Price Theory

Fülszöveg

Foreword
Modem economics is above all a way of thinking about social behavior. When a person decides to engage in any activity, the economist instinctively looks for benefits to that person that exceed his costs; conversely, if he decides not to engage in an activity, the economist looks for costs that exceed the benefits. Moreover, if two persons voluntarily engage in a transaction or trade, the economist looks for gains to both participants, not gains to one and losses to the other.
Recent decades have seen growing confidence that this economic way of thinking provides important insights into human behavior under quite different economic systems and institutions. It has been used to help understand primitive societies studied by anthropologists as well as advanced economies of the modem day; capitalist countries like the United States as well as Communist countries like China and Cuba; personal interactions that do not use explicit markets, like marriage and gift giving, as... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Foreword
Modem economics is above all a way of thinking about social behavior. When a person decides to engage in any activity, the economist instinctively looks for benefits to that person that exceed his costs; conversely, if he decides not to engage in an activity, the economist looks for costs that exceed the benefits. Moreover, if two persons voluntarily engage in a transaction or trade, the economist looks for gains to both participants, not gains to one and losses to the other.
Recent decades have seen growing confidence that this economic way of thinking provides important insights into human behavior under quite different economic systems and institutions. It has been used to help understand primitive societies studied by anthropologists as well as advanced economies of the modem day; capitalist countries like the United States as well as Communist countries like China and Cuba; personal interactions that do not use explicit markets, like marriage and gift giving, as well as transactions in organized markets, like the stock market; decisions to engage in crime as well as decisions to study economics; and decisions by college graduates with high IQ's as well as decisions by illiterates with low IQ's.
Although the range of behavior analyzed with the economic way of thinking has been greatly extended during the past several decades, textbooks on economic principles generally have taken a much narrower view of the scope of economics. This is not surprising since recent developments in a scientific field usually do not find their way into textbooks for many years. Fortunately, several economics texts in recent years have begun to take a broader view, and this text by David Friedman does so in the most thoroughgoing and satisfactory manner of any that I have seen. Every chapter shows evidence of a skilled and imaginative economist applying his tools to the world around him. Perhaps I can whet the reader's appetite for the book with a few examples culled from different chapters.
Travelers have long recognized that homes in Los Angeles are cooler and less comfortable during the winter than are homes in cities like Chicago, even though Los Angeles has a milder winter climate than Chicago does. Chapter 21 explains this by showing why indoor temperature can be raised more cheaply in Chicago Vissza