Customer Reviews

The Structure of Economics: A Mathematical Analysis

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Understanding this book assures you a passing grade on your Microeconomics preliminary exam. Excellent presentation that far surpasses the eloquence of even Varian's Microeconomic Analysis. Students of economics should get this book early on and refer to it often as they progress through their graduate degree.

I loved this book, but it's hard to classify. It is somewhere between a microeconomics and a mathematical economics text. There's also has a nice introduction on the methodology of economics. If your objective is a deeper understanding of microeconomics but Mas-Collel's "Microeconomic Theory" is too daunting, this book could be just right.

i used this book in an upper level undergraduate course in advanced microeconomic analysis whose curriculum (thankfully) relied mostly on class notes rather than this textbook. although i am now working on a masters degree in statistics and using highly technical textbooks in my studies, let me tell you that 'the structure of economics' still takes the cake for the most difficult textbook i've ever used (up until now, anyway; my stochastic processes course next semester might use a textbook more difficult than this one). i honestly couldn't understand enough of it to definitively decide whether the book is really good or not, but based on what i could understand, it seems like an excellent book, albeit, one that will be accessible only to people who think on a higher plane with regards to advanced microeconomic principles. if you decide to buy this book, please realize that you are not going to breeze through this book like you might breeze through a book that is more on the level of walter nicholson's 'microeconomic theory' (an excellent intermediate level classic on microeconomics). you could easily spend 20 minutes reading one or two pages in 'the structure of economics' and still not be able to entirely grasp what you've read. basically, this is a book that separates the men from the boys with the criteria being whether one can understand it or not. also, i think that the edition pictured above with the black cover is a pretty old one. i bought my copy last year and i believe it was a later edition although i'm not sure which one. the cover on my book has a similar design, but the cover is green, white and blue.

I have an ambitious goal for this review. I want this book to become a standard reference for all aspiring economists. If you only "kind of" understand the first several chapters of MWG and it gives you cold sweats at night, read this book as soon as possible. "The Structure of Economics" should be considered a classic and recommended to all graduate students of economics, and to all advanced undergraduates aspiring to graduate study. It is vastly superior to the equivalent sections in MWG (the "time-capsule" approach to economics...).

Every single page of this book gives the reader a fresh and profound perspective on the bread and butter mathematical techniques employed by practicing economists. The author does not wave his hands. Even better, he waves his hands very occasionally in very precise ways, and he tells you up front why it's necessary to do so without resorting to serious mathematical pyrotechnics (and tells you where you can find those pyrotechnics if you're intrigued). He presents the same ideas over and over in waves of increasing sophistication. He provides problems at the end of each chapter that are solvable and genuinely interesting. He is funny. He intersperses the text with jewels of historical context.

Some of the main lessons are: the meaning of Lagrangian objective functions and multipliers, the meaning and omnipotence of the envelope theorem, the sources of prediction and ambiguity in economic models, the sources and meaning of duality theory, the unity of most economic models...if you have seen these ideas all over the place and wished you understood them well enough to employ them yourself, this book is for you.

This book is not all you need, of course. But I think it delivers a bigger intellectual reward per unit time than MWG, Varian, Deaton and Muellbauer's "Economics and Consumer Behavior" (a great treatise on the consumer's optimization problem), Dixit's "Optimization in Economic Theory" (also a superb book, and a nice prelude to Silberberg). Even if you think you already knew something in the table of contents, Silberberg will make you see it in a cleaner, more general, more useful way. I keep thinking I can skip a section but then, nope, Silberberg has something to teach me.

Maybe I've been duped, but I don't understand why this book is not more widely read. The above reviews which claim the text is too arduous must have come from students without any prior exposure to basic mathematical economics. Perhaps you do need some preparation before tackling this book. But I am not very mathematically-inclined and I think this book is crystal-clear.

In summary: Buy it. Read it. Assign it to your students. Spread the word.

Interesting material and well writen. People with strong mathematic skills will speed through this book.

Professor recommends this book for our first year PhD micro econ theory courses. Definatley helps understand the application sides of first year micro theory topics.

This is a very good textbook for the Advanced Microeconomics. I use this book for my PhD course and it use very clear math steps to describe microeconomics. You must buy it if you are in the PhD program

Excellent book for micro economics, from intermediate to advanced level, allows for excellent undersatnding although as some point out in other reviews it can be at times complicated, but so is the nature of the subject it explains. In use with an additional text covering the more theoretical approach it is key to understanding the analytical part of microeconomics. A parallel could be established to some extent to Alpha Chiang's Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics.

The coverage of this book is not much comprehensive. It does not include some topics in microeconomics. But, it is a good textbook explaining economics in mathematics.

The book arrived in a timely manner and the condition was just as described. Very satisfied!