43 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly recommended, June 16, 2003
This review is from: Macroeconomics (Hardcover)
A clear and altogether pleasant presentation; excellent layout and typography. A quick check indicated it was perhaps a bit less thorough than Olivier Blanchard (Mankiw doesn't mention the problems with non-performing loans in the Japanese banking system; Blanchard does), but one has to draw the line somewhere, and there is something to be said for allowing the instructor a bit more flexibility to introduce examples. Quite interesting--I hesitate to label a textbook exciting, but it would be an undersatement to say that Mankiw's text is neither soporific nor unduly convoluted; it inspires further inquiry. If you are required to use another text in a course, so be it; if reading for your own education, Mankiw is excellent. One might be sorely tempted to purchase it as a supplement to other less clear texts.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, Otherworldly, February 24, 2006
This review is from: Macroeconomics (Hardcover)
This is a clearly written and nicely organized upper-division macroeconomics textbook. Mankiw uses plain English and simple math to model the macroeconomy in the short-run (the IS/LM model), the long-run (the AS/AD model), and the very long run (the Solow growth model). He also devotes a lot of space to the Mundell-Fleming model of international trade and finance. One of the best features is the frequent use of short case studies that apply economic theory to "real world" problems such as the Great Depression or the Japanese slump of the 1990s. Mankiw's views are mainstream -- he doesn't even hint at the existence of alternatives such as Austrian economics or neo-Marxism -- but he is non-dogmatic about policy and quite candid about the limits of what economists really know about the economy. His book is a small masterpiece of clear economic writing for undergraduates.
So why did I give it only four stars? I was disappointed by the relative neglect -- in spite of the many "case studies" -- of the micro-economic, historical, and institutional realities that underlay the graphs and algebra of conventional macroeconomic analysis. Let me give two examples of what I mean:
-- According to Ben Bernanke, Asian countries responded to the financial turbulence of the 1990s by amassing huge foreign exchange reserves to defend their currencies against future attacks. These savings have for the most part been invested in the U.S., where they have financed trade deficits and fueled asset bubbles in the equities and housing markets. In other words, capital has flowed from relatively capital-poor countries to a capital-rich country, where it has paid for consumption binges.
-- According to Robert Pollin, two decades of union-bashing, downsizing and free trade have led to widespread job insecurity in the U.S. With workers too intimidated and too worried about jobs to press for wage increases, the economy was able to grow in the 1990s without triggering a round of inflation, and the benefits of this growth were skewed towards upper-income groups. In other words, extra-market power relationships in the workplace directly affected macroeconomic performance and income distribution.
I don't doubt that these developments can be captured and analyzed in the IS/LM or AS/AD framework. I'm not so sure, however, that many people steeped in this mode of analysis would have expected these developments ex ante. That would have required a knowledge of history, policy responses, and specific markets that is difficult to capture in abstract models. For my taste, any approach to economics that focuses on algebraic relationships between economic aggregates to the semi-exclusion of history and institutions is just too "otherworldly" to be satisfying. But maybe that's a problem with the way my mind works, not with macroeconomics. It certainly doesn't mean that Mankiw's book is anything less than excellent. Any student interested in learning basic macroeconomic analysis should read it.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fairly clear, but no math, and not very rigorous., April 20, 2005
This review is from: Macroeconomics (Hardcover)
Well-written book: tries hard to restate conclusions and show how changes in policies and variables affect aggregate functions, etc. Sometimes confusing: doesn't always state whether a trend holds in the short run or long run.
Since I'm more used to micro, I found the vagueness of all the curves a bit maddening, as well as the lack of definitions and real-world indications of variable values. More importantly, there is basically no math here: I don't see how this book could possibly suffice for a grad student in econ (which I am not).
Interesting book on tough subject.
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