science concepts including monetarism, rational expectations and supply side economics. The book has kept pace with such diverse subjects as environmental issues, health care issues and opportunity cost of a college education and the latest developments in the information communication technology.

The book is well presented in a logical and easy to read and understand manner.

I used the great Paul Samuelson's text while in school in the '60's and it was THE standard - no college of any self-respect dared use anything else!

However, times do change so a couple of years ago I decided to get a newer edition, now co-authored by a certain William Nordhaus. What a disappointment. Samuelson's voice seems to have been suppressed to sub-audibility, possibly just due to his age. I felt none of the excitement my older book conveyed, nor got anywhere near the learning. I recommend people to buy the older all-Samuelson versions, they're cheaper anyway, and nothing that fundamental has changed in either micro- or macro-economics theory in the past 50 years. The micro part hasn't changed at all, with Adam Smith, supply and demand curves, and all that. In the macro area, the Fed still prints money by buying up treasurys, etc. etc. Of course, very recent disturbing changes have taken place, such as the Fed (incredibly!!) buying up toxic-mortgage packages, worthless corporate stock, bailing out megalithic monsters like AGI and GM and all those crooked "banks", and so on, but my new version didn't cover that either, or tried to submerge it. It's "supposed" to be "temporary", ha ha. We have allowed deregulation to destroy our economic system and I'm sure Dr. Samuelson would be very unhappy about it (he died at the age of 94 just a couple of years ago).

Put together 5 or 10 past editions of this widely-used textbook, and you'll have a documentary history of Keynesian backtracking as history keeps proving Samuelson and company wrong. My favorite howler: "It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable." -- Samuelson, _Economics_, the 1981 edition.

Another howler: last time I checked, _Economics_ still held to the validity of the Phillips Curve -- the idea that inflation and unemployment are inversely related. Samuelson and Nordhaus evidently slept through the stagflation of the 1970s -- editions of the textbooks going into the 1990s didn't even discuss stagflation in the context of the Phillips Curve theory, much less acknowledge that the mere existence of stagflation demonstrates the absurdity of Phillips' theory.

If you want to learn the reality of economics, read Henry Hazlitt's _Economics in One Lesson_, Milton Friedman's _Free to Choose_, George Gilder's _Wealth and Poverty_, and Friedrich Hayek's _Road to Serfdom_ for starters.