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Mainstream textbooks present economics as an objective science, free from value judgements. The Microeconomics Anti-Textbook demonstrates this to be a myth – one which serves to make such textbooks not only off-puttingly bland, but also dangerously misleading in their justification of the status quo and neglect of alternatives.
In this fully updated and expanded edition of their celebrated book, Professors Rod Hill and Tony Myatt lay out the essentials of each topic in the standard texts in a clear and concise way, before presenting an 'anti-text' analysis and critique. Challenging the assumptions, arguments, and models, Hill and Myatt provide the essential guide to decoding the textbooks, and show that real economics is far more interesting - and subversive - than the simplistic version presented to students.
Introduction - Our Goals, Audience, and Principal Themes
1. What is economics? Where you start influences where you go
2. Introducing economic models
3. How markets work (in an imaginary world)
4. People as consumers
5. The firm
6. Market Structure and Efficiency - or why perfect competition isn't so perfect after all.
7. Externalities, common access resources and public goods: the ubiquity of market failure
8. The marginal productivity theory of income distribution - or you're worth what you can get
9. Government, taxation, and the (re)distribution of income: is a just society just too expensive?
10. Trade and globalization without the rose-tinted glasses
Conclusion
Postscript: A case study of climate change and the textbooks
Description
Mainstream textbooks present economics as an objective science, free from value judgements. The Microeconomics Anti-Textbook demonstrates this to be a myth – one which serves to make such textbooks not only off-puttingly bland, but also dangerously misleading in their justification of the status quo and neglect of alternatives.
In this fully updated and expanded edition of their celebrated book, Professors Rod Hill and Tony Myatt lay out the essentials of each topic in the standard texts in a clear and concise way, before presenting an 'anti-text' analysis and critique. Challenging the assumptions, arguments, and models, Hill and Myatt provide the essential guide to decoding the textbooks, and show that real economics is far more interesting - and subversive - than the simplistic version presented to students.
