At 09:08 AM 04/22/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>I haven't found Samuelson's textbook useful for any of the
>interesting discussions of markets, black markets, offshore havens, ...
I used Samuelson's textbooks to study micro and macro in college.
*Terrible*! Badly written, verbose, not structured well at all,
especially for the mathematically literate student,
and heavily tied up in the Keynesian government-knows-what's-best
command economy view of the world. OK, the dude *did* have a Nobel
prize in economics, but as near as I could tell, what he *really*
specialized in was the economics of textbook sales,
updating this heavy tome every year or two so students had to
buy new ones instead of getting them used and selling them back
to the campus bookstore at the end of the year.
Most of the chapters had an appendix at the end which said
most of the same material half as verbosely,
but even that was still wading through molasses.
I don't mind a certain amount of excess material if the
author can write well and enjoyably, but this wasn't it.
Some of the micro classes switched to a different textbook
a year or two later - I think the author may have been Peterson?
which was much thinner and more readable.
My micro class was taught by a University of Chicago guy
who was a good speaker, clear without oversimplifying,
and who did a good job of balancing depth for his audience.
Micro being what it is, this involved a certain amount of
"Ok, engineers, this is an integral, go back to sleep while
I show the liberal arts majors areas under curves".
That's easier to do well with micro than macro,
but it still ain't that hard. I'd also taken economics in high school,
and once Mrs. Borish was sick and the old retired guy who used to teach
the course came in and subbed - he covered more in
two days than we did the rest of the semester and a good
third or half of the Micro 102 college course,
though not in as much depth as the college material.
It's worth reading Samuelson if you discuss economics much with
people who learned it using Samuelson, just so you can balance the
jargon and understand the themes they work with, but it's really dreck.
Get the Cliff Notes if there are any :-)
