Excerpt from "Preface"
"Economic ideas are important. But, too often in the teaching of modern economics, emphasis on techniques overwhelms ideas. We find that sad. Ideally economics courses would eschew the teaching of techniques for its own sake, but mathematical economics has become too deeply ingrained into the economics curriculum to allow that to happen in the near future. Cocerned economics departments must, therefore, resort to a second best solution, namely provision of a course in the history of economic thought.
We have written this book not for the scholar but for the student. Hence we've tried to strike a balance between oversimplification and extreme complexity, and to cover important issues in an intellectually satisfying manner while remaining clear and interesting to the undergraduate. And since most students justifiably seek relevance, we structure the book to demonstrate how uniquely relevant the history of economic thought really is to our discipline. Students should benefit enormously from the insights and historical contexts this text provides as a backdrop to the material they encounter in other courses." |
