I’m really excited about the 8th Edition (I should say Version 8.0) of my introductory economics text with Akila Weerapana because it comes from a new publisher, FlatWorld, and will be sold at a much more reasonable price—only 10% to 25%, depending on the order, of the price charged for the old edition.  In the past I told students to buy used copies because the price was so high, but no more: I got the publication rights back and found a new publisher, Flatworld. In addition to charging a reasonable price, Flatworld will also provide access to the book to wide audience with more flexible formats suited to the needs of students and teachers. The FlatWorld platform will allow us to update the book on a regular basis with minimal disruption. In addition to using the text in Stanford’s Econ 1 course next fall, I plan to use it in Stanford’s massive open online course (MOOC) Econ 1 when it again goes live this summer.

Principles of Macroeconomics v. 8.0 is already out, with Principles of Microeconomics v.8.0 and the full book Principles of Economics v. 8.0 out in the next few weeks.  Of course v. 8.0 has new facts and ideas as well as new features, but the goal of the book is still to present modern economics in a form that is intuitive, relevant, and memorable to students who have had no prior exposure to the subject. Akila and I both teach introductory economics— at Wellesley and Stanford—and we enjoy teaching greatly. We have endeavored to make the basic economic ideas as clear and understandable as possible.

The book starts out with the key idea that economics is about making purposeful choice with limited resources and about people interacting with other people as they make these choices. Most of those interactions occur in markets, and the book is mainly about markets, including labor markets, financial markets, capital markets, and international markets.  The micro part of the book shows why free competitive markets work well to improve people’s lives and how they have removed hundreds of millions from poverty around the world, with many more, we hope, to come.  The book shows how interference with free competitive markets due to monopolies or environmental spillovers can cause market failures, and looks at ways to remedy these failures including through the use of government.  The macro part of the book looks at monetary policy in all its modern forms and the effects of tax and fiscal policy. The book considers economic policy in theory and in practice and explains why government failure is also a problem in economics.